The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815

The second installment of Rodger's projected three-part naval history of Britain is one of very few books that actually warrant the adjective "magisterial." In this 900-plus-page volume, which concentrates on the period of the so-called Second Hundred Years' War against the French (1689-1815), Rodger elucidates the Royal Navy's rise to global preponderance and its consolidation as the single most influential institution in the nation's life. "Naval dominance of European waters," he asserts, "was the largest, longest, most complex and expensive project ever undertaken by the British state and society," and this sprawling and intricate story perforce embraces diplomacy, religion, and politics; economic, technological, and social trends; and developments in medicine and agriculture. Nothing, from the sociology of the dockyards to the evolution of gunnery tactics, escapes Rodger's acute analysis. Rodger made his reputation with the seminal work The Wooden World, in which he dissected the elaborately organized and highly cooperative life on board the ships of the eighteenth-century navy (and in the process completely overturned the notion that "rum, sodomy, and the lash" were its defining traditions), so it's no surprise that his evocation of that life here is lavish and fascinating. Women and children, he reveals, were common aboard ship (evidence suggests that one warship carried as many as a hundred wives), and were not infrequently killed in action (when one seaman and his wife died in combat, the wardroom goat suckled their three-week-old orphan). The vast number of people and wide variety of skills that war at sea demanded made the navy an astonishingly open institution: a senior petty officer during the Napoleonic Wars, for instance, was both black and a woman (though the latter fact was discovered only after she'd already served eleven years). Although Rodger is discerning in his assessment of every social level of the wooden world, he's especially perceptive in analyzing the recruitment, training, and culture of the officer corps; the navy, which required that its officers begin their careers by carrying out the duties of common seamen and mastering the skills of those they would command, "identified and promoted good men very fast," making it undoubtedly the most meritocratic institution in a society defined by archaic privilege. But as colorful as is this book's account of life and combat at sea, Rodger focuses on the developments on land that gave Britain command of the ocean. The most crucial advances in his story aren't naval or even technological but, rather, financial and administrative. The full capabilities of sea power could be realized only "when ships could be kept at sea with healthy crews for long periods." This seemingly obvious requirement demanded a national endeavor of unprecedented complexity and scope. In this period the British state, thanks to a greatly increased tax base and a wonderfully efficient collection system, had access to a greater portion of national income than did its rivals, and a huge amount of that wealth went to the state's highest-spending and most technologically sophisticated enterprise: its navy, which was by far Britain's largest contractor and employer, as well as the largest buyer of foodstuffs in the London markets. Facing problems of management on a scale "as yet unknown to private business," the navy built administrative systems of enormous competence, run by a cadre of officials of rare probity and ability (of whom Samuel Pepys was the most celebrated). This bureaucracy nurtured advances in technology high and low, managed contractors and adjusted markets with finesse, oversaw developments in medicine and hygiene (the navy -- whose officers were fanatical about the cleanliness of their ships -- enlisted some of Britain's most distinguished physicians to improve shipboard sanitation and diet, and its Sick and Hurt Board laid the foundations for the public-health movement and for the science of epidemiology), and, most important, revolutionized the feeding of men. Rodger makes clear that the single indispensable ingredient of the navy's success was its Victualling Board, which in its time must have been the world's best-organized government administration. Thanks to its efforts, thousands of men could be pent up in ships on the open seas for half a year yet be, as Rodger shows, "the healthiest body of British subjects in the world."

Rodger's appraisal of logistics and bureaucracy is the most penetrating and skillful I've encountered. Only a writer of verve could make these potentially deadening subjects compelling. It must have been tempting for Rodger to rely solely on his staggering erudition (he cites sources written in a dozen languages) and the sure knowledge that regardless of its literary qualities, his book will be the definitive treatment of its subject for at least a century (Paul Kennedy has justifiably said that Rodger's series will be "one of the great works of historical scholarship of our age"). But there's not a lazy sentence here, and a keen intelligence propels every paragraph. Sadly, though, with only a couple of exceptions, Rodger confines his acerbic wit to his eighty-six-page (!) annotated bibliography, which is full of waspish asides, including this one, directed at The Admiralty, by one N.A.M. Rodger: "Sketchy and unreliable."

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