The Late Victorian Navy: the Pre-Dreadnought Era and the Origins of the First World War (review)

There exists an unfortunate habit, when discussing all things military, to compare a given force or weapon system to some abstract standard of power or excellence. At times, we can forget that the most sound and fruitful basis for analyzing military matters is a comparative one. Roger Parkinson, in his excellent book The Late Victorian Navy, avoids this pitfall admirably. By rationally assessing the Royal Navy in comparison to its rivals, he goes a long way towards lifting the stigma of a "dark age" that Parkes, Marder, and Rodger placed on the Royal Navy of the 1870s and 1880s.

The frame in which the book is set is an appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of the Royal Navy vis-à-vis potential rivals. This gives Parkinson a context in which to discuss his thesis: "This book argues that the Naval Defence Act of 1889 triggered large building programmes by France and Russia, and later by Germany" (p. 5). Parkinson makes a persuasive but far from ironclad case that this was true. He makes an even better case that the Naval Defence Act, which significantly increased the size of an already dominant Royal Navy, had little to do with the actual strength of potential enemies. The Naval Defence Act came about because of a paradigm shift in British strategic thinking.

As John Beeler has shown, in the Great Power context of the period 1860 1881, the Royal Navy was primarily a deterrent force wedded to a war avoidance strategy. Disraeli and the Conservatives liked to use the navy more than the Liberals, but for diplomatic leverage rather than overt aggression. New technology, however, began to influence this stance in the 1870s. Merchant steamers of the era were as fast, or faster, than contemporary warships. This made the use of convoy difficult, and perhaps unnecessary. If the enemy could not hunt down your merchantmen, why waste effort and disrupt trade by employing convoys? To best protect trade, the new thinking ran, why not attack enemy fleets in port and institute a close blockade at the onset of war, rather than convoy your own ships or disperse your cruisers to destroy enemy raiders. This line of thought, Parkinson clearly demonstrates, led to a grand vision in the minds of men like Charles Knox Laughton, the Colomb brothers, and Lord Charles Beresford, of a huge steel and steam Royal Navy built not to deter wars, but to win them at the outset. Thus trade, Imperial, and home defense could all be managed by one, overpowering Royal Navy. No need for convoys, or expensive forts and a large army to garrison them. The Royal Navy, given a big enough steam battlefleet, could do it all.

This vision appealed to the greatest of late Victorian British politicians, Lord Salisbury. Acting as both Prime Minister and his own Foreign Secretary, Salisbury wished to maintain Britain's "splendid isolation." In short, he wanted to do something no British government ever managed, to guarantee Britain's strategic interests without any effort to cultivate or maintain a Continental alliance. Given a big enough Royal Navy, Salisbury reckoned, Britain could go it alone. The ghost of another Conservative Prime Minister, Lord North, must have shuddered in his grave.

Parkinson is good at showing that there was no significant threat compelling the Naval Defence Act. The Russo-French alliance was more fancy than fact at that time, both navies had their own troubles, and, in general, the Royal Navy was bigger and better than both combined. What drove the Naval Defence Act was a false sense of insecurity and a desire to go from a strategic posture of war avoidance to one of war fighting. And it was predicated on the misguided notion that the other powers would see Britain arming and...