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

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1890. They were the basic requirements for sustained local operations.

The spread of docking accommodation between 1860 and 1890 was driven

by technical change, commercial pressure, and strategic need. Dry docks

would enable the RN to send squadrons to any part of the globe and main-

tain them there. They were vital to the effective use of naval units. In areas

of overwhelming strategic need, where economic activity was inadequate to

support them, docks were built in Imperial Fortresses of Bermuda, Gibral-

tar, and Malta. Elsewhere, the Navy encouraged the construction of com-

mercial docks, providing government ﬁnancial assistance to ensure they

were conﬁgured for, and gave priority to warships. The emergence of an

effective policy followed a period of haphazard development at the outer

reaches of empire.

To exploit new opportunities to act on a global scale, the British state

required a London-based system for defence coordination, initially, in the

1880s the Colonial Defence Committee and from 1920 the Committee of

Imperial Defence. This process is examined in Nicholas d’Ombrain’s

essential War Machinery and High Policy: Defence Administration in Peacetime

Britain: 1902–1914.

d’Ombrains’ emphasis that the CID failed to settle

and direct national strategy and policy has been challenged by Avner

Offer in The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation which contends that

a well-developed maritime economic warfare strategy was in place in

1914.

The Anglo-Saxon and dominion ideas that underpinned these pre-

war plans were consistent with the long-term trends in British strategy and

the failure to prepare a continental army before August 1914. If we accept

the logic of Offer’s study, as many have, a long-term British strategy for

the defence of her vital interests emerges.

These interests came in two distinct categories: purely strategic threats

posed by European hegemonic powers, especially those that violated the

independence and integrity of Belgium, and global economic security, for

investments, trade, and shipping. Developing a consistent and, before

1914, effective strategy that could support British diplomacy in securing

these ends on low estimates was a work of genius. It ensured that when the

guns started ﬁring, the British were ready for global war and the rest of

Europe was still living with the delusion that the conﬂicts would be over by

Christmas. Despite this, Britain failed to deter Germany in 1914 because

the threat of an economic war of exhaustion was not one the Germans

recognised as vital, as Offer observes, it was ‘not visible enough’.

Deterrence

So far, this chapter has focussed on areas where the literature has

addressed the key questions. However, there remains a major gap at the

heart of the subject. There is no overall concept of British strategy for

the period into which the naval component can be integrated. The

whole is less than the sum of its parts.

122 A. Lambert

The British concept of imperial defence was based on the need to

avoid war: to this end it relied on a global strategic vision, using highly

mobile, centrally controlled forces that could counter any attack on

British interests, metropolitan or imperial, by attacking the most vulner-

able point of the aggressors’ own possessions. It was a deterrent strategy.

The security of British possessions and dominions was underpinned by

the threat that any attack on British interests would provoke an over-

whelming naval response, including the destruction of vital commercial,

political, and naval assets, economic exhaustion, and exposure to other

powers. The key to this strategy was the ability to mount a realistic threat

and to ensure any aggressor, real or potential, understood the limits of

British tolerance.

The ‘Trent Crisis’ of 1861 demonstrated that Britain did not need to

station forces in Canada to meet the US Army. Instead, Britain could rely

on deterrence.

In 1878 and 1885, Russian threats to Turkey and

Afghanistan were deterred by the assembly of a power-projection ﬂeet at

Spithead, not the local defences of the British Empire.

While the Rus-

sians feared for St. Petersburg, Sydney and Melbourne were safe. Britain’s

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, including economic blockades, seizure of overseas or

isolated territories as diplomatic assets, and attacks on major cities. British

thinking envisaged a war of limited commitment of manpower and

money, husbanding resources and strength for another twenty-ﬁve-year

conﬂict like that with revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe. While this

strategy 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 imperial frontier. Mastery of global communications and the

development of suitable base facilities, especially dry docks, ensured that 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, in any theatre. That this did not have to be done between 1856

and 1914 reﬂects the success of centrally directed deterrence in reducing

the threat to the empire.

From the ‘Trent’ through Fashoda to the two Moroccan crises, Britain

consistently and coherently employed carefully signalled deterrence to

secure her interests and avoid war. This concept provides the only ana-

lytical tool capable of explaining long-term success, low budgets, and the

Royal Navy and the defence of empire 123

resolution of specific case studies. It also has the benefit of making the

Baltic far more important in the history of ‘Imperial Defence’ than any

British overseas territory. The RN did not ‘defend’ the empire, it applied

pressure wherever a potential enemy was most exposed. From the St.

