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Book Review: The Royal Navy since 1815: A New Short History

documents make clear. They also show that the well-known dispute about cruiser size and numbers was not just about naval status. The Americans opposed larger numbers of small British cruisers for their blockade potential and wanted larger ships to break such blockades. The threat of a potential Great Anglo-American War of the late 1920s, which the Washington Treaty helped dispel, looks even less unlikely in this context. The final section on "The Use of Belligerent Rights 1937-70" concentrates at first on the debate over the Spanish Civil War when the Royal Navy, rather against its better judgement, protected British merchant ships from the unrecognized belligerent depredations of nationalist warships. It then prints the British "Handbook of Economic Warfare" drawn up in the Summer of 1939 that "provided a definitive statement of the methods of economic warfare ... based on the experience of nearly a century since the declaration of the Treaty of Paris in 1856." [413] This is followed by a report of the Ministry of Economic Warfare of a year later that admitted that following the fall of France, "contraband control, previously the chief weapon of the economic war, becomes relatively unimportant" [498] and that new blockade measures were necessary. These are detailed in subsequent documents. The collection then goes on into the postwar period covering in the main the problems thrown up by the Chinese Civil War, the Cuba Quarantine and the Beira Patrol. One interesting fact thrown up by the documents is that Macmillan was minded to try to stop Kennedy imposing the Quarantine but thought better of it. The final section is a little scrappy and although (as has just been said) it contains interesting material it lacks the comprehensiveness of the earlier sections. A more general criticism is that there is little overall on the debate on the use of submarines as commerce raiders. The 1937 Protocol on submarine warfare is mentioned in the relevant introduction but not included. Probably, and rather understandably, the editor thought the topic was too large to add to a study of the control of trade through surface blockade. The book might have had more focus if it had concentrated on its main underlying theme, Anglo-American relations, but it is a useful and significant volume nonetheless. It contains vital material for any future study of blockade and maritime interdiction. The volume is expensive on its own, but as always in these circumstances, prospective readers are encouraged to join the Navy Records Society. It really does offer excellent value, and back numbers are available at reasonable prices.