Tuesday, December 2, 2014

On Debt, II: For Who Are So Free? Manning the Fleet


It's not the song. The song is fine. It's the choice to perform it,  down the years, in a musical style that's been obsolete since the invention of the amplifier. I do not want "Hearts of Oak" distant and mannered. It is about hands on the sea. The sea is wild, pressing, urgent, in the now. It is dangerous, wily. It needs all our skills to survive and triumph. Instead we serve it boys and broken men on ships  designed by fools


or, to all appearances, beyond our grasp..

I think I know what that is. "Hearts of Oak" as we hear it is part of the conceit of a"New Augustinian Age," a denatured and unemotional Age of Reason, where people are stifled until they cry for life.. Obviously it is not true. The real Eighteenth Century was pretty wild. It's ideology, and I have an idea what purpose this particular inversion of idea and reality is all about. Start by inverting "Hearts of Oak." (NSFW, obvs.)

I've talked and talked about Eighteenth Century England as an unstable regime, forced to make war and desperate for the money to fight them. Inside the house are the elegant, listening to chamber music. Outside is the mob, stoning the house.  

We want to write the mob out of the story. It will push the price of consols up if fewer people think a default is in the cards. The problem is that we can't get rid of the mob, not if the wooden ships are going to go to sea. That's a mistake that people have made before, and keep on making. You don't need buy-in from your soldiers and sailors, provided you have flags and uniforms and great, steaming piles of patriotism. That's a link to Barry Sandler's "Ballad of the Green Berets," if you haven't the patience, and I think that the comparison is apt. I'm very lucky to even be conscious this morning after far too much overtime these last two weeks, and my employer tells me that it is going to solve its recruitment problem with a "climate of superior customer service" and a chance of promotion to department manager. 

I know it doesn't believe that. It is perfectly aware that what will solve its recruitment problem is pay raises. It's just not its place to  lead a competitive sector into a new world of the kind of wages it paid in the '70s. I don't think anyone believes it. It's a story we tell ourselves to evade the kind of policies that would lead to a labour shortage. That's ideology, and while we don't quite believe it as such, it is comforting if we use it to distance ourselves from the kind of people who sing "North Atlantic Squadron" because they like it.

Because, no, they're not dangerous, misogynistic, creeps. Well, they are, being young men. But, Goddamnit, we're not born socialised, we learn social skills through social interaction, and that happens mostly through positive reinforcement at work. Blah blah: the problem is that they're unemployed, bored, and frustrated, and the world won't end if you give them what they actually want, which is a good job. Except for all the people who seem to think that it will. 

Anyway, jobs for all: the War of Jenkins' Ear.

(It's a Habs sweater. That makes all the difference.)

"The War of Jenkin's Ear" is a bit of a joke. In much the same way that telling a "funny" story about how your 12th-level orc mage got his +3 ring of protection is a "joke." Nerd!, in other words. But I do have a point. Historically, what happened was that Charles VI put together a "Pragmatic Sanction*" to ensure that his daughter, Maria Theresia, would succeed* him instead of the  son* he never had to succeed* to both the ungainly congerie of Habsburg family possessions, and Elect* Holy Roman Emperor, which are linked because reasons*. When Charles VI died in the fall of 1740, various military conflicts followed, which can be framed around the Pragmatic Sanction. Many years later, Reed Browning once pointed out, historians brought order to this ungainly assembly of events by calling it the "War of the Austrian Succession," Now we have to explain why Britain and Spain went to war a full year before Charles died,and we either launch into the story of the fall of Sir Robert Walpole, or we go with the story of  Robert Jenkins' unusual preserve. (I'm pretty sure I've been in joints where there are jars of pickled ears on the bar. But enough about Thunderbirds hockey.) In the introduction to Browning's War of the Austrian Succession, the author thanks map librarian Nadine George and ILL librarian Carol Marshall,administrative assistants Roberta McPhail, Mary Highfield and Kimberley Highfield, and, of course, his wife and Kenyon College. Does any modern monograph get this kind of support? Because I'm not sure that anyone can understand an event as complicated as the "War of the Austrian Succession" without standing on the shoulders of the typing pool, and we don't have typing pools anymore. Hence, "War of Jenkins Ear." I'm an expert, and I'm still learning the details. Today I will explore details that make sense even if you settle for explaining the war in terms of some guy cutting off some other guy's ear over smuggling.