George’s Day Review in 1856 that celebrated the role of Britain’s right

arm in the winning of the ‘Crimean’ War, a global conflict that had

exposed Russia’s weakness through maritime campaigns and economic

warfare,

to the Fleet Review of July 1914, the assembly of a vast fleet on

the coast of Britain was a gesture of enormous power and irresistible

diplomatic weight. It only required to be used with skill to secure the

compliance of any rational state.

Global strategy – common doctrine

From the 1850s, the British developed a global strategy that worked; typ-

ically they only began to reduce it to theory afterwards. John Colomb’s

work of 1867, which emphasised sea communications was a key document,

which was understood by key policy-makers like Admiral Sir Alexander

Milne

and G S Clarke, and developed through the growth of historical

understanding, begun by John Knox Laughton culminating in Julian

Corbett’s key works. Corbett added a touch of political and economic

realism injected by his close contact with the Admiralty regime of Sir John

Fisher 1904–1910. While his 1911 text Some Principles of Maritime Strategy is

the strategic primer, England in the Mediterranean and England in the Seven

Year’s War are the Grand Strategic, and The Campaign of Trafalgar the stra-

tegic case study. These were the teaching texts of Edwardian imperial

defence, given as lectures at the Army Staff College and the Naval War

Course, before being published.

Increasingly inﬂuenced by a sophisticated understanding of Clausewitz

and the wealth of historical learning now made available, Corbett pro-

vided his countrymen with the intellectual tools to build a modern war-

ﬁghting system, and, by no coincidence this is precisely what they did.

Avner Offer has demonstrated that pre-war work by men like CIDS Secret-

ary Maurice Hankey and successive Directors of the Naval Intelligence

Division Britain went to war in 1914 better prepared for a global conﬂict

than any other power.

A better understanding of the key policy-makers of the pre-1914 period

would help to broaden our understanding of the problems of imperial

defence. Stephen Roskill’s biography of Hankey

is a beginning, but a

modern study of George Sydenham Clarke who exercised a key role in

imperial defence from the 1880s to the First World War would be a major

addition to the literature. At various times an Engineer, Fortress builder,

Secretary to the Colonial Defence Committee and then the Committee

of Imperial Defence, a Colonial Governor, and maritime strategist

Clarke’s contemporary writings and a lucid, if not very revealing memoir,

124 A. Lambert

illuminate an important element in the thinking of the period and suggest

that more might be found in his career.

Clarke was among the ﬁrst to integrate the concept of coast defence, a

military task, with the reality of RN global primacy to produce a scale of

coastal fortiﬁcation appropriate to the real needs of the empire, and

necessarily far below that deemed essential by careerist military engineers,

alarmist domestic politicians, and nervous colonial legislatures. His work

helped to make the defence of empire more rational and efﬁcient by the

beginning of the twentieth century. Similarly, the wider ﬁeld of pre-1900

defence cooperation provides opportunities for wider research.

Having settled the global strategy of a world empire, there remains the

question of how the RN carried on the day-to-day business of securing,

extending, and integrating the empire, formal or otherwise, into a cohesive

unit. The growing recognition that indigenous peoples had their own

perspective on the process, and that British presence was far from cohesive,

has produced a more sophisticated understanding of the RN in action.

Barry Gough’s Gunboat Frontier: British Maritime Ascendancy and Northwest

Coast Indians, 1846–1890 of 1984

examined the British Columbia

experience, while Jane Samson’s Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority

in the Paciﬁc Islands

stretches the concept to examine the underlying ideo-

logies of the naval ofﬁcers and their conﬂict with other Europeans in a

region where formal control was not established.

In his essay ‘Proﬁt and Power: Informal Empire, the Navy and Latin

America’, Gough overtly links naval history with the Cain and Hopkins

debate on gentlemanly capitalism through a regional study. It is highly

signiﬁcant that this paper appeared in a collection debating the new

approach to imperial history.

Naval historians have to take their ideas

and join in wider debates rather than rest content with exchanging ideas

among themselves.

Empires, however deﬁned, are about control. The progress of maritime

empire was nowhere more obvious than in the process of chart-making.

The RN was the primary agency for making the oceans of the world, and

their vital sailing routes British. By drawing the charts and ﬁlling them

with suitably imperial names, Britain took possession of the seas, reduced

the connecting spaces between her trading entrepots, colonial outposts,

and the metropole, improving the speed and proﬁtability of the system.

