Although Robert Forrester and Jon Wise focus on two different entities in their respective works—the British merchant marine and the Royal Navy—commerce and commercial relations with South America are at the core of both studies. Not surprisingly, Forrester devotes considerable space to summarizing British trade with Brazil and Argentina in order to contextualize as well as chart the fortunes of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company (RMSPC) and its successor, Royal Mail Lines (RML). Yet commerce was no less central to the Royal Navy's twentieth-century deployment in South American waters than it was to the corporate officers and shareholders of the RMSPC and RML. Indeed, close to the outset Wise states plainly that the overarching justification for Royal Navy visits to South American ports in the late 1920s and 1930s was the premise that they “would reap financial benefits in terms of future warship export orders,” and this rationale continued underpin British naval policy with regard to South America for the whole of the period he surveys (5).

The story that Forrester tells is for the most part not novel. For starters, his is hardly the first study of the RMSPC and RML: Thomas A. Bushell published a history of the company in conjunction with its centenary celebration in 1939, with a follow-up volume in 1950 covering the World War II years. More recently, Edwin Green and Michael Moss focused on the company's spectacular growth and even more spectacular collapse under the (mis)direction of Owen C. Philipps, Lord Kylsant, between 1902 and 1930 in A Business of National Importance: The Royal Mail Shipping Group, 1902–1937 (1982). And in 2002, Stuart Nicol's two-volume history of the firm, MacQueen's Legacy: A History of the Royal Mail Line, appeared. Furthermore, the RMSPC and RML figure prominently an article by Peter N. Davies and A. N. Bourn and several by Robert G. Greenhill, some of them co-authored by A. J. Arnold, only one of which is listed in Forrester's bibliography. (He does, however, cite Greenhill's unpublished University of Essex PhD thesis, “British Shipping and Latin America, 1840–1930: The Royal Mail Steam Packet Company” [1971]). Finally, there is an extensive literature on the British shipping industry generally, including Roland H. Thornton's British Shipping (1939, 1959), Ronald Hope's A New History of British Shipping (1990), and Stanley G. Sturmey's British Shipping and World Competition (1962), all three of which Forrester relies on extensively.

Given the existing work on his subject, both scholarly and popular, one might be forgiven for wondering what new light Forrester sheds on it. The answer is twofold. First, he appears to have made greater use of the company's annual reports to shareholders and on reporting from the Times of London than any previous author. Second, with the exception of Nicol's, his study is the only to cover the firm's history from 1945 to its absorption by rival Furness, Withy in 1965, and claims to do so in greater detail than does MacQueen's Legacy (8).

Of the two novelties, the latter is the more valuable from a scholarly perspective. Extensive quotations and paraphrasing from the annual reports and the Times sometimes make the text feel more like a chronicle than a work of historical analysis, a tendency that is heightened by sections in each chapter listing members of the board of directors and the company's fleet. As an example, chapter 5 opens, “H. C. E. Childers MP continued in the chair with Admiral Whish his deputy. Other directors were Messrs. Barlow, Berens, Chapman, Colville, Curtis, Edelman and Tufnell” (71). Missing is any sense of why this information might be of significance to the reader.

On a broader level, Forrester at times seems reluctant to foreground conclusions gleaned from his evidence. The story that emerges from his pages is one of mediocre, unimaginative, or worse management across much, if not most, of the RMSPC/RML's existence: a tale variously of conservatism, slowness or outright failure to respond to changing market conditions, high-risk gambles that should not have been taken, and other examples of poor, if not incompetent, leadership. Most obvious in this regard was Kylsant's lengthy term as director, which ended in bankruptcy for the company and a jail sentence for Kylsant himself, but the firm seems to have survived much of its first sixty-plus years in spite of, rather than due to, the directors' (in)actions. Yet while clear in detailing numerous specific instances of leadership failure, Forrester never really ties the thread together to engage in a sustained analysis of its managerial history, much less to situate such an analysis in the context of the wider historiography on British entrepreneurship in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a literature to which his work speaks, albeit largely by implication. His contributions to it, therefore, have largely to be drawn by the reader.

The strongest portion of Forrester's work is that devoted to the RML's fortunes after World War II, a fact perhaps related to his service as a deck officer for the company during the 1950s and 1960s. Here his analysis is more extensive and acute, and his judgment of the company's leadership more pointed. While maintaining that it could do little in the face of two postwar developments—flags of convenience and policies by many of Britain's trading partners mandating that their commerce be carried in their own nations' ships (much like the British Navigation Acts of the 1651–1849 period)—he minces few words in criticizing its failures to enter the tanker trade and to embrace containerization, and its continued faith in passenger custom despite the rapid growth of transatlantic air travel in the 1950s. Indeed, he terms the 1956 decision to build three new passenger liners at a cost of more than £15 million arguably “the single factor that led to the collapse of the Company” (214).

