Kennedy G. Imperial Defence. The Old World Order, 1856-1956

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RN was critical to the defence of what was considered ‘empire’. By exploit-

ing both models, we can develop an altogether more holistic view of

‘Imperial Defence’ than has been used in earlier studies.

Trade and

market access were the critical imperial concerns, not land or people.

Consequently, the word empire is problematic: it possesses connota-

tions and meanings that are hardly compatible with the British emphasis

on access and markets, investment, and opportunity. The territory of the

British Empire should not be seen in the same light as the Roman

empires of domination and control created by contemporary continental

powers. British policy-makers saw no purpose in controlling land and

people and had no difﬁculty with the concept of a looser federation or

the ultimate relaxation of colonial ties. However, there were always excep-

tions, the most obvious of which was India, before 1857 a privately run

continental empire that was both a market and an imperial base. India

undermines any attempt to build a simple theoretical model of the

British Imperial idea but, signiﬁcantly, not the strategic explanation

offered in this chapter of how it was secured.

After the loss of the American Colonies in 1783, Britain showed a

marked reluctance to engage in further large-scale imperial projects and

for the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century focussed on imperial assets,

naval bases, and key trade connections, otherwise unattractive outposts at

Malta, Hong Kong, and Aden enabled the RN to support trade. Other

assets, notably Australia and New Zealand were secured to preclude

French settlement, while in South Africa and India open frontiers exerted

a variety of pull factors.

The connection between trade, policy, and power is nowhere better

developed than in John Wong’s Deadly Dreams: Opium and the ‘Arrow’ War

(1856–1860). Examining the Far Eastern policy of the Palmerston Min-

istries Wong uncovers an aggressive commercial agenda, pushing the free

trade concept into hitherto closed or restricted markets, using the Navy by

turns as executor or persuader. This is the ultimate corrective to older

one-dimensional gunboats, and c. Wong shows Britain as an aggressive

commercial empire, prepared to use the ﬂotilla of coast-attack gunboats

left over from the Crimean War to drive a ﬁscal stake into the heart of

Chinese exclusionism. At the same time, heavily armed warships carried

‘trade’ missions to Siam and Japan. The message was clear: trade or

perish.

As Cain and Hopkins rightly stress, the power of the centre was

immense. Commerce and force went hand in hand. Nor was this a novel

fact. As Daniel Baugh has emphasised, the British fought and won the wars

of the eighteenth century primarily through economic attrition and

expected to apply the same system in 1914.

For imperial London, the key to external policy was, at its simplest, how

to keep Europe quiet and stable so that Britain and her capitalists could

focus efforts on commercial expansion elsewhere. The city was prepared

to pay a heavy premium for this stability and took a leading role in the

112 A. Lambert

navalist agitation of the 1890s, which culminated in the Spencer pro-

gramme of 1894.

The diplomatic policy of imperial Britain has recently been reconsid-

ered by John Charmley, who has criticised the inﬂexibly anti-German and

overly committed Continental policy of the pre-1914 Liberal Government.

He considers this marked a major change in British policy, away from one

which regarded imperial interests as primary, and restrained Britain to a

naval and ﬁnancial role in any Continental conﬂict.

While there was a

tendency to construct an apolitical consensus on defence issues, modern

scholarship is asking new questions. As the main parties diverged on impe-

rial issues, there is no reason to assume they converged on the defence of

empire. Furthermore, there was rarely anything like a ‘party’ position, as

Rhodri Williams demonstrated in: Defending the Empire: The Conservative

Party and British Defence Policy 1899–1915.

The Conservatives began the

shift of defence priorities from imperial to European, the modernisation

of the army and the navy, and the foundation of the politico-military

coordinating body, signiﬁcantly named the ‘Committee of Imperial

Defence’. The central ﬁgure in Conservative defence policy and founder

of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), Prime Minister Arthur

Balfour, shares a biographer with the leading naval ﬁgure of the genera-

tion, Lord Fisher.

Further studies of internal party debates on defence,

and policy-makers, particularly those working at the political/naval inter-

face will be of real value. The inner dynamics of Asquith’s pre-1914

government deserve a fresh study, along with the political and imperial

ideas of key ministers.

