Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires, and the Conflict that Made the Modern World
Andrew Lambert. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. 399 pp. Notes. Bibilo. Index. Images. Maps. $30.
Few subjects are more hotly debated by naval officers, policy makers, and historians than the strategic implications and definition of sea power, a concept first developed by the U.S. naval officer and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan in his pioneering work The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783. Mahan proposed to examine European and U.S. history through the lens of sea power, which embraces “in its broad sweep all that tends to make a people great upon the sea or by the sea.” Of utmost importance is the idea that the naval strategy essential to the successful exercise of sea power must function in peacetime as well as war. In the words of an unnamed French author quoted by Mahan, “it may gain its most decisive victories by occupying in a country, either by purchase or treaty, excellent positions which would perhaps hardly be got by war.” Considering this in terms of Mahan’s broad sweep, 130 years on we can take this to include not only territorial rights, but also other diplomatic and commercial interests.
In Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires, and the Conflict that Made the Modern World, Andrew Lambert, Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, seeks to both build on and overturn Mahan’s concept of sea power. One aim is to examine “the nature and consequences of seapower culture and identity through a collective analysis of the five seapower great powers, Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic and Britain,” which hints at an intriguing amplification of Mahan’s broad sweep. But he also writes that “The central argument of this book is that Mahan’s phrase ‘sea power’ . . . shifts the meaning of the original Greek word from identity to strategy.”
Lambert’s seapower is not to be confused with sea power, the distinct meanings of which he details in a glossary. Seapower is, in part, “an identity consciously created by medium-sized powers attempting to exploit the asymmetric strategic and economic advantages of maritime power.” Sea power, on the other hand, Lambert takes to be “the strategic advantage gained by dominating the oceans with superior naval force. The basic definition was set out by Alfred T. Mahan.” Changing the meaning of an established term of art by making one word out of two is a bold move, especially when the essential premise is wrong.
Mahan did define sea power in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, but not the way Lambert says. Nor did he choose the term for the reasons Lambert claims. “Mahan split seapower, derived from the Greek thalassokratia, into a phrase to increase the impact of his thesis. In the process he changed its meaning,” he declares. “Mahan’s new phrase was restricted to the strategic use of the sea by any state with enough men, money and harbours to build a navy, a list that included more continental hegemons than cultural seapowers.” But we have no indication that Mahan was talking about thalassokratia. In a letter to his publisher’s son, Mahan explained that he chose the term sea power “to compel attention . . . marrying a Teutonic word to one of Latin origin, but I deliberately discarded the adjective, ‘maritime,’ being too smooth to arrest men’s attention or stick in their minds.” Far from restricting his interpretation of sea power to strategy or any one thing, Mahan chose the term “to express . . . at once an abstract conception and a concrete fact.”
Moreover, the Greek word thalassokratia does not mean “sea power,” but mastery, sovereignty, or rule over the sea. When translators use the term “sea power,” the Greek word they are translating is often nautikon. This error might seem trivial, but in Lambert’s hands it has bigger implications. Quoting Herodotus on “the first Greek known to us who planned to have the mastery of the sea,” he offers this gloss: “In this passage Herodotus was the first, but certainly not the last, to conflate the possession of a large navy with being a seapower.” To make his case, Lambert seems to be saying that Herodotus doesn’t understand Greek and Mahan misdefined a term that for all intents and purposes he invented.
Setting aside the problems of language, Lambert’s main conceptual argument is that seapower is “the cultural core of a relatively weak state that makes the maritime dimension central to its identity, and seeks to achieve asymmetric influence” in order to become a great power. It is an identity that a handful of states have consciously adopted “by political action and public works, including statues and palaces, shipsheds and dockyards, naval demonstrations and festivals, subsidized artistic and literary output,” and other things that distinguish them from all other countries.
The idea that seapower states’ reliance on the sea is found not just in their ships and strategies, but also in their governance, art, and literature, is an attractive one. Lambert marshals a host of promising references in support. Unfortunately, his handling of them is erratic. Early on, he writes “The synergy between inclusive politics and seapower is critical. Progressive political ideologies, spread by sea as part of the trading network, have always been a primary weapon in the arsenal of seapower…. The ideas that shaped these states were essentially consistent. Both Athens and Carthage drew heavily on Phoenician precursors.” Yet his notion of “inclusive” embraces oligarchies, which are exclusive by definition. Ignoring Aristotle’s observation that “The Carthaginian constitution resembles the Spartan and Cretan: all three are like one another, but unlike any others,” he emphasizes the Carthaginians’ awareness of “their connection with other seapowers . . . not least Athens.” (This raises the question of what other seapowers he could be talking about, since he allows for only five.)
A particular frustration is that Lambert sends confusing messages about the benefits of seapower and inclusive government. He clearly believes that seapower is preferable to continental or military power, and joins a number of writers who inflate the virtues of seafarers over the wretched of the earth. Mesopotamia and Egypt, he tells us, were “constrained regions” whose geography “fueled a sense of exceptionalism and superiority”—as though his seapowers never saw themselves as exceptional and superior. And without a hint of irony, he asserts that “seafaring and the spirit of enquiry were commonly paired characteristics, while land-bound minds were restricted to pedestrian prospects and military solutions.” Such claims disregard the modest attainments of landlubbers like agriculture, architecture and civil engineering, astronomy, art, literature, law, metallurgy, mathematics, games, and so on.
