Protecting neutrality at sea in a global age, 1815-1914

Abstract

When it comes to maritime warfare, the ‘long’ nineteenth century had a distinct character. Bookended by the global Napoleonic wars that concluded in 1815 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, this century witnessed exceptional levels of global change, not least in the expansion of industrial empires and the extensive use of the world’s seas and oceans as highways of commerce, migration, investment and ideas. Historians estimate that more than 100 million people migrated across the planet between 1815 and 1914. 1 Many did so by moving across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The invention and development of steamships sped up the movement of these peoples as much as it mobilized the sinews of global industrial capitalism. The laying of trans-oceanic telegraph cables, which by the turn of the century traversed the planet, also globalized communications. The nineteenth century, then, was an age in which the seas played a pivotal role. Perhaps surprisingly, it was also a century in which not a lot of formal naval warfare occurred. Rather, the relationship between the naval powers and the seas seemed to be less about asserting military dominance over the world’s salty waters (even if in practice and by dint of its sheer size, the British Royal Navy dwarfed all others and did just that)2 and more about opening up the highways of trade and exchange that crossed on and under the open seas.