It is many years since British historians felt comfortable in celebrating their country's triumphs. Once upon a time, Britain's incontestable naval and commercial supremacy in 1815 would have been explained as the pre-destined fruit of national virtue, religious truth and political freedom. Among professional historians all three explanations would nowadays arouse varying degrees of amusement, distaste and embarrassment, but no modern consensus of opinion has emerged to replace them. For many years the tendency has been to ignore or belittle the fact as well as the consequences of British naval supremacy. Not many would go so far as to dismiss it outright as a convenient myth, or imply that Napoleon won the Napoleonic War,' but a number of intellectual strategies have been devised to ignore it. The first generation of major naval historians, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, were naturally concerned to trace how the Navy had made the Empire, since it was self-evidently the Empire which made Britain great. Taking their cue from them, many modern writers implicitly assume that the functions of the Navy were essentially aggressive, to win territory overseas. It seems for them to follow that sea power is nowadays both uninteresting, except to specialists in imperial history, and morally disreputable, something the honest historian ought to pretend does not exist.

All these explanations have force, but they are not altogether compatible with one another, and none of them now looks completely persuasive by itself. In the twenty-first century all but one of the great land empires has broken up, and both economic prosperity and international power are at least as closely linked to seaborne trade and sea power as they were in the eighteenth century. As to armies on the Continent, it is unquestionable that a Continental victory requires a Continental commitment, so long as one understands victory in the terms of 1815 or 1945: the physical conquest of the enemy territory, and the overthrow of his regime. Total wars of this sort, however, have been unusual in history. Most wars are fought at more limited cost, for more limited objectives. British wars for overseas trade or possessions, and strictly defensive wars against overseas enemies, could be conducted largely or entirely at sea and overseas — as they were in the English case up to 1688. Only rarely did the threat of a Napoleon or a Hitler force British participation in a European coalition war. It was dynastic engagements which enforced a Continental commitment for the century after 1688, not British national interests. Without foreign monarchs, there would have been infrequent need, or no need, to have armies and allies on the Continent. The foreign monarchs, of course, were recruited for religious reasons. Protestantism, and very little else, recommended William III and George I to their new subjects. Thus the Reformation, which had wrecked England's strategic security in the sixteenth century, continued to undermine it in the eighteenth. It is true that the one eighteenth-century war which Britain fought without Continental allies, the American War, was a partial defeat, but it is not at all safe to assume that the lack of allies was responsible, when there are other and better explanations. For most of the eighteenth century, the Continental Commitment was essentially for the benefit of the Church of England, not the Royal Navy.

England must resolve to be at the constant charge, of keeping a great Fleet in continual Action, if ever the Nation hopes to have any Peace or Tranquillity; for it is only the Navy under its Monarchical Government, as in Church and State Established, by God's Assistance, can bring any lasting Peace or Happiness to this Nation.

As these lines suggest, the significance of sea power to British history lies at least as much in domestic politics and the growth of the state as in foreign policy and war. Political theorists at least as far back as Aristotle have linked navies and democratic forms of government,' and it used to be customary, to connect the Revolution of 1688 with England's rise to naval greatness. Unfortunately for this argument, it is beyond doubt that the powerful English fleet of the 169oS was not originally the product of Whig revolution, or even Stuart monarchy, but of Republican government and military dictatorship.'° The State's Navy of the 1650S, like the fleets of Spain in the late sixteenth century, France in the late seventeenth, Germany in the late nineteenth, and Russia in more than one period, all show that autocratic, militarized states are perfectly capable 9f building large and efficient navies, often with astonishing speed – but they do not seem to be capable of sustaining their creations. The English Republic (and the English army which dominated it) took barely ten years to create the most formidable navy in Europe, and then to collapse. Spanish sea power enjoyed a brief period of strength in the 15905 followed by a steep decline. Louis XIV's fleet rose to be the largest in the world in less than thirty years, and had largely disappeared within another thirty. The fleet that, Tirpitz built on borrowed money ran out of credit in the budget crisis of 1912.

All these cases can be well explained by the argument that the temporary influence of a dominant favourite or the capricious will of the All-Highest was no substitute for the solid support of entrenched interest groups. 'Naval strength is not the growth of a day, nor is it possible to retain it, when once acquired, without the utmost difficulty, and the most unwearied attention,' wrote the pioneer economist Sir John Sinclair in 1782.12 Only the unwavering support of the political nation, sustained over decades if not centuries, could build up a dominant sea power.

