Trading in War

Trading in War by Margarette Lincoln offers a vivid account of the forgotten citizens of maritime London who sustained Britain during the Revolutionary Wars.

In the half-century before the Battle of Trafalgar, the port of London became the commercial nexus of a global empire and the launch pad of Britain’s military campaigns in North America and Napoleonic Europe. The unruly riverside parishes east of the Tower seethed with life—a crowded, cosmopolitan, and incendiary mix of sailors, soldiers, traders, and the network of ordinary citizens that served them.

Harnessing little-known archival and archaeological sources, Lincoln recovers this forgotten maritime world. Her gripping narrative highlights the pervasive impact of war, which brought violence, smuggling, pilfering from ships on the river, and a susceptibility to subversive political ideas. It also commemorates the working maritime community: shipwrights and those who built London’s first docks, wives who coped while husbands were at sea, and early trade unions.

This meticulously researched work reveals the lives of ordinary Londoners behind the unstoppable rise of Britain’s sea power and its eventual defeat of Napoleon.