The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire. Volume 26 in "Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare" (review)

As the centennial anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War nears, scholarship on the causes, course, context, and consequences of that great catastrophe, while never stale even in the dullest of historiographical doldrums, is enjoying a remarkable reinvigoration. This surge in new research and sophisticated interpretative methodology thrives not least on the desire to connect traditional historical themes and subjects to attendant or overarching cultural developments. Such efforts seek to discover, typically with success, a reciprocal relationship between the two realms as much of our received historiography appears incomplete without a discussion of the cultural forces that accompanied or helped shape the events under discussion, while coverage of cultural phenomena, if not anchored to more conventional political, diplomatic, military, social, and economic history, tends to trail off into speculation and theorizing.

Jan Rüger, trained under Richard Evans at Cambridge and now teaching at Birkbeck College, University of London, has identified and researched with admirable depth and intensity one such area where the military realm took on a distinct cultural dimension and where national cultures became militarized. He found it in the increasingly frequent, elaborate, carefully orchestrated and curiously addictive display of the British and German fleets to the public at so-called naval reviews and ship launchings in the quarter century preceding the end of all parades in 1914. This "Great Naval Game," enacted regularly on vast watery stages at Spithead, Kiel, and other venues, not only spawned its own distinctive rituals and dynamics as it played to eager national and international audiences thanks to the advent of the mass media, but built political consensuses and identities, and pretended to cement imperial solidarity in Britain and faith in the Kaiser's glorious leadership in Germany. It also bred illusions of naval power and efficiency that the sobering realities of the ensuing war could not possibly satisfy. Indeed, Rüger argues conclusively that the widespread public disappointment over the performance of the surface fleets in World War I on both ends of the North Sea may have had less to do with their less than stellar showing in engagements like Jutland than with unrealistic expectations raised in pre-war years by the dazzling display of so much technological perfection and ingenuity.

While such naval "reviews" and "inspections" served no conceivable military purpose, they clearly meant more than "bread and circuses" and cannot be dismissed as a mere extension of domestic politics, as Eckart Kehr argued from a different perspective so long ago. Instead, Rüger offers a far more sophisticated picture as, for example, even socialists and pacifists felt seduced into more or less enthusiastic expressions of approval over the exhibition of naval symbols of national greatness, or as female audiences at ship launchings, who might otherwise have embraced liberal and suffragist notions, demurely accepted their relegation to positions of utter insignificance in a world overwhelmed by symbols of male aggression and domination.

With his first major publication Rüger has contributed richly to our understanding of the uses of fleets in peacetime and to the interpretative prism through which one must view the forces and events that brought on World War I. His book should be widely read and discussed.