The Royal Navy in 1740: 1

Ships:
Rate
Guns
Crew
Home
Reserve
Laid up
Med
West Indies
N. Am.
Transit
crew
Total
100
850


7




8,500
7
Second
90
750


15




11,250
15
Third
80
600


11
2



7,800
13
Third
70
480
3
3
18
3
1

1
13,920
29
Fourth
60
400
7
1
16
2
1

1
11,200
28
Fifth
50
300
7
1
16
2
1

1
5,700
19
Sixth
20
130
5

1
5
4
4

2,470
19
Others


16

5
2
2
2
2

29

8,130+

32
10
93
18
12
8
5
69,000
181

This is about ships, and we live in a golden age of information, so you can learn a lot about them. To avoid clutter, I have linked to a loving Wikipedia page giving the specifications for the ships of the 1719 (1733 revision) Establishment. Here's the cut-and-paste text boxes for:
100 Gun First Rate such as Victory actually, Victory only, because, as the article says, it was the only 100 gunner rebuilt to the 1733 standards.

General characteristics for 100-gun first rates[10]
Type:100-gun first-rate ship of the line
Tons burthen:1869 4294 bm
Length:174 ft 0 in (53.0 m) (gundeck)
140 ft 7 in (42.8 m) (keel)
Beam:50 ft 0 in (15.2 m)
Depth of hold:20 ft 0 in (6.1 m)
Complement:850 officers and men
Armament:
100 guns:
  • Lower deck: 28 × 42 or 32-pounders
  • Middle deck: 28 × 24-pounders
  • Upper deck: 28 × 12-pounders
  • Quarter deck: 12 × 6-pounders
  • Forecastle: 4 × 6-pounders
Victuals:And 60 gun Fourth Rate

General characteristics for 60-gun fourth rates[14]
Type:60-gun fourth-rate ship of the line
Tons burthen:951 2794 bm
Length:
144 ft 0 in (43.9 m) (gundeck)

117 ft 7 in (35.8 m) (keel)
Beam:
39 ft 0 in (11.9 m) (1719)
41 ft 5 in (12.6 m) (1733)
Depth of hold:
16 ft 5 in (5.0 m) (1719)
16 ft 11 in (5.2 m) (1733)
Complement:365 officers and men (400 from 1733, 420 from 1743)
Armament:
60 guns:
  • Lower deck: 24 × 24-pounders
  • Upper deck: 26 × 9-pounders
  • Quarter deck: 8 × 6-pounders
  • Forecastle: 2 × 6-pounders
These, especially the staggering three deck 100 gunner, are pretty amazing pieces of old-fashioned naval architecture. What is not well brought out here is the fact that Britain was the only power to maintain three deckers in 1740. The fate of Victory suggests questions about the seaworthiness of these monsters, but in the absence of French or Spanish three-deckers the seriousness of a continental threat to Britain's control of the seas is a bit questionable. 

So that's one thing. The other is the crewing statistics, the main interpolation I have supplied to the table above. Harding further notes that numbers borne in the summer of 1739 was 16,000 (compare with an army of 28,000 men at home, 8000 on the Irish Establishment), and tha the intent of Cabinet and Admiralty at the time was to increase this to 35,000. Rodger provides a helpful, synchronic overview. Peak numbers borne in the War of the Spanish Succession (1700--1714) was 48,000; in 1747: 58,000; in 1760: 85,000. Rodger provides the further calculation that the 1747 figure is 62% of the total stock of British seafarers and watermen, while Lord Gage cited "150,000 free-born Englishmen" as being potentially affected in a 1740 parliamentary debate over a naval registration/reserve act. 

Look! More Wiki-plagiarism!

