Neptune's Trident: Sea Power, Order, and the Evolution of Maritime Strategy

Abstract

What explains the variation in the maritime strategies employed by states and how do these maritime strategies change over time? This dissertation seeks to answer these questions by developing a theory of maritime power that explicitly links maritime strategy to relative maritime power and competition over maritime order. Starting with the assumption that rising great powers seek to alter order to reflect their interests, it zooms in to examine this process within the maritime domain and argues that the specific maritime strategies employed to contest maritime order vary in predictable ways determined by a state’s satisfaction with the currently dominant maritime rules of the game and by its relative maritime power. The combination of these factors leads states to adopt one of four archetypal maritime strategies – anti-access, sea control, power projection, and reconcentration – each of which supports a different stage of competition over maritime order. Together, these four strategies form a trajectory of maritime strategy through which all maritime power pass, or seek to pass, as they rise and fall. This theoretical framework illuminates patterns in the maritime strategies of the four dominant sea powers of history – Portugal, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, England/Great Britain, and the United States – and their various challengers.