Black, Jeremy. The British Seaborne Empire

Naval War College Review, Summer, 2006 by John B. Hattendorf

Black, Jeremy. The British Seaborne Empire. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2004. 420pp. $40

Jeremy Black deliberately titled his book to link it with two classics, works that every maritime historian knows: C. R. Boxer's The Dutch Seaborne Empire (1965) and J. H. Parry's The Spanish Seaborne Empire (1966). The planned volume in that series that would have provided an overview of the British Empire was never completed, although nearly twenty years later D. B. Quinn and A. N. Ryan filled the gap for the early phase with their England's Sea Empire, 1550-1642 (1983). Black's contribution shows a significantly different approach as well as a much broader and more nuanced view of the general theme.

Jeremy Black is a prolific writer who has become widely known for his broad, sweeping histories of British foreign policy in the eighteenth century and of the history of European and world warfare, as well as for his insightful studies of maps and cartography. He is fully experienced and eminently well qualified to attempt a broad-based study such as this.

Although Black's title suggests a general history of the British Empire, his detailed focus is not on the earliest period but on the three hundred years from the Union of Scotland and England in 1707 to the present. To provide linkages, however, he has written a hundred pages that describe the origins of the empire, racing from pre-Roman times to the mid-eighteenth century. From that point forward, Black expands out into his larger study, tracing both the British Empire's rise and its decline. In this Black is careful to give weight to the three elements of his title: the "Britishness" of that empire, the complexity of its maritime basis, and the distinctive differences with other types of imperial powers. The book is a dense collation of factual detail, but the picture that Black paints and the perspective that he presents are interesting. He links maritime exploration, trade, migration, and naval affairs in a broad context while at the same time bringing in the wide range of cross-cultural issues involved. Even beyond that, Black characterizes the British Empire as the power that gave indirect rise to America and was America's immediate predecessor as a global superpower. This linkage, as Black reminds us, allows a reader to begin to think about the connections between consecutive global powers.

Imperial history has largely been ignored until recently in academic circles, but Black's work clearly succeeds in underscoring the importance of the British Empire's maritime nature in its distinctive contribution to the development of the modern world. Black concludes that "if the British Empire is blamed for many of the aspects of modernization and globalization, it also serves as a way of offering historical depth to a critique of American power, and, in part, this is at issue when British imperialism is criticized."

JOHN B. HATTENDORF

Naval War College