Naval Power in the Revolutionary Era.

This paper questions why the 'West' and in particular European states came to achieve a global dominance in naval warfare, a process which began in the fifteenth century and continues today as a result of the massive investment made by the United States in a fleet that is truly global in scale. What Black demonstrates is that this dominance was not inevitable or technologically predetermined, but was due to specific social, cultural, political, economic and strategic factors which sometimes caused non European naval powers to limit the development of a more aggressive deep ocean capability or to ignore it entirely. In contrast, in the case of major European powers like Great Britain and France, a combination of fortunate circumstances and intense military competition, which manifested itself as 'arms racing', resulted in an aggressive policy that exploited technological and organisational developments in the naval domain to the fullest extent possible. As a result, by the late eighteenth century there was no countervailing maritime power capable of limiting European maritime expansion. The paper explains how the Europeans, and in particular the British, consolidated and reinforced their naval supremacy in the nineteenth century and questions why this naval revolution has endured in the shadow of the more commonly known revolution in land warfare which took place at about the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]