The Price of Victory

Across two acclaimed volumes, preeminent naval historian N. A. M. Rodger has traced the progress of naval warfare in Britain from the seventh century through to Trafalgar, combining decades of scholarship with original insights and analysis. In this final volume, N. A. M. Rodger delivers a magisterial history of the Royal Navy, beginning after its defeat of Napoleon and concluding in 1945 with the Second World War.

At the end of the French and Napoleonic Wars, British sea power was at its apogee. But by 1840, as one contemporary commentator put it, the Admiralty was full of “intellects becalmed in the smoke of Trafalgar.” How the Royal Navy reformed and reinvigorated itself in the course of the nineteenth century is just one thread in this magnificent book, which refuses to accept standard assumptions and analyses. Rodger’s comprehensive narrative goes beyond the conduct of war at sea to tell a sprawling story of naval warfare as a national endeavor. As in previous volumes, the social history of officers and men—and now also women—has a prominent place. Along the way, he describes the development and strategic significance of submarine and navy air forces and the rapid evolution of weapons and ships (from classic Nelsonian type to hybrid steam/sail ships, then armor-clad and the fully armored Dreadnoughts and beyond). He assesses the character and importance of leading admirals—Beatty, Fisher, Cunningham—together with the roles of other less famous but no less consequential figures. Rodger sets all this in the essential context of politics and geo-strategy.

Based on a lifetime’s learning, The Price of Victory is a masterful culmination of one of the most significant British historical works in recent decades. Naval specialists will find much that is new and will be invigorated by the originality of Rodger’s judgments; but everyone who is interested in one of the central threads in British history will find it rewarding.