Paul Kennedy made quite a splash with “The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery” when it first came out in 1976, although I’m not entirely sure why. His primary theses – that the rise and fall of sea power track closely with that of economic power, and that the effective exercise of military might require a judicious blend and balancing of both sea and land forces – doesn’t strike me as startlingly insightful. One thing is for certain, however, and that is that this book is magisterial in its sweep and authoritative in its research.
Kennedy writes that any discussion of sea power must necessarily start with Alfred Thayer Mahan and notes that “The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery” was both influenced by and directed squarely at the conclusions made famous in “The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660–1783.” Kennedy stresses that Mahan’s insights were quite specific in terms of both time and place, and thus the universality of his conclusions must be questioned. Kennedy, on the other hand, seeks to take a more holistic perspective in order to develop conclusions that hold true regardless of time or place.
The author divides his narrative into three parts – Rise, Zenith, and Fall – but the story feels more like just “Rise & Fall” as the title suggests. The former was organic and took centuries to play out; the latter was stunning in its swiftness.
There are many early heroes of the Royal Navy – Drake, Raleigh, Essex, Hawkins– but no true founding father as the American navy has with John Paul Jones or classical Athens had with Themistocles. By the sixteenth century, the center of gravity in Europe shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic coastline. Great Britain, once an island on the periphery of European affairs, suddenly found herself on the frontlines of a dramatic economic and political revolution. At no point during this early period did the British possess a sustained national maritime policy or incisive strategy of sea power. Rather, Kennedy explains, “The central axioms of the doctrine of sea power – in particular, the need to secure command of the maritime trade-routes through the superior battle-fleet – were being slowly worked out and understood.” In the century between the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) and The Glorious Revolution (1688), the basic framework and infrastructure of a naval power came together organically. The British fleet, once a hodgepodge of free-lance privateers commissioned by various nobles, became a national, standing, and homogenous fleet paid for by regular votes of Parliament; a system of dockyards, provisioning, training, and recruiting came into being; and a leadership cadre of professional seamen developed that were “directly responsible to the government as an instrument of national policy.”
The general reader may find the first five chapters of the book slow going. Kennedy presumes a significant amount of pre-knowledge of several centuries of European history. In this section, Kennedy highlights a few additional points that bear repeating. First, between 1689 and 1815 the British fought seven wars against the French and only lost one (the American Revolution), which also happened to be the only conflict that featured no fighting in continental Europe and no British allies of note. Second, so long as the economy was strong and growing military setbacks could be easily overcome. For instance, despite the outcome of the American Revolution the British economy – and consequently the British merchant marine and Royal Navy – remained formidable. In 1774, the tonnage leaving British ports was 864,000. By 1800 it had more than doubled to 1,924,000. The British government’s ability to raise taxes and government loans grew at least commensurately with the economy. By the turn of the century, the British debt stood at 231 million pounds. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, himself blushed “Great Britain seems to support with ease a burden, which, half a century ago, nobody believed her capable of.” A strong economy, a strong navy, and strategic allies possessing land power were the keys to national security policy.
The second part of the story – the fall of British naval mastery – is fascinating. The great irony is that the British were formalizing their national security strategy based on sea power just as it was being eclipsed – or rather “disrupted” to use a phrase popular in contemporary Silicon Valley. But almost no one would have recognized it at the time. It wasn’t until 1889 that the British made official the two-power standard with the National Defense Act. Not even a year later Mahan published his seminal book with its unequivocal endorsement of large battle fleets, the concentration of force, the efficacy of naval blockade, the strategic importance of colonies, and the insuperable advantages of water for transportation. His core thesis, Kennedy writes, was that “sea power had been more influential than land power in the past and would continue to be so in the future.” Mahan’s thesis found a receptive audience across the western world, but nowhere more enthusiastically than in England, where his research seemed to confirm two centuries of British experience.
In 1904, Halford Mackinder delivered a paper to the Royal Geographical Society entitled “The Geographical Pivot of History” that drew very different conclusions than Mahan. At least superficially, the core argument is redolent of Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis concerning the closing of the American frontier. In short, Mackinder argued, four centuries of European imperial expansion and conquest was over and something far different was about to begin. Or as Kennedy explains, “efficiency and internal development would replace expansionism as the main aim of modern states.” For the first time in history “size and numbers would be more accurately reflected in the sphere of international development.” The continental heartlands would emerge as the global powers, a thesis in concord with that of Tocqueville nearly a century before. But unlike early prognosticators, Mackinder was specific. There may be some interesting modern parallels to the British position in the late 19th century to the US today. The British faced steep tariffs for industrial goods exported into the US (50% or more), while free trade allowed American wheat and other agricultural foodstuffs to wallop British farmers. It’s a scenario that Trump would find familiar.
