Research over the last few decades has served to blur to some extent the neat dividing line that historians used to draw between the state and the market; between the public and private sectors, to use a modern idiom. This is reflected in some of the ambiguities of individuals’ positions within the naval victualling system, within which a few contractors took on roles normally performed by government employees, and vice versa. Basil Cochrane, the contractor in the East Indies who forms the subject of Chapter 8, acted both as victualling contractor and Agent Victualler, whilst some members of staff in Deptford victualling yard held contracts to provide the yard with horses. Nevertheless, although the neat separation between public and private interests is a somewhat artificial one, it is possible and useful to look at the two in isolation, which is the purpose of this chapter. It looks first at the place of the Victualling Board within the naval administration, at how, along with much of the rest of the governmental machine, it evolved and became increasingly effective from the 1780s to 1815. It also explains the mechanisms by which it was granted money and the mechanism that allowed it, like the other civil departments of the navy, to spend beyond this grant by using the bill system to pay its contractors. Secondly, it looks in outline at the eighteenth-century mercantile community and its activities, before concluding with an explanation of the principal mechanism by which the Victualling Board reconciled its own interests with those of its suppliers: competitive tendering.

The state and the navy

The Royal Navy was consistently the most expensive and in peacetime the largest department of the British state in the eighteenth century. As such, inevitably its development was shaped and conditioned by developments in the machinery of government as a whole. Naval power depended upon the ability of the state to raise sufficient money to support the navy, and to deploy that money effectively. During the eighteenth century the British state became increasingly effective in both of these respects, and especially the latter, improvement in part being driven by the pressure of war and the need to maintain naval strength.