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Contents: Introduction The Collective Naval Defence of the Empire, 1900a "1940 List of Documents and Sources Biographical Outlines Index.

In the beginning, long before the concept of ‘maritime strategy’ was formed, there was piracy. Piracy was an endemic condition at sea which has an antiquity at least as old as does trade. Indeed modern scholarship is inclined to treat piracy as part of the general system of exchange.1 In South East Asia piracy remains an endemic problem, control of which is a major task of navies in that area.2 It is hardly a matter for surprise, therefore, that the oldest strategic motives for attack on maritime trade are derivatives of the rapacity of pirates, and that trade warfare is conducted in a complex regime of international law reflecting private and public response to the problem of piracy. From the perspective of the twentieth century, the laws of trade warfare appear primarily as restraints upon the considered actions of belligerents. Because of the underlying rapacious motive for attack on trade, however, prize law was at least as important in its function of adjudicating between privateers and naval officers on the one part, and their governors on the other. Prize law ensured that governments were able to exert some measure of control over events at sea, so that the war conducted on trade was compatible with the wider national interests, but the legal regime also prevented governments acquiring absolute control over the activities of their citizens and navies until 1856, when privateering was abolished.

Fear expressed by Americans at the end of World War I that British naval dominance would preclude the effective enforcement of the League of Nations Covenant was somewhat wide of the mark. Article 16 of the Covenant, paragraph 1, indicated that sanctions against an offending state were to follow the American wartime model. Commercial and financial transactions were to be severed at source. The effectiveness of the system would depend upon its universality. Paragraph 2 of Article 16 made provision for the possible need for military forces, but this was not conceived at the time of the Ethiopian crisis in 1935 as being intended to oblige members of the League to observe a sanctions rule. The extent to which naval blockade is a strategy which requires belligerent action against unoffending ‘neutral’ states made it inappropriate for League purposes. American hostility to naval blockade also ensured that it would be avoided.

THE REMARKABLE SUCCESS James Boswell had in arousing aristocratic sympathy throughout Europe for General Paoli's efforts to establish an independent Corsican state is well known, as is Lord Holland's expostulation: "Foolish as we are, we cannot be so foolish as to go to war, because Mr. Boswell has been to Corsica, and yet, believe me, no better reason can be given for siding with the vile inhabitants of one of the vilest islands in the world."' The French conquest and annexation of Corsica, however, was a serious defeat to Britain. After the Seven Years' War Britain was diplomatically isolated and the defense of her interests was dependent upon the maintenance of the power and influence of her preeminent naval forces. French annexation of Corsica impaired the effectiveness of British sea power in the Mediterranean, and the Duc de Choiseul's successful occupation of the Mediterranean island despite Britain's naval preeminence reduced the influence of British sea power throughout Europe. The failure of the government of the Duke of Grafton to prevent the defeat was the result of poor statesmanship compounded by political bickering. Partly as a result of political ineptitude and partly by accident, the Duke of Grafton had brought together in brief coalition an uncongenial group of men of faction. Out of loyalty to William Pitt who he thought should be brought back to power, Grafton had helped to bring about the collapse of the Rockingham government in 1766 by resigning from his office of Secretary of State. Pitt had then agreed to form a government, but he had insisted that Grafton have the