the Corn Laws was gradually to move British food production offshore, an early example of what is now called globalization. Those who voted to abolish the Corn Laws expected that corn (wheat) would be imported mainly from Russia (Poland, which Russia controlled, was then the main productive region), but with the collapse of shipping costs, it turned out that Britain was fed mainly from North America and, to a lesser degree, Australasia.
This development changed the meaning of wartime trade protection. During and before the Napoleonic Wars, British merchant ships mainly carried manufactured goods and the raw materials to make them, such as cloth and cotton. Sinking or seizing the ships would certainly affect the British economy, but it could not destroy Britain, which was largely self-sufficient in food. Once Britain relied heavily on foreign sources of food, cutting British seaborne trade threatened starvation: the imported food had to reach Britain by sea. Furthermore, the new industries relied heavily on raw materials brought by sea from abroad. Cutting that traffic could destroy the ability to produce the weapons needed to defend the British Isles. The Victorian Royal Navy found it difficult to arouse public interest in so abstract an issue as trade defence. Too many in the United Kingdom equated defence simply to defence (by army and militia) against invasion.
During the same period, Russia became the greatest wheat-exporting country in Europe. Before about the 1850s grain production was centred in the Baltic. By the 1850s, however, the Ukraine, with its rich black soil, was growing three times as much as the Baltic. This grain was exported through the Bosporus, the Turkish straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Quite aside from the exports, the Russians had long sought control of the straits. However, by the latter part of the nineteenth century exports through the Bosporus were their chief source of foreign exchange. That certainly sharpened Russian determination to control the straits, inevitably at the expense of Turkey. The situation was further complicated by the Russians’ position as the centre of Orthodox Christianity, hence as the protectors of many Christians living in Turkish territories in the Balkans on the edges of the Black Sea. The Russians viewed themselves as successors to the Byzantine Empire (‘the third Rome’), hence chosen to reverse the Turks’ victory over Byzantium (Constantinople) four centuries earlier. Byzantium had been a maritime empire controlling the eastern Mediterranean. Thus Russian interests made collision with the British inevitable, given British sensitivity to any challenge in the Mediterranean, on the other side of the Turkish straits.
Further down the scale were second-class cruisers like HMS Minerva. By the late 1890s they were by far the most numerous British cruisers. Minerva was placed in Chatham Reserve upon completion, then used for boiler trials in 1899-1903 as part of the Cruiser Training Squadron. She was later assigned to Devonport (1903-4), and then attached to the Mediterranean Fleet battle squadron in 1904-12 (during which she underwent a 1908 refit). She was then assigned to the new Third (reserve) Fleet’s 11th Cruiser Squadron. serving as temporary depot ship for the 6th Destroyer Flotilla in 1912-13. On the outbreak of war the 11th Cruiser Squadron was mobilized for the West Coast of Ireland patrol (Minerva captured an Austrian merchant ship off Cape Finisterre in September 1914). She was assigned to the East Indies and then to Egypt in 1914-15, serving at the Dardanelles (she sank the Turkish torpedo boat Demirhissar off Chios on 17 April 1915). She remained in Egyptian waters through 1916, helping to defend the Suez Canal against a Turkish attack. Once that threat had gone, she served in East African waters in 1916-18, and at the Cape in 1918. She was sold in 1920.
In the 1890s speed became the great distinction between cruisers – ships which could operate with the fleet – and the mass of cruising ships which maintained good order at sea and in British possessions. Until about 1885, however, many cruisers (corvettes) were not very fast at all. The corvette HMS Rapid was originally classified as a sloop, then rerated as a corvette, illustrating the fluid state of warship designations in the 1880s. The formal distinction was that a cruiser was a Captain’s command, a sloop a Commander’s.
(Allan C Green via State Library of Victoria)
Probably because Russia was a key grain exporter, the Russians particularly well understood how dependent the British were on grain imports. It was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a key OPEC member contemplating the vulnerability of Western oil-consuming states to an interruption in the flow of oil. As early as 1863 (in the context of a crisis over Russian suppression of a revolt in Poland), the Russians saw commerce warfare as a natural part of any war against the British. That year Russian squadrons visited New York and San Francisco. Americans saw the visit as valuable support during the Civil War. However, the point of the visit was to show the British that Russian warships could leave the Baltic (to attack their commerce) without the British observing them at all (the British seem not to have gotten this point). Once outside Russian waters, moreover, the squadrons could raid British commerce despite any blockade the British imposed (Russian geography, then and later, made it relatively easy to block access to the open sea). During the 1877-78 crisis the Russians sought to evade British blockade altogether by assembling the Russian Volunteer Fleet of commerce-raiding merchant ships in foreign ports.
There was a counter-current to British fears of trade warfare: by the 1850s British governments increasingly interested in commerce were less and less anxious to seize private property on the high seas. That applied particularly to the greatest free-trade country of all, the United Kingdom. For example, during the Crimean War – which contemporaries called the Great Russian War – no blockade was imposed. (It might, however, be suggested that the main goods the Russians imported by sea were manufactured goods from England, and that the British government of the day was not anxious to damage its own economy.)
The great scourge of previous wars had been privateers, privately-owned ships carrying special authorizations (letters of marque). Any civilian ship could be used in this way, so the number of commerce raiders could be immense. Similarly, all existing ports could be used as privateer bases. In 1859 the Treaty of Paris, signed by all the major sea powers except the United States, outlawed privateers. The potential scale of the commerce-raiding problem was dramatically reduced; navies had to choose between devoting resources to battle fleets and devoting them to war against trade.
The Treaty of Paris might even be read as abandonment of blockade. The British surrendered their ‘ancient right’ to seize enemy cargo carried in neutral ships. It seemed that shipowners could protect themselves in wartime simply by fleeing to other flags (as many did in 1914). Many in the Royal Navy thought this abandonment of the ancient rights of the maritime power had rendered sea power almost pointless. The treaty also limited what goods could legitimately be interdicted, food being an important exception. As the nineteenth century wore on, few British naval officers continued to believe that a ruthless enemy would care about either new rule – for them, enemy attacks on commerce increasingly carried the threat of starvation. The First World War showed that they were entirely correct.
Liberals led by William Gladstone sometimes argued that there was no point in planning for trade protection because the threat had been so dramatically reduced. At the least that made Gladstone, no friend of the Royal Navy, inclined against a fleet designed for blockade operations. Gladstone’s first administration spanned the period 1868-74, which was exactly when the presence role of cruisers was far more important than the trade protection role. Naval officers pointed to the depredations of raiders operated by the Confederates during the American Civil War to show that the threat to trade – to British food – was still very real. Alabama and other successful Confederate raiders showed just how effectively a steam-powered cruiser could attack merchant shipping, which in the 1860s was still overwhelmingly sail-powered.
Meanwhile the geography of British sea power changed. British naval dominance of Europe depended largely on the fact that the British Isles blocked the exits from the Channel and from the North Sea
