Abstract
Richard Harding’s new volume is certainly the most important single contribution to understanding the field of modern naval history in recent years. With numerous reference notes and a full bibliography that together take up nearly half the volume, Harding succinctly describes and analyses the main trends, debates, and issues within this sub-field of the broader subject of maritime history. In the process, he notes some the shared topics within the broader field, while effectively pointing out their relevance on the economic, diplomatic, political, social, and cultural aspects. In trying to explaining how naval history has now become an amorphous, ambiguous, dynamic sub-discipline, deeply connected to other scholarly endeavours, Harding found ‘that any attempt to define its limits, asserts its essentials or make claims for its contributions to wider bodies of scholarship is immediately contested by other scholars who survey the same field. Similarly, picking out the individual works that make up the most significant contributions brings forth dissension and alternatives’ (p. xi). Despite those challenges, Harding has done excellent work in describing the broad range of recent scholarship and identifying the key issues that new works have raised, while pointing out representative examples of these scholarly contributions.
Harding’s discussion of naval history is centered around three themes: (1) sea power and international relations, exploring the support that naval history has provided to policy and diplomacy in international relations; (2) politics and government, studies dealing with navies as one of the great departments of a nation-state; and (3) navies and societies, a topic that ranges from the experiences of individuals within a particular naval culture to the development of complex social organizations.
The use of these three themes reflects a developing use of the concept, first put forward in the Navy Records Society’s volume, British Naval Documents 1204–1960 (1993) and continued with increasing nuance in A Naval History of Britain (1997, 2004), N. A. M. Rodger’s three-volume work in progress. Harding’s use of this tripartite division is interesting it itself as a further analytical development of how to approach the complex topic of naval history and how one can use it to organize a single volume in terms of the multiple levels of understanding needed to analyse and to explain navies. Using a very broad wide understanding of these three themes, Harding notes how naval history has made great strides in shaking off the perception of its being a narrow, nationalistic, and technical study and how it has been moving more effectively toward becoming a more fruitful and diverse intellectual understanding of the historical development of navies. Nevertheless, he points out that there are difficulties when naval history meets with the still enduring prejudice that any study touching on war and violence is mere nationalistic propaganda and the glorification of aggression, inappropriate for the civilized scholar to contemplate. Harding’s observation on this matter remains valid, but it remains a pity that those who take such prejudiced views do not discriminate between historical works of different quality and approach. Hopefully, the continued production of carefully researched studies, based on a broader understanding that comes through a widening range of interdisciplinary approaches, will eventually overcome prejudice against the entire subject.
In examining his first theme, sea power and international relations, Harding provides an overview of historical scholarship on the Napoleonic wars to the present. He points out that this is the approach that first began to develop in the late nineteenth century and marked the beginning of the modern study of naval history. The main thrust of the research and writing has focused on the operations of navies and the associated technologies, strategies, and tactics involved. This approach has developed a vast literature that shows no sign of declining. The fundamental idea behind this approach was that it informs contemporary decision-making and provides a narrative that provides legitimacy and understanding for public support and funding for the vast governmental expenditure involved. Harding questions the efficacy of this approach and wonders if the producers of naval history of this genre are still as well connected and effective as they once were with their intended audiences. He notes that the situation will vary from country to county, but he sees a general weakening of this connection as historians have focused too much on the navies in the United States and Britain and have overly concentrated their work on battles in history as the ultimate expression of naval power. The situation is very different today than it was a century ago, when the public held a deep belief in naval power. Historians today have been losing out to the social scientists in their ability to use their insights to influence contemporary policy, while they have concentrated their efforts on issues that are largely remote from the focus of current policy makers. Under this rubric, Harding concludes that in our contemporary world, historians are needed more to provide a broader understanding of the roles of sea power in a globalized world for lawmakers and the general public rather than for them to provide operational lessons and principles of naval power for professionals. Yet, those who labor in the vineyards of professional military education would emphasize that Harding’s point should not be taken to exclude the needs of professionals.
In examining the second theme that encompasses ‘navies, politics, and government’, Harding produces an overview of scholarship since the nineteenth century on the period 1500 to 1789. This period in historical scholarship has seen many new historical approaches that are providing the basis for a critique of the late nineteenth-century ideas of Alfred Thayer Mahan in his assumptions about the immutable principles of naval warfare and the economic dependency of Europe on maritime trade. A reader may be frustrated to find that this theme is so limited in chronological terms, omitting the period from the French Revolution to the present. Providing some explanation, Harding notes that later historians have this theme as an initial entry point to show the growth of the global economy. In this way, his discussion merges with the subject of globalization as he makes the transition to his third theme in a new chapter on navies and societies.
In the third chapter, Harding sketches out the widening research agenda for naval historians; with the broad multi-dimensional meaning of globalization leading first to the connection of navies to maritime economies and industrial revolution in the context of the engines of growth. Further, he discusses science, technology, and technological determinism in naval history. The need to understand navies as complex organizations in terms of structures, systems, and expertise. Beyond this, he points to the more established areas of study in social history that include manpower, health and medicine, the sailor’s life at sea and ashore, as well as newer themes such as the cultural impact of navies.
Harding has started this investigation with the assumption that naval historians had become detached from its audience. He concluded that while there was some truth in this observation, it is much less than he initially imagined. While some naval history reflects, on one hand, popular war literature, and on the other, the use of history in the education of naval professionals, the field has developed much further in intellectual terms. One can certainly agree with Richard Harding that the best prospect for the future development of the field of naval history is not only for it to continue the multidisciplinary approaches that have already begun to develop, but to continue to broaden out beyond national boundaries with comparative studies from multiple archival source materials in multiple languages.