The British Seaborne Empire (review)

During his extraordinarily prolific career, Jeremy Black has ranged from eighteenth-century Britain and Europe, through the Grand Tour, to studies of maps. Here he turns his attention to the British Empire. Despite the book's title, Black is at pains to emphasize that he is not trying to contribute to the scholarship on empire—and in that ambition he succeeds admirably—but rather he seeks to understand the seaborne aspect of empire, "to throw light on the British, the people with whom they came into contact, the process of imperial expansion and the way in which empire was understood" (p. x). In this he is less successful.

In ten chapters, Professor Black examines the seaborne empire beginning with the breaking of the land bridge to Europe in 6500 BCE and concluding in 2004. The book's breathtaking chronological sweep is matched by its geographical range. This, of course, means that Black is unable to offer much detailed analysis. The key events are all here, but the vast canvas requires very big brushstrokes. One is tempted to suggest that a tighter chronological focus would have resulted in a more satisfying volume.

Black's central thesis—that the sea and naval power were central to Britain's rise to global dominance—seems irrefutable. His approach, however, is less enlightening. This is a rather old-fashioned diplomatic and military history of British foreign policy and Black is as concerned with European power struggles as he is with the processes of empire. In many ways, this study owes more to Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery than it does to the scholarship on empire. Black's empire is about governments, war, and impersonal forces. There is no systematic attempt to consider the role of people in the Empire, a fact all the more remarkable for the author's assertion on the final page that "it is easy to forget that people were involved in making empire" (p. 373). Trade, for example, is discussed in abstract terms, but there is no discussion of the key role of merchants and their networks in creating the British Empire, especially before the nineteenth century.

If the British people receive little attention, those whom Black calls "the Natives" are even more marginalized. Where they do appear, Black occasionally adopts a tone that verges on the distasteful. In North America, for example, "The settlers were helped greatly by the impact on the Natives of what was probably plague in 1616-18" (p. 44). During the Irish Famine diseases were "made more effective by malnutrition" (p. 205). More careful editing might have removed these unsightly phrases. A number of non-sequiturs have also been allowed to pass. Tacked on to the end of a British trade section, for example, are two sentences on legislating against slave resistance in West Florida (p. 131). As a result, this book feels like it has been rushed into print.

It is not easy to see to whom this book will appeal. It is unlikely to satisfy historians of the empire, and military and naval historians will find little that surprises them. Professor Black is a distinguished historian, but this book is not one of his best.