To Rule the Waves; How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World

New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2004. First Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/very good. xix, [3], 648, [1] pages. Maps. Occasional footnotes. Notes. Index. Inscription signed by author on half-title. Arthur L. Herman (born 1956) is an American historian, currently serving as a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. He generally employs the Great Man perspective in his work, which is 19th Century historical methodology attributing human events and their outcomes to the singular efforts of great men that has been refined and qualified by such modern thinkers as Sidney Hook. Herman received his B.A. from the University of Minnesota and M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University. He spent a semester abroad at Edinburgh University in Scotland. His 1984 dissertation dealt with the political thought of early-17th-century French Huguenots. His father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Herman taught at Sewanee: The University of the South, George Mason University, Georgetown and The Catholic University of America. His 2001 book on the Scottish Enlightenment, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, was a New York Times bestseller. In 2008, he added to his body of work Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. To Rule the Waves tells the extraordinary story of how the British Royal Navy allowed one nation to rise to a level of power unprecedented in history. From the navy's beginnings under Henry VIII to the age of computer warfare and special operations, historian Arthur Herman tells the spellbinding tale of great battles at sea, heroic sailors, violent conflict, and personal tragedy -- of the way one mighty institution forged a nation, an empire, and a new world. The author discussed the British Royal Navy and the British Empire from the Elizabethan age to the Falklands war. He argued that after the British Royal Navy took control of the oceans from the Spanish navy it paved the way for the rise of the British Empire. He asserted that the British Navy was instrumental in creating the new overseas trading routes and colonies that generated a global economic system and shaped the modern world.