The Price of Victory

The final installment of N.A.M. Rodger's definitive, authoritative trilogy on Britain's naval history.

Author: N A M Rodger

At the end of the French and Napoleonic wars, British sea-power was at its apogee. But by 1840, as one contemporary commentator put it, the Admiralty was full of ‘intellects becalmed in the smoke of Trafalgar’. How the Royal Navy reformed and reinvigorated itself in the course of the nineteenth century is just one thread in this magnificent book, which refuses to accept standard assumptions and analyses.

All the great actions are here, from Navarino in 1827 (won by a daringly disobedient Admiral Codrington) to Jutland, D-Day, the Battle of the Atlantic and the battles in the Pacific in 1944/45 in concert with the US Navy. The development and strategic significance of submarine and navy air forces is superbly described, as are the rapid evolution of ships (from classic Nelsonic type, to hybrid steam/sail ships, then armour-clad and the fully armoured Dreadnoughts and beyond) and weapons. The social history of officers and men – and sometimes women – always a key part of the author’s work, is not neglected.

Rodger sets all this in the essential context of politics and geo-strategy. The character and importance of leading admirals – Beatty, Fisher, Cunningham – is assessed, together with the roles of other less famous but no less consequential figures. Based on a lifetime’s learning, it is the culmination of one of the most significant British historical works in recent decades.

Naval specialists will find much that is new here, and will be invigorated by the originality of Rodger’s judgements; but everyone who is interested in the one of the central threads in British history will find it rewarding.

• English
• Hardback
• 976 pages

N. A. M. Rodger is a Fellow of the British Academy, Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and former Professor of Naval History at the University of Exeter. In October 2024 he is being awarded the Caird Medal of the National Maritime Museum, their highest honour, and he has been awarded the Julian Corbett Prize in Naval History, the Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, the British Academy Book prize and the Hattendorf Prize.

‘I have never reviewed a book that has given me more pleasure … a masterpiece’
Kevin Myers, Mail on Sunday

‘A great work of history … Nothing written during the past century, perhaps ever, approaches N.A. M. Rodger’s ambitious and masterly three-volume Naval History of Britain … it is likely to be regarded as one of the greatest works of historical scholarship of our age’ Paul Kennedy, The Sunday Times

‘Magisterial … triumphantly succeeds in moving the Royal Navy back to centre-stage in our islands’ story’ Andrew Roberts, Sunday Telegraph

‘Quite outstanding’ Sir Michael Howard, TLS Books of the Year