Sea narratives: cultural responses to the sea, 1600–present

Abstract

referencing the work of Michel Foucault and James C. Scott in the introduction, and here and there throughout, Malcomson remains mostly very close to the empirical ground. Many readers will likely find that a relief. Others, however, will wish he had dissected his material with a sharper analytical tool, and that he had been a little more self-critical in examining his theoretical assumptions regarding the nature and operation of what he calls order. For example, it is not clear on what grounds, or to what analytical ends, he chooses to privilege the top-down perspective by categorising officers’ actions, even when they wreak havoc on the social order, as order-creating, while lower-deck self-activity, even when it is overtly relationship-building like sex or mutiny, is deemed to be disordering. There is of course a logical and theoretical framework at work here, but Malcomson does not overtly engage with it. In a similar vein, while he is careful to emphasise that the three parts of the book should not be read as a causal sequence – order, disorder, and then punishment – he does not explain how their complex dialectical dance might fruitfully be understood instead. This is a missed opportunity. Malcomson is similarly reticent when it comes to the historiographical implications of his findings, of which there are many. Indeed, despite the book’s frankly misleading title, he is careful not to claim that his arguments have validity beyond the North American and West India stations in the early to mid-1810s. At the same time, by not closely analysing his discoveries in relationship to that particular geographic and chronological context, he also does not try very hard to avoid suggesting the opposite. As a result, it remains unclear whether his work really challenges previous studies, or simply enriches their arguments by complicating the overall picture. And perhaps we should be grateful: more stories of rum, sodomy and the lash will no doubt be forthcoming.