His handling of art and other cultural manifestations of seapower, while a promising approach, is particularly weak in execution. Although he presents many facts, he gives them little context. For example, he explains that the Romans “read Athenian texts that treated shipsheds as political and cultural icons,” but he gives no indication of what these texts are or what the consequences were for Roman policy or culture, except to say that they didn’t build their own. While he affirms that Peter the Great dug the canals of St. Petersburg in emulation of Venice and Amsterdam, he ignores the fact that the topography of St. Petersburg make canals a logical and viable choice. He also make no effort to situate the location of St. Petersburg in the region’s longer history. The city’s Neva River had been a point of entry into Russia’s extensive river network connecting the Baltic and Black Seas since at least the ninth century. Later on, he notes that “when Russia threatened to replace France as the new Rome…George III, ruler of the last great seapower state, acquired a rare print of the St Petersburg Main Admiralty,” which seems important, but again he relates the fact without context.
It works against his thesis that none of the fifteen points in the appendix, “Cultural Seapowers: A Conceptual Aide-Mémoire,” has anything to say about art, architecture, literature, or maritime law, the last of which has been a key marker of maritime identity for centuries and is often reflected in both art and literature. Thus, in his chapter on the Dutch Republic, Hugo Grotius, author of Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), a cornerstone of modern maritime law, goes unmentioned, while the following chapter, on “Sea States and Overseas Empires”—which deals with ancient Rhodes, medieval Genoa, and early modern Portugal—doesn’t reference The Lusiads of Luís Vaz de Camões, “the Homer of Portugal.”
The weakness in the coverage of artistic culture becomes most apparent in “England: The Last Seapower,” which looks at the 200-year rise of English seapower, the start of which Lambert dates to the 1430s, when “Englishmen debated exchanging the continental ambitions of the Hundred Years War for a seapower model.” This unexamined “debate” refers to the publication of The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, which you only learn from an endnote. But Lambert offers no background for the writing of The Libelle, nor does he explain that it became part of a public discourse on English maritime policy only with its republication by Richard Hakluyt at the end of the sixteenth century.
Given that Seapower States is avowedly about “maritime culture,” it is remarkable that the only thing Lambert has to say about Hakluyt here is that “What [Sir Francis] Drake did at sea Richard Hakluyt and Walter Raleigh reinforced from the library, shaping a history and mythology of seapower that consciously connected English success with precursor states.” His failure to engage with the substance of The Libelle, much less Hakluyt’s voluminous The Principall Navigations—or John Dryden’s historical poem about the Second Anglo-Dutch War, Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders; or Jane Austen’s novels; or any other text—is typical of his overall approach. While Lambert quotes the occasional primary source, he relies heavily on secondary ones.
The end of British sea power remains a significant preoccupation among theorists and historians of British naval power. But the cause is clear enough to Lambert: “Ultimately, the British seapower state would be destroyed by the United States of America,” which forced Britain to divest itself of overseas holdings to pay for its involvement in two world wars, and weakened its rival by forcing acceptance of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. But Lambert’s is an antiquated picture of the British Empire. Telescoping the events of a very long nineteenth century, he writes that “After the American Revolution [1776–83], Britain granted local self-government to colonies of settlement in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.” These events occurred in 1901, 1867, 1907, and 1934, respectively. British colonies in Ireland, the rest of the Americas, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, or China go unmentioned. In view of his silence about Britain’s involvement in the slave trade; the deportation of Levellers, the poor, criminals, and others; impressment; and other evidence that the “core values” of maritime states are no better than anyone else’s, this is hardly surprising.
Some of the problems of Seapower States result from the fact that Yale University Press made no apparent effort to edit the book. It is plagued by sometimes rambling narrative, repetition, and untamed prose. Such editorial inattention by a leading academic press is a disservice to authors and readers both. As a result, in assessing Lambert’s case for the nature of seapower, we are unfortunately left with a Scottish law verdict: “not proven.”
What about the consequences of seapower? Reprising his view of the innate superiority of sea over land, Lambert concludes that “Seapower still matters because the great fault lines of global politics consistently return to the contrasting nature of land and sea states … [The] tension between stasis and progress, closed minds and open seas, is the single greatest dynamic in human history…. The future has always belonged to seapower, but that identity remains a question of choice.” Even if he had made a more compelling case for the importance of seapower culture and identity, it is not clear that it would have any relevance to contemporary notions of sea power, whether one word or two.
With the 1890 publication of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783, Mahan set in amber the genius of the age of sail. Although it has never been out of print, as with many historical works that become touchstones for contemporary debate, it has been an awkward fit ever since. As one historian has noted, the book appeared “at the very time when new instruments of the Industrial Revolution were beginning to erode principles and theories upon which his doctrines were based.” With submarines, destroyers, aircraft carriers, and other previously unimaginable ship types sliding down the ways within a quarter century of its publication, the book seems to have had little tactical relevance. In the years since World War II, the advent of ballistic submarines, cruise missiles, stealth ships, drones, and cyberwarfare have rendered it even less relevant, as have decolonization, the rise of multilateral institutions and non-state actors, and the depletion of fish stocks worldwide due to illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. All of these have changed the way that people and their governments think about the sea and sea power.
But ours is not the only period that has seen such sweeping changes. The origins of and expectations for seapower in Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and Great Britain developed in vastly different contexts that Lambert does not consider, and their trajectories followed completely different arcs. His certitude about what differentiates a sea power from a sea state from a continental power wielding sea power is overambitious and, because he glosses over differences in search of similarities, it is unhelpful. While history has a lot to teach us about maritime and naval thinking, history is most useful as a set of examples against which to test our assumptions rather than as a library of patterns into which we can fix complex phenomena to make them appear more coherent. As Shakespeare wrote at the dawn of English sea power, “that way madness lies.”
