Chapter Seven
Mahan versus Mackinder (1859–97)
It is an interesting commentary on human affairs that Mahan’s exposition of the influence of sea power on the course of European and American expansion should have occurred at the very time when new instruments of the Industrial Revolution were beginning to erode principles and theories upon which his doctrines were based.
G. S. Graham, The Politics of Naval Supremacy
(Cambridge, 1965), p. 124.
The year 1859 is an unsuitable dividing-line for a traditional survey of British naval history in the nineteenth century, for the power-political framework in which the Pax Britannica operated was not undergoing any revolutionary change which would make this time an historical watershed in the usual sense. Nevertheless, it is necessary at this point to undertake an analysis of certain long-term developments, the origins of which were rooted in the second half of the nineteenth century and the consequences of which were to be of far-reaching significance. Between Queen Victoria’s inspection of the 250 craft assembled before her at the end of the Crimean War and the great Spithead review to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the effectiveness of sea power itself, and the predominance of British naval mastery in particular, was being slowly but surely undermined.
Since these trends were to escape the attention of some navalists until well into the twentieth century, it is scarcely surprising that they were not detected by most observers at the time. Glad to be freed from the taxation burdens of the Crimean War and to forget the inglorious way in which it had been fought, the mid Victorians relapsed into a state of complacency about their navy and their world politics, which, despite occasional challenges from the French, remained unshattered for a further few decades. An unease at the overall situation led to an additional three ironclads being laid down in 1867 but the Franco-Prussian War gave a further boost to the Royal Navy’s position. The German navy was nonexistent; the French fleet, powerless to affect the result of the conflict, sank into decay afterwards as all the European powers concentrated their energies upon land armaments. The United States remained preoccupied with its civil war and reconstruction, but was in any case gradually losing some of its intense anglophobia. Hence the pleasant situation occurred in which Britain’s naval superiority rose while her expenditure on the fleet fell or was at least kept steady. Even the ‘jingo’ outburst in the Eastern Crisis of 1877–8 had little lasting effect, the country relapsing into its old state of indifference soon afterwards.
This era of inexpensive maritime supremacy came to a sudden end in 1884. Even before then, the French had been engaged for several years upon a large shipbuilding programme, unnoticed by a British public which retained an unjustified confidence in its navy’s invincibility; in fact, the two fleets were almost equal in numbers of first-class battleships. The revelations of naval weakness by W. T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, fell like a bomb upon a public already uneasy at the commercial and colonial threats to Britain’s world interests, and the clamour became so great that the battered Gladstone government was in that year alone forced to spend an extra £3.1 million upon warships and £2.4 million upon naval ordnance and coaling stations. Momentarily the unrest was calmed but it rose to a new height in 1888 after Salisbury’s Conservative administration had relaxed its efforts. Unfortunately, the foreign scene did not allow any such return to the casual indifference of former days. Ever since the British government’s decision to occupy Egypt in 1882, the French had been persistently hostile all over the globe, especially in Africa, and their own fleet programme remained large. At the same time, Russia, which had almost been on the brink of war with Britain in 1885 over Afghanistan and was now threatening to upset the political balance in the Balkans, was building up its fleet and becoming more receptive to an entente with France. The prospect of a Franco-Russian naval alliance, which would pincer the under-strength Mediterranean Fleet and cut that vital line of communication in time of war, was too grim to be dismissed with soothing phrases and half-measures. In March 1889 the government proclaimed its intention to maintain a two-power standard by introducing the Naval Defence Act into Parliament – under which £21.5 million was to be spent upon new construction, including ten battleships. Yet even this was insufficient to eradicate the Achilles’ Heel of the Mediterranean and four years later the Press and public, now totally unable to relapse into their former apathy, recommended the agitation. The result of this heated political debate was that in the following spring the laying-down of seven battleships and many smaller vessels was announced, only a few days after the final retirement of Gladstone on this very issue. There could be no more appropriate symbol of the changed conditions and attitudes since the mid Victorian period than the defeat of this constant opponent of swollen naval armaments.1
Although the British were to remain anxious about the Franco-Russian naval challenge until the events of 1905, it seems in retrospect that they probably overestimated the danger from this direction, forgetting the weaknesses of their rivals and seeing only those in their own fleet. The French navy, impressive on paper, suffered from constant political interference and strategical controversy, and its ineffectiveness was fully revealed during the confrontation at Fashoda in 1898, where the obvious superiority of the Royal Navy provided Salisbury with one of his strongest trumps.2 The Russian navy was in an even worse state, its fleets lacking homogeneity in speed and size, and its sailors, confined much of the year to land, lacking the necessary gunnery practice and even the elementary navigational skills to take on their British counterparts; its pathetic performance in the war against Japan in 1904–5 showed how overrated it had been. Even if the two powers had fought jointly against Britain, the situation would have been far brighter than that painted by the Navy League and other agitators at home: the ‘enemy’ had virtually no experience of combined fleet operations; language and signalling difficulties were great; and neither dared to concentrate more resources upon their navies whilst the attitudes of Austria, Italy and especially Germany were so problematical. Britain’s strategical weakness in the Mediterranean was admittedly grave but the threat there could be neutralized in the last resort by withdrawing the fleet to Gibraltar, strengthening the newly acquired base at Alexandria and sending all merchant shipping round the Cape instead. In the final analysis the Franco-Russian challenges were probably a good thing for the Royal Navy, forcing it to make radical improvements in its fighting strength and efficiency and to hasten the end of its practice of employing so many ships and men upon that variety of miscellaneous tasks which had characterized the previous decades.
