The sea — that wine-dark whale road, to mix Homeric and Anglo-Saxon evocations of it — has always held a special place in the human psyche. A site of both great peril and great opportunity, it has influenced our languages and our cultures, just as it has our economic systems and the contours of our many histories. A presence experienced almost as universally as the sun and the soil, the sea is one of human civilisation’s shared foundations.
Andrew Lambert, an eminent naval historian, is a strong believer in the power of the sea to shape the destiny of nations. In Seapower States he looks in detail at five historical polities — Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic and England — which he holds up as prime instances of ‘seapowers’: states that deliberately chose to place the sea at the centre of their political and cultural identities, and used the ‘asymmetric’ capabilities this granted them to make their way in the world as trade-oriented great powers. At least for a time.
In emphasising politics and culture, Lambert aims to rethink the importance traditionally placed on ‘sea power’, by which he means the possession of a large-scale navy. The United States, for example, with its ‘continental’ self-identity, is a land power with a lot of ships. It has ‘sea power’, but it is not a ‘seapower’ like Venice was: a state that placed all its bets on the sea, did so consciously, and became distinct from other states in doing so.
This distinctiveness, in fact, is the foundation for the ‘conflict’ referred to in the book’s subtitle. To Lambert, the sea’s beneficial impacts — which he grandly summarises as ‘the economic, political and intellectual agendas of progress’ — were enjoyed by seapowers alone, rather than shared in varying amounts by all states.
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