The Changing Strategic Environment
Geography and context remained remarkably constant from the early eighteenth century down to the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, France always being the main enemy. France presented two different principal threats: direct invasion across the Channel and trade warfare prosecuted mainly by waves of privateers operating out of French ports. French colonies abroad could also support trade warfare, as in the Indian Ocean campaign during the Napoleonic Wars. French fleets could also attack valuable British colonies, as Villeneuve threatened to do in the Caribbean during the run-up to Trafalgar. Such threats were generally intended to force the British to relax their blockade of French or allied ports.
What did the Victorian Royal Navy consider a cruiser? At the upper end of the scale were battleship-size ships like HMS Powerful, seen here steaming at 18kts, probably as newly completed. She wears the classic Victorian livery of black hull, white superstructure (and gun mountings), and buff funnels. Ships assigned to hotter climates had white hulls. The cruiser classification appeared, perhaps for the first time, in the 1 January 1878 edition of Classification of the Armoured and Unarmoured Ships and Vessels Constituting the Fighting and Sea-Going Divisions of the British Navy. It divided unarmoured cruisers into three classes, the first of which were frigates (new and old) and the Bacchantes. The second class were the big new corvettes. The third were smaller corvettes. The official 1880 armament list included not only unarmoured ships described as cruisers, but also armoured cruisers. As might be expected, the latter included the five belted cruisers, but also the ironclads Warrior and Black Prince as well as Achilles and Repulse and the smaller Hector, Valiant, Defence, and Resistance. The 1886 list split armoured cruisers into two classes, the first including the new Orlandos and the five earlier belted cruisers – and the big but obsolescent ironclads. This classification may reflect an abortive project to re-engine the big ironclads to make them into large fast cruisers. It is more difficult to understand inclusion of the smaller ironclads (the 1886 list omitted Resistance), which in 1886 were second-class armoured cruisers. The ironclad cruiser categories had been dropped by 1888 in favour of a distinction between first-, second-, and third-class cruisers (whether or not protected). Earlier lists, at least as late as 1875, distinguished armoured ships from unarmoured ships retained for sea service, the latter including the old screw frigates.
The most valuable British overseas asset (not yet a colony) was India, from which the British had only recently, at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, largely ejected the French. Throughout the nineteenth century, the two poles of British policy were the need to maintain security in Europe and the need to maintain access to, and control of, India (and hence of valuable possessions and connections further east).
India was too large to attack by sea. The route from Britain to India was another story. The quickest route was by sea to Egypt through the Mediterranean, overland to the Red Sea, and thence by sea to India. This route made the Mediterranean a vital British interest, even before the Suez Canal made the route far more efficient. Thus the closest Napoleon came to threatening British control of India was his campaign in Egypt, which was intended to distract the British from intervening against France in Europe.
In the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat, the world changed. The British gained bases in the Mediterranean (Malta and, more temporarily, the Ionian Islands) which gave them a permanent naval presence there; previously they only had Gibraltar, near the French end of that sea. The sea/land/sea route to India became more important, as the British consolidated their rule and began to use India as a base for operations further east. British interest in the Mediterranean, and therefore in the Ottoman Empire, which (at least nominally) controlled the eastern end of the sea, including Syria (meaning present-day Syria, Lebanon, and Israel) increased. For decades the Russian Empire had been moving south towards and beyond the Black Sea at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. It became a staple of British policy to maintain the Ottoman Empire despite its increasingly decrepit state, both to maintain a balance of power in Europe and to keep the Russians from direct access to the Mediterranean, hence to the sea route to India. By 1840 the Admiralty considered the Mediterranean second in importance only to the Channel.
The French were the principal threat to the route to India via the Mediterranean. In 1830 they established themselves on its southern shore in Algeria. At its eastern end they became involved in Syria and Egypt in 1840. They also became involved in Italian politics leading to the consolidation of that country. The British could see these steps as moves towards French domination of the Mediterranean. By 1840 the largest active British fleet was in the Mediterranean, not the Channel.
The Spanish colonies in South America became independent countries which could, for the first time, trade openly with Britain. The United States began to expand, and it too was an enormous market. The combination of finance provided by the City of London, the British-based industrial revolution, and British shipping created an explosive increase in British ocean trade. In the past, colonies producing particular materials or goods (such as spices or sugar) had been key to national prosperity. Now colonies, except for India and connections further east, became less important economically, particularly after slavery (which had made Caribbean sugar production lucrative) was abolished in the British Empire. Trade itself coupled with manufacturing became much more important. As the centre of the industrial revolution, Britain had goods the world increasingly wanted. The British Government increasingly saw free trade as key to national prosperity.
The British Government adopted free trade policies, abandoning protective tariffs. Perhaps the most important case was the Corn Law, protecting British farmers, abolished in 1846. In addition, in 1849 the British Government abandoned the Navigation Acts, which had limited shipping between Britain and her colonies to British ships. The latter had been tolerated as a way of maintaining a large merchant fleet. British policy had been to keep a large fleet of ships in reserve, expecting to activate the ships in an emergency largely with crews of merchant seamen. In effect, abandoning the Navigation Acts favoured British shipbuilders and engine-makers, because in the 1840s and 1850s Britain absolutely dominated world shipbuilding in the new primary material, iron, and also the engine-building industry. The effect of abolishing the Corn Laws was gradually to move British food production offshore, an early example of what is now called globalization. Those who voted to abolish the Corn Laws expected that corn (wheat) would be imported mainly from Russia (Poland, which Russia controlled, was then the main productive region), but with the collapse of shipping costs, it turned out that Britain was fed mainly from North America and, to a lesser degree, Australasia.
This development changed the meaning of wartime trade protection. During and before the Napoleonic Wars, British merchant ships mainly carried manufactured goods and the raw materials to make them, such as cloth and cotton. Sinking or seizing the ships would certainly affect the British economy, but it could not destroy Britain, which was largely self-sufficient in food. Once Britain relied heavily on foreign sources of food, cutting British seaborne trade threatened starvation: the imported food had to reach Britain by sea. Furthermore, the new industries relied heavily on raw materials brought by sea from abroad. Cutting that traffic could destroy the ability to produce the weapons needed to defend the British Isles. The Victorian Royal Navy found it difficult to arouse public interest in so abstract an issue as trade defence. Too many in the United Kingdom equated defence simply to defence (by army and militia) against invasion.
During the same period, Russia became the greatest wheat-exporting country in Europe. Before about the 1850s grain production was centred in the Baltic. By the 1850s, however, the Ukraine, with its rich black soil, was growing three