Jan Glete for Routledge A re-brand of the old UCL imprint; Routledge is producing some excellent stuff. Glete is one of those historians who knows his stuff backwards but sometimes does not express it in a very arresting fashion. Be prepared therefore to read this no more than one chapter at a time. Glete's approach is centred on who had (and who was seeking) the ability to operate violent coercion on the sea traffic. His era covers both the heyday of private war but also the waning of the city-state and the rise of national navies. (Though were the Seven Provinces really Amsterdam in disguise?). Like all good modern historians he opens play with a number of chapters on major themes. In this case the historiography of naval warfare, the technology and its tactics and strategy, the personnel and the interaction with states. He then considers a number of major naval powers or conflicts. This opens with the remarkable Portuguese Empire and its interaction with everyone from Ottoman to the Chinese. I am not sure he manages to explain its rise and fall, but I enjoyed the thought that the Ottomans captured Egypt because the Portuguese ruined the Mediterranean pepper trade. The Mediterranean is considered as a failure of empires in a good overview (based on Guilmartin) of this theatre - one that often operated at the edge of the technology. The Baltic is then considered as an exercise in naval state formation, once again stressing the failure of Denmark to live up to its early potential. Western Europe up to 1560 sees some excellent analysis of Anglo-French fighting (the near invasion of the 1540s). Atlantic warfare to 1603 steers us towards the wars against the Spanish. A chapter on the first global war (Spain and the Seven Provinces) is a very good summary of Jonathan Israel's views. Overall an excellent summary, containing much that is difficult to find elsewhere. Old Duffer's Book Corner Book Reviews The Punic Wars The Northern Wars 1558-1721 1688: A Global History Richelieu And Olivares Warfare At Sea 1500-1650 Louis XIV The Renaissance At War The Great War and Modern Memory Battles of the Greek And Roman Worlds Histoire Militaire des Guerres Puniques Dictionnaire des Maréchaux de France The War The Infantry Knew 1914-1919 The Great War The Byzantine Wars The French Civil Wars The Somme The Myth of the Great War The Wars Of The Ancient Greeks Histoire de l'armée française de 1914 à nos jours To The Last Man: Spring 1918 Flodden 1513 Verdun 1916 The Mediterranean In The Ancient World The National Army Museum Book Of The Boer War La Bataille d'Abbeville Soldier Sahibs The Celtic Empire The Imperial War Museum Book of 1918 War And The World: Military Power And The Fate of Continents Back to Perfidious Albion #103 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by Charles and Teresa Vasey. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com