• DOI:10.1080/21533369.2001.9668314
• Corpus ID: 163008417

Commissioned officers' careers in the Royal Navy, 1690–1815

@article{Rodger2001CommissionedOC,
  title={Commissioned officers' careers in the Royal Navy, 1690–1815},
  author={Nicholas A. M. Rodger},
  journal={Journal for Maritime Research},
  year={2001},
  volume={3},
  pages={129 - 85}
}

• N. Rodger
• Published 1 December 2001
• History
• Journal for Maritime Research

Anyone who has ever investigated the social history of the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century, and particularly the history of its officers, will have encountered a surprising lack of basic information. Although we possess an alphabetical list of the commissioned officers of the Navy, lately re-issued by the Navy Records Society,1 there is no printed source which can tell us how many officers there were in the Navy at any time. The question of how the Navy was manned presents the modern historian (as it presented the contemporary naval administrator) with many difficulties, but at least the number of men serving in particular years is easily discovered.2 Though personal information about officers is much more plentiful than about men, with statistics the situation is reversed. There is no means of knowing whether the supply of officers in each rank matched the demand, and whether the relationship between supply and demand changed over time. We have no quantitive information as to when and at what stages in their careers officers were promoted. As a consequence we cannot tell precisely how the commissioned officer corps as a whole developed, and we have no context in which to place the careers of individuals. We cannot exactly tell if, or how, particular officers were lucky or unlucky in their careers, because we cannot say what were the normal expectations of officers of their generation.