Meanwhile, the Royal Navy was wrestling with a dilemma. How to maintain their world-girdling empire with its concomitant naval requirements in the face of peer-state challengers in continental Europe. The infamous naval reformer, Jackie Fisher, claimed that “five strategic keys lock up the globe” (Dover, Gibraltar, the Cape, Alexandria, Singapore), but that didn’t stop him from pulling the fleet back into home waters at the turn of the century. Britain led industrialization, and that very same industrialization ultimately undermined the Royal Navy’s historical advantage. In 1885, the British possessed 38 mainline battleships, while the rest of the world’s navies combined only boasted 40 of similar quality. A generation later, in 1897, the year of the famous Spitland Jubilee review, the British total had grown to 62 battleships, but the rest of the world had seen their total explode to 96. Between 1897 and 1914, “both the Pax Britannica and the concomitant foreign policy of ‘splendid isolation’ were brought to an end with incredible swiftness,” Kennedy writes. Fisher – “that brilliant, ruthless, demonic man” – dramatically re-aligned the entire perspective of the Royal Navy. The focus shifted from “south & west” to “north & east.” In a policy he boasted as “Napoleonic in its audacity and Cromwellian in its thoroughness,” Fisher junked hundreds of the old colonial cruisers and gunboats. The First Sea Lord was unambiguous and unapologetic about his goals: a navy that exhibited speed, firepower, efficiency and concentration of force. He famously sneered: “an enemy cruiser would lap up [gunboats] like an armadillo let loose on an ant hill.”
Fisher certainly had his critics, but it is hard to argue against his logic, which was designed to blunt the rising German naval challenge. Admiral Tirpitz, the father of the German High Seas Fleet, “must take joint honors with Fisher as being the man who contributed most to the ending of Pax Britannica,” Kennedy writes. A large, modern and well-trained German battle fleet threatened naval Armageddon in the North Sea. Compared to that the rest of the British Empire hardly mattered. Ironically, a relatively powerful German navy put added emphasis on the British army. That traditionally small organization – which as late as the Stanhope Memorandum in 1891 had its official duties defined as defense of Great Britain, India, and the colonies – suddenly had to contend with defeating, in coordination with France, a large German army in continental Europe. It was no longer true, as Francis Bacon once quipped in the 15th century, “the power that commands the sea is at great liberty and may take as much and as little of the warre as he will.” Instead, a very different world had emerged, one that Lord Kitchener remarked in 1915: “Unfortunately, we have to make war as we must and not as we should like to.”
The British made the commitment to continental Europe, with all of its consequent impacts on army expansion, reluctantly but thoughtfully. The prospect of allowing the Germans to control the Channel coast was simply “the worse evil.” From a naval perspective, the German position was markedly inferior to that of the British, not only numerically but also geographically and logistically. “A stalemate in the North Sea was the most secure strategy imaginable for Britain,” Kennedy writes. But it was demoralizing for an armed service long held as both the shield and sword of the nation and empire.
The strategic implications of the submarine were even worse for the Royal Navy. Kennedy doesn’t say so, but it feels as though the submarine was the greatest revolution in naval military history. The author concedes: “Already the vast pre-war expenditure upon the battle fleets was made to look absurd, as was the Mahanite insistence upon the primacy of capital ships and the decisive naval battle.” Indeed, “Britain’s naval mastery in the future would never again be so secure as the pre-submarine era.” Mahan had famously asserted: “History has conclusively demonstrated the inability of a state with even a single continental frontier to compete in naval development with one that is insular, although of smaller population and resources.” Barely a generation after he wrote those words his thesis was rendered patently untrue.
The speed at which the mighty British navy was eclipsed by events is startling. In 1914, the Royal Navy had been allocated 25% of total government expenditure. By the early 1920s, it had fallen to 6%. In the final year of the First World War the naval budget exceeded 350 million pounds. By 1923 it had fallen to just over 50 million. With the Washington Naval Conference in 1925 the British formally declared herself content with naval parity (albeit with a friendly US Navy) rather than naval mastery, and for the first time agreed to have her naval strength bound by treaty rather than her own national defense needs. On the one hand, naval planners felt, as historian Michael Howard once colorfully put it, “the heavy and ominous breathing of a parsimonious and pacific electorate.” On the other hand, the performance of the nave in the First World War, the advent of submarine warfare and increasingly that of air power had made Mahan’s concepts of sea control by battle fleets quite irrelevant. The navy was simply no longer the senior service of the British armed forces, a reality that played out dramatically over the course of just a few decades.
This book is sure to appeal to serious readers across a wide range of interests: European history, economic development, strategic studies, etc.
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