Tom Pocock
Britannia Rules the Waves
Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World, 1788-1857
By Peter Padfield
John Murray 457pp £20 order from our bookshop
AT THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century, the British found a new religion known as Sea Power. proclaimed by such thoughthl naval historians as Sir Julian Corbett and the American Rear-Admiral A T Mahan, its Old Testament was the defeat of Napoleonic France by British maritime supremacy and its New Testament was naval rearmament, the Navy League and the revolutionary Dyeadnought battleships with which the new German threat at sea was to be faced.
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