Britannia’s finest years

In 1903, the final volume of Laird Clowes’s seven-part History of the Royal Navy thudded on to Britain’s bookshelves: 4,385 pages of broadside-by-broadside chronology from 55 BC to 1900 AD that were in print for almost a century. Nobody has attempted to follow it on that scale, until Professor Rodger that is. His 1997 volume, Safeguard of the Sea, took us to 1649; this second volume takes us on to 1815. It has been worth the wait.

Rodger says he wants to ‘put naval affairs back into the history of Britain’. High time, when too many think that history began in 1914, geography stops somewhere near the Russian border, and the sea is really just for swimming in. This 900-pager continues his work in great style. If you wonder how a nation once rent by civil strife, with a fraction of the population and wealth of its continental neighbours, became the undisputed master of the oceans and the trade that plied in them, read this. Then go figure, as the Americans say, about the 21st century.

There is plenty of good old-fashioned narrative in this encyclopaedic blockbuster. We get a splendid look-it-up history of what happened and why: not just what every schoolboy used to know about great events like Trafalgar and St Vincent — or even, for humility’s sake, the Dutch in the Medway — but also quaint asides like the Kentish Knock and the Nootka Sound Crisis. If it happened and it mattered even a tiny bit you will find it, decently listed, indexed and annotated (there are 322 pages of appendices and notes, all useful), even if we are spared the track charts of sailing-ship battles which we ancient mariners had to study and reproduce at exams when we were, as we used to say, young gentlemen — personages of course covered in this book.