Ruling the Waves
Book Review Britain Against Napoleon: The Organization Of Victory; 1793-1815 by Roger Knight (Penguin Group, 2013).
As the world order deteriorates, Western policymakers cast about for historical analogies to explain the situation and guide our response. Some see the tense relations between the United States and Communist China as a “new Cold War.”1 Others find a dire warning for our times in the failed isolationism which prefaced World War II.2 History abounds with lessons for discerning statesmen, and all these examples have much to teach.
A generation ago, though, the conservative sage Russell Kirk suggested that the most instructive parallel may be to Great Britain’s decades-long battle against Revolutionary France. “America plays today the role that was Britain’s at the end of the eighteenth century,” he wrote in a 1982 essay; “like the English then, we Americans have become, without willing it, the defenders of civilization against the enemies of order and justice and freedom.”3 The conservative statesmanship of figures such as Edmund Burke, William Pitt, and George Canning has only become more relevant as a new axis of despots attempts a revolution against Western primacy.
Those leaders successfully turned their nation’s counterrevolutionary convictions into a set of practical policies to overcome a seemingly insurmountable set of geopolitical challenges. Roger Knight’s 2013 magnum opus, Britain Against Napoleon: The Organization Of Victory; 1793-1815, is one of the finest explanations of how they did it.4 An accomplished naval historian and biographer of Horatio Lord Nelson, Knight intricately details the fiscal, industrial, diplomatic, and military measures that ultimately defeated a regime which threatened to engulf all of Europe.
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