Pax Britannica

Barry Gough’s stated object in writing this book was to re-connect imperial and naval history, to remind readers that the nineteenth-century British Empire depended entirely on naval power. It takes its title from a celebrated, not to say hackneyed, phrase, the meaning of which still bears reflection. The reference is of course to the Pax Romana, and ‘pax’ in this context does not exactly mean ‘peace’ in the common sense of friendly relations between different nations. This is the legal sense of the Latin word, the ‘King’s Peace’ of medieval England, close in meaning to our modern English ‘rule of law’: it refers to the internal good order of a jurisdiction subject to a common legal system, not the external relations of one country with another. It would have been worth the author considering to what extent the nineteenth-century British Empire really was a ‘Queen’s Peace’, and whether this peace extended over the sea in any meaningful sense. It would have helped to give some definition to an otherwise sprawling, and even invertebrate, survey. This is neither a narrative history nor a work of analysis but a tour of the British Empire, roughly arranged by region, in which the author rambles genially around the subject reflecting on things which catch his interest. At times, he becomes quite lyrical about the pleasures of seapower: ‘The sailors lived in a world of danger and a world of enchantment ... Flying fish, penguins, iguanas and sealions all had describable characteristics of delight, and then there were the natural wonders, such as erupting volcanoes, tsunamis, a fire in the rigging during the storm known as St. Elmo’s Fire and, perhaps the greatest entertainment, rounding Cape Horn in the highest seas and the worst weather’. Your reviewer was reminded of his childhood copy of The Wonder Book of the Navy without the coloured engravings (though Gough has some good monochrome illustrations). Themes do not very clearly emerge, but the author’s friendly, indeed admiring, attitude towards the British imperial project (‘one of the most remarkable and indeed promising experiments in the history of nations and international affairs’) certainly does. He is not entirely uncritical, recognising that naval officers ‘could be both high-handed and high-minded’, but he is usually ready to credit the British government at least with the right intentions. This is not a study driven by theory, still less by ideology. The cultural turn is not turned here; post-modernism and post-colonialism are not present; we meet some post-captains but definitely no subalterns. Or perhaps there is one, for in a sensitive passage Gough reflects on the impact of British power as it appeared to the Indians of the coastal islands of British Columbia. He sees the loss as well as the gain, but there is nothing here of the tone of prim disapproval which is obligatory in some modern studies of the British Empire, and no anguished contortions to appease the spirit of political correctness. Readers will find this depressing or refreshing according to taste

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