Most historians view the 14-month world cruise of new U.S. Navy battle force under President Theodore Roosevelt that catapulted the United States to global power and prominence. In this way, they were able to transform their small- and medium-sized nations into great powers.Ī country’s ability to ship goods in bulk has long represented an expression of national power.įollowing the Napoleonic wars in the early 19th century, a large Royal Navy effectively knitted together the British Empire upon which “the sun never set.” By the latter half of that century, the British maintained a “two-power standard,” whereby the size of the Royal Navy had to meet or exceed the next two navies combined. ![]() Carthage in the third century B.C., Venice in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the Dutch republic in the 16th and 17th centuries also fielded merchant and naval fleets to pursue and protect their interests. Athens had a robust navy as well as a large merchant fleet. The ability to ship goods in bulk from places where they are produced to places where they are scarce has long represented an expression of national power. Taken together, these views add up to strategic confusion and an obliviousness to history.Ĭenturies of global rivalry show how a country’s power-and its decline-is directly related to the size and capability of its naval and maritime forces. Michael Gilday, the chief of naval operations, has argued that the Navy needs to accelerate the decommissioning of its older cruisers and littoral combat ships to free up money for vessels and weapons that will be critical in the future. Indo-Pacific Command until he retired this spring, observed in March that China could invade Taiwan in the next six years-presumably setting the stage for a major military showdown with the United States-while Adm. Leading voices simultaneously recognize the rising China threat while also arguing that the United States must shrink its present fleet in order to modernize. Now, with defense budgets flat or declining, leading Defense Department officials are pushing a “divest to invest” strategy-whereby the Navy must decommission a large number of older ships to free up funds to buy fewer, more sophisticated, and presumably more lethal platforms.Ĭhina, meanwhile, is aggressively expanding its naval footprint and is estimated to have the largest fleet in the world. Navy to create a shortsighted peace dividend. With the end of the Cold War, policymakers went a step further, slashing funding to the U.S. ![]() government at the time cut subsidies for the nation’s commercial shipbuilding industry, eventually hobbling the shipyards it would need to build a bigger fleet. The 1980s and 1990s marked the beginning of this downward trend. ship numbers have seen a dramatic overall decline. Still, on the high seas, quantity has a quality all its own. Other factors, of course, play a role: The types of ships it has-submarines, aircraft carriers, destroyers-the manner in which they are deployed, the sophistication of their sensors, and the range and lethality of their weapons all make a difference. These encounters and their dissemination are crucial to our understanding of imperial relationships and imaginations at the height of the imperial age.The number of ships a country possesses has never been the sole measure of its power at sea. The requirement to stop regularly at foreign stations also brought men of the Royal navy into contact with local coal heavers, as well as indigenous populations and landscapes. ![]() This infrastructure required careful management, and the processes involved show the development of bureaucracy and the reliance on the 'contractor state' to ensure this was both robust and able to allow swift mobilisation in war. In doing so, it shows that the 'coal question' was central to imperial defence and the protection of trade, requiring the creation of infrastructures that spanned the globe. In particular, it considers how steam propulsion made vessels utterly dependent on a particular resource - coal - and its distribution around the world. This book examines how the expansion of a steam-powered Royal Navy from the second half of the nineteenth century had wider ramifications across the British Empire.
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