The British Empire – described by Ashley Jackson as ‘the world’s largest political entity, a powerful military and strategic alliance, and an economic bloc’ – could not help making enemies. Gibraltar was a key imperial fortress and its four foes in 1940 – France, Spain, Italy, Germany – had their own empires and their own imperial ambitions. Britons had been fighting Frenchmen and Spaniards for centuries and were now confronting Germans and Italians too.

A look at the map explains why the British were here, and why other empires wanted to drive them out. The peninsula of Gibraltar is at the key maritime choke point where two huge continental land masses almost meet and two great bodies of water do not quite mingle. This location, on what an eighteenth-century commentator called ‘the greatest Thoroughfare of Trade and Commerce in the World’, at the crossroads of traffic between Europe and Africa, between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, has given a very small spur of land great strategic significance in imperial power play.

The actual Rock of Gibraltar is a chunk of Jurassic limestone, folded by such tectonic violence that some geologists thought it might be upside down. It stands on the north side of a fissure probably carved over five million years ago by what is termed the Zanclean Deluge, when the western ocean poured through the gap between Europe and Africa to fill up the desiccated basin of the middle sea. The mouth formed by this cataclysm has a southern as well as a northern lip: in the ancient world the two promontories were known as the Pillars of Melkart to the Phoenicians, the Pillars of Herakles to the Greeks and Romans. In the latter story, the mythical hero and strongman Herakles, or Hercules, pulled Africa and Europe apart with his bare hands. In tearing open the Fretum Herculeum, the ‘Herculean Channel’, he squeezed up Mons Abyla with one fist and formed Mons Calpe with the other. Today we call these two headlands Ceuta and Gibraltar, and the turbulent channel between them the Strait of Gibraltar or el Estrecho de Gibraltar.

The Rock has seen the ebb and flow of many empires over thousands of human (and hominin) lifetimes. ‘Neanderthal Man’ should really be ‘Gibraltar Woman’, because the very first known skull of our human ancestor was found in Forbes Quarry in Gibraltar, eight years before another similar cranium was discovered in 1856 in Germany’s Neander Valley, which gained the honour of naming the Neanderthals. A rock engraving found in 2012 in Gorham’s Cave at the southern end of Gibraltar, with lines carefully scored into rock and cross-hatched, seems to prove the Neanderthals’ capacity for abstract thought. Gibraltar may have been the last European redoubt of Neanderthal hominins fleeing southward from the ice around forty thousand years ago.

The Phoenician and Roman name for the limestone peninsula was Calpe. The name ‘Gibraltar’ resulted from the Moorish conquest of Spain that began in AD 711. Landing there from Africa, the Berber chief Tarik ibn Zeyad called the prominent Rock after himself, Jebel-el-Tarik (Tarik’s Mountain). The Moors held Gibraltar for 750 years, but the twelfth-century Moorish castle that still stands on the northwest shoulder is all that now remains of their ‘City of Victory’. When the Spanish took the rocky outcrop back in the fifteenth century they hispanicised the place name to ‘Gibraltar’, though the earliest English seamen through the strait tacked closer to the Arabic version of the name, spelling it ‘Jerbolter’ or ‘Jubalterra’. George Macaulay Trevelyan considered that AD 711 was when

Gibraltar’s human history began, summarising thus:

That ‘jungle’ was evergreen oak, pine and Mediterranean scrub of wild olive, buckthorn and turpentine. The ‘beasts’ included wild boar, red deer, foxes, rabbits, snakes and lizards. Gibraltar’s ‘Barbary apes’ are actually tailless monkeys, Macaca sylvanus, introduced by humans from Morocco.* In the eighteenth century, macaques warred with the raptors who also nested on the Rock. The monkeys stole eagle eggs and the eagles feasted on baby monkey. Humans cut down most of the trees for firewood and fuel in their sieges, and goats and cattle scavenged the rest of the aromatic shrubbery.

British strategic interest in the Strait of Gibraltar began some nine hundred years after Tarik ibn Zeyad, with sea battles in the Anglo-Spanish War of the 1590s. In the seventeenth century, Barbary pirates out of Algiers and Tunis (some of them English renegades) played havoc with Mediterranean trade routes, threatening London’s supply of coffee. James I sent out a punitive expedition in 1620, and the Protector Oliver Cromwell considered seizing Gibraltar from Spain.

