The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and its opponents in Georgian Britain

(Hardback)

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The press gang, and its forcible recruitment of sailors to man the Royal Navy in times of war, acquired notoriety for depriving men of their liberty and carrying them away to a harsh life at sea, sometimes for years at a time. Nicholas Rogers explains exactly how the press gang worked, whom it was aimed at and how successful it was in achieving its ends. He also shows the limits to its operations and the press gang's need for cooperation from local authorities, who were by no means prepared to support it.
Written by an expert in the social history of eighteenth-century Britain, it is both well-researched and highly readable.

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

Author Bio

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.