An enduring influence on imperial defence and grand strategy: British perceptions of the Italian Navy, 1935–1943

The Mediterranean was a vital artery of the British Empire. It was a strategic corridor, linking Britain to its Middle and Far East possessions and precious resources. Its control was a central tenet of British imperial strategy, yet by the mid-1930s, this faced a new challenge from Fascist Italy. The Italian Navy was central to expansionist aspirations and forced British reappraisals of the allocation of defence resources both in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. It therefore came to exert a generally under-appreciated influence on pre-war British imperial defence policy and war planning. Although consistently viewed as vastly inferior to the Royal Navy, it was still seen as an impediment to Britain's ability to deliver imperial defence across the globe, or conduct a worldwide war against multiple enemies. This view persisted even after important defeats were inflicted on it in 1940–1941, and continued right through to 1943. Awareness of the seriousness with which the British viewed Italian naval strength adds important context to debates about British strategy in the Far East and over Winston Churchill's preference for a ‘Mediterranean first’ strategy. Italian naval power played a greater role in shaping the Allied prosecution of the Second World War than is commonly accepted.     

Imperial Outposts and the War Beyond: Singapore,Hong Kong and the British Empire’s Land Force Contribution to the Korean War

Histories of the British Empire’s strategic outposts in the Far East have traditionally focused on their traumatic loss to the Japanese adversary during the Second World War. Only in the past decade-and-a-half have historians begun to examine the post-Second World War importance of these outposts to the continued defence and security of Britain’s empire in the Far East. In taking this line of historical enquiry still further, the article examines how Singapore and Hong Kong were used to project British military power, specifically army deployments, across the Far East, and far beyond the imperial frontier, in support of Britain’s involvement in the 1950–53 Korean War and therefore in pursuit of the empire’s foreign and defence policy objectives. It adopts an essentially operational analysis to this end, relying on operational and army ‘ground-level’ sources from the records of the Colonial, Foreign, and War Offices at the British National Archives. It uncovers the hidden workings of the mechanisms of imperial military power projection through strategic outposts, which ranged from training to logistical support to the exercise of command and control, and how these mechanisms and outposts were utilised by the British Far Eastern land forces involved in the Korean War. In so doing, the article sheds much valuable and original light on the historical importance of these strategic outposts to imperial defence.     

The Long Goodbye: British Agency in the Creation of Navies for India and Pakistan

The armed forces of India and Pakistan draw legacies from a common British imperial past. British influence persisted in the navies that emerged from independence and partition on the South Asia subcontinent. Complaints over treatment and other grievances in the colonial Royal Indian Navy underscored a major mutiny in February 1946, prior to division of warships, shore-based establishments and personnel between the two countries. The transformation into truly national navies was long and involved, buttressed by continued reliance on British professional expertise and arms transfers. While the Admiralty offered warships on the basis of association with the commonwealth and defence cooperation in the Indian Ocean, navies in India and Pakistan led by senior British officers pursued distinct agendas and force structures that more and more looked towards potential war against each other. Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, intervened often in naval matters before and after partition, encouraging Indians and Pakistanis to build up naval forces suited to national needs as well as serving British interests and imperial defence commitments during the early Cold War. Continued British presence impaired full nationalisation and the assumption of higher leadership roles by qualified indigenous naval officers in the newly independent commonwealth nations.     

Race and Identity: The Culture of Combat in the Pacific War

This article addresses how the Royal Navy intended to defend the British Isles from invasion before the First World War. Revisionist historians have recently suggested that during his first tenure as First Sea Lord, 1904–10, Sir John Fisher conceived and implemented a radical new home-defence strategy. Fisher's ‘flotilla defence’ system assigned a hitherto unprecedented importance to flotilla craft. This was apparently a marked departure from previous practice, which had been to rely upon armoured warships to deter invasion. These claims are not supported by the evidence and have failed to appreciate that flotilla craft had historically formed the foundation of the naval defence of the British Isles. War Plans drafted in early 1909 confirm that before leaving office Fisher remained committed to the blockade of enemy naval forces and that he identified blockade as key to the security of the British Isles.     

