Reddit Reddit reviews The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649­-1815

We found 5 Reddit comments about The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649­-1815. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649­-1815
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5 Reddit comments about The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649­-1815:

u/blackcatkarma · 312 pointsr/worldnews

Theoretically, the monarch is still the executive and is the one to call parliament and dissolve it (now limited by the Fixed-Terms Parliament Act). Practically, since at least the time of Queen Victoria, these powers have been understood to be in the hands of Her Majesty's Government, acting in the monarch's name and "advising" the monarch.

That it developed this way has historical reasons: parliament evolved after King John signed Magna Charta in 1215 into a body whose consent was more and more needed for the governing of the realm. The English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution settled the question of who was supreme, the monarch or parliament. But the idea was always that the House of Commons represented the people while the monarch, theoretically, governed. The running of the government was, in practice, delegated to a member of parliament (Lords or Commons), acting in the monarch's name.
This means that in practice, the government, being made of up members of the House of Commons and having a majority there and at the same time holding the monarch's powers, end up able to decide rather a lot about how things go.

(When at the beginning of WW2, the House of Commons passed a law giving the King emergency powers, what this meant was giving the government emergency powers.)

What's unusual here is the timing and the length of the prorogation before the next Queen's Speech (which is written by the government and lays out the legislative programme for the beginning session of parliament).

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EDIT: Since this is getting lots of upvotes, here's some more for the interested - but for a good read on how England and then Great Britain accidentally came to be a parliamentary democracy, I recommend, as a starter, Wikipedia's Parliament of England. Most of the things I say here are gleaned from Trevelyan's classic (i.e. old and in some ways outdated) "History of England" and various other things I've read. Apologies to the Scottish, but I'm simply uninformed about Scottish parliamenty history. And generally, I'm only a history fan. If anyone feels moved to correct me or to add their knowledge, please do so.

There are several crucial points in the development of parliament (as an idea in England/Europe, discounting here the Roman senate and Germanic thing or witan) and Parliament (as an institution). Firstly, of course, that there is a parliament at all, which happened in 1215 when King John needed money from the Barons and they extracted certain concessions from him.
Next is the regular election or appointment of representatives and then the division into a House of Lords and a House of Commons. This happened over the course of the 13th century. If I remember G.M. Trevelyan correctly, this division wasn't so much a decision as it was a gradual development, where members of parliament with common interests would start to meet in separate groups. The landed nobility and the church had different interests from the burghers (the merchant class), so essentially you could say that House of Lords vs. House of Commons came about because the merchant class and the landed class (plus the church) had different material interests and different ideas of how rights should be distributed among the King's subjects.

In 1362, Parliament managed to enshrine in law that all taxation needed its approval (I'm hazy about the how and why; I should read up on it). While monarchs until James II (r. 1685-1688) had enough personal income to finance the army and navy (source: the breathtakingly excellent "Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649-1815" by N.A.M. Rodger), the increasing complexity of the world and the shift of income generation from land to mercantile and, later, industrial activities meant that the defence of the realm eventually slipped from the hands of the monarch alone and was put at Parliament's whim, through the power of taxation and money appropriation.

Queen Anne, who died in 1714, is famous for being the last British monarch to veto a law. There is a quote from one of her speeches: "Make yourselves safe, gentlemen", meaning, it was up to Parliament (the landowners and merchants) to organise the defence of their business interests, oops, I meant "the realm".

England/Britain/the UK remained a strongly class-based society - and still is one, in some respects. There has, at least until now, been relatively little appetite for "off with their heads"-style revolution, and the monarch was disempowered rather quietly after the failed experiment of the first English republic under Cromwell.
King William IV (r. 1830-1837), Victoria's uncle, was the last monarch to force the appointment of a Prime Minister against the will of Parliament. Queen Victoria herself subverted the constitutional process by, for example, writing to fellow European monarchs, some of whom were family relations, on matters of foreign policy.
But what counted was, already then, the actions of the British government and not the personal opinions of the monarch. Victoria's "magic royal circle" (Niall Ferguson) failed to prevent the outbreak of the First World War, as the world had moved beyond the personal control of monarchs - thanks to, in part, England's invention of parliamentary and then constitutional monarchy.

GOLD EDIT: "þanca unc" - thank you - via the Old English Translator.

u/PearlClaw · 28 pointsr/AskHistorians

The core of Britain's Naval success lay around 3 things.
Firstly, the Royal Navy had powerful advocates at all levels of government, this resulted in what could most simply be described as 17th and 18th century interest group politics. This meant that there was always some degree of public funding and enthusiasm for the navy. Something essential in a service that cannot be built up quickly, ships take time to build.
Secondly, navies are expensive. In the 17th and 18th century Britain became the worlds leading economy, both from a basis of domestic manufacturing and internal trade as well as a dominant power in international trade. Additionally Britain had organized public finance, both in the form of the Bank of England, which allowed the government to take out loans at low rates of interest, as well as parliamentary control of expenditures, which meant a budget (this seems normal but both pre- and post revolutionary France lacked this).
Thirdly, due to Britain's extensive maritime trade the Royal Navy had access to a tremendously large pool of trained seamen. While an army can be recruited from the base of the entire population a navy functions best when recruited from a pool of skilled seamen. Despite having a smaller population than France the Royal Navy had access to a far larger pool of skilled sailors due to the relatively small part played by seaborne commerce and high seas fishing in the French economy.

Obviously all these factors are related, essentially 17th and 18th century Britain represented the perfect storm in terms of naval advantages, and while other states saw this and tried to compensate Britain's structural advantage was too great to overcome.

Edit for sources:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Command-Ocean-History-1649%C2%AD-1815/dp/0393060500

http://www.amazon.com/Pursuit-Glory-Europe-1648-1815-ebook/dp/B002RUA4Y8/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370804892&sr=1-2&keywords=the+pursuit+of+glory+europe+1648-1815

u/TheLionHearted · 6 pointsr/AskHistorians

N.A.M. Rogers talks about how trading of languages was common aboard Royal Navy ships; this mixing of languages, in addition to the generally dangerous and insular lifestyle led by career men, would no doubt imprint upon them a veritable omniscience of swears. And it makes sense, in my own interactions with people learning English or Danish, the first words they want to know are the swears.

u/jschooltiger · 2 pointsr/AskHistorians

Hi there, I am not a professional naval historian (my master's was in American history, post civil war) but I have read quite a bit on the topic. Several books come to mind:

u/lucindawst · 1 pointr/Random_Acts_Of_Amazon

Used paperback looks relatively inexpensive