Maritimer Imperialismus: Seemachtideologie, seestrategisches Denken und der Tirpitzplan 1875 bis 1914. By ROLF HOBSON (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004; pp. 388. Eur 34.80). ALTHOUGH Dr Hobson is a Norwegian researcher, this book (based on his doctoral dissertation) originally appeared in an English-language edition as Imperialism at Sea: Naval Strategic Thought, the Ideology of Sea Power, and the Tirpitz Plan, 1875–1914 (Leiden, 2002). The text has not been revised for this German translation, which was arranged by the German Military History Research Institute in conjunction with the author's current base at the Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo. It revisits a field that has been scrutinised meticulously since the papers of the Imperial German Naval Office (Reichsmarineamt: RMA), and those of Alfred von Tirpitz, the State Secretary for the Navy from 1897 to 1916, were opened for investigation. Following Jonathan Steinberg's pioneering Yesterday's Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet (1965), Volker Berghahn's Der Tirpitz-Plan: Genesis und Verfall einer innenpolitischen Krisenstrategie unter Wilhelm II (1970) and Michael Epkenhans's Die Wilhelminische Flottenrüstung, 1908–1914: Weltmachtstreben, industrieller Fortschritt, soziale Integration (1991) have investigated the German fleet's construction history; Ivo Lambi's The Navy and German Power Politics, 1862–1914 (1984) has traced the development of naval war planning; and Holger Herwig and Paul Kennedy, among others, have placed Tirpitz's build-up in a broader political perspective. The British response to the German challenge has been studied with almost equal thoroughness, Jon Sumida and Nicholas Lambert introducing major revisions to Arthur Marder's standard history of Admiralty policy. It might well seem that there is little more to say. Nonetheless, Hobson fairly claims that most previous work has lacked an overtly comparative perspective, and in the first section of his book he provides a lengthy overview of international politics in the later nineteenth century. He highlights the emergence of modern industrialised and technological ‘arms races’ and stresses the distinctive environment for naval (as opposed to land) warfare created by international maritime law and its protection for neutral rights, notably in the 1856 Declaration of Paris. Although this discussion is largely based on secondary sources, it is judicious and clearly organised. His second section, which deals with the emergence of modern naval strategic doctrine—the British ‘Blue Water’ school, the French Jeune Ecole, and above all the contribution of Alfred Thayer Mahan—is similar. Because of this unusually long lead-in, however, only the latter half of the book draws heavily on primary and under-exploited sources, including the RMA and Tirpitz papers at Freiburg but also published contemporary books and articles. In fact, part of the novelty of Hobson's approach lies in an attempt to reconstruct the professional debate in Germany about naval doctrine, including the views of Tirpitz's critics such as Karl Galster. By doing so he is better able to highlight the distinctiveness (and the grave shortcomings) of Tirpitz's own views. He places much emphasis on Tirpitz's June 1894 Dienstschrift IX on operational doctrine, and his secret July 1897 memorandum to the Kaiser on construction policy. In the former document Tirpitz borrowed from Mahan the notion that a modern navy was essential to promote peacetime commercial development (and he later made this insight a centrepiece of RMA navalist propaganda). In the second he made clear that the primary target of German building was to be Britain rather than, as previously, France and Russia.