ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book talks about national security in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It attempts to show that before 1800 naval power rested on a variety of sub-cultures; but from about 1800 that variety was increasingly unified within an ideology first articulated by Samuel Bentham, at the time Inspector General of Naval Works. The book addresses the sense of distrust felt for government bureaucracy in the late eighteenth century. It argues that strategic legacy, political choices and logistical limitations had brought British naval power to a period of critical pressure in the late 1790s. The communities serving naval dock and victualling yards were subject to pressures from government. The culture of government bureaucracy was no less self-interested. Hence, to safeguard the public interest, in the seventeenth century a system of cross-checking had been instituted among officials to create collective responsibility.
