When the Royal Navy celebrated Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, 173 ships and 50,000 sailors filled the Solent. The Spectator (3 July 1897) described the ‘endless succession of battleships, cruisers, destroyers, gunboats and torpedo boats’ as offering ‘the most magnificent naval spectacle ever beheld’. More importantly, the fleet at Spithead ‘would have been able to beat any navy or combination of navies that might be brought against it’. It constituted, the magazine proclaimed, a purely defensive weapon, designed only to safeguard the shores of the British Isles, protect the colonies and police the seas ‘for the benefit, not of Englishmen alone, but of the whole world’.
Not everyone was entirely convinced. Three weeks later The Spectator published Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Recessional’, which warned that a day might come when:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
In The Price of Victory, Nicholas Rodger tells the story of how Kipling’s warning came to pass, and Britain went from being the world’s only superpower to an international also-ran in the course of a few decades and, crucially, two world wars.
Rather like Norma Desmond in reverse, Britain stayed small while the pictures got big
He begins with the defeat of Napoleon, which set Britain up to exploit a virtuous circle. Her naval strength – demonstrated to the world during the French Wars – protected and promoted trade, sometimes rather robustly at cannon point. Trade made money, which paid for the navy, underwrote the empire and drove the industrial revolution. The technological leadership and manufacturing capacity that followed then further underpinned British sea power.
Rodger’s version of this story reminds us of three important and often forgotten lessons. First, British expansion was a result not of far-sighted national strategy and statesmanship, much less of devious imperialist plotting, but of the usual chaotic collision of political chancers, inept bureaucracy, the occasional bright spark and sheer blind luck. Government was just as bad at delivering then as it is now – a continuity that you may find depressing or strangely reassuring.
Second, the deterrence that underpinned the Pax Victoriana was founded, not on maximising frontline military power in the shop window, but on maintaining the ability to mobilise power, both military and industrial, more effectively than rivals could manage. Those designing our new Strategic Defence Review might do well to remember that.
Third, and most important, Britain’s success was principally the result of lack of competition. For all the occasional scares about France or Russia, it was only after the unification of Germany and the reunification of the United States that economic challengers emerged who proved capable of posing and sustaining a military threat. With the dawn of the new century, the British economy began to fall behind, even as weapons of war became ever more expensive. The most powerful battleship of 1906, Dreadnought, cost eight times as much as Warrior had in 1860. Worse, the wars increased in size. By 1944-5 it was clear that Britain could not keep up with resource-rich nations such as the USA and USSR. Rather like Norma Desmond in reverse, Britain stayed small when the pictures got big.
Rodger is not as comfortable with fleets of steam and steel as he was with Nelson’s wooden world in the second volume of his naval history of Britain. He remains preoccupied with battleship actions long after the focus of naval warfare had shifted in both world wars, for instance, and his grasp of second world war strategic realities is weak. The Germans never ‘looked on the verge’ of seizing the oil of Iraq and Persia; and the Japanese navy could not have advanced ‘right to the Californian coast’. Making his case about ‘the price of victory’ required deeper analysis of the economic effects of the world wars than he offers and more consideration of how and why the electorate became less willing to underwrite the military costs of empire during the early 1900s. Money was important, but there was more to it than that.
But weak spots are inevitable in histories on this scale. The latest volume is the third of a trilogy which seeks to connect ‘the contribution which naval warfare, with all its associated activities, has made to national history’ in its many aspects. Rodger is surely right in thinking that we cannot get a clear picture of the history of stones set in silver seas like ours without understanding the impact of naval warfare and its preparations. Island nations need to build and maintain a navy; but doing so has always been the most expensive and difficult activity a state could attempt – at least until it started providing welfare. A ship such as Victory was the Space Shuttle of her day: costly, bleeding-edge technology, designed boldly to go where few others dared – superpower incarnate. Such weapons cannot be improvised in a hurry. They require sustained national effort and public support. War at sea, therefore, is often decided long before the first shot is fired, and Rodger’s account pays as much attention to peacetime developments as to what happened in the heat of battle.
Rodger’s project risked Casaubonery when first conceived more than 30 years ago, and it has only got bigger since, as even more specialist literature has emerged. The two-decade interval between the publication of volumes two and three suggests that progress has not always been smooth, but Rodger’s research is up-to-date. Most importantly of all, he has finished. The result is a very considerable and scholarly work of synthesis which will provide a baseline for future work on Britain and its naval history for a generation or more. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a project like this even being possible today. Which publisher or funding body would pay for it? Which university would give their staff the time to do it? Which historian, for that matter, would have the skills, ambition or self-belief to take it on?
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