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  • Preparing for Blockade 1885–1914: Naval Contingency for Economic Warfare by Stephen Cobb
  • David McLean (bio)
Preparing for Blockade 1885–1914: Naval Contingency for Economic Warfare, by Stephen Cobb; pp. xxiv + 349. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013, £84.00, $149.95.

In any war, it is invariably the battles which mark its progress. So it is as well with the writing of much military and naval history. Stephen Cobb’s Preparing for Blockade 1885–1914 offers something different. He writes about a period when the Royal Navy was not engaged in combat; yet this is a period when anxiety about how warfare might next be conducted preoccupied a range of senior Admiralty staff, a wider circle of officers both serving and retired, and informed civilian and academic authorities. Despite its command of the ocean, how would Britain prevail in conflict with another (albeit lesser) maritime power? How would it perform when the resources of the Royal Navy might be stretched to protect convoys, essential lines of international trade, and domestic food supplies, while also keeping enough men-of-war sufficiently concentrated in the North Sea and the Channel to destroy an enemy when the decisive battle had to be fought? Since the mid-eighteenth century, Britain had won its major wars by implementing blockades. This remained the basis of strategic thinking, even though blockading squadrons themselves might risk a dispersal of firepower. There was also the Law of Nations to consider: could strict blockades ever be enforced in a war of survival without serious political repercussions, perhaps even drawing in neutral nations as unwanted belligerents? Cobb addresses these complex international and diplomatic issues at the start, setting them in the context of contemporary legal opinion, the 1907 Hague Conference, and college teaching for naval staff of the period. As might be expected, much attention is paid to the publications and influence of Julian Corbett. There is also an interesting revision of the role of Edmond Slade. Although his first few chapters have an impenetrable quality in places, Cobb nonetheless packs in a great deal of essential background. The study is also notable for its extensive biographical information about the leading figures in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century naval [End Page 139] intelligence. That focus is indeed sufficient for Cobb to highlight professional debate within the service as the focus of his book. Readers can judge that for themselves; the book certainly has more to commend it.

With the prospect of war with the United States long discounted, it was assumed as late as the 1880s that Britain’s next enemy would be France. By the 1900s, though, maintaining dominance of the seas was clearly perceived as a forthcoming struggle with Germany. This posed a problem with manpower as well as material. At the start of the twentieth century, Britain supplied sailors for fifteen million tons of shipping from its population of forty million. Germany’s ratio of manpower to tonnage was more favorable: from a population of forty-six million, Germany had to meet the needs of only three million tons. In 1914, forty-three percent of the world’s merchantmen sailed under the British flag. British and dominion shipping was the life blood of Britain’s economy; attacks upon it by torpedo craft, warships, and other armed raiders would be designed to cause commercial panic in London and perhaps even wider social unrest. Cobb illustrates how the spectre of the Alabama and its devastation of Union shipping in the 1860s continued to haunt British naval strategists for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

The solution to this looming crisis was armed merchant cruisers, swift enough to outrun an enemy man-of-war yet sufficiently equipped to guard sea lanes and to keep marauders at bay. But what sort of ships? And what specifications regarding gunnery, armor, coaling capacity, and speed were necessary? The Admiralty’s first list of suitable auxiliaries was drawn up in 1876. In 1881 it was decided that thirty vessels might be adapted, until the list was revised in 1888, in 1892, and again in 1895. Furthermore, what agreements with and subsidies for ship-owners, insurers, and underwriters were required? These are...

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