A question of perspective

By far, the largest literature on imperial defence concerns the implica-

tions of the growth of responsible dominion government for defence

issues. This perspective has been well handled in national and dominion-

based studies by Preston, Gordon, and McGibbon,

while Nicholas

Lambert’s more speciﬁc Australia’s Naval Heritage: Imperial Strategy and the

Australia Station 1880–1909

provides an excellent collection of docu-

ments, the lucid and well-balanced introduction demonstrates the irrelev-

ance of strategic threat to discussions of Australian naval requirements. In

reality, all dominion-based studies suffer from a degree of unreality, in

part a product of the political basis of the debates they cover, and in part,

of the strategic realities that such debates blatantly ignored. The powerful

nationalist trend in Australian and Canadian history, closely linked to

ongoing debates about the future role of the British Crown in national

life, has been set back of late, notably by John Moses and Christopher

Pugsleys’ edited volume The German Empire and Britain’s Paciﬁc Dominions,

1871–1919 which argues for an altogether homogeneous concept of

empire, based on self-interest. By examining German ambition and

Royal Navy and the defence of empire 113

contemporary Australasian opinion on the threat it posed, these essays

stress the essential role of the empire in securing the dominions.

Nicholas Tracey’s The Collective Naval Defence of the Empire, 1900–1940 pro-

vides extensive documentation on the period up to 1918, illustrating the

Admiralty’s clear commitment to common naval training, equipment,

signals and systems, even if dominion political pressures made distinct ser-

vices inevitable.

In reality, the greatest, perhaps the only, threat to the British Empire

between 1856 and 1918 came from Europe. The emergence of a European

hegemonic bloc, similar to the Napoleonic superstate, was the worst-case

scenario for British war-planning, the seizure of Antwerp and the River

Scheldt by such a hegemon, the only cast iron casus belli in British political

life. With the main danger lying close to the centre, not on the peripheries,

the British state necessarily focussed its attention on Europe, because while

Europe was stable British interests were secure. No continental power

would unilaterally attack Britain or her outlying dependencies while their

rivals were in a position to exploit the inevitable problems. Fortunately for

the British economy, the same forces that secured the British Islands from

invasion, the major battle ﬂeets were also the key to the defence of the

wider world. There was, as the Admiralty rather baldly stated throughout

the nineteenth century, only one ocean, and a dominant Fleet would

secure the Empire the ability to use that ocean (and deny the ocean to

other powers) better by blockading the enemy in European harbours than

chasing isolated cruisers across the open oceans in an age before wireless.

This reality was understood by contemporary analysts, notably the historian

Sir John Laughton. Between the mid-1860s and the end of the Edwardian

era, Laughton harnessed history to the development of national strategy

and his powerful review articles providing the strategic education for

British ofﬁcers and a famous American strategic thinker, Captain Alfred

Thayer Mahan USN.

British strategy

It should be stressed from the outset that British strategy was central not

peripheral, powerful, not petty. After 1861, British imperial strategy

shifted away from the stationed forces, both land and sea, of the previous

sixty years towards mobile, centrally controlled units advocated that year

by the Mills Committee and urged as an economy measure by William

Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. With suitable local facilities

and good communications, naval forces stationed locally could be

reduced in quality, for example, replacing front-line ﬁghting ships with

gunboats adequate to meet the widespread local demands placed on the

navy. Powerful units could be dispatched from Britain or the Mediter-

ranean to reinforce the periphery. In late 1864, Gladstone renewed his

call for a ‘Flying Squadron’ strategy, but Prime Minister Palmerston and

114 A. Lambert

the Cabinet rejected the proposal. When Gladstone became Liberal party

leader and then Prime Minister in late 1868, this ‘Flying Squadron’ strat-

egy was adopted with almost an unseemly haste, as an economy measure.

The First Lord of the Admiralty summed up the new policy:

The diminution of the force permanently maintained in distant seas

will enable my Lords to send a cruising squadron of frigates and

corvettes to visit the stations from time to time, and my Lords antici-

pate that much beneﬁt to the naval service will be derived from this

policy.

Within days, a ‘Flying Squadron’ was on its way to Australasia.

However,

it should be stressed that the possibility of war with Russia in 1878 and

1885 was deterred by the assembly of a power projection ﬂeet at Spithead,

not the local defences of the British Empire.

