The Rise and Fall of the British Navy

Although it pretends otherwise the capital city of Britain is a port. Its great building reflect a national fortune built on booty carried from the corners of the globe. Britain has never felt European but it hasn't got an island mentality - it projected its power and identity onto the shipping lanes of the oceans so that it developed a cosmopolitanism, an ambition to be bigger than it was.This is not just a history of the Royal Navy and a list of triumphs and noble tragedies, but a history of Britain's seafaring tradition and its daring and innovation in extending Britain's imperial and trade dominance from the very beginnings of Britain to the modern day. Ben Wilson charts Britain's rise to world domination through its control of the oceans, the skill of its men and the development of new technology, describing the ways in which the lines of trade and war encircled the globe. He describes the shift in emphasis from massive land armies, bloody victories and territorial mastery to strategic, high-tech, sea-based lightning strikes as the determining factors in global affairs.Ben Wilson also shows how a focus on the sea shaped Britain in more subtle ways - for example, the race to dominate shipping lanes in the 17th and 18th centuries gave an impetus to science and freed Britain from the control of landed aristocrats and generals, and gave merchants and traders a say in the political life of the nation. The sea also had a profound effect on literature, music, art and architecture, not to say the national character, both in obvious ways ('Britannia Rules the Waves'), but also encoded in national DNA, buried beneath the surface.This history of Britain is the history of the sea, telling the national story in a fresh and grippingly dramatic way.