Historians of the Victorian British Empire would generally agree that the Royal Navy's supremacy and the domination of the world's trade by the British merchant fleet were central components of imperial power in that period. Yet this maritime world has been relatively neglected. Scholars of naval history have been drawn either to the ships of the line of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries or to the armored battleships of the early twentieth century, leaving the Victorian navy largely ignored. Writers on merchant shipping have been mesmerized by the glamour of sail, leading to a historiographical sidelining of one of the major features of the mid- to late nineteenth-century global economy—its growing reliance on the British steamship. And the Victorian port city is only just beginning to be given its due as a topic of research. Miles Taylor's excellent edited collection on the Victorian maritime world is therefore an encouraging indication of a new level of interest in this important period of the history of the oceans.

The outstanding chapter in this volume is Andrew Lambert's, which considers the role that the history of Venice played in nineteenth-century Britons' thought about the future of their seaborne empire. Lambert points out that Victorians were inclined to ransack the past for usable political and military lessons for the present. The Venetian Republic was often drawn on as a parable of either the strengths of sea power or of the threats of internal moral decay and rival's land armies to a maritime empire. Lambert provides a sparkling account of how these themes played out in the art of Turner, in the writings of Ruskin and Seeley, and in the geopolitical thinking of Gladstone and Disraeli. Another strong chapter, by Jan Rüger, speaks to similar questions. Rüger explores how the idea of the British as islanders pervaded late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture and affected political and military thinking. Rüger also traces the ways in which the Anglo-Saxonism of E. A. Freeman, the imperialist poetry of Newbolt and Kipling, and the political agitation of pre–First World War advocates of naval power all promoted the discourse of the island nation.

The Royal Navy is addressed more directly in John Oldfield's study of the long-running campaign against the slave trade and in a reflection by Jeremy Black on the position of the Victorian empire in the global balance of power. Oldfield gives a lucid survey of his topic. The Atlantic slavery patrol involved a major financial commitment from 1816 to 1865 and freed 160,000 slaves, while the pursuit of Indian Ocean slave traders lasted almost into the twentieth century. However, as Oldfield points out, the antislavery activities of the navy became part of the basis for an ideology of the civilizing role of the British. And in the period of the scramble for Africa, putting down slavery became an important legitimation for colonial conquest. Black seeks to evaluate the challenge posed to the Royal Navy by the United States, Russia, and France. He gives a technically informed analysis of the capacities of their respective fleets. Britain clearly was dominant at sea, but in the long term there was always a tension between Britain's need for a worldwide deployment of its ships to protect its international trading network and the requirement to concentrate naval power at home in order to deter the European powers.

One case study in the book focuses closely on the merchant fleet. Crosbie Smith's piece on the Pacific Steam Navigation Company, which plied routes on the west coast of South and Central America, provides a vigorous account of the establishment of this London-based company and the role of American entrepreneur William Wheelwright and British Captain George Peacock in setting up the service during the late 1830s and 1840s. At one level this is exactly the sort of detailed study of specific steamship companies that we need. But the implications of such case studies need to be drawn out: Smith's conclusion—that we should not regard Wheelwright as a visionary—seems a rather limited one.

Three excellent essays by distinguished historians draw attention to the consequences of the enormously faster and more reliable intercontinental transportation system made possible by the steamship. John MacKenize shows how steamships enabled the creation of museums, libraries, universities, and other cultural institutions in the cities of the empire. MacKenzie usefully frames the issue as one of the development of a colonial public sphere. He points out a central political paradox of this process: the generation of this public sphere, through closer intellectual links with the metropolis, actually stimulated a greater self-awareness on the part of both the settler colonial and the colonized bourgeoisies, ultimately contributing to aspirations for self-government. Judith Brown gives us a beautifully written survey of the impact of the steamship revolution on the Indian empire. She explores how travel to the metropolis and within the empire crucially affected the personal and political trajectories of Gandhi, Nehru, and many lesser figures of the Indian intelligentsia. She shows how the settlement of Indian traders across the Indian Ocean helped shape the world economy. And she gives an informative account of the enormous flow of labor to Southesast Asia and the mass emigration of indentured labor. Despite the exploitative brutality that characterized these experiences, these migrations laid the basis for the existence of the present major Indian descent populations across the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Elizabeth Buettner looks at two forms of child migration that the steamship made possible. Upper-middle-class British families in India felt compelled by convention to send their children to the United Kingdom for schooling. This occasioned great psychological trauma for parents and children alike. Meanwhile, in Britain, Dr. Barnardo's charity organized the large-scale emigration of children from urban slums to Canada. Buettner shows that this was conceived both as a paternalistic endeavor to save the children and as a way of defusing the perceived political threat of the lumpen-proletariat. All three of these chapters are fascinating in themselves, but they tend to be more about the consequences of change in intercontinental transportation than about the maritime world itself. That may disappoint readers primarily looking for work focusing more specifically on shipping and ports. Nevertheless, these are strong essays by any standard.

My one real reservation about the collection is that its subtitle suggests a more ambitious methodological agenda than the book actually delivers. Simply demonstrating the existence of transnational and imperial connections is not enough in itself, if we are truly to address the question of “The Sea and Global History.” Given the signs of new vigor in maritime history, which this book reflects, now is a good time to do more systematic thinking about how studying the global linkages across the oceans may require new strategies of research and to consider how our work might lead us to interpret modernity in dramatically new ways.