Myths and stereotypes surrounding seafarers in the Age of Sail persist to this day. Sailors were celebrated for their courage, strength, and skill, yet condemned for militancy, vice, and fecklessness. As sail gave way to steam, sailing-ship mariners became nostalgic symbols of maritime prowess and heritage, representing a timeless, heroic masculinity in an era when the modernizing industrial world was challenging assumptions about gender, class, work, and society.
Drawing on British seafaring memoirs from the late nineteenth century, Making Men in the Age of Sail argues that maritime writing moulded the reading public's image of the merchant seaman. Authors chronicled their lives as they grew from boy sailors to trained seafarers, telling colourful tales of the men they worked with - most never doubted that the sailing ship had made them better men. Their testimony reinforced and preserved conservative perspectives on seafaring manhood as Britain's economic and technological priorities continued to evolve in the new steamship age.
Offering a gender analysis of the image of the seafarer, Making Men in the Age of Sail brings the history of British sailors into wider debates about modernity and masculinity.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Milne explores masculinity with admirable nuance and empathy. Rather than relying on generic, predictable frameworks, this book provides a meticulous guided tour of the situations where masculinity mattered most in this particular time, place, and profession." Isaac Land, Indiana State University "Making Men in the Age of Sail is a complex and enlightening achievement which clearly reflects the finely-honed skills of a long career in history writing. Milne succeeds in uncovering the tensions and paradoxes of the self representation of a masculine standard. He also reveals some of the implications of this cultural representation for broader questions of gender, emotion, class, race, nation, workforce, and modernity. This is an evocatively and sympathetically written account which makes the merchant seafaring community come alive." The Great Circle, Australian National Maritime Museum "The scholarship, as you would expect from Milne, is first-class, even officer-class, and his authors would be pleased that, through fluent and logically structured narrative, Milne furthers our knowledge and alters our perception of the lives of men working under sail, just as the authors themselves tried to do." Labour History Review
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978-0-2280-2184-1 (9780228021841)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Graeme J. Milne is a historian and author of People, Place and Power on the Nineteenth-Century Waterfront: Sailortown. He lives in the Liverpool.