The same process was equally signiﬁcant in opening up the oceans of the

world, and more especially the complex coastal waters of rival powers, and

key choke points, to facilitate the offensive coastal operations that were

the basis of British war-planning for a European conﬂict, and on which

the whole structure of deterrence rested. Older histories of naval survey-

ing, notably the Admiral Day chronicle the achievement but have little to

say about the purpose of the activity.

While the literature on hydro-

graphy is large, a few examples will have to sufﬁce. Lambert provides a

case study of the role of chart-making in British strategy.

Andrew David’s

Royal Navy and the defence of empire 125

The Voyage of HMS Herald 1852–1861 continues a strong run of work on

Australian charting and stresses a variety of imperial, colonial, and scient-

iﬁc themes, notably the importance of new steam shipping routes.

Often

dressed up as high-minded services to civilisation, maritime safety or

science, the British hydrographic effort was, in truth, part of the great

project to reduce the world to order, to impose British ideas, values and

control where necessary, and ensure access to contested waters, be they

choke points like the Danish narrows or oceanic steam ship routes like the

Torres Strait. Deep ocean research was pioneered to enable the laying of

that quintessentially British imperial project, the oceanic submarine tele-

graph cable.

That hydrographic knowledge and skills were critical to serious war-

planning was soon recognised, and by the 1850s, the hydrographer was the

leading source of strategic advice and a key player in many aspects of naval

policy and planning. Surveying Ofﬁcers were the key planners at all levels

of war in the nineteenth century, notably for operational planning in the

Baltic and the Black Sea during the Crimean War.

In addition to the

more obvious information, such as charts of naval bases and strategic

narrows, the RN also developed an understanding of oceanic phenomena

that would inﬂuence operations, notably tides, currents, and wind pat-

terns. The ﬁrst fully reliable set of tidal data for the English Channel in the

1840s was the key element in planning against a possible French invasion.

All ofﬁcers were requested to report any information they considered

useful to the hydrographer; the entire ofﬁcer corps was drawn into

the work of marine science in 1849 when the Admiralty issued: A Manual

of Scientiﬁc Enquiry prepared for the use of Her Majesty’s Navy: and adapted for

Travellers in General. Authors drawn from the scientiﬁc elite, including

Darwin, provided guidance on methods of observation and recording for

all relevant branches of science: astronomy, magnetism, hydrography,

tides, geography, geology, earthquakes, mineralogy, meteorology, atmos-

pheric waves, zoology, botany, ethnology, medicine, and statistics. It was

written for men of ‘good intelligence and fair acquirement’. A hint of

pecuniary reward was held out to encourage application. In addition to

the exact sciences, social and ethnographic evidence should be acquired.

The potential results of issuing the volume were immense; the Admiralty

had ‘cruisers in every sea; and where the ships of the navy are not present,

it sometimes happens that the vessels of the merchant are conducted with

much intelligence and enterprise’.

It did not need to be said that such

information had a direct naval utility.

The mixture of high science and practical naval intelligence-gathering

enshrined in the Manual demonstrated the wider ambitions of the Admi-

ralty. Foreign ports were to be assessed, their docks, repair facilities, engin-

eering works, coal stocks, tides and other key aspects recorded. Charts were

to be made, and the example supplied included a fort, in case the strategic

purpose should escape the less-gifted ofﬁcer. Unknown coasts and seas

126 A. Lambert

were to be analysed.

In the age of steam, navies and steam ship com-

panies sought certainty. The RN provided HMS Challenger for a pioneering

three-year oceanographic voyage in 1872, the multi-disciplinary research

team pioneering the modern study of oceanography. This was science in

the service of empire, knowledge for proﬁt and for war. While the science

and the voyage of the Challenger have been studied, the imperial beneﬁts

await their analyst. The intellectual attainments required to examine such

diverse issues have been resolved in the US.

The central role of naval

science deserves to be better integrated with the study of science, know-

ledge, power, trade and strategy of the empire.

Imperial bases

While most accounts of British bases follow John Colomb’s focus on coal

supplies, these were less important than the infrastructure. From the 1740s,

when the ﬁrst extra-European examples were built at Bombay, the real indi-

cator of imperial might was the growth of local and metropolitan partner-

ships to construct and maintain dry dock accommodation. Docks were far

more costly than coal and from the 1840s became the litmus test of imperial

defence. Docks enabled the colonies and dominions to show their commit-

ment to the critical naval defence of empire and increase the presence of

British naval forces while also securing a very useful commercial asset. That

such docks were also located at cable communication centres and offered

access to engineering facilities made them unequalled force multipliers –

Britain could operate ships around the globe and sustain them.