Actual taking of territory in the area began after the Restoration of King Charles II, when the nearby Atlantic port of Tangier came into English possession in the dowry of the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza on her marriage to Charles in 1661. English occupation of Moroccan soil was brief, although ‘TANGIER 1662–1680’ became the earliest ‘battle honour’ of the standing army, and the word ‘tangerine’ crept into the English language. The English abandoned the port of Tangier itself in 1685 – but not before the Admiralty had glimpsed the strategic potential of Gibraltar as the key to the Mediterranean.

In 1700, Carlos II, the last Habsburg king of Spain, died disabled, deranged and devoid of issue. The War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) followed over who was to inherit his global empire, a dynastic fight between two royal cousins, an Austrian Habsburg, Archduke Charles, and a French Bourbon, Philippe d’Anjou, who was backed by his grandfather, the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV of France. The prospect of France and Spain uniting as a Catholic superpower threatened Protestant England and Holland, so they joined an alliance supporting the Austrian claim.

The commander-in-chief of the combined Dutch and English forces in Europe was John Churchill, who was made the first Duke of Marlborough in 1702. Although the French and the Spanish had the largest land armies in Europe, Marlborough outmanoeuvred them to achieve four great victories in five years – Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet.

Early in 1704, the testy English admiral Sir George Rooke sailed his second task force into the Mediterranean. Rooke had reasons to be grumpy: his wife had just died, he was a martyr to gout and his mission was going wrong. Finding Cádiz too well defended to attack, Rooke decided to capture Gibraltar, which was manned by a tiny Spanish garrison.

On Friday 21 July 1704 (OS)† a squadron of sixteen English and six Dutch warships under Admiral Sir George Byng sailed into the bay and anchored in line abreast opposite Gibraltar’s western seafront defences. At the same time, nineteen hundred English and four hundred Dutch marines under Prince George of Hesse were landed on the sandy isthmus in the north. The prince summoned the Spanish governor, Don Diego de Salinas, to surrender. He defiantly declined to do so, although he had only a few score fighting men and several hundred civilian militia who were already beginning to melt away like the morning dew.

At five o’clock in the bright blue morning of Sunday 23 July Admiral Byng’s ships began bombarding the city’s fortifications, although the gunners often could not see through the voluminous white clouds of gunpowder smoke. Then Byng sent in two naval landing parties in longboats, rowing through a vile slick of effluent from the ships’ heads and the town’s sewers to storm the breached castle by the southern mole. The party under Captain William Jumper took the southern fortification and ran up the Union Jack; it is called Jumper’s Bastion to this day.

By Monday, the situation of the besieged defenders was untenable. Gibraltar was under marine musket fire from the north and naval bombardment from the west. Many Gibraltarian civilians had retreated to the Upper Rock, out of range of the shelling, while some wives and children fled to the Catholic shrine of Our Lady of Europa at the flatter southern end of the peninsula. There, in English accounts, the officers held their men back from rape and robbery, but according to the Spaniard Ignacio López de Ayala there was no such restraint, and Gibraltarians had to avenge their womenfolk by knifing English rapists and dropping their bodies down wells or sewers. The governor, Don Diego, was forced to capitulate and make terms.

Under these, there was to be no change in the religion or laws of Gibraltar. Those who swore allegiance to Charles III could stay, with the same privileges and rights as before. Only two dozen Gibraltarian families, some seventy people, chose to remain. About four thousand refugees left, decamping to San Roque nearby and other parts of Spain, led by priests who assured them that the French would soon drive the heretics out. The English looted all their Catholic churches save one, and despoiled their sacred shrines. The statue of Our Lady of Europa, which every passing Catholic ship dipped its colours to, was thrown unceremoniously into the surf, together with the beheaded baby Jesus. English imperialism of the day meant Protestantism and plunder.

The War of the Spanish Succession rolled on. In August, there was an all-day sea battle between the English and French fleets off Vélez-Málaga, the largest naval engagement of the war. Battleships and war galleys pounded each other into an exhausted stalemate; hundreds of sailors died before both fleets retreated.

Gibraltar had fallen to Anglo-Dutch forces and now the Mediterranean started to become a British lake. After previous raids on Spanish territory, the English ‘pirates’ usually went home. Not this time. The enclave on the Rock would grow into a gall on Andalusia: a citadel, a foreign colony, a nest of commerce and capitalism, a port of free trade. As Thackeray put it: ‘Gibraltar is the great British depot for smuggling goods into the Peninsula.’

