Sea Power and the Control of Trade:

Charts the British government's changing perception of the utility of naval control of trade between 1854 and the late 1960sThis collection of departmental files and treaties reviews the changing perceptions in the British government of the utility of naval control of trade over the period from the outbreak of the Russian or 'Crimean' war in 1854 to the United Nations mandated Beira patrol, established in 1966 to stop the flow of oil to Southern Rhodesia. The capacity of navies to influence world events through control of seaborne trade was profoundly affected by nineteenth-century developments in economic theory, commercial organization and naval technology. Although the number of relevant documents from the nineteenth century are relatively few, the apparatus for study of naval strategy was significantly improved by the formation of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) in 1904. Thereafter, until the Second World War, the question of belligerent rights at sea was under almost continuous scrutiny. The naval wars with France had been fought with the old mercantilist strategic tools. The resultant collateral damage to Britain had been a declaration of war by the United States in 1812 while Napoleon's 'Continental System' had even more disastrous consequences for the French Empire. From that time, questions about belligerent rights were the most divisive issue in Anglo-American relations, and the degree of attention the British government had to devote to the legal restraints on naval strategy kept pace with the growing naval and economic potential of the United States, the only country in a position to pose a serious threat to British sea power. The focus of this collection is on the work during the years of peace in preparation for war, marked by a series of milestones: the need to find a modus vivendi with France on the eve of the Russian War; the first effort at recodification of prize law in the Declaration of Paris of 1856; the need to deal with the consequences of the American Civil War; the Declaration of London of 1909; the apparent effect of the use of economic controls to deny enemy access to supply on the outcome of the First World War; the formation of the League of Nations in 1919; and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1927. The First World War vastly enhanced the prestige of naval blockade but circumstances during the Second World War correspondingly deflated the value accorded to it. Post Second World War the British government had to respond to the exercise of belligerent rights by other states on a number of occasions but in the nuclear age there was no longer any expectation that naval control of commerce could provide decisive protection of British interests. In any event, with the formation of the United Nations, the concept of neutrality all but disappeared and resolutions of the Security Council became all the law of belligerency which was required.