This is an epic revisionist study, representing a lifetime's scholarship and spanning a vast timeframe from the ancient to the contemporary. Andrew Lambert concentrates on five great powers that became seapowers “by actively constructing a cultural identity focused on the sea”—Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and Britain (p. 5). These maritime-based states-cum-empires “did more to advance trade, knowledge and political inclusion than their landed peers: they shaped the global economy and the liberal values that define the contemporary Western world” (p. 6). Lambert persistently stresses that adopting seapower status was a choice and not the product of geographical determinism—Tudor statesmen consciously propelled seapower into English culture and policy in their response to a constraining European system. Seapowers were states that knew their history, drawing upon precedents in “endless, intelligent emulation” (p. 36). In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Johan de Witt “was familiar with Themistocles and Pericles, heroic leaders of the first seapower state” (p. 178).
Throughout Lambert's analysis, a crucial distinction is made between having sea power and being a seapower: contemporary China, Russia, and the United States possess sea power but they don't qualify as seapowers because the sea “is at best a marginal factor in their identities” (p. 6). Ancient Persia or Wilhelmine Germany developed powerful navies and overseas empires but their “underlying culture” proved “terrestrial and military” (p. 6). Imperial Japan was not a seapower either because its empire-building was primarily continental. For all Peter the Great's admiration of the Dutch and the English, Russia “like Rome and Imperial Spain, was a great land power that created a powerful navy as a strategic tool” (p. 228). The conceptual framework is refined further in discussions of ancient Rhodes, early-modern Genoa, and Imperial Portugal showing that “being deeply engaged with the sea, or possessing overseas empires, did not make states seapowers” (p. 204). Rhodes and Genoa exploited the sea but “without challenging the great powers,” while Portugal's cultural core “remained impervious to the ocean” (p. 204).
Continental powers frequently built navies to crush seapowers and “extend the strategic reach of the army”—Rome's annihilation of Carthage in 150 BCE being the classic example (p. 87). Despite the “special relationship” rhetoric, Britain—the new Carthage not a reinvented Rome—was scuppered by American financial might, revealing yet again the “divergent . . . worldviews of a seapower empire and a continental military state” (pp. 289–90). Embracing seapower status was often a response to relative weakness and vulnerability vis-à-vis land-based powers. But seapowers were doomed once they tried continental strategies, for example, the Dutch (1688–1713) and the British (1916–1945).
Land-based hegemons were highly antagonistic toward seapowers because the continentals feared “change, inclusive politics and free markets” (p. 7). In this culture clash, Plato's “corrupting sea” trope had a long trajectory. From Ancient Greece onward, inclusive seapower politics—oligarchic in form ordinarily—was essential for mobilizing human and fiscal resources to support costly navies. Representation of the merchant elite on the Dutch Admiralty boards guaranteed organized violence for commercial protection. England didn't become fully maritime until 1688 when the monarch shared power with the City of London and landed elites. As the Athenians also discovered, funding the fleet to compete with continental power additionally “needed a larger economic base, an empire” (p. 56). The ideal, however, was a minimalist imperium, typically chains of fortified ports and the maintenance of a balance of power. Even Hannibal was a “classic seapower statesman, a cool, calculating realist with a preference for treaties and compromise” (p. 109).
A major innovation in Lambert's study is the extensive discussion of the cultural manifestations that defined seapowers. The Parthenon complex in Athens, Carthage's circular harbor, the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Dam Square in Amsterdam, and Greenwich Palace in London represented the architecture that “aggressively connect[ed] maritime trade, naval might and secular identity” (p. 135). Shakespeare's plays are full of “seapower-inflected language” (p. 269). The abandonment of “maritime iconography for cows and fields” by the Dutch elite in their painting preferences coincided with the end of seapower status (p. 199). Nevertheless, seapower identities have left long legacies (in Britain especially)—Lambert suggests that the United Kingdom's difficulties with the European Union stem from Britain remaining “different” (p. 308).
Given that Lambert identifies the role of merchants, shipowners, and overseas trade in underpinning seapowers, there is much here for business historians to grapple with. Continental states tended to exclude business actors from political power, whereas sea-based regimes, from the Phoenicians onward, enfranchised “commercial wealth” and thus “tied policy to economic interests” (p. 33). Napoleon's “nation of shopkeepers” slur about Hanoverian Britain was exactly right. As well as war galleys to escort the merchant fleet, late-medieval/early-modern Venice developed a standardized coinage, banking systems, and bills of exchange to sustain international transactions. But Lambert also notes the tendency toward gentrification among mercantile elites—dynamic maritime economies “required a steady supply of fresh merchant families” to avoid ossification (the fate which befell the Dutch in the eighteenth century) (p. 200). Above all, this study further informs the Varieties of Capitalism debate, distinguishing between the economic and business models of continental and sea states.
Given the massive historiography consulted, it is unfortunate that the reference notes are at the back of the book. Being based in Liverpool, the once great second seaport of the British Empire, this reviewer is not convinced that the United Kingdom remains “culturally attuned to maritime activity” as the British-owned merchant marine has virtually disappeared (p. 7). But these are niggling critiques. Very well written, with a dry wit and full of entertaining rhetorical flourishes, this book is a joy to read. It is also richly illustrated with annotations to support the text's argument, further aided by a number of useful maps, a conceptual aide–memoire, a glossary of key terms, and an extensive index. With its vast, wonderfully comparative scope, Lambert's magnum opus will prove a leading and lasting contribution not just to maritime studies but to global history as well.