Spain made ferocious assaults to take the place back in 1704 and 1705, but the defences, sometimes manned by Royal Marines, held.‡ The French won the War of the Spanish Succession in the sense that the Bourbon Philippe d’Anjou got the crown and became Su Majestad Felipe V, Rey Católica de España, but they also lost. The spoils of war were sorted out in the 1713–14 Treaties of Utrecht. Following the 1706–7 Acts of Union the now united ‘Kingdom of Great Britain’ legally acquired ‘the full and entire propriety of the Town and Castle of Gibraltar, together with the Port, Fortifications and Forts thereunto belonging …’

Article X of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Great Britain and Spain, signed in Utrecht on 13 July 1713, stated: ‘Her Britannic Majesty [Queen Anne], at the request of the Catholic King, does consent and agree, that no leave shall be given under any pretence whatsoever, either to Jews or Moors, to reside or have their dwelling in the said Town of Gibraltar …’ London would keep asking if this condition was being met and Gibraltar would keep demurring. The reality was that the garrison and fortress could not keep going without both Jews and Moors. They were under the protection of the Emperor of Fez and Morocco, who only allowed besieged Gibraltar to import fresh food, provisions and building materials like timber and bricks from the Barbary Shore on the proviso that the place be open to all his subjects. From 1712 to 1717, the Jews from Tetuán had a synagogue in what is now Gibraltar’s Bomb House Lane. A 1721 treaty with the emperor granted his subjects, ‘whether Moors or Jews’, exactly the same privileges in British dominions as those ‘granted to the English residing in Barbary’. The fact that this directly contradicted the Treaty of Utrecht was an anomaly that Gibraltar was happy to live with. Other dissidents escaping from intolerance also began gravitating to Gibraltar, ‘the asylum of people of all nations who expatriate themselves for their country’s good’, as the nineteenth-century traveller Richard Ford tartly remarked.

*

Secure on the territory it had seized, Britain could now open the door to the Mediterranean. Gibraltar, as the journalist Tommy Bowles quipped, was the hook on which the key hung. The Rock became the portal for the Royal Navy’s expansion of the British Empire eastwards through space and time: Gibraltar in 1704, Minorca in 1708, Malta in 1800, Corfu in 1814, Cyprus in 1878, and Egypt with the Suez Canal in 1882.

The American War of Independence, which began in 1775, was a military disaster for the British Empire. Among all the setbacks and surrenders, Gibraltar remained invincible, withstanding what is still called ‘the Great Siege’, actually its fourteenth, between 21 June 1779 and 3 February 1783. French and Spanish forces assailed the Rock for an incredible three years, seven months and twelve days, and the defending governor, General Eliott, proved an outstanding leader. ‘Stout old Eliott’ (as G. M. Trevelyan called him) inspired his garrison of 7500 men and 3000 civilians while holding off at least 35,000 French and Spanish soldiers, who attacked Gibraltar with fireships, bombardments and infantry.

Initially finding Gibraltar’s civilian engineers ‘indolent, drunken, disorderly and over-paid’, teetotal Eliott created a company of ‘soldier artificers’ drawn from willing volunteers in the Gibraltar garrison. These forefathers of the British army’s Royal Engineers built the King’s Bastion, a blunt arrowhead of a fortress jutting west into the Bay of Gibraltar, and during the siege, under their top NCO, the Cornish ex-miner Sergeant Major Henry Ince, dug tunnels through the limestone to shoot down on the enemy from halfway up Devil’s Tower bluff at the northern end of the Rock.

When peace came early in 1783 Governor Eliott was given the Order of the Bath and elevated to the peerage as first Baron Heathfield of Gibraltar. Seagulls now perch on the head of his noble bust that stands prominent in Gibraltar’s Alameda Gardens. Eliott had ensured that Spain did not become a French province nor the Mediterranean a French lake. Captain John Drinkwater’s non-fiction History of the Late Siege of Gibraltar, first published in 1785, went through four editions in five years and made its author a small fortune. Drinkwater returned to Gibraltar and started building the Garrison Library in 1793. (This was for British officers only: Gibraltarian civilians had to found their own Exchange and Commercial Library in 1817.)

