ABSTRACT
Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) has a history.2 Navies mattered to it primarily at just one time, between 1815-1930. Though France and the United States also practiced the art of using ships to stabilize the situation ashore, its master was Britain, which attempted and executed the greatest uses of seapower for the purposes of SSTR on record. Its failures were as weighty as its successes; together, they shaped the world as much as did any other phenomena. No other power in history ever relied on navies, or gained as much from them, to the extent that Britain did during this period. Its very status as a – the – world power rested on seapower. In 1922, Prime Minister David Lloyd George said “we are naturally sailors and an amphibious race.” In 1927, Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain, described seapower as “our great strength and decisive weapon.” In 1929, a First Sea Lord, Charles Madden, wrote, “The Navy is the chief sanction of our Foreign Policy; it is hardly an exaggeration to say that every Foreign Office telegram is backed by it.”3 Navy and empire were especially linked. Between 1815-1930, outside Europe, India, and some other colonies, the Royal Navy (RN) was Britain’s main arm of policy. Among its basic roles were tasks in war, power politics and areas related to SSTR, often described by terms like “presence,” “symbolic use,” “imperial policing,” “gunboat diplomacy,” “coercion” and “preventative, precautionary and pre-emptive naval diplomacy,” to pursue national interests, commercial or political, and common goods, like enforcing international law, suppressing piracy, and supporting free trade. This chapter assesses Britain’s use of maritime power in SSTR between 1815-1930, and its value, limits, and unintended consequences.
