CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Janzekovic, Izidor |
|---|---|
| Title | The Balance of Sea Power in the Early Modern Era (1648-1713) |
| Summary | The balance of power was one of the founding ideas of the emerging inter-state system in the early modern era. This idea, however, has been analysed exclusively in relation to land powers on the European continent, while the historiography has failed to recognize its naval aspect so far. This omission seems strange, considering that the contemporaries conceptualized and measured absolute and relative sea power. This study focuses on how the practice and theory of the balance-of-power idea were applied on the high seas and specifically among sea powers in the early modern era. Moreover, since state and sea powers were intertwined, it also shows how states reacted to other states’ decreasing or increasing sea power. Warships or ships of the line were the most important instruments of naval warfare and key to any assessment of sea power. The contemporaries focused on the number of warships and their size based on the number of guns per ship. Detailed tables of fleets with the number of warships and guns for the major engagements show the equality or balance of sea power. As warships were costly to build and maintain at sea, all the states always had limited capacity. The author argues that attaining and maintaining the balance of sea power in the seventeenth century was not just an abstract idea, but also an interactive process. The study concentrates on the period between the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the Peace of Utrecht (1713). During this period, the focus is on the three major European conflicts, which also had their global dimensions. The Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652–1674) were one of the key naval and economic confrontations in the early modern era. In the early stages, the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–1697) was a serious naval challenge to the ‘maritime powers’ of England and the Dutch Republic by France. The War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713) dealt a blow to French naval ambitions, weakened the relative Dutch sea power and cemented the English naval supremacy in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The author used a three-level methodology, drawing on different types of sources, to assess the balance of sea power in the early modern era. He sought to identify the ‘actual’ sea power (ship lists), the practical and political strategies for achieving or maintaining the balance (international treaties and diplomatic correspondence), and the development of the idea of the balance of sea power in the legal and theoretical realm (texts by jurists and philosophers). The contemporaries were aware of the potentials and limits of sea power, so that the relative and actual naval strength of states was often discussed. The author argues that there was a real or naval balance of sea power between the different fleets, that the balance of sea power was acknowledged in the international alliance treaties, and that the balance of sea power became an element of early modern political discourse. |
| Supervisor | Kontler, László |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/janzekovic_izidor.pdf |
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