Rationale for the Volume

The Anglo-German naval race, as its name implies, had two participants, both of whom were equally important to the events that unfolded. Despite this, many of the accounts of this, probably the most totemic of all modern armaments competitions prior to the Cold War, analyse it largely from the viewpoint of one or other of its principal actors. Rarely, in such studies, are both contestants the equal focus of attention.

There are, to be sure, many good reasons for this tendency. Without doubt, the naval policies of Britain and Germany were both significant undertakings in their own right, worthy of detailed individual scrutiny and capable, within their exclusive national contexts, of revealing much about the political progress taking place in their particular settings. Indeed, that the growth of the German navy can best be understood not as a military or foreign policy tool, but rather in a domestic setting, as a policy response to the difficulties faced by the autocratic German political elite to the demands for greater political pluralism on the part of the wider population has long been a mainstay of the ‘Kehrite’ school of German history, a point that will be elaborated later in this introduction. In this context, giving equality of focus to Britain, the other player in the naval race, would make little sense.

In addition to the strong pull of such domestic contexts, it is also true that many of the leading players in the saga of the naval race were colourful characters that merit serious and close personal study on their own terms without the encumbrance that comes from intruding a wider international context. That one might examine the life and policy judgements of a Fisher or a Churchill without equal reference to their German counterparts is not, in this sense, a matter of great surprise. Equally, that a historian might chose to write about Tirpitz or Kaiser Wilhelm II without conterminously putting the British dimension on display in terms of absolute equality is clearly not an invalid approach.

If existing studies of the Anglo-German naval race thus tend to be studies of British naval policy or of German naval policy, or alternatively biographical evaluations of Fisher or of Tirpitz, this is entirely understandable and justifiable. Nevertheless, this is an approach that this volume intends to abjure.