This book has two principal goals: first, to trace the ways in which Great Britain’s activities and accomplishments on and beyond the seas during the past four centuries helped to bring about its rise and decline as a global power; second, to show how these activities and accomplishments contributed “to the British peoples’ sense of themselves” (237). The project is partly inspired by recent historiographical trends that have invited a renewed interest in maritime history.

Part 1, “The Flowing Tide,” offers chapters concerned with the rise of England’s power and global influence: overseas trade, piracy, slavery and the slave trade, migration, and naval power. The concise narratives offer interesting particulars and valuable statistics culled from an impressive variety of secondary sources. Perhaps the best of these is the chapter on “Migrants” in which Glen O’Hara gives figures showing that a remarkable preponderance of overseas emigrants came from Great Britain (Germany was a distant second). Britain’s population growth fueled not only a high level of emigration but also the prodigious growth of London. O’Hara says very little about London, however—a missed opportunity since the great metropolis (no other European city came close to matching its growth during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) brought together the three large forces that drove Britain’s dynamic economy: maritime commerce, use of fossil-fuel (coal) energy, and increasing agricultural productivity. The essential study of this intersection, although it takes for granted the role of seaborne commerce in London’s prosperity, is E. A. Wrigley’s People, Cities and Wealth: The Transformation of Traditional Society (Oxford, 1987).

In chapter 6, O’Hara sketches how, in the course of three centuries, the Royal Navy “became the most important strategic force in the world” (107), and in chapter 7 he sets forth the many ways by which it enabled Britain to survive in the two world wars of the twentieth century. He rightly doubts whether Britain should be considered “victorious” in these wars and is well aware that by 1918 British power was seriously hobbled, and by 1945 almost completely drained. At this juncture, “the flowing tide” of part 1 gives way to “the ebbing tide” of part 2.

Yet the reader is not provided with an adequate explanation of why this momentous reversal of Britain’s fortunes came about. The massive military commitment to France in 1914–18 is not mentioned, although its enormous casualties wiped out a significant portion of Britain’s skilled industrial manpower and also undermined political support for standing up to Hitler when the need arose. And since O’Hara ignores the impact of the French alliance during 1914–18, it is strangely inconsistent for him to explain, as he does earlier, the loss of the American colonies in 1776–83 by reference to the absence of a continental ally (112). (Any useful European alliance at that time was geopolitically impossible for Britain to procure, but this line of interpretation appears to be ineradicable.) Although the author is aware that the huge monetary cost of the First World War seriously drained away Britain’s wealth, he says nothing about how it happened and fails to point out its most dire consequence—the removal, fatally as it would prove, of control of world finance from London to New York and Washington. This was, after all, a fundamental reason why the formerly flowing tide of British power ebbed.

It would be wrong to devote this review solely to pointing out essential elements that are lacking in the narrative of growing power and its loss. Woven into the fabric of the book, particularly in the latter part, is a continuing interest in British national consciousness. O’Hara proposes to modify an existing inwardly focused and predominantly cultural narrative of the British past by one that emphasizes the influence of the sea and far-flung territories. Any reliable history of national consciousness is inevitably hard to achieve, but his delving into an impressive variety of books and articles has yielded a rich harvest of telling facts and also, what is truly admirable, comparative observations. The variety of topics is wide ranging: to name a few, the costly naval commitment to suppressing the African slave trade; the impact of North Sea oil and gas; the rise, decline, and revival of English seaside resorts; the ups and downs of the fishing industry; and the popularity of fish and chips.

Regarding British national consciousness in the twentieth century, the chapters “Migrants” and “Immigrants” are especially relevant to the book’s purpose. A publication of 1909 referred to British migrants as “the arterial blood of the British Empire” (102), and O’Hara points out how great the exodus from Britain during that decade was. Many of these emigrants were not desperately poor and were often eagerly welcomed and supported by the dominions that commonly were their destinations. I could wish he had probed the influence of this significant migration on the outlook of family members who stayed behind. Regular family correspondence along with journalistic and government-promoted interest in these dominions seems to have amplified a popular British sense of a wider British world. While there is much truth in the idea that the heart of England is to be found in quiet, well-kept villages, it may also have been true that, in the early twentieth century, lots of people living in the island realm regularly turned their thoughts to the distant lands that would soon be constituted as the British Commonwealth of Nations.