If the word ‘strategy’ is now essential for us, it was however absent from French vocabulary of the eighteenth century. At that time no theorist of naval war considered anything than ‘tactics’, that is to say ‘the art to arrange the Navies in the order which is appropriate for the object that one proposes & to regulate their movements’. It meant a science of naval evolutions, or, in other words, operations, which a squadron could carry out. This science is the general officer's one, but, reading the French theorists, from the P. Hoste to the vicomte de Grenier via Bigot de Morogues, it is clear that its subject was not yet a ‘universal science of the war’ including the art of preparing a plan of campaign. That was the task, not of the seaman, but was the monopoly of the king and some of his ministers. On the other hand, the vocabulary then of use in France strained to catch a reality of this. Although the neologism ‘la stratégique’ appears in 1771 from the quill of the Lieutenant-Colonel Joly de Maizeroy, the erudite translator of Byzantine military writings, and it was useful to name such a science which forms and prepares the projects before directing them, the word, nonetheless, remained rare and was not yet applied to the sea.

To this first linguistic difficulty is added a second, related to the frequent absence of sources in archives on the discussions and the methods of decision making by the king in his council. Generally, the design of a plan of operation remains opaque to us. Only the orders given as a result are directly known; all the former stages remaining a state secret. At most we can guess that the development of a plan of campaign was conditioned by political objectives of the Bourbon monarch, by the theoretical structure of the naval forces, fixed on different occasions during the century, and by the concrete constraints amongst units available or likely to be so a few months later. Everyone always expected a short war, such as only one campaign at sea, of a few months, would be enough to confirm the decision.

One of the paradoxes of slave-trade history is that while we now know a lot about the gut-wrenching process of turning Africans into slaves and the hazards of trafficking on tropical coasts, we know relatively little about the sailors who manned the ships. To be sure, historians have dredged the smattering of life writings that refer to slave ships, many of which reveal graphic accounts of the brutality of captains and mates and a seaman's induction into the trade. Yet precisely who the sailors were, from what ports they hailed, how they were recruited, remains elusive if not opaque. This has not stopped historians generalizing about slave-ship sailors: they are said to be ‘multiracial’, a ‘motley crew’ from different quarters of the globe.

One exception to this trend is Mike Breward who has made use of the detailed muster rolls of Bristol at the end of the eighteenth century to offer a portrait of slave-ship crews. The muster rolls earlier in the century did not have a lot to offer the historian, which typically record the pay due to sailors for months at sea and the last ships the seamen entered. These rolls were designed to assess the contribution seamen made to the hospital fund, legislated in 1747. In Bristol, the task of tracking the levy and its administration was put under the jurisdiction of the Merchant Venturers, which is why the muster rolls are in its archives. The early rolls tell us little about the social provenance of the seamen beyond noting the port from which they typically sailed, and because captains were sometimes lax about their entries, this information is not always reliable. The differential payments allotted seamen do reveal the number who died or ran during the voyage, those discharged at the port of delivery and the sailors who were impressed or even elected to enter men-of-war during wartime. This information is vital to assessing the volatility of crews. The one other advantage of the mid-century muster rolls is that the more regular ones list the last ship on which the seaman sailed, giving historians a chance to measure persistence, an issue that maritime historians have seldom addressed.

Mutiny was an ever-present threat on Bristol's slave ships. It was even written into the articles of agreement between owners and seamen. On the Sally, drawn up in July 1785, the crew promised to ‘faithfully and truly perform and do their several Stations and Services … without any Manner of Denial, Mutiny, or Resistance whatever.’ A template contract of 1787 said the same thing. What mutiny meant in this context was not entirely clear. It was a slippery term, applied most obviously to seamen who collectively took possession of a ship, merging in this context with piracy. We are all familiar with the mutiny on the Bounty. Yet mutiny could also apply to cuffing an officer, grabbing him by the lapels, maliciously complaining about poor provisions, and calling the officers ‘rogues’, as Justice Willes instructed the jury in a case involving a recalcitrant gunner in 1749; if, of course, such actions could be construed as inciting a general disaffection against the captain and ship's hierarchy. Simply refusing to obey orders and threatening to go on strike fell within its ambit, for these could be seen as ‘mutinous expressions’. The great mutiny at Spithead in 1797 was essentially a strike, although unlike a land-based one, the seamen commandeered the fleet, electing delegates to co-ordinate their resistance.

