'The greatest gift to modern civilization': Naval power and moral order in the United States and Great Britain, 1880--1918

In the generation before the First World War, the navies of Great Britain and the United States shaped national policy and directed industrial growth. In a similar but usually overlooked way, the navies highlighted larger cultural trends. This dissertation investigates the relationship between the naval debate and larger contemporary cultural issues.; I argue that a major impetus behind the pre-1914 navalist debate in the United States and Great Britain was the concern of a prominent segment of the Protestant middle class about the vitality of what they called "Christian civilization." Commonly accepted by Anglo-American liberals into the twentieth century, this concept traced the lineage of Western civilization back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and from this attribution claimed both moral superiority and inherent fragility. Though dissimilar in many respects, navalists of both countries saw the navy as a primary means to protect this greater end of civilization.; This argument displays three interrelated themes: first, navalism was a discrete phenomenon, founded upon the idea of Anglo-American exceptionalism, yet finding differing forms in the two Anglo-American nations; second, the navalist community was further split between conservatives who emphasized historical precedent as a guide to stability, and progressives advancing navalism as an expression of the era's spirit of expansion and possibility; and third, defining manhood was central to the naval debate because of the omnipresent analogy between man and the state.; The question of worldview is central to this inquiry. To pursue this question in depth, I have focused upon four emblematic figures, two each from the United States and Great Britain, whose beliefs intersected at support for naval expansion. Though starkly different in temperament and political views, Alfred Thayer Mahan, an American naval officer and historian, and William T. Stead, an English journalist were united in a pervasively religious worldview that motivated the naval expansionist views of each. Of a later, more secular generation, British historian Julian S. Corbett and American Richmond Pearson Hobson, a naval officer and reformist politician, defended a fragile civilization founded upon a semi-sacred civil ideal more nationalist than semi-sacred civil ideal more nationalist than cosmopolitan.