When Britannia ceased to rule the waves

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.