For these were the activities into which the greater part of Britain’s naval energies had been redirected ever since the end of the Crimean War. The old responsibilities remained and were added to by new ones to make an impressive list of duties: the African slave trade patrols, debt-collecting expeditions in Latin America, the campaigns against piracy in the Red Sea and East Indies, enforcing British claims in Malaya and Burma, the protection of missionaries and traders all over the globe, and the steady charting of coasts and seas. In 1861 sixty-six warships and almost 8,000 men were deployed on the China and East Indies Station, even though the Second China War had been concluded; to which should be added forty more vessels in the Mediterranean, twenty-three on the North America and West Indies Station, fifteen each on the Pacific and the West African Stations, eleven at the Cape, nine off the south-east coast of South America and nine also in Australian waters.3 With some right the Admiralty called out against the pressures from merchants, missionaries, Colonial and Foreign Offices, the First Lord complaining:
from Vancouver’s isle to the river Plate, from the West Indies to China the Admiralty is called upon by Secretaries of State to send ships … The undeniable fact is that we are doing or endeavouring to do much more than our force is sufficient for. It is fortunate that the world is not larger, for there is no other limit to the service of the fleets.4
The same, incidentally, was true of the British army in this period, which, apart from its standing commitments to the defence of India and the major colonies, was involved in a whole host of what Bismarck once derisively called ‘gentleman’s wars’ – against the Ashanti, the Zulu, the Burmas, the Boers, the Egyptians, the Afghans and the Dervishes.5 Here again was an armed service diluted and broken up into small contingents all over the globe so that its effective fighting power was much reduced. Considerable withdrawals of military and naval forces deployed overseas were made, under Gladstone’s prodding, by Cardwell and Childers in the period 1868–74 but this did not transform the basic picture: both services remained chiefly specialists in colonial warfare. Most of the naval officers who were later to transform and lead the Royal Navy had their first baptism of fire and early experiences in these minor colonial engagements: Fisher in the Second China War of 1859, Beresford in the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, Jellicoe at Alexandria and in the relief of the Peking legations in 1900, Beatty in the Nile campaign of 1896–7 and again in the Boxer uprising, Sturdee during the Samoan civil war of 1899. The marvel was that their minds and habits were not so moulded by this somewhat artificial and esoteric form of naval warfare that they were unable to react effectively to more serious threats.
In many other ways, too, the pre-Crimean position of the British Empire seemed to continue unaltered in the decades following. While the European powers were fully preoccupied with the diplomatic and military struggles which accompanied the unifications of Italy and Germany, they became even less interested in those parts of the world to which Whitehall attached great importance; only the French, as ever, kept up their game of upsetting British consuls and traders in the tropics but until 1882 this was always checked in the final resort by a Quai D’Orsay more anxious about European affairs.6 More important still, after the death of Palmerston successive British governments became increasingly inclined to adopt a policy of non-intervention in Europe, establishing that tradition which was later in the century to be given the proud though misleading name of ‘splendid isolation’. In the late 1860s, however, this policy was anything but splendid. It had chiefly been induced by an awareness that Britain did not possess the armed forces necessary to intervene on the continent with any prospect of success: Palmerston’s ignominious defeat at the hands of Bismarck over Schleswig-Holstein in 1864 was yet another of those very necessary reminders that sea power alone often possessed but a limited effectiveness in European politics.
At the same time the Empire continued to expand, steadily, inexorably, in all directions. The annexations of the 1850s and 1860s, listed earlier, were soon to be eclipsed by later acquisitions; for in the final three decades of the nineteenth century, Britain laid claim to Cyprus, Egypt, the Sudan, Somaliland, Kenya, Uganda, Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Zanzibar, Bechuanaland, the Transvaal, Orange Free State, most of present-day Ghana and Nigeria, Papua, North Borneo, Upper Burma, several Malayan states, Wei-hai-wei, the southern Solomons, the Gilbert, Ellice, Tongan, Fijian and many smaller groups in the Pacific Ocean. Even when the situation later changed and other nations joined in a frenetic scramble for overseas colonies, the British, aided by their established position in the tropics, appeared to come out the best: ‘between 1871 and 1900 Britain added four and a quarter million square miles and sixty-six million people to her Empire’.7 Furthermore, in many aspects of economic life the British predominance remained unshaken, despite the ‘great depression’ of 1875–95. The £1,000 million invested abroad in 1875 had risen to £4,000 million by 1913, bringing in around £200 million annually as interest to cover the growing gap in visible trade. In shipping, too, Britain possessed more merchant vessels than all other nations together at the turn of the century and was still the carrier of the world, again a useful aid to the balance of payments. Insurance and banking maintained London’s grip upon the global financial market as well.8
Not only did the picture seem reassuring in those respects, but navalists inside Britain at the close of the nineteenth century could also feel relieved that politicians and the public as a whole had at last developed a regard for their navy and learned to appreciate its close link with their commercial expansion and rise to world empire: before 1880, as Professor Marder had noted, ‘the subject of naval defence was almost foreign to English thought’.9 That this situation changed so rapidly was not only due to the Press agitation at the Franco-Russian danger but also to the publicizing activities of a host of naval strategists and historians.10 Of these, by far the most famous was the American naval captain, A. T. Mahan, whose study The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660–1783, published in 1890, won international acclaim and ‘appeared to reveal immutable rules concerning the role of navies in international affairs that could be neglected only at a nation’s peril’.11 Written to stimulate American interest in a larger fleet, this widely-read and oft-quoted book became the bible of navalists everywhere, particularly in Britain, where its author was fêted and revered.
Mahan’s notion about the role of sea power in history have been sufficiently examined earlier in this study and require no further elaboration here.12 Whether or not one agrees with his interpretation that great power rivalries between 1660 and 1815 had their outcome decided chiefly by maritime campaigns is less important at this stage than an understanding of the strategical and political implications for the future which emerged from his writings, or were in some cases read into his publications by his enthusiastic but one-sided followers. From these works one gained an impression that large battlefleets, and a concentration of force, decided control of the oceans, whereas a guerre de course strategy was always ineffectual; that the blockade was a very effective weapon which would sooner or later bring an enemy to its knees; that the possession of select bases on islands or continental peripheries was more valuable than control of large land masses; that overseas colonies were vital for a nation’s prosperity and that colonial trade was the most treasured commerce of all; that ‘travel and traffic by water have always been easier and cheaper than by land’; that an island nation, resting secure upon its naval might, could with impunity ignore the struggles of land powers and adopt if necessary an isolationist policy; and that the rise of a country to world greatness without sea power was almost unthinkable. Taken together, they formed the basic tenets of the pre-1914 navalist philosophy, much of which endured well past that particular epoch; it centred upon the belief that sea power had been more influential than land power in the past and would always continue to be so. Finally, Mahan, whilst urging the need for a strong American fleet, fully expected and firmly hoped that Britain’s naval predominance would remain unassailed in the future.
