Seafaring superpowers
JERRY BROTTON enjoys a wide-ranging voyage around mighty maritime states, from Athens to the British empire
Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict that Made the Modern World By Andrew Lambert Yale University Press, 424 pages, £20
The age of seaborne sail and steam may be over, but the period of premodern ‘seapower states’ was crucial in shaping our current moment of globalisation, driven as it is by cultural interdependence yet characterised by conflicts over wealth and resources. Andrew Lambert’s magisterial new book offers a provocative yet persuasive account of how five historical sea powers – Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch republic and Britain – shaped our global social, economic and political identity.
Much has been written about seaborne empires, often romanticising their achievements. What distinguishes Lambert’s clear-eyed assessment of seapower states is his argument that rather than just possessing powerful navies, their national and cultural life is defined by the sea. Paradoxically, “seapower states are not powerful; they focus on the sea because they are weak”. Openness to different cultures and forms of exchange mean that they are defined by political inclusiveness. Their political organisation is republican, working in tandem with merchant communities and defined in opposition to autocratic land-based empires.
Ancient Athens was the first city to become what Lambert calls a “sea state”, successfully defining its naval seapower and democratic ideals in contrast to Persia during the Peloponnesian Wars. Carthage then inherited its inclusive, multicultural ideals until crushed by “Roman monoculture” in the Punic Wars. The early modern seapower states of first Venice, then the Dutch republic and finally the British empire all looked to Athens and Carthage as models of seaborne naval and commercial power. The account of British seapower is particularly fascinating, tracing how the country became an “oligarchic republic” in all but name in the late 17th century, and how the navy served the City’s merchant class.
There is much to admire yet also debate in Lambert’s wide-ranging analysis. He argues that autocratic land empires feared naval sea-powers not for their strength at sea but for their “liberal, progressive and inclusive ideas”, which defined classic western thinking from Plato to Ruskin. Brexit, he argues, could “represent a state that has recovered something of its seapower heritage by stepping away from a continentally focused organisation” like the EU. Meanwhile, the current US trajectory of economic protectionism and political isolationism threatens the vitality of the global economy, still reliant on movement across oceanic space. The future, Lambert claims, has “always belonged to seapower”. Only time will tell if he is right.