The Pacific’s New Navies

An Ocean, its Wars, and the Making of US Sea Power

By Thomas M Jamison

Published by Cambridge University Press

RRP $51.95 in paperback | ISBN 9781009559744

 

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, it is hard to comprehend a time when the US Navy wasn’t the all-powerful blue water fleet we know today. Its development was in fact the result of naval wars and arms races around the Pacific in the late nineteenth century and the realisation that states such as California looked out to the Pacific, rather than Atlantic Ocean.

Consider that, in 1877, the size of Chile’s Navy must ‘enter calculation of any nation intending to undertake war at sea’.

Similarly Japanese and Chinese navies were modernising as their nations industrialised.

This book has been described by other reviewers as ‘extraordinary’, reminding readers that ‘any pivot to the Pacific is not new in American history’.

The book had a long gestation with the author benefitting from various post graduate funding sources. In bringing this book to fruition, Jamison has deepened our understanding of the rise of US naval power and the forces that shaped it.

VERDICT: Serious naval historians will welcome this thoroughly researched and timely history of this rise of naval power in the Pacific.