From a maritime standpoint, the sea brought immigrants to the shores of the new nation and served as a base for outward trade with the world at large.īut in the bigger scheme of things, the United States had spent the century previous to Mahan’s book expanding westward and inwards, assimilating half of the North American continent into its political union. The United States was born of British maritime colonies located on the Eastern seacoast. Still, the impact of Mahan’s book, in its time, was astonishing and entirely unexpected. The themes and arguments of Mahan’s work were not entirely novel, having roots in a late 19th-century intellectual school of thought known as “navalism,” which focused on advancing state power through the construction and maintenance of - guess what? - a powerful navy. He had written a book about 200 years of naval history and about what that naval history meant to the rise and relationships of state power in the world. Navy, but throughout the broader American (and overseas) political, economic, and industrial system. Mahan’s book struck the highest levels of the governing classes like a bolt of lightning and created a tempest of intellectual upheaval not just within the U.S. It was reviewed and discussed in every major journal of commentary, news magazine, and newspaper of the time. As history books go, there are many chronicles that are better written than Mahan’s.ĭespite its dry-sounding title, however, Mahan’s book instantly became a best seller in the United States. It was not so much a history book as a book about “sea power,” of the naval type, and its “influence” on history. In 1890, Mahan published one of the most important books of the age, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. And the rest is history, if you know it.Īlfred Thayer Mahan: The Influence of Sea Power Upon History In 1886, Mahan, by then a captain, was appointed as an instructor of naval history and tactics at the newly created Naval War College. After the war, Mahan spent the next two decades making his career in the sea service. The young Ensign Mahan served on the Union side during the Civil War, learning his naval profession by working on ships that supported the Northern blockade of the Southern ports. Navy in 1859 (just a few months before Edwin Drake brought in the world’s first commercial oil well at Titusville, Pa., for those of you who have been taking staff rides through history in our previous essays in Whiskey & Gunpowder. And it would be several generations after Stimson before God would be forced out of public life in the United States, let alone out of its Navy.Īnd as to the “prophet” Mahan, that would be Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), rear admiral, U.S. The Navy simply acknowledges and respects the fact that the Almighty chose to cover more than 70% of the surface of the Earth with, on average, two miles of salt water. The American Navy pays homage to many of the ancient customs and traditions of the sea, but institutionally, it does not now and never has worshipped false idols.

Hmmm…Imagine if gravity worked other than the way that it does. To the well-trained Navy mind, it is like living with the law of gravity. It is, quite simply, the Navy’s way of accepting and accommodating the way the world works, maybe even the way that the world works best. There is nothing “peculiar” at all about the phenomenon that Stimson was describing. But if he was serious, that’s just like a non-Navy guy, to get the really important things backward. Stimson recalled “the peculiar psychology of the Navy Dept., which frequently seemed to retire from the realm of logic into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God…and the United States Navy the only true Church.” Did Stimson say “peculiar psychology?” Maybe he was kidding, or making an inside-Washington joke. IN HIS 1948 memoir entitled On Active Service in Peace and War, former U.S.

Navy, but throughout the broader American (and overseas) political, economic, and industrial system.”

“Mahan’s book struck the highest levels of the governing classes like a bolt of lightning and created a tempest of intellectual upheaval not just within the U.S.

Alfred thayer mahan born in