ABSTRACT
During and after the Seven Years War the western powers became increasingly preoccupied with global politics, while the traditional causes of diplomatic dispute, the possession of land and the security of frontiers, were located to the east. That dichotomy is reflected in the statistics of the great powers’ naval and military strengths. Both Britain’s naval personnel and her tonnage doubled between the age of Louis XIV and the Seven Years War. The size of the Bourbon navies was subject to great fluctuation, though by the time of the War of American Independence France had some eighty ships of the line and Spain around sixty (though together they failed to match the British fleet’s total of some one hundred and seventy). By the 1780s the Russian fleet, first established by Peter the Great and then allowed to decline after his death, had been re-established with thirty-seven ships of the line on the Baltic and around twenty on the Black Sea.
