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- [00:01]
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- [02:15]
Andrew Lambert
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Kev Lotchin
Persons and participation may vary.
- [02:26]
Andrew Lambert
Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery.
- [02:35]
Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, it fell to Britain to maintain the balance of power in Europe. But how could such a small island manage such A task. How could it prevent the rise of another tricorned tyrant? Well, that's the subject of Andrew Lambert's sweeping book, no More Napoleons. Speaking to Kevlotchen, he explains how Britain kept Europe at peace without the need for huge armies, why Belgium was so important to maintaining stability on the continent, and why the idea of Britannia ruling the waves continues to be relevant today.
- [03:12]
Kev Lotchin
Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure to have you on a podcast. Now we're talking about your book no More Napoleons. This is the story of how Britain made sure it wouldn't face another Napoleon Bonaparte. If I could ask you quite a big question, start. How do they go about that in.
- [03:28]
Andrew Lambert
The 20 odd years it took to defeat the French revolution and Napoleon? 20 odd years, which is effectively an adult lifetime for many people. Britain realizes that security is critical, that Europe is not something it wants to be in, it's something that it needs to manage. Europe is a problem. Napoleon is just the last and most effective of the French leaders who have tried to conquer all of Western Europe, dominate Central Europe, control Italy and turn France from a nation state into a European empire with enormous resources. We know what those resources are because in 1812, Napoleon is able to move 600,000 men into Russia without stopping any of his other campaigns. Britain simply cannot fight a country on land which can mobilize millions of men. It doesn't have those human resources, but fortunately it's an island and its resources are dominated by an all powerful navy of astonishingly high levels of professionalism, Sustained tradition of not just victory, but annihilating victory over rivals. And it's funded by global trade. Britain is the world's leading global commercial operator. So as long as Britain can keep the sea under control, can keep the Straits of Dover in British hands, it can exercise leverage in Europe. But it can't bring down Napoleon on its own. It has to rely on allies, and for most of them, revolutionary Napoleonic period. Those allies come and go pretty quickly. Napoleon or some other French general meets them on the battlefield, they get completely demolished, they surrender and eventually they have to give up. What happens in 1811, however, changes the game. Russia has been the ally of Napoleon since 1807. That's a period of five years. And the British have applied to the Russians the same economic blockade they've applied to France. They're attacking France not with an army, but with economic pressure. And the French are struggling. The Russians have a much more vulnerable economy and within five years the British have broken the Russian economy Russia cannot export its bulky primary goods, much as is the case today. And eventually the Russian economy falls and the Russians change sides. They cannot be Napoleon's allies anymore. Napoleon invades to put them back into his economic attack on Britain and he loses because his warfare doesn't work outside west and Central Europe. He relies on pillaging the locals to feed his army and the locals don't have anything to pillage. Once you get into Russia, the Russians defeat Napoleon, the Prussians then join. That's North Germany. Then the Austrians join and only at that point do the British see it's possible now to reconstruct Europe. And they make a huge diplomatic effort, supported by large amounts of money, to persuade the Allies to come to a Grand Congress which is held in Vienna, to rebalance Europe in a classical way so that no one power can dominate. And they set up a series of interlocking alliances. The British ally themselves with Russia, Prussia and Austria against France. But then they align themselves with France and Austria against Russia and Prussia. So there's a series of, of alliances. And before all of that they've restructured the map of Europe critically. They've taken a province which had long been known as the Austrian Netherlands and they've glued it onto what we know as Holland, the Dutch state, creating the United Netherlands. And this was meant to be a state that could halfway defend itself against France and with the support of the Prussians and the British would be secure the that France was now back in its pre revolutionary era boundaries. It was secured by a new barrier of forts which the Duke of Wellington helped to put up and that they could then stop spending all that money on fighting a massive world war and start to deal with the enormous debt burden that the war had left them with. Wellington is at the centre of this. He's the Ambassador in Paris in 1814. He's at the Vienna Congress as well. Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister is very much a Brexiteer. He wants out of Europe because it's politically embarrassing, it's expensive. So he wants a long term solution. And the Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, manages to make all of that happen. Of course we do get another Napoleon. 1814. He goes 1815 he comes back and he has to be defeated all over again.
