Naval Blockades and Seapower

This new collection of scholarly, readable, and up-to-date essays covers the most significant naval blockades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Here the reader can find Napoleon’s Continental Blockade of England, the Anglo-American War of 1812, the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the first Sino-Japanese War 1894-95, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the second Sino-Japanese War 1937-45, the Second World War in Europe and Asia, the Nationalist attempt to blockade the PRC, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the British blockade of Rhodesia, the Falklands War, the Persian Gulf interdiction program, the PRC "missile" blockade of Taiwan in 1996, and finally Australia's recent "reverse" blockade to keep illegal aliens out of the country.

The authors of each chapter address the causes of the blockade in question, its long and short-term repercussions, and the course of the blockade itself. More generally, they address the state of the literature, taking advantage of new research and new methodologies to provide something of value to both the specialist and non-specialist reader. Taken as a whole, this volume presents fresh insights into issues such as what a blockade is, why countries might choose them, which navies can and cannot make use of them, what responses lead to satisfactory or unsatisfactory conclusions, and how far-reaching their consequences tend to be.

This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of strategic studies, military history and maritime studies in particular.

Bruce Elleman is an Associate Professor in the Maritime History Department in the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the US Naval War College, and most recently author of Modern Chinese Warfare, 1795-1989 (Routledge, 2001), Wilson and China: A Revised History of the Shandong Question (M.E.Sharpe, 2002), and co-editor with Chris Bell of Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century: An International Perspective (Frank Cass, 2003).

Sarah C.M.Paine is an Associate Professor in the Strategy & Policy Department at the US Naval War College and author of Imperial Rivals: China, Russia and Their Disputed Frontiers (M.E. Sharpe, 1996) and The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Perceptions, Power and Primacy (Cambridge, 2002). Current research interests include a book project on Japanese-Soviet rivalries over northeast Asia from 1931 to 1949.