LAUSR

apply to cases where superiors have less than total control over subordinates—in the form of the threat of legally unlimited and arbitrary corporal punishment, not unlike under slavery—or in less closely knit communities? After all, ships rarely comprised more than 700 individuals who were crammed together onto a tight space and made codependent on each other. Similarly, how might these dynamics operate under less formalized social hierarchies —with a noble officer corps formally in charge of commoners of often very low social status? Or, remaining within the limits of the time period and the specific organization that the authors are interested in, what made British navy ships less mutinous, on average, compared with their French or Spanish counterparts, and what was it about the way British ships were organized that secured the supremacy of Britain at sea and thus its dominance in world politics for roughly two hundred years?