Population 1100–1751
YearPop.±%
11003,250,000—    
13503,000,000−7.7%
15412,774,000−7.5%
16014,110,000+48.2%
16515,228,000+27.2%
17005,058,000−3.3%
17515,772,000+14.1
This is, inconveniently, for England alone, but Scotland is small, and, for the purposes of this discussion, Ireland counts as "foreign." Taking the numbers as found for the moment, and waving our hands uselessly in the direction of the likely age-distribution, a male working-age population number for 1740 is going to be in the range of 2 million, so either Lord Gage is full of it, or the English have salt water in their veins. A third possibility is that a large "floating proletariat" is identifying as English in whatever data source Gage is picking up, so that his "150 free-born Englishmen" includes Lascars, etc, in a neat and vaguely plausible run around the collision of demograpic plausibility (7.5% of the male working population of a subsistence agricultural society in the marine transportation sector?) at the expense of wandering so far out into handwaving territory it's actually more plausible that an MP speaking in the Commons might be pulling numbers out of his ass. 

That said, the 68,000 figure is attested, and, although nominal, as based on ship's complements rather than ship's rosters, we do know that the ships were able to get uder way. 

For the moment we can take away the observation that the Admiralty was, as a normal practice, building more ships than it could conceivably man, and that, nevertheless, the nation, however conceived, did a fair job of meeting the Admiralty's expectations. In the spring of 1745, for which period for some reason a particularly ample data set survives to allow us to bring our forensic attention on the Fleet, we have:

Class
Home Nominal
Home Effective
West Indies
Med
North America
Cruisers/convoy
Line
20
17
12
28
2
1
Cruisers
10
6
15
18
10
17
 Harding, 236

1745 is a pretty critical year. The Austrians and Prussians are fighting in Bohemia, freeing the French of a blitzkrieg through Belgium, demonstrating that the "Dutch Barrier" was obsolete, with Maurice de Saxe  winning a very convincing victory in a spring campaign (always logistically tricky due to shortage of grass) at Fontenoy. The Dutch demanded that the British fulfill their promise of 40,000 men, and while many of those could come from Hessian and Danish auxiliaries, the auxiliaries had to be paid, and that meant re-exporting "colonial" goods to Europe, and that meant convoy on the one hand, and impeaching French sugar imports to keep prices high, on the other. Notice that only ship of the line is on convoy duties: last year, Vernon hit on the idea of using his three-deckers as convoy ships in order to get them clear of the foul weather of the Channel and southern North Sea, and that did not end well. This year, only 15,000 of the 20,000 men required to man the fleet in home waters could be found, and the three-deckers were laid up entirely,with the Board of Admiralty demanding a regiment of foot to bring them up to strength to sail, and the King, with his eyes on Flanders but with overall good sense, refusing. Soldiers could be conscripted into sea service; but that wouldn't turn them into sailors, and the confidence we see that they could be restricted to "waist duties" such as hauling ropes is a little optimistic here. Mathews in the Mediterranean had been under pressure to send ships, and, hence, some of the 23,000 men he is holding, back home, but Rowley seems to have sailed clear of this pressure,perhaps reflecting the difficult situation in Italy in the wake ofthe Battle of Toulon. This in spite of the fact that naval stores for the Mediterranean Fleet have to be shipped out from Britain under convoy. The Mediterranean Fleet replenishes itself with fresh stores as it can, but only preserved food has the holding power needed for long cruises, and provision of properly packed, properly preserved food requires depot-level supply, hence sourcing in the Home Counties, along Thames and Medway. Convoys, store ships, multiple theatres of operation and the competing needs of the army: the manning situation is desperate. 


Now let's take this in a different direction. Fifteen thousand men is not going to turn out to be enough to keep Prince Charles off the island (I like the Corries' version), but it is going to be enough to prevent crucial reinforcements of success that might well have ended Britain's War of the Austrian Succession in "regime change" similar to that which overtook the Dutch Republic. 

Motivation, then: it's not magic that's keeping the ships at sea. First, pay: N. A. M. Rodger rather combatitively, and early in his career (125--6), stood up for the seaman's base pay rate of 22s 6d/28 day month after deductions on the grounds that at time when a ploughman might make £3-4/year, even a landsman's rate might have been attractive in some parts of the kingom. Then, he muffs his chance to state the landsman's rate or give us any sense of  how many onboard in, say, 1745, were receiving a landsman's rate while doing substantive seaman's work. Because I'm not saying that employers have been known to pull that crap, but I am saying....

