Wednesday Evening Seminar Series
Michaelmas Term 2020: Week 3
Microsoft teams Meeting: Please email info@ccw.ox.ac.uk to be invited.
Julian Corbett and the battle for British strategy - 1914-15
Professor Andrew lambert, KCL
In August 1914 Britain went to war without an agreed grand strategy, with the two armed services anticipating very different conflicts. The Royal Navy was anticipating having an army strike force, the British Expeditionary Force, to help secure sea control and remove threats to oceanic trade: Instead the BEF was committed to France, leaving the Navy, Britain's only Great Power strategic asset detached from the war in Europe, tied to supporting a military force of a mere 5 Divisions.
This talk will examine the development of national strategy from the perspective of Julian Corbett, leading exponent of British strategic doctrine, CID official Historian, and author of critical memoranda in the period when Admiral Lord Fisher returned to the Admiralty, and challenged the drift into a continental commitment that was neither pre-planned nor inevitable. Corbett would write the official history of his process.
Andrew Lambert is Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies at King's College. After completing research at KCL 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 KCL. 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, and the early development of naval historical writing. His work has addressed a range of issues, including technology, policy-making, regional security, deterrence, historiography, crisis-management and conflict. He received the 2014 Anderson Medal for The Challenge: Britain against America in the Naval War of 1812. Professor Lambert has lectured on aspects of my work around the world, from Australia and Canada to Finland, Denmark and Russia.
