Preparing for blockade 1885-1914: naval contingency for economic warfare

摘要

Twenty years ago the foundational premise on which Stephen Cobb's study rests - that the British Admiralty had well developed, coherent plans for waging economic warfare against potential European foes years before the outbreak of the First World War - would have generated far more scholarly waves than it does today. At that point only Avner Offer's The First World War: an agrarian interpretation (1991) had examined British war plans at any length. Since Offer's landmark book appeared, however, Britain's preparations for a naval conflict in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras have become the basis of a scholarly growth industry, spawning monographs by Nicholas Black, John Brooks, Andrew Gordon, Shawn Grimes, Nicholas Lambert, Matthew Seligmann, and Jon Sumida, to cite prominent examples. Given this flurry of activity, it might be asked if more remains to be discovered.