While the Russians feared

for St. Petersburg, Australia and India were safe. Similarly, the Trent crisis

of 1861 had demonstrated that Britain could not station forces in Canada

to meet the US Army. She had to rely on deterrence. Her global empire

could not be secured against serious attack by local defences. This was a

matter of basic economics and political expediency. Britain would not pay

for a high level of local defence, nor would her colonies. The only strategy

that combined real power, global reach, and relative economy was one

based on the offensive strength of the RN. Throughout the nineteenth

century, the RN had the power to destroy any rival navy, securing British

interests, and releasing the ﬂeet for further offensive operations, includ-

ing an economic blockade, the seizure of overseas or isolated territories as

diplomatic assets, and attacks on major cities. The war would be fought

with a limited commitment of manpower and money; while it could not

destroy a major power, it would exhaust their military and economic

resources and ultimately break their political will. Sea power gave Britain

the ability to attack an enemy at their weakest or most sensitive point

rather than simply countering an attack at the point it crossed the imper-

ial frontier. A maritime striking force could be dispatched from the centre

of the empire, staging through the global chain of bases, to project power

against any rival. Because so many accounts equate defence with the terri-

tory and focus on a local balance, this global concept has been largely

overlooked. Only viewing the empire as an oceanic construct will reveal

the consistencies.

Because the British never wrote down their core strategic doctrine in

the period 1815–1914, many historians have argued that there was no

strategy. This is not correct. The British retained the strategy of the

Napoleonic wars and consistently upgraded to integrate new technologies

and political realities. Between 1856 and 1865, the strategy shifted from

stationed forces to a centrally controlled ‘expeditionary’ strategy. The

long-term success of British strategy is obvious. Between 1814 and 1914,

Royal Navy and the defence of empire 115

no major power attacked Britain. While rival powers could identify areas

of relative British weakness, the North-West frontier of India, Canada, and

oceanic trade – none could develop a strategy that could coerce Britain.

By contrast, Britain did have a strategy that could deter her rivals, and

consequently, the reality of British power was written in stone, at Cher-

bourg, Cronstadt, New York, and Wilhelmshaven.

What sort of navy?

To carry out this global role, the RN needed a dominant sea control battle

ﬂeet, forces to provide local support to the civil power at the margins of

empire and the ability to attack and destroy ﬁrst class fortresses. In the

main, historians have failed to address these disparate issues.

Studies of naval policy were for many years dominated by the works of

Arthur J. Marder,

but they were only concerned with European issues

leading up the inevitable war in 1914 and takes to easily the idea that the

strategic redistribution of the early twentieth century was a ‘retreat’. While

Britain had a unique global chain of bases with dry docks, cable communi-

cations, and coal stocks, the ﬂeet could be redeployed with relative ease,

as it would be after 1918. Ruddock Mackay’s biography of Fisher provided

a new standard work on the most important British Naval ofﬁcer of the

era, while important works by Jon Sumida and Nicholas Lambert have

overturned Marder’s judgements in important areas, notably technology

and strategic policy.

Their work places the Fisher era in a more global

perspective, stressing that it was the need for powerful imperial and Euro-

pean naval squadrons, not simply the threat posed by the German ﬂeet,

that forced John Fisher to make radical changes in all aspects of policy.

These new insights begin the process of returning the empire to the core

of naval history. The next stage will be to assess the overall policy perform-

ance in the light of the growing centralisation of defence in the era of the

Committee of Imperial Defence.

The best study of naval policy in this period is Beeler’s British Naval

Policy in the Gladstone–Disraeli Era, 1866–1880 of 1997.

In a work of

remarkable depth, based on exemplary research, Beeler comprehensively

demolishes the old myths about the ‘Dark Ages of the Admiralty’, lack of

strategic planning, and inconsistent policy-making that had been allowed

to stand far too long. The RN, working with limited budgets, under con-

stant pressure for cuts managed to maintain a force equally capable of

dominating European waters and securing oceanic trade in the distant

oceans. The key to this new version is Beeler’s ability to go beyond the

documents and develop a broader grasp of the issues. The RN did not

create policy papers and strategies like European armies and therefore

should not be studied in the same way. Beeler has also edited Professor

Donald Schurmans’ 1955 Cambridge PhD thesis for publication as Imper-

ial Defence 1868–1887 in 2000.

