Empire, Technology and Seapower: Royal Navy Crisis in the Age of Palmerston

ISBN-13: 9780415370042 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 320 str.

Howard J. Fuller

Opis

A revealing new examination of Palmerstonian diplomacy during the pivotal decade of the 1860s, the evolution of the modern capital ship and the real nature of empire', technology' and seapower'. In contrast to the standard image of the mid-Victorian Royal navy as all-powerful, Howard Fuller shows how it suffered serious challenges in this period. Global naval supremacy was no longer unassailable' or certain. He skilfully demonstrates how what was good naval practice during the Trent Affair was no longer good in the American Civil War once the Unionist side introduced the monitor' form of Ironclad, which deliberately forfeited longer-range power-projection for local, coastal command of the sea'. Technology had pitted tactically based, national powers of defence against strategically based imperial ones -- and had intertwined with modern civilian-military debates. How the Royal Navy addressed this issue, successfully or not, and how such decision-making at Whitehall affected that at Westminster is explored using a wealth of international primary and secondary sources. This book will be of great interest to all students of the Royal Navy, and of maritime and strategic studies in general.

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Spis treści

Introduction  Part I: Palmerstonian ‘Gunboat Diplomacy’, Ironclad Technology and the ‘Declinist’ Controversy  1: The edge of naval defence  2: British decline  3: Peace-making  4: ‘Rule Britannia'  5: True, because it did not happen  6: Breastworks  7: Monitors for coastal assault  8: ‘Shock and Awe’  Part II: From the Crimean War to the American Civil War: Naval Innovation and the Anglo-French Balance of Power  9: "Naval architecture, to a great extent, must remain sheer empiricism"  10: "It is impossible now for this country to rely entirely for its defence upon its naval means"  11: "The British Lion must put his tail between his legs, and ‘Civis Romanus’ give up swaggering so loftily"  12: "They may hope for a fair share of success in at least the outbreak of hostilities"  13: "To increase his naval means, evidently for offensive as well as for defensive Purposes"  14: "If by a Stroke of the wand I could effect in the Map of the world the Changes which I could wish"  15: "The policy of substituting ships protected by heavy iron plates need not enter into the consideration"  16: "We are too rich, too industrious, too dependent on other nations, to face indifferently the prospect of a blockade"  17: "We have found a way of making men-of-war shot proof"  18: "Give us in the shortest Time good means of Defence at Home"  19: "The means by which we shall again be able to catch the bird in his own net" 20: "Not as the wisest, nor as the most economical, nor as the safest way of meeting the exigencies of the case"  Part III: ‘Splendid Isolation’, the ‘Cherbourg Strategy’ and the ‘Great Armament’ Reconsidered  21: ‘Splendid Isolation’: a matter of choice?'  22: Cherbourg  23: Cronstadt  24: The ‘Great Armament'  25: The edge of naval offence  26: ’twixt sea and shore  Part IV: Iron Lion or Paper Tiger? The Myth of British Naval Intervention in the American Civil War  27: "The dissolution of the Union will prove good to the world, to Great Britain, and probably in the end to America herself"  28: "We shall soon iron the smile out of their face"  29: "Is the Warrior itself a match for the Monitor? It is useless now to talk of speed and magnificence"  30: "The peril of committing the honour of this country to the assumption of an attitude, which it may be unable or unwilling permanently to maintain"  Conclusion

O autorze

Howard J. Fuller is Senior Lecturer of War Studies at the University of Wolverhampton (UK), Associate Editor for the International Journal of Naval History and the author of Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power (2007).