We will never know how many acts of mutiny took place on the high seas. Minor incidents were unlikely to be reported, especially if a captain handled the situation with any tact. On the Wasp, which sailed for Bonny and New Calabar, the captain charged the London bosun John Person of ‘mutiny’ in July 1794 and delivered him to the governor of Cape Coast Castle a month later. A chance entry in the muster rolls of the Mary, which set sail for Africa in the summer of 1789, reveals that the captain put John Walters, an able seaman from Cardiff, on board the Panama for ‘mutiny’ six months into the voyage. Later, when the ship reached Jamaica, Captain Edward Mentor put two Dubliners on board the HMS Centurion for the same reason. As John Newton remarked, removing truculent seamen to men-of-war was a well-worn tactic of slave-ship captains.

As you leave the archives and walk to the river's edge, you can sometimes see the tide turning. The tidal range of Bristol's River Avon is immense; at its highest point on the highest spring tide, nearly 50 feet. In 1830 it was reckoned to be 40, and in the late eighteenth century, before the construction of the floating dock, around 36. Pilots were needed to ferry ships up the river at full tide; indeed, pilots were needed to guide vessels from the stormy Bristol Channel towards Kingroad, the estuary of the Avon, where the ships would drop anchor and await a favourable wind and tide to take them seven miles to the city's centre.

This set of essays begins with the pilots, a body of men who lived at Crockerne Pill, close to the first natural harbour on the river at Hungroad. This closely-knit community created a dense cousinage to confront the dangers of piloting in the Bristol Channel. Aware of their importance to Bristol's commercial prosperity, the pilots were quite willing to carve some independence from the merchant oligarchy that officially regulated them and the Admiralty who sought to curb their willingness to help sailors escape the press. Pill became a haven for runaway seamen and illicit commerce, a thorn in the side of the city, the merchants, and the national government, who, for sound commercial and environmental reasons, had to tolerate its rambunctious disrespect for constituted authority.

Chapter one presents an indispensable link from the quay to the Atlantic. The other chapters zone in on different aspects of Bristol's broader maritime history. Although Bristol was always something of a metropolis of the west, an important market and distributing centre for goods made or grown in the West Country and Wales, overseas commerce was the lifeblood of the city. That commerce was diverse. Bristol had strong links with Ireland, trading with Dublin and the ports to the south such as Cork, Limerick, Kinsale, and Waterford. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, seventy vessels carried dairy produce, salted beef and pork, linen, leather, and timber to Bristol in return for manufactured goods and colonial products.

The War that Britain fought between 1739 and 1748 has not been considered one in which the strategic, operational, or tactical abilities of its statesmen and military leaders blossomed. In London, Sir Robert Walpole, the duke of Newcastle, the earl of Carteret and almost all their colleagues in the highest positions of state, are usually seen as ill-informed, misguided, and fractious. On the battlefields the likes of the duke of Cumberland, the earl of Stair, Sir John Cope, Henry Hawley, seem to have little grasp of the broader purpose of their campaigns. At sea, Edward Vernon, Thomas Matthews, Charles Knowles, Henry Medley, and John Byng were unable to make good use of Britain's greatest strategic advantage – sea power. At best the war, which for Britain ended with the status quo ante, was solid training for those lights were going to burn brightly eight years later in the Seven Years War – most obviously, the secretary of state for the Southern Department, William Pitt, but also the illustrious commanders, George Anson, Jean-Louis Ligonier, Edward Hawke, Edward Boscawen, Jeffrey Amherst, and James Wolfe.

The transformation of Britain's performance in the two wars has long been associated with the emergence of this new generation of leaders. That they played important roles in the victories is undeniable, but locating the causes of success almost exclusively in the characters of the leaders, throws much else into the shade.

This chapter will focus less on the performance of individual leaders than on the social process of leadership itself. This way of looking at leadership shows that it is not rigidly hierarchical, nor bureaucratically determined. Nor are its outputs the product of a purely scientific rational process. It is not confined to formal organisational ‘commanders’ nor the preserve of a single brain. Leadership at all levels is a social process that exists between people – the leaders and the led – who are in a constant process of renegotiating that relationship and may be changing roles at any time. Even the output of the strategy formulation process – strategic policy – is only one step in actual performance of the organisation.

