| To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World (P.S.) | 
 enlarge | Author: Arthur Herman
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  54 reviews
Sales Rank: 52471
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 688
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.4 x 1.5
ISBN: 0060534257
Dewey Decimal Number: 941
EAN: 9780060534257
ASIN: 0060534257
Publication Date: November 1, 2005
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| Customer Reviews:
 Should a professor of history make such basic mistakes or be so superficial? September 26, 2005
55 out of 65 found this review helpful
Impressed by the favorable reviews and interested by the sweep of the author's perspective, I bought "To Rule the Waves". Early in the book (page 54), however, I found this extraordinary sentence, "Once they (the Spanish ships) arrived off Hispaniola, the South American-bound section sailed to Cartagena (now the capital of Venezuela) to drop off goods and supplies,....". Perhaps Mr. Herman should look up an atlas and find out that the capital of Venezuela is Caracas, and Cartagena is in Colombia.
Hoping that this was simply an isolated case of sloppy writing and editing, I continued to read in the book. On page 282, I was startled by still another absurdity, "The British navy enabled Clive to beat his rival Dupleix at the battle of Plassey in 1757..". Really? How did he manage to do so, when: (i) Dupleix (the governor of the French colony at Pondicherry) had already been recalled in 1754; and, (ii) Clive fought the forces of a local Indian prince, the Nawab of Bengal (Siraj ud Daulah), at Plassey (in Bengal, nowhere near the battles in the Carnatic to which Mr. Herman refers) and there were no French troops in this battle? These are not complex questions of fact - Mr. Herman could easily refer to any standard history of India, or if he felt inclined to a bit more research, to more specialized histories of the rise of British power in India.
Apart from errors of fact, there are questions of judgment. Is it really accurate to refer to Napoleon at the relief of Toulon as a "committed terrorist"? What on earth does this mean? He had written one anti-Paoli essay,a piece of Jacobin propaganda, and met Robespierre. But he was inserted into a position in the French forces relieving Toulon by Saliceti, a "depute en mission", who knew the Bonapartes from Corsica. Perhaps Mr. Herman thinks of the Jacobins as the fore-runners of Al-Qaeda?
This book really could and should have been written better. It's useful to pick up the general thread of what happened in the rise and dominance of the Royal Navy over three centuries and more. But it's no substitute for the number of other works which do exist, about different periods, battles and themes which Mr. Herman tries to cover in his book. For an example of a superlatively well-written and recent book on just the Spanish armada, I would strongly recommend "In Confident Hope of a Miracle" by Neil Hanson, who doesn't have Mr. Herman's credentials as a professor of history, but apparently doesn't need them as he writes so much better and in greater depth.
 Power and Empire on the High Seas August 15, 2005
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Arthur Herman's effort here is most impressive. He captures the complete Royal Navy's history from its most humble, if not dastardly, beginnings as privateers struggling for their very existence against the then world superpower, the Spanish, to its evolution as worldwide hegemonic force that supported a global empire, and to its eventual decline after World War II. The British Empire was built and sustained by the Royal Navy. Herman sustains this narrative from its start in the Elizabethan age to the present with unparalleled ability to capture and present the details with alacrity and conciseness. He never leaves the reader wondering what the point was or lost in a maze of pointless historical details.
Ultimately, Herman shows that though the Pax Britannia has waned, its influence has not been lost. America as its geopolitical successor has presided over the Pax American. In this day and age of the Global War on Terrorism where the US is locked in a land battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are lessons to be learned from the Royal Navy. The broad strategic goals of the US need to be supported by a strong and modern blue ocean Navy. Herman links a strong Navy with a robust geopolitical strength and ultimately the ability to enforce a nation's will anywhere on the globe.
In 2006 the US Navy plans on buying only four warships and to drop its aircraft carrier fleet from twelve to eleven, pointing to a shift in resources away from the Navy to its brethren in arms on the ground. While many argue that transformation will offset reductions to the size of the US Navy force, it should not be forgotten that quantity does have a quality all its own. It seems that this may be the price we will pay to conduct land operations in Iraq. But it may be price to high to sustain Pax Americana. As Herman pointed out in the last chapter, the Royal Navy was cut to sustain British Army obligations to NATO after World War II. It never recovered and neither did Britain as a world power.
 One of the worst proofed books I have ever seen August 10, 2005
5 out of 13 found this review helpful
When I first started reading the book I found it very enjoyable but then I started noticing the typos and it became so distracting that I found myself concentrating more on them than the narrative. I found 26 typos between pages 147 and 511.Examples Page 389
a lieutenant (to) steer Page 282
the most powerful political player (in)Southeast Asia Page 377
On and off for the better (part) of a decade Page 458 including Coles and Childer's own son ?? Two men have one son??
An Excellent Compendium August 3, 2005
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
Having read a great many works on the British Navy generally, and on the "Age of Nelson" specifically, I highly recommend this book to the general reader who desires a comprehensive overview of the subject. Other reviewers are correct that the book tends to be somewhat simplistic and hyperbolic in places, and I was amazed at the number of editorial gaffes, double and omitted words, etc. Having said that, Herman does an excellent job of providing a context for the major turning points in the British Navy's history, and particulalrly its precipitous decline between the First and Second World Wars. May not tell British Navy history fans all they want to know, but sure provides a well-organized, well-written and engaging story for the general reader.
Well-written, but too simplistic July 29, 2005
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
1st the author should be commended for his excellent prose. This book is very engaging, nicely written and gives such a sweeping panorama of British naval history that one wonders how the author was able to command the sources necessary to produce this volume. I am usually not a fan of naval history, esp. in the 18th & 19th centuries, but this was a fun read.
However, I do see one overall issue here that may in fact be the book's chief and fatal flaw: Herman seems to try to boil down everything related to the British navy from Elizabethan times to the 1980s in terms of personalities. That is to say, he focuses far too heavily on contingency and men's actions and not enough on grand scale historical processes, structures and buracracies. I'm usually a big fan of contingency in history, the belief that history is changed and influenced to a large degree by the actions of human beings. Fred Anderson's CRUCIBLE OF WAR and David H. Fischer's WASHINGTON'S CROSSING are excellent examples of such interpretations. But Herman goes beyond these 2 books, and stresses it so much that it becomes very simplistic. He does this to the extent that logistics, British politics, international relations, economics, financial history, etc. are all downplayed/ignored. At one point (p. 349) he boils down the Napoleonic Wars to a duel between 2 men-Napoleon & Nelson. He writes "two men, and two only, would decide the final outcome [of the war]: the masters of the two new kinds of warfare, Napoleon and Nelson. the events of the next decade were as much a matter of a personal duel between them as a conflict between competing nations and political ideologies." Quite frankly, this is absurd and extremely simplistic and sullies an otherwise good book.
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