Whatever reservations one may have upon Mahan’s analysis of the past, it is clear that his interpretation and ideas were most significant, throwing a new light upon the course of European history; no scholar since his day could write about the rise of the British Empire without acknowledgement to the role of sea power. What was true of the past was not necessarily so of the future, however, yet at the time it was as an ‘evangelist of sea power’ rather than as a naval historian pure and simple that he was regarded; journalists, admirals and statesmen hung upon his predictions and accepted his teachings as a virtually complete doctrine of power-politics. In point of fact, Mahan’s mind was too rooted in the past to be much of a success in this field of prophecy. As one of his biographers has explained,
In activity and by disposition Mahan largely looked to the past; he gained his lessons from a study of the past and used the past for analogies. There can be no doubt that Mahan was so absorbed with the past that he often failed to appreciate future trends in naval warfare. He was not sufficiently alive to the fact that history frequently does not repeat itself and that the shape of things to come may not always follow the pattern of the past.13
Ironically enough, it was only a year before Mahan published his plainest appeal through the guise of history to the American people, Sea Power in Relation to the War of 1812 (1905), that a much more perceptive prophecy of future world politics was being elaborated. On 25 January 1904, the famous geopolitician Halford Mackinder read a paper to the Royal Geographical Society entitled ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’.14 In it he suggested that the Columbian epoch – that period of four centuries of overseas exploration and conquest by the European powers – was coming to an end, and another, far different one was about to begin. With very little of the world left to conquer, ‘every explosion of social forces’ would take place in a much more enclosed environment and would no longer be dissipated into unknown regions; efficiency and internal development would replace expansionism as the main aim of modern states; and for the first time in history there would be ‘a correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalizations’, that is, size and numbers would be more accurately reflected in the sphere of international developments. This being the case, Mackinder continued, it was important to consider what the future would bring to the great strategical ‘pivot area’ of the world – central Russia. That vast region, once the source of the many invading armies which had for centuries poured into Europe and the Near East, had been outflanked, neutralized and much reduced in importance by the mariners of the Columbian era, who had opened most of the rest of the world to western influence. For 400 years the world’s trade had developed on the sea, its population had on the whole lived near to the sea, political and military changes had been influenced by sea power. Now, with industrialization, with railways, with investment, with new agricultural and mining techniques, central Asia was poised to regain its previous importance:
The spaces within the Russian Empire and Mongolia are so vast, and their potentialities in population, wheat, cotton, fuel and metals so incalculably great, that it is inevitable that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there develop inaccessible to oceanic commerce.15
Mackinder’s stress upon the importance of the ‘heartland’, later taken up with enthusiasm by Haushofer and the Nazi geopoliticians, and somewhat discredited as a consequence, is probably too simple, one-sided and deterministic to be accepted in its entirety today; but the broad outlines of his argument were prescient and compel the closest attention. Certainly, his audience at the Royal Geographical Society was impressed by this unusually wide-ranging paper. One of them, Leo Amery, ventured to go further and, while not laying stress so specifically upon central Asia, elaborated one aspect of Mackinder’s message in even clearer power-political terms:
Sea power alone, if it is not based on great industry, and has not a great population behind it, is too weak for offence to really maintain itself in the world struggle … both the sea and the railway are going in the future … to be supplemented by the air as a means of locomotion, and when we come to that … the successful powers will be those who have the greatest industrial base. It will not matter whether they are in the centre of a continent or on an island; those people who have the industrial power and the power of invention and of science will be able to defeat all others.16
These predictions, of the rise of certain super-powers with massive populations and industrial and technological strength, were not new to political thinking – as early as 1835 de Tocqueville had forecast the inevitable rise of the United States and Russia – but they were now being expressed in a much more definite form. Some twenty years before Mackinder, for example, Sir John Seeley had pointed to the immense developments which ‘steam and electricity’ were bringing to those two great continental states, against whose consolidated resources and manpower the widely scattered British Empire would find it impossible to compete unless drastic changes occurred in its own structure. ‘Russia and the United States will surpass in power the states now called great as much as the great country-states of the sixteenth century surpassed Florence.’17 Yet if Seeley still placed hopes upon the transformation of the Empire into a much more organic unit, Mackinder could not be so sanguine. Britain would continue to maintain its strategical and maritime advantages vis-à-vis Europe, but these would count for little against the rising super-powers. Already in his book Britain and the British Seas, published in 1902, Mackinder had insisted:
In the presence of vast Powers, broad-based upon the resources of half continents, Britain could not again become mistress of the seas. Much depends on the maintenance of a lead won under earlier conditions. Should the sources of wealth and vigour upon which the navy was founded run dry, the imperial security of Britain will be lost. From the early history of Britain herself it is evident that mere insularity gives no indefeasible title to marine sovereignty.18
Nevertheless, although the course of the past seventy years has only served to reveal the correctness of his forebodings, these views had only limited support in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There might be an awareness that all was not well in the colonial and industrial world, but most politicians and newspapers continued to believe in their country’s ability to rule the waves and therefore to maintain its place in the international system; and the fears that were expressed concerned more immediate dangers rather than the longer-term premonitions of Seeley or Mackinder. This complacency was indirectly reinforced by the intellectual superiority of the advocates of the ‘Blue Water’ or navalist school over their ‘Brick and Mortar’ or army rivals, a victory which not only led to the reversal of the mid-nineteenth century policy of raising a militia and building fortifications against possible invasion but also to an almost absolute belief in the effectiveness of sea power.19
If it were possible to express the newer and rather isolated views described above with the utmost simplicity, one might say that a decline in Britain’s relative world position was being hinted at, if not openly forecast, because of two closely-linked developments:
1. Britain’s naval power, rooted in her economic strength, would no longer remain supreme, since other nations with greater resources and manpower were rapidly overhauling her previous industrial lead, and
2. sea power itself was waning in relation to land power.
The first of these developments was undoubtedly true and in it, clearly, lies the root of Britain’s long-term decline. Although she was maintaining her predominance in the world of finance and international services as mentioned above, her position as an industrial power of the first order – indeed, in a class of her own – shrank rapidly in the final three decades of the nineteenth century as other nations overtook her in many basic fields of industry and technology, which are after all the foundations of modern military strength. It might at first seem odd that ‘As her industry sagged, her finance triumphed, her services as shipper, trader and intermediary in the world’s system of payments became more indispensable.’20 But it was not. As we shall see, both were part of a similar movement which occurred when British industry felt real competition for the first time. Instead of meeting the latter it was avoided; and as a result she lost, somewhere in these years, her formerly unquestioned place as the workshop of the world.
In a certain sense this had always been quite probable, for Britain’s economic domination of the world after 1815 had rested upon a unique concatenation of very favourable circumstances. It was not to be expected that she would remain eternally either the only or even the greatest industrialized nation; when others, with larger populations and more resources, took the same path, a relative decline was inevitable. In some ways she herself made decisive contributions to this process, both by building railways in the foreign countries which were to enable their industries and especially agriculture to rival Britain’s, and by establishing and developing those foreign industries with repeated financial injections. Moreover, none of these rivals were to feel any compunction about imposing protectionist tariffs upon imports, especially when the depression of 1875–96 brought a slowing-down in the momentum of the world’s trade and industrial production. British statesmen, whether Liberals or Tories, held on to free trade as an article of faith, an expression of their basic philosophy; but there were practical grounds for this, too. Britain was simply too dependent upon international trade to prejudice that commerce, whereas neither the United States, Russia, France or Germany exported so great a proportion of their manufactures nor were they so heavily dependent upon imported foodstuffs. The results were inevitable: whilst British industrial goods faced tariffs as high as 57 per cent (Dingley Tariff) into the United States, American wheat, cheaply grown and cheaply transported, crushed the life out of British agriculture. More alarming still, foreign manufactured wares were imported into Britain in ever-increasing proportions.
