Deterrence through Strength: British Naval Power and Foreign Policy under Pax Britannica

Preface

Preface In the past several decades historians have expressed doubt about the validity of a Pax Britannica. The point of entry for this research was an impression that such doubts seemed, first, to be part of a general trend of projecting the decline of Britain’s power and influence onto an earlier era, and second , to have sprung from a mistaken conception of British objectives. The trailblazing work of Andrew Lambert on the capabilities of the traditional British sailing fleet and new British naval technologies in the nineteenth century raised further suspicion that the British power employed to influence other nations was being overlooked. The period at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign, 1838 to 1846, provides ample opportunities for testing the idea that Britain could and did use its navy effectively to accomplish diplomatic and commercial goals. It contained instances of Britain threatening naval force (against the United States and France) and actually using it (against China and Egypt). This period also ushered in an era of swift technological change, as the Royal Navy and its competitors adopted steam-powered warships. It was long enough after the Napoleonic Wars to be free of the idiosyncrasies of immediate viii preface postwar naval policy. And, finally, existing historical studies scarcely address the relationship of Britain’s naval capabilities to its foreign policy in this period. Because British foreign policymaking was not bureaucratized in the mid-nineteenth century, much of the substance of decision making could not be found in official dispatches and records. Thus, the majority of my research focused on the private correspondence, notes, and journals of statesmen, drawing out the goals and strategies of British policy and the ways in which it was often implemented by naval power. This volume aims to demonstrate through three case studies —of North America, China, and the Mediterranean—that Britain influenced other nations with its navy, but it always did so with the ultimate goals of preserving peace, stability, and British diplomatic freedom. The apparent contradictions of this defensive policy based on offensive capabilities offer intriguing insights into the ways a dominant world power calculated its interests and decided whether to exercise its naval supremacy. Several of the quotations in this book include variant spellings , which have been preserved in their original forms. The ruler of Egypt during the Syrian Crisis is thus referred to here as Mehemet Ali, rather than Mohammed Ali, following the spellings and conventions used by early Victorian British officials . Chinese person and place names are transliterated in pinyin style, with the exception of quotations and map labels, which will contain the original transliteration of the sources, and the commonly used Wade-Giles place names Canton, Peking , and Nanking. Translations of French quotations have been provided by Dominique Poncelet except where otherwise noted. ...