More recently (313), Rodger has noted that the basic pay rate was, indeed, set in 1653 and held through the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, but this was okay, because the period was one of steady or declining prices, as though that paints a more benevolent picture of Admiralty pay policy! He then goes on to admit the obvious; that this was far less than was paid in the merchant marine, and that is why, back in 1739, the fleet was being manned with marines and by using an embargo on outbound sailings to either force sailors into the colours by unemployment, or to allow the press to work its magic. 

Mentioning the press brings images of brute coercion, images that are perfectly fair except to the point where they fall short of helping us understand why the fleet worked. The basic answer was that coercion was complete, but fleets that don't get some level of buy in just do not sail. They collapse into mutiny, malingering and desertion. The obvious answer, and the one that you will pretty much expect of me by now, is that there is an implicit payment in useful skills, so that it is precisely the high pay available in the merchant marine that is keeping men under the colours. They are learning the skills that will allow them to get high paying jobs later. It is more than incidentallly interesting that only a very small proportion of sailors took advantage of the remittance system to pay out to their wives, presumed wives, and other dependants. It might be placing too much weight on the evidence, but my old graduate school buddy Gerry Lorentz observed that this is because actually seafaring sailors, as opposed to about-harbour riggers, were young men presumably putting away the werewithal needed to get married in the first place. So, then, young men in training, and the Royal Navy as the apprenticeship of a maritime nation. 

I'm going to explore that a little further in a minute, but first I want to get some other details taken care of, and that's the attraction of not starving. Here, again, from Rodger's early work, is the ration issue per man of the Royal Navy.  

Day
Bread
Beer
Beef
Pork
Pease
Oatmeal
Butter
Cheese
Sunday
1lb
1 gal. (8 pints!)

1lb
½ pt



Monday
1lb
1 gal



1 pt
2 oz
4 oz
Tuesday
1lb
1gal
2lbs





Wed.
1lb
1gal


1/2 pt
1pt
2oz
4oz
Thurs
1lb
1gal

1lb
1/2pt



Fr.
1lb
1gal


1/2pt
1pt
20z
4oz
Sat
1lb
1gal
2lbs







On its face, this is unimpressive to an Expert(TM), because he's seen so many lists exactly like this from "bread of ordnance" returns. Everyone from janissaries to the inhabitants of an Amsterdam workhouse are supposed to be fed like this in 1745, and while I'll bite for the Janissaries, I have my doubts that the indigent poor saw anything like this much food. It's pretty clearly a normative list, laying out an idealised expectation. The victualling board, for example, issued 54 million pounds of bread in 1750--7, but also 6 million lbs of flour, 809,000lbs of suet, 705,000lbs of raisins, 71,000lbs of oil, and 160,000lbs of stockfish. The latter foods would have added significantly to quality of life onboard, and are not listed because of its normative character. Still, the fact that the Fleet didn't die of inanition is something. 

Just to put the actual, as opposed to normative caloric demand in perspective, let's back up a year to the first invasion crisis of the war. In January of 1744, increasing amounts of information became available to London to the effect that the French, under the influence of the Comte de Maurepas, were going to attempt an invasion. A little less than 10,000 men were assembled at Dunquerque on transports. They would be carried across the Channel under a fair wind by a combined escort of a small squadron already at Dunquerque and a much larger one which had finished outfitting at Brest. This would require combining the two squadrons, and notice that this was imminent, received confidentially on 12 February, led the Cabinet to direct Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Norris to sortie from Portsmouth to attack Dunquerque. 