This latter development was an indication that Britain’s industrial decline in this period is not simply to be described as an unavoidable and natural process; it was also caused by complacency and inefficiency.21 Otherwise, there would have been no reason why British goods could not have held their own against their chief rivals, Germany and the United States in the home market, or in neutral ones. In fact, they were badly hit in both, and this was due in the main to the unwillingness of British manufacturers to keep ahead or at least abreast of their competitors. New machinery, new techniques, rationalization of resources, these all took time and energy and money, and did not appear very attractive when one could still make adequate profits from traditional methods. Very little was being invested in the modernization of British industry compared with the many millions which were flowing out to benefit foreign governments, railways, mines and industries. laissez-faire seemed to produce, with some notable exceptions, a casualness of approach, and there was little attempt at grouping together the scattered and usually small-scale British firms into large trusts and cartels, as the Germans and Americans did. Public school education – described by one critic as being ‘actively anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, games-dominated’ in its effects22 – and the élitist and classics-dominated universities were more adept at producing pro-consuls of empire than scientists, technologists, engineers and business managers. Germany and the United States, in contrast, possessed not only many more universities but also infinitely more graduates with a scientific education.
Perhaps this all might have changed, had the pressure upon Britain been really severe, had the shock-waves from the depression and these new challenges been more traumatic. Unfortunately, they were not and in any case the British were able to employ two extremely convenient assets to cushion any blows and to keep life comfortable: their ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ empires, and their enormous earnings from invisibles. The former provided ready receptacles for British goods when other areas became too competitive or unattractive; for example, Australia, India, Brazil and Argentina took the cotton, railways, steel and machinery that could not get into the American and European markets. In the same way, whilst British capital exports to the latter dropped from 52 per cent in the 1860s to 25 per cent in the few years before 1914, those to the Empire rose from 36 per cent to 46 per cent, and those to Latin America from 10.5 per cent to 22 per cent. Britain escaped from the great depression ‘not by modernizing her economy, but by exploiting the remaining possibilities of her traditional position’.23 Nor was there any of the now-familiar balance-of-payments problems for the economy, thanks to the immense rise in invisible earnings. In terms of actual goods exchanged, the gap had been widening alarmingly since the mid century – a sign both of this lack of competitiveness in industrial products and of the increasing dependence upon imported foodstuffs – but it was always handsomely covered by the income from services and investments. Although this was in the short term better than actually having a payments crisis, it was hardly a satisfying position for a nation that was also a world power, subjected to international challenges and crises.
For good or ill the root of success for the new industrial state was the efficiency of its productive machine. If that failed disastrously, in an industrialized world, then national disaster would undoubtedly follow. Did the cushion of income from foreign investment, which was masking certain industrial problems and hiding the absence of new export sectors by increasing rentier-status in the world, encourage the breeding of rentier attitudes? Was Britain becoming another Holland of the eighteenth century, moving from industry and trade towards finance? The point was that the springs of wealth from financial income were less secure, less resilient, more subject to disturbance under the stress of political insecurity abroad or the shock of war than the solid indigenous strength of an efficient system of production and trade.24
Mention of the ‘shock of war’ prompts the final remark that healthy industries not only provide the weapons necessary for victory but also produce continuous fresh wealth, assuming (fairly reasonably) that their products can be sold; whereas investments, if ever once liquidated to purchase abroad the sinews of battle lacking at home, cannot be recovered and this must quickly lead to a balance-of-payments crisis afterwards.
There were, of course, many exceptions to this overall trend; there were entrepreneurs and firms with drive and imagination. The successful men behind Boots the Chemist, Rington’s Tea, and Pear’s Soap were chiefly involved with domestic custom, however, and it must be agreed that they were not ‘developing technologies which were to prove strategic in terms of the major growth industries of the twentieth century’.25 More important still, they were not trades which would contribute much to the military and maritime strength of an empire at war. With these latter, and far more vital types of industry, the picture was bleaker. Coal production and exports rose rapidly in this period, but only because of a vast increase in labour and not because of new techniques and machinery. In any case Germany’s total production by the first decade of the twentieth century had drawn close to Britain’s, while that of the United States was more than equal to both. Oil, still in its infancy as an industry, was chiefly produced in Russia and the United States. British iron production steadily increased, but once again due simply to expansion of labour and capacity. The story of the steel industry, an even more vital one, epitomizes much that was wrong with British industry at this time. Although ‘every major innovation in the manufacture of steel came from Britain or was developed in Britain’,26 its capitalists were simply too reluctant to invest in new plant. By the early 1890s both Germany and the United States had overtaken her and were drawing away; ‘In the United States Andrew Carnegie was producing more steel than the whole of England put together when he sold out in 1901 to J. P. Morgan’s colossal organization, the United States Steel Corporation.’27 Textiles, Britain’s greatest export of all in the nineteenth century, were already beginning to decline, even though cushioned by their tropical markets; again, a failure to modernize, to get rid of the old mule-spinning techniques, was a major cause. In machine-tools, a field in which Britain had been supreme for decades, the collapse was even faster. And what of the new, vitally important industries of the twentieth century – electrics and chemicals? In both, British pioneers had made many of the first advances; in both, Germany and the United States were to be much more successful in production and sales. The automobile, where the British were not pioneers, was chiefly in the hands of the French, the Americans and the Germans. The production of optical equipment, small arms, glass, shoes, agricultural machinery and many other items were also, in the main, the work of foreigners. Quite often, a British firm, competing successfully, turned out upon closer inspection to be either a subsidiary of a foreign company or one in which the owner-managers were recent immigrants (e.g. Brunner-Mond, the core of the later Imperial Chemical Industries).
