It took an American Admiral, A T Mahan, to point out the truism that control of the seas, and of the trade that sails upon them, is the key to the hegemony of any self-respecting superpower. Mahan, writing in the 1890s, was analysing the outcome of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, a truly global conflict that Noel Mostert, writing more than a century later, rightly calls 'the first Great War'. Britain not only won the wars, but the wooden walls of its Navy scored such an annihilating victory as to guarantee that Britannia ruled the waves – and hence the world – for another 100 years.

Mostert, a South African-born Canadian citizen and Second World War veteran, is a disciple of Mahan, but in his superb new narrative of the Anglo-French wars at sea – including the Anglo-American War of 1812 – he identifies another vital factor downplayed in Mahan's geopolitical world view: the sheer genius