In 1960, Dakar became the capital of Senegal. It became an African city in the fullest sense, realizing a political status that matched its composition and urban identity. This book has shown that identity to have been forged by city dwellers as they sought to mitigate the racism embedded in colonialism to make Dakar a resource and a livable space that suited their own needs. This historical foundation, paired with Dakar's role as an economic, social, and cultural mecca in its region, poised the city for rapid growth once the changes of the mid-1940s set in. The capital grew in population, and trans-formative change in the city's landscape followed in the 1950s as intensive development took place in the waning years of colonialism. By the time of independence in 1960, the greater agglomeration that constituted Dakar had a population of almost half a million people, a milestone it more than doubled only fifteen years later.

Part of Dakar's outward-facing identity was one of transience and impermanence. The capital's involvement in local, regional, and global networks— and the movement of people inherent to them—only deepened over time. In the absence of significant natural resources on which to build a national economy, Leopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal's first president, sought to maintain the country's international standing, with Dakar at its center as an incubator of heterogenous human resources. Senghor positioned Senegal to act as a global hub that was hospitable to people from all over the world. Journalists, diplomats, multinational corporation employees, researchers, nongovernmental organization workers, and others replaced French colonial administrators and their corollaries as Dakar's transient foreign community.

For many years, I was among them, inserting myself further and further over time into the transactional culture, which had become complex and expansive by Senegal's fiftieth anniversary of independence while maintain-ing many of the attributes established some eighty years prior. As a transient Dakarois, I found myself participating in the local transactional culture that wove throughout the court records I read through each day. The prominence of informality, which had originated in Dakar's early years of growth, was embedded in a world that paired scarcity with prosperity and remained central to its workings.

The U.S. Navy has only recently recognized that there is both an art and a science to leadership and that higher command at the flag and general officer level requires a unique approach in professional military education. As understanding slowly developed, the navy began by using history and biography, then they used applied social science theories and business management applications. In the early twenty-first century, the Naval War College began a new approach, a previously untried method of individual flag officer development.

In the late eighteenth century, the United States of America took form in the context of ideologies from the Enlightenment that informed not only the political context and debate over the purposes and functions of a navy but also how Americans initially viewed naval officers. At the outset, Americans did not like the title of “admiral,” which they thought inappropriate to their new republic. Primarily because of the Royal Navy's name, Americans viewed it as a product of the monarchical and aristocratic values they were trying to avoid. Many thought military and naval education a danger to the new republic, believing in the militia and the innate abilities of Americans as militiamen and privateers.

At the same time, they had no corresponding distaste for the rank of “general,” which Congress gave to George Washington and others, associating it with Cromwell and the militia rather than the aristocracy.

The American Continental Navy of 1775–1785 and the United States Navy, established in 1794, used the rank of captain, not admiral, for its most senior officers. On 22 December 1775, Congress appointed Captain Esek Hopkins commander in chief of the Continental Navy with the courtesy title of commodore – the Dutch term that King William III had introduced into the Royal Navy in 1689. Congress overwhelmingly voted to deny Hopkins the perquisites of an admiral, such as table money for expenses. Hopkins's career was short and unsuccessful. When Congress dismissed Hopkins from service, no one replaced him as commander in chief.

On 15 November 1776, the Continental Congress had created a table of equivalent ranks for the officers of the army and navy that included the naval ranks of admiral, vice admiral, rear admiral, and commodore.

In 1922, the Tribunal de Première Instance, Dakar's principal civil court, received a complaint from Diame Diop. It alleged that Makha Diouf had borrowed a bracelet from the complainant with the purpose of temporarily pawning it to be able to purchase an animal for his butcher's shop. Once Diouf had sold the product at his butcher's shop he would be able to reclaim the bracelet and return it to its owner. Still awaiting the return of the bracelet, Diop sought its restitution and brought the matter to the court. This ordinary case was just one among thousands brought over the course of the first several decades of the twentieth century in Dakar, capital of former French West Africa (FWA) and today the capital of Senegal. People in colonial Dakar approached the court to broach the obstacles and stalemates they encountered as they managed their resources and the networks of transactions in which those resources were embedded. As they did so, they carried with them ideas and assumptions about what was acceptable and what was not in the expanding social and economic landscape of Dakar. In this way, a case such as Diop v. Diouf was about more than simple reclamation of property or breach of faith. It was also about needs, practices, and expectations in a French West African colonial urban setting.