The truly ‘Imperial’ parts of the empire were, by the 1870s, very

limited. Only Malta, Gibraltar, and Bermuda were imperial bases, naval

fortresses entirely funded by the imperial Government. Other bases were

partnerships, like Sydney, Auckland, Halifax, Esquimault, Hong Kong,

Cape Town, and Bombay (Mumbai). These partnerships were clearly and

consistently established.

Consequences

In 1914, the British Empire went to war to uphold the European balance.

The pre-war strategic planning worked, the empire quickly slipped into

gear, and by Christmas the conﬂict had been conﬁned to the European

theatre, German communications were cut, her cruisers were annihilated,

and her colonies swept up and turned to imperial use. The human, mater-

ial, and industrial resources of the world were harnessed to the war in

Europe; it was a truly remarkable performance, the master narrative of

which was very properly carried in Julian Corbett’s neglected masterpiece

Naval Operations.

Despite the pre–war planning, Britain’s commitment to the First World

War soon escalated such that Britain ended up providing not only the

Royal Navy and the defence of empire 127

greatest part of the naval, ﬁnancial, and industrial power of the alliance,

as had been expected, but also a very substantial part of the military force

as well. A major problem for attempts to comprehend the nature of naval

role before 1914 has been the tendency to treat the period as little more

than the inevitable build-up to the total war being waged during

1916–1917. This approach misses the key point that British interests and

policy were directed towards the avoidance of such a catastrophe and that

August 1914 represented the failure of British policy.

Similarly, the very success of pre–war planning for imperial defence,

and the ease with which the oceans were cleared of German cruisers, has

diverted attention from the quality of the effort and the long-term basis of

such planning. The threat of cruiser warfare on the open oceans was

taken very seriously throughout this period. Fortunately, the answer

remained constant. Once steam power became essential for oceanic

warfare, suitable cruiser squadrons with superior communication facilities

and docking accommodation would have been quite adequate against any

conceivable combination of French, Russian, or German ships: all three

countries lacked the ships, bases, and facilities for a serious campaign.

Between 1914 and 1918, the RN had remarkably little to do outside

Europe, the war was over by Christmas. Paul Halpern’s A Naval History of

the World War One provides a ﬁne summary of these campaigns, while the

ﬁrst of Hew Strachan’s three-volume The First World War places the Paciﬁc

and African theatres in a broader context.

Conclusions

The main lines of argument about the role of the RN in the ‘defence of

Empire’ revolve around the relative importance of European and imperial

issues, their interdependence, and the ﬂuid nature of British strategy.

Since the end of the Cold War, historians have begun to revisit this area,

with empires and their upkeep becoming a major interest. Although

excellent work has been done by the scholars highlighted in this essay,

there is much more left to be done if we are to understand how the RN

helped to secure a unique global empire of trade and investment. Before

we try to create neat constructs that link the past with the present, we must

be very careful to understand why those who were making the big

decisions acted as they did, to see them in their own context, rather than

judge them by our standards. Hindsight is a powerful analytical tool, but it

is no substitute for understanding.

Naval historians have to exploit the current interest in empires to join

the debates, bringing their own unique insights and resources to bear.

The balance between the local and colonial-/dominion-based studies

and those focussed on the centre needs to be redressed, naval policy and

strategy needs to be integrated with other aspects of Britain’s overall inter-

national position, from diplomacy and trade to Entente arrangements and

128 A. Lambert

communications technology. Fortunately, we have a rich legacy of work on

which to build, and many important contributors to these debates are cur-

rently at work in the ﬁeld.

Naval historians have to ask better questions. The key requirement is to

understand the British Empire as a unique institution with its own distinct

strategy and strategic culture. The defence of empire was not an issue of

peripheries and local problems, nor was it the subject so hotly debated by

vote-hungry dominion leaders and their historians. Ultimately, it was about

using the sea for trade and communications, deterrence, and war-ﬁghting.

The RN ensured that a global empire of trade and capital could use the sea.

Between 1856 and 1918, the RN met these demands in peace and, when all

else failed, in war. While the Imperial Government and the dominions were

willing and able to pay for naval mastery, the empire was safe.