(This is the campaign in which Norris flew his flag from Victory, and the experience helps explain his decision to send his first and second rates away. In practice, the order meant taking 18 ships of the line out of Portsmouth into the winter Channel on 14 February. On 17 February, he arrived in the Downs. In theory, he was ready to deal with Dunquerque, but information now came in that the Brest squadron was making its way up Channel, and Norris himself was stuck in the Downs by weather so fierce that he had to strike yards and sails. On 24 February, Norris received word that the French were anchored off Dungeness, waiting out a north-north-west wind and ebb tide which gave Norris reason to believe that he would be able to descend on them and destroy the French squadron before the invasion flotilla could be re-assembled after being partly blown on shore by the same weather than had nailed Norris in the Downs. By 8 PM, Norris was anchored near the French, southeast of Dover, with the expectation of a battle next day. Instead, from 1AM on the night of 25 February (again, 25 February! In the Channel! In wooden sailing ships!) the wind began to freshen. Neither fleet could manoeuvre. Indeed, anchors were dragging, ships were drifting, and visibility was so poort that neither fleet knew how the other was doing. Early in the morning, Anglesea's (50) cable parted, and the ship was driven by the wind right through the French position. 

They were gone. Word had reached the squadron commander, 77 year-old Comte Amiral de Rocquefueil of the scope of the disaster at Dunquerque. Anchors were cut, and the fleet sailed before the wind to Calais. By 1 March, Norris was back at the Downs, still waiting on news of the status of the invasion force. Finally, on 28 March, the invasion threat abated, Norris returned to shore to advice a rudderless Admiralty Board, although whether he much improved things may be wondered, his useful ships were allowed to go into harbour, and the three-deckers sent away to convoy the long-delayed outbound military and trade convoys as far as Spain. 

The point of this campaign anecdote is that the calorie count, if not the details, of the ration schedule above must be correct, or everyone in the fleet would be dead by this point. Cold, humid, windy cold, hard work, hard lying, the human body can stand up to all of this, but only if the food keeps coming. This is not likely to be sufficient incentive to just anyone to stand up to the conditions at sea. It will be incentive enough for a half-starved boy whose body is trying to balance its hormone-driven need to feed and build the muscle-mass of a future father against the starving times of rural underemployment. Now let him go to sea, and let him eat and drink his fill, and he will put up with hard lying, at least until he begins to appreciate the barganing postion that high wartime wages gives him.  

The reason that I think that the 90 and 100 gunners are important in this story is that I've built up a picture of the fleet at mid-war as being similar to the workforce I know: underpaid, offered alternatives, and trapped in a training process where it takes on the unskilled, turns them into the skilled, and then loses them to other employers.  The big First and Second Rates are the most difficult and complex machines in the fleet, and the picture we see here of their gradually declining utility and use is consonant with this picture. 

I've left till now a final, dangling point, the observation that wartime wages are high. Rodger notes at one point that it does not look as though Parliament ever contemplated matching civilian sector wages. Indeed, this relationship of wages to naval manning needs a closer look. Britain used the press, rather than a conscription scheme, Rodger tells us, because Britain was a weak state in which local authority trumped the power of the centre, and that the county magistracy jealously stood up for the rights of the trueborn Englishman. That's only a bit of a parody, and, since Jess Brewer at least, we can see how wrong it is. The actual strength of the English state, which is clearly considerable, is measured by the large size of the excise bureaucracy and its success in levying taxes. This is a strong state.

So what does it tell us that the elite has closed its ranks against naval conscription? That, in some profound sense, it is content with the way things are. It sees the press as socially useful. How so? I could go out on a going out on a speculative limb here, but I have tried to keep this post as clear of that as I can just by sticking to the facts, and the facts, at least as laid out in Rodger's account, pretty clearly support the idea that the press is being seen, not in terms of the rights of freeborn Englishmen, but in terms of its effect on wartime wages. 

And I'm going to leave it at that, because it's already 5PM, and its Christmas season, and I need a little decompression time before I face work again tomorrow in a chronically understaffed retail environment.

*It's complicated. 

12 comments:

  1. Is this "keep the RN's wartime wages down, by not competing with merchant marine wages", or "make sure the wartime wages mostly go to older men with established families, by setting up the press to be selective in ways that make it more likely it's going to get the young and inexperienced and badly connected"?

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  2. It's pretty clear that the press only worked at all because it targeted "an inarticulate and politically weak group." The devil is in the details. Warships pressed from returning merchantmen, taking recruits who were often entered as volunteers, "almost all of whom were seamen or seafaring men." However, crews could and did desert their ships at sight of pressing Royal Navy vessels coming alongside. In theory, men who deserted, even at sight of land, forfeited their pay, to the great profit of shipowners. Practically, the Royal Navy suspected connivance between men, mastes and shipwoners, but officers did not feel that they could take action.