In 1783, after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which brought the American Revolution (1776–1783) to an end, the land area of Spain's possessions in the Americas was larger than at any other point in history. Covering more than 16 million square kilometers, the Spanish Empire included a large part of both the North American and the South American continents. It extended all the way from California in the north Pacific, through the powerful viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, to Tierra del Fuego, and the viceroyalty of Río de la Plata in the south Atlantic, and included the provinces of New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida; the viceroyalty of Nueva Granada and several captaincies general; and the large Caribbean islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo, in addition to the archipelago of the Philippines.

However, in spite of all it had achieved, after the war this huge empire was faced with a number of challenges. Historians today point to the end of the reign of Carlos III (1759–1788) as the beginning of a period of crisis for the Spanish monarchy. The Bourbon Reforms, as they are known, were reaching their limits. This was due in part to factors internal to the Spanish monarchy. But there was a later phase characterized by renewed attempts at reform. This is the period between 1783 and 1792, during the tenure of the Count of Floridablanca as secretary of state – the most powerful position in the government – which coincides with the creation of a new political institution: the Junta de Estado (1787–1792), a council of state that functioned as a true cabinet.

In the present chapter, I focus on the aspects of reform that involved the navy. I attempt to analyze the importance of the support given by Floridablanca to the secretary of the navy, Antonio Valdés (1783–1795), a naval commander who played a leading role in the junta.

In a society based on privilege, like Spain's in the eighteenth century, in which there was no separation between the public and private spheres, power networks were vital. This was true for the exercise of political governance as well as naval leadership. It is important to keep in mind that the court in Madrid, as the embodiment of the absolute monarchy, was the epicenter of power relations between the ruling elites in Spain and its overseas empire.

‘Everyone that enters upon it’ wrote Henry Laurens of the slave trade, ‘should fortify themselves against misfortune.’ There were many who would concur. William Snelgrave, a London-based slaver of the 1720s, alert to the dangers, zoned in on African mutinies aboard slave ships, which he designated the ‘chief subject’ of his Account. Seventy years later, the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson addressed the same issue in a letter to one of the early leaders of the French Revolution, the Comte de Mirabeau. There was an ever-present threat of rebellion aboard ship, he told this progressive aristocrat, and all too frequently the insurgencies of slaves were ‘industriously consigned to oblivion, that not a Trace, if possible, may be found’. Clarkson cited the case of the Britannia, a Bristol ship skippered by James Bruce, where shackled slaves besieged the ships’ barricade and overran the quarterdeck only to be suppressed by superior firepower. Confronted by defeat, some of the militants ‘cast themselves into the Sea, with masks of Joy in their Countenance, and of the most perfect Contempt for their oppressors.’ Or, so it was reported. Of the 190 slaves who boarded the vessel on the Windward coast, only ninety reached Barbados.

The revolt on board the Britannia was far from exceptional. A seaman who had sailed on three Bristol slave voyages during the 1760s told Thomas Clarkson that the predicament of capture was ‘so very intolerable and grievous’ that Africans ‘will do anything to extricate themselves from it’. Historians who have trawled through the relevant sources for the long eighteenth century have discovered roughly 500 acts of collective violence by Africans caught up in the British, Dutch, and French slave trades: nearly 100 by free Africans who attacked boats and vessels from the shore, often as reprisals against malicious trading; and about 400 shipboard mutinies. These are conservative estimates, for Clarkson was right to note that slaveship captains were reluctant to chronicle many intended revolts because they would reflect badly on their reputations.