*

In the years after the Great Siege, Gibraltar’s population swelled. The place became an entrepôt for legitimate trade and illicit smuggling as well as a byword for squalor, drunkenness and disease. ‘Yellow Jack’ and malaria raged intermittently. Ill-disciplined soldiers stupefied themselves with ‘blackstrap’ or other raw drink in the ninety or so grogshops crammed into the wynds, alleys and steep ‘ramps’ of the Upper Town. Corruption ruled. Governor O’Hara – ‘the Cock of the Rock’ – ignored public intoxication because he received a major cut of all alcohol sold.

The Duke of Kent (Queen Victoria’s father) began unpopular but much-needed reforms when he became governor in 1802, but the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, en route to Malta in April 1804, still recoiled from the stink of the drains, the ‘degraded’ Spaniards and Moorish ‘wretches’. (He did enjoy the yellow broom in flower and the ‘perfect Gothic Extravaganza’ of the stalactites in St Michael’s Cave, reminding him of the ‘caverns measureless to man’ he had already written about in ‘Kubla Khan’.) Lord Byron, spotted scowling in the Garrison Library by John Galt in 1809, found Gibraltar ‘the dirtiest and most detestable spot in existence’.

When Napoleon made his foolish decision to invade Spain, Gibraltar did very well out of it. In the Peninsular War of 1807–14, British and Portuguese forces under the Duke of Wellington eventually drove the French Grande Armée out, assisted by bandit armies of Spanish guerrilleros who ambushed French convoys, with all the atrocious cruelties that Francisco Goya depicted in Los Desastres de la Guerra. Genoese entrepreneurs fleeing the French armies set up shop in the British peninsula, bypassing Cádiz and trading with Spain’s disaffected American colonies. There was serious money to be made from prize ships captured in naval warfare, and work in the Royal Navy dockyards.

Some of Admiral Horatio Nelson’s fleet resupplied at Gibraltar before sailing out to do battle with the Napoleonic navy off the Spanish coast on 21 October 1805. His last signal read ‘Engage the enemy more closely’ as he led his twenty-seven ships head on against thirty-three French and Spanish vessels off Cape Trafalgar. As he walked on the quarterdeck of Victory in the pell-mell battle, one-eyed, one-armed Nelson was shot by a sniper firing down from the mizzen-top of the French ship Redoubtable grappled alongside. He died painfully about three hours later, saying: ‘Thank God, I have done my duty.’ His grieving crew transported his corpse back to Rosia Bay in Gibraltar in a barrel of Spanish brandy. Nelson’s final triumph at Trafalgar was a world scoop for the Gibraltar Chronicle, and marked the start of his posthumous celebrity.§

In Victorian and Edwardian days Gibraltar became well known as ‘the Rock’. Other nicknames – the Gate, the Key, the Lock, the Keeper, the Watchdog, the Guardian, the Sentinel of the Mediterranean – marked it as a pillar of empire. Its profile appeared on colourful tea-towels, tin trays and china plates. Many troopships called in at Gibraltar on their way to and from imperial wars. Between 1815 and 1904, the British army took part in thirty-three overseas campaigns, fighting Abyssinians and Afghans, Boers and Burmese, Ceylonese and Chinese, violently pacifying Maoris, Tibetans and Zulus. A hundred Gibraltarian muleteers earned the Anglo-Egyptian medal with ‘Suakin 1885’ clasp for their work as porters of military equipment in the fight against Sudanese Dervishes.

In 1855, the dauntless Jamaican-born sutler Mary Seacole was surprised to hear her name called out in the marketplace in Gibraltar. ‘Why, bless my soul, old fellow, if this is not our good old Mother Seacole!’ She turned to find two invalided officers from the 48th Regiment of Foot who had often been fed at her house in Kingston in the Caribbean, now hard to recognise beneath the thick beards they had grown in the Crimean War. Mrs Seacole was en route to the front in order to set up the British Hotel near Balaclava, ‘a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers’. In her next stopover in Malta, a British doctor would give her an introduction to Florence Nightingale at Scutari.

Mark Twain arrived in a party of North American tourists on board SS Quaker City in 1867 and described the Rock in chapter 7 of The Innocents Abroad: ‘everywhere you choose to look, Gibraltar is clad with masonry and bristling with guns’.

Gibraltar saw every kind of sea-going vessel because by the end of the nineteenth century Britannia did indeed rule the waves. The Royal Navy – ‘the shield of Empire’ to popular newspapers – was then the world’s largest; British merchant shipping carried 60 per cent of world trade; and Gibraltar became an important coaling station for steamships whose engineered propulsion meant they could ignore the peninsula’s peculiar winds that caused problems in the age of sail. By the 1880s, between fifteen and twenty vessels a day were bunkering in Gibraltar, refuelled by Maltese coalheavers. Common names in Gibraltar like Azzopardi, Borg, Caruana, Mifsud and Zammit attest to Maltese ancestry.

