British and American sailors by 1776 had a long history of resisting impressment, or their forced recruitment into the British navy. From hiding themselves away below decks or on land to outright rioting in the streets, sailors fought impressment, agreeing that being taken into service violated their own sense of liberty. As this talk will explore, that resentment continued in the years leading up to and during the American Revolutionary War, and sailors, politicians, and other radical thinkers used the subject of impressment to articulate bigger ideas about rights and liberty across the Atlantic.

Sofia Zepeda, PhD, is the Assistant Professor of Maritime History at Williams-Mystic: The Coastal and Ocean Studies Program of Williams College and Mystic Seaport Museum. Her previous research explored the everyday lives of British and Irish sailors and their families in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Suggested reading:
Christopher Magra, Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Denver Brunsman, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013).
Nicholas Rogers, The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and its Opponents in Georgian Britain (New York: Continuum, 2007).