The Wooden World

This social history reconstructs the Royal Navy as a working society in the mid-eighteenth century, roughly from the War of Jenkins's Ear through the American Revolutionary years, with a core in the Seven Years' War. Using logs, courts-martial, pay books, and letters, Rodger describes manning and impressment, the ranks from cabin boy to admiral, food, pay, discipline, sickness, and the relations between quarterdeck and lower deck. He treats the ship as a town with its own economy and patronage, and he tests later myths of unrelieved brutality. The book is an anatomy of naval life, not a battle narrative of particular campaigns.

Bound in brown cloth blocked on all sides in dark brown and gilt with a cutaway ship picture. Brown slipcase.