Most histories of the Royal Navy, those of the Navy Records Society included, concentrate on the service's wartime activities. This volume does not. Rather, it is centred upon a man who never participated in combat operations during his sixty-year naval career. For an officer during the period 1650–1815, or 1900–1945, this would have been an extraordinary achievement. For Alexander Milne and his contemporaries too young to have served during the Napoleonic Wars, it was the rule, rather than the exception.

In turn, Milne's service career serves as a microcosm for the Navy during the years 1815–1900, often dubbed the Pax Britannica by diplomatic historians. This period witnessed the wholesale transformation of the Navy's materiel, and of many other facets, personnel and administration among them. Those portions of its history have received substantial historical scrutiny, especially in recent years. What the Navy did with its ships and men, however, has attracted much less attention. This volume seeks to address that lacuna.

During the wars of the long eighteenth century, the British government used naval power in ways that repeatedly antagonised not only enemies but neutral states as well. The ‘Rule of 1756’, which prohibited wartime transport of goods to destinations by parties barred from doing so in peacetime, and Britain's unilateral policy regarding visit and search of neutral vessels on the high seas had been major factors in the formation of leagues of armed neutrality in 1780–81 and 1800–1801, and, along with impressment, were among the casus belli of the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States. When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, the Royal Navy was as large as the rest of the world's navies combined and, had it chosen, Britain could have continued to use its power in similarly highhanded fashion. It did not, although the initial omens were hardly encouraging.

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, as in previous conflicts, British naval power had been employed in combined operations to seize enemy possessions overseas. At the Congress of Vienna the British delegation unilaterally barred any discussion of restitution. Were colonies to be returned to their former rulers, the British alone would make the decision. And, given the Royal Navy's hegemonic position, there was nothing any other European power could do about this fait accompli other than impotently to resent it.