John Parfitt

Britannia’s finest years

issue 23 October 2004

In 1903, the final volume of Laird Clowes’s seven-part History of the Royal Navy thudded on to Britain’s bookshelves: 4,385 pages of broadside-by-broadside chronology from 55 BC to 1900 AD that were in print for almost a century. Nobody has attempted to follow it on that scale, until Professor Rodger that is. His 1997 volume, Safeguard of the Sea, took us to 1649; this second volume takes us on to 1815. It has been worth the wait.

Rodger says he wants to ‘put naval affairs back into the history of Britain’. High time, when too many think that history began in 1914, geography stops somewhere near the Russian border, and the sea is really just for swimming in. This 900-pager continues his work in great style. If you wonder how a nation once rent by civil strife, with a fraction of the population and wealth of its continental neighbours, became the undisputed master of the oceans and the trade that plied in them, read this.

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