Professor Jeremy Black MBE is an English historian and a Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of over 100 books, principally but not exclusively on 18th-century British politics and international relations, and has been described as "the most prolific historical scholar of our age". This well-produced collection of essays, based on papers presented at a conference at Huddersfield Polytechnic in 1987 and first published in Britain by Leicester University Press in 1988, should be made compulsory reading for those would-be historians who too readily take naval power for granted. Unlike some conference publications, the twelve essays of this volume cohere remarkably well, especially in the underlying common agenda which emerges covering many aspects of the theme set in the first chapter by J.R. Jones: "Limitations of British sea power in the French Wars, 1689-1815." He points out how contemporary Britons and their European allies had exaggerated expectations of what the navy could do. Failings were consequently ascribed to mismanagement, corruption and neglect, and historians have too often followed this lead. Subsequent essays by Jeremy Black "Naval power and British foreign policy in the age of Pitt the Elder" and Philip Woodfine "Ideas of naval power and the conflict with Spain, 1737-1742" carry forward this revisionis.