It is easy to conclude that over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries France did not develop the naval leadership needed to compete effectively with Britain in the eighteenth, and this despite the many outstanding individual exceptions and successes that can be identified along the way. This relative weakness, it seems, was due to a series of deep contradictions within the French navy. Separate Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, for example, presented practical problems of coordination and command, but also quite distinct cultures of leadership: one sea where traditions of noble, military command stretched back centuries and the other where any such traditions had to be invented. A gulf could also be said to have existed between the maritime periphery and the centre in Paris or Versailles, separated not just geographically but also by contrasting maritime and continental strategic outlooks. Similarly, it was difficult to integrate a typically jealous, privileged, and Catholic nobility with the body of active and able seamen in coastal communities, a great many of whom were Huguenots. Thus, the conflict within the naval hierarchy (traditionally said to be divided between the noble officiers rouges and the officiers bleus of the lower orders) was made all the more intractable by the wider confessional division in France. If some of these contradictions now seem less stark than they were once believed to be, they nevertheless still contribute to the perception that the navy suffered from a debilitating imbalance due to the separation of civil and military authority. The history of the navy was dominated by a succession of high-profile and powerful ministers of state which appears to have come at the cost of strong naval leadership and command. The admiralty of France seems irrelevant in comparison. That this was a larger political failure in France is reinforced by the popular image of an ineffective or uninterested monarchy acting as something of an emblem of this wider structural dysfunction. This civil-military division needs to be considered more carefully, however. Far from just the effect of serial mismanagement, it was the product of careful attempts to manage the balance between another, far more relevant, contradiction. Historically, the navy was shaped by its twin functions as an aspect of governance and as a military arm of royal power.

In 1777, the regulating officer for Bristol, Captain William Hamilton, the man responsible for recruiting seafaring men into the navy, ran into a spot of trouble. His lieutenant had impressed a couple of pilots for assisting men to escape the clutches of the press gangs, and the whole river came to a standstill. As Hamilton explained to their lordships at the Admiralty, the pilots and their assistants were responsible for the navigation of all inward and outward boats to Bristol, and he had no choice but to release the men his lieutenant had detained. The pilots, who all lived at Crockerne Pill, a village some five miles from Bristol and two miles from the mouth of the river on the Somersetshire side of the Avon, were ‘absolutely necessary to the trade of this City & have always been considered as such’, he remarked.1 The master of the Society of Merchant Venturers had applied for their discharge and Hamilton had conceded. What else could he do but continue to garner good relations with the merchant elite whose co-operation was always important to the manning of the British navy.

Hamilton was not the only regulating officer to be confronted with this dilemma. In March 1742, the lieutenant of a naval tender impressed another pilot, one James Rumney. He lived in Pill with his wife and four children, and predictably his fellow pilots swung into action, threatening to close the port in protest to his detention. As the town clerk reminded the Admiralty, it was quite irregular to impress pilots on duty. ‘If such Grievances are overlookt, or winkt at’, he continued, the merchants’ ‘Shipps must be kept riding at their anchors, which they shall rather choose than to hazard them loaden down our Channel without the assistance of these so usefull and necessary Conductors.’

Huge tides, blustery winds, treacherous rocks, and shifting quicksand meant that pilots were essential to the commerce of Bristol. John Stuckey remarked that the tides to Bristol ran ‘at a prodigious rate’ with a range of nearly 6 fathoms or 36 feet. Without an experienced pilot and his hobblers, ships could easily be beached on the serpentine Avon, bringing traffic to a standstill. The approach to the Avon estuary was equally treacherous.

The progress of abolition in Bristol presents us with an interesting paradox. Why did the emergence of a movement to abolish the slave trade falter after a promising start in the 1780s? The obvious answer is that Bristol was a slave port and successfully muffled and contained demands for the termination of the trade. While this is undoubtedly true, it is not an entirely sufficient answer. Bristol had many of the qualities that made it a vibrant scene of public debate: a rich assortment of clubs and associations; a newspaper press with at least three weeklies vying for public attention; and a library society and circulating libraries that meant the city had antislavery literature at its fingertips. Following up on James Bradley's research into the dissenting vote and British radicalism, David Richardson, the foremost authority on Bristol's slave trade, has surmised that Bristol had all the conditions that made Manchester and Sheffield important centres of abolition sentiment. And yet Bristol did not emulate the mass petitioning of those towns in the big push for abolition in 1791–2. Along with Liverpool it was mute; encircled by a host of West Country towns that did join in the mass condemnation of the slave trade, including Bath, Trowbridge, Taunton, Gloucester, and Exeter.

