ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates that the extant strategic discourse on economic warfare was reflected in the Admiralty's 'practice': the procurement of merchant cruisers up to 1914. It examines the literature on economic warfare, but writers like Arthur Marder did not spend much time on the influence of thinkers like John Laughton and Julian Corbett. A subcomponent of grand strategy is military doctrine, which deals with military means: what means shall be employed, and how. Alastair Iain Johnston identified three phases in the strategic culture approach, which challenged 'the ahistorical, non-cultural neorealist framework'. Neorealism is 'generally considered a major advance on the classical realism of Hans Morgenthau and others'. Neumann and Heikka reject any implication that strategic culture 'is the stable product of a homogeneous process inside a clearly limited nation-state' in favour of seeing it as an unstable compromise of a transnational contested process.
