![]() The War had been fought and won on land – although it was unclear how and indeed if any state, other than perhaps the United States, was genuinely a victor. To some historians, these events rendered Mahan’s analysis irrelevant, while Mackinder’s prophecy seemed to have been proven. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy – and its French, Russian, Italian, and from 1917 American counterparts – appeared to achieve little, their expensive battleships floating idly, unable to win a decisive victory over enemy fleets. The battles of the Somme and Passchendaele were etched irrevocably on the national psyche, bywords for futility and waste. It built a large army against the supposed traditions of the ‘British way in warfare’, resulting in enormous casualties and economic ruin. In the process of defeating this rival, Britain destroyed the foundations of its own strength anyway. Britain fought a disastrously expensive war on the European continent against Germany and its allies. In the popular conception of the First World War, this process began to play out a decade later. With the advantages of sea power seeming to ebb away at the dawn of the twentieth century, the sun must set on the British Empire sooner rather than later. At the centre of a maritime ‘world-system’, underpinned chiefly by the might of the Royal Navy, Britain could not hope to match a Russo-German combination on land. Mackinder’s nightmare scenario posed difficult questions for the future of the British Empire. Germany and Russia, working together, might come to control all of ‘Euro-Asia’, marshalling a vast pool of resources that would enable them to destroy any challenger to their hegemony, on land or at sea. ![]() His lecture has commonly been interpreted to claim that, by exploiting the enhanced mobility afforded by new technologies such as trans-continental railway networks, states with large armies would now dominate the international order. He sought to shock the Edwardian elites in attendance with a bold thesis: the ‘Columbian epoch’ – the age that Mahan had described in which navies had been critical to the development and maintenance of power in the international system – was over. ![]() It was published later that year in The Geographical Journal as ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, and like Mahan’s work has since become a classic text in the canon of strategic thought, acting as a key element in the foundation of ‘geopolitics’. On 25 January 1904, this academic – Halford John Mackinder – visited the Royal Geographical Society in London to deliver a lecture. While Mahan looked to the age of sail – and the rise of the British Empire – to understand sea power, his message, as the title of this book suggested, was one for the present day.Īcross the Atlantic Ocean, a Reader in Geography at the University of Oxford was also mulling the future utility of sea power. The core of his ideas concerning the relationship between land power and sea power was perhaps most succinctly expressed in The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future, in which he claimed that ‘control of the sea, by maritime commerce and naval supremacy, means predominant influence in the world because, however great the wealth product of the land, nothing facilitates the necessary exchanges as does the sea’. His ideas were admired by powerful individuals in Europe, notably Kaiser Wilhelm II, and helped him to forge relationships with policymakers in the United States too, not least President Theodore Roosevelt. The book helped to propel Mahan to celebrity status in the ensuing years. ![]() His most famous tome, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, was published in 1890 and remains the traditional starting point for studies of sea power theory to this day. In the decades prior to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the American naval officer and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan published a series of works explaining why navies mattered. ![]()
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