Maritime power & the struggle for freedom : naval campaigns that shaped the modern world, 1788-1851 / Peter Padfield. Padfield, Peter, author.

Woodstock, NY : Overlook Press, 2006.

xii, 451 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 21 cm

With Maritime Supremacy, naval historian Peter Padfield was acclaimed for bringing a fresh perspective to world history by looking at it through the lens of naval history, as no one had before. Now in the follow-up to that book, Maritime Power, Padfield combines the drama of battle with a trenchant analysis of the causes of victory, revealing the hidden constant of history whereby sea powers have, throughout the modern era, prevailed over land-based empires." "In the history of warfare at sea, no era can match the glory of the Nelson era, during which Britain gained supremacy over her rival, Napoleonic France, in the Battle of Trafalgar of 1805, and after which she was to find a new rival, the young United States, in the War of 1812. Padfield sets the reader on the gun deck, amid the cannons, smoke, blood, and death and "offers naval campaigns and sea battles as vivid as anything you will find in Patrick O'Brian" (former secretary of the U.S. Navy, John Lehman, The Wall Street Journal). In his analysis of the factors that led Britain to global dominance in the nineteenth century, Padfield shows naval history to be a major determinant and shaper of the modern world.