Quintin Colville is Senior Curator: Research at Royal Museums Greenwich, Visiting Professor at the University of Portsmouth, and Research Fellow at the University of York

James Davey is Lecturer in Naval and Maritime History at the University of Exeter

List of figures and tables
Notes on contributors

Introduction
Quintin Colville and James Davey

Part I Sociocultural analyses of the Royal Navy

1 Particular skills: warrant officers in the Royal Navy, 1775-1815
Evan Wilson
2 My dearest Tussy': coping with separation during the Napoleonic Wars (the Fremantle papers, 1800-14)
Elaine Chalus
3 The Admiralty's gaze: disciplining indecency and sodomy in the Edwardian fleet
Mary Conley
4 Navy, nation and empire: nineteenth-century photographs of the British naval community overseas
Cindy McCreery
5 Salt water in the blood: race, indigenous naval recruitment and British colonialism, 1934-41
Daniel Owen Spence

Part II Representations of the Royal Navy

6 Memorialising Anson, the fighting explorer: a case study in eighteenth-century naval commemoration and material culture
Katherine Parker
7 The apotheosis of Nelson in the National Gallery of Naval Art
Cicely Robinson
8 Naval heroism in the mid-Victorian family magazine
Barbara Korte
9 'What is the British Navy doing?' The Royal Navy's image problem in War Illustrated magazine
Jonathan Rayner
10 Patriotism and pageantry: representations of Britain's naval past at the Greenwich Night Pageant, 1933
Emma Hanna
Afterword: Britain and the sea: new histories
Jan Rüger