Book Review: Extreme Violence and the ‘British Way’: Colonial Warfare in Perak, Sierra Leone and Sudan by Michelle Gordon

Abstract

approaches his subject by breaking it down into three broad categories: Ships; Seamen; and Working, Living and Dying in the Navy. Each of these sections is further broken down into separate parts, the first comprising chapters on the materials of ship construction, the building of a ship, the construction of an arsenal and the rebuilding of the fleet across the eighteenth century, where we get an idea of the growth in numbers of warships and other vessels. There is hardly an aspect of the royal fleet that is not covered in this encyclopedic work: shipbuilding, the persistence of galleys, crewing, medical provision, the salaries of officers and seamen and how they compared with those in civil society, the presence of women, the relative costs of forced (convict) and paid labour in the naval arsenals, whether the Spanish was a less mutinous navy than were others, rations and their cost within the larger financing of the fleet, and espionage, to identify just some of the many topics. That Torres is able to cover so many issues is testimony to the work of an impressive Spanish naval bureaucracy, whose archival legacy underpins a corpus of older and more recent work which Torres discusses in an invaluable critical bibliographic essay. Turning to the function of the fleet, for most of the century, the emphasis was on defence, and life on board was continuous sailing as the fleet joined up the dots of global empire, the drama of battle a relatively rare occurrence. However, innovations in ship design and construction contributed to a tactical revolution in the Spanish navy in the last third of the century, one favouring a more aggressive approach. Hence Trafalgar. For Torres that catastrophe was a consequence of a collapse of the Spanish state dating from Spain’s intervention in the War of the First Coalition from 1793 and the fundamental problem thereafter of inadequate funding; in that sense the failure of the fleet was part and parcel of the larger developing crisis of Spain’s antiguo regimen. In exploring his subject, Torres’ text is masterly, but his Spanish publisher has also done him proud. Desperta Ferro, which produces very successful history magazines full of splendid graphics, draws on those strengths to ensure that almost every page of the book is enhanced by useful illustrations – contemporary maps, plans and so on – by tables, and by diagrams and so on showing, for example, the layout of a gun deck, all of which make the book not only easily intelligible to those without Spanish but also a joy to leaf through. The consequence is that in some respects the book looks like a coffee table book, but the book is much more than that, and is by far the most impressive read currently available on the Spanish navy in the eighteenth century, one which will surely lead the field for years to come.