ABSTRACT
The secondary and smaller maritime powers are states with extensive maritime interests and navies which cannot on their own face up to that of the dominant seapower. The maritime dimension of their national security depends on their being able to cooperate with other, similarly placed powers to contain the hegemony of the power with the potential to command the sea. The balance struck between these two tendencies within the European states system found expression in maritime law and the leagues of armed neutrality up to 1801. During the two centuries between the wars of Louis XIV and the First World War, Britain was usually dominant at sea and exerted economic pressure on its opponents, to the extent that the maritime balance allowed. Some secondary powers sought to challenge that Britain conducted economic warfare in a manner similar to that of the dominant land power. Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine Germany and the United States in the era of the world wars fall into the category of secondary powers which abandoned their traditional national security policy. We will here focus on those traditions, as they pertained to those secondary maritime powers of the eighteenth century – Sweden, Denmark–Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Venice – which became small naval powers in the nineteenth century; also continental great powers which could not afford a first rate navy, such as Russia and Spain, or France, Germany and the United States in the late nineteenth century. 1