- [08:22]
Kev Lotchin
That is such a rich answer and there's lots we're going to dig into there. The one I want to start with is Belgium. I learned much more about Belgium than I expected to in a book about largely controlling French ambition. And you narrow down not really on Belgium, but this one River The Scheldt estuary. So I wonder if we could talk more about why this one river is so important to the British.
- [08:45]
Andrew Lambert
It's all about keeping the French out of northern Belgium. The Scheldt estuary, which is the one place where you can collect a big enough fleet to launch a serious invasion of England. Nowhere else in northwest Europe is big enough in terms of secure water to house a battle fleet and an invasion force. In 1588, the Spanish were going to use it to invade England. They didn't get there. Napoleon was trying to do this too. So keeping that piece of water out of the hands of the French was critical. But that then sets the tone for the whole of the rest of the 19th century. Keeping France within its 1815 boundaries, making sure that France and Russia are not too friendly, because between them, they have quite a lot of naval power. And that would be difficult but not impossible to deal with. And he sees this as an opportunity to position a fleet just off the coast of England in a secure water space. And I don't think he ever intended to invade England. But as long as he had a fleet in the Scheldt and an army in Belgium and Holland, he could always say he was going to invade. The British would stay on the defensive, and he would use his army to do other things. In 1805, he talks about invading England. He can't, because his main fleet can't get out of their main base at Brest in Brittany. They're blockaded. And his second fleet sails into the Mediterranean, where it's annihilated by Nelson at Trafalgar. But they weren't coming to England. They were going to Sicily, which he also wanted to invade and failed to do so. So Napoleon is using, became convinced as a way of keeping the British on the defensive. He says, hey, I'm over here. I'm going to invade. What are you going to do? And the British say, okay, let's get our army on the south coast. Let's stop you invading. They don't realize until a French emigre general comes across and tells them, look, he's. He's fooling you. The army that he collects at Boulogne is not going to embark for an invasion of England, because if he loses it, that's him finished. And it's the same in 1940. Hitler was never coming. He wanted the British to give up, but they wouldn't. Same with Napoleon. In 1805, Napoleon uses the army from Boulogne to march all the way down the Rhine and defeat the Austrians in two great battles. @ Ulm and Austerlitz. That's what the army is for. He assembles armies there all the way through his regime. They never go to England, they go to Eastern Europe, to Russia, down to Austria. So Napoleon is fighting, fighting British sea power with continental military power, and the meeting point is the Scheldt estuary. That's where you have to invade from. But they can't make it work. French naval power is never adequate. They cannot face the Royal Navy in battle with any hope of success. And so this is Napoleon bluffing. But the British don't want to be bluffed into being on the defensive, so they have to think more proactively. And what Wellington is doing after the war is making sure the British have an expeditionary force they can send off to take out these threats. They can identify the target, they can use their sea power to get there, and then they can take out the threat. They do this in 1854, they land in the Crimea and destroy the Russian naval base at Sevastopol. It's the same strategy. The enemy is different, but they are a threat to British vital interests. And as a result, we use the same strategy. We threatened the Americans with this strategy in the 1854, 60s as well. So it's a universal strategy, but its primary target is France, which is the nearest and most significant threat. But it can also be used against other.
- [12:27]
Kev Lotchin
Threats. So is it fair to say that Britain is controlling other kind of polities from becoming kind of hegemonies, in a sense, by being its own naval.
