Mahan's Sea Power Theory

Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), a United States Navy officer and president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, set out the classical theory of sea power in his most influential book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, published in 1890. Drawing on a detailed reading of European naval history from the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th century through the Napoleonic Wars, Mahan argued that command of the sea (he used the term "command of the sea," which later writers rendered as "sea power") had been the decisive factor determining which nations rose to great-power status, because control of maritime trade routes allowed a state to accumulate wealth through commerce, project military force overseas, and deny the same advantages to rivals. Mahan identified six conditions favoring a nation's development as a sea power: favorable geographical position, serviceable coastlines, extent of territory, population size, national character suited to commerce, and the character of government, using Britain's insular position and its powerful, unified Royal Navy as his paradigmatic case.