This, the most detailed examination of the

116 A. Lambert

issues in print, was written by a scholar who had spent his career examin-

ing the question and mastering the ideas of the key thinkers who inﬂu-

enced its development. Schurman’s Education of a Navy and Julian S Corbett

are the key texts for this process. The appearance of a festschrift for Pro-

fessor Schurman in 1997 allowed a new generation to add their thoughts

to his legacy.

John Beeler stresses the central role of deterrence in impe-

rial strategy between 1856 and 1905. Beeler shows how the RN secured the

empire by blockading enemy ﬂeets at home or destroying them inside

their arsenals. The empire was secured by superiority in modern, ﬁrst-class

warships, a unique chain of bases, and the capacity to project power to all

corners of the globe. Even at the height of the Anglo-German Naval race,

as Nicholas Lambert points out, the Admiralty was developing a Paciﬁc

strategy involving Dominion Navies and a new approach, the ‘ﬂeet unit’

concept. The ﬁrst such unit was an all new Royal Australian Navy: New

Zealand bought the British a battlecruiser and the Canadians did a lot of

talking. Even so, British strategy at the outbreak of war in 1914 was res-

olutely maritime. The British Government only accepted a continental

strategy in late 1915, as David French demonstrates. He demolishes

another major strand of the ‘continentalist’ argument by showing that the

choice was seen as a massive gamble, relying on dominion manpower to

win the war in Europe before Britain ran out of money. Ultimately, Amer-

ican intervention provided the resources and manpower to ﬁnish the job,

but Britain had not become a continental power, just another in the long

line of sea-powers forced to go ashore in strength to ﬁnish off a rival land

power. In truth, the empire was the dominant issue, and the threat posed

by Germany was, for all its seriousness, a temporary aberration. Once

Germany had been defeated, the British wanted to re-establish a Euro-

pean balance so that they could get back to their core activity of trade and

empire, and when they rebuilt their forces post-war, it was new ships and

bases they wanted, not armoured divisions. Only through the possession

of overwhelming naval power could the British Empire be defended, but

even then by deterrence rather than war-ﬁghting.

While there is a rich harvest of literature dealing with the Victorian

Navy, much of it published in the period 1890–1914, a golden age for all

manner of heavy blue-bound books on history, strategy and memoir, a

treasure trove that still requires its modern analyst, there is only one sub-

stantial operational narrative. William Laird Clowes’ seven-volume The

RN: A History from the Earliest Times devotes the ﬁnal volume to the period

1857–1900.

Although Clowes recognised the importance of administra-

tion, exploration, and technology, his main concern was a narrative of

operational history, minor wars, logistics, naval brigade support for the

army and the odd natural disaster. Many of these conﬂicts were ‘imperial’,

but few could be considered ‘defence’. Together with lists of ofﬁcers

holding the senior posts and other data, the book is a vital tool, only truly

appreciated by those who ask what the RN was doing in 1901. The need

Royal Navy and the defence of empire 117

for a substantial modern narrative history of the twentieth-century Navy,

World Wars apart, is pressing. Only through a long view of operational

patterns, deployments, and stations, linked to the wider ﬁelds of imperial

diplomatic and economic history will the naval role in the defence of

empire become clear. Until then, we are left with tantalising vignettes,

their true meaning obscured by the lack of context.

One area where a significant body of research has been undertaken,

with impressive results, is the design history of the Navy’s instruments,

the fighting ships, and their technology. This process has been led and

assessed by Naval Architect David Brown.

While much time and effort

was expended producing papers to explain Admiralty policy, and a

significant proportion of these remain in the archives, a more reliable

analytical tool can be found in the major spending decisions. A careful

examination of any warship design should reveal much of the strategy

that was in place at the time it was ordered. Strategy and policy are not

made on paper. The production of papers was both cheap and easy: they

were often only part of a wider process and were written for purposes

which are far from obvious to the modern reader. By contrast, the

expenditure of money on ships, infrastructure, and personnel are the acid

test of strategy and policy. The ships, their deployment, and operation

can be read as easily as a file of papers, but they provide evidence of far

greater weight. For example, the Naval Defence Act of 1889 provided a

combination of ship types which, when analysed, inform the careful

reader that Britain was re-asserting her sea control strategy, that she

expected to blockade her main enemy, France, with a fleet of ocean-

going battleships capable of fighting on the open ocean, supported by

a large force of cruisers, for close blockade and commerce protection,

with torpedo gunboats to counter the threat posed by French flotilla

craft. Distant waters were catered for with a pair of second-class battle-

ships and some modified cruisers. By examining naval design over a

longer period, it is possible to see how these ships differed from those

that had preceded them, but also to place them in the continuum of

British battle fleet–based sea control.

