Reviews Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution by Nathan PerlRosenthal (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015, 372pp, maps, appen, notes, index, ISBN 978-0-674-28615-3; $29.95 hc) Citizen Sailors is a well-researched and original contribution to Atlantic-America maritime history. Assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California Nathan Perl-Rosenthal displays a solid understanding of Atlantic social, cultural, and legal history in his presentation of an important bur largely overlooked theme in American maritime history. Perl-Rosenthal focuses on the changing definitions and metrics for determining citizenship for maritime laborers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. During times of war, a sailor's ability to prove his nationality often meant the difference between freedom and impressment, imprisonment, lashing, or even death. Furthermore, assessment of the nationality of officers, men, and the ships they belonged to could have tremendous financial implications in an era of blockades, privateering, and naval prize money. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Atlantic maritime world relied on "the common sense of nationality" based on the relative homogeneity of labor within the competing maritime empires. The typical crew consisted of a majority of "native son s" whose cultural characteristics and language derived clearly from their place of birth. Citizenship in this context was "acquired at birth and normally unalterable." In Citizen Sailors, Professor Perl-Rosenthal argues that the American Revolution and its afrermath began a shift from this common-sense determination to complex modern systems of documenting individual citizenship among maritime laborers. The commonalities between British and American sailors instituted an ambiguity into "commonsense" determinations of citizenship that became increasingly unacceptable during the Napoleonic E ra and the War of 1812. The author describes a wide range of innovations in identity marking developed by common sailors, maritime bureaucrats and diplomats. Key developments included the US Congress's establishment of the London Agency for the Protec-
SEA HISTORY 153, WINTER 2015-16
tion of Seamen in 1796. Under George Lennox, the agency developed a complex system for tracking individual American seaman. Indeed , the agency's largely overlooked records provide the basis of the book's more original and strongest scholarship. In 1803, Congress enacted a law directing the federal government to begin certifying the nationality of American sailors. The customs house, through its "protections," became the certifying and administrative mechanism for issuing and tracking sailor-identity papers. By the early nineteenth century, "identity documents from the federal government, usually certified and handled by federal officials, had become necessary and sufficient proof of American nationality at sea." In juxtaposing "federal citizenship for seamen" with the more localized terrestrial citizen constructs, the author illustrates from ye t another vantage point the wellestablished ambiguities of race found in the early antebellum maritime wo rld. While it is certainly a scholarly volume, the book is accessible to anyone interested in American maritime history during the Age of Sail. Perhaps a bit too strong on context for the specialist maritime historian, the book's linkage to the larger historical processes and events make it a useful volume for introducing important maritime perspectives to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students . The volume's weaknesses are irksome, rather than substantive, and reflect the publisher more than the author. Illustrations are perfuncrory and the maps not well presented or effectively integrated . The subtitle, "Becoming American in the Age of Revolution" is misleading. "Documenting American Identity in the Revolutionary A tlantic" might have been more on point. These minor points aside, this is a valuable and extremely well-researched contribution to the history of United States during early the Revolutionary and Early Republic periods, and a welcome addition ro the ca non of American maritime history.
New York, 2015, 448pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, ISBN 978-0-307-40886-0; $28hc) Go ro any library and yo u will find shelves groaning under the weight of the dozens of tomes published in the last hundred years about the 1915 sinking of the RMS Lusitania by a German U-boat. It has been probed as a cloak-and-dagger mystery: Was it really sent to the bottom by the deto nation of poorly packed munitions secretly shipped by British agents from the then-neutral United States? Was it a set-up? Did Sea Lord Winston Churchill conspire to throw the most magnificent of his nation's ocean liners and its innocent passengers into the path of mortal danger just ro draw the US into World War I? And why on earth do we need yet another book on the ropic? The answer is simple. A century on, with the Lusitania long gone from living memory, what happened ro the sh ip is no longer the issue. The issue is why it mattered. Why did the fate of one ship, however glorious, make any difference in the midst of a worldwide conflagration that was slaughtering innocents by the millions?
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