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Reviewed by:
  • Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty's Navy
  • Jeremy Black (bio)
Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty's Navy, by Michael Reidy; pp. xiv + 389. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008, $40.00, £27.50.

Tides of History is a first-rate study that contributes substantially to criticism linking information to power and modernity. Michael Reidy's detailed scholarship on the role of the Royal Navy in studying the oceans will be of great interest to specialists and refutes the idea of the mid-nineteenth century as the "dark decades" of poor leadership. Yet it is the wider theme that is of particular interest. In essence, Reidy shows that how we understand the world involves both a measure of intellect and also a definition of power: the power to know, to analyze, and to plan, employing both knowledge and analysis. Reidy takes information [End Page 746] as a cause, measure, and product of power, and understandably so, given that his focus is the Royal Navy, by far the most potent naval force in the world and one with worldwide commitments. In the period of his study, the Royal Navy saw action off China, Greece, Syria, Malaya, Algiers, and elsewhere, while also protecting British interests in the Falkland Islands and patrolling against slavers in the Atlantic, among other missions.

The acquisition of information was important but so also was its use. The increasing scope and tempo of information demands, acquisition, and use—and the complex feedback among them—proved defining characteristics of modernity and thus modernisation. At the same time, information, as part of the language of power, was an aspect of the legitimation and normative codification of the British Empire's maritime role. Thus, there was an interplay—seen for example in the charts discussed by Reidy—between the symbolisation of knowledge, itself an aspect of the image of power, and the mechanisms of knowledge display and use. These mechanisms gained a certain utility in their relationship to that image. The repeated transition, from symbol to mechanism, as demonstrated in maps and charts, was an aspect of a broader politics of knowledge, namely its implementation in terms of new uses and needs.

Tidology is a key issue for Reidy, and he shows that knowledge over space—in this case the crucial space of inshore waters—was crucial to the process by which it became possible to anticipate and manage risk. Such management was highly significant in and important to the success of the informed, self-consciously rational planning processes gaining visibility in nineteenth-century Britain.

Reidy ably links these processes to the practice of scientific investigation and discussion, both newly normative in a society increasingly impressed by the idea that authority should take scientific form. On the global scale, this development reflected the long-term impact of Cartesian thought and the attempt in Britain to reconcile revealed religion with the insights gained by Newtonian science. This understanding of religion ensured that it did not entirely break from new systems of thought nor fashion a conservative ideology. Reidy's is an important work that could be profitably taken forward into the twentieth century. [End Page 747]

Jeremy Black
University of Exeter
Jeremy Black

Jeremy Black (jeremyblack@tiscali.co.uk) is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He has lectured extensively in Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and the U.S. His books include European Warfare, 1660–1815 (1994), Maps and History (1997), War and the World, 1450-2000 (1998), The British Seaborne Empire (2004), and George III (2006).

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