One might summarize the above by saying that, whilst failing to seize the opportunity to develop important new industries, Britain was also neglecting to re-equip her traditional ones, relying instead upon a comfortable but unspectacular increase in her usual exports (cloth, coal, iron) to less competitive markets and a vast increase in invisible earnings to conceal these omissions. Industrial production, which had been growing at about 4 per cent p.a. in the years 1820–40 and at about 3 per cent p.a. between 1840 and 1870, became steadily more sluggish: between 1875 and 1894 it grew at just over 1½ per cent p.a., far less than Britain’s main rivals. ‘In 1870, the United Kingdom contained 31.8 per cent of the world’s manufacturing capacity, as compared with 13.2 per cent in Germany and 23.3 per cent in the United States. By 1906–10, Britain’s relative share had dropped to 14.7 per cent, while Germany now held 15.9 per cent and the United States 35.3 per cent.’28 British exports, which had expanded at 5 per cent p.a. in volume between 1840 and 1870, dropped to a rate of growth of only 2 per cent p.a. in the years 1870–90, and to 1 per cent p.a. in the decade following.29 The consequence, naturally enough, was that Britain’s share of world trade shrank, even though her overseas commerce rose in absolute terms:30
If economics are any guide to politics – and since Marx most people will admit that they are – the Pax Britannica was beginning to rest upon shaky foundations. That ‘outstandingly strong framework for national and world power’ mentioned in the preceding chapter was now sagging a little. Britain’s unique industrial and commercial lead, upon which Pitt, Canning and Palmerston had been able to find the ultimate support for their foreign and naval policies, was gone. To spend further time explaining or regretting the fact in this narrative would be superfluous. Even the cataloguing above of the failures of British industry, although these were certainly of significance in explaining the speed of this collapse, might appear somewhat unnecessary, when one considers the inevitability of the trend which resulted in Britain being able to produce only one quarter of the steel of the United States by 1913; after all, as Professor Mathias reminds us, ‘When half a continent starts to develop then it can produce more than a small island.’31 What is now necessary is to examine the political and strategical consequences of Britain’s industrial decline. This itself can only be done in the next, and later, chapters but some very general observations could appropriately be made at this point.
Before this is done, however, it is worth briefly looking at one solution which many British statesmen of the period 1880–1914 believed might help them to arrest this relative decline – Imperial Federation, the welding together of the disparate parts of the Empire into an organic customs and military unit. In his book, The Expansion of England, Seeley had advocated the fusion of the white dominions with the motherland into a sort of ‘Greater Britain’, which would then be able to join Russia and the United States in the first rank’.32 Viewed strategically, this was a dubious proposition from the start: the white population of the Empire totalled only fifty-two million in 1900, smaller than that of Germany, let alone those of Russia and the United States, and instead of being concentrated in one mass unit it was scattered across the globe. In any case, whatever the long-term futures of such states as Canada and Australia might be, their populations and industries were then too small to provide much more than marginal assistance in any conflict with a great power. Nevertheless, prominent politicians such as Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Milner took up the cause of imperial federation with great cry, and received a sympathetic response from many strategists and politicians in Britain for this concept. Some favoured it because they welcomed the help or moral support of the dominions; others because they genuinely thought it would make a vital difference. Oppenheim wrote in 1902 that ‘Historically the doom of Great Britain would seem to be certain but for the new factor introduced by the existence of powerful and patriotic colonies …’33 The famous warship designer, Sir William White, deeply impressed by his visit to the United States in 1904, where he saw fourteen battleships and thirteen armoured cruisers being simultaneously built in American yards, declared: ‘Unaided by our colonies we cannot long hold the sceptre of the seas in the teeth of American competition.’34 Yet, while attempts were made for almost half a century after the first Colonial Conference of 1887 to realize this aim of federation, the movement met with the unyielding opposition of the dominions, especially Canada and later South Africa (and later still, Eire). Having only recently secured constitutional and financial independence from Westminster, they had no wish to surrender it again. Measures of partial cooperation in the military and naval fields were to be instituted: a Greater Britain was not. Nor was the majority of the British people prepared to abandon the policy of free trade for the sake of the Empire’s greater unity, and this resistance proved to be an even more formidable stumbling-block.
That this steady decline in Britain’s relative economic strength, and the parallel failure to turn the idea of imperial federation into something effective, did not immediately have severe consequences for the country’s world-wide naval power, that in fact many experts and all the public held that the Royal Navy was in a more unchallengeable position in 1914 than at any other time in the previous century, should not surprise us. What we are trying to analyse here is a very long-term development, the first signs of which were already appearing by the end of the nineteenth century, although the overall trend was not to be fully recognized until decades later; only the prescient few could perceive a future decline in naval terms as well, therefore. In the first place, as we have seen, the economic crisis was masked and avoided by the favourable balance of trade, by the cushion of invisibles. In the second place the British shipbuilding industry itself was not hit by the challenges of foreigners, probably because its products at that time were individually constructed; as Hobsbawm puts it, ships ‘were no more mechanized than palaces’ in production.35 At this stage the industry was in its hey-day, boosted along by civil orders and by the increasing warship demands of the British and other governments. Thirdly, the Royal Navy naturally still benefited from its control of the many overseas bases, of the superb cable communications system, of the near-monopoly of good steaming coals, and from the ultimate support which it and the giant merchant marine gave to each other. In strategical terms these were of immense value, as her naval rivals fully recognized. Fourthly, there was the constant negative factor, which these rivals could not share, that Britain did not need, or at least did not appear to need, a large and expensive standing army which would necessarily bite into the money available for the navy. Finally, as we shall see in the following chapter, the Foreign Office after 1900 responded in a remarkable swift and perceptive fashion to what it recognized to be the ineluctable flow of events. By giving way on the peripheries, by alliances or ententes with former rivals, it allowed the navy to concentrate again to control the waters of vital interest and to check the chief danger. For all these reasons, a decline in Britain’s naval position was hard to recognize; in numbers of warships alone, Britannia seemed to be ruling the waves as effectively in 1900 and 1914 as she had done in 1820 and 1870.
Nevertheless, Palmerston would have noticed the differences immediately, had he returned to survey the world scene about the turn of the century. The major change was that the spread of industrialization, besides hitting Britain’s supremacy in that field, had enabled all other modern powers to build a navy of their own; not merely France, but also Russia, Austria-Hungary, and more importantly, the United States, Germany and Japan, now had this capacity. And not only could they build a navy, but they all were actively doing so; for in the last decade of the nineteenth century every sea-going nation, and not just Britain, took to heart Mahan’s teachings about the influence and importance of sea power. The great powers were so entranced by his doctrines, and the application thereof for their own ends, that the age has been described by Professor Langer as one of the ‘new navalism’. Even if none of these countries would or could attempt to build a fleet equal to the Royal Navy, the culminative effect of this orgy of warship-building was the same: Britannia could not hold them all off. A surrender of local naval mastery in certain regions was bound to follow.
