“They Are a Little Afraid of the British Admiral”

This article looks at the role of the British Royal Navy during the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Although the British government decided to stay neutral and work with Russia to mediate between Japan and China, the presence of the China Station of the Royal Navy played a subtle role in influencing the strategies adopted by China and Japan. However, as the British government underestimated its own naval power and possibly overestimated that of its potential opponents, the China Station played only a limited role to protect British interest. As a result, Russia used a much weaker fleet to achieve its territorial and political goals, while Britain was forced to increase its military and naval investment in East Asia. The result of the war was the opposite of the intention of the British government, namely to maintain stability in the area and check the spread of Russian influence.

Quantitative Methods in German Military History

Traditional historiography relies mostly on the analysis of written sources. Over the last years, historiography and military history have come to use quantitative methods of increasing complexity, allowing historians to use serial sources. The article presents four books and a published paper to illustrate this trend in modern historiography.

War and Society in Spain

This article offers a new historiographical overview of the military history of Spain in the early modern period, covering recent works published by English-speaking scholars as well as the latest studies by Spanish and Italian historians. Differences tend to focus on whether the rival paradigms of ‘decline’ or ‘resilience’ offer the better insights into the period after the end of Spanish military supremacy (c. 1648). A survey of recent work on this topic leads us to some very significant observations about factors underpinning power, such as a common or shared culture and identity, as well as the more obvious and traditional components of military and naval power. The nature of royal power and monarchy are analysed, as are the structure of the army and the construction of the state in Spain. The relationship between the state and civil society, and the debate about the militarization of Iberian society and the study of cultural and religious values, are also examined. On balance, recent literature leads us to a more positive assessment of the resilience of Spanish military power in the second half of the 17th century.