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The intense rivalry in battleship building that took place between
Britain and Germany in the run up to the First World War is seen by
many as the most totemic of all armaments races. Blamed by numerous
commentators during the inter-war years as a major cause of the
Great War, it has become emblematic of all that is wrong with
international competitions in military strength. Yet, despite this
notoriety, 'the Great Naval Race' has not received the attention
that this elevated status would merit and it has never been
examined from the viewpoint of both of its participants
simultaneously and equally. This volume, which contains a
comprehensive survey of the existing scholarship on this topic,
both English-language and German, as well as important primary
source materials from a range of archives in both Britain and
Germany, fills this gap. By putting the actions of the British
Admiralty side-by-side with those of its German counterparts, it
enables the naval race to be viewed comparatively and thereby
facilitates an understanding of how the two parties to this
conflict interacted. By offering a comprehensive range of German
documents in both their original text and in English translation,
the book makes the German role in this conflict accessible to an
English speaking audience for the first time. As such, it is an
essential volume for any serious student of naval policy in the
pre-First World War era.
The intense rivalry in battleship building that took place between
Britain and Germany in the run up to the First World War is seen by
many as the most totemic of all armaments races. Blamed by numerous
commentators during the inter-war years as a major cause of the
Great War, it has become emblematic of all that is wrong with
international competitions in military strength. Yet, despite this
notoriety, 'the Great Naval Race' has not received the attention
that this elevated status would merit and it has never been
examined from the viewpoint of both of its participants
simultaneously and equally. This volume, which contains a
comprehensive survey of the existing scholarship on this topic,
both English-language and German, as well as important primary
source materials from a range of archives in both Britain and
Germany, fills this gap. By putting the actions of the British
Admiralty side-by-side with those of its German counterparts, it
enables the naval race to be viewed comparatively and thereby
facilitates an understanding of how the two parties to this
conflict interacted. By offering a comprehensive range of German
documents in both their original text and in English translation,
the book makes the German role in this conflict accessible to an
English speaking audience for the first time. As such, it is an
essential volume for any serious student of naval policy in the
pre-First World War era.
Many of the major wars of the 20th century emerged from the ruins
of previous peace settlements. French hostility to the Treaty of
Frankfurt of 1871 contributed to the tense political climate that
culminated in the First World War; German resentment of the Treaty
of Versailles helped to create the conditions necessary for
Hitler's attempt to reshape Europe by force in the Second World
War. Likewise, the Cold War had its roots in the outcome of the
titanic Russo-German struggles of 1914-17 and 1941-5. Beyond
Europe, post -1945 wars in Korea, China, the Middle East and
Indochina all had their origins in failed peace settlements. Why
did peace so often collapse in this period? What was the causality
that led from peace to war? Drawing on a series of case studies,
Losing the Peace provides a comprehensive study of the key themes
of peace and war and answers the question of why peace has so often
failed in the modern era. Matthew Seligmann, an expert on
Anglo-German relations before 1914, is Reader in History at the
University of Northampton. His most recent books include Spies in
Uniform: British Military and Naval Intelligence on the Eve of the
First World War (2006) and Naval Intelligence from Germany (2007)
Matthew Hughes is Reader in History at Brunel University, a former
editor of the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research
(2004-08), and from 2008 to 2010 holds the Major-General Matthew C.
Horner Chair in Military Theory at the US Marine Corps University,
Quantico. His recent publications include the Palgrave Advances in
Modern Military History (2006).
'Naval tradition? Naval tradition? Monstrous. Nothing but rum,
sodomy, prayers and the lash.' This quotation, from Winston
Churchill, is frequently dismissed as apocryphal or a jest, but,
interestingly, all four of the areas of naval life singled out in
it were ones that were subject to major reform initiatives while
Churchill was in charge of the Royal Navy between October 1911 and
May 1915. During this period, not only were there major
improvements in pay and conditions for sailors, but detailed
consideration was also given to the future of the spirit ration; to
the punishing and eradicating of homosexual practices; to the
spiritual concerns of the fleet; and to the regime of corporal
punishment that underpinned naval discipline for boy sailors. In
short, under Churchill, the Royal Navy introduced a social reform
programme perfectly encapsulated in this elegant quip. And, yet,
not only has no one studied it; many people do not even know that
such a programme even existed. This book rectifies that. It shows
that Churchill was not just a major architect of welfare reform as
President of the Board of Trade and as Home Secretary, but that he
continued to push a radical social agenda while running the Navy.
When and why did the Royal Navy come to view the expansion of
German maritime power as a threat to British maritime security?
Contrary to current thinking, Matthew S. Seligmann argues that
Germany emerged as a major threat at the outset of the twentieth
century, not because of its growing battle fleet, but because the
British Admiralty (rightly) believed that Germany's naval planners
intended to arm their country's fast merchant vessels in wartime
and send them out to attack British trade in the manner of the
privateers of old. This threat to British seaborne commerce was so
serious that the leadership of the Royal Navy spent twelve years
trying to work out how best to counter it. Ever more elaborate
measures were devised to this end. These included building
'fighting liners' to run down the German ones; devising a
specialized warship, the battle cruiser, as a weapon of trade
defence; attempting to change international law to prohibit the
conversion of merchant vessels into warships on the high seas;
establishing a global intelligence network to monitor German
shipping movements; and, finally, the arming of British merchant
vessels in self-defence. The manner in which German schemes for
commerce warfare drove British naval policy for over a decade
before 1914 has not been recognized before. The Royal Navy and the
German Threat illustrates a new and important aspect of British
naval history.
Why did the British government declare war on Germany in August
1914? Was it because Germany posed a threat to British national
security? Today many prominent historians would argue that this was
not the case and that a million British citizens died needlessly
for a misguided cause.
This book counters such revisionist arguments. Matthew Seligmann
disputes the suggestion that the British government either got its
facts wrong about the German threat or even, as some have claimed,
deliberately 'invented' it in order to justify an otherwise
unnecessary alignment with France and Russia. By examining the
military and naval intelligence assessments forwarded from Germany
to London by Britain's service attaches in Berlin, its 'men on the
spot', Spying on the Kaiser clearly demonstrates that the British
authorities had every reason to be alarmed. From these crucial
intelligence documents, previously thought to have been lost, Dr
Seligmann shows that in the decade before the First World War, the
British government was kept well informed about military and naval
developments in the Reich. In particular, the attaches consistently
warned that German ambitions to challenge Britain posed a real and
imminent danger to national security. As a result, the book
concludes that the British government's perception of a German
threat before 1914, far from being mistaken or invented, was rooted
in hard and credible intelligence.
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