The maritime arms buildup before 1914 marked a key juncture in the militarization of the world in the long twentieth century. The Anglo-German naval arms race ranked as the single most spectacular current of the naval arms race that engulfed the globe in the age of what William L. Langer has called the “new navalism.” Historians have studied this race, and the broader context of Anglo-German antagonism, from different perspectives ranging from military strategy and diplomacy to domestic politics. Jan Rüger's prize-winning comparative study of the cult of the navy in Britain and Germany before 1914 dramatically advances this already well-developed literature by offering a superb and richly textured cultural history of British and German pursuits of sea power.

The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire examines the operations of power and identity as they lent shape and meaning to the cult of the navy in both countries. At the center of Rüger's analysis are fleet reviews and launches of warships as the two main genres of the naval theater that came into its own after the turn of the twentieth century. Far from being a mere exercise in the top-down invention of tradition and governmentally controlled propagandist education from above, this theater developed, Rüger argues, as a site of intense negotiations among multiple actors and institutions inside and outside the state and as a point of intersection among the worlds of empire, state power, civil society, and mass entertainment. This book is based on vast research in multiple archives and libraries in both Britain and Germany, and it uses a wide array of sources, including the official records of navies, state agencies, and local government; press reports; personal journals; and visual materials, such as pictures, films, and photographs. Moreover, Rüger has an astonishing command of British and German historiographies and effortlessly draws on, and engages with, diverse literatures on matters such as militarism, nationalism, mass politics, popular culture, mass media, and gender relations.

Moving adeptly back and forth between each country, The Great Naval Game is organized into five main chapters, with an epilogue sketching the afterlife of the naval theater after World War I. The first chapter details the rise of warship launches and fleet reviews as theatrical, professionally stage-managed, and costly public events celebrating the navy in Britain and imperial Germany before 1914. The next chapter reconstructs the many ways in which the public itself and new mass media (popular press and the cinema, in particular) actively molded and commodified the naval theater. The third chapter examines the naval spectacle as a potential site of social imperialist and militarist politics, of a manipulative modern-day strategy of bread and circuses. Here Rüger stresses the very limitations of such a strategy as evidenced by the key role and motivations of local civic elites and the critical distance that workers, who otherwise took pleasure in the naval spectacle, placed between themselves and the official political rhetoric. The fourth chapter presents the celebrations of the navy as a “theatre of identity” that involved the construction of nationhood and belonging (140). Cultural nation building on the maritime stage wove together the local, the national, the regional, and the imperial and fused such diverse national signifiers as the monarchy, empire, technology, military, gender, war, and geography into a representational whole. The final chapter approaches the public staging of the navy as a performative display of power and deterrence intended for national and international consumption. These displays directly fed the Anglo-German antagonism through their ostentatious character; the linkage among national identity, the sea, and military power; and the rituals’ own peculiar rhetoric and choreography of rivalry. Incessantly driven by mass politics and popular culture beyond the control of rationalizing political and military elites, the cult of the navies, concludes Rüger, charged the strategic conflict between Britain and Germany with symbolic meanings that created a culture of antagonism, which in turn heavily circumscribed the space for diplomacy and détente, even after the arms race itself had been decided in Britain's favor by 1910.

The Great Naval Game expertly analyzes the British and German naval theaters as parallel histories beyond any exceptionalist fictions of national uniqueness and separateness. While the main emphasis is on the commonality of the naval theater on both sides of the North Sea, Rüger's analysis is also highly attuned to national differences in its articulations. Rüger, for example, demonstrates how the lines between military and civilian worlds were drawn differently in each national naval theater. In Germany, the ceremonial emphasis was on the separateness of the military and the fanciful enactment of the military monarchy and Wilhelm II himself as the all-mighty “All Highest Warlord” (186–90). In Britain the navy and the “Sailor King” (182, 184–85) shared representational space with members of government, parliament, and civil society. Such differences extended to and were reinforced by the performance of gender relations during fleet reviews and ship launches. If the public rituals of the German naval theater were more militarist (and masculinist) than those of its British counterpart, Rüger is at pains to emphasize that in neither context was militarization “from above” matched by any popular militarism “from below” or that the willful participation of nonelite audiences in both countries involved other desires and attractions.

Jan Rüger has written a wonderful book that brings together military, cultural, and comparative history in an exemplary manner. His study offers a new, highly original perspective on the flourishing of the Anglo-German antagonism before the First World War. And yet Rüger's outstanding analysis simultaneously raises questions about the limits of attempts to rewrite the history of this antagonism from the angle of culture and identity. The main issue it does not resolve is how to best link these analytics to discussions of military strategy and competitive geopolitics. To be sure, Rüger goes a (very) long way toward exploring this linkage, yet it is also noticeable that he falls short of exploring at least one key link: the construction of the “enemy.” Rüger casts the imagination of that “other” simply as the negation of the “self,” not offering further analysis. What is still needed is an exploration of the rather specific imagination of the imperial-military opponent, be it Britain or Germany; its imbrication with visions of the (national) self; and its intersections with notions of military strategy and global politics. Such an examination could securely build on Rüger's marvelous monograph.