But Peter Padfield shows that they are in fact intimately related.

Why is it that land-based nations and empires in this period have tended to be defeated by maritime powers?

Simple. Empires like France or Austria are continental powers, and their focus is on land warfare, which requires a massive army to protect their borders.

That in turn means the political system in those places tends to be a massive centralised bureaucracy, with the state making a lot of the key economic decisions.

Maritime powers on the other hand, the British and the Dutch, relied on sea power because they were well placed to trade internationally.

Trade requires that ships get to and from their ports in safety. 

The sea lanes they ply need to be protected from piracy if trade is to be profitable.

That job has to be done with naval power, and plenty of it.

So you had a confluence of interests between an increasingly influential and wealthy merchant class in maritime nations, and a complex and expensive naval establishment that needed the profits from trade to operate effectively.

These are two very separate ways of looking at the world - on the one hand the aristocratic, hierarchical inflexibility of the major European continental powers; and on the other the maritime Dutch, English and later American focus on trade leading to liberty, flexibility and enterprise.

Peter Padfield writes that freedom has always been a distinguishing mark of merchant power “since both trade and consultative government require the widest dissemination of information and free expression of opinion; thus the basic freedoms of trade spread through all areas of life, tending to break down social hierarchies and the grip of received ideas, creating more open, mobile and enterprising cultures. Liberty has always been the pride and rallying cry of powers enjoying maritime supremacy.”

The author makes what seems to me to be a self-evident case that the system of trade,. maritime supremacy and the ideals of liberty, free inquiry and mercantile enterprise was developed first by the Dutch, then by Britain, and is currently exemplified by Britain's direct successor, the United States.

As well as illustrating the relationship between the type of power fielded by European nations in the early modern era and the political philosophies which underpinned them, the book also includes some excellent descriptions of some of the key sea battles of the period.

 

It begins, as you would expect in a book about the struggle between freedom and repression, with the Spanish Armada, works it's way through the Dutch struggle against Spanish Hapsburg rule, the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 which brought the Dutch ruler, William of Orange to the British throne (and cemented the influence of Dutch ideas in British thought and practice), through the Anglo-French wars to the American Revolutionary War.

You'll learn a great deal about the role of sea power from both a military and a political/cultural perspective, which is not something you come across every day.

If you enjoy this book, I think you'll also find "The First Salute" by Barbara Tuchman a useful companion, as it discusses the little-known yet crucial role of naval operations in the American War of Independence (or as we call it here at Shire Network News, "a serious of unfortunate misunderstandings in which a robust internal exchange of views on tax policy and electoral representation got a tad out of hand.")