This is a very good book. By turns both analytical and funny, serious and engaging, general and personal, learned and allusively creative, each page reveals another facet of Britain’s long relationship with the surrounding oceans. Recent years have seen a veritable flood of books, articles, and special journal editions focusing on Britain’s relationship with the sea. Jonathan Scott, who has made his name as a historian of seventeenth-century ideas, has now set out to delineate just how the waters flowing through Britons’ imaginations affected how they saw themselves and their state. The result will fascinate students and their professors alike.

I found two chapters in particular especially convincing. Chapter 3, “The Discipline of the Sea,” shows how mariners came to think of their superiors as incompetent aristocrats in the collapse of the English monarchy during the 1630s and 1640s, contrasting their own skill and daring with their supposed superiors’ constant vacillations and retreats. It is an interesting ideological and philosophical counterpoint to Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s constant evocation of material class and interest as the cleaving point between shipboard workers and masters, as Scott himself notes in a series of open questions as to the relevance of his findings (72). It may, nearly twenty-five years after Rediker published Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, provide one way of passing now beyond the constant debates between the New Left and traditional maritime historians as to the role of labor in oceanic economy and society.

Just as revelatory, chapter 4, “The Ark of War,” lays bare how the Commonwealth navy of the 1650s helped to create the idea of the English, and to some extent the British, as a uniquely valorous, brave, and martial people. Here, relatively humble accounts of England’s wars with the Dutch are used to show how literate Englishmen came to think that all islands had been “designed by God for a commonwealth” (88). That their state was not yet an island—before the 1707 Union with Scotland—of course shows once again just how important histories of both national imaginings and geography have really become in the making of modern Britain. Subsequent chapters, on the mercantile activism of the Restoration (chap. 5), the effect of oceanic discoveries in creating the growing concept of a “world island” (chap. 7) and Britain’s increasingly troubled intellectual engagement with the idea of a European “continent” (chaps. 8 and 9) are similarly thoroughgoing and thought provoking.

One can always ask for more. I would like to have seen more about Scots and “Scottishness” in the making of the title’s “Britannia”—not to mention the Cornish and Welsh. As the title suggests, Scott’s pages are full of mystical thinkers, literary allusions, poets, and mapmakers. Where seafarers and captains appear, even their contribution is very much centered around their imaginations of the seascape around them. What they were actually doing on a day-to-day or hour-by-hour basis remains relatively obscure. The focus is very much on the idea of Britain and the sea, rather than quite its concrete and lived reality. One would have to turn to other texts to get a really visceral sense of sailors’ and merchants’ struggle with the gray-green and blue world beyond Britain’s shores. Miles Ogborn’s 2008 Global Lives, Maya Jasanoff’s superb evocation of North American Loyalist flight in Liberty’s Exiles (2011), Emma Christopher’s Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes (2006) or the early chapters of Linda Colley’s 2007 Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History are all good examples of historians’ recent fascination with Britons’ seemingly endless maritime travels in the past that usefully supplement Scott’s understanding of past thinking with a sense of doing.

Still, that is hardly Scott’s focus or goal. What he does splendidly is spelled out precisely in his highly apposite and sparse preface and introduction: “to map the changing geographical language of English and then British politics” and to ask “how a rural and agrarian English society transformed its government in a mercantile and maritime direction under the extreme pressure of war” (xiii). In admirably meeting both briefs, he has brought together recent postmodern literatures of identity and geographical imaginings with more concrete and state-based historiographies, exemplified by Roger Morris’s recent work on the practical sinews of British naval mastery, dockyard reform, maritime power, and British political culture. It is an enormous achievement of brevity, distillation, and allusion to be able to achieve all that in a relatively short book.

The only shame is that, in a relatively short conclusion, Scott suggests the scale and scope of Britons’ obsession with their maritime status in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—without the book going on to investigate that modern time frame as well. Perhaps there is space in the market for a second volume.