This book is about those needs, practices, and expectations. The lens it adopts is one that focuses on Dakarois’ strategies for living in and negotiating the city with each other and within a world of racism espoused by a colonial state that was self-contradictory and unable to achieve the degree of control it sought. By peering into corners of life that ostensibly were mundane but in actuality were central to an urban existence while minding the overarching umbrella of state rhetoric and imperatives, this book explores the contours of life in Dakar over the formative period of its development as a major regional city. It is not a history of a city. New neighborhoods and lines drawn, streets named and spaces reshaped, political debates and mechanisms of rule installed, port and the military installments—these aspects of Dakar have been examined and explained elsewhere, providing an excellent sense of how Dakar featured in the stories of French colonialism in West Africa.

This essay examines the recovery and development of strategic leadership as an educational aid for senior officers and statesmen. Between 1902 and 1914 Julian Stafford Corbett (1854–1922) provided history and strategy lectures for the Royal Navy's senior level war course, an educational programme designed to prepare the navy's leadership for future conflicts through in depth study of strategy, technology, intentional law, historical and contemporary experience, and national policy. Corbett, a lawyer by training, was wealthy and politically engaged. In the less than a decade he developed his limited initial brief, providing historical content, into a programme to capture and define national strategy, and disseminate it as doctrine. He worked closely with service leaders, including First Sea Lord Admiral Sir John Fisher (1904–1910) and successive directors of naval intelligence, the navy's chief war planner, and the officer responsible for the war course. Not only did he teach almost all the middle and senior level naval officers who served in the First World War, but his extensive publications ensured national strategic doctrine was widely understood, by service leaders and civilians.

Corbett's work was shaped by service agendas, but the navy left him to deliver the programme. This intellectual partnership between the navy's strategic leadership and a sophisticated Clausewitzian intellectual proved to highly effective. In 1907 Corbett published England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, which demonstrated the impact of limited maritime strategy in a global war with extensive continental military operations. It was a template for a future conflict, written for admirals and statesmen, not academics. The book stressed that British maritime/amphibious strategy had triumphed over French-continental methods, and remained the basis of national strategy in 1907. He highlighted the critical role of civilian strategic leadership, working in partnership with sophisticated service leaders, in this case Pitt the Elder and Admiral Lord Anson. His argument shaped contemporary strategic choice, ensuring Britain did not create a mass conscript army before 1916.

The leadership he studied was national, not individual, rational rather than heroic, and his focus was on the evolution of contemporary strategic doctrine. In his study of the Trafalgar campaign Corbett emphasised strategic continuity, not tactical innovation.

