Perhaps this is not a book of history. At its core, it is a political book. Although at nearly 400 meandering pages of text, it is too unproductively long and tedious to make a good pamphlet.

Lambert's central thesis is that a set of political beliefs (his political beliefs, I assume) that are centred on free trade, capitalism, democracy, British imperial nostalgia, and conservatism, can be linked with the historical concept of a "SeaPower". That concept is vaguely defined, unfortunately, but clearly you are a SeaPower if you trade overseas, have a fleet, and Lambert likes you. Primarily the concept of a SeaPower seems to be an attempt to give British exceptionalism a wider historical basis by looking for analogies, farfetched or not.

I would actually agree that some of the historical and philosophical links that Lambert tries to build have a probabilistic form of validity. They are not unique to him, either. For example, Ioanna Iordanou explores the same link between Venice's sea-trade economy and Venice's political and administrative system in her excellent book on Venice's Secret Service. But the difference is that she makes a strong effort to underpin her position with evidence. Lambert just makes claims. His book is a ratcheting series of assertions with way too few attempts to bring in some evidence to defend these claims. To the reader, this quickly becomes tedious.

Maybe we are supposed to takes his claims at face value because of Lambert's authority. He is no amateur, after all, but a professor of naval history at King's College with a substantial publication record. That seems hardly a sufficient reason to let him get away with an endless stream of assertions that are both poorly structured and repetitive. Moreover, some of them are outright bizarre. Lambert's fast summary of naval strategy in the 20th century fails to demonstrate much more than that strong opinions are an inadequate substitute for knowledge. Admittedly, Lambert is primarily a historian of the 19th century, but he should have known better.

This book is a mistake, then. Lambert is entitled to his views and he might have written a really interesting book about them. Probably it should have taken a lot more time, and some 300 pages less. ( )

When I started this book I really didn't know what angle Lambert was going to adopt. To be honest, I mostly expected a boiler-plate examination of the sinews of naval power for the current age, with a particular eye on Beijing's maritime aspirations. I then get exposed to this somewhat labored dichotomy between nations with a "seapower" culture, versus countries that simply have navies capable of offensive naval action; my reaction being okay, let's see what the author does with this.

One then goes through this looping examination of those disparate polities that Lambert holds had a "seapower" culture: Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Netherlands, and Britain. The argument being that only such states were the true creators of open societies, or are at least the best opponents of overbearing hegemonic states. It's at this point we eventually wind up arriving at author's true concern; Great Britain's absorption into a European Union that, to Lambert, is just a new form of German hegemony. Yes, this is mostly a pro-Brexit polemic. Keep in mind that I'm not convinced that the EU as it's been run has been all it's cracked up to be and, since this book was probably finished about 2017, you could argue that I should give Lambert more benefit of the doubt. However, since it turns out that the Brexit skeptics were dead right about this being a disastrous move, mostly implemented on dishonest arguments, that result makes this book look like wishful thinking. Professional historians might have reason to read this book as a case study of when a smart person fails to rise above their own prejudices, but the general reader should give this work a wide berth. ( )