This chapter examines the strategic history of the British seapower state, the last great power to rely on naval power as its primary strategic instrument in peace and war. Maritime strategies reflect the reality that seapower states need to control maritime communications for security and prosperity: that control allows them to attack the shipping, overseas possessions and, critically, the economies of their rivals as an alternative to a land invasion. Military great powers have responded to the maritime threat by building military navies to secure command of the sea, to facilitate the invasion and overthrow of a seapower rival. If that option fails they use naval resources to attack floating trade of a seapower adversary. The Navy become central to national identity.

Between 1688 and 1945 Britain developed and used a unique maritime strategic model that linked strategic decision-making to policy aims, political structures, and economic realities. This strategy enabled Britain, a small offshore island, to act as great power in the European, and later global systems, but it was a fragile asset. Naval power had limited strategic impact, even the purely naval Anglo-Dutch wars of the 17th century were settled by economics, not sea battles. The combination of insularity and powerful financial instruments enabled Britain to wage long wars of limited mobilisation, but it needed allies to defeat great power rivals. Securing such allies cost money, and restricted war aims. The key strategic concerns were naval dominance, the security of the Low Countries and the legal basis of economic warfare. Whenever possible the Navy was used to maintain peace through deterrence and suasion, war with other great powers was always unwelcome because it would be long, costly and bad for business. There was no short-war strategic option. In war the British Army supported maritime strategy, it was not a ‘continental’ force, and was never committed to that role in peacetime while Britain remained a great power. Britain’s rivals employed a variety of naval strategies to counter or limit the impact of this maritime strategy, an invasion of Britain, arms racing, fleets in being, coastal defences and commerce raiding, but the only method that succeeded was the United States attack that broke the British economy between 1939 and 1945, backed by the construction of an immense fleet. Although no longer a great power after 1945 Britain’s global maritime interests and insular location remained critical aspects of national security.

This essay examines the recovery and development of strategic leadership as an educational aid for senior officers and statesmen. Between 1902 and 1914 Julian Stafford Corbett (1854–1922) provided history and strategy lectures for the Royal Navy's senior level war course, an educational programme designed to prepare the navy's leadership for future conflicts through in depth study of strategy, technology, intentional law, historical and contemporary experience, and national policy. Corbett, a lawyer by training, was wealthy and politically engaged. In the less than a decade he developed his limited initial brief, providing historical content, into a programme to capture and define national strategy, and disseminate it as doctrine. He worked closely with service leaders, including First Sea Lord Admiral Sir John Fisher (1904–1910) and successive directors of naval intelligence, the navy's chief war planner, and the officer responsible for the war course. Not only did he teach almost all the middle and senior level naval officers who served in the First World War, but his extensive publications ensured national strategic doctrine was widely understood, by service leaders and civilians.

Corbett's work was shaped by service agendas, but the navy left him to deliver the programme. This intellectual partnership between the navy's strategic leadership and a sophisticated Clausewitzian intellectual proved to highly effective. In 1907 Corbett published England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, which demonstrated the impact of limited maritime strategy in a global war with extensive continental military operations. It was a template for a future conflict, written for admirals and statesmen, not academics. The book stressed that British maritime/amphibious strategy had triumphed over French-continental methods, and remained the basis of national strategy in 1907. He highlighted the critical role of civilian strategic leadership, working in partnership with sophisticated service leaders, in this case Pitt the Elder and Admiral Lord Anson. His argument shaped contemporary strategic choice, ensuring Britain did not create a mass conscript army before 1916.

The leadership he studied was national, not individual, rational rather than heroic, and his focus was on the evolution of contemporary strategic doctrine. In his study of the Trafalgar campaign Corbett emphasised strategic continuity, not tactical innovation.

