Sara Caputo is Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, and Research Fellow at Magdalene College. Her work has won the Prince Consort and Thirlwall Prize and Seeley Medal for a historical doctoral thesis completed at Cambridge, and the British Commission for Maritime History Prize for best UK thesis on maritime history. She has also been awarded the international Ideas Prize, the Sir Julian Corbett Prize in Modern Naval History, and the Scottish History Society Rosebery Prize. She has published several articles on maritime social and cultural history, and held visiting fellowships at various institutions in Britain, Germany, and the US.

• Introduction; Part I. The State: 1. Countable 'foreigners': birthplace and demographic profiles; 2. 'Sacred and indestructible' bonds: alien seamen, subjecthood, and the Navy; Part II. The Nation: 3. A Babel and a Gehenna: languages and religions; 4. 'Complexions of every varied hue': racial beliefs, biopower, and acclimatisation; 5. 'They cannot keep the sea beyond a passage': the Royal Navy and recruitment in the Two Sicilies; 6. 'From among the Northern nations alone': Dutchmen, Danes, and Norwegians in the fleet; Part III. Displacement: 7. Mercenaries, migrants, and refugees: Navy crews as 'motley crews'; Conclusion.

'Sara Caputo's Foreign Jack Tars is an impressive debut by a gifted young historian. Based on a heroic trawl of the archives, her study combines clear and concise writing with a command of quantitative methods. It also marries transnational and national history, revealing that the Royal Navy, the focus of much national pride and widely perceived as a symbol of Britishness, in fact relied to a significant extent on foreign manpower.' Stephen Conway, University College London