wholehearted official enthusiasm in the Royal Navy (RN), pointing out the limits of the
cult of battle that he believed had secured an unhealthy grip on the public and official
imagination (Corbett, 19 88 ). His nuanced appreciation of the risks that a stronger navy
should and should not be willing to run in seeking battle was integral to his brilliant, if
somewhat dated, view of the roles of the RN in war. His understanding of the value of a
largely maritime and amphibious way of war rested heavily on historical evidence from
a pre-industrial context. But what was of lasting value was his insistence upon the pri-
macy of war on land, and therefore upon maritime, rather than narrowly naval, strategy.
The title of the first chapter of his classic study of the Seven Years War (1756–63)
conveyed the basic message: ‘The function of the fleet in war’ (Corbett, 1973). That
subject merited a measure of strategic thought that it received only rarely.
Of course, navies and maritime trade were strategically important in the nineteenth
century, but for the principal purposes of this text, developments in land warfare have
commanded priority treatment. The significant topic of radical changes in marine
architecture and naval design between Trafalgar and Jutland is well covered in a library
of specialist studies. This narrative adheres closely, if austerely, to the focus that defines
this whole endeavour: strategic history. So what follows is a summary of the strategic
history of sea power in the nineteenth century.
The century concluded where it had begun, with Britain’s Royal Navy pre-eminent at
sea. It was not unchallenged in 1914, at that time by Germany, and it had been menaced
occasionally by France in the preceding century. The appearance in 1 848 of a French
screw-propelled steam warship, the Napoleon, rang alarm bells in Britain over an alleged
invasion danger. The French construction of an armoured frigate, the Gloire, in 1 858 ,
propelled similarly to the Napoleon, provoked an immediate British technical reply:
the all-iron Warrior. Until the early 1900s, when the baton of rivalry was passed to
Imperial Germany, France was Britain’s only naval rival, albeit one that the latter had
little difficulty out-competing time and again. There were at least four major reasons why
Britain was the leading – one cannot quite say hegemonic – great power in the nineteenth
century, periodically co-equal with continentalist Russia, depending on the issues of
the day. Those reasons included its dominant commercial and naval sea power; its wealth
and pre-eminent, though relatively declining, general economic strength, a strength that
depended critically on the country’s sea power; and an overseas empire of increasingly
awesome proportions that was founded, sustained and exploited by sea power. Finally, to
cite a less obvious reason, though one whose strategic implications should not be mocked,
Victorian Britain was a much respected and widely envied civilization; it enjoyed the
benefits of what today is known as ‘soft power’ (Nye, 2002: 8 –12).
With respect to the wars of the period, with its ability to reach relatively rapidly
and reliably into the Black Sea, the Baltic and even the North Pacific, in 1 8 54–6 the
RN enabled the temporary Anglo-French alliance to defeat Russia. Earlier, it had played
an important role in helping the Greeks achieve their final independence from Turkey
in 1 8 31. That behaviour was pursued in somewhat uneasy occasional collaboration
with Russia. With good reason, the Russians were suspected of being far more interested
in securing control of the Turkish Straits than they were in aiding their Greek co-
religionists. In the American Civil War, the Union Navy played a crucial role in
exercising what eventually became a reasonably effective maritime blockade of the
extensive coastline and the major and most minor ports of the Confederacy. However,
68 War, peace and international relations