No More Napoleons: How Britain Managed Europe from Waterloo to World War One
588 pages
Capt M K Barritt and Dr James Bosbotinis
What personal narrative framework do we have for the period 1815-1914? Looking back to the formative texts of my early years, I see chapters headed ‘Pax Britannica’ with themes of attempts to suppress white and black slavery, to end piracy and promote world trade, to pursue scientific exploration and hydrography. Accompanying chapters entitled ‘Time of Transition’ seek to address the settings of profound social change and rapid technological advance. Operational passages are spasmodic and somewhat disconnected. In The Naval Side of British History (my copy carrying a school prize label inside) Sir Geoffrey Callender provided some philosophical and strategic context, with a sea power comparison with Venice and Holland at the outset, stress on the acute attention throughout to Rhine Delta and Dardanelles, and a declaration that Germany’s drive through Belgium in 1914 “unravelled three centuries of careful British statesmanship by sounding the doom of Antwerp.” Now, with consummate mastery of the complexity of this tumultuous century, but forensic focus on European security, Andrew Lambert provides a compelling account of how Britain sustained the sea power strategy that prevented the emergence of a dominant continental power.
It has been a deeply rewarding experience to have been at work during the timeframe of the gestation of this book, to have met and corresponded with Andrew, benefiting from his incisive grasp of strategic context, and witnessing the depth of the research that underpins his writing. I have spoken of forgotten stories, of people who fall outside the beam of the historians’ spotlight, and of a golden spider’s web of enlightened interest. There is much of that in No More Napoleons, and here are some instances.
Byam Martin is generally acknowledged as a vitally important and influential Controller and Admiralty Lord. Here we see more. The man responsible for close support of Wellington in the Peninsular campaign, he played a part in that great general’s application of ‘the British way of war’. An expeditionary army of the size that the country could generate, was delivered and supported by the Royal Navy, having effect in the best place to supplement the effort of great allied continental armies. It was Byam Martin, the British Commissioner overseeing the dismantling of Napoleon’s ‘pistol pointed at the heart of England’, who disposed the naval forces at Wellington’s rear as he took his stand at Waterloo. He shared with Wellington a grasp of the strategy that was abandoned in the run up to the First World War and saw the failure of British generals to defend Belgium.
Byam Martin is also part of the spider’s web of shared skills and insights. He knew John Ross from Baltic days as a skilled linguist and liaison officer, intelligence operator and surveyor. We think of Ross as a polar explorer. Here, symptomatic of the sheer depth of research behind this book, he is identified as a vital exponent of steam power for warships. Other significant and influential advisers on steam and gunnery, Commander John Hoseason and Captain Henry Chads are brought in from the sidelines.
John Washington, Hydrographer to the Board of Admiralty, lies in the shadow of his predecessor Francis Beaufort. In earlier books Andrew Lambert has revealed the key part that he played in gathering and providing hydrographic intelligence to inform the very top levels of national decision-making and strategic direction. Here we see more of him at work as Andrew dissects the scares that have dominated many accounts of the 19th century and provides a fresh and balanced look at developments such as the mis-named ‘Coastal Defence Ships’ which were ideally suited to attack Cherbourg, as proven in the Baltic during the Crimean War using the Hydrographer’s charts. Washington was a key figure in the concept of the ‘harbours of refuge’, Alderney for the watch on Cherbourg, Holyhead now connected with first class roads and bridges, allowing rapid movement of army and militia to and from Ireland.
It is simply impossible to exaggerate the groundwork of dogged research behind the strategic argument in this book. Here is a narrative framework that should be absorbed by all serving naval officers. No More Napoleons should stand on the reference shelves alongside Seapower States and The British Way of War. For, as James Bosbotinis demonstrates below, it is a key primer for British statesmen confronting ‘Would be Napoleons’ today – and also for their naval advisers.
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The subject of order, whether regional or global, is of much interest, especially given the degree of flux affecting the contemporary global system: shifting balances of power, the impact of new and emerging technologies, and myriad other geopolitical and geo-economic uncertainties and challenges. Such a set of challenges would have been familiar to the statesmen of the major European powers of the 19th century, as Professor Andrew Lambert sets out in masterly fashion in No More Napoleons. While it is focused on the period from Waterloo to the First World War, it is a “study of strategic change in an era of dramatic technological progress…an age of economic anxiety, shaped by a massive national debt burden, domestic instability, new technologies and regional insecurity.” Moreover, as Lambert emphasises, “History should be more than an explanation of what happened, and why. If it is to have any value going forward, history needs to locate significant events in larger patterns and identify long-term trends.”
In this book, Lambert charts the development of British strategy from the morning of 18 June 1815, through the following decades as London sought to ensure that any new French threat to British interests was deterred, to meeting the challenge of Russian ambitions, and then the emergence of Imperial Germany. Lambert both explains what happened and why, whilst also setting his analysis in the wider contexts of the development of British strategy from the late 17th through to the 20th centuries, including countering the German threat in the autumn of 1940, and the challenges of today. For example, consider substituting ‘Russian’ for ‘French’ in the following: “At the heart of the French problem lay relative decline…it needed to expand to remain a great power, recovering the so-called ‘natural frontiers’…”. Similarly, the emphasis on the inherent versatility and adaptability of maritime power, highlighted by the ‘Cherbourg strategy’ and its subsequent application in the Crimean War, has an enduring and contemporary resonance. The following three statements from pages 137, 373 and 396 taken together would arguably serve the UK well today; “British strategy was maritime, expeditionary and focused on securing sea control…to join alliance partners in Europe…Britain needed a deployable offensive military capability…the Navy responded to emerging strategic needs…the capabilities necessary to achieve effect on land: through economic warfare…bombardment and amphibious strike.” In this regard, Lambert’s second appendix, ‘The Principles of British Strategy’ would on its own, be worth buying the book for.
Furthermore, the Introduction, ‘Ordering and Offshore Balancing: Britain, Europe and Global Power’, provides a most valuable analysis, including on the subject of polarity, as Lambert explains: “Critically, unipolar world orders differ from bipolar and multi-polar systems. Britain operated in a multi-polar world, and did so as a distinctly different sea power, focused on oceans and commerce, rather than territory and land-based revenues.” This has contemporary relevance as the international system is arguably once again bipolar, and as Øystein Tunjsø highlights, the contemporary bipolar system centred on US-China rivalry means that: “Today, maritime East Asia is the primary area of the superpowers’ strategic competition and interaction. The relative importance of land and sea power in the two bipolar systems [US-Soviet, US-China] and the differences between rivalry and balancing on land and at sea illustrate how geopolitics shapes the effects of bipolarity.”[1] As Lambert explains with regard to current debates on the US and offshore balancing, the latter is a “strategy of relative weakness, reflecting limited resources, it is not an obvious choice for the dominant power in the global system.”
For the UK, “‘Offshore Balancing’ was a process, not a conclusion, one that operated in constant tension, endless shifting to meet new threats, as old rival became new allies, notably so in 1854. The desired outcome was the maintenance of peace without any diminution of power and economic dynamism.” In No More Napoleons, Lambert provides a masterful account and analysis of that process, encompassing the grand strategic down to the tactical, as well as factors such as culture and the creation of identity. This book quite simply must be read by all those with any form of interest in matters of strategy. It is most highly recommended.
[1] Øystein Tunjsø, The Return of Bipolarity in World Politics: China, the United States, and Geostructural Realism (New York and Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2018).
