| Summary/Abstract |
Colin S. Gray’s The Leverage of Sea Power1 may well be the best book on naval warfare of the last century, if not beyond. This time-span is deliberately chosen, for it excludes Julian Corbett’s Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (1911) as well as Alfred Thayer Mahan’s no less classic The Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660–1783 (1890). Yet a case can certainly be made that Gray’s book belongs in this select company. Comparisons of this sort are inevitably difficult, and are complicated in this case by the fact that these books address very different audiences and differ widely in intention and scope. It is more illuminating to say that if one is to search for true predecessors of Gray’s treatise in the (admittedly slender) literature of naval strategy, perhaps the only really comparable works are Corbett’s masterpiece, England in the Seven Years War (1907), and C. E. Callwell’s virtually forgotten Military Operations and Maritime Preponderance (1905).
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