Dr. Sarah von Hagen

Naval violence became a constant presence in the Atlantic world through the formation of professional and permanent naval forces in the second half of the early modern period. Acts of war at sea threatened and cost human lives; they produced effects of power and served as catalysts for the development of warships as the most expensive and advanced weapons of their time, and for navies as the largest organizational and administrative structures of the period. Despite their central importance in the shaping of the Atlantic world, maritime military violence and the war experiences of historical seafarers have rarely been addressed explicitly in historical scholarship. By conducting a historical-anthropological investigation of violence in naval battles of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this dissertation fills a significant gap in early modern military history and the historiography of violence. It offers a new bottom-up perspective on the global conflicts over supremacy that characterized the long eighteenth century.

Research Questions and Sources

This project examines acts of violence committed by British, French, and Dutch naval forces in the North Atlantic and the North Sea in order to explore how warfare at sea was shaped by its specific spatial and technological conditions, what consequences it entailed, and how it was represented both textually and visually. The timeframe is framed by two conflicts that may be described as genuine naval wars: the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667) and the American War of Independence (1775–1783). Both mark key points in the tactical development and contemporary perception of naval warfare. The aim of the project is to uncover the specific signatures of maritime warfare violence in this period by analyzing how violence—understood as physical force in the sense of the power to injure (Heinrich Popitz)—was experienced, enacted, represented, and legitimized in its contemporary context.

The source base includes both individual and mediated accounts of experience, court records, and contemporary visual representations of naval battles. Taken together, these sources offer insights into the social production of knowledge, into narratives that shaped the processing of maritime violence, and into prevailing normative frameworks of the period.

Experience – Technologization – Mediality. Specificities of Naval Violence

Maritime violence as a contingent and spatial phenomenon

Situations of maritime violence were highly contingent phenomena, whose course and outcome were scarcely controllable. Environmental influences, the unpredictability of the surroundings, and technical factors shaped the course of events; ships and their crews were exposed to the forces of sea and wind, and maneuvers or movements were difficult to plan. The apparent boundlessness and amorphous vastness of the sea, contrasted with the extreme confinement of the ships as “floating fortresses” and their movement on a constantly shifting element, gave rise to a specific form of spatiality. This contingency and spatiality demanded distinct—and often improvised—strategies of coping in the moment: technological superiority and tactical know-how did not guarantee strategic advantage or military success. Technological and operational developments—whether in the form of ship types or revised strategies—had to prove themselves at sea; the need for change arose not least from concrete experiences of violence. At the same time, acts of violence at sea often eluded the immediate perception of contemporaries. Naval battles were, on the one hand, unobservable in their entirety and, on the other, frequently took place without witnesses beyond the participants themselves. It was only through processes of medial representation that the experiences of war in the secluded, “wooden world” (N. A. M. Rodger) became visible at all.

Methodological and theoretical approach

Human beings were necessary participants in naval battles, but not sufficient in themselves: the course and outcome of a battle were shaped as much by weather, wind direction, waves, ships, gunpowder, and natural conditions as by human decisions and actions. The scope for action and the probabilities of possible outcomes shifted constantly during the battle and, at times, slipped entirely beyond human control. In order to empirically grasp the phenomenon in its full complexity, violence is approached praxeologically—operationalized through the maritime practices of burning, boarding, chasing, and cannon fire. Supplemented by insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), this approach treats human, technical, and natural actors symmetrically. This makes it possible to observe violence more comprehensively and precisely as the effect of a spatially and temporally situated, complex, open-ended, yet patterned interplay of human bodies, technical artifacts, natural and climatic conditions, movements, and normative expectations. To adequately reflect the specific nature of maritime violence on a narrative level, the project follows the methods of situational violence research, using thick description of selected case-study sequences. This close-up perspective is combined with a macro-level analysis that traces the mechanisms and effects of individual violent practices beyond the specific situation in which they occurred.