This book looks at the transition of wooden sailing fleets to the modern steel navy. It details the technological breakthroughs that brought about this change - steampower, armour, artillery and torpedoes, and looks at their affect on naval strategy and tactics. Part of the ever-growing and prestigious Warfare and History series, this book is a must for enthusiasts of military history.

Ships have histories that are interwoven with the human fabric of the maritime world. In the long nineteenth century these histories revolved around the re-invention of these once familiar objects in a period in which Britain became a major maritime power. This multi-disciplinary volume deploys different historical, geographical, cultural and literary perspectives to examine this transformation and to offer a series of interconnected considerations of maritime technology and culture in a period of significant and lasting change. Its ten authors reveal the processes involved through the eyes and hands of a range of actors, including naval architects, dockyard workers, commercial shipowners and Navy officers. By locating the ship's re-invention within the contexts of builders, owners and users, they illustrate the ways in which material elements, as well as scientific, artisan and seafaring ideas and practices, were bound together in the construction of ships' complex identities.

This book is a comparative study of the evolution of the German navy in the second half of the nineteenth century. It examines the development of strategy, especially commerce-raiding, in comparison to what other navies were doing in this era of rapid technological change. It is not an insular history, merely listing ship rosters or specific events; it is a history of the German navy in relation to its potential foes. It is also a look at a new military institution involved in an inter-service rivalry for funds, technology and manpower with the prestigious and well-established army.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the United States has sought to achieve Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan's vision of "command of the sea" using large battle fleets of capital ships. This strategy has been generally successful: no force can oppose the U.S. Navy on the open seas. Yet capital ship theory has become increasingly irrelevant. Globally, irregular warfare dominates the spectrum of conflict, especially in the aftermath of 9/11. Fleet engagements are a thing of the past and even small scale missions that rely on capital ships are challenged by irregular warfare. In a pattern evident since World War II, the U.S. Navy has attempted to adapt its capital ship theory to irregular conflicts--with mixed results--before returning to traditional operations with little or no strategic debate. This book discusses the challenges of irregular warfare in the 21st century, and the need for U.S. naval power to develop a new strategic paradigm.

Maritime archaeology deals with shipwrecks and is carried out by divers rather than diggers. It embraces maritime history and analyses changes in shipbuilding, navigation and seamanship and offers fresh perspectives on the cultures and societies that produced the ships and sailors. Drawing on detailed past and recent case studies, Richard A. Gould provides an up-to-date review of the field that includes dramatic new findings arising from improved undersea technologies. This second edition of Archaeology and the Social History of Ships has been updated throughout to reflect new findings and new interpretations of old sites. The new edition explores advances in undersea technology in archaeology, especially remotely operated vehicles. The book reviews many of the major recent shipwreck findings, including the Vasa in Stockholm, the Viking wrecks at Roskilde Fjord and the Titanic.

This book examines the origins of Wilhelmine Germany's "Tirpitz Plan" of naval rearmament. The evolution of the Imperial Navy's strategic theories is compared with that of the French, British, and United States navies. Particular attention is given to the relationship between strategy and maritime law within the different national schools.

This book examines British naval diplomacy from the end of the Crimean War to the American Civil War, showing how the mid-Victorian Royal Navy suffered serious challenges during the period. Many recent works have attempted to depict the mid-Victorian Royal Navy as all-powerful, innovative, and even self-assured. In contrast, this work argues that it suffered serious challenges in the form of expanding imperial commitments, national security concerns, precarious diplomatic relations with European Powers and the United States, and technological advancements associated with the armoured warship at the height of the so-called 'Pax Britannica'. Utilising a wealth of international archival sources, this volume explores the introduction of the monitor form of ironclad during the American Civil War, which deliberately forfeited long-range power-projection for local, coastal command of the sea. It looks at the ways in which the Royal Navy responded to this new technology and uses a wealth of international primary and secondary sources to ascertain how decision-making at Whitehall affected that at Westminster. The result is a better-balanced understanding of Palmerstonian diplomacy from the end of the Crimean War to the American Civil War, the early evolution of the modern capital ship (including the catastrophic loss of the experimental sail-and-turret ironclad H.M.S. Captain), naval power-projection, and the nature of 'empire', 'technology', and 'seapower'. This book will be of great interest to all students of the Royal Navy, and of maritime and strategic studies in general.

This work addresses many persistent misconceptions of what the monitors were for, and why they failed in other roles associated with naval operations of the Civil War (such as the repulse at Charleston, April 7, 1863). Monitors were 'ironclads'- not fort-killers. Their ultimate success is to be measured not in terms of spearheading attacks on fortified Southern ports but in the quieter, much more profound, strategic deterrence of Lord Palmerston's ministry in London, and the British Royal Navy's potential intervention. The relatively unknown 'Cold War' of the American Civil War was a nevertheless crucial aspect of the survival, or not, of the United States in the mid 19th-century. Foreign intervention—explicitly in the form of British naval power—represented a far more serious threat to the success of the Union blockade, the safety of Yankee merchant shipping worldwide, and Union combined operations against the South than the Confederate States Navy. Whether or not the North or South would be 'clad in iron' thus depended on the ability of superior Union ironclads to deter the majority of mid-Victorian British leaders, otherwise tempted by their desire to see the American 'experiment' in democratic class-structures and popular government finally fail. Discussions of open European involvement in the Civil War were pointless as long as the coastline of the United States was virtually impregnable. Combining extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, this work offers an in-depth look at how the Union Navy achieved its greatest grand-strategic victory in the American Civil War. Through a combination of high-tech 'machines' armed with 'monster' guns, intensive coastal fortifications and a new fleet of high-speed Union commerce raiders, the North was able to turn the humiliation of the Trent Affair of late 1861 into a sobering challenge to British naval power and imperial defense worldwide.

The Battle of Lissa or Battle of Vis (Croatian: Bitka kod Visa) took place on 20 July 1866 in the Adriatic Sea near the Dalmatian island of Vis (Lissa in Italian) and was a significant victory for a fleet of the Austrian Empire over a numerically superior Italian. One of the main reasons for this poor performance was the internal rivalry between the commanders of the Italian fleet and, as a consequence, the Italian admirals Albini and Vacca, with their ships, did not face the enemy during the entire battle. We understand that the Austrian maneuver was consistent and the best possible according to the available means, and also had luck in its favor and the failures of the Italian fleet. So let s test a hypothesis in which the latter will have its main tactical shortcomings corrected.

Navies in Modern World History traces the role of navies in history from the early nineteenth century, through both World Wars, to the dawn of the twenty-first century and beyond. In a series of case studies Lawrence Sondhaus examines the national fleets of Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Japan, Brazil, Chile and the Soviet Union, and demonstrates the variety of ways in which each country has made decisive use of naval power. In each case the author argues that the navy in question helped change the course of modern world history; he also systematically analyses the challenges navies faced in assembling matériel, training personnel and performing their mission. This book discusses the leading role of navies and shipbuilders in key technological innovations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including advances in steam power, armor, artillery and torpedoes, and looks at aircraft carrier design and naval aviation in general in the second half of the twentieth century. It also explains how, today, technological breakthroughs are centered around naval stealth and maritime propulsion systems. Special attention is devoted to the evolving state of naval technology, and the book shows how the relative industrial capabilities of seafaring countries have been reflected in their maritime building programs, providing an important link between the evolution of modern national fleets and the broader history of the period.