The paper explains a methodology, where previously there was none, for identifying African and diasporan naval personnel hired by the British Royal Navy to serve in the West African Station in the mid-nineteenth century. The methodology employs a variety of naval documents including: ship's musters, description books, daily sick lists, and medical journals to identify African and diasporan personnel. The Royal Navy employed four categories (Kroomen, Liberated Africans, Africans, Blacks) to describe and to differentiate the African and diasporan work force within the Station. By identifying African and diasporan naval personnel more can be learned about the ways in which race and ethnicity were constructed and applied during the age of abolition. It also provides a method capable of examining the shipboard lives and socio-economic niches carved out by 'subject' people within the British maritime Atlantic World.

This thesis argues that British naval officers provide a useful category of analysis for social and cultural historians. While previous scholarship has largely ignored naval officers or treated them as equivalent, socially and professionally, to army officers or the traditional professions, the present study argues that the nature of service at sea presented challenges to officers' social status. Drawing on thousands of recently-digitized sources, as well as extensive archival materials, it explores the formation of naval officers' social identity, the forces that shaped their careers, and the changing landscape of social status at the end of the eighteenth century. The demands of life at sea placed naval officers in a liminal social space. Their claims to gentility were contingent and contested. They needed to be proficient in practical as well as theoretical skills. At the same time, officers were expected to be gentlemen. How officers shaped, and were shaped by, the changing definitions of that term provides the framework for the thesis. It makes three central contributions to the fields of British social and naval history. First, it emphasizes the continuing significance of social status boundaries in Georgian Britain. The existing literature misconstrues the chronology of the changing nature of gentility and misunderstands the relationship of naval officers to issues of gentility and professionalism. Second, it recalibrates our understanding of the nature and mechanisms of patronage networks. Social backgrounds made relatively insignificant contributions to shaping officers' careers; patrons used a much wider range of criteria when selecting clients. Finally, it questions the traditional separation of naval history from social and cultural history. The Navy and naval officers were central to British life at the end of the eighteenth century and cannot be effectively analysed separately. The Navy was both socially unique and uniquely important to Britain during the crisis of the Wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

This study examines Churchill's struggle during the summer of 1940 to preserve Britain's naval superiority worldwide, through the neutralization of the French fleet and by securing the active participation of the United States. Sources consulted included autobiographies of the participants, especially those by Churchill, Reynaud, Baudouin, and Weygand, document collections, and British and American official histories. This study is organized to give a chronological analysis of Churchill's efforts from 10 May to 2 September 1940, ending with the United States' acceptance of the destroyers-for-bases agreement. This act committed them to shared strategical responsibilities with Great Britain. The thesis concludes that Churchill's efforts in this period laid the foundation for later Allied victory.