Andrew Lambert. Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires, and the Conflict that Made the Modern World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 320 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-23004-8.
Reviewed by Ryan Wadle (Air University, eSchool of Graduate PME)
Published on H-War (April, 2020)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)
With his Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires, and the Conflict that Made the Modern World, Andrew Lambert has produced an enthralling strategic and cultural history of states who willingly bucked the traditional path to power by taking to the sea. Concurrently, though, it is also an idiosyncratic and frustrating work beset by poor structure within chapters and the need for better visuals to support the narrative.
Lambert, who serves as the Laughton Professor of Naval History at King’s College, London, is a leading naval historian with a publication record spanning multiple time periods, which makes him an ideal candidate to take on this project. Here, Lambert seeks to correct the historical record on seapower states, much of which has been shaped by their destructive and dismissive continental rivals or in the works of Alfred Thayer Mahan, whom Lambert argues “did not engage with the soul of seapower, only the strategic surface. He split the Greek word into a phrase—sea power—because he could not turn to Venice, or Britain, in his search for a sea power precursor for his native country” (p. 2). Even as Lambert acknowledges that Mahan is worthy guide for strategic thought, he seeks to focus on the unique maritime cultural legacy created and perpetuated by seapower states.
Lambert’s book defines the core traits of seapower states before tracing the rise of the true seapowers that have defined world history: Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and England/United Kingdom. These states recognized their weaknesses relative to their continental rivals and thus consciously reshaped their destinies by turning to the sea. From a cultural perspective, these states possessed a vibrant, curious, and outward-looking merchant class, helping to fuel their desire to access new markets for their goods. They each formed relatively inclusive political structures, typically oligarchic republics that allowed the mercantile classes who depended on foreign trade to acquire political power. This in turn afforded these seapowers the opportunity to marshal incredible financial resources to maintain the fleets and requisite logistical systems to protect this system of overseas trade. The accumulation of wealth permitted seapowers to fund incredible architecture and artistic programs that signaled their wealth and power to their visitors and own citizens alike. Critically, each state sought to emulate its predecessors’ methods and also prove to skeptics that their resistance to continental empires had precedent. In the case of Athens, the first seapower state, this meant looking to the Minoan civilization on Crete as a seapower forbear. This precedent allowed each of Athens’s successors to view themselves as the keeper of a distinct political and cultural tradition.
In Lambert’s estimation, maintaining a seapower state involves striking the correct balance between the core characteristics that define them. For instance, seapower states form “inclusive” political systems that allow a strong political voice to merchants and commercial interests, yet they cannot abide full democracy because the masses will likely lose interest in the maritime enterprise. Similarly, seapowers depend upon the construction of an empire to maintain commercial access overseas, yet these holdings cannot be too extensive lest they turn the state into a landed empire beholden to terrestrial concerns. Seapower states also thrive in eras of multipolarity when they can navigate the space between two or more continental powers, but the winnowing of powers into unipolar hegemons usually spells doom for seapowers, who often exhausd their financial reserves in battles for survival against larger opponents. For instance, this fate befell the Dutch Republic following its expensive war with Bourbon France in the late seventeenth century and the United Kingdom after the two world wars against Germany.
The bulk of the book’s nine chapters analyze the rise and fall of each of the aforementioned seapower states, but Lambert also helpfully includes two chapters that provide some valuable counterpoints to his larger argument and one that analyzes the present state of seapower. In one chapter, Lambert delves into Peter the Great’s attempt to turn the Russian Empire into a seapower. This effort ultimately failed because his successors reverted to continental thinking and did not see much value in maintaining the requisite physical and cultural infrastructure. Another chapter analyzes a trio of what he terms “sea states,” or nations that turned to the sea in a manner akin to the seapower states yet were unwilling or unable to become a major power: Rhodes, Genoa, and Portugal. Finally, he analyzes the current geopolitical era, taking a dim view of Russian and Chinese seapower while classifying the United States as a continental hegemon with a strong navy working in league with modern sea states, such as Japan and a diminished United Kingdom. According to Lambert, America’s recent inward turn and historical inconsistency of supporting its navy could compel the modern sea states to bolster their navies to defend the sea control and maritime commerce that the Western order relies upon.
The chapter on the sea states, which is simultaneously thorough and very efficient, highlights the unfortunate flaws that burden Seapower States. First, this is a dense book and the chapters on the individual seapower states are not presented in a straightforward narrative style, meaning that readers will likely need some familiarity with the subject matter to appreciate the richness of the text. Within those chapters, Lambert also has an unfortunate tendency to discuss the same events at multiple points, giving them the feel of a first draft. Furthermore, for a book that spends so much time discussing the importance of art and architecture as expressions of seapower grandeur, the images are few and of poor quality.
Still, even in spite of its exasperating imperfections, Seapower States is a much-needed volume with a novel approach and argument in a field that remains too wedded to a Mahanian focus on the movement of fleets and naval rather than maritime strategy and its effects writ large. In addition to the welcome addition to the academic historiography, it is also a perceptive and cogent analysis of grand strategy relevant to strategists and policymakers.
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Citation:
Ryan Wadle. Review of Lambert, Andrew, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires, and the Conflict that Made the Modern World.
H-War, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53140
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