Coastal Policing in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Riddle of the Coast, C.1660-1822

The first comprehensive study of Britain’s coastal policing and administration across the long eighteenth century.

Throughout Britain’s past its coast has presented security concerns. Despite this long history of raids, smugglers and warfare, consistent, designated and permanent coastal enforcement bodies were only established in England in the 1690s. Initially a reaction to the threats of the Nine Years’ Wars, their creation spoke to a new understanding of ＂The Coast＂ as a politically distinct and liminal space - a region neither land nor sea - with its own issues and social dynamics that had to be controlled through new, more sophisticated, methods.

This study explores the circumstances that both necessitated a formalised policing of coastal areas and influenced the subsequent development of these enforcement bodies, showing how their missions and practices fluctuated in relation to key political events and economic policies across the century. In doing so, the book encompasses a long eighteenth century, starting with political developments in the run-up to the Glorious Revolution and ending with the overhaul of coastal bureaucracies in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.

In conjunction with this larger historical sweep, through extensive archival research, the book reveals the failures in coastal policing, arguing that these shortcomings stemmed not from the cunning of smugglers or bureaucratic inefficiency but from inherent contradictions in Britain’s imperial ambitions. In highlighting the complexities of this watery borderland, Hannes Ziegler sheds new light on the inner workings of Britain’s fiscal-military enterprises and state-building challenges of its evolving imperial identity.