Abstract
When A. J. P. Taylor compared the defence expenditure of the European states in the half-century before the First World War, he found himself confronted with the ‘paradoxical appearance’ that, by this measure, ‘for most of the period Great Britain was the most militaristic of the Great Powers’.1 More recent scholarship has questioned and refined these findings, noting that by 1914 British defence expenditure in absolute terms had been significantly outstripped by that of Germany and Russia. Moreover, following a spike in military spending during the Boer War, British defence expenditure as a percentage of gross national product was lower than that in France, Germany, and Russia for most of the decade preceding the outbreak of the First World War, and by 1913 was also lower than that in Italy and Austria-Hungary. On the other hand, per capita defence spending in Britain — a measure used by many contemporaries — was the highest among the European powers for almost all of the same period, and British defence spending as a proportion of total public expenditure remained higher than in either Germany or France.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford, 1971), pp. xxvii–xxix.
L. E. Davis and R. A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism (Cambridge, 1986), p. 160;
J. M. Hobson, ‘The Military Extraction Gap and the Weary Titan: The Fiscal Sociology of British Defence Policy, 1870–1913’, Journal of European Economic History, 22 (1993), pp. 461–506; N. Ferguson, ‘Public Finance and National Security: The Domestic Origins of the First World War Revisited’, Past and Present, no. 142 (1994), pp. 141–68; and The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700–2000 (London, 2001), p. 47; Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War, pp. 1–14.
M. Howard, ‘The Edwardian Arms Race’, in D. Read (ed.), Edwardian England (London, 1972), p. 150; Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War, p. 4.
H. C. G. Matthew, Liberal Imperialists: The Ideas and Politics of a Post-Gladstonian Élite (London, 1973), pp. 215–23; Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, pp. 152–56;
H. Pelling, Winston Churchill (London, 1974), pp. 147–62.
M. Howard, The Continental Commitment (London, 1972), p. 23.
Howard, ‘Edwardian Arms Race’, pp. 145–61; P. M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London, 1980), pp. 410–70.
Admiral Fisher, the architect of the British revolution in naval construction, had originally hoped that his reforms would lead to financial savings for the Admiralty. His fast and powerful new battle cruisers were intended to be capable of performing the work of either a battleship or first-class cruiser. When complemented by coastal defence submarines, it was envisaged that the new vessels could be built in smaller numbers than the capital ships of the traditional battle fleet, leading to substantial savings in construction costs, manning, and maintenance. Indeed, for the three fiscal years from 1906–7 to 1908–9, the Liberal government was able to draft navy estimates that were on average some 15 per cent below those of 1904–5. From 1909, however, with European rivals rapidly constructing ‘Dreadnoughts’ of their own, Britain found herself in an increasingly costly naval race. See J. T. Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology, and British Naval Policy, 1889–1914 (London, 1993), pp. 57, 111–15, 185–96, 330–7;
N. A. Lambert, Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution (Columbia, 1999), pp. 91–126.
G. R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War1886–1918 (Oxford, 2004), p. 392.
G. Wawro, Warfare and Society in Europe, 1792–1914 (London, 2000), pp. 160–2.
W. M. Hamilton, The Nation and the Navy: Methods and Organization of British Navalist Propaganda, 1889–1914 (unpublished thesis, University of London, 1977), p. 29. The pre-eminent British naval theorist of the Edwardian period was Julian Corbett, a historian and lecturer at the Royal Naval War College, who argued for the importance of British command of the sea in order to protect imperial communications and trade routes. See J. S. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (London, 1911);
B. Ranft, ‘Sir Julian Corbett’, in G. Till (ed.), Maritime Strategy and the Nuclear Age, 2nd edn (New York, 1984), pp. 39–43.
Summers, ‘The Character of Edwardian Nationalism’, pp. 69, 80; F. Coetzee, For Party or Country: Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Popular Conservatism in Edwardian England (Oxford, 1990), p. 138. The British navalist leagues never came close to matching the membership of their German counterpart, the Flottenverein, which boasted more than 330,000 adherents by 1914.
See F. Coetzee and M. S. Coetzee, ‘Rethinking the Radical Right in Germany and Britain before 1914’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 21, no. 4 (1986), pp. 515–37 at p. 522.
Morris, The Scaremongers; G. J. Marcus, ‘The Naval Crisis of 1909 and the Croydon by-election’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute (1958), pp. 500–14; A. J. P. Taylor, ‘We Want Eight and We Won’t Wait’, in Politics in Wartime: and Other Essays (London, 1964), pp. 53–6.
D. Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain, 1901–1914 (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 160.
Summers, ‘The Character of Edwardian Nationalism’, pp. 68–87; Coetzee, For Party or Country, pp. 4, 29; E. H. H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880–1914 (London, 1995), pp. 18, 20;
A. S. Thompson, ‘The Language of Imperialism: Imperial Discourse in British Politics, 1895–1914’, Journal of British Studies vol. 36, no. 2 (April, 1997), pp. 148–9.
S. E. Lobell, ‘War is Politics: Offensive Realism, Domestic Politics, and Security Strategies’, Security Studies, vol. 12, no. 2 (Winter, 2002–3), pp. 183–6.
R. Williams, Defending the Empire: The Conservative Party and British Defence Policy, 1899–1915 (London, 1991), pp. 29, 77–80.
A. H. Burgoyne (ed.) The Navy League Annual (1908–1909), p. 278; Summers, ‘The Character of Edwardian Nationalism’, p. 80.
B. Russell, Portraits from Memory: And Other Essays (London, 1956), p. 76;
H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866) (London, 1934), pp. 650–4. For a fuller description of the Coefficients, see Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency, pp. 150–2.
Hamilton, The Nation and the Navy, p. 269; A. L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–1905 (Princeton, 1988), pp. 144–52.
A. J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904–1919 (5 vols, Oxford, 1961–70) i, p. 124.
F. W. S. Craig, British Parliamentary Election Results. 1885–1918 (London, 1974).
N. Blewett, The Peers, the Parties and the People: The General Elections of 1910 (London, 1972), p. 410.
W. E. Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1880), i, pp. 126, 193–7; ii, pp. 270–95. Once in office, Gladstone’s government decided against returning Cyprus to Turkish control, despite some enthusiasm from Goschen, then serving as special ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, for such ‘a splendid act of disinterested renunciation’.
See W. N. Medlicott, ‘The Gladstone Government and the Cyprus Convention, 1880–85’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 12, no. 2 (1940), pp. 186–208.
J. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England, 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 156–8.
P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 687–8.
A. Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford, 1989), p. 220.
A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (2 vols, Oxford, 1976), pp. 464–5.
B. Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy: Ideology, Interest, and Sea Power during the Pax Britannica (London, 1986), pp. 39–41.
A. Offer, ‘Morality and Admiralty: “Jackie” Fisher, Economic Warfare and the Laws of War’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 23, no. 1 (1988), pp. 99–118.
J. S. Corbett, ‘The Capture of Private Property at Sea’, in A. T. Mahan (ed.), Some Neglected Aspects of War (London, 1907), pp. 151.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Matthew Johnson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Johnson, M. (2013). The Militarization of the State: Armaments, Popular Navalism, and the Liberal Party. In: Militarism and the British Left, 1902–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274137_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274137_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44551-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-27413-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)