The empire was the dominant concern of the British state issue and

central to defence planning throughout the period under review. The

First World War, for all the cost and horror of the European land war,

was a temporary aberration. Once Germany had been defeated, the

British wanted to re-establish a European 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 empire be defended, and even then by deterrence

rather than war-ﬁghting. Despite this, the political leadership accepted

the Washington and London Naval Disarmament Treaties which ended

British naval superiority and reduced Britain’s international standing. In

the late 1930s, Britain lacked the naval power to deter and the reserves to

ﬁght a major war. Continentalists argued that sea power was a waning

asset in the twentieth century. In truth, the Washington Treaty process,

by unilaterally reducing the size of the RN and increasing its age, while

air and land forces remained unlimited, destroyed the deterrent basis of

imperial strategy. Britain, having acquired a global empire, wanted

nothing more than to be left alone to enjoy it. A dominant RN was the

insurance policy on the property, failure to keep up the payments

resulted in overstretch, weakness, and ultimately in a series of disasters

between November 1941 and the March 1942. Sea power and strategy

secured the British Empire for 200 years. In the post-imperial era, this

simple fact was largely ignored. Now the tide has turned: it is time to put

the RN back at the centre of British and imperial history.

Notes

1 D.G. Boyce (ed.), The Crisis of British Power: The Imperial and Naval Papers of the

Second Earl of Selbourne, 1895–1910 (London, 1990), 129–130; B. Gough, ‘Proﬁt

and Power: Informal Empire, the Navy and Latin America’ in R.E. Dumett

(ed.), The New Debate on Empire (London, 1999), 63–81.

Royal Navy and the defence of empire 129

2 R.A. Preston, Canada and “Imperial Defense”: A Study of the Origins of the British

Commonwealth’s Defense Organisation, 1867–1919 (Durham, NC, 1967) argues

this point in the title and throughout the book.

3 R. Robinson and J. Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism

on the Dark Continent (London, 1961); P. Cain and A. Hopkins, British Imperial-

ism: Innovation and Enterprise: 1688–1914 (London, 1993).

4 See Dumett, Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: The New Debate on

Empire.

5 Naval history has to reach out and join in these debates, exploiting the rich

opportunities provided by a sudden surge of interest and ensure that the

central importance of the RN is recognised.

6 J. Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium and the ‘Arrow’ War (1856–1860) (Cambridge,

1998); G.S. Graham, The China Station: War and Diplomacy 1830–1860 (Oxford,

1978) remains useful.

7 D. Baugh, ‘Great Britain’s Blue Water Policy, 1689–1815’, International History

Review, 10 (1988): 33–58; Baugh, ‘British Strategy during the First World War

in the Context of Four Centuries: Blue-Water versus Continental Commitment’

in D.M. Masterson (ed.), Naval History: The Sixth Symposium of the U.S. Naval

Academy (Wilmington, 1987), 85–110.

8 S.R.B. Smith, ‘Public Opinion, the Navy and the City of London: The Drive for

British Naval Expansion in the Late Nineteenth Century’, War & Society, 9

(1991): 29–50.

9 J. Charmley, Splendid Isolation? Britain and the Balance of Power 1874–1914

(London, 1999).

10 R. Williams, Defending the Empire: The Conservative Party and British Defence Policy

1899–1915 (Yale, 1991).

11 R. Mackay, Balfour: Intellectual Statesman (Oxford, 1985).

12 I. McGibbon, The Path to Gallipoli: Defending New Zealand 1840–1915 (Auckland,

1991).

13 N. Lambert, Australia’s Naval Heritage: Imperial Strategy and the Australia Station

1880–1909 (Canberra, 1998).

14 J. Moses and C. Pugsley (eds), The German Empire and Britain’s Paciﬁc Dominions,

1871–1919 (Claremont, California, 2000).

15 N. Tracy (ed.), The Collective Naval Defence of the Empire, 1900–1940 (Aldershot,

1997).

16 A.D. Lambert, The Foundations of Naval History: Sir John Laughton, the RN and the

Historical Profession (London, 1997) examines the growth of a serious investiga-

tion of the naval past, alongside the growth of national strategic concerns and

the historical profession.

17 J.F. Beeler, British Naval Policy in the Gladstone–Disraeli Era, 1866–1880 (Stan-

ford, 1997), 35–37 and Table 1.

18 Childers draft letter to Earl Clarendon, The Foreign Secretary 23 January 1869

in J. Hattendorf et al. (eds), British Naval Documents 1204–1960 (London, 1993),

593–595.