In the mid-nineteenth century the complex relationship between Britain, France and the Channel Islands acquired a new urgency, as the British state launched a massive project to create an artificial harbour on the Island of Alderney, the lynchpin of a system of maritime security that would ensure the safety of British merchant shipping in wartime, countering the threat posed by the rapidly advancing naval base and fortified harbour at Cherbourg. In the event of war Braye Harbour would be critical to Britain's global system, the physical manifestation of a distinctive maritime culture and the strategic methods of a unique seapower state. Together with a second new harbour at Portland, 60 miles north, it would enable the Royal Navy to control the western entrance of the English Channel, isolating Cherbourg from the French naval bases on the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. This massive, costly project, the product of an era of heightened Anglo-French tension, exploited the latest engineering expertise to address the strategic problem of commanding the seas with short-ranged steam ships. But Braye was only the latest in a long line of developments that linked the Channel Islands into the British strategic system and, like those that had gone before, it changed the relationship between Britain, France and the Islands, and the Islands themselves. How should we understand the interlocking relationships between great powers and small islands, terrestrial identities and maritime realities? The conflicted history of Braye Harbour suggests an ambitious cultural reading could offer a way forward.

Early in 1862, as the British House of Commons prepared to decide whether to continue funding the massive naval harbour project at Braye, geologist, mining engineer and author David Thomas Ansted (1814−80) elevated a humdrum issue of expenditure and engineering onto an altogether higher plane. Ansted presented the harbour and fortress complex as the key to naval dominion, and a totem of national culture. His article ‘England's “Broad Stone of Honour”’ linked the great Prussian fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, looming over Coblenz at the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine, the key to the defence of Germany, with the new bastion that secured command of the English Channel: they were the representative bulwarks of their respective countries.

Beginning in the late 1780s the strategic geography of the English Channel and Western Approaches would be fundamentally altered by the construction of large artificial harbours, extending existing ports into deep water and enhancing their security against wind and tide. While Cherbourg, Plymouth and Holyhead pre-dated steam shipping, later works at Dover, Portland and Alderney and French harbour upgrades at St Malo, Granville, Dunkirk and Calais, were influenced by the prospect that future wars in the Channel would be fought by steam ships. Steam navigation posed a particular challenge for the Channel Islands, which lacked the local capital to acquire and operate steamers, and the floating harbours needed to operate them efficiently. While some islanders tried to persuade the British Government to build such harbours, the new technology significantly reduced the Islands’ offensive strategic potential. After 1830 local naval operations would be shaped by steam, not small sailing vessels. Island privateering was no longer a significant asset, but the Islands remained critical to commanding the Channel. Their security became a national priority and required new harbours.

The Channel resumed its central place in British grand strategy after the 1814−15 Treaties of Paris and Vienna, where British diplomacy helped shape a European system to resist French expansion in Europe, while the Waterloo campaign demonstrated how the Castlereagh/Wellington diplomatic and strategic ‘System’ worked. With France constrained by the 1815 borders the only significant strategic threat it could pose to Britain would be against merchant shipping, especially at the focal point in the Channel and Western Approaches. As all French regimes between 1815 and 1870 attempted to secure domestic support by overturning the Vienna Settlement, these attempts frequently reduced Anglo-French relations to diplomatic crises and arms racing. It would be against the background of heightened tension that Britain developed a series of new naval stations to support steam warfare in the Channel, specifically to counter the emerging naval base at Cherbourg.

The Channel Islands remained a critical element in this response. In late 1830 former Prime Minister Wellington became anxious about their security, fearing a ‘Revolutionary’ French government would use war to maintain domestic credibility, encouraged by a francophile Whig administration that deliberately weakened links with Austria, Prussia and Russia, which had hitherto restrained France, and secured Britain's vital interests in Europe, keeping Belgium and the River Scheldt outside France.

The maritime aspects of the wars of the French Revolution and Empire were asymmetric, between a British seapower empire of oceanic connectivity and a French dominated European system that focussed on territorial control and economic restriction. The inclusive British political system privileged naval strength, the defence of trade, and sea control. This position was based on battle fleet dominance, which remained undefeated across two decades. British identity became ever more closely linked to naval success as Nelson, the Nile and Trafalgar added new names to national culture. This sustained long-term funding for major infrastructure projects, new ships, and high levels of skilled manpower. Superior ships and men enabled the Royal Navy to defeat naval rivals, and attacks on commercial shipping by national warships and privateers. Naval dominance sustained a hard-line economic war that broke the Russian economy, and seriously damaged that of France, while the City of London and the British economy more generally continued to support the national war effort through extensive capital loans, and private measures, such as those of Lloyds Patriotic Fund. Seapower could not defeat Napoleon, it supported a grand alliance that would achieve that aim. By 1815 Britain had become a global seapower empire of unrivalled wealth and influence.