‘The warrior has always shewed himself greater than his weapons’: the Royal Navy’s interpretation of the Russo-Japanese War 1904–5

During the Russo-Japanese War, British naval attachés serving with the Japanese produced a series of reports on both technical and cultural aspects of the conflict. In seeking to explain the Japanese successes, the attachés compared and contrasted their hosts with themselves, Royal Navy and Britain more generally. These reports offer a rare insight of the cultural preconceptions of Royal Navy officers prior to the First World War, presenting explicitly the norms and beliefs that served to unite the service. Recovering these collective understandings helps to illuminate the decision-making processes that took place within the Royal Navy both prior to and during the First World War.     

Losing the Blanket,Building a Fence: Australian Anxiety and the End of Military Colonialism in Malaysia

From 1955 to 1988, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) maintained a large airbase in Northern Malaysia. For the first 15 years of its existence, RAAF Butterworth had a modest and incomplete perimeter fence. With the end of British military colonialism in Malaysia and Singapore following the implementation of the ‘East of Suez’ policy, the Australians became preoccupied with their physical security and the role of the perimeter fence. By exploring the adoption of practices of exclusion via physical barriers in the wake of British withdrawal, this paper argues that the changing psychological outlook of Australian military officials reflected broader Australian anxieties about their own sense of ‘Britishness’ and the nation’s place in a decolonising Asia. As the Australians lost their British ‘blanket’ they built a fence.     

America's Role in the Five Power Defence Arrangements: Anglo-American Power Transition in South-East Asia, 1967–1971

Prior to 1971, Britain played a key role in the security of Malaysia and Singapore, especially during the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) and Konfrontasi (1963–1966). Britain's military withdrawal from the east of Suez beginning from 1968 not only became a catalyst for post-colonial development of Malaysia and Singapore, but also pushed them towards America's security umbrella. Negotiations to replace the Anglo-Malaysian Defence Agreement with a new defence arrangement were fraught with pussyfooting on the part of British, Australian and New Zealand leaders. The Malaysian and Singapore defence ministers were divided and contributed to further foot dragging. By the time the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) were signed by the five nations in November 1971, collective defence among the signatories had devolved to mere consultation. By analysing the obstacles encountered during the negotiations and American influence on the shape of the FPDA, this paper demonstrates that a power transition that had been set in motion after Second World War was completed by 1971 when British strategic influence in South-East Asia gave way to American dominance.     

The Shipping Conference System,Empire and Local Protest in Singapore, 1910–1911

This article analyses local opposition in Singapore in 1910–11 to the shipping conference system and the responses of a powerful group of British shipowners and the Colonial Office. The conference, a cartel agreed among shipowners, divided monopoly profits among its members and a small group of London-based merchant houses. We suggest that the concerns of Singapore anti-conference protestors, backed by the governor of the Straits Settlements, counted for little in official London circles when weighed against the vital role of shipping in the British Empire. Even in 1967 the strength of the empire and British shipping was still apparent when the Singapore government refused to support local mercantile opposition to the Far Eastern Freight Conference.     

A Leading Arsenal of Democracy: American Rearmament and the Continental Integration of the Canadian Aircraft Industry, 1948–1953

This article shows how the Royal Navy under the leadership of John Fisher exploited the British Consular system in Germany and Denmark to obtain both open-source and covert intelligence between 1906 and 1914. This structure was initially constructed with the tacit support of the Foreign Office, replacing an earlier intelligence network in France and Russia. The intelligence collected by the consuls reflected the Royal Navy's strategic priorities at the time. The most important subject concerned German coastal defences, a detailed knowledge of which was essential for the Admiralty's offensive littoral strategy. From 1908 Charles Hardinge attempted to restrict the Admiralty's use of its Consular Officers for intelligence purposes, with limited success. The consuls continued to provide essential intelligence for the Royal Navy up until the outbreak of war.     

From Commonwealth Responsibility to the National Interest: Australia and Post-war Decolonisation in South-East Asia

This article re-examines the drivers of post-war Australian foreign policy in South-East Asia. The central argument is that the motive of Commonwealth responsibility has not been given sufficient explanatory weight in interpreting Australia's post-war engagement with South-East Asia under both Australian Labor Party and Liberal-Country Party (Coalition) governments. The responsibility expressed by Australian policy-makers for the decolonisation of the Straits Settlements, Malayan Peninsula and British Borneo Territories cannot be adequately understood within a cold war ideological framework of anti-communism. Nor can it be explained by the instrumental logic of forward defence. The concept of responsibility is theorised as a motivation in foreign policy analysis and applied to Australian involvement with British decolonisation in South-East Asia between 1944 and 1971. The article finds that in its approach to decolonisation, Australia was driven as much by normative sentiments of responsibility to the Commonwealth as it was by instrumental calculations of cold war strategic interest. This diminished with the end of Indonesia's ‘Confrontation’ of Malaysia in 1966 and subsequent British commitment to withdraw from East of Suez. Australia's policy discourse becomes more narrowly interest-based after this, especially evident in Australia's negotiations with Malaysia and Singapore over the Five Power Defence Arrangements from 1968 to 1971.     

