Globalisation and Sea power - Waterstones


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Chapter One

Globalisation and Sea Power ‘When man ceased to look upon streams, rivers, and seas as barriers and learned to use them as highways, he made a giant stride toward civilization. The waterways of the world provided a new mobility – to man himself, later to the products of his toil and skill, and at all times to his ideas.’ 1 Until the early modern period, oceanic travel was the exception rather than the rule, with only the Arabs and the Chinese venturing beyond the coastal regions of their known and familiar horizons, and not far beyond. Apart from the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, Europeans had made the Atlantic coast of their continent the limit of their ambition, with settlement of Greenland and Iceland and what proved to be unsustainable ventures beyond into the vastness of the North Atlantic. This situation changed in the wake of the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 and the ‘Reconquista’ of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, leaving the Western European monarchies free from the threat of external predators (if not struggles among themselves) and able to speculate about what the Atlantic might offer. The voyages and explorations of Columbus, Magellan and da Gama, at the start of the early modern period, kicked off the process of globalisation as Europe began to reach out across the oceans and the world became increasingly connected through the medium of the sea. As these maritime ventures continued to expand, states were able to take advantage of the new opportunities opening up in terms of trade routes, the exploitation of resources and the ability to exert military   E. B. Potter, Sea Power: A Naval History (1960).

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10 | Super Highway

influence on the oceans. The fortunes of states became linked to their ability to access and exploit the seas, with globalisation, hand-in-hand with the development of sea power, becoming the driving force for imperial ambition and economic success. The period led to the formation and growth of successive worldspanning maritime empires. Great Britain built and maintained an extensive empire through the maintenance of a network of markets and colonies, fuelled by trade, whose security and integrity were guaranteed by the barrels of naval guns and the cutlasses of its semi-mythic naval heroes. Although the maritime empires of Spain, Portugal, then the Dutch, French and English faced opposition and challenge in turn, not least from each other, no other power outside Europe or the Americas had the technical, organisational and industrial capacity to break the monopoly of sea power held by the Western world. The only non-Western power that ever came close to establishing a maritime-based empire, but only on a regional basis, was Japan in the Second World War. Its success was temporary and dependent on the peculiar conditions that prevailed while Britain and the USA were distracted by the necessity of defeating Nazi Germany and its Axis allies in Europe. Western maritime dominance resumed, this time led by the USA, although the European empires did not long survive the austerities that afflicted the home countries and the nationalist aspirations of their former colonies.

The pre-modern era Until the time of the great oceanic voyages of the fifteenth century, maritime dominance had been always regional in its extent and ambition, constrained by the limitations of naval technology, an imperfect understanding of oceanic weather patterns and the presence of substantial regional powers determined to hold their own against interlopers. The limited maritime operations of the Greeks and Romans in the Mediterranean, with their extensions into the Black Sea and Red Sea and onto the Atlantic coast, disappeared amid the collapse of the classical world. In the ensuing fragmentation and instability, the idea of a securely navigable, accessible and interconnected world suffered something of a setback as both maritime and intellectual horizons closed down considerably. These gave way to contested sea-spaces

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Globalisation and Sea Power  |  11

and trading routes in the Mediterranean and around the Atlantic coast, occupied by no single dominant power and menaced by raiders, predatory warlords and dynastic rivalry. The next phase, from the ninth century, was characterised by the rise of Italian maritime city-states (notably Venice, Genoa and Pisa), successively trading with the Levant and helping themselves to the spoils of the Crusades and the break-up of the Byzantine Empire. The key to sea power in the pre-modern era was the ability to maintain a balance between the need to sustain a profitable trading fleet in times of peace and stability and the ability to generate sufficient fighting power in wartime. Meanwhile, the Red Sea and Indian Ocean were controlled without serious opposition or competition – apart from the threat from pirates – by the warships and merchants of Islam, whose coercive power dominated the Red Sea, the western Indian Ocean and whose commercial reach extended to India and China. Further East, Chinese imperial regimes, notably the Song and Ming dynasties, held most of what we now know as South East Asia and East Asia in a tribute-based political and economic system, whose power at sea was built around intricate trading networks, a huge fleet of powerful warships and the resources of the world’s largest economy. Chinese ships at the time of the Ming emperors were rightly famous and remarked upon by European commentators. At about 120 m (400 ft) in length, with up to nine masts, watertight bulkheads and innovative technologies, they dwarfed comparable Western models, both in scale and sophistication. Such was the maritime dominance of the Ming dynasty fleets that, in the early fifteenth century, the great Ming Navy consisted of 3,500 vessels, 2,700 of which were warships stationed along the length of the coast of China. Any account of China’s maritime heritage has to mention Zheng He, a eunuch admiral, who commanded powerful ‘treasure’ fleets, comprising warships and merchantmen, on a succession of wide-ranging tributecollecting, exploratory and trading voyages between 1405 and 1433. The scope of his operations extended to the Gulf and East Africa in the west, to all of South East Asia and to the Malaysian and Indonesian archipelagoes. Gavin Menzies in his book 1421 would have us believe that he went even further than that, but the argument would appear to become progressively more circumstantial, though no less engaging, the further the book, and its hero, travel from China.

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