It should not be surprising at all that the US Navy inherited many, if not most, of its early practices and current traditions from the British Royal Navy (or RN). Also, the study of history in general is unsurpassed in providing an understanding of where we are now and where we are going as a people.
To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World by historian Arthur Herman (Harper-Collins, 2004) is a well-written and fascinating account of the Royal Navy, starting from before there even was a Royal Navy, and continuing through the end of the Falkland Islands War with Argentina in the early 1980s.
He describes in well-researched and vividly described detail first the technological and then the bureaucratic and capitalistic advances that made possible the world's first modern standing navy. These developments are discussed as they came about, as befits the type of chronological history that this is.
It was this model of a standing navy, however, that the early American Congress would initially reject, and then finally come to realize after the Civil War was entirely necessary for any nation to become a great maritime nation, and therefore a great power in the world.
There are some drawbacks to the book, though. First, although fairly sizable (over 550 pages of text alone), the work must be necessarily general in order to fit such a large topic into a confined space. Second, and more importantly, it is an unapologetically admiring and self-congratulatory epic overview of what at one time was the most powerful Navy on the globe.
Finally, Dr. Herman overstates his premise, but then fails to prove it. While he does, in fact, mention some breakthroughs to which the Royal Navy contributed or of which it was primarily the intended recipient, nothing in the book proves that in and of themselves those developments shaped the world. It isn't really even attempted.
Those minor quibbles aside, To Rule the Waves is a lot of fun to read, well researched, and tough to argue with as a general history of the Royal Navy. For sailors and historians who want an insight into our early Navy, the book provides a helpful portrayal of the heroes, such as Nelson, Drake, Raleigh and Pepys, that our early naval heroes, such as Jones, Barney, Lawrence and Perry, would have looked up to and tried to emulate.
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