Technology and Culture

The British battleship HMS Dreadnought was launched in February 1906, just a few years after Edward VII ascended the throne. The ship was the brainchild of First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher, the hard-driving, forward-thinking admiral who, as a boy, had joined the Royal Navy aboard Horatio Nelson's old flagship HMS Victory. In the century that had passed since the battle of Trafalgar, warships and naval tactics had evolved in slow, halting steps. The all-big-gun, advanced-fire-control, steam-turbine-powered Dreadnought embodied a complete set of revolutionary technologies and tactics that instantly put paid to all previous battleships. Other navies were developing ships along the same lines—USS Michigan was already on the drawing board—but Dreadnought got there first.

The name Dreadnought quickly became the metonym for the modern battleship, and its unique profile became instantly recognizable as an icon of British might. Over the subsequent century, the strategic and technological impact of Dreadnought has been written about and discussed perhaps more than any other warship of the twentieth century. Exactly one hundred years after its launch, a group of scholars convened at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK, to participate in an "experiment" (p. xiii) to examine, not the traditional "navalist" history of Dreadnought, but how it fits in a broader historiography. The eleven chapters in this fairly thin book are written by noted experts in their fields and place the ship within its symbolic, political, cultural, and operational contexts.

Jan Rüger, who teaches modern European history, begins by showing how the Royal Navy, understanding the role of imagery in the projection of strategy, showcased Dreadnought's launch with a level of pomp and circumstance, including the use of newfangled searchlights, that would not be out of place in a modern Hollywood release. Andrew Lambert, an eminent naval historian, explains that Jacky Fisher chose the name Dreadnought very carefully; it is a fine old English word, first used by Queen Elizabeth I for one of her navy's ships.

Martin Daunton, an economic historian, examines the shift in British taxation policies from tariff-heavy to those favoring a more progressive income tax, which allowed "the British government [to] afford both old age pensions and HMS Dreadnought and its successors" (p. 49). T. G. Otte, a specialist in diplomatic history, notes that "Britain's ability to project naval power was a component of her foreign policy" (p. 52). Dreadnought was an overt political statement aimed (unsuccessfully) at deterring foreign powers—notably Germany—from building up their fleets. Michael Epkenhans, author of numerous books on German military history, looks at Dreadnought [End Page 195] through the eyes of German admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who at first saw the ship as a "golden opportunity" for Germany to build up its fleet and attain parity with Britain, since both navies were starting at "point zero" (p. 80). He came to rue this decision as Britain outspent and outbuilt Germany, and when war came, outfought it as well.

In the next section, Lucy Delap and Max Jones look at Dreadnought as an icon in (respectively) "women's politics" (p. 95) and boys' papers. Delap describes with some irony how the Women's Social and Political Union took the aggressively masculine name of the ship for its suffrage paper The Woman's Dreadnought. The ship figured prominently in Boy's Own Paper and Chums as a continuation of their heroic representations of the navy and the sea.

The final section locates Dreadnought within its more traditional historiography of technology and operations. Crosbie Smith, who has studied the concepts of efficiency and effectiveness in the works of Lord Kelvin, applies the same lens to Charles Parsons, developer of the steam turbine, and to the aforementioned Jacky Fisher. Naval analyst and historian Eric Grove provides a welcome potted history of HMS Dreadnought that would have perhaps been better placed at the beginning...