This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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This October a major scholarly achievement was realised with the publication of The Price of Victory, the third and final instalment of N.A.M. Rodger’s great trilogy on the naval history of Britain from 660 AD to 1945. It has been an odyssey, albeit one that to complete took more than three times longer than Homer’s hero took to journey home.

The first volume, Safeguard of the Sea, was published back in 1997, some six years after Rodger had left his job as Assistant Keeper of the Public Records at the then Public Records Office to join the National Maritime Museum. Having moved to Exeter University, he completed the second volume, Command of the Ocean, covering the period from 1649 to 1815, in 2004.

Mindful of the fates of others who have attempted grand, multi-volume naval histories of Britain, Nicholas Rodger, now aged 74, was known to quip that one of his key aims was to become the first historian to live to see it completed. What he describes as “an exciting episode of brain surgery” delayed the completion of the final volume for several years, and left achieving this a closer-run thing than was — one suspects — entirely comfortable.

To the immense relief of all, Rodger recovered to complete his great work, and it has, emphatically, been well worth the wait. The Price of Victory is, like its predecessors, a most substantial work in both physical and scholarly senses.

At the outset of his task, Rodger aimed to create “not a self-contained ‘company history’ of the Royal Navy, but a survey of the contribution which naval warfare with all its associated activities has made to national history”. In doing so, he sought to link naval warfare “to political, social, economic, diplomatic, administrative, agricultural, medical, religious and other histories which will never be complete until the naval component of them is understood”.

He has succeeded handsomely, firmly entwining naval and naval-related matters into the core fabric of the history of the British Isles. The Price of Victory is a worthy conclusion to an epic series that will both stand in its own right and, as he hopes, serve as a baseline for future scholarly endeavours.

The vast, polyglot erudition underpinning Rodger’s prose wears no disguise. Yet, for all its great length and the density of knowledge each page imparts, The Price of Victory is, like its two preceding volumes, a lively read, leavened with the author’s dry wit.

Nor are Rodger’s three volumes merely a succession of battles. Even the operations of the World Wars, though rightfully receiving the attention their significance warrants, do not overwhelm the narrative to the exclusion of all else. The 19th century gets 13 of the 35 chapters, through which we learn of matters as diverse as the diverging political philosophies that generated a succession of reforms in the Admiralty to cope (or in some cases not) with the exponentially increasing paperwork required to administer so complex an organisation as a navy and its effect on the increasing professionalisation of the modern Civil Service.

Also explored is the contribution to scientific advance and social developments in medicine that saw women progressively brought into the Navy’s medical establishment, from going to sea as washerwomen aboard the hospital ship Minden in 1842, through the work of Florence Nightingale’s naval contemporary, Eliza Mackenzie at Therapia, near Constantinople, and the introduction of nursing sisters aboard the hospital ship Malacca in 1898.

Any misapprehensions of effortless superiority from Nelson’s heirs are also laid to rest. The 19th century Royal Navy was a remarkable organisation in many aspects. But it also struggled mightily. Rodger charts missteps aplenty, from failures such as the technologically advanced HMS Captain, which capsized and sank, claiming almost 500 lives, months after it was commissioned in 1870, to the difficulties in educating and managing Royal Naval personnel — fully professionalised from 1853 — leaving the vital new engineers in career cul-de-sacs, and the senior officer corps well past its best.

It is likely that The Price of Victory will form the final act of both N.A.M. Rodger’s great trilogy and his career as an actively publishing historian. “It is time,” he writes, “to pass the torch to others.” If that is the case, then there can be few finer ways to sign off and few retirements more richly earned. However, the great enquiring mind remains, along with a lengthy list of outlines and ideas (some, a little less ambitious in scope) that even so mighty a work as this is unlikely to have exhausted. Health and desire permitting? You never know.