In 1972 Herbert Schottelius and Wilhelm Deist published a series of essays under the title Marine und Marinepolitik im kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1871-1914, which inspired many scholars and students to use the German naval experience to achieve a deeper understanding of the Second Reich. One of those essays compared the evolution of the German and American fleets and suggested productive avenues of research and understanding via transnational research and analysis. Dirk Bönker has taken seriously that suggestion made so many years ago in an excellent study of the development of navalism and the naval elites of both Germany and the United States before the Great War.

In the first of four sections, the author explores the development of national naval strategies from the perspective of two countries determined to emerge as major players on the world scene. In the next part of the study he illuminates the basic premise of that emergence: the confrontation between battle fleets that would validate great power status. The third section places the possibility of confrontation in the context of advancing naval professionalism and politics. The philosophy adopted by naval elites on both sides of the Atlantic, and the subsequent effort to advance that philosophy within the political context of their respective nation states, potentially offer a rich and provocative basis for discussion and analysis. The last portion of the study places the naval ambitions of both countries in a practical political context. Here the naval elites become advocates for the maritime force they considered necessary to achieve global political and economic influence. In both cases the author demonstrates striking cross-national similarities. The combination of a political leader such as Alfred von Tirpitz and the effectiveness of the German general staff emerged as a model for implementing the goals espoused by the naval advocates of each country.

Other reviewers have already remarked on Bönker's excellent research, insightful transnational contrasts, and excellent insights. It is also worth examining the analytical and historiographical assumptions that underpin the study. For example, Bönker regularly refers to the historian Eckart Kehr as a radical. While this was certainly true in 1930, when Battleship Building and Party Politics in Germany, 1894-1901 first appeared, the perspective on the work of Kehr–an avowed socialist historian–has changed fundamentally in the last half century. Bönker suggests a lack of evidence for the Sammlungspolitik described by Kehr, which supposedly permitted Tirpitz to bring together the National Liberals with the agrarian conservative elements of Prussia to accelerate naval development and to solidify support for the German political and social system. The navy would grow, possibly disrupting the international scene, while at home social and economic stability would reign.

Kehr actually surrendered the radical mantle after his rediscovery by Hans-Ulrich Wehler in the 1960s. The storm of literature that emerged during the Kehr renaissance that followed went a long way toward providing a more complete picture of Wilhelmine Germany. Wehler and Volker Berghahn agreed with Kehr that domestic politics played the primary role in shaping naval policy and guiding any steps toward militarization. Bönker argues that historical attachment to the primacy of internal policy, to paraphrase one of Kehr's titles, has excluded the professional military from the dialogue and diminished historical understanding of navalism in Germany–and perhaps in the United States as well. The author admits, however, that the social history of Kehr, Wehler, and Berghahn remains the paradigm for current interpretation of these issues.

A comparative examination of naval elites as sophisticated as the present study successfully places us in the midst of Tirpitz, Stephen Luce, Bradley Fiske, George Dewey and others. It demonstrates the remarkable similarity of their conclusions within the context of a common desire for global economic influence, all emerging in the shadow of the decisive battle. This study takes considerable time in bringing that rarified dialogue back to political reality, however. Tirpitz understood full well the difference between what he thought Germany needed in a navy and what he could achieve. Sammlungspolitik helped him to begin in 1898, but the Reichstag election of 1912 and the victory of the SPD suggested an end. The present study brings philosophy, ambition, and political reality together late and reluctantly. Readers need to understand the evolution of naval leadership, naval thought, and specific goals within the dynamic context of the internal party politics that Kehr examined so closely. In the United States, the naval leadership may have wanted an officer-secretary such as Tirpitz and the seeming efficiency of the German General Staff, but civilian leadership in the American republic guarded its authority jealously and resisted such ambitions. While certainly frustrating, these circumstances did not surprise the leaders of the United States Navy. The American case might also suggest that what passed for navalism only approached maritime militarization, rather than the more pervasive German militarism. In the end, while the American and German naval experiences provide remarkable philosophical similarities, they also present their own special cases in terms of political realities, success, and implementation. Militarism in a Global Age provides a necessary study in contrasts and a provocative look at the current ways in which naval historical analysis can provide a window onto national experiences.