- [12:36]
Andrew Lambert
Hegemon? Well, the British are doing something very interesting. It's balancing from offshore. They're not putting boots on the ground, they're using ships, but they're also balancing asymmetrically, because what the British have is economic and naval power. And all of their rivals are economically and commercially backward. And their navies are not very good, but they have very large armies. So we've got this attempt to balance off, but it's completely asymmetric. The British are not going to march on Paris. You know, that only happens after Napoleon falls. They're not going to do those classic things. They're going to attack you in a domain where you cannot fight back effectively. So it's asymmetric and it's offshore. And this is why so many people misunderstand what British power is, because they're trying to measure it in conventional terms, and they can't understand how this tiny little British army makes Britain powerful. The simple answer is it's only significant because the Royal Navy can deliver it to the places that really.
- [13:39]
Kev Lotchin
Matter. Is there a certain amount of bluffing there that decided that the British response could be larger than it ever could.
- [13:45]
Andrew Lambert
Be? There's a degree of bluffing in that the British would take years to build an army to achieve anything much. 20 years of Napoleonic war, good example. And even then it was still very small. But the bluff is that long term economic warfare is going to win. And quite a lot of European rulers don't buy that argument until they've had it demonstrated to them. Napoleon thinks he can deal with the nation of shopkeepers who he dismisses as the Carthaginians. He just assumes that history repeats itself and that he is the Roman emperor. So there is a degree of bluffing, but it's a degree in which you're exploiting the ignorance of your opponent. Britain's main opponents are not thinking seriously about maritime power. They're thinking much more in continental military terms. So their tool of measurement is not one that the British recognize. And this causes some problem in Britain because the army obviously assumes that being the army, they must be in charge, but in Britain they're not. And so we have this complete mismatch. And where does the British army fight it? Napoleon? Well, it fights him in Portugal and Spain. Why? Because we can't let the French use the naval base at Lisbon to attack our Atlantic commerce. That's what that campaign is about. And when Napoleon starts to fold after the Russian campaign, then you can liberate Spain. But the British have no particular interest in liberating Spain. They're just punishing the French and attacking.
- [15:17]
Kev Lotchin
Them. Also within that is Belgium and the Scheldt. And then that becomes part of a united Netherlands. And that takes away the threat.
- [15:25]
Andrew Lambert
Presumably. Well, the object of the United Netherlands is to create a kind of second tier European power that has enough military strength to be able to stand up for itself, if only briefly, against France. And that stand up period would allow the British to send their strike force into Belgium. It would allow the Prussians and the Hanoverians who were then under the British monarchy, to get their troops into Belgium as well. And this is all set up in 1814, a lot of it planned in 1813 by the British and it's then operationalised in 1815. The Waterloo Campaign is exactly how this was meant to work exactly. Belgian troops, Dutch troops fighting under the same flag, Prussian troops, Hanoverian troops, and some British troops as well. You know, it's not the great British victory that people tend to think. It's a massive allied effort to defeat Napoleon and the Brains of the effort come from Wellington. The problem is that the Dutch and the Belgians do not like each other at all. And they are divided by a common language and different religions and they had very different political traditions. So there's a fallout between the Dutch and the Belgians which the Dutch handle remarkably badly. Wellington is the Prime Minister when this happens and he insists on a negotiation involving all of the great powers, the Dutch and the Belgians in London. So he takes control of the creation of a solution and his concept, which is essentially a two state solution, will finally come into being in 1839. Takes nine years. One of the longest running diplomatic processes of the 19th century. It's entirely conducted in London and the outcome is one that's very much in the interests of London. The Dutch and Belgian borders are secured. France is not able to grab any territory and the whole thing is controlled. And Wellington is either involved from the start, right the way through, and he is in many ways the personal guarantor that this will endure. You know, his name now is, is such that all the other wartime leaders have gone, but Wellington is still there and he stands for order and upholding treaties. So the British are using this increasingly elderly man as their primary strategic weapon because he's an awful lot cheaper than raising.
