European Naval Research Articles

The Influence of Strategic Procurement on the Performance of the European Naval Defense Industry

ABSTRACT The naval defense industry plays a crucial role in national security, particularly in the context of global rearmament and shared threats. However, the industry’s performance in Europe has been hindered by factors such as decreased fleets, shrinking industry capabilities, and increasing production costs. This study of 102 large surface vessels (frigates and destroyers) from eight European countries found that production time is positively correlated with technical variables such as weight and speed. A small but significant learning effect also existed, with a 1.5-month decrease for each marginal increase of one unit in the batch. Regarding strategic sourcing, the study found no effect of the share of US subsystems on production time. However, European cooperation led to an increase in production time, likely due to higher coordination costs. Conversely, importing subsystems from a European ally tended to reduce production time. The study’s findings highlight the challenges facing the naval defense industry in Europe and suggest that strategies such as increasing batch size and cooperation with European allies can help to improve performance.

The Introduction of American Naval Ordnance in the Caribbean Sea in the Late Modern Period: Operational dimensions and American expansion

Since the 1970s, the Caribbean has been a hub for nautical archaeology, often focusing on European naval ordnance as evidence of early modern maritime occupation. The mid-nineteenth century ushered in a new military context with rapid American expansion, introducing contemporary innovations in American naval artillery. This study delves into the significance of American naval ordnance in the late nineteenth-century Caribbean, with a focus on its potential for revealing new imperialism and evolving regional dynamics in the archaeological record. It analyses the late nineteenth-century naval operational context in the Caribbean, concentrating on USS Kearsarge and its guns’ history from 1862–94 and its loss on Roncador Cay. Primary sources provide insight into their evolution associated with the wreck site, with emphasis placed on Dahlgren shell guns as a potential identifying feature.

Giving the Devil His Diu: Malik Ayyaz, the Estada da India and Reassessing Comparative Naval Power in the Early Modern Indian Ocean

The 1509 Battle of Diu is regularly cited as a definitive example of European naval superiority over the Asian powers of the Indian Ocean. Some authors, like the late Jan Glete, have gone so far as to assert that, after Diu, no Indian Ocean state was ever able to challenge the Portuguese at sea again. Yet these analyses ignore that Portugal’s primary adversary in India, Gujarati governor Malik Ayyaz, not only survived the battle of Diu but also continued to wage a private war against the Estada da India until shortly before his death in 1522. This article examines Ayyaz’s war against Portugal from beginning to end and uses his career as a lens through which to offer a re-evaluation of Gujarati naval strength in the early sixteenth century. Its findings suggest that the conflict between Ayyaz and the Estada da India was ultimately a draw, with neither side possessing a meaningful technological or military advantage over the other.

THE SOCIAL SITUATION OF THE MAGHREB COUNTRIES IN MODERN TIMES DURING THE 18TH-19TH CENTURIES. ALGERIA AS A MODEL

During modern times, the Maghreb countries from Tripoli to the atlantic front witnessed patterns of government and close economic, social and cultural conditions, while Europe experienced a period of decisive economic and social transformations in the age of enlightenment, then the industrial revolution, and the colonial movement to dominate underdeveloped countries. At the beginning of modern times, the Maghreb countries knew the imminent danger from the european naval powers that controlled the maritime outposts on the coast of the western basin of the Mediterranean. Taking advantage of the political and military weakness of the Maghreb countries. The european foreign threat, especially the Spanish one, has been perched on the Maghreb coastal cities for more than three centuries, but with the emergence of the ottoman power in the western basin of the mediterranean, which began to intensify efforts to mobilize local energies in order to remove the imminent danger, it was able to ward off the spanish advance and eliminate some of its sites one after another, the last of which was the liberated cities of Oran in 1792 AD. Research Objectives : This research paper aims to shed light on the social situation of the Maghreb countries during modern times and the interaction of the local population with new arrivals from different countries of the world, and then highlight the extent to which the local population suffered from the pandemics that the mediterranean region was experiencing at that time, as well as the foreign invasion, all of which were factors that converged against the local population

Industrialisation, Warfare, and Science: An Archaeological-Historical Insight into Technological Changes of Mid-18th to Early 19th-century European Naval Ships

For European naval powers, whose economic and political well-being depended on the success of naval enterprises, warships played a fundamental role. Based on a multi-scalar and comparative approach, evidence from post-medieval (or historical) shipwrecks, can contribute to a better understanding of modern technology and society. This article deals with the innovations of British, French, and Spanish warships that sailed from about 1750 to 1815. An archaeological, archaeometric, and documentary study of wreck sites, with emphasis on ships’ structure, equipment, and ordnance, provided novel data to address the development of naval technology of the period. Based on this comprehensive approach, the information obtained allowed for a discussion of the impacts of industrialisation, warfare, and science on the innovation dynamic developed within the aforementioned states.

