Dr Sara Caputo

Affiliated Lecturer
Director of Studies in History, History and Politics, and History and Modern Languages, Magdalene College
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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Dr Sara Caputo
My general areas of interest are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transnational maritime history, British and European imperial history, the history of medicine, and the history of mapping. More specifically, my research focuses on maritime mobilities, knowledge, and exchange.
 
I completed my PhD at Robinson College, Cambridge, and my thesis on 'Foreign Seamen and the British Navy, 1793-1815' was selected as joint winner of the University's Prince Consort and Thirlwall Prize and Seeley Medal, and as winner of the British Commission for Maritime History Boydell & Brewer Prize for best doctoral thesis in maritime history completed in the UK. In 2024, the monograph based on this research won the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Book Prize.
 
In the past, I have been an International Visiting Fellow at the Deutsches Schifffahrtsmuseum in Bremerhaven, Germany, a W. M. Keck Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and an honorary Caird Fellow at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

From 2019 to 2022 I was Lumley Junior Research Fellow at Magdalene College, and a Senior Research Fellow from 2022. I am lucky enough to be still at Magdalene, as Director of Studies, having also joined the Department of History and Philosophy of Science as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. I remain an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of History.
 
I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
 
My first book, entitled Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, appeared with Cambridge University Press in autumn 2022. It investigates the economic, legal, social, cultural and diplomatic context of transnational 'encounters' and employment aboard British naval vessels, drawing on primary sources from British, Dutch, Italian, Maltese, and American archives, as well as further material from Denmark, Norway, France, Germany, and Spain. I am interested in combining different historiographical methodologies, qualitative and quantitative.

My second book, published by Profile Books and the University of Chicago Press in 2024, is entitled Tracks on the Ocean. It focuses on the history of Western cartographical representations of maritime travel, exploring the origin and evolution of the convention of representing journeys as lines on maps and charts. The personal ‘tracks’ with which Europeans marked the ‘pathless’ seas, I argue, offer us a new tool to understand the links between imperial power, resistance to power, and developing ideas of science and the environment in modernity. For more background on the origins of this project see here.
 
I am currently writing up my third book, a comparative and transnational history of naval medicine in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British, French, and Spanish navies, including a perspective 'from below'.
 
I am also preparing an edition of letters and journals written by Scottish boys who served in the British Navy during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, under contract with Boydell & Brewer for the Scottish History Society.
 
In 2024-5, I am teaching on the following papers:
 
- Lecturing for Part IA Outline 6, The Global Eighteenth Century.
 
- Lecturing for Part IA Outline 5, Europe in the World, ca 1450-1780.
 
- Lecturing for Part IB Advanced Topic 11, Becoming British? Union and Disunion in Eighteenth-Century Britain.
 
- Lecturing and supervising for Part IB Advanced Topic 12, British Worlds, 1750-1919.
 
- Lecturing and supervising for Part IB Advanced Topic 16, The Mediterranean World, 1450-1800.
 
- Lecturing for Part II Specified Subject 24, Rethinking Europe from the Mediterranean Shores, 1796-1914.
 
- Lecturing and supervising for Part II Specified Subject 29, Sites of Knowledge.
 
- Seminar classes and supervisions for Part IA, Introduction to Historical Thinking, Historical Thinking IB, and Historical Thinking III.
 
 
I welcome enquiries from students wishing to research maritime, transnational, or eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and European history for their Part II Dissertations or MPhil or PhD Dissertations. I am also interested in supervising projects in the history of science, technology, medicine, or cartography.
I am currently co-convenor of the Cambridge Eighteenth Century Seminar, with Dr Melissa Calaresu. I also convene the Cambridge Mediterranean History Research Cluster.

 
Other activities
 
2021-present: Member of the executive Council of the Scottish History Society.
 
2016-present: Outreach widening participation lecturing and mentoring with the Cambridge University Admissions Office (including Experience Cambridge, Sutton Scholars, Insight Explore Summer Mentoring and The Subject Matters programmes) and The Brilliant Club charity. Various talks and sessions on History and on International Relations.
 

Contact

Tags & Themes

Address

Magdalene College, Cambridge, CB3 0AG, United Kingdom

Email
sc914@cam.ac.uk
Keywords
Cultural historyHistories of ColonialismHistory of scienceImperial historyInternational historyLabour historyMediterranean historyMilitary historyModern British historyOceanic and maritime historySocial history
Geographical
BritainEurope

Key publications

Books
 
Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
EXCERPTS
 
Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps and Maritime Travel (Profile Books and The University of Chicago Press, 2024).
AVAILABLE HERE AND HERE. 
 
Scottish Young Gentlemen in the British Royal Navy, 1791-1818 (Boydell & Brewer for the Scottish History Society, under contract).
 