- [18:02]
Kev Lotchin
Troops. There's definitely this perception that Wellington is the Iron Duke, the general. But as I was gathering from your book, he has this entire second life as a statesman and I wondered how you felt about those two sides of him, how you would assess.
- [18:15]
Andrew Lambert
Him. There's been a tendency with Wellington to always present him in his red jacket, which of course is, it's curious because when he was on the battlefield he didn't wear uniform, he fought in civilian clothes. He wears the uniform for other occasions, but mostly he wears the uniform as the embodiment of the power of the British state. There's a great portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence of 1814, before Waterloo and just the look on his face, he says, yes, I am the man. And that's it. You know, there's no discussion here. I'm it. I've just sorted out the, the future of Europe At Vienna. I'm the Ambassador in Paris. I'm running the politics of Europe. Because he was always the servant of the state. He was always engaged in making the state stronger, supporting his interests, developing strategy. Also he's a protege of Pitt the Younger, the Prime Minister who fought the first half of those 20 odd years of war, and a colleague of Lord Castlereagh, the great diplomat. So he is somebody who is politically acute and for a soldier, I think, astonishingly so. He is determined to carry out the King's government. That's not a political statement, that's a strategic statement. The government has to be conducted. He becomes Prime Minister because everybody else has either died or fallen over and there's a bit of chaos. And he solves that by taking over and basically running the country like it was his army. And right to the end, 1852, September, he dies less than a week after passing major legislation through Parliament to secure a much more efficient militia reserve for the frontline army. Even though he is a national treasure, he is not inert, he is dynamic and he's constantly pushing the agenda. And occasionally the left wing politically who don't like spending money on defense, try and make fun of him, but everybody in Europe takes him very seriously right to the.
- [20:18]
Kev Lotchin
End. Let's talk about the politics there. You mentioned earlier about how Britain didn't want to be in Europe. Europe was to be managed. Was there much political battle about the pros and cons of that kind of.
- [20:32]
Andrew Lambert
Isolation? Well, The British, after 20 years of the Napoleonic wars, had been out of Europe effectively for two decade long periods with a very brief interlude in the middle. So Europe wasn't what it was in the 18th century. It wasn't where young gentlemen went to get some culture and see the world. Increasingly, the British were seeing their own country. This is where Turner's art of the coasts and scenery of England and the British Isles is so important. He says, you don't need to go there to see wonderful things. We've got it all. Oh, by the way, there's this whole other world that we've conquered, occupied trade with around the world. So why don't we think about.
- [21:11]
Kev Lotchin
That? So the grand tour, not so grand.
- [21:13]
Andrew Lambert
Anymore? Well, it doesn't recover its central role in the education of the British elite. They're as likely to end up doing career enhancing jobs around the empire as they are to go into Europe. British diplomats are still heavily represented at all the major courts. Several of them have war experience. So there's a transition of smart people out of the army as a fighting force into diplomacy, government, administration. The British don't have so many skilled men that they can waste them, so they reuse them over and over again. But politically we've got the Conservatives or Tories as they're commonly referred to in this period, who govern the country and the Liberals led by the Whig aristocrats who want to live in a different country, but when they get into power, they realize that actually what the Tories are doing is pretty much the right thing. So there's general consensus within the political leadership. And it's no accident that the Treaty of London is finished by the Liberal minister, Lord Palmerston, who had been a Tory minister. The Treaty of London gives you independent belgium. So it's 1839 Treaty of London Belgium, independent, neutral and guaranteed to be both by all the great powers. And that's the kick line for the opening of the First World War. When the Germans cross the Belgian border, they have opened up the Treaty of London and it's on that basis that Britain then joins the war. They don't join the war to defend France or because the Germans have started a war. They only join the war because the Germans are marching through southern Belgium, not all of Belgium. They only go through Liege and use the railways. That's.
