ABSTRACT The construction of so many temporary Admiralty offices in St James's Park during the First World War, despite the threat of enemy bombing, shows that British naval administrative efficiency then depended significantly on the close physical proximity of offices, albeit supplemented where necessary by additional liaison mechanisms. Subsequently, however, changing office practices, and advances in communications infrastructure and technology, made it possible for the administration to stretch itself very considerably. That was fortunate, since developments in warfare, including a great increase in the accuracy and weight of bombing attacks, demanded dispersion. By the Second World War, it can be argued there were four different Admiralties in the country, London, Bath, and Western Approaches and Rosyth Commands. They were not quite separate, however, but functionally linked with each other and with numerous other naval establishments, to the degree one could no longer identify Admiralty headquarters geographically; instead, it existed wherever there were officials and officers who carried out Admiralty functions.
adopt contemporary stereotypes regarding the ‘untrustworthy and unpredictable Barbary pirates’. It is, however, the case that the traditional Eurocentric diplomatic historiography against which Heinsen-Roach chooses to tilt has since some years been discredited. In the field of New Diplomatic History, it has long been emphasised that western diplomats, whether ambassadors or consuls, found it necessary to adapt to the conventions of their host states and to be prepared to be flexible with respect to their own diplomatic-cultural frames of reference. This is exemplified by the wellknown need for representatives of the Dutch East India Company to be prepared to perform the ritual obeisance of the kowtow before Chinese and Japanese potentates. A weakness of the book that may be mentioned is the rather narrow focus on its principal subject. Heinsen-Roach is determined to show that, in the second half of the seventeenth century, the States General proved unable, in its role as central lynchpin in the Republic’s political system, to raise sufficient funds to secure the release of the prisoners. This, she notes, ‘reflects the shortcomings of a decentralized state’. However, this is not really tenable if one reflects that, during this period, the States General were taking the lead in the creation of an enormously expanded standing navy of purpose-built warships, one furthermore that was intended as the property of the nation as a whole. This fleet did duty in the defence of the Republic and its maritime economy against the France of Louis XIV and the England of Charles II. It further played a leading role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. That the raising of funds for the redeeming of the captives was left to the families involved, and to their individual towns and regions, was not so much the result of the powerlessness of a decentralised system, but more a consequence of the scale of other, higher-priority matters demanding the attention of the States General and the provincial states.
There is no shortage of books on British piracy, but David Wilson’s evidencedriven examination of the final phase of the Golden Age phenomenon is, if the reader will forgive me, a welcome piece of new scholarship in which there is much to be treasured. Focusing on the period 1716-1726, which witnessed a shocking resurgence and proportional diminution of maritime piracy in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Wilson’s book, which “contains pirates” but is “not a book primarily about pirates” (xi), engages a vast and complicated maritime network of imperial merchants, colonial settlers, and naval forces touched by and touching piracy. Well-paced and clearly written, Suppressing Piracy mounts a persuasive challenge to the broadly accepted narrative of the late Golden Age “War on Piracy,” arguing instead that the isolation and eventual collapse of large-scale European-captained Atlantic piracy was the result of trade pressures and colonial allegiances, and not the straightforward result of a decision that the British navy should at last get tough with respect to the plague of the hostis humani generis. Wilson’s book opens by painting an image, to which it will periodically return, of the just-hanged bodies of Bartholomew Roberts’ crew, in one of the most famous anti-pirate victories of the eighteenth century. In Wilson’s framing, though, Ogle’s triumph over Roberts is the exception that proves the rule: this was a famous victory in part because it had little company. Historians have conceded that the British lacked the naval capacity simply to suppress pirates in the 1670s through early eighteenth century. They did not miraculously develop this capacity in 1722 (the date of Roberts’ defeat). Instead, posits Wilson, effective anti-piracy efforts were localized, which meant allying with various colonial and mercantile stakeholders to bolster Parliamentary and Admiralty campaigns. Even so, Wilson is not precisely arguing
