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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb work by Kennedy,
By
This review is from: Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (Paperback)
First, a couple of notes on earlier reviews. Kennedy wrote this book ten years before Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, not as a compilation afterwards. Second, he doesn't talk about the US Navy because it is not the subject of his book. He is not biased by writing a history of the Royal Navy and sticking to the Royal Navy--the reviewer who imagines the US Navy as so important as to need discussion in a book about the RN is. Third, US monitors were, compared to the broadside ironclads like HMS Warrior being built across the sea, a joke.
The book's strength is in ascribing the interplay of finance, trade, and strategic necessity their rightful place at the center of both British history and the history of the Royal Navy. Britian had the best navy for much of the period 1588-1942 because it needed it, could afford it, and could lavish money on it because it didn't have to simultaneously maintain a large army. What killed the Royal Navy was not just industrial decline, but also the need to create a first-class air force because the navy could no longer defend the metropole on its own. By 1938, the RAF supplanted the RN as the biggest beneficiary of defense spending. That was the point of no return.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting and well researched,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (Paperback)
Very well written and interesting. Not nearly as dry as I thought it'd be and it explained quite a bit as to the forces which led to the rise of Western Civ. Also possibly prophetic although some of Kennedy's statements here seem to contradict his very popular "Rise & Fall of the Great Powers". Read both & actually I prefer this book. A must read for anyone interested in rounding out their knowledge of Naval history or even general Western History, 1500 to present.
Kennedy does a superb job in documenting his information.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
First Major Work by An Eminent Historian,
By Andrew Scott (Oakville, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (Penguin Classic History) (Paperback)
This book was published in 1976, twelve years before the same author's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. In this, his first major work, Kennedy picks up the threads of an area of historical enquiry which had begun with Alfred Thayer Mahan's Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. Kennedy traces the rise, apotheosis, and decline of the command of the seas which upon which rested the power of Britain and her Empire. Kennedy approaches the questions around British sea power from a geopolitical perspective, emphasizing the economic underpinnings of British sea power. As Kennedy admits in his introduction, he devotes relatively little attention to the individual battles and admirals who stand out in the story of the Royal Navy. No attention is paid to life on the lower decks. That, however, was never Kennedy's purpose. Some of the analysis now seems rather dated, based as it is on sources which have been partly superseded by historiographical advances. Nevertheless, it stands as a fascinating work, taking in the sweep of international developments from an Olympian perspective.
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