In the first seven decades of the eighteenth century, abolition was a non-starter in Bristol. Until 1745, Bristol was the pre-eminent British slave port, profiting from the termination of the Royal Africa Company's monopoly in 1698. Clearing only five ships per annum in the late 1690s, Bristol was sending out over forty a year by 1720 and over forty-five in 1730–2 and 1737–8. Over the course of the long eighteenth century, 1698–1807, Bristol carried 587,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas, of which 486,000, or 82.8 per cent, survived. In its heyday, Bristol merchants were responsible for 40 per cent of all British slaving, and the knock-on effect of this activity was immense, in terms of shipbuilding, manufacture for African markets, marine insurance, and the importation, refining, and selling of tropical products. David Richardson has calculated that in 1790 perhaps 40 per cent of all economic activity in the port was involved one way or another with the slave trade, and at its prime one can reasonably assume it was higher.

Since the first few months of 2020 the world economy has been faced by crises that it had not seen for over seventy years. The sudden progress of the virus COVID-19 throughout most of the world forced an unprecedented economic shut-down, bringing predictions of an economic jolt whose repercussions are likely to be felt for many years to come. So new was the virus that most national governments quickly turned to the scientific community to help them understand the epidemiology. They looked to this community to inform decisions relating to the immediate political questions about ending ‘lock-downs’ and organising life in the post-virus world. They barely dared to make a move without the endorsement of some part of the scientific community. However, it was not long before citizens became restless in many parts of the world, particularly the western world. This was reflected in political backlashes and even violence. It was a stark reminder of an old tension that exists within societies between political authority and the authority of experts.

Barely had the global concern over COVID subsided when another major crisis jolted world politics. In January 2022 increasingly aggressive displays of Russian military power on the borders of Ukraine sent tremors through the world's diplomatic channels. While Russian messaging was ambiguous in so far as what Russian grievances actually were and what would satisfy the Kremlin, what was not in question was the expert power of the Russian armed forces. On conspicuous display was the modern hardware and the new tactical organisation of an armed force that had been substantially reformed since 2008. It was believed that if Russia decided to launch a large-scale invasion of Ukraine it would be a short, one-sided affair.

In the event the invasion of 24 February was a dismal failure. The expertise in the operational art and the technological and tactical changes supposed to have radically altered the effectiveness of the Russian military proved illusory. On the ground, in the air, and at sea the expertise of Russian forces was far more limited in combat than initially anticipated. This came only six months after the withdrawal of Allied forces from Afghanistan had also shown that highly developed, expensive military expertise could not prevent humiliation and disaster. In the world of the military, as in civil society, the authority of the experts was undermined.

Henry Cruger is usually remembered as Edmund Burke's radical sidekick, his colleague as MP for Bristol from 1774 to 1780, a tumultuous half-decade when Britain went to war with its American colonies. Although he had stronger links with Bristol than Burke – he had been a common councilman since 1766 and became an alderman in 17821 – it has always been Burke who has stolen the limelight. This has been snobbery on Bristol's part; the pleasure of being represented by a well-known national politician and writer. In the centre of Bristol to this day stands a statue of Burke. Cruger's memory is tucked away on a small plaque off Park Street where the merchant-politician once lived.

The plaque reveals several things. Cruger had a long life, dying at the age of 87 in 1827. He was an American, but lived for thirty-three years in Bristol, becoming mayor of Bristol in 1781 and joining the elite Society of Merchant Venturers that dominated the commercial and political life of the city. Henry Cruger was also a transatlantic figure. He was one of three American-born members to sit in eighteenth-century British parliaments; he actually contested four elections and sat twice for Bristol, in 1774 and again in 1784. But in April 1790, two months before the next general election, when parliament was still in session, he left for New York and two years later became a state senator there. That made him rather unique, especially as objections were raised to his American heritage when he ran in Bristol in 1784, and to his British links when he ran in New York.

Cruger's decision to return to New York was related to the impact of the American war on his economic circumstances, but there is no doubting the strength of his roots there. He hailed from a merchant dynasty that had prospered in New York and was active in its politics. His grandfather Jan Cruger, very likely of Dutch descent, arrived in New York in 1696 and established a shipping business in association with Onzeel Van Swieton. The partnership survived some early legal challenges including one from Abraham De Peyster, a leading figure in New York.