Connections between Mutinies in European Navies

Abstract

AbstractDuring the revolutionary 1790s, an unprecedented number of mutinies tore through the British, French, and Dutch navies. This simultaneous upsurge of lower-deck militancy in both allied and belligerent fleets was not coincidental, nor was it simply a violent expression of similar pressures making themselves felt on ships under different flags but all engaged in the same conflict. Instead, through manifold personal connections, men who circulated back and forth across the frontline, and through the gradual emergence of a common political ideology, mutinies across navies constituted a single radical movement, a genuine Atlantic revolution in this so-called age of Atlantic revolutions.