Leo Amery was a long-serving Conservative MP, minister, imperialist and close contemporary (though not, I think, a close friend) of Winston Churchill’s - they were at Harrow together, where at their first meeting the future staunch foe of Nazi oppression pushed the smaller boy into the school pool. For some reason, he seems to pop up in many of my readings on diverse topics and here he is again, in 1904:
Sea power alone, if it is not based on great industry, and has not a great population behind it, is too weak for offence to really maintain itself in the world struggle … both the sea and the railway are going in the future … to be supplemented by the air as a means of locomotion, and when we come to that … the successful powers will be those who have the greatest industrial base. It will not matter whether they are in the centre of a continent or on an island; those people who have the industrial power and the power of invention and of science will be able to defeat all others.
Comments on H. J. Mackinder, “The geographical pivot of history”, Geographical Journal xxiii, no. 4 (April 1904); quoted in Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001 [1976]), 184 (emphasis in Kennedy).
This was quite farsighted of Amery. Not only was he quite right about the necessity for industrial power, and about the weakness of naval power (not likely to be a popular point of view during the twilight of the Pax Britannica), but he also pointed to the future importance of aviation as a form of transport a mere four months after Kitty Hawk (which in any case was barely reported in the British press). Some day I must read up on Amery.
Somehow, Cliopatria has gotten wind of this site, and have already added it to their History Blogroll! So I’d better put some content up, hadn’t I.
I’ve just put in a massive order at Abebooks (which links the catalogues of many secondhand booksellers from around the world). This is not something I will be able to afford to do often, but at the moment I am still working full-time so it is sort of affordable. One thing I’ve found out that is that even if you choose the slower, cheaper postage option, it usually doesn’t take anything like the estimated 21-36 (or more) working days to get to Australia, but more like a week or two - so it’s not really worth going for the faster, more expensive postage unless you really, really needed it yesterday.
Most of the books are primary sources, particularly British novels from the interwar period featuring predictions of massed air raids on cities, ranging from the relatively well known (eg Nevil Shute’s What Happened to the Corbetts (1939), Harold Nicolson’s Public Faces (1932)) to the delightfully obscure (eg Bernard Newman’s Armoured Doves: A Peace Novel (1931), or Leslie Pollard’s Menace: A Novel of the Near Future (1935)). There are also some non-fictional works, such as L. E. O. Charlton’s The Next War (1937), that I missed in an earlier Abebooks order a few months ago. I already have a decent pre-WWI collection, but I splashed out on R. P. Hearne’s Aerial Warfare (1909), an early and important work (a bit of a luxury as the State Library has it - but I found a surprisingly cheap copy so I couldn’t resist!)
Also I’ve ordered some of the more important secondary sources for my area - not least so I don’t have to keep constantly renewing or re-borrowing them from the library over the next three years! These include Malcolm Smith’s British Air Strategy between the Wars, and David Edgerton’s England and the Aeroplane. Finally, to add a comparative dimension, I picked up Peter Fritzsche’s A Nation of Flyers and Joseph Corn’s The Winged Gospel, classics on airmindedness in Germany and the USA respectively.