Abstract
As the founding fathers of the ‘historical school’ of naval strategists, Sir Julian Stafford Corbett (1854–1923) and Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) shared careers and convictions of sometimes remarkable similarities. Both turned to serious scholarship relatively late in their lives. Both thereafter committed themselves to bringing naval history into the mainstream of intellectual respectability. They were convinced of history’s immense power as an educational tool and they looked to the past for insights that might guide their War College students and assist policy-makers in coming to grips with the changing technical and diplomatic circumstances of their own world.
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Notes
Julian S. Corbett, Drake and the Tudor Navy (London, 1898).
That year he also edited for the Navy Records Society, Papers Relating to the Navy during the Spanish War, 1585–1587 (London, 1898). His two earlier books for the ‘English Men of Action Series’ were Monk (London, 1898), and Sir Francis Drake (London, 1890).
Donald M. Schurman, The Education of a Navy: The Development of British Naval Thought, 1867–1914 (London, Chicago, Toronto, 1965; reprint Kreiger, 1984); and
Julian S. Corbett: Historian of British Maritime Policy from Drake to Jellicoe (London, 1981).
‘Mahan and World War II: A Commentary from the United States’, Brassey’s Naval Annual (New York, 1941), reprinted in B. Mitchell Simpson III (ed.), The Development of Naval Thought: Essays by Herbert Rosinski (Newport, 1977) pp. 20–40.
B. D. Hunt, Sailor-Scholar: Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond, 1871–1946 (Waterloo, 1982) pp. 18–21.
J. S. Corbett, The Campaign of Trafalgar (London, 1910) Preface, p. viii.
J. S. Corbett and H. J. Edwards (eds), Cambridge Naval and Military Series, University Press 1914–25, Volume I
Excerpts have also been published in G. E. Thibault (ed.), The Art and Practice of Military Strategy (Washington: National Defense University, 1984) Chapter IX.
J. S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years War: A Study in Combined Strategy (London, 1907, 2 vols), vol. I, p. 9.
P. M. Stanford, ‘The Work of Sir Julian Corbett in the Dreadnought Era’, USNIP, vol. 77, no. 1 (Jan 1951) p. 67.
Paul Haggie, ‘The Royal Navy and War Planning in the Fisher Era’, in Paul Kennedy (ed.), War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880–1914 (London, 1985) pp. 118–32
Lt-Cmdr P. K. Kemp (ed.), The Papers of Admiral Sir John Fisher, vol. II, Navy Records Society, 1964.
See Michael Howard, The British Way in Warfare: A Reappraisal (London, 1974) p. 12.
J. S. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (London, 1911; New Impression, 1972) p. 2.
See also Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London, 1976) chapter VII, ‘Mahan Versus Mack-inder’, pp. 177–204.
See Barry Hunt, ‘British Policy on the Issue of Belligerent and Neutral Rights, 1919–1939’, in Craig L. Symonds (ed.), New Aspects of Naval History (Annapolis, 1981) pp. 279–90.
For example, Arnold White, ‘The Chess Board at Sea’, Daily Chronicle (13 Feb 1912). He wrote, ‘we have probably seen the last of the convoy system’.
Brian Ranft (ed.), Technical Change and British Naval Policy, 1860–1939 (London, 1977).
Viz., Fred T. Jane, ‘Under the White Ensign’, Evening Standard, 15 Jan 1912.
A. J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, vol. IV, 1917: Year of Crisis (Oxford, 1969) pp. 167–71.
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© 1989 John B. Hattendorf and Robert S. Jordan
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Hunt, B.D. (1989). The Strategic Thought of Sir Julian S. Corbett. In: Hattendorf, J.B., Jordan, R.S. (eds) Maritime Strategy and the Balance of Power. St Antony's. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09392-2_7
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