James Davey's major reexamination of the Royal Navy's strategic role in the Napoleonic conflicts, 1803–1814 and 1815, In Nelson's Wake: The Navy and the Napoleonic Wars, the first for many for decades, is based on a combination of original research and the latest published literature. In 1892, Alfred T. Mahan asserted the decisive impact of sea power on this conflict. Such ideas seemed passé after 1918, however, and for many years the prevailing trend in British historiography on the Napoleonic conflict and national strategy downplayed and even disputed the Royal Navy's contribution to victory. In the era of world wars, hot and cold, it was fashionable to dismiss the contribution of sea power, stressing the role of land forces. The key text of this argument, Sir Michael Howard's The Continental Commitment (1972), spoke to a particular period when the British Army on the Rhine was the center of Britain's NATO contribution. As those days are long past, the “Continental Commitment” can now be seen as a short-term anomaly. Since 1989, the emergence of a multipolar world and the critical role of the oceans on global economics have shifted the agenda back towards a maritime perspective. Consequently, there is a striking synergy between Davey's text and the strategic concepts advanced over a century ago by Julian Corbett in England and the Seven Year's War (1907), Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (1911), and other vital texts. Corbett emphasized the limited and maritime nature of British power, demonstrating how it succeeded without conscripting soldiers or seeking decisive land battles. The Royal Navy was the “Senior Service” because Britain's survival depended on imported food and raw materials, along with the proceeds of international trade. Between 1803 and 1814, Britain secured command of the sea in fleet battle and strategic blockade to impose a crushing economic restriction of France and her conquered satellites, steadily strangling an entire continent, denying Napoleon the opportunity to consolidate his Universal Monarchy or expand beyond the west and central European heartland.

Davey reinforces Mahan and Corbett's pioneering examinations of national strategy with detailed historical research that addresses the latest debates about supply, administration and logistics, economics and strategy. Alongside a wealth of telling detail, he sustains a compelling assessment of the naval role in victory. Where Mahan asserted the importance of economic warfare, Davey traces the interaction of Napoleon's Continental System and the British Orders in Council through to the decisive point. Exploiting his expertise on the Royal Navy's critical Baltic campaigns between 1807 and 1812, campaigns that enabled Britain to endure and wreck the Russian economy, Davey provides a clear line of causation. When Napoleon attempted to increase his control over the economies of Europe, Russia broke with the System, because the alternative was national bankruptcy and regime change. After his defeat in Russia, Napoleon's continental enemies, supported, funded, and equipped by Britain, defeated his armies as decisively as the Royal Navy had broken his economy. The economic war against France provided an occasion for the United States of America to attack Britain, declaring war just as Napoleon invaded Russia, anticipating his success would bring the British to their knees. Instead, Napoleon was defeated, and Britain was able to deploy a fleet of similar size to the one used in the Baltic between 1807 and 1812 to the American theater. Naval victories and the defeat of American commercial warfare secured the Atlantic, while the blockade broke the American economy, bankrupting the federal state and annihilating American commerce. Bankrupt and burned out of their capital city, the Americans were obliged to make peace in December 1814, despite the British refusing to discuss their core war aims of “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights.” Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh also kept the legal basis of British economic warfare off the agenda at the Congress of Vienna, preserving British power for future conflicts. Finally, Napoleon's “Hundred Days” ended with his surrender on board HMS Bellerophon, an old 74-gun battleship that had fought with distinction at the Glorious First of June, the Nile, and Trafalgar. Confronted with the reality of British power, Napoleon admitted that the Royal Navy had broken his dreams of conquest.

The existential nature of the Anglo-French conflict—as well as its distinctly naval coloring—was reflected in the heightened rhetoric employed by both sides. Napoleon dismissed the British as mere “Carthaginians,” doomed to be destroyed by a new Roman Empire; but J. M. W. Turner and many another British commentator took up the challenge. The British owned the label and celebrated their victory in suitably classical terms: Napoleon was no Scipio Africanus, and Turner created a series of “Carthaginian” masterpieces to drive the point home, images that hung alongside Trafalgar, British seascapes, and celebrations of industrial progress. When the wars ended, the Army was demobilized, the Navy was rebuilt, and Nelson given pride of place at the very heart of a newly imperial London.

The success of the book reflects Davey's ability to strike a fine balance between narrative, analysis, and context. His points, securely based in archival sources and modern scholarship, are frequently driven home with telling quotes from sailors, statesmen, and other makers of contemporary culture. Ultimately Davey explains how the British waged the first “Great War” and did so without copying the continental strategies, relying primarily on sea control and global trade to offset their exclusion from the markets of a burgeoning continental super-state. Britain could not win this war alone, but her limited aims, the restoration of a stable, balanced and peaceful European state system, were compatible with those of other powers, in stark contrast to Napoleon's dreams of world conquest. Maritime strategy and offshore balancing have returned to the center of world affairs, making this a timely text as well as an impressive contribution to scholarship.