Sea power has tended to occupy a subordinate role in the historiography of the early modern “military revolution,” except in the work of scholars such as Jan Glete and Alan James. Benjamin Redding prefaces The English and French Navies 1500–1650 with an account of the Battle of the Solent (1545) in order to show that fleets were vital strategic assets rather than merely a collection of vessels for transporting land forces. Redding exhibits an impressive command of Anglophone and Francophone primary sources as he examines the two nations’ respective high commands, administrative structures, naval funding, and warship design. Naturally, England and France had other maritime rivals to contend with over the course of the early modern period—not least Spain, the United Provinces, Denmark, and the Ottoman Empire. However, this is not a survey history but a focused comparative study of bureaucratic and technological evolution, designed to test Glete’s argument for a strong correlation between naval expansion and the formation of fiscal-military states.

The introduction sketches out the contrasting geographies and political cultures of the two nations. Sixteenth-century France was far larger than England in almost every respect—landmass, population, and revenue—but its size, and the distance from Paris to the nation’s ports, meant that naval policy and operations resided largely in the hands of regional governors. The fact that France was forced to divide its resources between its Mediterranean coastline and the Atlantic seaboard required, among other things, different types of ship for the two theaters. England had no such distraction. London’s proximity to naval bases in the Thames and Medway allowed English monarchs to keep a tighter grip on maritime policy. Furthermore, the English high command included many experienced seafarers, in contrast to aristocratic powerbrokers in France.

Chapter 1 discusses the naval high commands in more detail, contrasting the centralized English “Council for Maritime Causes” with the semiautonomous regional naval administrations in France. Chapter 2 argues that these vested regional interests led to inertia within French naval administration. Chapter 3 examines how the respective fleets were funded. Whereas the French crown was able to divert a proportion of normal taxes to finance its fleets, English monarchs had a smaller revenue at their disposal and had to negotiate with Parliament in matters of taxation. This led to a range of fiscal experiments, not least the evolution of an annual navy budget, an innovation which helped to create a professional standing English naval force several decades before its French counterpart. Queen Elizabeth introduced an extra-parliamentary levy known as “ship money” in the 1590s as an emergency measure to guard against the ongoing threat of Spanish invasion. Four decades later, Charles I controversially revived ship money and extended the levy to inland counties in order to expand his navy. Redding claims that ship money had little impact on naval construction— only £86 was allocated to Charles’ flagship the Sovereign of the Seas, for example—but it could be argued that the injection of ship money cash freed up other revenue streams for projects such as the construction of the Sovereign. The chapter moves on to discuss the growth of maritime trade, the protection of which became a priority for the English navy from the late sixteenth century, and for the French in the early seventeenth. Redding argues that the need to safeguard each nation’s stake in transnational competition was essential to the formation of its state navy. Chapter 4 discusses warship design and experimentation, not simply in military terms, but as a projection of royal power and prestige. The arms race between the two monarchies was more than an expensive vanity contest, for it also provided propaganda for international and domestic consumption. It would have been good to have learned more about how the two nations sourced the raw materials for these periodically intense shipbuilding programs, as large-scale procurement had domestic and international consequences. Chapter 5 considers how the fluctuating strength of the state and each succeeding monarch’s interest (or disinterest) in maritime matters led to oscillations in the growth of the two navies. By 1630, both nations had enough state-owned warships to compete on the international stage. They had arrived at this point in different ways, which Redding considers to be consistent with the model of “punctuated equilibrium evolution” advocated by Clifford J. Rogers. Chapter 6 has the appearance of an epilogue rather than a conclusion. The somewhat cursory discussion of the role of the English navy in the British Civil Wars makes two telling points. First, it shows how the parliamentarians’ possession of London at the start of the First Civil War enabled them to secure the navy and the Thames–Medway dockyards. Second, whereas the French navy was further fragmented by the events of the Fronde, the English fleet, having been swiftly and completely appropriated by Parliament in 1642, was revitalized. Improved state investment allowed it to blossom into the powerful navy of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. Some might take issue with Redding’s reference to the Commonwealth’s “imperial ambitions” (181), especially given that he repeatedly accuses Glete of teleology (17, 47–8, 186, particularly 188). Parliament’s initial ambitions for the navy were simply to prevent Charles I from obtaining men and materiel from Ireland and mainland Europe, and to discourage foreign states from intervening in the conflict. It was only later that the navy was used to secure existing English possessions in the Caribbean and America, and later still when it was sent to wrest territory from Spain.

Redding concludes that navies were a product of, and contributed to, state formation. Nevertheless, he makes a persuasive case that Glete’s model should be revised and refined, for it is evident from this detailed comparative study that the expansion and development of the English and French navies proceeded along very different (but equally uneven and unpredictable) paths.