    Second, men were pressed ashore by an arrangement that by Napoleonic times called the Impress Service. The press gang could be a very powerful force from the perspective of the men taken by it, but operated under some pretty extraordinary legal constraints. Killing a member of an improperly constituted press gang constituted manslaughter, not murder according to Broadfoot's Case.  County magistrates could, and did, release men from press gangs on legal pretexts. The city of London kept press gangs out of its jurisdiction by compounding to turn over men at an agreed rate, as did Bristol. You can imagine the results, even before you hear of the celebrated 1759 case in which London tried to turn over the Black Boy Alley Gang.

    Liverpool, reportedly for fear of mob violence, refused to either compound or admit press gangs --which therefore operated in Liverpool on its own cognizance, and dealt with the mobs as best it could. Good luck pressing a voter, especially with an election or a byelection in the offing, which effectively ruled out former seamen of property.

    At the time, sea officers frequently asserted that the press brought them unsuitable men with no sea experience. Being men of the Eighteenth Century, they would go on to claim that they were being brought rogues, rapscallions, the blind, lame and ruptured, Edward "Poet" Thompson claimed that of 480 men on Stirling Castle when it sailed, 225 were the "pressed refuse of the gaols and scum of the streets." With his usual habit of apologising for the old Admiralty, not alway unjustifiably, Rodger points out that the actual ship's roster shows only 115 of 480 men on the ship at that date were impressed, and that none were "identified as coming from prison."
    Ooh! Here's another neat bit: Masters apparently were often eager to have their apprentices pressed, since it relieved them of the cost of providing for the young men, while by simply registering their impressments at the Navy Pay Office, they could claim the apprentice's pay. That sounds fair.

    I suspect that there's a somewhat more grown-up literature around the press, which I should probably look at rather than continuing to quote Rodger, but it'll have to wait.

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  3. Finally, just to make sure I haven't missed a point, there's the rather large set of press exemptions issued to seamen in protected positions, which up to half of all seamen in the United Kingdom may have possessed by the middle of the Seven Year's War.

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  4. So the press is specifically selecting the defenseless and expendable.

    It does make the RN's discipline problems through this period rather more comprehensible.

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  5. ...And offered them a chance at a fortune through prize money. That's kind of the other side of the coin. That a regime facing an existential challenge (and notice that in spite of the cliche of consequence-free cabinet wars, the main governments participating in the War of the Austrian Succession have an impressive record of instability and actual or near "regime change") ends up having to bargain with the powerless. Daniel Braugh makes the interesting point that the Western Squadron would never have kept the sea so long in the Seven Years War had the crews not been motivated by a steady stream of prizes. That's the complicated process through which the Eighteenth Century European economy was shifted from a low-growth to a high-growth trajectory. Is this the part where I talk about expert riggers (that is, the guys who rigged ships in harbour) from Plymouth erecting the iron bridge over the Menai Gorge? Nah, people are probably bored by the whole idea that there's a skills-development path leading from stringing the standing rigging to assembling steam engines.

    One is left to wonder what bottom-up changes might take place in a theocratic government trying to raise, and launch, its third army in a generation against an alien regime to the south.... , Would it be perverse to suggest that it might look like Gamergate and yet at the same time be a hopeful development, if youthful energies were productively channelled and positively reinforced by a sentient terrane that's as afraid of the Pain Gyre as anyone else? Just askin'

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  6. Standing rigging to steam engines? Large public structures is easier to believe (who else would have known how you hoist awkward long beams up to a height?) than steam engines. Though I suppose early stationary steam engines are all about the awkward long beams.

    I tend to think of prize money as "that never happens", from the perspective that most ships even in the 18th century RN never actually fought anybody. But of course statistically it did happen, and the money did get paid out, and people are hopeful.

