While the industrial revolution was elbowing its way on board, the Navy was receiving the benefit of organizational and administrative modernizations. The Victorian age saw the irresistible rise of accountancy management in all fields of official activity. It started roughly contemporaneously with the elevation of ‘pursers’ into ‘paymasters’, paid by salary in place of profit and percentage, and it spread outwards from the Admiralty until the ways of measuring efficiency – and even the understood meaning of naval discipline – had insidiously changed. In the 1840s “immense books of forms began
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