SAVILE HISTORY – SOCIETY, RELIGION AND BRITISH SEAPOWER – ANDREW LAMBERT TALK. CHAIRED BY SAVILIAN ADMIRAL NICHOLAS WILKINSON.

For over two hundred years Britain was a seapower as opposed to a military power. Its status as a seapower enabled it to achieve success disproportionate to its size. The maritime identity of Britain made it more dynamic, open, and inclusive than its continental rivals.  In Seapower States Andrew Lambert argues that the Protestant faith played a significant part in establishing Britain as a seapower. He will discuss the influence of its Protestant faith and wider society on Britain’s rise to and maintenance of naval supremacy.

Andrew Lambert is Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies at King’s College. After completing research in the Department he taught at Bristol Polytechnic,(now the University of West of England), the Royal Naval Staff College, Greenwich, and the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and also Director of the Laughton Naval Unit housed in the Department. In 2020 he was made a Fellow of Kings College London (FKC).

His work focuses on the naval and strategic history of the British Empire between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. He has written extensively on naval history and his publications include Seapower States which won the 2018 Gilder Lehrman Book Prize in Military History. His latest book is The British Way of War: Julian Corbett and the Battle for a National Strategy, Yale 2021.