Militarizing the Western world: Navalism, empire, and state-building in Germany and the United States before World War I

This dissertation is a cross-national study of German and American navalism at the beginning of the twentieth century, as an important driving force in the militarization of the Western world in the past one hundred years. Focusing on naval officers and institutions, the study explores how navalism defined the place of military force and the naval profession in state, civil society, and foreign relations. The analysis falls into four thematic parts which, in sequential order, examine three issues---imperial policy, maritime warfare, and state-building---and probe the underlying premises and practices of naval professionalism.; It is the central contention of this dissertation that navalism in Germany and the United States was part and parcel of a transnational militarism of experts that stressed the scientific and managerial mastery of naval warfare and participated in the increasing bureaucratic domination of society for the purposes of international competition. This brand of modernist militarism addressed itself to the imperatives and needs of industrial states; it devised military-force-based imperial solutions to the problem of the global dependency of national industries. Navalism welded together considerations of institutional expertise, national industry, and maritime superiority.; Eschewing national exceptionalist narratives, this dissertation recaptures the sense of convergence that had united observers of the naval arms, the new global politics, and the advance of militarism before the outbreak of the Great War. This undertaking challenges both scholarly and popular understandings of Western militarization before 1918. These understandings have othered Prussian-German militarism. They have placed that militarism at the center of the arming of Europe and the coming of war in 1914 and pitted it against West European and American liberal democracies and political modernity more broadly. By paying attention to the trans-atlantic crossings and borrowings, which underwrote the German and American pursuit of a common naval project, the dissertation contributes to the new developing field of transnational history.