"Salty Masculinity in the British Atlantic"

In the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, ship captains forged a nascent middling identity around the notion of maritime mastery. Building on inherited early modern notions of guild mastery, ship mastery involved developing a skilled craft and control over dependents, both household and laboring dependents. As captains increasingly turned to enslaved people to meet their needs for sailing labor, ship mastery intensified and became reified as a set of hierarchical gendered, racial, and classed practices. These reinforcing practices were essential to the formation of an emerging salty masculinity. Captains developed their salty masculine identity in opposition to both the enslaved, free, and coerced sailing laborers they controlled, and the polite landed middling people who benefitted from their risky labor. The ship as a space of business and the laboring relationships it created twisted existing forms of hierarchy to facilitate the formation of a new gendered, classed, and racial identity that would accelerate the expansion of capitalist markets.
Using captains and sailors’ letters, depositions, and logbooks, this paper explores how captains enacted their mastery on board a ship and how these practices shaped their emerging identity. Building on work at the intersection of business and identity, this paper explores how coercing labor and laboring in adverse conditions shaped the emergence of an alternative middling identity that was essential for the expansion of capitalism. While cultural histories of masculinity and early modern business tend to focus on the polite culture of middling merchants, captains provide insight into an alternative version of middling masculinity no less essential to the blossoming of an Atlantic world.