
Hal M. Friedman |
Review of Roy Adkins and Lesley Adkins, The
War for All the Oceans: From Nelson at the Nile to Napoleon at
Waterloo. New York: Viking, 2007. Pp. xxvi, 534. ISBN
978-0-670-03864-0. |
This recent account of the
naval aspects of the Napoleonic Wars emphasizes that the Royal Navy
essentially won those wars for Great Britain. While it will
probably be popular among general readers, it is badly lacking in
many respects and will not offer scholars very much. In fact, given
what professional historians have already written about the period,
this reviewer is unclear why the book was published. The authors are
identified as historians and archaeologists and Fellows of the
Society of Antiquaries of London; between them, they have published
three previous books, including Roy Adkins' Nelson's Trafalgar:
The Battle That Changed the World.[1]
But if they are in fact professionally trained historians, it is not
demonstrated here.
The book is a fairly
straightforward narrative of the Napoleonic naval wars from
Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt in 1798 until his final defeat at
Waterloo in 1815. It begins with a significant focus on Horatio
Nelson's defeat of the French fleet off Egypt and Napoleon's
subsequent defeat on land. The authors then cover French invasion
attempts of England, Britain's preemptive strike on the Danes,
continued British foiling of French invasion fleets, and British
conquest of French colonies in the Caribbean. Next come rising
tensions with the United States, British conquest of French and
Dutch colonies in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, the naval
aspects of the War of 1812, and even the British Navy's role in
transporting Napoleon to St. Helena after Waterloo. Along the way,
the Adkinses bring in naval figures who took part in other
endeavors, such as Sir Sidney Smith and his espionage activities.
They further describe what naval life was like for both officers and
enlisted men, as well as for sailors' families. They also detail the
Royal Navy's participation in ground campaigns and sailors' attempts
to escape from French prisons.
The book's central argument,
again, is not only that the Royal Navy was key to Allied victory in
the Napoleonic Wars but that it was the instrument of
victory. Some historians and politicians have been enunciating this
sort of position since 1815, but without much evidence or cogency.
In the present instance, the authors have consulted a wonderful
array of sources--especially primary sources. In particular, their
Bibliography lists many memoirs from British naval personnel. That,
however, may be the problem: by focusing so narrowly on the
participants' very words, the authors may be looking a bit too
closely at the bark and missing the tree, not to mention the forest.
Though they cite secondary sources, I miss works by David Chandler[2]
or Paul Kennedy; the latter's Rise and Fall of British Naval
Mastery[3]
demonstrates that while the Royal Navy was, in fact, a crucial
component of Allied victory, it was only one of several. The
Adkinses claim that naval supremacy allowed the British to conquer
virtually all French colonies, starve Napoleon of trade, and still
mount strikes on the European periphery. Kennedy would agree, but he
goes a significant step further in pointing out that British
dominance of the sea ensured control of not only trade but also
finance, shipping, banking, and insurance. He further shows its
financial dominance allowed Britain not only to operate its Navy and
merchant fleet and maintain a small Royal Army, but even more
importantly, to subsidize its Continental allies, Prussia, Austria,
Russia, and Portugal, not to mention numerous Germanic states and
the Ottoman Empire. The Continental powers were therefore able to
supply the majority of the ground troops that defeated Napoleon. In
short, Allied victory was one of, to use a twentieth-century term,
"combined arms warfare."
The Adkinses talk only too
briefly about the ground campaigns, unless there was significant
naval involvement in the form of landing parties. But even granting
that their book is about the Royal Navy's role in the wars, merely
asserting their main thesis without concrete evidence for it, while
ignoring the role of the Royal Army and Allied ground forces is
questionable history at best. The Royal Navy alone was not
sufficient to ensure victory and, just as we are learning ever so
slowly vis-à-vis air power in our own day, one does not win
wars without ground troops that can completely defeat an enemy and
occupy territory. In this case, the British could not have done
without their allies, especially Russia and Prussia.
There is also a major problem
with the book's organization. Given their non-specialist target
audience, the authors have adopted a very straightforward,
chronological narrative that proves unsuited to describing life in
the British Navy and the Navy's place in British society, while at
the same time attempting to describe strategy, operations, tactics,
and action. If the authors had adopted a thematic approach, like
that of N.A.M. Rodgers in his Command of the Ocean: A Naval
History of Britain, 1649-1815,[4] their
book would have been better organized and less disjointed. Given all
that they set out to describe in each chapter, the Adkinses'
narrative is broken between the Navy's operations and the social
history of the institution and its members. This makes for a very
confusing, incomplete, and incoherent story. Entire chapters are
sometimes devoted to stories of events like British sailors breaking
out of French prison camps and fortresses, with a bit of strategy,
operations, and tactics of the war seemingly thrown in for good
measure!
Related to the book's
structural problems is its use of sources. The authors quote memoirs
very liberally: block quotes frequently occupy half a page or more,
the narrative devolving into a mere string of quoted matter without
any analysis of its accuracy.
The authors also fail to
sufficiently explore new or previously not well covered aspects of
naval warfare. For instance, they describe the presence of wives and
children on ships at certain times, but never fully develop the
topic. As another example, I had not, until this book, thought about
the problem of lightning at sea as an operational hazard. But this
subject, too, is hastily dealt with before the authors rush on to
stories about the fate of Nelson's horse and the social norms
associated with the disposal of dead bodies washed up on shore. The
Adkinses even find a couple of instances of Americans captaining
British Navy warships but only mention their names without
explaining how and why the men wound up working for "the enemy."
This book is an example of a
new genre of history written largely by non-professional historians,
especially journalists, since the 1990s. As I review more and more
of these books, I become more and more suspicious of non-specialists
trying to write history. There is certainly nothing wrong with
narrative, and professional historians could learn a great deal
about it again. But books like The War for All the Oceans are
poorly researched and structured, negligent in evaluating sources,
and, worst of all, unoriginal. Unfortunately, the greed of publishers,
the historical amnesia of the reading public, and the stereotype
that professional historians are boring force us to spill much ink
over books that need not have been written.
Henry Ford Community College
friedman@hfcc.edu
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