- [22:59]
Podcast Host
It. This History Extra podcast is brought to you by Rocket Money. Throughout history, experts have offered various solutions for ensuring your financial well being. In the medieval era, for instance, carefully managing an unlikely resource eels could ensure that you had an effective, if unusual, way of paying your debts. For steely eyed Victorian industrialist Andrew Carnegie, ruthless efficiency was key to balancing the books. But it's not always easy, as my own attempts to keep track of my finances suggest. But help is at hand. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Rocket Money automatically categorizes what you're spending across your accounts, letting you choose the categories and tags you need to successfully manage your finances and track patterns in your outgoings. It also consolidates checking, savings, loans and investments into a single helpful dashboard offering a crystal clear view of your financial picture. Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join@RocketMoney.com HistoryExtra that's RocketMoney.com HistoryExtra. RocketMoney.com.
- [24:13]
Andrew Lambert
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- [24:33]
Kev Lotchin
Checkouts. That's the good stuff right.
- [24:35]
Andrew Lambert
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- [24:44]
Kev Lotchin
Win. How did Britain get from the position of Waterloo where France is like the main enemy to the Entente Cordiale And I realized you got a side salad of Napoleon III in the middle of that. But in that same window you also see Russia go from ally to.
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Andrew Lambert
Enemy. So essentially when the Napoleonic wars end, Britain has treaties with all the great powers which are meant to essentially lock everybody into a set of behavior where an upsurge of dynamic threat from any one of those places would be met by combined action. Everybody's aware that the dynamic here is going to be France. And for the first 70 odd years of the 19th century, it's France that's unstable, dynamic, aggressive. The French are carving out an empire in North Africa, they're conquering Algeria, they're going into Tripoli, they're attacking into Morocco. They have ambitions and they're essentially trying to rebuild their glory by going around the world conquering another kind of empire. The European monarchies are more stable and more conservative, so they tend not to move in that direction. The Russians are aggressive in, in Central Asia, in, in the southern regions around the Black Sea, but they're not aggressive in towards the west, so it's possible to work with the Russians. The British get a bit concerned about Russian penetration into Central Asia, but in all honesty, it's not a serious threat. There's some economics in this as well. The Russian economy is very good at exploiting conquered markets. So British policy is thinking about the money as well as the strategy. But how Britain evolves is essentially reactive. The British are not trying to change anything. And between 1820 and, well, in the 1850s, Britain is not really equipped to do anything. It would find it difficult to send 20,000 troops to Europe. It only gets ready with an expeditionary force by the mid-1850s, just in time to fight not France, but Russia. And the irony here is that the British are fighting the Russians with the French as their allies. So everything the British have been thinking has been turned on its head. The conservative Russians have broken all the rules and the radical French are now your allies and friends. This doesn't last very long because the French want the British to help them rebuild their empire. And the British point blank refused to do that, despite the French building a big navy and a threatening naval base. So it's about managing risk, it's about making sure that no new threat emerges that the British haven't anticipated. No new problems crop up that they haven't thought through and taking sensible long term proactive measures. If you're building the great harbour at dover, that's a 25 year project and they're building one there, they're building one at Portland, they're building other great harbors in other places. These are massive engineering projects which are solving strategic.
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Kev Lotchin
Problems. What are those.
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Andrew Lambert
Problems? The problems are how do you operate convoy system in the age when the French will have steam powered warships and almost all of your commercial traffic is going to be in sailing ships. And the French have a lot of small harbors on the north coast of France, not big enough for a fleet, but big enough for steam powered cruisers. So they have to build a chain of secure naval and harbour bases between the Thames Estuary all the way down to Land's End before you launch off into the Atlantic trades. And that's a day's sail between each of the major harbours. So they go from the Thames estuary to Dover to Spithead outside Portsmouth, then to Portland, then to Plymouth. And from the Plymouth, they then go out into the open ocean. And at each of these locations they can be secure overnight. Their escorting steam vessels can refuel and prepare for the next day's action. The base on Alderney is never needed, but the fact that it existed is enormously important. In 1858, when the French make a big push to get British support, Queen Victoria goes to Cherbourg. She tells the French she's not going to collaborate and then she visits Alderney just to point out that Cherbourg isn't secure because the British have close by naval.