The Suez Canal opened at the end of 1869 and was a boon to the British. By Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee year, 1887, the British India Steam Navigation Company (BI) and the Pacific and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) were among the shipping lines carrying thousands of passengers along ‘all-red routes’, named for the colour that marked British territories on the map of the world. The British Empire covered nine million square miles and contained over 300 million people. One key British-controlled all-red route was broken into passages of roughly a thousand nautical miles each: Portsmouth to Gibraltar; Gibraltar to Malta; Malta to Port Said, and then, via the Suez Canal which Prime Minister Anthony Eden once described as ‘the swing door of the British Empire’, another thousand nautical miles to Aden. From there, the itinerary either dropped south towards British East Africa and Cape Colony in South Africa or led east towards India, Ceylon, Burma, and the trading ports of Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as the white settler dominions of Australasia. Travellers on this route always looked out for the Rock.

Entrepreneurs took advantage of the new opportunities and markets that easier travel opened up. Few were as enterprising as the Hindu merchants from the city of Hyderabad, ninety miles northeast of Karachi in Sind, then in British India and now part of Pakistan. These adaptable bania saw the whole world as their market. Family firms sent out hawker-scouts on long-distance voyages from Bombay to find niches along the shipping routes where small businesses could establish a foothold, and then sent stock and staff to make them flourish in places like Aden, Port Said, Alexandria, Cyprus, Malta and, of course, Gibraltar.

By March 1938 there were 129 British Indians living on the Rock, running twenty-six shops along Main Street. It is possible that the very first Sindwork shop opened in Waterport Street as far back as the 1860s. Other Hyderabad family firms such as D. Chellaram, J. T. Chandia and Pohoomull Brothers followed in the 1870s and 1880s, selling silks, shawls, lace, oriental curios and brass and silver knick-knacks to tourists. In 1916, Bulchand & Sons and Khemchand & Sons were the first ‘Indian Bazaar and Curio Stores’ to join the Gibraltar Chamber of Commerce. But by then, the merchants’ legal status had changed. From the beginning of the twentieth century, as British subjects not born in Gibraltar but only allowed to reside there, the Indians were deemed ‘Statutory Aliens’ and suffered the same sort of prejudices here as Jews did elsewhere. Stephen Constantine has pointed out that ‘Statutory Alien’ was the lawyerly term used to soften the frankly racist Aliens Order Extension Order of June 1900 which allowed the governor to expel any person judged ‘undesirable’. Why was this happening? As the Rock was growing in naval and military importance, Whitehall was on the lookout for possible threats to that development. ‘We take it as an admitted principle’, said an 1889 British government report, ‘that no person, whether British subject or an alien, has an absolute right to enter or remain in the Fortress of Gibraltar contrary to the wishes and commands of the Crown and its Officers.’

*

The pound sterling became legal tender in Gibraltar on 1 October 1898, replacing Spanish coinage; the money that HM Government invested is further evidence of the strategic importance of the Rock. Between 1895 and 1905, a great new harbour and dockyard was constructed, covering over three hundred acres of Gibraltar Bay. There were three new moles, with piers and moorings, as well as three graving docks for the Royal Navy’s biggest battleships, with cranes, workshops and forges. It was pointed out that this £11,000,000 investment (approximately £1.2 billion today) was vulnerable to hostile shelling from the hills on the Spanish mainland, but the objection was confidently overruled. As a concession, the oil tanks were moved to the eastern side of the Rock and the thousand-yard Admiralty Tunnel was cut straight through the limestone to link Sandy Bay on the east side of the peninsula to the works.

Gibraltar is parched in summer, so between 1898 and 1928 six huge water reservoirs were also carved inside the limestone rock. On the eastern slope of scree breccia and windblown dunes above Sandy Bay they constructed a ‘water catchment area’ covering fourteen acres. Timber piles driven deep into the steep slope held a wooden framework to which hundreds of sheets of galvanised corrugated iron were screwed. (When ants ate the timber, they imported British Empire teak.) Fresh rainwater could then run down the sheets, whitened with slaked lime, into a channel feeding the giant tanks inside. The four reservoirs holding five million gallons of water were impressive enough for King George V and Queen Mary to pay them a dutiful visit on 30 January 1912, returning from the Coronation Durbar in India.

