‘The Price of Victory’ by N.A.M. Rodger review
The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain: 1815-1945 by N.A.M. Rodger looks above decks for the story of the modern Royal Navy.

The Price of Victory is the third in Nicholas Rodger’s monumental trilogy on the history of the Royal Navy: the first two volumes covered 660 to 1815; this final instalment takes the story on from the aftermath of the Battle of Trafalgar through to the end of the Second World War. It is a period in which Britain sought to maintain naval dominance during a period of substantial technological change. His purpose throughout the trilogy has been to explore ‘the contribution which naval warfare, with all its associated activities, has made to national history’, and so his discussion ranges beyond battles and admirals (though both feature) to include political, economic, and social contexts.
The emergence of new technology is central: iron and steel hulls, steam and oil engines, heavier armaments, torpedoes, telegraph and wireless signalling, and aircraft all transformed naval warfare. With these changes came new strategies and geopolitical thinking, especially the rise of naval intelligence. Rodgers also tracks the changing role of the Admiralty under the influence of different governments. Bureaucracy and policy often struggled to keep up: the Anglo-German arms race before 1914 led to only one major engagement, at Jutland in 1916, while commerce-raiding and economic warfare played a much greater role across the 20th century. Similarly, aircraft carriers enabled new strategies during the Second World War, but these had to be worked out as the war went on. Social attitudes also shifted, as seen in the changing relationship between class, technical expertise, and rank – and the formation of the Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service) in 1917.
Such broad issues are leavened by Rodger’s sharp eye for individual stories. Rear-Admiral Michael Seymour, examining a new Russian sea mine in 1855, sought to reassure worried officers when he said: ‘“Oh no; this is the way it would go off”, and shoved the slide in with his finger’. Astonishingly Seymour survived, though blinded in one eye. Plenty more vignettes could be plucked from the book’s pages.
Rodger is judiciously critical in places: it sometimes seems that the Navy functioned despite Admiralty schemes, not because of them, and he is forthright on the flaws of key figures such as Admiral Sir John (‘Jackie’) Fisher. Yet this is still, at its heart, a history told from inside the Navy, and from the top; there are sections on the ‘lower decks’, but much attention remains on officers, commanders, and politicians. Where the Royal Navy is compared to other services or foreign counterparts, the advantage almost always rests with the home team; the Royal Air Force is largely blamed for interservice rivalries, while Rodger condemns similar problems with the US more explicitly.
The same tendency appears in discussions of empire. ‘The Navy had not created, nor tried to create, an empire of territory and overseas rule’, Rodger argues, yet that was largely because by 1815 Britain already had control of vast territories, and the Navy’s actions followed imperial interests. Conflicts with China are blamed on feckless diplomats and rogue adventurers, rather than naval officers. The campaign against the slave trade in the 1800s is presented as ‘largely ineffective, inconsistent and seemingly hypocritical’, ‘quite insufficient to suppress the trade’, but nevertheless a noble cause in which Britain sacrificed money and sailors. This reading of the Navy’s role in the empires is a very sympathetic one.
But if not every reader shares that sympathy, they will nevertheless find in The Price of Victory a complete and forensic treatise on the subject. The trilogy together represents the most complete such treatment ever written – a remarkable accomplishment.
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The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain: 1815-1945
N.A.M. Rodger
Allen Lane, 976pp, £40
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Richard Blakemore is an Associate Professor of Social and Maritime History at the University of Reading.