The Unfortunate Shipwright is an important primary source for the slave trade but one that is used sparingly. David Richardson did not use it in his research on the Bristol slave trade; Marcus Rediker cited it twice in The Slave Ship; and Emma Christopher deployed it selectively to detail the poverty of seamen and one fleeting episode of sailor-slave amity. The tract has surfaced in Bristol, where it is noted in the Port Cities website as one of three first-person accounts of the Bristol slave trade, and it is mentioned in a number of local histories. Even so, the larger story has not been told, despite the fact it is a valuable eye-witness account of a slave voyage by a literate artisan, and one that he subsequently fleshed out in a much larger version. Many of the life writings of seafarers in this period come from people of a somewhat higher station, déclassé mariners who went to sea for youthful adventure, men like Robert Stanfield or William Butterworth. It is unusual to find a perspective from a labouring man. There are very few of them for the eighteenth century. The Unfortunate Shipwright is important not simply because it throws insider light on shipboard tensions and chains of command, but because it reveals quite graphically the difficulties of seamen getting legal redress for wrongs committed on the voyage. It links the power dynamics of the ship to the power dynamics of the port and its courts of law. The Unfortunate Shipwright belongs to a strain of travel literature in which adventures overseas are discussed to edify the public about exotic lands and peoples. As a genre it could be traced back to the picaresque novel of Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, first published in 1593, although it is not as jocosely satirical as that account since it was designed as a prelude to a legal suit and fired by a strong sense of personal grievance. It was also a narrative of life on the high seas and, in the spirit of Defoe, of ‘extraordinary Events, unexpected Accidents and miraculous Deliverances’. There was a spate of these productions in the 1740s when Britain engaged first Spain and then France to protect colonial possessions and promote freer trade in Atlantic waters.

One of the greatest exemplars of personal leadership in the history of modern Spain was a naval officer, the son of a humble postal worker from Vigo, whose brilliant career would be acclaimed by contemporary literary figures such as Benito Pérez Galdós and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. His name and accomplishments would be commemorated in streets all over Spain, and he would even be proposed as Regent of the Kingdom after the 1868 revolution that deposed Isabel II (who, even so, remained steadfast in her affection for him). Méndez Núñez would never get a chance to play this role, however, because he succumbed to illness only a year later and died at just 45 years of age.

The Spanish navy has memorialized Méndez Núñez several times by naming ships after him: an armoured frigate (up to 1886), a light cruiser (1922–1963), a destroyer (1973–1992), and a new class F-100 frigate (2007–). Among the other ships in this last class, some are named after such illustrious seafarers as Christopher Columbus, Álvaro de Bazán, and Blas de Lezo. Thus, despite ever-shifting political winds, Méndez Núñez's name has continued to be celebrated almost without interruption from the time of his death until the present, a period of almost 150 years.

It is true that Méndez Núñez did not discover a new world or win any decisive battles like Lepanto, Ponta Delgada, or Cartagena de Indias, but his prominence transcends his naval accomplishments, and he has come to be considered a paragon of good character, personifying what it means to be a Spanish patriot.

Born in Vigo on 1June 1824, Méndez Núñez joined the navy as a midshipman before the age of sixteen and was promoted to sub-lieutenant on 11 June 1846, thus rising to an officer's rank more quickly than he ought to have. This was due to his outstanding service in the reconnaissance expedition to Equatorial Guinea aboard the brigantine Nervión, which earned him his first decoration: the Fernando Poo Cross. Later, serving in Spain's expedition in support of Pope Pius IX, he earned the Pontifical Cross and the Pontifical Medal.

An examination of strategic leadership in the navy during the Second Republic is of great interest for multiple reasons. These include our current lack of knowledge about the naval sphere and the actions aimed at steering naval policy during those years, the fact that this period coincided with a great upheaval in international politics, and that it was also a period of transformation at home.

Taking only a brief look at the several figures between 1931 and 1936 who were responsible for setting naval policy, we can conclude that, with few exceptions, the continuity, knowledge, and time necessary to develop a policy with any kind of long-range perspective by the Republican government were missing. As a consequence, there was a lack of strategic leadership at a time when the most serious threat to Spain's national security lay in the naval situation.

Going back to the beginning of the century, the Spanish navy had endured incomplete and ill-considered plans, multifarious and discontinued shipbuilding projects, and, in general, the lack of a balanced, viable agenda that was consistent with the country's economic reality. A profound change was therefore needed for the navy to become an efficient tool. The first requirement was to understand its structural problems, the second was to define exactly what was expected of it, and the third was to formulate a plan to invest resources, realistically, in a way that was consistent with the navy's needs and its mission.

