Vol. 42, No. 06
06/01/2026
Deep Dive Into the Royal Navy
The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain, 1815-1945, by N.A.M. Rodger, New York: Norton, 2025, 974 pages, hardcover.
This authoritative work is the final volume of a trilogy of British naval history, with the three books totaling about 2,500 published pages. It succeeds The Safeguard of the Sea (published in 1997), which covered from the years 660 to 1649, and The Command of the Ocean (published in 2004), which picked up the historic thread from when Cromwell landed at Dublin with an English army (1649) to 1815 — including the Napoleonic Wars and the Battle of Trafalgar. As author N.A.M. Rodger said in the second volume, after that campaign, “Britain had an unchallenged command of the sea in quantity and quality, materially and psychologically, over all her actual or potential enemies.” That account concluded contemporaneously with the Battle of Waterloo.
The book under review navigates from the time of Napoleon’s surrender to the British Royal Navy through the Second World War, including an epilogue that briefly summarizes more current events such as attacks on warships and merchant vessels in the Red Sea and Beijing’s bullying in the China Seas. (The chronology is quite helpful.)
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