MATTHEW S. SELIGMANN. The Royal Navy and the German Threat, 1901-1914: Admiralty Plans to Protect British Trade in a War against Germany.

Abstract

Matthew S. Seligmann has produced a fine reassessment of the British navy's strategic planning versus Germany in the years before World War I. The author focuses on measures taken by the Royal Navy to guard against a German war on British commerce. Seligmann asserts that scholars have paid scant attention to the fact that Britain took seriously such a threat, and he highlights the loss of the passenger liner Lusitania to submarine attack in World War I as evidence of the view held by many that Britain was unprepared for a war against shipping interests. In truth, Seligmann reveals that the threat was a perceived one, but that British efforts to guard against a commerce war centered on the threat posed by civilian ships, mostly passenger liners, converted into auxiliary cruisers. The author identifies two reasons for this oversight. Firstly, most scholarly studies focus on British offensive planning in the prewar years rather than on defensive preparations. The second has to do with the debate surrounding the origins and nature of the Anglo-German naval arms race in the years leading up to World War I. Seligmann identifies the two prevailing schools of thought in the debate concerning when Britain identified Germany as a potential enemy and why. The first of these, the traditionalist school, holds that Britain considered Germany a threat as early as 1902 given its warship construction program. The revisionist school of thought asserts that well after 1902 the British continued to look at France and Russia as the chief threats to British overseas interests, since the German construction program centered solely on capital ships designed to fight an engagement in the North Sea rather than cruisers. Only after 1905 did that focus begin to change in the context of the naval arms race. Both of these schools of thought hold in common that the growth of German sea power was based on the battleship rather than vessels capable of pursuing commercial warfare. As a result, there was little British impetus to plan measures to defend commerce against the German navy. Seligmann asserts that both of these schools are incorrect as he examines British measures to combat a German war against their trade through the use of auxiliary cruisers. Such measures occurred as early as 1901, which challenges existing arguments about when the British considered Germany a threat.