The Great Naval Game

Jan Rüger teaches history at Birkbeck College, University of London. In 2002-3, he was a visiting fellow at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University.

This book is about the theatre of power and identity that unfolded in and between Britain and Germany in the decades before the First World War. It explores what contemporaries described as the cult of the navy: the many ways in which the navy and the sea were celebrated in the fleet reviews, naval visits and ship launches that were watched by hundreds of thousands of spectators. At once royal rituals and national entertainments, these were events at which tradition, power and claims to the sea were played out between the nations. This was a public stage on which the domestic and the foreign intersected and where the modern mass market of media and consumerism collided with politics and international relations. Conflict and identity were literally acted out between the two countries. By focusing on this dynamic arena, Jan Rüger offers a fascinating new history of the Anglo-German antagonism.

Introduction; 1. The rise of the naval theatre; 2. Culture, politics and the mass market; 3. Bread and circuses; 4. Nation, navy and the sea; 5. The Anglo-German theatre; Epilogue: No more parades; Bibliography.