Geolocation and voting: Candidate–voter distance effects on party choice in the 2010 UK general election in England

The effect of geographical distance between candidate and voter on vote-likelihood in the UK is essentially untested. In systems where constituency representatives vie for local inhabitants' support in elections, candidates living closer to a voter would be expected to have a greater probability of receiving that individual's support, other things being equal. In this paper, we present a first test of this concept using constituency data (specifically, notice of poll address data) from the British General Election of 2010 and the British Election Survey, together with geographical data from Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail, to test the hypothesis that candidate distance matters in voters' choice of candidate. Using a conditional logit model, we find that the distance between voter and candidates from the three main parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat) matters in English constituencies, even when controlling for strong predictors of vote choice, such as party feeling and incumbency advantage.     

Understanding the historic legacies of empire from the timbers left behind: Towards critical dendroprovenancing in the British North Atlantic

The forests of British North America were integral to Britain's maritime empire. Many of these timbers exist today as wooden beams and flooring at historical dockyards and garrisons such as the Royal Naval Dockyard of Bermuda. In this paper, we investigate what timbers from this Dockyard can tell us about interconnections and empire-building throughout the North Atlantic region. To do this we drew from approaches of critical physical geography, historical geography, and dendroprovenancing by using timber as a way to interrogate collaboratively the changes in—and connections across—socio-ecological landscapes. We examined HM Customs records between 1825 and 1850 to determine the flow of timbers to Bermuda. We then sampled timbers from buildings constructed between 1825 and 1853 and analyzed them using isotopic and dendrochronological techniques to establish the probable location of origin of the timber samples. HM Customs records showed that prior to the 1840s, timbers primarily came from British North America, whereas post-1840 timbers primarily came from the southeastern United States, with some still coming from Europe and British North America. To establish whether timber use by the Royal Navy and Royal Engineers matched the pattern in the customs documents, we looked to the dendrochronological records. Dendrochronologic evidence showed that military construction followed the same pattern, with buildings constructed pre-1840 using material from British North America and buildings constructed post-1840 using timbers sourced from the southeastern United States. Finally, using this information we explore some of the connections between regions, in terms of resource use, and the implications of those uses—for example, that the British Admiralty continued to benefit from the practices of slavery through the use of products produced from enslaved labour in other parts of the North Atlantic well after emancipation.     

Union Jack or Yellow Jack? Smallpox,Sailors, Settlers and Sovereignty

In 1877 the flagship of the Royal Navy’s Australia Station, HMS Wolverene, was quarantined in Sydney Harbour. It marked a curious moment in which the dreaded disease smallpox arrived in the city aboard three different vessels within the space of a month. With cases appearing among merchant seamen, naval sailors and local residents, this event exposed numerous antinomies in the health governance of New South Wales. If the colony’s legislative authority over the imperial warships tasked with its protection proved uncertain, so did the extent to which civic power could be exerted over the movements, property and bodies of individual citizens. Exploring the conjoint histories of the naval and medical defence of the Australian colonies, this article argues that 1877 saw these tensions playing out on different scales of sovereignty. Marking a critical point before colonial defence and quarantine strategies turned markedly against ‘Asiatics’, this incident encapsulated the uneasy state of colonial self-government amid a technological transformation of the seaways.     

