The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783

Sea control, Alfred Thayer Mahan argued, is what decides the fate of nations. Working through the wars fought between Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands from 1660 to 1783, he sets out the conditions that make a country a naval power (geography, population, government policy, national character) and then reads the battles as evidence. Britain won, in his telling, not with armies but with fleets that strangled its rivals’ trade. The lectures behind the book were written for the US Naval War College, and their effect was enormous: Theodore Roosevelt, the German Kaiser, and the Japanese admiralty all took the lesson to heart, and the battleship race that followed helped set the stage for 1914. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.