THE STRUGGLE FOR SEA POWER: A Naval History of the American Revolution

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The influence of sea power upon history, of the American path to independence, and of the rise and fall of the British Empire. Includes eight pages of color illustrations. This naval perspective tackles one of the greatest of all historical conundrums: How did 13 isolated colonies, which in 1775 began a war with Britain without a navy or an army, win their independence from the greatest naval and military power on earth?

Traces every key military event in the path to American independence from a naval perspective, including valuable new insights into American, British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Russian history. Also brings this important viewpoint to bear on economic, political, and social developments that were fundamental to the success of the Revolution.

The American Revolution involved a naval war of immense scope and variety, including no fewer than twenty-two navies fighting on five oceans-to say nothing of rivers and lakes. In no other war were so many large-scale fleet battles fought, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, French, and American history. Simultaneous naval campaigns were fought in the English Channel, the North and Mid-Atlantic, the Mediterranean, off South Africa, in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the North Sea and, of course, off the eastern seaboard of America. Not until the Second World War would any nation actively fight in so many different theaters.