Following in the wake of the classic studies by C. R. Boxer on the Portuguese and Dutch seaborne empires and J. H. Parry on the Spanish seaborne empire, Jeremy Black has produced an even more ambitious work on the British seaborne empire. Recognizing that the “requisite knowledge” and “relevant cultural parameters” to understand the British Empire are missing among much of the population of postimperial Britain, Black offers a “narrative account” of the “history and `geographical structure’ of the empire” (xi). Whereas Boxer and Parry concluded their magisterial histories in the early nineteenth century, Black takes his story of the British Empire up to the present (2004), thus covering an enormous span of time, from the early medieval to the postmodern. As a scholar of maritime history, he is keen to stress the maritime nature of the Empire. “Sea power” he observes, “made the empire what it was: without sea power there would have been no empire, or at least no empire in the form it actually took” (x).

After an introduction examining the relationship between Europe and the oceans, Black starts his chronological account of the British Empire with a chapter on the origins of empire. He begins with the Romans and concludes in the mid-seventeenth century, although much of the chapter is devoted, appropriately, to the period after John Cabot's voyage (1497). Two chapters follow dealing with the period 1650–1750 and the struggle for maritime dominance. A single chapter examines the pivotal period 1750–1815, during which Britain triumphed over France. Two further chapters deal with the Pax Britannica between 1815–1901, and four chapters examine consecutive periods in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As Black explains in his preface, the greater amount of space devoted to the twentieth century as compared to the nineteenth allowed him “to focus on the decline of the maritime strand and to consider the continued relevance of the topic” (xi). A final chapter offers some conclusions.

Black's coverage of the Empire is immense, ranging from political to military, economic, social, demographic, and cultural history. In some chapters, he deals with all these topics; in others, he is more selective: for each of the periods 1650–1750 and 1815–1901, he devotes a chapter to social, economic, and cultural topics and then follows with a chapter looking at military and political issues. For each of these subjects, he relies on enormous secondary literatures. As far as I could judge for the early modern period, Black has read all the appropriate work and mastered the factual details and intricacies of interpretation. He is as comfortable dealing with imperial diplomacy as he is with the cultural image of the sea or the composition of the fleet. Apart from his command of the material, he is a master of deft observation and succinct summary; the book is an undeniably impressive piece of historical synthesis.

If there is an argument in the British Seaborne Empire it is that there is “no central narrative.” For Black, the Empire involved “trade and war, fishing and shipbuilding, piracy and seaborne settlement, emigration, immigration and a myriad other links” (355). He sees these relationships and connections as open-ended, with the only constant theme being one of change. As a result, Black's narrative is chronological and contingent; in most sections of his account, one event follows another over more than 500 years. But this methodological approach creates problems. In places, the narrative becomes exhausting to read, as one hurtles from one war or crisis to the next or ricochets from one part of the world to another. Moreover, the emphasis on change over time squeezes out any real consideration of “geographical structure.” Events are located in time and space in the narrative, but there is not a single map in the entire book, a remarkable omission given Black's writing on cartography and the symbolic importance of those maps of the world sprinkled with British possessions colored in red, which Black no doubt saw on the wall of his school classroom in the early 1960s. Black also gives little consideration to the different places and geographies of empire. He mentions the geographical shift of empire from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, but much more could have been made of the swing to the east. The cross-sectional portrait, so well used by historical geographers and magnificently employed by travel writer James/Jan Morris in the middle volume of the Pax Britannica trilogy, could have been used to effect.

Consideration of the changing geographies of empire would have slowed the chronological narrative and perhaps led to some reflection on the evolving geopolitics of empire. Black refers to Halford Mackinder in several places but hardly engages with his ideas about oceanic versus continental empires, or the role of technology in shaping empire. Yet some engagement with larger interpretations (not simply Mackinder) would have helped shape Black's narrative and made the book more relevant. As it is, Black has written an imperial narrative full of wars, ships, and trades but has eschewed the opportunity to offer a provocative interpretation of the seaborne nature of the British Empire.