That conclusion seems reductionist given the RML's other noteworthy failures, especially when Forrester compares its attitude towards tankers and containerization to that of the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company (196–97, 217–18). That the latter exists to this day despite its own heavy investment in passenger liners during the 1950s suggests that RML's demise was not the consequence of a single bad decision.

Both Forrester and Wise chart the twentieth-century decline of British economic and, in the latter's case, naval influence in South America. At the same time, both challenge the widely held belief that the decline was steady, much less inexorable. Forrester points to periods during which the RML thrived despite such complicating factors as the growth of American competition, notably the mid and late 1930s, the late 1940s, and early 1950s. Similarly, Wise is at pains to complicate the narrative of American economic, naval, and military advance, and concomitant British retreat, in South America following World War I. Indeed, he argues that, in terms of warship sales to the continent's republics, Britain's greatest successes came in the postwar era, notwithstanding the loss of empire and falling from the ranks of the great powers.

Wise's study builds on Christopher Bell's excellent examination of interwar British naval policy (2000), which surveys Admiralty efforts to encourage foreign warship orders for British shipbuilders in order to ensure a healthy domestic industry on which the Royal Navy itself could rely when the need arose. In this sense Wise's title is somewhat misleading: his book is chiefly about British efforts to win shipbuilding contracts rather than the Royal Navy's operations in South American waters per se. Furthermore, those efforts encompassed much more than warship visits to the continent's major ports. Wise also discusses the roles played by naval attachés, naval missions—naval officers sent to help train their counterparts in foreign navies—and their converse: training foreign officers at British naval education establishments.

Ironically, Wise makes clear that the greatest obstacle to securing foreign warship orders was not American competition and opposition, nor even strained relations with South American states (the long-standing British-Argentinian dispute over the Falkland Islands most prominently) but the British government itself, specifically the Foreign Office, the Treasury, and the Board of Trade. The first's “sins” were ordinarily those of omission—a tendency to view the navy as an agent of foreign, rather than commercial, policy—although it generally opposed sales that might precipitate regional naval arms races, and in the late 1930s it vetoed efforts to sell cruisers to Chile on the grounds that the desired design, mounting 8-inch guns on a displacement of more than 8,000 tons, was in excess of the 1936 London Treaty's limitations.

In contrast, the Treasury and Board of Trade were more concerned with foreign governments' ability to pay for the vessels they ordered, and their financial caution, coupled with their refusal to provide credit or underwriting for armaments exports, placed Britain at a substantial disadvantage when competing with other warship-exporting countries, some of which not only exercised less fiscal prudence but also underwrote export credit risks for private firms.

Given those liabilities, coupled with American efforts to direct (“dictate” might be more apposite) the South American republics' naval policies in the post–World War II era and to monopolize the supply of their warships, Wise makes a persuasive case that Britain's track record in selling to those countries was quite creditable. To be sure, that record was not one of unbroken success: the late 1920s and much of the 1930s constituted a dry spot for those sales, as did intervals after 1945, but as late as the late 1960s British firms were still winning substantial shipbuilding and renovating contracts.

Not all of this success was due to British salesmanship, whether emanating from the public or the private sector. At least as much, Wise suggests, was due to American ineptitude, coupled with regional rivalries, most notably that between Argentina and Chile, that made a hash not only of Washington's Mutual Defense Assistance Program for hemispheric defense, but also of its efforts to unload surplus World War II–era (or older) warships of dubious value on its often resistant “allies.” Indeed, American heavy-handedness alienated several of its South American clients, including its closest ally, Brazil. By 1965, despite the fact that most South American countries “were largely equipped with ex-US warships,” the “urge to establish solidarity with other Third World [sic] countries and to rebuild economic relations with Europe” was widespread across the continent (166). That said, to devote an entire chapter to US–South American naval relations during 1945–65 in a work about Britain's relationship with the latter, as Wise has done, seems tangential, not to say unnecessary. The shortcomings of American policy could have been effectively and succinctly summarized in the context of British achievements and the reasons therefore, rather than detailed in a stand-alone section that makes up 12 percent of the whole text.

Both of these studies will appeal chiefly to specialists in their respective subjects. Of the two, Wise's is the narrower, but at the same time more the original in terms of its contribution to the historical literature. Forrester's, as suggested above, will probably be more valuable as a reference work for those interested in modern British business history than as an analysis of the RMSPC/RML's oscillating fortunes.