Table of Contents

Introduction                                                                                                        
Impressment and the Law                                                                      
Resisting the Press gang: Trends, Patterns, Dynamics        
Spotlight on Two Ports: Bristol and Liverpool                  
Manning the Navy in the Mid-century Atlantic                   
The Navy and the Nation, 1793-1820                                                    
Epilogue                                                                                                                           

Promotional Information

Nicholas Rogers' book gives the reader a detailed and illuminating insight into the world and ways of the press gang.

About the Author

Nicholas Rogers is a leading expert on the social history of eighteenth-century Britain. He is Professor of History at York University, Toronto and currently Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow, Huntington Library, California.. His many books include Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt and Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain, for which he won the Wallace K. Ferguson prize.

Reviews

"The Press Gang was a pleasure to read.  Rogers has done his research, consulting a variety of primary sources including Admiralty records, numerous newspapers of the period and pamphlets.  He places the press gang and community resistance to their activities in a new light, and challenges the prevailing historiography of British naval history by bringing this story to light.  By examining the violent practices of the Navy, and the British government's support of them, Rogers has transcended the prevailing heroic interpretation of naval history." -Donald H. Parkerson, Nautical Research Journal, Vol. 54, June 2009

"Detailed and illuminating insight into the world and ways of the press gang" Bookseller Buyers Guide

Mention -Book News, February 2009

"The great strength of this book is Roger's ability to link impressment, which only a small demographic can define and discuss, to larger social issues...Rogers has done much to illuminate the ways in which human agency constrained the expansion of coercive, government-sponsored military conscription throughout much of the British Atlantic World.  He is to be applauded for refusing to yield the human spirit to ubiquitous structural forces associated with legal, political, and military institutions such as impressment." -Christopher P. Magra, The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord, 2009

"[Rogers] should be commended for his efforts.  This volume reads easily and makes a major contribution to the literature on civil-naval relations." -Keith Mercer, International Journal of Maritime History, Vol. 21, 2009