Navies of Europe (review)

This book is extremely good value for money. It is very nicely produced with high quality paper and print, which feels and looks nice. It has four maps and forty-eight photographs. More to the point perhaps, the reader is supplied in admirably concise style with all the salient facts and figures of all the navies of Europe for the enormous period of 1815 to 2002. It is an extraordinary thing to try to do, and the miracle is that the author has, by and large, achieved his objective.

Lawrence Sondhaus has the happy knack of being able to pepper his text (which does rather tend to focus on meticulously detailed accounts of construction programmes) with interesting nuggets of telling detail. These include reviews of comparative losses after most of the leading maritime campaigns and wars of the period, a note on the drop in the percentage of Britain's annual budget enjoyed by the Royal Navy from 20 percent to less than 10 percent from 1815 to 1830, and passing comments on the implications of this and that aspect of technical advance.

Of course this comes at a certain price. The pace is breathless, the material largely derived from existing well-known sources, and the expert will look in vain for much that is actually new, or indeed for any grand themes to the book, apart from that of the waxing, waning, and indeed contemporary waxing of the fleets of Europe. Its subject is, quite simply, what it says on the cover. This means that in such a tour d'horizon there is inevitably a certain over-evenness of treatment. The implications for the navies of Europe of the 1894 battle of the Yalu River between China and Japan, for instance, gets almost as much treatment as the influence of Alfred Thayer Mahan. This is partly a consequence of the focus on construction programmes and the impact on them of naval technology that the author explicitly adopts. The book is "fact heavy" sometimes at the expense of analysis or explanation. Inevitably, there are slips to which the purist would object—Admiral Sandy Woodward, for example was not in operational command of the Falklands operation, although in modern British practice he would have been.

Nonetheless, this is an effective useful summary text that will introduce this vast subject to readers at the undergraduate level and will also act as a convenient reminder and work of reference for postgraduates and other experts. No doubt it is because of this that author and publisher have provided us with the value-for-money noted at the beginning of this review. They are plainly assuming that this book will be widely bought. On the whole, they deserve to be right!