This new book explores innovation within the Royal Navy from the financial constraints of the 1930s to World War Two, the Cold War and the refocusing of the Royal Navy after 1990.

Successful adaptation to new conditions has been critical to all navies at all times. To naval historians the significance and process of change is not new, but in recent years innovation has been increasingly studied within a number of other disciplines, providing new theoretical positions and insights. This study examines key case studies of change, some successful others less so, which place the...

The British involvement in the war of 1739-1748 has been generally neglected. Standing between the great victories of Marlborough in the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1713) and the even greater victories of the Seven Years War (1756-1763), it has been dismissed as inconclusive and incompetently managed. For the first time this book brings together the political and operational conduct of the war to explore its contribution to a critical development in British history during the eighteenth century - the emergence of Britain as the paramount global naval power. The war posed a unique set of...