    The theocratic government isn't what we'd think of as a government; more of a god-king autocracy asserting ownership of a latitude-band cultural cluster. (One reason the second try is so far east of the first; the folks out east have the spare population to support recruiting an army.) At the imperial level it's nothing like as cohesive or as resilient as the post-Glorious Revolution English. Maybe not as cohesive as the Athenian hegemony over Greece, even, maybe more like vaguely hypothesized Achaean clientage interactions. It's having a very bad time and some of its ... marcher appendages, let's say, are doing their damndest to culturally innovate out of the mess they're in. (Which is easier when the upper class has been pruned quite so hard.)

    I haven't got there, yet, though; the next two books (done, but not copy-edited) are about boring things like going to school for a new career track after being evacuated into the Second Commonweal. The one after that (currently in flailing) has the initial interaction with what can be thought of as combinatorial Cretan-Victorian thalassocracy. It may be the one after that which gets to artillery manufacturing and an attempt at a less theocratic than it used to be member of that cultural cluster.

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  7. The skills transition that turned riggers into autobody guys (and, in the dark, cyberpunky future, hackers) is step-by-step. First you get the guys who know how to hoist beams to hoist beams. Which, once hoisted, have to be bolted and rivetted together.

    Now, it's not like that learning and experience with fitting engine bits together go very deep, but it's also not like there's anyone else qualified to get the bits and pieces of a steam engine down to the bottom of a pit and erect it there,so you go with what you have. Eventually,the guys with the wrenches have some grip on how to use them, and they get recruited into the team that makes the stationary engines in the factories.

    I dunno. In the end, it's about how, during a labour shortage, you take what you can get and rely on learning-by-doing. If it's working,you can tell by the way that you get fewer and fewer city-levellling explosions over time. If it's not, you can tell from the gradual increase in the number of city-levelling explosions. Ahem.

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  8. It comes to mind that ships of the early-steam era were using a lot of iron framing and reinforcing bolts and such-like, and that a lot of steam engines went into ships. Wouldn't have been an initial distinction about engine-fitters, so of course the riggers would have been tightening all those bolts and dealing with engines before the skills moved ashore.

    Totally agree about the labour shortage.

    Sunrise Propane managed to kill a couple people and hurt dozens and make a large mess in 2008; this year's major gas leak didn't kill anybody and made a much, much smaller mess. So the march of civilization is at least going the right way in Toronto, at least in respect of large explosions.

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  9. IIRC, Rodgers points out that desertion and re-impresssment were well-worn parts of the cycle. C18 administration worked best when run on a loose rein (compare the British melange of manning systems to the French Inscription Maritime - the latter was supposedly fairer, but simply broke down under local resistance, corruption and inability to meld with induction and training of non-seamen). Note also that the RN offered a career - from seaman to AB to petty officer or skilled trade (armourer/sailmaker/carpenter/gunner) to dockyard officer with the prospect of generational advancement into the gentry class.

    That said, and while British administration looks very jerry-built to us, it was much more cohesive than predecessors or most rivals. How was it, for instance, that they kept control over distant possessions even in the face of considerable local temptation and poor communications.

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    1. I think the whole "kept control" thing here is a bit of a red herring. The British Empire will never set in Antarctica as long as there is a wall map in some abandoned school room in a ghost town somewhere that shows a solid third of the continent in glorious, British red. It's not like a bunch of penguins are going to declare independence from the Queen-Empress.

      On the other hand, the Empire lost America in 1776 by trying to exert "control."

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    2. Consider the historical comparisons: Roman generals in charge of provincial armies, Mongol domains, Islamic governors. Kamran, Auranzeb's son and governor of Herat, said that he never opened a letter from his father without trembling. It could contain a death sentence, because both he and his father knew that Herat was as much a base for a bid for the empire as a defence against Iran. Or the Spanish crown trying to manage its American possessions: it did reasonably well, but it had to concede a lot to local powers. With the notable exception of the United States, British abroad never escaped imperial control, and were mostly kept in hand, Despite having local sources of revenue, local troops, learning local languages and often marrying local women.

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  10. Or Caribbean governors sailing with pirates, Anglo-Indian magnates building villas around Delhi and dabbling with being Mughal courtiers, Doctor McLoughlin founding the state of Oregon with his right hand and the colony of British Columbia with his left...

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