thalassoCraCies 141coasts, will be more instructive than the amount of effort expended in another field.
Furthermore, it has at the present time a very marked analogy in many respects to the
Caribbean Sea,—an analogy which will be still closer if a Panama canal–route ever be
completed. (Mahan, 1890: 33)It is thus obvious that The Influence of Sea Power was at least as much a political
tract as it was a work of history, and—readable though it is—Mahan’s book was not
based on deep research in the archives. Mahan was, of course, aware that control of
the seas in an age of sail power must have a different character to control of the seas
in his own day, when steam power was supreme (though he did consider that oared
ships, such as galleys, possessed a similar maneuverability to steamships, which was
something of an exaggeration). But he was convinced that lessons could be learned
from the eighteenth century, and this was a good moment to choose, because it was
in that period that the English (after 1707 the British) created a maritime dominion
within the Mediterranean without themselves having a Mediterranean coastline. It
is worth adding that the Russians attempted to achieve something similar, though
their repeated attempts ended in disaster. And these maritime activities revealed
very clearly the importance of the straits that give access to the Mediterranean,
whether the Dardanelles that blocked Russian incursions while the Ottomans held
firm sway in Constantinople, or the Straits of Gibraltar that, in Mahan’s view,
blocked any attempt by Spain to revive the nation’s navy, so long as Britain held
Gibraltar itself; and to these it was now possible to add the Suez Canal which,
though under British and French control, attracted the attention of Mediterranean
competitors. Mahan’s approach was founded upon a particular view of international
relations as a great game in which nations competed for power and influence,
expressing their power through control of the sea routes and using their power to
promote trade. Rivalry was the fundamental concept. In a maritime setting, that
generally involved commercial rivalry. The great powers faced other rivals than just
their fellow great powers. Piracy was a constant problem, as any American aware of
his countryman Stephen Decatur’s role in suppressing the Barbary corsairs, deep
within the Mediterranean, could testify (and as the naming of American warships as
USS Decatur testifies to this day). The factors each nation must take into account
when thinking about its power at sea were, in Mahan’s view, six: its geographical
position in relation to the sea; the “physical conformation” of the nation itself;
extent of territory; number of population; “character of the people;” character of
the government (Mahan, 1890: 28–29). But his historical discussion was in fact
informed by another very important element: the technology available to each
nation, and its ability to harness this, because, as his six factors indicated, population
and resources were limited. The achievement of the British navy was to establish
formidable naval power despite difficulties in recruitment and in the harnessing of
resources to build the ships Britain required.
The problem with Mahan’s approach is that naval power comes first. It becomes a
precondition for the creation of a commercial network across the sea. But we also
need to consider a scenario familiar from the ancient and medieval worlds in which
commercial activity precedes or develops alongside naval power, and may also be
closely linked to piracy. We can certainly conceive of commercial networks that did not
have the backing of naval power and were not thalassocracies within any meaningful0002063951.INDD 141 2/17/2014 11:36:30 AM