PhilPaine.com

The two hefty vol­umes of Rodger’s his­tory of the British Navy bring the sto­ry only up to 1815. But this life­time schol­arly work is well-bal­anced with read­abil­ity. Rodger thinks strate­gi­cally more than tac­ti­cally. He knows that the eco­nom­ics of get­ting ships on the sea, admin­is­ter­ing and sup­ply­ing them, and mak­ing sure they do some­thing use­ful is the heart of the mat­ter. Britain had exer­cised con­sid­er­able sea pow­er in the north­ern world in Anglo-Sax­on times, but the land-lub­bing, horse rid­ing Nor­man aris­toc­racy used ships very crude­ly. Even in the Renais­sance, there was no real “navy”, but mere­ly incon­sis­tent attempts to put togeth­er fleets for var­i­ous tem­po­rary pur­poses, and naval tac­tics remained prim­i­tive. Hen­ry VIII was par­tic­u­larly irre­spon­si­ble and destruc­tive, as he was with every­thing else. Elizabeth’s reign was dom­i­nated by “pri­va­teer­ing”. It was only dur­ing Cromwellian times, when the rul­ing dic­ta­tor­ship feared dis­loy­alty among sea­men, that the first attempts were made to orga­nize and admin­is­ter what would fit our mod­ern notions of a nation­al navy. Much of the sto­ry, of course, involves the more eco­nom­i­cally advanced Dutch, with whom British polit­i­cal, mil­i­tary and eco­nomic rela­tions were inter­wo­ven for cen­turies. Rodgers is very adept at sort­ing out these complexities.