- [29:14]
Kev Lotchin
Base. And Cherbourg is the grand French port, which is potentially a replacement for the.
- [29:20]
Andrew Lambert
Scheldt. Yeah. So Cherbourg is this enormous project which has a very long history. It's the top end of Normandy, it's 60 miles from the Isle of Wight. And Portsmouth, which is a very significant place. It's a place where the French have thought to invade from in the age of Louis xiv, Louis xvi, the one who had his head chopped off, he starts to build a massive artificial harbor at Cherbourg, the world's biggest engineering project on a scale that befits a very dominant, aggressive European power. The revolutionaries close this down because they get their hands on Antwerp, which is already there, so they don't need to worry about Cherbourg. Napoleon then revives Cherbourg because he wants to have Antwerp man, Hamburg and Cherbourg and breast and, and, and he's mass producing ships and naval bases. He can't mass produce sailors. The French are all short of skilled sailors. The British know all of this and they know it from the beginning. As soon as they start digging at Cherbourg, 1858, it's sort of ready for use. And Louis Napoleon says, come look at my enormous naval base and bow down before me and acknowledge me as, as Napoleon, the Napoleon. And Albert and Victoria go along and play along with this. And then they just say, no, we're not going to work with France to rebuild Europe in the image of France. We're going to increase our navy even more. We're going to mobilize a large reserve force. And public press has just got up a war scare, so we've got 200,000 armed men who just volunteered to defend the country. So, no, we don't believe in you. And from that point on, the Second Empire spirals down to catastrophe, picks a fight with the Germans, which doesn't work very well at all. So it's about balancing out. It's about identifying threat, it's about responding to it strategically in intellectual terms, but also in hardware.
- [31:21]
Kev Lotchin
Terms. We'll come back to World War I, but this idea of not wanting to be part of Europe, it has, if I can say it, these kind of Brexity.
- [31:31]
Andrew Lambert
Parallels. It.
- [31:33]
Kev Lotchin
Does. Do you see much commonality.
- [31:35]
Andrew Lambert
There? Well, there's a realization by the British elite that after 20 years of not being in Europe, they hadn't lost anything that they thought they might have lost. Those connections weren't as important to the British by 1815 as they might have been 50, 60 years earlier. Europe was not now the center of the British world view. There was a much wider world to think about, and that's where the dynamic things are happening. The British are stabilizing Europe, but they're dynamic in the outside world. It's not a dislike of Europe, it's. It's not some kind of visceral hatred of Europe and its many ways. It's just a sense that Britain doesn't need to be connected with Europe as closely as it had been. And if they've done their work properly at the Congress of Vienna, there will not be another major European war for some time. And that is indeed the case. Even the Franco Prussian War of 1870, 71, which the British are watching closely, it's over very quickly. It's a war to seek, settle who is the big cheese in Western Europe. And the Prussians win that quite quickly. They don't cross the Belgian border, so nothing happens, nor do the French. So the British mobilize, they warn, but they don't act because they don't need to. They don't care that the balance of power has shifted from Paris to Berlin. They would care if Berlin had occupied the whole of France, as Hitler would do, and was mobilizing it as a resource base for their own purposes, that would worry the British a lot. But a German domination of Central Europe is good for the British because it stops the French challenging the British at sea. It keeps the Russians away to the east where they're less troublesome. And of course, the royal families of Germany and Britain are closely.
- [33:26]
Kev Lotchin
Intertwined. And your book takes us to World War I. And this is where this German expansion becomes the.
- [33:33]
Andrew Lambert
Problem.
- [33:34]
Kev Lotchin
Yeah. What goes wrong in the British response in run up to 1914 that allows World War I to happen? What's prevented so many other.