Bad drains had plagued Gibraltar: improving its public health raised its status. An attempt at moral cleansing, also, followed the Great War (in which seventy-six Gibraltarians joined the British armed forces, half a dozen died on active service and some four hundred patrolled the Rock in the Gibraltar Volunteer Corps). In January 1922, Governor Smith-Dorrien expelled over a hundred Spanish prostitutes from Serruya’s Lane (a name whitewashed to New Passage in modern Gibraltar). The women were pushed across the Spanish border to La Línea, to ply their trade in the brothels on Calle Gibraltar or ‘Gib Street’.

When the British Empire pioneered telecommunications, Gibraltar was at the heart of it. By 1870, Birmingham could communicate with Bombay by telegraph, in messages pulsed in Morse code along undersea trunk lines of copper wires sheathed in gutta percha. The cable ran from Cornwall to Portugal and then onwards via the Rock of Gibraltar through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean. By 1887, the year after Gibraltar got its first telephone exchange, the Rock was one of sixty-four stations along the Eastern Telegraph’s 22,400-mile cable network.

In December 1901, Guglielmo Marconi bounced the first radio signal (three dots: ‘S’ in Morse code) 1700 miles over the Atlantic, from Poldhu in Cornwall to Signal Hill in Newfoundland. By 1903, a wireless-equipped warship could steam from Portsmouth to Gibraltar receiving Poldhu transmissions all the way. In 1906, the Admiralty set up Morse radio transmitters with a thousand-mile range at Gibraltar, Portsmouth and Cleethorpes. On the Rock, the Royal Navy took over the ship monitoring and signal station of Lloyd’s Register of Shipping at Windmill Hill, just north of Europa Point, four hundred feet above sea level. The transmitters were converted to high power in 1909, so the Admiralty in London could directly control the fleet at sea.

*

The exercise of sea power, as the narrative historian Barbara Tuchman pointed out, can be as unconscious an activity as breathing oxygen or speaking prose. It took an American naval officer, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, to formulate the process. The impact of his classic book, The Influence of Sea Power on History 1660–1783, published in 1890, was enormous in his day. The book stated the obvious – who masters the sea commands the stage – but said it so persuasively that it affected global geopolitics. ‘In isolating and describing a great historical fact,’ Tuchman observed, ‘[Mahan] himself made history.’

Admiral Mahan’s big idea galvanised imperialism. It boosted the USA’s turn to empire in the 1890s, and provided the rationale behind the annexation of Hawaii, the development of the Panama Canal and the seizure of Cuba and the Philippines in the 1898 Spanish-American War. ‘Take up the White Man’s burden –’, exhorted the imperialist Rudyard Kipling in a poem for the Americans soon after,

And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better,

The hate of those ye guard –

The Influence of Sea Power on History was also avidly studied in East Asia. Imperial Japan built a powerful fleet to strike at Imperial Russia in 1904. Although China was occupied and fragmented, Chinese nationalists like Sun Yat Sen dreamed of a maritime strategy for the future, only now being achieved in the twenty-first century with China’s creation of a ‘blue water’ fleet for the People’s Liberation Army (Navy) and huge new island bases in the South China Sea. ‘Seapower is the lifeline of China’s market economy,’ wrote a Chinese academic in an article on Mahan in 2011, and President Xi Jinping has pledged to make China a global naval power.

In the nineteenth century, Imperial Britain was mad for Mahan because the admiral flattered British pride in their maritime empire. In 1893, Mahan dined with Queen Victoria and the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, and he was awarded honorary degrees by both Oxford and Cambridge in the same week. ‘Command of the sea is everything,’ young Winston Churchill told his mother in 1896.

Early in the book, Captain Mahan pointed out the importance of the seizure of Gibraltar in 1704. The severing of Spain’s Atlantic naval base at Cádiz in the west from its Mediterranean naval base at Cartagena in the east effectively crippled Spanish sea power. ‘It is a bridle in the mouth of Spain and Barbary,’ Richard Ford had observed of Gibraltar fifty years before Mahan.

