In the end notes to the paperback edition of Arthur Herman’s To Rule the Waves (a section which the publisher HarperCollins entitles “PS”) the author describes his “mission” in writing this impressive work as “to give an account of the Royal Navy that went outside the usual bounds of military history or even British history, and presented the Royal Navy as part of world history. I not only wanted the men and the ships and the battles all to be there, but also the navy’s unique role in creating the physical connections and boundaries of our world.” This is a task which he accomplished admirably, creating a book which explains with insight and perspicacity “How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World.”
In truth, the best summary of what the book actually achieves is encapsulated in the first three paragraphs of Herman’s introduction, in which he sketches his broad intentions:
“The job of the historian is not just to recount or explain the past but to show how things have come to be what they are.
“This book will show how a single institution, the British navy, built the modern global system, which is our system, for better or worse. It did this first by challenging and toppling the global system forged by Spain and Portugal in the age of Columbus. Then it reshaped the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to fit the needs and desires of the British Empire. Those needs – access to markets, freedom of trade across international boundaries, an orderly state system that prefers peace to war, speedy communication and travel across open seas and skies – remain the principal features of globalization today.
“Of course, a complicated historical development on this scale demands far more players and factors than just the British navy. But take it out of the picture, and the history of globalization becomes murkier, more haphazard, less inevitable and certain. Without it, a British Empire would have been unthinkable, and without a British Empire and its successor, the Commonwealth, half the world’s independent nations would not exist today. Other nations might have built a modern unified world, but they probably would not have done it as quickly, efficiently, elegantly – or as humanely. In fact, not since the Roman legions has an ostensibly military force had so decisive an impact on the history or its own nation and the world.”
In many respects, then, Herman’s book is an extended demonstration in detail (as he explicitly avers) of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Seapower Upon History. In this enterprise he succeeds and, as suggested in our earlier excerpts, transcends the bounds of the ordinary military or naval history.
For anyone interested in the origins and evolution of our contemporary world, I strongly recommend this interesting and in many ways extraordinary book.
Haysville Community Library 