In the second place the long-term financial tendency was also serious in view of the rapid technological changes in warship armour, weapons and propulsion in this period. As the size of vessels steadily rose because of military and technical reasons, so their cost increased too – but at a far greater pace, a phenomenon of which we are well aware today, but which in Victorian Britain was regarded as inexplicable. A ninety-gun warship of the mid century cost almost half as much again if it was fitted with a screw propellor (£151,000 as against £108,000); but by the end of the century the tendency had become much more alarming, particularly after the introduction of turbines and larger guns, as the following figures show:36
| Class of battleship | Year of estimate or laying-down | Average cost |
|---|---|---|
| Majestic | 1893–5 | £1 million |
| Duncan | 1899 | £1 ” |
| Lord Nelson | 1904–5 | £1.5 ” |
| Dreadnought | 1905–6 | £1.79 ” |
| King George | 1910–11 | £1.95 ” |
| Queen Elizabeth | 1912–13 | £2.5 ” |
Little space has been devoted in this survey to the nineteenth-century changes in warship construction, which within a half-century turned the ship of the line which Nelson and even Blake would have recognized into something akin to the ironclad of modern times. This is because, although there were many tactical consequences of this development, the strategical ones were far fewer: the greatest, seen in very broad terms, was the benefit Britain received, due to her advanced industrialization, of being able to build faster, and therefore to react quicker, to innovations in design. By the end of the century, however, the staggering rise in warship prices had made the picture much graver. In the near-crisis year of 1847, naval costs totalled £8 million, but the annual expenditure in the early and mid Victorian periods was usually less than that. A half-century later, the estimates were spiralling at an unprecedented rate for peacetime:
| Year | Naval estimates (£ million) |
| 1883 | 11 |
| 1896 | 18.7 |
| 1903 | 34.5 |
| 1910 | 40.4 |
This greatly accentuated the pressures upon the Royal Navy for, although other, less wealthy countries suffered from the same development, the British felt that they could never compromise on this issue: whatever the cost, they had to stay supreme. Yet this bald assertion, however natural it appeared to British politicians and admirals at the time, faced two enormous obstacles which were in the future to ensure that it became no political absolute. Firstly, the government, slowly abandoning the principles of laissez-faire and responding to the demands of a mass democracy for social and economic improvements in the country at large, was aware that other ministries were seeking a greater share of the budget; and, though expenditures soared all round, compromises had to be made by each side. Gladstone’s resignation in 1894 had not symbolized the end of an age-old quarrel over resources after all, merely the temporary victory of the Liberal Imperialists. Preference was also to be given to defence expenditures under the Unionist cabinet which followed, but the Liberal administration of 1905–14, elected upon a reformist platform and aware of rising social expectations and tensions, found this dilemma much more acute. The whole problem of whether a democracy is willing in peacetime to meet the calls of those who urge military readiness in case of war was beginning to be argued and worked out. The second obstacle to the above-mentioned absolute lay simply in the fact that no country’s resources were inexhaustible. The higher the cost of armaments rose, the greater would be the number of countries that would ultimately be forced to abandon the race, at least on a great-power scale. The question was, would Britain herself be able to stay the pace – or would it be possible only for those continental states of enormous resources, of which Mackinder had written?
It would be a long time before the answer to that question was clear; but even at the turn of the century it was obvious that the spread of industrialization was altering the world’s international balance in many ways. Nations long dormant, though potentially powerful because of their populations and resources, had been galvanized by the Unbound Prometheus – the impact of technology and organization – and these revolutions were already having important strategical consequences. In the western hemisphere the United States was assuming a more and more dominating position, its economic activities and political influence permeating the Caribbean and Latin America. In the same way Japan was pulling ahead of its neighbours in the Far East and extending its control there. The newly united German Empire, boosted by an amazingly swift industrial and commercial expansion, was steadily changing the old balance of power in Europe. Finally, industrialization was not only allowing Russia to take the first real steps to develop its immense resources, but strategic railway construction was giving it a means of direct military pressure upon China and India. All of these changes implied at least a consequent diminution of Britain’s influence in the areas concerned, and some a distinct restriction upon her hitherto almost unchallenged predominance and freedom of action. The same was true for the other great political development of the later nineteenth century – the colonial expansion of the great powers. A demand for fresh markets and sources of raw materials, a rise in nationalism and changes in the balance of power, a yellow Press catering for the first time to a mass readership, internal challenges to the political status quo, the spread of Darwinistic notions – perhaps all consequences or associates of the industrial revolution – had pushed these countries into a frantic search for overseas possessions. Hitherto, the British had usually had to contend with the spasmodic challenges of the French. Now many more nations entered the fray, with the result that Britain’s comfortable and extensive ‘informal empire’ in Africa and Asia virtually disappeared: it either had to be made formal or it was annexed by others. The whole experience was most unpleasant for British statesmen. No doubt they secured a larger share of colonial real-estate in this scramble than anyone else – with their head-start, this was scarcely surprising – but once again their position had relatively declined; informal control of most of the tropics was exchanged for formal control of one quarter of it. Strategical supremacy was also affected by the acquisition by foreign powers of important bases along the world’s shipping routes, for instance, Bizerta, Dakar, Diego Suarez, Manila and Hawaii.
These changes bewildered many Britons, even though their feelings were often concealed by a display of national pride and bravado which mid Victorians would have considered as both unnecessary and distasteful, Palmerston always excepted. The British public of the 1880s and 1890s would have been more upset still had the second aspect of Mackinder’s thesis been known to them: that the sea power was itself waning in relation to land power. This, too, was a very long-term trend, measurable only over decades, whose consequences were to be fully perceived only in the next century; but once again it is worth while to examine briefly its general characteristics.
Perhaps the real villain of the piece was the railway, ironically a British invention, and one which had greatly benefited the British economy and people. Nevertheless, the transformation it wrought upon such areas as central Europe, the ‘Heartland’ of Russia and the mid-west of the United States was far more decisive; the industrialization of those regions, despite the assertions of certain economists in recent years, was scarcely feasible without the railway. The transport of goods, which had for centuries been cheaper and faster by water, now became easier by land, a tendency which was to increase with the introduction of motorized transport in the twentieth century. And not only was industry stimulated, but commerce, which had long been difficult, now flourished under the new conditions; the opening of the Mont Cenis (1871) and St Gotthard (1882) tunnels greatly increased the northward flow of Mediterranean fruits and vegetables, for instance. The Columbian epoch of which Mackinder spoke, when most trade and populations had remained close to the sea, was slowly ending as continental countries were freed from this physical constriction. With the improvement of land communications, a nation without much seaboard, but with a large population and extensive territories, could now exploit its resources, and the peculiar advantages of small, predominantly naval-commercial countries such as Holland and Britain were gradually being lost.