 
Journal articles
 
‘From Surveying to Surveillance: Maritime Cartography and Naval (Self-)Tracking in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Past & Present 264:1 (2024), 84-118.
ACCESS (OA)
 
‘Human Tales on the Pathless Sea?: Imperial Subjectivities and Exploration Ship Tracks in European Maritime Mapping, c.1500-c.1800’, The English Historical Review 139:598-599 (2024), 770-800.
ACCESS (OA)
 
‘Trailblazers’ Wakes: Ship Tracks in Western Imperial Mapping’, Imago Mundi 75:2 (2023), 288-93.
ACCESS
 
‘Treating, Preventing, Feigning, Concealing: Sickness, Agency, and the Medical Culture of the British Naval Seaman at the End of the Long Eighteenth Century’, Social History of Medicine 35:3 (2022 [advance access December 2021]), 749-69.
ACCESS (OA)
 
‘Mercenary Gentlemen? The Transnational Service of Foreign Quarterdeck Officers in the Royal Navy of the American and French Wars, 1775-1815’, Historical Research 94:266 (2021), 806-26.
ACCESS (OA)
 
'Exploration and Mortification: Fragile Infrastructures, Imperial Narratives, and the Self-Sufficiency of British Naval “Discovery” Vessels, 1760-1815', History of Science 61:1 (2023 [OnlineFirst 2020]), 40-59.
ACCESS (OA)
 
'Alien Seamen in the British Navy, British Law, and the British State, c.1793 - c.1815', The Historical Journal 62:3 (2019), 685-707.
ACCESS
 
'Towards a Transnational History of the Eighteenth-Century British Navy / Vers une histoire transnationale de la marine britannique au XVIIIème siècle’, Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 397 – 'Perspectives Transnationales, 1780s-1820' (2019), 13-32.
ACCESS
ACCESS (OA)
 
‘Scotland, Scottishness, British Integration and the Royal Navy, 1793-1815’, The Scottish Historical Review 97:1 (2018), 85-118.
ACCESS
 
 
Chapters in edited volumes
 

‘Military Movements’, in David Lambert and Callie Wilkinson (eds),  A Cultural History of Transport and Mobility – Volume 3: A Cultural History of Transport and Mobility in the Age of Global Exploration and Empires (1450-1800) (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025).

'“Contriving to Pick Up Some Sailors”: The Royal Navy and Foreign Manpower, 1815-1865' in Thomas Dodman and Aurélien Lignereux (eds), From the Napoleonic Empire to the Age of Empire: Empire after the Emperor (Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2023), 205-26.
ABSTRACT

 

Other publications

Book reviews
 
 
Historical approaches
 

- Lukas M. Verbugt (ed.), Debating Contemporary Approaches to the History of Science (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), H-Sci-Med-Tech (2024).
ACCESS

- Naomi Lloyd-Jones and Margaret Scull (eds), Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A (Dis)united Kingdom? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Reviews in History (2022).
ACCESS

- Paul Ashton and Alex Trapeznik (eds), What Is Public History Globally?: Working with the Past in the Present (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Rethinking History 24:2 (2020), pp. 255-7.
ACCESS

 

Maritime and medical histories

- John Morrow, The Naval Government of Newfoundland in the French Wars: 1793-1815 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), International Journal of Maritime History (OnlineFirst 2024).
ACCESS

- Teresa Michals, Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals: Amputee Officers in Nelson’s Navy (Charlottesville VA and London: University of Virginia Press, 2021), The Mariner’s Mirror 110:2 (2024), 236-7.
ACCESS

- David Wilson, Suppressing Piracy in the Early Eighteenth Century: Pirates, Merchants and British Imperial Authority in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2021), Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 46:1 (2023), 177-9.
ACCESS

- Lenora Warren, Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1789-1886 (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019), H-War (June 2020).
ACCESS

- John Morrow, British Flag Officers in the French Wars, 1793-1815: Admirals’ Lives (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), History: Reviews of New Books 47:1 (2019), pp. 14-15.
ACCESS

- Margarette Lincoln, Trading in War: London’s Maritime World in the Age of Cook and Nelson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), The London Journal 44:1 (2019), pp. 87-8.
ACCESS

- Helen Watt and Anne Hawkins (eds), Letters of Seamen in the Wars with France 1793-1815 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2016), Archives 52:1 (2018), pp. 81-3.
ACCESS



Public history and radio
 

- ‘Tracks on the Ocean’, Sea Control, podcast of the Center for International Maritime Security (21 October 2024), interviewed by Jared Samuelson.
ACCESS

- ‘Sea Travelling’, BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed (15 October 2024), with Dr Helen Sampson, interviewed by by Dr Laurie Taylor.
ACCESS

- ‘Ships and History’, BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking (13 April 2022), with Dr Jake Subryan Richards and Tom Nancollas, chaired by Professor Rana Mitter.
ACCESS

- ‘Foreign Jack Tars’, Preble Hall, podcast of the U.S. Naval Academy Museum (20 June 2022), interviewed by Professor Claude Berube.
ACCESS

- ‘The Medical Culture of the British Seaman’, Sea Control, podcast of the Center for International Maritime Security (12 June 2022), interviewed by Jared Samuelson.
ACCESS

- ‘When Subjecthood and Citizenship Did not Matter: the Royal Navy and Foreign Seamen in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’, Cambridge Core Blog, Cambridge University Press (7 November 2018).
ACCESS

 

Textbook chapters

- ‘Recruiting Seamen in the Atlantic World’, in Life at Sea: Seafaring in the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1600-1900 (Adam Matthew, 2022).
ACCESS