19 F. Egerton, Admiral Sir Geoffrey Phipps Hornby (London, 1896), 145–150.

20 A.D. Lambert, ‘Great Britain and the Baltic, 1809–1890’ in Rystad et al. (eds),

In Quest of Trade and Security: The Baltic in Great Power Politics, Part One

1500–1900 (Lund, 1994), 297–334.

21 A.D. Lambert, ‘Australia, the Trent Crisis of 1861 and the Strategy of Imperial

Defence’, in D. Stevens and J. Reeve (eds), Southern Trident: Strategy, History and

the Rise of Australian Naval Power (Crows Nest NSW, 2001), 99–118.

22 A.J. Marder, An Anatomy of British Sea Power: Naval Policy in the Pre Dreadnought

Era (London, 1940); A.J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The RN in

the Fisher Era, 5 volumes (Oxford, 1961–1970).

130 A. Lambert

23 R.F. Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone (Oxford, 1973), 374–378; J.T. Sumida, In Defence

of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy 1889–1914

(London, 1989), 338; N.A. Lambert, Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution (Columbia,

SC, 1999).

24 J. Beeler, British Naval Policy in the Gladstone-Disraeli Era, 1866–1880 (Stanford,

1997).

25 J. Beeler (ed.), D. Schurman, Imperial Defence 1868–1887 (London, 2000).

26 Keith Neilson and Greg Kennedy (eds), Far Flung Lines: Studies in Imperial

Defence in Honour of Donald Mackenzie Schurman (London, 1997).

27 London 1903. Clowes died the following year. The book was reprinted in

1996–1997. For a recent assessment of Clowes’s work, see A.D. Lambert,

‘Reﬂections of a History of the RN’, The Naval Review (October 1997): 392–399.

28 D.K. Brown, From Warrior to Dreadnought (London, 1997) and D.K. Brown, The

Grand Fleet (London, 1999) cover this period and offer a wealth of insight for

the non-technical layman.

29 D.J. Lyon and R. Winﬁeld, The Steam and Sail Navy List 1815–1889 (London,

2004).

30 J. Beeler, The Birth of the Battleship: British Capital Ship Design 1870–1881

(Rochester, 2001) is a very good example of a case study exploiting the full

range of archival sources.

31 For a full-length discussion of this problem and solution, see R. Taylor,

Manning the RN: The Reform of the Recruiting System, 1847–1861. University of

London Unpublished MA thesis; E.L. Rasor, Reform in the RN: A Social History of

the Lower Deck, 1850 to 1880 (Hamden Conn, 1976) provides a wider context. J.

Wells, The RN: An Illustrated Social History 1870–1982 (Gloucester, 1994) pro-

vides an overall narrative of the period.

32 A. Gordon, The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command (London,

1996).

33 The Fundamentals of British Naval Doctrine BR 1806 (London, 1995), and sub-

sequent editions. The impact of Corbett’s Some Principles of Maritime Strategy of

1911 on this text is profound.

34 N. Fergusson, Empire (London, 2004) is also a major series on Channel Four

Television.

35 A.D. Lambert, ‘The Introduction of Steam’ in R. Gardiner (ed.), Steam, Steel

and Shellﬁre: The Steam Warship 1815–1905 (London, 1992).

36 H. Barty-King, Girdle Round the Earth: The Story of Cable and Wireless (London,

1979), 73–74. Eastern Telegraph was one of the constituent parts of the

modern company.

37 P.M. Kennedy, ‘Imperial Cable Communications and Strategy, 1870–1914’,

English Historical Review, 86 (1971).

38 Ibid., 748.

39 For an example of an imperial defence asset that linked the disparate elements

of the system, see S.J.A. Earle, A Question of Defence: The Story of Green Hill Fort,

Thursday Island (Thursday Island, 1993). This small fort covered the key ship-

ping route and coal depot in the Torres Straits. It was built and manned by the

Queensland Government, with the Imperial government providing guns.

40 D.R. Headrick, The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics,

1851–1945 (New York, 1991); N. Lambert, ‘Transformation and Technology in

the Fisher Era: The Impact of the Communications Revolution’, Journal of Stra-

tegic Studies, 27 (2004): 272–297.

41 G.S. Graham, Great Britain and the Indian Ocean 1810–1850 (Oxford, 1967),

305–328.

42 A.D. Lambert, ‘Wirtschaﬂiche macht, technologischer Vorsprung und Imperi-

ale Stärke: Grossbritannien als einzigartige globale macht 1860 bis 1890’ in

Royal Navy and the defence of empire 131