- [33:42]
Andrew Lambert
Conflicts? Essentially, what the British have ended up with is a situation where German ambition has persuaded them that they should establish good relations with France and Russia, who are allies. The French and Russians are allies against Germany. They never ally themselves against Britain. When the British have issues with the French over Africa in 1898, the Russians don't back them. And when the Russians have issues with Britain, the French don't back them. But if it's an issue involving Germany, they're marching step by step together. So the British are essentially on balancing Europe by being friendly with France and Russia, but they have no commitment to defend either of them. We then enter a period when we have liberal governments who have failed to understand how Britain secured Europe across the long 19th century. These men are much more concerned by domestic politics. And in the summer of 1914, the only thing they're worried about is the future of Ireland that is dominating their thinking. We also have a British army that after the war in South Africa, the Second Anglo Boer War, 1899, 1902, had started to think that it ought to become a proper European army, that it should be an army like the French and the Germans that is very big and dominating the national defense budget. They don't get this because everybody knows the navy is Britain's primary instrument, but they get the ideas and the delusions that go with it. So the Expeditionary Force is founded in 1907 on the basis that Britain will deploy four divisions and some cavalry into Northern Europe very obviously to secure Antwerp. But when the war actually breaks, the ministers don't really think at all. And Churchill, who's in charge of the navy, says we should send the army to join the French. And all the generals say, yeah, of course, we're good, that's good. And so we end up doing the one thing that the great wars against Napoleon never did, which is attempt to build a continental European sized army to achieve decisive effect in Europe. Wellington would have turned in his grave. You know, this is an appalling approach because it means you start to demobilize the things that make Britain great, which are the navy, global dominance of maritime economic trade, the centrality of British industry. The British are building all the world's ships and operating most of them. And once you start stripping skilled men out of shipyards and steel plants and get them killed, somewhere in Picardy logic has left the room. This is insane. The British are not fighting for themselves. They don't have an issue here. They're fighting because they think it's their job to help the French defend themselves. The French defended themselves remarkably well without British help. Instead, the British lose the opportunity to secure Antwerp. And as a result, the Germans not only capture Antwerp, but they also capture Ostend and Zeebrugge, which become the single most dangerous pair of naval bases in the world. And that's the basis of the U boat campaign against British shipping, which very nearly turns the balance of the war. So the British had lost the plot in.
- [37:09]
Kev Lotchin
1914. And this is something about the Royal Navy that we've kind of talked around. We might think of it as being like a navy, as being like a fighting force, but is as much, if not more a protector of commerce than anything.
- [37:22]
Andrew Lambert
Else. This is the, this is the key problem that we have in the 21st century. People think that we have three armed fighting services. We don't. We have the world's most impressive maritime security force because most of the world's other navies don't do maritime security. And then we have two small fighting forces. The Royal Navy has always had this massive peacetime role. You know, Royal Navy assets are on station doing duty in high risk areas everywhere from the ballistic missile deterrent submarines to the Straits of Hormuz, where various people are trying to stop ships going in and out for different reasons. That is why the Royal Navy is so important. It's its day to day peace and war permanent commitment. Running a convoy system in war is just a slightly more vigorous version of running trade protection in peacetime. So we have this peacetime Royal Navy which is spread around the world, defending trade, promoting trade, even pushing open some trade barriers. And then we have this wartime Royal Navy where the same men get in different, bigger, more powerful ships to fight naval enemies as necessary, but their day to day job is defending trade. And if the Royal Navy disappeared tomorrow, the global oceans would be significantly less secure and there would be no exemplary force out there doing.
- [38:42]
Kev Lotchin
This. In your book and in this conversation, we've talked about Britain really being a sea power state. How relevant do you think that this kind of historical notion of Britannia rules the waves is today, and particularly against this backdrop of rising global nationalism.
