Book review: Eleanor Hubbard. Englishmen at Sea: Labor and the Nation at the Dawn of Empire, 1570–1630

In Englishmen at Sea, Eleanor Hubbard examines the lives and experiences of English seafarers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, stressing their centrality in shaping English overseas enterprise while evaluating how they perceived nationhood and what this meant to them. Hubbard convincingly argues that English seafaring transitioned from a warlike and predatory culture in the 1570s toward a more disciplined commercial and colonial orientation by the 1630s. This was a negotiated process in which the practices and customs of English seafarers often clashed with the emerging corporate visions of empire. It was control over people and not space that was key to seaborne empire, and nationhood formed a key organizing principle for sailors and merchants alike. Through a focus on maritime labor, Hubbard joins other maritime historians who have emphasized the supremacy of the sea and seafarers in shaping imperial enterprise while offering new and perceptive insights into the relationship between nation, corporation, and seafarer. Hubbard’s explicit focus on English mariners—those “flawed and forgotten men who played a central role in their nation’s rise to global prominence” (25)—provides a novel examination of how early modern seafarers navigated not only oceans but also institutional, legal, and national boundaries too.