Sentiment vs Strategy: British Naval Policy, Imperial Defence, and the Development of Dominion Navies, 1911–14
This article examines British naval policy towards imperial defence and the development of autonomous Dominion navies in 1911–14. It shows that the Admiralty's main goal under the leadership of Winston Churchill was to concentrate British and Dominion warships in European waters, and ideally in the North Sea, to meet the German threat. Churchill's approach to naval developments in the Dominions was also shaped by his desire to fulfil the Cabinet's policy of remaining strong in the Mediterranean Sea. He made some concessions to sentiment in the Dominions, but his attempts to create a coherent imperial policy for the naval defence of Britain and its empire were ultimately unsuccessful. By 1914 it was clear that the Dominions would not provide the additional warships Britain required for the Mediterranean, and on the eve of war the Admiralty was beginning to prepare an imperial naval strategy that more accurately reflected the Empire's capabilities.
Geography, Technology, and British Naval Strategy in the Dreadnought Era
Abstract : In The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that the effective deployment of naval force had determined the outcomes of the great European wars of the 18th century. Many, if not most, readers believed that this historical survey was the basis of related major arguments that were applicable to the late 19th and 20th centuries. The first was that naval supremacy was the prerequisite to economic prosperity and international political preeminence. The second was that naval supremacy could be achieved only through the possession of large numbers of battleships, which were always to be kept together to be able to contain or destroy enemy battleship fleets. The notion of the naval supremacy of a single country based upon battleships united in accordance with the principle of concentration of force thus became identified as the essence of Mahanian strategic theory. In effect, geopolitical and naval operational strategic lines of argument were conflated into a recipe for policy that was supposed to be universally valid. Such an understanding of what were widely believed to be the two main components of Mahan's thinking, however, was seriously flawed. In the first place, Mahan actually believed that naval supremacy in his own time and in the future would be wielded by a transnational consortium of naval powers acting in defense of a global system of free trade to the mutual benefit of participating parties. Secondly, Mahan's treatment of the principle of concentration of force in his most popular book was heavily conditioned by the particular geographical circumstances of Great Britain and its empire. Thus, while the first proposition was addressed to the question of the nature of an international system, the second was to a very considerable degree concerned with the character of the naval security problem of a single state. The relationship between the two arguments was thus much weaker than has been supposed.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.