One of the Second Republic's naval leaders stands out from the rest, José Giral Pereira (1879–1962), who served two separate terms as minister of the navy (10 October 1931–11 June 1933, and 19 February–18 July 1936). Giral, who was a pharmacist by profession, was the only navy minister to push for a plan aimed at dealing with the main challenges mentioned in the previous paragraph. His plans were ready to be approved in July 1936, but the process was interrupted by the war, and since then they have languished in the navy's archives.

However, because of their quality and sense of direction, they are among some of the best plans formulated in the first third of the twentieth century.

Rooting Transience through Residence without Settlerism

Dakar was not a deeply rooted Atlantic city born of the earlier commercial era but a new city erected during and following the moment of colonial conquest, representing the new relationship between France and West Africa. France did not consider its major cities in Africa to be sites of indirect rule or places in which native authority as conceived by the state would hold sway. Rather, they were sites of France's power, embodied in signs of French civilization and ideals, which were not masked but overtly conveyed. French administrators saw the presence of their own as a boon and marker of modern urban life in their cities in sub-Saharan Africa, which they understood to be inherently nonurban and unmodern.

This chapter explores the complex relationship with residence that existed at the level of the colonial state, pointing to the importance of its ideas regarding two populations—one that it termed European and another that it recognized as autochthonous—in helping it project attitudes toward everyone else. It reveals that white residence dictated French priorities in Dakar, even in the absence of a settler dynamic, while also showing that the existence of a community of autochthons provided a language of rightful urban belonging to only a limited group of Africans. Dakar was not built atop a tabula rasa. The society that inhabited the Cap-Vert peninsula shaped the evolution of urban forms and dynamics, as occurred throughout colonial Africa. John Parker's work on Accra showed that many of the important debates that emerged with urban growth occurred not only between the state and Africans but within African communities, especially autochthonous ones. Working in Yoruba towns, Margaret Peil proposed a model for the interactions between autochthons and newcomers, positing the ways in which each adapts to the other by way of turning to different livelihoods. These are important perspectives that intervene in the tendency to perceive dynamics involving autochthons as ethnically defined or principally tied to land ownership concerns. For Dakar, autochthony influenced both transactional culture and the model of transient residence as well as the racial contours of French assertions regarding city dwelling.

Trinity College Library in Dublin is probably best known as the home of the world-renowned Book of Kells, which is housed in the almost-as-famous Long Room in the old library building. The establishment of Trinity College Library in 1801 as a legal depository for books published in Ireland and the UK, in addition to its vast collection of incunabula and manuscripts, means that it is one of the largest libraries in Ireland and gives it a standing equal to the best libraries in Europe.

There are several detailed accounts of the history of the Library, which address its funding, acquisitions and administration: Peter Fox's authoritative account traces the Library's development from the foundation up to the present; a collection of essays edited by W. E. Vaughan, published in 2013 to celebrate the tercentenary of the laying of the foundation stone of the Old Library, looks at the building and its contents; Elizabethanne Boran's unpublished thesis offers insight into the early years of the Library. Of particular interest to this volume are a number of essays and studies that address the manuscript collection, specifically the manuscripts collected by James Ussher, whose library forms the main part of the manuscripts held in Trinity College. William O’Sullivan's introduction to Colker's catalogue offers a concise overview of the cataloguing and acquisitions of the manuscripts. Bernard Meehan's essay, ‘The Manuscript Collection of James Ussher’ builds on the work of another essay by William O’Sullivan, ‘Ussher as a Collector of Manuscripts’, both of which illustrate the extent to which James Ussher was a highly regarded bibliophile in the seventeenth century. Jane Maxwell's essay on ‘A Guide to the Manuscript Sources in TCD for the History of the Library’ is a valuable catalogue of early-to-late lists of acquisitions, catalogues and information on the Muniments collection. John Scattergood's Descriptive Catalogue provides a good introduction to the history of the manuscript collection as well as detailed descriptions of the Medieval English manuscripts. Finally, anyone interested in James Ussher's book-collecting zeal, and the seventeenth-century antiquarian network in which he moved, is directed to Boran's published collection of his correspondence. I am indebted to these scholars and those cited in the footnotes for some of the detail that follows.

