Abstract Daniel Gordon in his monograph on Citizens without Sovereignty explored how, in eighteenth-century France, sociability enabled those without power in the ancien régime to organize and order social spaces where they could have autonomy and offset their political impotence. The idea that those without power could create an autonomous existence within the ‘gaps and interstices’ of that hierarchical, authoritarian regime offers a potential framework for thinking afresh about French prisoners of war held in Britain during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), when tens of thousands of captured French sailors, soldiers, civilians, women and children were held in sites across the country. This article will explore examples of the ways in which the prisoners of war found a sense of dignity and purpose in seemingly insignificant forms of sociability and benefited from the networks that underpinned the Transport Board’s organization of their captivity. Daniel Gordon in his monograph on Citizens without Sovereignty explored how, in eighteenth-century France, sociability enabled those without power in the ancien régime to organize and order social spaces where they could have autonomy and offset their political impotence. The idea that those without power possessed a desire for dignity and an autonomous existence within the ‘gaps and interstices’ of that hierarchical, authoritarian regime offers a potential framework for thinking afresh about French prisoners of war held in Britain during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), when tens of thousands of captured French sailors, soldiers, civilians, women and children were held in sites across the country.1The sheer numbers of prisoners of war created the need for a centralized state administration to deal with the influx. The Transport Board at the Admiralty constructed systems and processes to control the potential subversiveness of so many ‘enemies’. A heavily regulated, hierarchical system maintained the prisoners in a position of political impotence. Much as Gordon looked to take ‘an inventory of the disparate spaces that remain free’,2where those without power in ancien régime France created a refuge from arbitrary authoritarianism in sociability, so this article will explore examples of the ways in which the prisoners of war similarly looked to find a sense of dignity and purpose in seemingly insignificant forms of sociability that the British authorities did not regulate to the same extent as other aspects of the prisoners of war’s lives.
Astbury et al. (Sat,) studied this question.