Abstract
The words of Sir Walter Ralegh would be hard to improve upon as a statement of the benefits of sea power.1 In the reign of Elizabeth I, the era of adventurers such as Ralegh, Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake who infringed upon the commercial monopolies claimed by Spain and Portugal, it was beginning to become clear that Britain was particularly well positioned to take advantage of the seas.2 Nobody could have foreseen, however, the extent to which, over the course of the following three centuries, the country would accumulate a spectacular record of naval victories, acquire an enormous far-flung empire, and come to dominate world trade.3 It was sea power that made all this possible.
He that commands the sea, commands the trade, and he that is lord of the trade of the world is lord of the wealth of the world and he that hath the wealth hath the dominion.
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Notes
Ralegh was not the first to make this point. His comment in full, with the spelling unmodernized, reads as follows: ‘This was Themistocles opinion long since, and it is true, That hee that commaunds the sea, commaunds the trade, and hee that is lord of the Trade of the world is lord of the wealth of the worlde and hee that hath the wealth hath the dominion. for Ambition is serued by men, Men are bought, monies buyes them, money is gotten by trade, Trade maineteyned by passing the seas, and wee passe the seas by shipps.’ From ‘Of the Art of Warre by Sea’, published as an appendix to P. Lefranc, Sir Walter Ralegh, Écrivain: l’oeuvre and les idées (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1968), p. 600.
On the era of privateering, see Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
It was in 1578 that Ralegh, with his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, became involved in planning the establishment of English colonies in America. Before 1578, ‘England had not a single foothold outside Europe’. See D. B. Quinn, Ralegh and the British Empire (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1973), pp. 27–8.
On the influence of maritime power on the political, social and cultural character of a nation, see Peter Padfield, Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World, 1588–1782 (London: John Murray, 1999), and
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (London and New York: Verso, 1994).
On the Dutch maritime experience, see C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (London: Penguin, 1990).
On the nature of Dutch society during this period, see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). It was in 1672, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, that Charles II invited Dutch artists to settle in England; two who came were the Willem van de Veldes, a father and son. They were rapidly engaged by the king and his Lord Admiral brother, James, Duke of York, and given a studio in the Queen’s House at Greenwich. This was the beginning of marine art in England.
For a discussion of how George Eliot ‘cited her delight in Dutch realism as the basis for her kind of realism’ and the parallels that can be drawn between her novels and the works of Vermeer, see Frederick Karl, George Eliot: A Biography (London: Flamingo, 1996), pp. 277–8, 284.
The fact that a maritime society is also likely to be a free society is a central proposition of the American naval historian Captain A. T. Mahan in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 (London: Methuen, 1965; first published 1890).
On the English Civil War, see John Kenyon, The Civil Wars of England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988),
Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), and
Norah Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
The most interesting account of the ways in which the British novel does respond to the Industrial Revolution is Catherine Gallagher’s The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
The number of critical books about sea literature is remarkably small. The list of general surveys includes Frank Knight, The Sea Story: Being a Guide to Nautical Fiction From Ancient Times to the Close of the Sailing Ship Era (London: Macmillan, 1958),
Frank Watson, The Sailor in English Fiction and Drama 1550–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931),
Anne Treneer, The Sea in English Literature: From ‘Beowulf’ to Donne (Liverpool and London: Liverpool University Press and Hodder & Stoughton, 1926), and
Charles Napier Robinson, The British Tar in Fact and Fiction: The Poetry, Pathos and Humour of the Sailor’s Life (London and New York: Harper, 1909). Books on American sea literature are listed in the notes to Chapter 5.
On cannibalism, see Frank Lestringant, trans. Rosemary Morris, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).
On the physical regime at sea, see Jonathan Neale, The Cutlass and the Lash: Mutiny and Discipline in Nelson’s Navy (London: Pluto Press, 1980).
On the slave trade, see Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (London: Picador, 1997).
See also, W. E. F. Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers: The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969).
John Cannon, The Oxford Companion to British History (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1997), p. 869.
On the Pax Britannica, see Bernard Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy: Ideology, Interest, and Sea Power During the ‘Pax Britannica’ (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986).
I would like to acknowledge my debt to Semmel’s work, which has helped me fundamentally in formulating the overall approach taken in this book. As is the case with anyone working in this field, I am also indebted to Paul M. Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Macmillan, 1983), and
C. J. Bartlett’s Great Britain and Sea Power, 1815–1853 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963).
On America’s changing maritime economy, see Benjamin W. Labaree, Willam W. Fowler, Jr, Edward W. Sloan, John B. Hattendorf, Jeffrey J. Safford and Andrew W. German, America and the Sea: A Maritime History (Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport, 1998).
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Peck, J. (2001). Introduction. In: Maritime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985212_1
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