Members of the Naval Documents of the American Revolution (NDAR) team will travel to The National Archives at Kew in October for “The Prize Papers of the American War of Independence,” an international workshop bringing together scholars working on maritime warfare, prize law, privateering, and the extraordinary documentary archive created by wartime capture.

Held on 8–9 October 2026, the workshop is organized by the Prize Papers Project, The National Archives, the German Historical Institute London, the German Maritime Museum, and the University of Oldenburg. It accompanies The National Archives’ major exhibition, Revolution 250: America’s Independence Story, 1763–1783. The meeting also coincides with an important milestone for the Prize Papers Project: on 8 October, an initial collection of papers from 150 captured vessels associated with the American cause will be released through the open-access Prize Papers Portal.

The workshop is especially significant for NDAR because of our ongoing collaboration with the Prize Papers Project, through which we are working to identify and make greater use of materials relating to the American Revolution preserved among the records of the High Court of Admiralty and its vice-admiralty courts. Captured ships could carry extraordinary documentary archives with them: letters, logbooks, commercial papers, accounts, legal documents, drawings, and other materials never intended for government preservation. Taken together, they provide an unusually intimate record of the people caught up in the revolutionary war at sea.

Christopher F. Minty, NDAR Managing Editor and Project Director, will present “‘False & Colourable’: The Brigantine Adventure and the Paper War of the American Revolution.” Drawing upon the remarkable surviving case surrounding the Adventure, the paper examines the fabricated papers, false destinations, contested loyalties, and commercial networks that sailors and merchants used to navigate a maritime world in which capture might come from British, American, or French forces.

Two members of NDAR’s Advisory Board will also feature prominently in the program. Abby Mullen will present “Mutiny or Loyalty? Revolt from the Enemy in American Prizes,” joining Minty on the panel “Loyalty, Deception and Survival at Sea.” Nathan Perl-Rosenthal will deliver the workshop’s keynote address, “Empires of Privateering: 1780 Around the Globe,” placing privateering and maritime warfare during the revolutionary era within a genuinely global framework.

Their participation reflects the international and collaborative direction of NDAR’s work. The Prize Papers allow us to move beyond naval operations narrowly conceived and reconstruct the wider human environment of maritime warfare: merchants and sailors, prisoners and privateers, loyalists and revolutionaries, families separated by war, clandestine trading networks, and the papers people carried aboard ships as they crossed an increasingly contested Atlantic.

The collaboration also creates important opportunities for NDAR's documentary work. As newly catalogued and digitized Prize Papers become available, NDAR can connect these materials with naval correspondence and other records preserved in archives across Britain, Europe, and North America—sometimes reconstructing events from documents that were separated by capture nearly 250 years ago.

The October workshop will bring together specialists from the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe to begin exploring what this remarkable body of evidence can tell us about the American Revolution as a maritime and global conflict.

For NDAR, it is also an exciting next step in a collaboration that is helping us recover the Revolution at sea through the records governments created as well as the papers the war itself captured and preserved.

Register for the online workshop.