Abstract
At War in Distant Waters presents a timely reassessment of Britain’s colonial campaigns against the German and Ottoman empires during the First World War. It demonstrates that rather than being opportunistic land-grabs peripheral to the European theatre, they instead constituted key objectives in a global naval strategy designed to ensure British trade continued to move freely across the world’s waves. With great clarity, fluid prose, and acute analysis, Phillip G. Pattee deftly interweaves naval, economic, and diplomatic histories to reveal a network of overlapping political, military, and commercial interests – naval officers, colonial officials, government departments, bankers, oil, and shipping concerns – producing a compelling and convincing case for placing the protection of trade at the centre of Britain’s war effort.
The author’s thesis rests on the argument that, as Britain was a free trading nation, any loss in commerce would have caused significant economic damage to the country by raising freight and insurance rates, with high inflation affecting costs of living and ‘leading to unrest severe enough to force the government to sue for peace’ (p. 120). That operations were restricted to German ports and wireless stations instead of occupying colonial hinterlands indicates their primary mission was ‘to sap commerce raiders’ logistic support’ (p. 127) and ‘enhance command of the sea, rather than to add territory to the Empire’ (p. 12), thus challenging previous historiographical assumptions.
Pattee shows this policy predated the war, with the Committee of Imperial Defence’s establishment in 1902 moving ‘Britain’s security planning from ad hoc responses toward overarching, coordinated strategy’ (p. 68). Admiral Sir John Fisher worked with imperial financiers to establish the infrastructure, funding wireless stations to gather naval intelligence on ship movements. To ‘warn merchant vessels of known enemy raiders’ locations and reroute the traders around the threat’ became a more efficient strategy than ‘attempting to protect trade routes with constant patrols’ (p. 197), and allowed ships to be retained for controlling the North Sea. Free trade directed naval strategy, with a convoy system initially avoided because it forced ‘shipping into regular routes at prescribed intervals, while cutting off all other potential trade’, which would reduce revenue from ‘freights, commissions, investments, and insurance’ and be ‘nearly as detrimental to British security as cumulative shipping losses’ (pp. 70–1). Pattee argues that by overlooking these imperatives, what ‘historians who fixate on the significance of Jutland fail to realize is that British naval strategy, successfully executed during the first year of the war, elevated the Royal Navy to a dominant position’, while Jutland ‘merely upheld’ this dominance (p. 206). The eradication of commerce raiders facilitated the movement of Dominion troops to the European theatre, allowed trade to proceed normally, and secured British finance, successes which ‘compelled Germany to view the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare as its only strategic option’ (p. 194).
While Pattee displays an impressive grasp of the diplomatic and economic context, by ignoring the recent cultural turn in naval history he overlooks the notable influence of colonial navalism within imperial defence strategy. The Colonial and Imperial Conferences between 1887 and 1909, supported by the propaganda of ‘naval theatre’ (see Jan Rüger, The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire, Cambridge, 2007), raised the issue of colonial contributions towards the empire’s naval defence, which culminated in the 1910 Naval Defence Act which established the Royal Australian Navy. Some explanation of this and its impact on his thesis would have been enlightening, considering the RAN’s warships feature prominently in Pattee’s assessment of Pacific operations, slightly undermining his attempt to redress Eurocentric interpretations of the war effort. His methodology also hinders him by relying entirely on documents located in the former metropole, while primary source material from Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa could have painted a more nuanced picture of Dominion responses and motives which did not necessarily dovetail with Whitehall’s, as evinced in disagreement over ‘local’ naval defence strategy when the Australian Auxiliary Squadron was established (see Daniel Owen Spence, ‘Australian Naval Defence and the 1887 Colonial Conference: Context, Policy and Reaction’, International Journal of Naval History VI, 2007), and briefly alluded to by Pattee himself when discussing Australia’s preference for selling meat to the US, where it attracted higher prices (p. 182). With German documents also absent, Pattee is left to glean Wilhelmine perspectives through a filter of secondary literature (particularly in chapter 2, which examines German foreign policy). Nevertheless, At War in Distant Waters provides an important advance in our understanding of the global dimensions which made the 1914–18 conflict the First ‘World’ War.