Magdalene Fellows - Ms Sara Caputo

Dr Sara Caputo

Dr Sara Caputo is a Senior Research Fellow at Magdalene. She is Director of Studies in History, History and Politics, and History and Modern Languages (Part IA, IB, and II).

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 and exchange.

My first book, entitled Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. It investigates the 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.

My second book, entitled Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps, and Maritime Travel, is forthcoming in summer 2024 with Profile Books and The University of Chicago Press. It investigates the history of Western cartographical representations of maritime travel. For more background on the origins of this project, please see the Faculty of History website.

I am currently writing up a third monograph, 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 a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. I lecture and supervise on British, European, and World History, as well as the early modern history of science and medicine in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

Research Interests

  • Transnational history
  • Maritime and naval history
  • History of migration
  • ‘Long’ eighteenth century
  • History of cartography
  • History of language
  • History of medicine
  • Quantitative historical methodologies

Qualifications

  • BA History (Hons), Cardiff University
  • MSc History, The University of Edinburgh
  • PhD History, University of Cambridge

Career/Research Highlights

  • Dr Sara Caputo wins string of awards
  • 2018-19 Scouloudi Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London
  • 2015-18 Lewis-AHRC Scholarship, University of Cambridge, Robinson College
  • 2015-18 Honorary Vice-Chancellor’s Scholar, University of Cambridge

Selected Publications

Books

Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Read Excerpts

Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps and Maritime Travel (Profile Books and The University of Chicago Press, in press).
Available on Profile Books and The University of Chicago 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).
READ (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 (forthcoming).

‘Trailblazers’ Wakes: Ship Tracks in Western Imperial Mapping’, Imago Mundi 75:2 (2023), 288-93.
READ

'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 (2021).
READ (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.
READ (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.
READ (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.
READ

'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.
READ
READ (OA)

‘Scotland, Scottishness, British Integration and the Royal Navy, 1793-1815’, The Scottish Historical Review 97:1 (2018), 85-118.
READ

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

Related websites

Departmental Page (Faculty of History)