Beginning in the 1990s, N A M Rodger embarked on writing a comprehensive naval history of Britain. His aim was not to produce a narrow account of the deeds, warships and sailors of the Royal Navy. Rather, he aimed to ‘survey … the contribution which naval warfare, with all its associated activities, has made to national history’. In fact, his work has ranged more widely still, frequently diverting into discussions of the other navies with which Britain shared maritime connections or fought for control of the oceans. Rodger chides British historians who ‘adopt an exclusively British point of view (all too often from sources only in English), and assume implicitly that Britain was, or ought to have been, in control of events’.

This third and final volume of Rodger’s much-acclaimed series appears some twenty years after the second, The Command of the Ocean. This gap has made the arrival of ‘volume three’, as it is commonly referred to, hotly anticipated among historians. I first became aware of this sense of expectation while an undergraduate at Exeter University in the mid-2000s. A sense of the reverence in which Rodger was held can be found in a tutor’s comment on a rather average essay I had written. The academic observed, ‘you rather over-rely upon Rodger’s The Command of the Ocean,’ before adding, ‘but then it is the key work in the field.’

The expectations for The Price of Victory, therefore, could hardly be higher. Here, as in the other two volumes, Rodger’s ambition is to reorientate British history towards the sea and naval historians towards the nation. He approaches his task in the same manner as in the earlier volumes, focusing on