Abstract
It is evident that this book grew out of the editors’ frustration with the current state of naval history. In their bold introduction, they bemoan the marginalization of naval history in academia while simultaneously condemning naval historians for self-marginalizing. They colorfully summarize the usual accusations: naval history has traditionally been the preserve of ‘old white men in blazers and club ties’ (3). But they also go further, arguing that the field has been damaged by a persistent interest in the ‘rise of the West’, outdated ideas like the military revolution and the continuing influence of classical naval theorists. In their view, too much naval historical scholarship has been slanted toward explaining British relative success. Their goal is to rebalance the scholarship by, as they put it, crashing the banquet of early modern history. They admit that much new naval historical scholarship is now barely recognizable to an older generation, as historians of gender, family and culture have already crashed the party before them. But for the editors, that is all to the good. The point of this volume is to connect the strategic with the cultural. They propose to do so by asking how early modern Westerners conceived of the usefulness of force at sea.
The emphasis on conceptions leads to the title, which at first glance is slightly confusing. ‘Ideologies’ is an anachronism, but it is the mechanism the editors have chosen to explain one of the most important questions in early modern naval history. How did states muster the enormous resources necessary to build and sustain naval power? Jan Glete’s influential answer was that states needed a glue that bound together interest groups and committed them to the long, expensive task of naval construction and maintenance. The editors seek to examine the various types of intellectual, cultural and social glues that bound Westerners together in this shared mission across three centuries – these are the ‘ideologies’ of the title.
The book has 15 chapters spread over four parts. The first examines Venetian, Dutch, Spanish and French national identities; the second looks at Spanish, British and French monarchical fleet-building projects; the third suggests that there were ideologies operating in ‘communities of violence’, including corsairs, pirates and privateers; finally, the fourth section looks at how strategies were constructed in Scandinavia, Britain and the United States. Eagle-eyed readers will note that one of these is not like the others – the communities of violence. As a full summary of all 15 chapters is neither desirable nor possible, let us dive into those communities first to demonstrate how widely the editors have cast their nets.
Take, for example, corsairs. Sadok Boubaker explains that in early modern Tunis, raiding non-Muslims at sea was a religious duty and legal texts on holy war (jihad) contained direct references to the corso. But it was also a source of income, and the result was, in the framework of this book, an ‘ideology’ of naval power. By connecting religious and economic motivations, corsairs could draw on a larger and broader resource base to finance their expeditions. While the chapter itself is choppy and difficult to read in places, it succeeds in elucidating the ideology that maintained corsairs as prominent members of Tunisian society until the early nineteenth century. In the same section, Claire Jowitt tackles ‘the ideology of early modern piracy’ (188), though not in perhaps the way most readers will expect. Frankly, the chapter title is misleading, as it suggests an analysis of how communities of pirates constructed ideologies. Instead, she looks at how the language of piracy was used during periods of monarchical transition in Tudor and Stuart England – not by pirates, but by playwrights, poets and other commentators. ‘The ship of state’, with the monarch as the captain, was a common trope in early modern England. When the captain was replaced, Jowitt traces how the imagery and language of piracy was used to depict the new regime. Her analysis is compelling and reveals the pervasiveness and variety of the ‘ship of state’ trope. She stops just short of another monarchical transition in 1688, and it would have been interesting to carry her analysis a little further.
Readers will see in those two short summaries that the chapters in the communities of violence section do not depart significantly from the national analyses presented in the other chapters. J.D. Davies’ engaging chapter also connects strategy to culture by looking at English claims to the ‘sovereignty of the seas’ around the British Isles in the seventeenth century. Most of the legal basis for such claims had been fabricated hundreds of years before the Stuarts took the throne, but they eagerly capitalized on shaky, often fictitious portrayals of previous periods of English naval strength to develop their own naval ideology. They promoted that ideology through a variety of media and public statements, such as when James, Duke of York decided to name his fourth son Edgar, after a tenth-century king who had supposedly ruled over all four of Britain’s near seas. By claiming sovereignty over these waters, British leaders generated public support for naval spending, yet also created a strategic dilemma. Was it worth going to war to protect those claims? Steve Murdoch’s chapter on how the Scandinavian countries responded to such bombastic British claims picks up precisely where Davies leaves off – an excellent example of careful editing.
Those brief summaries will have to suffice, such is the nature of short book reviews. There is plenty more for readers to discover in many other excellent chapters. The editors generally maintain focus on connecting strategy and culture throughout the book, and the contributors bring new research to their chapters. Ideologies of Western Naval Power provides a scatterplot of answers to one of the essential questions of early modern history: how did states construct the interest groups necessary to sustain force at sea? The book’s weaknesses are superficial: the title requires an explanation and there are some misleading chapter titles. But it is undoubtedly a significant contribution to early modern history, naval or otherwise, and it deserves a home in every institutional library. The price point likely prohibits wider distribution, but that is no fault of the editors.