ABSTRACT
By 1976, Paul Kennedy’s own examination of British gunboat diplomacy during the nineteenth century expanded into a sobering history of the Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery as a whole. British Empire fought for its life against its own Central Powers of Imperial Germany and the Ottomans in Turkey. Campaigns against piracy in Chinese waters and the suppression of the Indian Mutiny were similarly able to make good use of the barely seaworthy, very slow and short winded gunboats built too late for operations in the Crimean War. At the same time Victoria’s navy naturally assumed that British pre-eminence and the age of progress in general went hand in hand. In 1977 Michael Howard had concluded an inherent problem with gunboat diplomacy, and modern warfare itself, was the ruthless application of national interests when the more genuinely those states by reason of their democratic structure embody indigenous and peculiar cultural values and perceptions.