The European Union’s Security Intervention in the Indo-Pacific: Between Multilateralism and Mercantile Interests

ABSTRACT Is the EU raising its political and security profile in the Indo-Pacific solely because of China’s assertiveness or US–China strategic competition, as often posited? On the basis of official documentation and elite interviews, this article advances a more nuanced view of the rationale behind the EU’s engagement there. Aside from increased European naval involvement the EU and its member states are fostering the capacity building of Indo-Pacific countries concerned with their maritime safety, maritime security and to uphold the rules-based multilateral order. Yet, this article demonstrates how mercantile goals lie behind the EU and its member states’ politico-security engagement.

European Naval expedition 2021: Mounting Momentum for Asian Collective Security Arrangements or a Frivolous Third Party?

European Naval expedition 2021: Mounting Momentum for Asian Collective Security Arrangements or a Frivolous Third Party?

A second-hand shipwreck market: Salvage auctions in mid-eighteenth-century Helsinki

When a merchant ship was wrecked in the Gulf of Finland in the eighteenth century it was salvaged (mainly its running rigging), together with its cargo. In eighteenth-century Sweden, salvage was the monopoly of the Northern Diving and Salvage Company (1729–1802). In Helsinki, several salvage auctions were held each year. Salvage documents are useful sources not only for investigating the demand for ship parts, but also for identifying ships and explaining past marine accidents. The detailed technical knowledge provided by auction protocols offers insight into ships and their equipment in the early modern Baltic. Many ships were on their way to St Petersburg (established in 1703), the home port of European naval stores, but many of them were wrecked on the rocky coasts of Helsinki. This gave rise to a strange kind of shipping based on random imports and the use of recycled cordage, sails and anchors from the shores blessed by unfortunate ships.

Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919. By Erik Grimmer-Solem (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2019) 654 pp. $44.99

Grimmer-Solem’s Learning Empire traces the circuits by which six university economists in Germany came to influence their country’s economic, foreign, colonial, and social policy in the decades preceding World War I. Grimmer-Solem, deploying the tools of intellectual historians to examine these professors and their worldviews, mounts a robust, multifaceted inquiry into Germany’s response to globalization in the long nineteenth century. In an innovative turn, he does so not through the use of familiar diplomatic and military documents but through the mobilization of the personal papers of German social scientists who, though mostly forgotten today, nonetheless enjoyed prominence in fin-de-siècle Europe. The reclamation of this source base is a significant achievement in itself.Learning Empire mainly situates its findings within the voluminous historiography on modern Germany. Yet, the book also makes valuable contributions to growing secondary literatures about transnational entanglements, global flows of ideas, and the relationship between European liberalism and European imperialism. The depth and scope of the book are, accordingly, immense. Proceeding chronologically over the course of ten chapters, Grimmer-Solem examines Germany “in the world” along several lines: how the frontiers of the United States influenced the German push for settler colonies; Germany’s infamous, if nebulous, demand for world status (Weltpolitik); Germany’s hope to revise double standards in a British-dominated international system; the European naval arms race; public disappointments surrounding German colonial performance in Africa; responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914; and, not least, the failure of the postwar Versailles settlement. In each case, Grimmer-Solem scrutinizes certain professors’ connections to power with the aim of refining, and periodically revising, conventional wisdom about German policies in the run-up to war. In this effort he succeeds, strongly conveying that members of the (widely liberal) German economics professoriate had a larger role in shaping German imperialism than has hitherto been appreciated.What did this role look like? Learning Empire demonstrates that, when Wilhelmine Germans supported expansionist campaigns, leading professors of economics were well represented within the ranks and in government policies. Ernst von Halle and Hermann Schumacher, for example, produced timely propaganda touting the benefits of accelerated naval construction to schoolchildren and parliamentarians alike. In such cases, technical experts from German universities shaped the thinking of both domestic officials and a broad (and increasingly assertive) public. As Grimmer-Solem further shows, the professors in question operated as products of global networks, journeys, and conjunctures in an age when German universities enjoyed international preeminence.But were these professors reliable indicators of overall “middle-class” opinion and behavior, as Grimmer-Solem argues? On this point, Learning Empire is less convincing. The book, in its sustained focus on professional economists as sources of opinion influencing the government, fails to define how such influence differed in impact from that wielded by, say, bourgeois journalists. Separately, the book does not address what role, if any, its chosen personalities played in influencing Otto von Bismarck’s decision to enter Germany into the colonial scramble of the 1880s. In Chapters 8 and 9, which shed new light on German colonial reforms in the early 1900s, Grimmer-Solem’s relative inattention to the origins of Germany’s formal imperial project looks regrettable.Grimmer-Solem’s approach to writing has detectable strengths and weaknesses. His decision to craft economics professors’ careers into the core of a prosopography is original, and it works especially well in the chapter about navalism. Elsewhere, however, the narrative gives the impression of too much information swirling around in too irregular a tempo, such that it becomes difficult to distinguish one intellectual career or moment from another. Further editing would have eased the way.Such quibbles notwithstanding, Learning Empire is deserving of wide acclaim. Multiple generations studying Imperial Germany will benefit from Grimmer-Solem’s learned, insightful book.

