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Foreword Water is unquestionably the most important natural feature on earth. By volume the world’s oceans compose 99 percent of the planet’s living space; in fact, the surface of the Pacific Ocean alone is larger than that of the total land bodies. Water is as vital to life as air; indeed, to test whether the moon or other planets can sustain life, NASA looks for signs of water. The story of human development is inextricably linked to the oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers that dominate the earth’s surface . The University Press of Florida’s series New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology is devoted to exploring the significance of the earth’s water while providing lively and important books that cover the spectrum of maritime history and nautical archaeology broadly defined. The series includes works that focus on the role of canals, rivers, lakes, and oceans in history; on the economic, military, and political use of those waters; and upon the people, communities , and industries that support maritime endeavors. Limited by neither geography nor time, volumes in the series contribute to the overall understanding of maritime history and can be read with profit by both general readers and specialists. Few Americans of the twenty-first century can remember a time when the United States was not a world power, but such was not the case less than a century ago. For a century and a half after settlement, the English-speaking colonies of North America contended for their survival against an unreceptive natural environment, hostile Native Americans, and aggressive French and Spanish settlements to the north, west, and south. During the century following independence, citizens focused on achieving unity at home and security for the new nation in the caldron of European wars. During the nineteenth century, as AngloAmerican settlers spread across the North American continent, their merchants and missionaries established links in the distant corners of the wider world. Protection of far-flung American interests fell to the infant U.S. Navy, which stationed six tiny squadrons in regions most frequented by American citizens . Most important during the antebellum era were those that patrolled the Mediterranean Sea (to counter Barbary corsairs) and the waters of Latin America, where wars of independence and conflicts among the newly independent nations brought turmoil that endangered American lives and properties. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Asia emerged as the focus of American overseas interests, and the Asiatic Squadron (renamed the Asiatic Fleet in 1901) assumed preeminence among U.S. naval forces. The Asiatic Fleet—precursor to the Pacific Fleet of World War II and the Seventh Fleet of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries—headquartered in the U.S.-owned Philippine Islands, even though most of the vessels assigned to it operated on the coast and in the rivers of China. William Braisted has devoted a lifetime to the study of U.S. naval forces in Asiatic waters. Two previous volumes examine the Navy’s execution of American policy in the western Pacific between 1897 and 1922. This x / Foreword volume focuses more narrowly on naval operations in China during the decade between the close of the Washington Naval Conference in 1921–1922 and the Shanghai Incident a decade later. Braisted delineates how senior naval officers, his Diplomats in Blue, struggled to balance their duty to protect U.S. citizens with their orders to respect—indeed, help maintain—Chinese autonomy while at the same time promoting the U.S. policy of enforcing the “Open Door” in China. Pursuit of those goals required close cooperation with U.S. State Department representatives and the naval forces of other Western nations, particularly Great Britain, and Japan. Success required an understanding of the various factions contending for power in China, the ability to convey a sense of conditions in strife-torn China to officials in Washington, and the juggling of limited resources to meet successive crises. Other authors have chronicled U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operations in China, described life in the “China Navy,” and analyzed Japanese-American naval relations during the era, but Braisted is the first to probe the interplay between policy and operations and to analyze relations between American officers and their informal allies. He does so with a sophistication that makes his study particularly timely because of the insights it conveys into the complexity of working in and with a foreign culture in a “peacekeeping ” or “maintenance of order” operation similar to the campaigns in...

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