Roundtable Discussion: Sea Power in History

Thursday, April 23, 5:15pm (James McCune Smith, Room 743)
Roundtable: Sea Power in History

Professor Andrew Lambert (King’s College London)
Dr Christopher Miller (University of Glasgow)
Professor Evan Mawdsley (University of Glasgow)

In celebration of Professor Evan Mawdsley receiving the prestigious Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize for his Supremacy at Sea (Yale, 2024), this panel considers sea power as an important theme in global history. In security studies, the subject has rarely seemed more relevant—with struggles in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, an American carrier task force deployed against Iran in the Indian Ocean, and the growth of the Chinese maritime forces.

This roundtable brings together three historians with a strong interest in sea power.

Professor Andrew Lambert is Laughton Professor of Naval History at King’s College London and is the most eminent naval historian working in Britain today, and his wide-ranging work includes Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict that Made the Modern World (Yale, 2018), and The British Way of War: Julian Corbett and the Battle for a National Strategy (Yale, 2021).

Dr Christopher Miller is Senior Lecturer in Business History & Strategy at the University of Glasgow, and has a broad interests in naval history and has written extensively about the economics of warship construction in the twentieth century, including his Planning and Profits: British Naval Armaments Manufacture and the Military Industrial Complex, 1918-1941 (Liverpool University, 2018).

Professor Evan Mawdsley’s Supremacy is Sea (Yale, 2024) is, among other things, about when and how the United States overtook Britain to become preeminent in sea power in 1944-1945. His War for the Seas (Yale, 2019) was partly about the relative importance of American and British air and sea forces in the Allied victory. He was Professor of International History at the University of Glasgow until his retirement in 2010, and is currently a Professorial Research Fellow.

Professor Mawdsley was recently awarded the 12th annual Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize for Supremacy at Sea. The $50,000 prize is bestowed in recognition of the best eligible English-language book in the field of American military history, distinguished by its scholarship, its contribution to the literature, and its appeal to the broadest possible general reading public.