given that Southern blockade runners succeeded in importing 600,000 rifles, plus fancy
fashionable goods worth a fortune in a society starved of the finer things of life, obviously
there were holes in the blockade. Sea power played no role worth mentioning in the wars
of German unification. They were too brief for a maritime dimension to register any
influence, while the military action was wholly continental. In the Balkan wars which
studded the decades from the 1 8 70s to the 1910s, sea power was sometimes a minor
factor, for the more rapid transport of Russian troops, for example. But, as a general rule,
the struggle to inherit as much as possible of the barely living corpse of Turkey-in-Europe
was a story of strategic land power, not sea power. In sharp contrast, although the Boer
War of 1 8 99–1902 was waged entirely on land, for the British Empire it was enabled in
the most fundamental sense, which is to say logistically, strictly by Britain’s unchallenged
control of sea communications to southern Africa. Such control was a strategic sine qua
non for London. Finally, sea power showed its teeth decisively both in the Sino-Japanese
War of 1 8 94–5 and in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5. As an insular power, Japan
depended wholly upon maritime strength to exert itself abroad, and particularly on land
on the Asian continent. In both wars, despite suffering from some of the ill-fortune and
errors that happen in all conflicts, the Imperial Japanese Navy covered itself with glory.
Those triumphs led to its infection with the virus of the ‘victory disease’, a malady that
would prove fatal in a later and much greater conflict.
From this brief survey of the strategic significance of sea power in the nineteenth
century, one notes that although nearly everything changed in naval technologies of all
kinds – propulsion, construction, armament, protective armour and, rather less than was
desirable, in ship-to-ship communications – there was little actual warfare at sea,
although Japan eviscerated Russia’s benighted Baltic Fleet in 1904. That fleet had toiled
with painful slowness from one French coaling pit stop to another, all the way from
Kronstadt in the Baltic to the Sea of Japan to meet its Trafalgar in the Tsushima Strait
off Korea. It was simply outclassed in all departments, except courage, by the Japanese
Navy. Tsushima was a decisive sea battle. Had Japan lost, it could not have sustained its
aggressive land campaign in the face of a Russian navy commanding sea communica-
tions between Korea and the Home Islands. Nevertheless, Tsushima was an exceptional
event indeed in this long period. War at sea between great powers with navies of
approximate symmetry, if different strengths, was not a notable feature, indeed hardly a
feature at all, in the strategic history of the century. But the RN was of paramount
strategic importance as the backstop to and symbol of Britain’s status as the leading –
certainly a leading – great power.
Politics and strategic history
When analysing the veritable torrent of technological, socio-cultural and domestic
political changes of the period 1 8 15–1914, it is all too easy to lose sight of the inter-
national political context. A striking advantage of a focus upon strategic history is that
it compels attention to the major plot lines in international politics. Especially with
reference to military developments, as already cited, the view of the strategist and
strategic historian demands an answer to the enduring question: what is it all about?
Shortly an attempt must be made to answer that question, the one that leads us to the
central plot of the strategic history of the period. But first it is necessary to return briefly
Nineteenth century: technology and war 69