- [39:01]
Andrew Lambert
Being a sea power state, that's one word. There's a kind of important definitional business to do here. If you write sea power as one word then we're talking about an identity, a self created sense of yourself in the world as a. As a maritime, economic, naval power. The American author Alfred thayer Mahan in 1890 realized that this word didn't apply to the United States, which is a very large continental power. And so he split it into two words. C Power. And that's the dis. The descriptor for what all navies are trying to have. That is power at sea. That has nothing to do with the economy. It has very little to do with the size, scale or quality of your navy. But it does mean that your navy is quite clearly not central to your self identity, to your strategic requirements and to your perception of yourself in the world. You don't have to know much about 19th century Britain to know that they saw themselves as the heirs of ancient Athenian republic, the Venetian Republic. They were quite happy to be called the Carthaginians and they greatly admired the Dutch Republic of the 17th century. Those are the great sea powers of the past. And Britain takes that to a global level. Britain is the global sea power in the 19th century. And that's what makes this so important. Because the asymmetric position that the British take is that we are global sea power and everybody else is doing different things. How relevant is it today? Well, it was always a question of choice. Britain didn't become a sea power state, it chose to be a sea power state. One of the founding texts of this is Thomas More's great book Utopia, which was written in Antwerp, which takes us neatly back into northern belgium in the 1510s during some very unpleasant trade negotiations with the Holy Roman Empire which was a bit like the eu. It was trying to maximize its profits against the outlying English by dominating the wool market in, in the Antwerp Exchange. And Cardinal Woolsey and more, his right hand man, realized that Britain had to get out of Europe. That they shouldn't allow themselves to be in a position where they were subservient to continental interests. Because continental powers don't see the world in the same way as the English. That feeds into the policy of Henry viii who then creates a major battle fleet navy which can defend England against invasion. 1545, the French attempt to invade. They are defeated. You now have a navy that can protect your trade and stop the trade of your enemies. In wartime, the English navy then goes to controlling the Channel. It's called the English Channel because the British beat the French. They then move into the Mediterranean and open up the Mediterranean, both for their trade, but also as a location for influence. So by the 17th century, Britain is defined in its relations with the rest of the world by naval power. And that naval power is the backbone of the economic effort, the extension of empire, the dominance of trade. Without that navy, none of this happens. The British understand that they are never going to be a great continental military power that's not available. They have to use insularity and they have to use it skillfully. So they put their effort into the navy, their cultural effort, into supporting that. And that feeds into an economic expansion which generates the revenue which allows you to build these very expensive warships and operate them effectively. But behind all of that, you've got cultural creation going on. Naval history begins in the Admiralty with Mr. Pepys, who writes massively about naval history, and his successors are heavily involved in promoting this. This is an ideology that you promote. It's hard work and you have to sustain it. And when you stop telling these stories, when people don't know who Nelson is and Trafalgar Square has lost its meaning, you've got to start all over again or just give up and say, well, that's the end of it. I think we need to understand these things before they disappear, than to take an intelligent, educated judgment on whether we want to persist with this or whether we think it is just an epoch. I think if this country wants to stand on its own two feet and amount to something in the world, that is how it will do it, because that's the only way that it was ever able to do that. One of the things that separates the British from Europe is their much more global worldview. When the British think about their friends and allies, many of us have relations right around the world in what was once the British Empire. Most Europeans do not have this. They do not have that connection with the world. They don't have test matches against India or Australia. You don't get these things that we have without those historical feeds. And we need to think about them and we need to think intelligently about them. It's not a do we or don't we? It's we need to think, we need to understand how we got got here and how we got here is not a European story. In many ways, it's an adversarial story. Britain versus Europe, because Europe was hostile and Napoleon is the obvious poster boy. For European.
- [44:28]
Podcast Host
Hostility. That was Andrew Lambert, professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, and he was speaking to Kev Lotchin. Andrew's book, no More Napoleons is out.