People, too, could be transported across land much faster, a fact which not only affected shipping companies (especially those going around Cape Horn) but also had direct military implications. The body which appears to have appreciated this first was the Prussian General Staff, whose efficient planners turned railway time-tabling into a work of art. In 1866 it had been able to put 400,000 into the field in a very short time for the campaign against Austria; and ‘it mastered the problems of mass organization and movement so brilliantly that in 1870 1,183,000 men passed through the barracks into the army in eighteen days, and 462,000 were transported to the French frontier in the same time.’37 The traditional British strategy against one power or a coalition dominating Europe, of dispatching expeditions to the peripheries, be it the Low Countries or the Portuguese or Italian coast, would now be a much more risky proposition if the enemy could swiftly rush a far greater force to the threatened point by rail, instead of having to rely upon road communications and forced marches. Conversely, a land power could be freed from its dependence upon the sea in certain circumstances – the most notable example of this being the advantages which Russia acquired by the construction of the trans-Siberian railway. The latter, so argued the Russian finance minister Witte in a memorandum to the Tsar in 1892, ‘would not only bring about the opening of Siberia, but would revolutionize world trade, supersede the Suez Canal as the leading route to China, enable Russia to flood the Chinese market with textiles and metal goods, and secure political control of northern China’.38 These hopes were soon to be blunted by the war with Japan, the result of which reassured navalists everywhere; but in retrospect it is possible to see the Russian defeat as being due more to unreadiness and inefficiency than to the workings of sea power. By 1945 at least the boot was on the other foot and no Japanese navy could have helped much to hold Manchuria. Even as it was, the Russian expansion by land at the turn of the century was quite impressive, Mackinder later noting in one of his perceptive comparisons:
It was an unprecedented thing in the year 1900 that Britain should maintain a quarter of a million men in her war with the Boers at a distance of six thousand miles over the ocean; but it was as remarkable a feat for Russia to place an army of more than a quarter of a million men against the Japanese in Manchuria in 1904 at a distance of four thousand miles by rail.39
More worrying still to the British was the threat which Russian railway construction offered to their control of India. For centuries this important possession had been only accessible to a great power by sea, but by 1900 it appeared to be in deadly danger from the approaching Orenburg-Tashkent railway, to which the British simply had no answer. Only a large army, not the Royal Navy, could hold India from the north-west. Truly, the defence of an empire susceptible in so many places to attack from land was a desperate problem for a country that was basically a sea power, as The Naval and Military Record pointed out in 1901 in a leader which is worth quoting at some length:
There has never been room for doubt that certain limitations must hamper the expansion of a naval Power. The familiar truth has been somewhat obscured by the writings of Captain Mahan, which may easily be misread by Englishmen who are naturally proud of their Navy and of their expanding Empire. It may be doubted, however, if Captain Mahan ever intended to suggest that an extensive Empire, scattered over all parts of the globe, can be held for many centuries by sea power alone. The defence of India, as we recently pointed out, is based upon sea power, but it also involves the maintenance of 300,000 troops, and makes a considerable drain upon the limited supply of military recruits under our voluntary system of service. The Canadian frontier, again, could hardly be held with security in the event of war against the United States. Our conquests in South Africa may oblige us to maintain a permanent garrison of 50,000 troops, and at present it is not very clear how that army is to be raised under the voluntary system … Singapore, for example, is a valuable naval base, but it cannot be held by the Navy alone. The port requires a large garrison. Thus, the limitations of sea power begin to be felt when territorial expansion can no longer be safeguarded exclusively by the guns of the fleet, backed by minor garrisons.40
There were other changes, too, which had taken place or were still in process in the nineteenth century, which might cause one to wonder if Mahan’s strategical analysis of Britain’s previous naval wars would be of much relevance in the future. Particularly significant here was the alteration in the effectiveness of the blockade, whose effects, even if exaggerated by navalist historians, had usually been considerable. The newer world powers, the United States and Germany, and the old enemy, Russia, having less of their national wealth bound up in overseas trade, were far less susceptible to defeat by naval pressure alone than ever Spain, the Netherlands or even France had been. To seize the Spanish flota or to interrupt the Dutch trade with the Indies had been to deal the enemy’s economy a very severe blow indeed; but now it was different, as was emphasized in a very interesting lecture given at the United Services Institute by an Inner Temple barrister, one Douglas Owen, in 1905. As he explained, the trade which British privateers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had harassed was that between ports which then belonged to her rivals – Ceylon, Mauritius, Cape Colony, Guinea, Dominica, Trinidad, St Vincent, St Lucia, Demarara, Grenada, French Canada. Since those times they had all become British. In the second place, colonial trade as a whole had declined in importance; the gold and silver from Latin America, the spices from the East Indies, the rum and tobacco and sugar from the West Indies, had no modern equivalents – except perhaps the carriage of raw materials and foodstuffs to the British Isles itself. In other words the best targets were now nearly all British. Thirdly, the coming of the railway had reduced the effectiveness of the blockade and the possibility of paralysing the enemy’s trade:
Since those times, railways have been introduced and so developed as to link together city, town, and port, whilst inland waterways have on the Continent been created and developed to an extent of which most Englishmen have no conception. Even if it were possible for us to close absolutely our adversary’s ports, his trade would go on with little interruption … Today France can supply herself through Belgium; Germany, through Holland and Belgium; Holland, through Belgium and Germany; Russia, through Germany and the Low Countries … The days of coastal blockade, in the case of European States, with any thought of starving out the enemy, or with any idea of making prizes of his coastal traffic, have gone for ever.41
As the final sentence indicates, this paper was written under the belief that the clauses of the Declaration of Paris of 1856 concerning the inviolability of neutral vessels would be observed in future wars; and that the enemy would simply proceed to lay up all his ships and to rely upon neutral carriers. Most people accepted that this would be so, and it was such a consideration which had caused Salisbury in 1871 to protest that that particular treaty had made the fleet ‘almost valueless’ for anything other than preventing invasion. Even if Britain was in the future to reject this agreement, however, Owen’s analysis still possessed a certain validity: the European powers could obtain supplies more easily from neutral neighbours under modem conditions of transport than they ever could have in the past. And it was laughable to think of trying to starve out Russia or the United States.