It is helpful in this context to divide eighteenth-century British government into two parts: the crown's and Parliament's. The crown's government, which included the army and foreign affairs, was based on a balance of central and local forces, the powers of the crown checked by those of the nobility and gentry. It was traditional if not archaic, dispersed and inefficient. Parliament's government was quite different; highly centralized and precociously professional. Here were found the Treasury and the revenue-collecting departments, especially the Customs and Excise, and here too was the Navy. Studying one side or the other of government produces entirely different conclusions. The location of the main revenue-raising and revenue-spending departments on the efficient, Parliamentary side of British government is one of the most distinctive and important features of British constitutional development. Because Parliament captured the Navy, it was able to realize the character of British sea power as the ideal expression of the nation in arms which was founded on the folk-memory of the Elizabethan age. It made the Navy an expression of the liberty of the people, where the army was an expression of the power of the crown. The Stuarts could never have done this, however wisely they had managed the Navy.

The British state's unequalled capacity to raise revenue was the indispensable foundation of sea power, but its significance is not solely military. Getting and spending so large a proportion of national income made the state the principal actor in the economy, and it was the economy which made Britain great. By the later eighteenth century, before the industrial revolution had begun, Britain was already one of the two great international trading powers. There is much disagreement among economic historians as to how the British economy grew and what factors gave rise to the industrial revolution, but chronology alone makes it clear that Britain was a great power before she was an industrial power. By 1815, when her main commercial rival, France, had destroyed herself and much of Europe with her, Britain was incontestably the dominant world trading power – but the industrial revolution was still in its early stages, and only water-powered cotton mills were yet making a major contribution to the economy. In the period in which Britain rose to greatness, there were only three significant economic activities in the British Isles: agriculture, foreign trade and war.

Attempts have been made to downplay the significance of one or all of these, but it is hard to believe that they were not all three essentially involved in Britain's economic growth. Foreign trade, especially the rich colonial and East India trades, generated the liquid capital which paid for wars. At least until the 17905 the British economy was producing more investment capital than it could absorb, which was how the government was able to borrow steeply rising sums at stable or falling interest rates. Since it is probable that the peacetime economy was not running at full capacity, wartime expenditure financed by borrowing had little inflationary effect, and Britain's eighteenth-century wars were at least partly paid for by mobilizing unemployed capital and labour. The effect of the state, especially the state in wartime, was to stimulate the economy. `In many ways, this two-way system of raising and simultaneously spending vast sums of money acted like a bellows, fanning the development of western capitalism and of the nation-state itself.'22 The economic burden of war was therefore remarkably low, except when large armies like Marlborough's and Wellington's campaigned overseas and had to pay for what they purchased locally in cash. What was spent on the Navy was nearly all spent in Britain, or spent overseas in buying from British merchants who remitted their profits home.

The financial system in turn linked international trade with domestic agriculture, whose rapid productivity growth made possible the rise of the economy as a whole. From 1600 to 1800 the population of England almost tripled, but the agricultural workforce stayed about the same and the country remained broadly self-sufficient in food. By 1800 only one-third of the British population (compared to two-thirds in France) was on the land. Even in the hard years of the Great Wars, when fourteen harvests failed out of twenty-two, few people were ever in serious want, and both the economy and the population continued to grow very fast. A prosperous rural population formed a large consumer market for nascent domestic industries, while those displaced from the land provided the manpower which fought the wars, at a low cost to the productive economy. All this was made possible by the growth of an efficient national agricultural market, in which, as we have seen, the Victualling Board was heavily involved. This national market depended on coastal ship-ping, for only the efficiencies of water transport were capable of integrating so large an area as the British Isles. The agricultural market also spread the financial system to the remotest corners of the British Isles, and drained the surplus profits of farmers and landowners into the London capital markets. In this way agriculture too contributed capital and skills to the `maritime imperial' system.

It has been argued that the industrial revolution, when it came, heralded the end rather than the beginning of Britain's economic supremacy, for it was based on technologies which could easily be exported. The commercial and agricultural revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on which Britain's economic supremacy was first established, derived from `social efficiencies' of British society which were difficult or impossible for foreigners to copy.z6 These were precisely the aspects of society which also favoured sea