Seapower States, Andrew Lambert
Seapower States, Andrew Lambert
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Seapower States
Maritime Culture, Continental Empires, and the Conflict That Made the Modern World

Author: Andrew Lambert

Narrator: Julian Elfer

Unabridged: 13 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/27/2018


Synopsis

Andrew Lambert, author of The Challenge—winner of the prestigious Anderson Medal—turns his attention to Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and Britain, examining how their identities as "seapowers" informed their actions and enabled them to achieve success disproportionate to their size.

Lambert demonstrates how creating maritime identities made these states more dynamic, open, and inclusive than their lumbering continental rivals. Only when they forgot this aspect of their identity did these nations begin to decline. Recognizing that the United States and China are modern naval powers—rather than seapowers—is essential to understanding current affairs, as well as the long-term trends in world history. This volume is a highly original "big think" analysis of five states whose success—and eventual failure—is a subject of enduring interest, by a scholar at the top of his game.

About Andrew Lambert

Andrew Lambert is Laughton Professor of Naval History at King's College, London, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.


Reviews

When I started this book I really didn't know what angle Lambert was going to adopt. To be honest, I mostly expected a boiler-plate examination of the sinews of naval power for the current age, with a particular eye on Beijing's maritime aspirations. I then get exposed to this somewhat labored dicho......more

Goodreads review by John

A dense read but worth the time...especially as a landlubber. Important insights about the future of seapower with the US and China.......more

Goodreads review by Dan

This is one of those "big history" books in which the author develops an overriding hypothesis that is claimed to explain much history, and then spends several hundred pages illustrating this central idea (Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers" springs to mind). Lambert distinguished bet......more