What was more – and this one can see increasingly in the twentieth century – the new inventions of the mine, the torpedo, the submarine and long-range coastal ordnance were making the operational problems of a blockade even more difficult than hitherto. Nor was it easy to perceive how modern warships, dependent as they were upon coal, could maintain a watch upon an enemy’s harbour for more than a couple of days. As early as 1893, the First Lord, Spencer, had thought ‘an effective blockade with steam power will be extremely difficult, if not impossible’, and The Times said the same publicly in 1895. Most interesting of all, Mahan had also voiced his doubts about it in a well-known article published in 1896.42 While it was to be a number of years before these developments caused an official alteration in Britain’s traditional policy of the close blockade, even by the end of the century it was evident that the matter was regarded with uncertainty and unease in some quarters. Furthermore, although at first the new inventions seemed only to restrict the freedom of action of battleships operating near hostile coasts, it was later recognized that there was no inherent reason why the mine and the torpedo could not be employed on the high seas also. Escorts for the battle-fleet could no doubt be provided as a counter-measure; yet the more these monstrously expensive capital ships (so vulnerable despite all their armour to one blow from such weapons) depended upon the protection of smaller warships, the more their very existence was called into question. Some far-sighted strategists quickly drew their own conclusions: Admiral Sir Percy Scott, who transformed gunnery standards in the Royal Navy, caused a minor furore by a letter to The Times of June 1914, in which he prophesied that submarines and aircraft would make the battleships worthless and pleaded instead for a naval policy based upon a large air force, a great fleet of submarines and many cruisers (for trade protection).43 His critics protested that the case was not proven and that Mahan’s principles would continue to be valid. To see the victory of such heretical theories at this time of the great power and efficiency of the British battle-fleet would have been too bitter a pill to swallow; but behind these protests might one not also detect the deeper fear that the supremacy of the submarine, torpedo-boat and aeroplane on the naval battlefield would presage the fall of Britain’s own maritime mastery? A battle-fleet, after all, could only be built by a limited number of states and took many years to create, giving the British time to take counter-measures; but any reasonably ambitious country could afford aircraft and submarines, thus assuring to itself at least local naval dominance.
If industrialization, changing forms of transport and innovations in technology, had made Britain’s traditional weapon of the blockade a much less useful one, these same processes had also caused her to be much more vulnerable to hostile naval pressures upon her own lines of communication with the outside world. The vast rise in her population, which had multiplied sixfold between 1750 and 1913, together with the industrialization of the country, had led to an enormous increase in the demand for foodstuffs and raw materials; rising prosperity accelerated this trend; the free-trade system did even more so, turning Britain into the centre of world trade, dependent as no other country was for its prosperity upon the import and export of commodities; and the coming of the steamship and refrigeration permitted foreign farmers to take advantage of the lack of tariffs and to flood the British market with their own products. The transformation was dramatic; as late as the 1830s over 90 per cent of the food consumed was also grown in Britain, but by 1913 55 per cent of the grain and 40 per cent of the meat consumed was imported. In raw materials the dependence upon imports was even more marked: seven eighths of these supplies came from abroad by 1913, including all of the cotton, four fifths of the wool, most of the non-phosphoric iron ore and almost all non-ferrous metals.44 By 1869, just as this development got under way, Malmesbury was stating nervously: ‘We cannot grow or supply half the food we want for our increased population.’45 The protection of the thousands of merchant ships carrying this immense commerce was seen to be a far more crucial task for the Royal Navy in any future conflict than it had been in the past. As Admiral Fisher put it in characteristically blunt fashion: ‘It’s not invasion we have to fear if our Navy’s beaten, it’s starvation.’ From an economic point of view, Britain was more susceptible to blockade than any other power on earth.
There was one further consequence of the industrialization of the western world which caused Britain’s position as a power to be relatively reduced: the organization and deployment of mass armies, following the Prussian model. Well before the nineteenth century, it is true, there had been occasions when large bodies of soldiers had been assembled for battle; but more often than not they had only been effective inside their own country, or for a short period of time, their assembly and deployment had taken ages, their uniforms were raggle-taggle, their weaponry assorted and their logistics primitive. The industrial revolution, with its accompanying rise in population, not only permitted still larger armies to be recruited but also provided the financial and material strength for them to be clothed, armed and fed for a very long time. In other words, as Ivan S. Bloch intuitively suggested in his book Modern Weapons and Modern War, future conflicts between the great powers were going to be endurance tests where the defensive would have the upper hand:
instead of a war fought out to the bitter end in a series of decisive battles, we shall have as a substitute a long period of continually increasing strain upon the resources of the combatants. The war, instead of being a hand-to-hand contest in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority, will become a kind of stalemate, in which neither army being able to get at the other, both armies will be maintained in opposition to each other, threatening each other, but never able to deliver a final and decisive attack.46
Despite the fact that the new railways now enabled generals to transfer troops at great speed right across a country, industrialization was paradoxically likely to see future wars turn out to be long drawn-out affairs of mass armies. All this made the small professional army which Britain possessed a nonentity. Previously, the landing of 30,000 or so troops at a chosen point in Europe was either very effective in itself or was at least of considerable assistance to an ally. Now, with an army which was smaller than Switzerland’s, and which was to a large extent locked up overseas, Britain’s ability to influence continental affairs through military pressure was negligible. If the British were to land their army on the German coast, Bismarck is reported to have quipped, he would call out the local police force and have it arrested!
This sharp decline in Britain’s military effectiveness did not escape observers inside the country. In 1869 Colonel Walker, well positioned as British military attaché at Berlin, shrewdly observed:
that we should ever again play the part of earlier days in great Continental wars is impossible, the magnitude of the disciplined and expensive forces of other nations, whose armies are supplied by conscription … precluded us from a participation in the numerical contest for supremacy.47
By the turn of the century, General Maurice too could sadly report that ‘It appears that despite the historic past of the British Army on the Continent the general impression among foreign officers is that literally we have no army at all.’
To reverse this decline, however, would have meant the introduction of some form of national conscription on the continental model, an undertaking which seemed to politicians and public alike not only expensive and unpopular but one which contravened basic political principles and traditions. A combination of genuine belief, political tactics and a regard for economy ensured that the existing ideas of what Liddell Hart later termed ‘the British way of warfare’ – naval actions and blockade, seizure of colonies, peripheral attacks on the continent – were to be preferred in any future conflict with a European enemy. And since this approximately coincided with a period in history (roughly 1879 to 1905) when a balance of power existed upon the continent, the need to reconsider this traditional policy was small. But what if that balance should ever be upset by the rise of one nation or a coalition which, besides appearing unfriendly in outlook towards Britain, threatened to dominate Europe and against which the military strength of the opposition was simply too weak? Colonial actions, blockade, small-scale landings, would be irrelevant here, yet to stand aside would probably be to permit the whole continent to fall into the hands of an unfriendly power, the most dangerous event in the world to all British statesmen aware of their country’s history and traditions. Although this contingency still seemed unlikely at the turn of the century, several British writers were pointing already to certain developments which made it less remote. The whole argument about a military commitment to Europe, upon the size of that commitment, and upon the consequences for Britain’s entire defence and foreign policy, lay just around the corner; and upon its outcome depended much of the future of the Royal Navy itself.