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Anglo-French Naval Rivalry, 1840-1870, by C. I. Hamilton; pp. xiii + 359. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, £40.00, $59.00. Review by Fredric P. Smoler, Victorian Studies Vol. 38, No. 2, Winter 1995, pp. 315-17 Between 1840 and 1870 Britain and France engaged in a contest eerily evocative of U.S.-Soviet military competition during the Cold War, with repeated war scares fueling what C. I. Hamilton very plausibly argues was history's first true arms race. Hamilton's ideal-typical arms race has prerequisites. Most strikingly, its conditions are a period of rapid and militarily-decisive technical innovation, unprecedented wealth, a shared conception of strategic bipolarity, and an expanded and engaged political class. The Anglo-French naval race was thus the first possible arms race.
A second striking irony is that the remarkable French successes in the naval race-Hamilton seems persuaded that in the late 1850s and early 1860s the Second Empire came very close to matching the Royal Navy in European waters, and could conceivably have invaded successfully-had only perverse consequences for French national security, which they indeed fatally compromised. The money squandered on an irrelevant if state-of-the-an navy could have bolstered the Imperial army the Prussians rolled over in 1870, while the overseas territory the navy was intended to defend, and the imperial adventures it made possible, both dispersed scarce military resources as Prussia advanced, and alienated possible allies. A third irony, of course, is that two of the most advanced European states began a naval race just as the potency of conventional naval, as opposed to military, force had begun a long and probably permanent decline. All of this underscores one of Hamilton's implicit, unfashionable, and indisputable points: the perceptions of contemporaries are often a perfectly worthless guide to the broad significance of their experience. One of the remarkable things about this book is its breadth: it is a sophisticated work of comparative administrative, social and technological history, with an easy grasp of the diplomatic and political history which is inextricable from its subject. Hamilton also makes an intriguing intervention in an arcane branch of intellectual history, a sub-discipline which might be called the history of strategic thought: he demonstrates that under the stress of radical technical change, admiralties lost sight of the essential difference between naval and military power. The mid-nineteenth-century navies were in a period of unprecedented technical transformation: admirals equipped with the centuries-old and extremely stable technology of the square-rigged and wooden-hulled warship confronted a series of revolutionary and finally irresistible innovations, chiefly steam-propulsion (first the paddle wheel, then the screw), shell-firing guns, iron hulls and armor plate. These multiple transformations seemed to have extraordinarily destabilizing implications for the European balance of power, and have since spawned a considerable technical literature and a body of durable half-truths; Hamilton is a graceful guide through both. The Anglo-French naval race was also the period in which the Royal Navy transcended the form it had taken during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and perfected in the victory over Napoleonic France-a shape it retained in popular and professional imagination for a good deal longer-and became recognizably the institution which fought both twentieth-century World Wars. This very undramatic period of the Royal Navy's history remains generally obscure, and Hamilton continues the work so brilliantly begun by Michael Lewis thirty years ago. He also synthesizes the specialist literature on the Second Empire's navy-to which he has contributed-and unravels the bureaucratic mysteries of contemporary dockyards, Boards of Admiralty and Ministries of Marine-the administrative arcana which silently and obliquely shape the outcome of great wars. Hamilton's fourth chapter ("The Militarization of Naval Warfare in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Tactics and Strategy") seems his most original contribution. The obvious contemporary tactical and strategic issues were those raised by the radically new technologies of steam propulsion, armor plate and rapidly evolving artillery, and mid-century admiralties struggled painfully to exploit the possibilities. Hamilton has noticed that a peculiar feature of both French and British thought in this period was a tendency to abandon as obsolete the characteristic features of a maritime strategy. This tendency faded as the period drew to a close, but Hamilton has provided a fascinating miniature study of the evolution of professional thought under the stresses of rapid technical change. Hamilton's chapter on personnel seeks to integrate some of the social history of both navies with an account of the manning debate and its strategic implications. This section is generally reliable, although his description of the Royal Navy mutinies of 1859-1865 as a response to physical brutality is unpersuasive; the case cited did not result in a mutiny, and few or none of the mutinies were the result of physical abuse. This caveat in no way diminishes the excellence of this study, whose bald and even arid title, which suggests a narrow monograph, in fact conceals a subtle, suggestive and remarkably wide-ranging book. Fredric Paul Smoler |