ABSTRACT
Before the advent of the serial European long-cycle hegemonic basing systems (beginning with Portugal in the sixteenth century), at least two Asia-centered empires featured some basing access related to naval power, perhaps often unremarked upon because of the Eurocentric nature of most Western international relations theory. In both of these cases – the Mongol Empire and Ming China – we are dealing with largely contiguous land empires whose naval power was marginal to their overall imperial policies. And, in both cases, there was no rival offshore seapower equivalent to the role played by Britain over several centuries, so that there was no major problem regarding trade-offs between sea and landpower, as would later be the case for the (in Padfield’s terminology) European “hybrids” such as France, Germany and the USSR. Japan, geographically in a situation similar to the later U.K.,1 lying offshore a great continent from which it was separated only by narrow straits, did not field significant naval power until the late nineteenth century, and did not exert itself to influence politics on “the continent.” So here, Mahan and others to the contrary, fundamentally landpowers could also dominate the seas, albeit in a limited way.
