LIST PRICE: £40.00 Euro PRICE: €50.00
FORMAT: Hardback (pp: 192) ISBN: 1-904558-80-113 DIGIT ISBN: 9781904558804
PUB. DATE: 12 Feb 2007Summary:
The emergence of the professional naval officer was related both to the
necessities of naval warfare and to the structure of society on land. Originally
warships were manned by two separate sets of commanders - gentleman soldiers
skilled in fighting, and 'tarpaulins' of humbler social origin skilled in
navigation and the manual skills of sailing. Elias traces the onboard conflicts
between them, from Drake's famous insistence that the gentlemen 'haul and draw'
with the sailors, to the gradual merging of the two hierarchies by the end of
the eighteenth century. The innovation of the midshipmen - boys of gentle birth
who both learned the manual skills of the sailor and received the education of a
gentleman - gave crucial advantage to the British Royal Navy over the French and
Spanish, in which the greater rigidity of social barriers ashore prevented a
similar solution afloat. Planned but never completed by Elias, this book has
been reconstructed from his mainly unpublished typescripts.
Contents:
Norbert Elias,
1897-1990
- Norbert Elias (1897-1990)
- Editors' Preface
- Introduction: Elias's Studies of the Naval Profession by Rene Moelker and
Stephen Mennell
- Gentlemen and Tarpaulins
- Tensions and Conflicts
- The Development of the Midshipman
- Achieving Maritime Supremacy
- FRAGMENTS: The Growing Costs of the Naval Establishment: Elizabeth and
Cromwell Compared
- On Institutions
- The Last Act: Elias's Scenario For a Play about Drake and Doughty
- Textual variants
- Bibliography
- Index.
from the publishers website:
http://www.ucdpress.ie/ucdpress/display.asp?K=510000001451904&aub=Norbert%20Elias&m=5&dc=5