Cosmopolitans Afloat: Franco-American Maritime Culture, 1778–1800

This paper explores the everyday cosmopolitanism of American seamen during the age of the American Revolution, focusing in particular on their relations with French-speaking seamen in the Caribbean and European waters.  The life of a sailor lent itself to the creation of an everyday cosmopolitanism: that is, a remarkable openness to cross-cultural contact, a distinctive linguistic and religious flexibility, and a rare willingness to interact and even cooperate with foreigners.  This culture, unique among common people, marked sailors’ social and political outlooks and helped shape their significant contributions to the American Revolution and early Republic.  Sailors had a leading role in protesting British taxation in the 1760s, took an active part in forging the revolutionary alliance with France, served as conduits for revolutionary news and ideas circling the Atlantic world, and contributed to the formation of an American national identity.  The paper focuses on the day-to-day interactions between American and French seamen, primarily those serving in the American navy.  It shows that American and French seamen learned each other’s languages, integrated into each other’s maritime worlds and collaborated to organize mutinies.  It also looks at conflicts between the French and American seamen as a way to explore the ways in which, their conflicts aside, the two peoples forged a shared maritime world.  This cosmopolitanism of ordinary people, it also shows, was often in conflict with elites’ desire to forge a nation-state in the crucible of revolutionary politics.