Algeria in declining ottoman hierarchy: Why Algiers remained loyal to the falling patron

The shattering Ottoman order in the early nineteenth century offers an intriguing puzzle about the behaviors of subordinates within declining hierarchical orders. While Greece, Egypt, and many other provinces challenged the Porte, Algiers preferred to remain within the Ottoman order. The puzzle turns into a riddle when considering that Algeria was bounded to the center in a loose way and uprising against the Porte was less risky and less costly. Why did a geographically remote and loosely integrated subordinate remain within the Ottoman hierarchical order at a time when well-integrated and geographically close subordinates, one after another, picked the challenge option? This paper proposes three factors, which may be more generally applicable to the clients of declining patrons: the inability of the Porte to force Algeria against its interests, which decreased the costs of continued allegiance; Algeria’s need for a balancer against threats from European naval powers, which the Porte provided; and the domestic political legitimacy that allegiance to the Porte also provided to Algeria’s rulers.

Jeremy Stöhs, The Decline of European Naval Forces. Challenges to Sea Power in an Age of Fiscal Austerity and Political Uncertainty , Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2018, 290 p.

Jeremy Stöhs, The Decline of European Naval Forces. Challenges to Sea Power in an Age of Fiscal Austerity and Political Uncertainty , Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2018, 290 p.

Modernity as a Process of De-Limitations

Abstract This article presents some outlines of a new theory of modernity. As distinct from the theories of modernity of the Enlightenment (Habermas) and their critique in the form of theories of power (Foucault, post-colonial philosophies), modernity is described as a complex process of various “de-limitations”, which is set in motion in Renaissance philosophy. Since in antiquity cosmology as well as the geography of the ecumene were each tied to anthropological, ethical and political conceptions respectively, the de-limitation of the cosmos (Cusanus, Copernicus) and the de-limitation of the ecumene by the European naval powers trigger scientific, political and cultural transformations reaching from the upvaluation of insatiable curiosity to the anthropological idea of experimental self-creation (Montaigne) up to the idea of limitless economic growth (Locke). Since rational, power-related and cultural ideas are amalgamated in the different de-limitations, this theory opens up a new perspective on the ambivalences of modernity.

Islamic Seapower during the Age of Fighting Sail, by Philip MacDougall

Focusing on the naval affairs of the Islamic world roughly from the early sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, Philip MacDougall’s book examines the engagement of Islamic states with the sea. He analyses the organisation, administration and construction of their fleets, particularly in the age of sail, while questioning the functionality of those fleets in conflicts with European naval powers in this period. Geography provides an effective way to divide the subject-matter: the three main parts of the book focus on Islamic naval affairs in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Western Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Examining the Ottoman Empire from the adoption of sailing vessels to the Battle of Navarino in 1827, MacDougall discusses the efficiency of the fleet in the first part, which is the longest of the three sections, and argues that operational shortcomings largely stemmed from traditional administrative methods. The second part concentrates on the Gazi states...

European naval diets in the sixteenth century: A quantitative method for comparative and nutritional analysis

This paper develops and utilizes novel methods that combine historical records concerning the diets of European naval mariners in the sixteenth century with modern information on the nutritional content of food. Energy, vitamin, and mineral intakes were compared to modern recommended values. Calorie provisions were sufficient and relatively constant in all Western European fleets. The absence of vitamin C was a universal failure of the naval diet. The limiting factor to variety and balance in the naval diet was the demands of preservation with limited technology. Fish declined in importance between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries while beef increased in importance. A database structure that allows for calculation of nutritional information was designed and utilized in this research and is provided online for future reference and calculation of diets.

European military naval industry: From fragmentation to Europenization?

The paper analyzes the development and perspectives of the European military naval industry. Since the EU is increasingly engaged in maritime military operations in the framework of the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), this field of industry is becoming increasingly important for the functioning of the EU as a strategic actor. Like other military industry sectors (military aeronautics and electronics, land industry), the naval military industry has undergone significant changes since the Cold War and the process of ?banalization? that has affected it. The purpose of this paper is to answer the question to what extent this field of industry is ?Europeanized?, i.e., whether we can discuss about the ?banalization? of the European naval industry, and what consequences these processes have on the national sovereignty of the EU Member States. In order to answer these questions, the paper will first consider the process of ?banalization? of the European military industry. Then, the analysis will focus on the naval military industry sector. The author highlights the fragmentation of this industry and its ?national capture?. Finally, in the third part of the paper, the perspectives of the development of this industry are discussed. It is argued that the European naval military industry is not yet ?Europeanized? and that EU member states continue to favor national producers. However, in the light of new initiatives implemented in the field of development of the EU military equipment market, the military industry as a whole, and therefore the naval military industry, is moving towards increasing homogenization and Europeanization.

