Omond investigates the complex relationship between government and the armed forces, from 1642 to the early twentieth century.

Naval source material from the Tudors to Napoleon which will fascinate historians of tactics and technology.

John Charnock (1756 1807) was a professional naval biographer and historian. After completing his studies at Trinity College, Oxford, he joined the Navy as a volunteer and began to research historical and contemporary naval affairs. This six-volume work, first published between 1794 and 1798, contains biographies of over two thousand post-captains and admirals who served in the Navy between 1660 and 1793. Charnock researched this monumental project using historical naval biographies made available by his friend Captain William Locker, lieutenant-governor of Greenwich Hospital. He also drew on...

John Charnock (1756 1807) was a professional naval biographer and historian. After completing his studies at Trinity College, Oxford, he joined the Navy as a volunteer and began to research historical and contemporary naval affairs. This six-volume work, first published between 1794 and 1798, contains biographies of over two thousand post-captains and admirals who served in the Navy between 1660 and 1793. Charnock researched this monumental project using collections of historical naval biographies made available by his friend Captain William Locker, lieutenant-governor of Greenwich Hospital....

John Charnock (1756 1807) was a professional naval biographer and historian. After completing his studies at Trinity College, Oxford, he joined the Navy as a volunteer and began to research historical and contemporary naval affairs. This six-volume work, first published between 1794 and 1798, contains biographies of over two thousand post-captains and admirals who served in the Navy between 1660 and 1793. Charnock researched this monumental project using collections of historical naval biographies made available by his friend Captain William Locker, lieutenant-governor of Greenwich Hospital....

James Anthony Froude (1818 1894) was one of the foremost historians in Victorian England, famous for his controversial 1884 biography of Thomas Carlyle (also to be reissued in this series), and for many works on England during the Reformation period. In 1892 Froude was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. This volume, first published posthumously in 1895, contains a series of lectures on the English navy in the sixteenth century which he gave at Oxford between 1893 and 1894. Informed by Froude's earlier research on the Reformation, the lectures focus on key leaders and...

Sir Frederick Charles Lascelles Wraxall (1828 1865) was a historian, novelist and translator (from French and German) who spent most of his short adult life in mainland Europe. Amongst his many publications was the 1862 authorised translation of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. He served as assistant commissary at Kerch in the Crimea in 1856 and afterwards maintained a strong interest in military matters, on which he published several books. This volume, first published in 1856, outlines the military capability of thirteen European nations at the end of the Crimean War. Wraxall uses German...

First published in 1853, this book chronicles the personal experience of the 'Kaffir' war of 1851 2 (now known as the eighth Xhosa or frontier war), between the European settlers and the native inhabitants of the Eastern Cape in South Africa. Serving as a lieutenant, William Ross King (1822 90) sailed to South Africa from Cork with the 74th Highlanders in March 1851 and remained there until late 1852. His memoir was not intended as a detailed history of military operations in the Kaffir war and in fact encompasses all of King's experiences in South Africa rather than focusing solely on the...

First published in 1831, this account of a notorious event in the history of the navy makes extensive use of letters, papers and the testimony of those involved. Sir John Barrow (1764 1848) was Second Secretary to the Admiralty, and so had unrivalled access to official documents. He begins with a chapter detailing the first visit to Tahiti by Captain Cook. The mutiny, Bligh's 4,000-mile voyage in an open boat, the capture and court martial of some of the mutineers and the fate of the remainder who settled on Pitcairn Island are described with clarity and even-handedness. Whilst acknowledging...

Edward Codrington (1770 1851) joined the navy at the age of thirteen. Having narrowly avoided freezing to death in Nova Scotia three years later, he went on to serve during some of the most important naval conflicts of his time. This two-volume biography was first published in 1873, and combines his own accounts with the research of his daughter Lady Bourchier. Volume 2 opens in 1827 as the English fleet, now under Codrington's command, faces the Turks at the battle of Navarino, now seen as a decisive moment in the struggle for Greek independence. It also includes accounts of the blockade of...