ABSTRACT
The study of naval tactics was once regarded as a central aspect of naval history. For the first great generation of naval historians who wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, history was useful knowledge, intended to inform naval debate, to educate naval officers and to guide naval policies. In the years after the First World War, when all things military were out of fashion, military and naval history fell from favour, and no aspect fell farther or, harder than the study of tactics. When military and naval history did revive, it was largely thanks to the work of the 'War and Society' school, applying to the military the general historians' enthusiasm for social history. If war matters to history, then battles certainly matter, even if they do not matter as much as many people thought they did in the first great age of naval history a century ago.
