Biography
Sara Caputo's 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, her research focuses on maritime mobilities and exchange.
She completed her PhD at Robinson College, Cambridge, under the supervision of Professor Renaud Morieux. Her 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 the past, she has 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 she was Lumley Junior Research Fellow at Magdalene College, and a Senior Research Fellow from 2022. At HPS she is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, sponsored by Professor Dániel Margócsy, while remaining an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of History. She also serves as Director of Studies in History at Magdalene College.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Research interests
Her 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. It combines different historiographical methodologies, qualitative and quantitative.
Her second book, Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps and Maritime Travel is forthcoming with Profile Books in 2024. It presents a history of European cartographical representations of maritime travel, and the origins of the convention of representing journeys as lines. For more background on this project see here.
Her current project is a comparative and transnational history of naval medicine in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British, French, and Spanish navies, including a perspective 'from below'. Her first article on this research appeared in Social History of Medicine in 2021.
Key publications
Books
Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
- Winner of the Prince Consort and Thirlwall Prize and Seeley Medal, 2020
- Winner of the British Commission for Maritime History Boydell & Brewer Prize, 2020
Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps and Maritime Travel (Profile Books and The University of Chicago Press, in press).
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 (advance article 2024).
'Human Tales on the Pathless Sea?: Imperial Subjectivities and Exploration Ship Tracks in European Maritime Mapping, c.1500–c.1800', The English Historical Review (forthcoming).
'Trailblazers' Wakes: Ship Tracks in Western Imperial Mapping', Imago Mundi 75:2 (2023), 288-93 (forum article).
'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.
- Winner of the Fachverband Medizingeschichte e.V. wissenschaftlichen Förderpreis für herausragende medizinhistorische Arbeiten, 2022
- Winner of the Society for Military History Vandervort Prize, 2022
- Shortlisted for the Society for the Social History of Medicine Roy Porter Prize, 2018
'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.
'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.
'Alien Seamen in the British Navy, British Law, and the British State, c.1793–c.1815', The Historical Journal 62:3 (2019), 685–707.
'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.
'Scotland, Scottishness, British Integration and the Royal Navy, 1793–1815', The Scottish Historical Review 97:1 (2018), 85–118.
Chapters in edited volumes
'"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.
Other publications
Book reviews
Teresa Michals, Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals: Amputee Officers in Nelson's Navy (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2021), The Mariner's Mirror (submitted and forthcoming).
Alex Chase-Levenson, The Yellow Flag: Quarantine and the British Mediterranean World, 1780–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), Journal of British Studies (submitted and forthcoming).
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Public history and radio
'Ships and History', BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking (13 April 2022), with Dr Jake Subryan Richards and Tom Nancollas, chaired by Professor Rana Mitter.
'Foreign Jack Tars', Preble Hall, podcast of the U.S. Naval Academy Museum (20 June 2022), interviewed by Professor Claude Berube.
'The Medical Culture of the British Seaman', Sea Control, podcast of the Center for International Maritime Security (12 June 2022), interviewed by Jared Samuelson.
'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).
Textbook chapters
'Recruiting Seamen in the Atlantic World', in Life at Sea: Seafaring in the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1600–1900 (Adam Matthew, 2022).