The Ottoman Naval Academy and the Development of Naval Training in the Reign of Sultan Abdülaziz (1861–1876)

During the period after the battle of Navarino in 1827, steam warships were widely adopted by the major navies, and the rise of ironclads in the late 1850s marked the turning point both in warship construction and naval strategy as the dominant element of battle at sea. These rapid developments observed in European naval warfare throughout the nineteenth century had a remarkable effect on the strategic power of the Ottoman navy and the new era that started with the accession of Sultan Abdülaziz pioneered the emergence of the Ottoman armoured fleet. This brought about the need for qualified personnel to operate the increasing number of ironclads within a decade of his accession. Accordingly, this article examines the progress of the Ottoman Naval Academy and the reorganization of naval education in the same period. It starts by examining the primary criteria for selecting students during the admission process, and challenges whether the alterations made to rearrange the length of education and the student placement quotas were sufficient to meet the expectation for the targeted number of qualified personnel. From a detailed examination of archival sources, it has been found that the Naval Academy was more properly regulated and that it offered a far superior naval training during this period than was previously thought. The reasons for this are detailed by considering the nature of the new training methods, the quality of the curriculum and the standards of teaching.

Between Tribute and Unequal Treaties: How China Saw the Sea World in the Early Nineteenth Century

AbstractThis article attempts to analyse the Chinese ideology and practice in the sea world from the perspective of the Jiaqing emperor (r. 1796–1820), whose 25‐year reign ushered in modern China in historiography.1 Since the seventeenth century, the Manchu Chinese rulers and civil and military officials had increasingly acknowledged that China was inferior to European naval powers, while at the same time holding fast to their claim to universal greatness as expressed in the tribute system. It took the collusion of all sides involved – including the complicity of foreign powers – to sustain this dual ideology and practice. Qing China did not bear sole responsibility. Contrary to prevailing scholarly interpretations, such duality did not result in abject defeat for China, or total victory for western countries as embodied in the unequal treaties later on, but rather bestowed a measure of success on all parties.

К типологии рукоятей китайского клинкового оружия – «пистолетная» рукоять как датирующий признак

The most part of Chinese edged weapons traditionally have the hilt which is fixed by the riveting of the end of the tang on the end of the pommel. Some traditional hilts have wooden grips fixed to the tang with rivets. Practically all these hilts have the windings of textile cord or band. They are hilts traditional for China during thousands of years. However, as it is described in special literature, among Chinese edged weapons there are samples with so called “pistol” grips. These types are not traditional for China and could be used for the reliable dating characteristic for pieces of Chinese weapons in the museum and private collections. Judging by the material of the “pistol” grips - nephrite and wood - one is able to distinguish 2 types of handles dating by the 2nd half of 18th century and the 1sthalf of 19th century respectively. The 1st type could be connected reliably with the penetration of elements of Mughal military culture into the Qing Empire via Eastern Turkestan in the second half of the 18th century; the 2nd type could be connected presumably with the influence of the European naval edged weapons (beginning from Dutch and Portuguese ones) to the weapons of nations of South-East Asia and further - to the edged weapons of China. The extreme rarity of the hilts of the 2nd type demands the continuation of researches in this direction to find out the genesis of these hilts, the degree of popularity, the area and period of existing.

Global perspectives on the European arms industries

The authors of this article offer perspectives on the symposium on the European arms industries published in volume 12, number 1 of The Economics of Peace and Security Journal. The symposium contributions cover the history, current situation, and likely future prospects of the European naval, land armaments, military helicopter, aerospace, and outer space industries. The perspectives then comment on the articles as a group and do so from a global vantage point inasmuch as the commentators constitute a group of prominent researchers and policy analysts drawn from around the world.

Against the odds: The evolution of the European naval shipbuilding industry

Despite a low volume of production at national levels, the European naval industry remains quite fragmented 25 years after the end of the cold war. Contrary to what might be expected from an industrial or budgetary perspective, neither cross-border consolidation nor cooperative programs have resulted in European restructuring. The sovereign nature of shipyards has led to the promotion of a domestically-centered industry transformation. Again, contrary to what might be expected, this appears to be a potentially sustainable approach due to the long-term relationship between navies and their domestic industrial partners. Even so, one can question the sustainability of the current economic model, reliant as it is on export contracts and insufficient margins to manoeuver.