Further value was derived from the policy of naming ships to link the

Navy with the colonies; the Australian station had seven ships with ‘local’

names, or heroic pasts, usually Nelson, Trafalgar, and the Armada. In

1889, the new battleships were the Royal Sovereign class, named for Colling-

wood’s ﬂagship at Trafalgar. By 1916, another class was re-using these

names, just in time for Jutland where many ships bore Nelsonic names.

This careful attention to the past reinforced the deterrent value of naval

demonstrations.

Royal Navy warships were normally designed with imperial concerns in

mind. Their range, seaworthiness, and habitability reﬂected possible use

for global tasks. These features become apparent when compared with

similar ships in rival ﬂeets. Although it was once normal to criticise British

118 A. Lambert

warship designs, the latest research has done much to revive the reputa-

tions of ship designers, shipbuilders, and the Admiralty.

In the 1850s, the RN radically reformed the career structure for ratings.

Hitherto, sailors had signed on for the commission of the ships and were

released after three years. In early 1853, a Committee recommended that

seamen should enter the RN for a term, with twenty years of ‘Continuous

and General Service’ qualifying for a pension. The pension was a retainer

so that the sailor could be recalled in the event of war.

These new ratings

would be naval specialists distinct from merchant seaman. The new system

would also generate a reserve, and to reinforce the effect, other seafaring

men were drawn into the reserve, direct from the merchant service. In

1857, a regulation uniform for all sailors was introduced, emphasising

their new professional status as warship sailors. It also helped to build the

unique identity of the seamen, who by the high Victorian age had been

transformed from a colourful rogue into a model of working-class recti-

tude. The fact that these men now served longer raised the average age of

naval ratings, while improved pay, promotion, and transferable skills made

a naval career, hitherto a short-term choice, more attractive to settled and

ambitious men. In 1859 the Royal Naval Reserve was added to Continuous

Service, creating the modern naval career structure for ratings. The

reservists were regularly drilled. In 1914, the RN mobilised the largest

ﬂeet the world had ever seen, entirely from its own resources in a matter

of days. With continuous service, the use of physical punishment declined,

and in 1866 it was effectively suspended.

The all-volunteer, long service ratings were basic material from which

the RN was built, and the Petty Ofﬁcers who led them were the backbone

of excellence. These men enabled the RN to deploy effectively across the

globe, with trained and experienced personnel rather than the short

service, conscripts who made up much of the manpower in other navies.

In view of the distances involved, such men, like their army counterparts,

were essential for an imperial force.

For a fresh insight into the ofﬁcer corps, Andrew Gordon’s The Rules of

Game is invaluable, stressing the increasingly rigid command systems and

lack of scope for individual initiative in the telegraph- and semaphore-con-

trolled navy of the late nineteenth century. His denouement at Jutland

shows the limits of men and education after a century without a major

war.

In some ways, that was the price of success: successful deterrence in

the long term leads to a lack of contact with real war.

Decline

It is important to recognise the impact of the declinist/continentalist liter-

ature of the 1960s and 1970s on historical understanding of imperial

issues. With empire and naval power consigned to the dustbin of history,

many scholars were anxious to explain the process. Assuming the decline

Royal Navy and the defence of empire 119

in manufacturing output, imperial possession and naval strength, when set

alongside membership of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

and the European Economic Community (EEC), indicated a process of

managed decline and overriding European concerns that they were

unduly hasty in seeking out the long-term causes of decline and backdat-

ing the decline of British power. In the early 1970s, Michael Howard’s The

Continental Commitment and Correlli Barnett’s The Collapse of British Power

provided key elements to the ﬁrst major text of the modern, naval history

revival, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery of 1976.

Arguing that the story had come to a close, Kennedy linked naval power

with economic activity, with the emphasis on industrial output to explain

the process of his title. The naval defence of empire was not a priority,

empire was over; Europe and the near continent were the key issues. For

the period under review, the strategic redistribution of the Fisher era was

portrayed, using a contemporary metaphor, as the recall of the legions,

with the obvious implication that it indicated decline and presaged fall.

