Power at Sea

This three-volume work is naval history on the grand scale. In 1,240 pages Lisle Rose takes us through the naval history of the past 120 years. He writes well, in an often almost conversational manner which, admittedly, sometimes lapses into the florid at times; he has strong and quite often novel views and explains them at length; his work is based on extensive consultation of the secondary literature that must have taken a lifetime to master. The pace is good. All three volumes are both readable and, more to the point, worth reading. They can be read at two separate levels. The first is as a prolonged examination of the manner in which American naval power took over from the British, and of the impact of that naval power on world events. Rose is clearly sympathetic to the Mahanian view that countries which can make full use of the sea as a means of transportation predominate because they tend to prosper in peace and prevail in conflict. This grand theme is closely related to currently fashionable concepts of sea-based ‘empire’ and to the huge impact on world events that maritime powers such as Britain and the United States have had and continue to have. Readers interested in this approach and who have worked their way through Rose's book might like to turn next to Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World (2007) because the two works complement each other so well—regardless of whether you agree with their thesis. Both books concern the stewardship of global affairs over the past two centuries by the English-speaking peoples. Mead writes about the impact of that stewardship on world events (which was largely intended to usher in a peaceful, liberal and prosperous world order) and explains it by pointing to Anglo-Saxon advantages in their political and moral culture, their economic strategies and their success in war. Rose touches on all of these subjects too, but focuses on the naval and military process by which this dominance was successfully achieved and maintained

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