Screw Threads on the SS Xantho Engine: a Case of Standardisation in 19th Century Britain

A former RN gunboat horizontal trunk engine taken from the SS Xantho (1848–1872) in 1985 was totally disassembled by May 2004. All the threads on the engine were examined and the majority were found to be British Standard Whitworth (BSW). This provides material evidence of the spread of standardisation at a time when the Royal Navy commissioned the first mass-produced marine engines and fitted them to the 'Crimean War Gunboat' types. The study also provides a pointer to the use of screw threads as a diagnostic tool in maritime archaeology.
© 2004 The Nautical Archaeology Society     

朝鲜战争与澳英关系

在澳英传统关系变迁中,朝鲜战争无疑是一个标志性事件。朝鲜战争的爆发暴露了英联邦防御机制在远东地区的脆弱性,从而导致澳大利亚在外交和防务决策方面自主意识的增强;朝鲜战争凸显了澳美防务合作的重要性以及亚太地区国际关系的复杂性,并使得澳大利亚借机实现了与美国缔结防务同盟关系的愿望。澳美关系首次取代澳英关系成为澳大利亚外交和防务政策的基石,而澳英关系自此以后则朝着更加平等的方向发展。     

Vancouver island in the empire

Colonised by sea from the British Isles half a century before it became a part of Canada in 1871, Vancouver Island is best understood as part of a worldwide system of island bases that included Aden, Bombay, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Malta, St Helena, Sydney and Trincomalee (Ceylon). Its character was formed by the Royal Navy as it moved into the Pacific and by other imperial personnel attracted by reports of cheap land in a picturesque landscape, good fishing and hunting, and a British civilisation. Surprising numbers of British officers and civil servants arrived from India and China as well as Britain. Historians from east of the Rockies, busy writing the Empire out of Canadian history, tend to approach the Island's history through an ideological cloud of nationalism. The result has been an unfortunate distortion of Vancouver Island's imperial past.     

The Rolt Memorial Lecture 2018: Science and Engineering at War in Orkney

Initially conceived as a contribution to a conference which was to have been based in Caithness and was to have included a visit to Orkney, this paper examines the scientific and technological background to some of the wartime remains associated with the defence of Scapa Flow, the Royal Navy’s principal fleet anchorage in home waters in World Wars I and II. Summarising the surviving evidence of selected aspects of vessel-related, marine and aerial science and engineering around Scapa Flow, it is prefaced by a short account of Tom Rolt’s own wartime career, and concludes with a comparative appreciation of his place in the pantheon of literary engineers.     

A group of early 20th-century naval victualling finds from Royal Clarence Yard,Gosport, Hampshire

Abstract

Archaeological excavation in 2007 on the site of a late 18th-century brewery and associated pump-house at Royal Clarence Yard, Gosport uncovered an assemblage of pottery within the backfill of the latter structure. This was one of a small number of Admiralty victualling yards responsible for the provisioning of ships and shore establishments of the Royal Navy at home and overseas. Analysis of the pottery and other finds, supplemented by documentary research, has provided an opportunity to study items distributed by the yard to the messes of ships of the Royal Navy in the early 20th century.     

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
Shipwreck Index of the British Isles: Volume 1 — Isles of Scilly, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset (Edition limited to 1000 of 10-volume series) RICHARD & BRIDGET LARN
Old Ironsides—The Rise, Decline & Resurrection of the USS Constitution THOMAS C. GILLMER; illustrations WILLIAM GILKERSON
The Sailing Navy List: all the Ships of the Royal Navy Built, Purchased and Captured, 1688–1860 DAVID LYON
Captain Cook's Endeavour (Conway's Anatomy of the Ship series) KARL HEINZ MARQUARDT
Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and America, 1500–1860 JAN GLETE
Östersjöns Sjunkna Skepp. En Marinarkeologisk Tidsresa JOHAN RÖNNBY and JONATHAN ADAMS
Building Plank-on-Frame Ship Models RON MCCARTHY
The Foundry: Excavations on Poole Waterfront 1986/7 DAVID R. WATKINS
Versunken in der Ostsee—Schiffe und Schätze auf dem Meeresgrund GÜNTER LANITZKI     

汉密尔顿的远东之行与罗斯福政府远东政策的调整

1933年8月至1934年3月,奉美国远东司司长霍恩贝克之命,副司长汉密尔顿对远东进行了长达半年的考察,并最终向国务院提交了关于日本、关于"满洲国"、关于中国、关于美国远东政策的四份报告。这四份报告对第一届罗斯福政府的远东政策走向产生了重大影响:美国重新调整了远东政策,即在中日之间维持某种平衡,并持续对该区域的出口;摆脱了对战争的担忧,认为短期内苏日、美日间不会发生武装冲突;对伪满洲国继续奉行"不承认主义"。