This school of thought downplayed the importance of extra-European

concerns in the making of British policy and of the Navy in British secur-

ity. The immense human cost of the First World War on land only added

to a sense of naval irrelevance. Fortunately, more recent work, notably by

Avner Offer, has redressed this balance, while the end of the Cold War has

shifted the contemporary strategic picture back towards global capabilities

and sea-based power. Now that current national strategy is essentially com-

puterised, Corbett

the past will be read in a very different way. The

gloom of the 1970s has passed: the bipolar world with an obsessive focus

on the inner German frontier is only a memory, and historians have to

consider new questions. Some have even dared to argue that the empire

was not such a bad thing.

Defence coordination

Global empires only work if they are well organised and exploit their

strengths; if they try to be strong everywhere, they collapse under the

weight of their defences. Like other successful empires, the British relied

on superior communications to secure an advantage over rivals and to

enable the centre to direct the periphery. In 1800, Mail Packets had been

the fastest strategic communication system, but the Government was quick

to exploit the new power of steam for strategic communications. By 1830,

naval steamers linked Britain with the Mediterranean every month. Within

a decade, private companies were being subsidised to carry Government

mail on oceanic routes, notably Cunard on the Atlantic and Peninsula &

Orient across the Indian Ocean.

These and other mail companies con-

tinued to provide shipping services, auxiliary warships, and naval reserve

postings throughout the period. However, steamships were soon overtaken

120 A. Lambert

by a far faster system – the submarine telegraph cable. Developed in the

1840s, the cable immediately attracted naval interest. It was ﬁrst used to

link Dover and Calais in 1851 and rapidly created a new type of global

power. By 1855, a line connected London with Balaklava. Effective real-

time or near-real-time global communication improved central control,

reducing local freedom of action and allowing centrally directed forces to

reinforce any region under threat or counter-attack where the enemy was

vulnerable. The spread of the system was dramatic: North America was con-

nected by 1867, India by 1870, Australia and Japan by 1872, Brazil in 1873,

and the rest of the world quickly thereafter. Links between the dominant

Eastern Telegraph Company and the Government were close, and in times

of crisis, notably the occupation of Egypt in 1882, the company went

beyond what might be expected of a commercial concern.

The Zulu War

of 1878 was one of the ﬁrst signiﬁcant conﬂicts in which strategic commu-

nications were used to shift forces, with a new cable being laid from Aden

to Durban to improve central control.

Empire, however deﬁned, was now

defended as a single unit, rather than as a series of geographically and

intellectually distinct areas. In 1899, it took only two months to lay 3,000

miles of cable from the Cape Verde Islands to Cape Town for the South

African War. Little wonder the French considered the cable network more

important to British power than the navy.

These developments, although essentially commercial, were aided,

directed, and inﬂuenced by the application of Government funds. At every

stage, speed and reliability were enhanced, improving the ability of the

centre to control the periphery, and more signiﬁcantly, of the centre to

direct forces from the centre or other parts of the periphery to reinforce a

threatened area. In this way, the empire, formal and informal, was welded

into a single strategic entity.

Improved communications were especially

useful to Britain, because Britain alone had the capability to use the

information to move her forces across the globe. She could also deny such

communications to an enemy. As Britain controlled the sea, and almost all

the submarine cables, and cable-laying tonnage, enemy cables could be cut

or re-used. In 1914, Britain had a global communications strategy – built on

command of the sea.

The information edge that Britain developed in the

nineteenth century, through her dominance of systems and the sea, facilit-

ated the next step – the growth of communications intelligence gathering.

These advantages meant that the effective power of British forces grew

rather than their size, because improved central control reduced the need

for local forces. After 1815, Britain applied substantial ﬁnancial and tech-

nical assets to the provision of superior long-distance communications, pio-

neering oceanic steamships and submarine telegraph cables. However, the

effective exploitation of epochal developments in ship, weapon, and com-

munication technology relied on a relatively unnoticed element in the

totality of imperial defence infrastructure. The dry dock was the pivot

around which British Imperial strategy was transformed between 1860 and

Royal Navy and the defence of empire 121