At the end of the nineteenth century, however, a new power was rising. Imperial Germany emerged in 1871 from the unification of twenty-seven German-speaking territories as a vigorous industrial prodigy under its Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. But when the mentally unstable Wilhelm II unexpectedly became Kaiser in 1888 he wanted to run things his own impetuous way, especially abroad. Captain Mahan’s ideas inspired Wilhelm to think globally: he was fascinated by the growth of the United States and Japan, and coined ‘die gelbe Gefahr’, ‘the yellow peril’, a racist term for the Chinese. A grandson of Queen Victoria, the big-moustached Kaiser wanted to emulate Britain by having a large navy and lots of faraway colonies in the Pacific and Africa. Wilhelm II ordered copies of Mahan’s book for every ship in the German fleet, and started building three dozen battleships. In 1906, Britain produced HMS Dreadnought, the new ‘all big gun’ battleship armed with ten twelve-inch guns and fast turbine engines, starting ‘the dreadnought race’ for giant battleships.

*

A dispute over the Strait of Gibraltar had nearly ignited the Great War of 1914–18 ten years earlier. Germany wanted a colony on the shores of the Mediterranean and objected strongly to France being given a free hand in Morocco, seeing it as a conspiracy by existing members of the imperial club to block its own ambitions there. It was as though the Italians and the British had agreed that the French could put their towels on all the Moroccan loungers, which the Germans hoped would be their ‘place in the sun’.

At the end of March 1905, Kaiser Wilhelm II made an inflammatory speech in Tangier in favour of Moroccan independence, and Germany threatened war against France. No one wanted another Franco-Prussian War like that of 1870–1 when Paris was besieged and so much blood was shed. At the beginning of 1906, twelve nations gathered in the south of Spain for a three-month peace conference at Algeciras, actually just ‘a milestone on the road to Armageddon’, as Winston Churchill later remarked.

The delegates all met in the brand new, British-designed-and-owned Reina Cristina Hotel in Algeciras, looking across to the leonine silhouette of Gibraltar. In the bay in between, the great, grey warships of the Royal Navy’s Atlantic and Mediterranean Fleets lay at anchor. As Nelson’s old dictum put it: ‘A fleet of British ships of war are the greatest negotiators in Europe.’ Representatives of the future ‘Entente Alliance’ of France, Britain, Russia, the United States and their supporters (which included Spain and Italy) squared up to diplomats from the future ‘Central Powers’ of Germany and Austro-Hungary. The Allies won. After US President Teddy Roosevelt leaned on him, the German emperor backed down; the Sultanate of Morocco would henceforth be policed and ‘protected’ by France and Spain.

In March 1912, France established a protectorate over the whole of Morocco, conceding to Spain in November of that year a small northern coastal strip, ‘the bone of the Moroccan cutlet’, henceforth known as Spanish Morocco. In 1923, British diplomats ensured that Tangier became an ‘international zone’ run by a committee drawn from six nations – Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain – so no single foreign power could plant its guns at the mouth of the Mediterranean and threaten the Strait of Gibraltar.

* The Mediterranean ‘Barbary Coast’ stretches west from Egypt to the Atlantic. The Arabs conquering North Africa called the people who lived in the Maghreb before them ‘Berbers’, following the Roman name ‘barbari’, barbarians. ‘Barbary apes’ and ‘Barbary steeds’ are essentially Moroccan.

† The Old Style (OS) Julian calendar, used in England until 1752, was eleven days earlier than the New Style (NS) Gregorian calendar used on the continent. The Royal Navy at sea tended to follow the Old Style of home, whereas the British army, in land wars abroad, used New Style to conform with local allies. Thus 21 July 1704 (OS) was also 1 August (NS). Whichever date you prefer, it was summer, and searingly hot.

‡ Since 1827 the Royal Marines’ insignia has included GIBRALTAR as their sole battle honour above the globe and laurel and the motto per mare pre terram, by sea and by land. For the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Corps in October 2014, Gibraltar gave a chunk of the Rock to stand as a memorial near the Royal Marines’ main training base at Lympstone in Devon.

§ A Miss Mdingane, a school teacher in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, gave a small boy called Rolihlahla the Christian name ‘Nelson’ on his first day of school in 1923. Perhaps she foresaw that young Nelson Mandela would become a heroic leader (see http://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/names).

1922 also saw the publication of Ulysses by James Joyce, a book which ends with Molly Bloom, born Marion Tweedy in Gibraltar, remembering the fig trees in the Alameda Gardens ‘and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes’, and under the Moorish wall the lingering memory of an erotic kiss.