‘Now is come a darker day’: Britain, venice and the meaning of sea power

Abstract

As Victorian Britain assumed the mantle of greatness, a rapidly expanding empire of trade, markets, industry and money, bound together by cutting-edge communications technology, and defended by a uniquely powerful navy, the more reflective analysts and commentators began to draw exemplary parallels with earlier maritime empires. The search for a useful past would dominate the development of naval history and political theory throughout the Queen’s long reign. Nowhere was this process more marked than in British attitudes to Venice, and by mid-century this long defunct Italian republic had assumed a critical place in the intellectual and cultural world of imperial Britain, an ideal case study of the rise and fall of maritime empires. Consequently the Victorians did not have to wait for the American strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan to tell them that sea power was the product of a total national engagement with the ocean.1 In truth Mahan took his cue from British intellectuals, and his message found an audience already prepared by half a century of high-level analysis.