The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Denver Brunsman; Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution by Christopher P. Magra

The impressment of sailors into the British navy was a common and controversial wartime practice from the late seventeenth century until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Although impressment occurred throughout Great Britain’s Atlantic empire, the subject never received a book-length study until the publication of Denver Brunsman’s The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, in 2013. This work was followed three years later by Christopher P. Magra’s Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and the Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution. While both volumes cover some of the same material, each author has a different focus. Brunsman, while conceding the harsh effects of impressment on sailors and their families, argues that the practice was essential to maintaining Britain’s maritime empire during the long eighteenth century (1688–1815), and is most concerned with the period from 1688 to 1763, intending to cover the remainder of the...