ABSTRACT
Historians have described navies and naval operations as a nation-state’s actions that involve a specific range of activities within the spectrum of armed conflict and violence at sea. The traditional historiographical focus has been on the scope of naval activities at sea that a state directly controls and directs with state-owned, state-hired, or purpose-built warships. Scholars make a distinction between the actual practice of strategy in maritime wars and the early traces of maritime and naval strategic theory in the early modern period. Navies in the first phase of the early modern period used a range of new technical innovations to move beyond the galley warfare that had characterized navies and naval actions in Antiquity. Most importantly, whole new areas of research are opening up that involve understanding navies and naval affairs in social and cultural terms of nationhood, community, society, race, empire, gender, ideology, memory, commemoration, and other social and cultural themes and issues.
