Sublime

Naval vessels were extremely expensive items of capital equipment whose value deteriorated rapidly in adverse conditions. Naval warfare too was dominated by caution and manoeuvre. The stakes were high: outright defeat might mean invasion or the destruction of the merchant fleet. Hence navies were usually kept close to home.

On the larger stage of Eurasian or global economic competition, the maritime sector of the European economy, for all its success in developing the commodity trades across the Atlantic, and in finding customers among the expatriate Europeans in the Americas, was simply too small, too restricted in economic and demographic capacity, to aspire to glob

if ever this war is to be won, it must be won at sea. Bonaparte has about forty-five ships of the line, and we have eighty-odd, which sounds well enough. But ours are scattered all over the world and his are not. Then again the Spaniards have twenty-seven, to say nothing of the Dutch; so it is essential to prevent them from combining, for if Bonapa

The real advantage of industrial imperialism lay in scale and speed. Industrial technique and the supply of capital allowed Europeans to stage a series of blitzkrieg conquests. They could lay down railways at breakneck speed to bring their force to bear hundreds of miles from the sea.

By the sixteenth century it was clear enough that Europe’s comparative advantage over other Eurasian civilizations lay in its precocious development of marine activity. The simultaneous growth of long-distance trade with the Americas and India was one sign of this. Another was the rise of the huge cod fishery in the North Atlantic,

European armies had evolved into highly specialized machines to fight each other – but not to fight military forces whose ‘strategic doctrine’ was radically different. This was painfully apparent in the encounters between British troops and Native Americans in the 1750s.

Another trait of a thalassocracy is that, as always with strategic positioning, trade-offs are essential[297]. Most old thalassocracies mastered the sea because they didn’t have much land to defend. Conversely, most countries with vast swaths of land had a hard time competing on the sea, because they lacked the focus and cohesiveness that made it p