During the eighteenth century, the Spanish Bourbon naval system evolved in two well-defined political and administrative phases, roughly divided by the outcome of the Seven Years War. This evolution, however, has seldom been understood from the perspective of strategy. The purpose of this article is to outline the evolution of Spanish naval strategy from the writings of four authors who have rarely been studied from this perspective, or who are practically unknown as strategic thinkers. The four plans described in this essay illustrate the evolution of Spanish naval thinking during both periods, showing not only the main objectives of Spanish foreign policy, but also the tasks that naval forces were expected to fulfil, their interaction with land forces, their relation to merchants and privateers, and the relation between naval strategy and shipbuilding policy.

In order to understand the origins of Spanish Bourbon naval strategic thought, is it necessary to consider the situation of Spanish naval forces during the late Spanish Habsburg period. During the second half of the seventeenth century, the main naval threat to the empire came from the rising power of Louis XIV's France. After having simultaneously fought the Dutch Revolt (1566–1648) and the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), the Spanish monarchy still had to combat the French armies until the Peace of the Pyrenees was signed in 1659. This, however, proved to be only a brief respite, and Franco-Spanish hostilities resumed during 1667–1668 (War of the Devolution), 1672–1678 (Franco-Dutch War), 1683–1684 (War of the Reunions), and 1689–1697 (War of the League of Augsburg). In this same period, the French monarchy followed a programme of mercantilist expansion, aimed at seizing a share of international commerce, which, in turn, led to confrontation with the English and the Dutch. These emerging maritime powers, on the other hand, fought three naval conflicts (1651–1654, 1665–1667, and 1672–1674) that led to important transformations in the European practice of war at sea. The traditional armed merchantman, improvised as a warship and used as an infantry rather than an artillery platform, became obsolete in the face of the specialised man-of-war, larger, strongly built, and primarily armed with heavy broadside cannon.

The mid-century decades were Bristol's golden age of privateering. In the years 1738 to 1783, over 580 vessels were launched to maraud enemy shipping, the high point being during the Seven Years’ War when Britain engaged the French in Atlantic waters and expanded its territory in North America and the Caribbean. The newspapers of the day are full of accounts of the ventures of the privateers, their battles, captures, and disasters, to a point that some historians have typified the era as the age of plunder.

Much of this activity was transcribed in the style of derring-do, a Chaucerian phrase meaning ‘daring to do’, which by the eighteenth century exemplified the courage and masculinity of the British sailor taking on its traditional foes. Although some historians continue to regard privateering as little more than legalized piracy, privateering was subject to quite specific rules of reprisal. Unlike piracy, it was not regarded as ‘an afront to all mankind’. The days when the boundaries between piracy and privateering were blurred by the willingness of the state to sanction the pillaging of the Spanish Main and open new avenues of commerce were over. Private men-of-war were commissioned by the state; their owners or captains had to apply for licences to attack enemy vessels, whether specially designated privateers or merchantmen; and the conquests had to be officially registered or ‘condemned’, to use contemporary legal parlance, in the Admiralty courts or adjunct jurisdictions.1 Royal proclamations and statutes laid out the division of spoils for officers and men in naval vessels, with the Admiralty taking a share of 10 per cent before 1708 but none thereafter. Private men-of-war were subject to more flexible arrangements, but they had to be set down in legal contracts, and the captains of these vessels had to register the names of crew members who were entitled to a share, just in case they felt shortchanged by the agents who managed the prizes.

Understandably and predictably, there were grey areas of privateering activity that were open to abuse. A Caroline statute allowed captains and seamen the right to pillage ‘all such Goods and Merchandizes’ as could be found ‘upon and above the gun deck’, a right that potentially cut into legitimate prizes and encouraged embezzling.