During the wars of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries tens of thousands of English sailors had their wages deferred because the government could not come up with the cash to pay them. Instead, Navy sailors were discharged with undated government promissory notes, usually called ‘sailors’ tickets’, which they and their families sometimes had to wait months or years to have paid. This essay traces the way the Navy tried to institutionalize this system, and it also looks at competing ordering projects coming from within the London maritime community that sought to pressure the government to pay the tickets in a timely fashion, to manage overextended credit networks and — in the face of considerable Navy opposition — to make tickets more fungible so they could be used as collateral for debts. One feature of these conflicts was the rise of frauds on sailors’ pay tickets, and over time the Navy endorsed increasingly punitive methods to deal with the problem, most notably various kinds of institutional prosecution. The people indicted for ticket fraud, many of them at the Old Bailey, were predominantly women, and their ‘crimes’ were linked to more legitimate activities long associated with sailors’ female relatives. This essay argues that predatory borrowing by the State and the competing ordering projects to which it gave rise helped to configure as well as to distort social relations and economic opportunity both for women and men within the maritime community.

中文翻译：

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海军军饷欺诈和伦敦海事男女，约 1620-1740 年


在 17 世纪和 18 世纪初的战争期间，数以万计的英国水手被推迟支付工资，因为政府拿不出现金来支付他们。相反，海军水手带着未注明日期的政府本票出伍，通常称为“水手票”，他们和他们的家人有时不得不等待数月或数年才能支付。本文追溯了海军试图将这一系统制度化的方式，还研究了来自伦敦海事界内部的竞争性订购项目，这些项目试图向政府施压，要求政府及时支付票据，管理过度扩张的信贷网络，并——面对海军的强烈反对——使票据更具可替代性，以便它们可以用作债务抵押品。这些冲突的一个特点是水手工资票欺诈行为的增加，随着时间的推移，海军支持越来越严厉的方法来解决这个问题，最引人注目的是各种制度性起诉。因门票欺诈而被起诉的人，其中许多人在老贝利球场，主要是女性，她们的“罪行”与长期以来与水手女性亲属相关的更合法的活动有关。本文认为，国家的掠夺性借款及其产生的竞争性订购项目有助于配置和扭曲海洋界女性和男性的社会关系和经济机会。