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London Review of Books

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Linda Colley

  • The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649-1815 by N.A.M. Rodger  Buy this book

You might think that Trafalgar Square says it all. Its massive column surmounted by the 18-foot-high statue of Horatio Nelson, the bas-reliefs at the base commemorating his ships’ destruction of the French and Spanish fleets and the city of Copenhagen, the surrounding monuments to various imperial warriors: surely all this sums up what the Royal Navy’s command of the oceans in the 18th and early 19th centuries was quintessentially about? The greatest achievement of the second volume of N.A.M. Rodger’s formidable trilogy devoted to British naval history is its determined questioning of any such assumptions.

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Linda Colley is Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. Her latest book is The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History.