This revisionist study shows how the Royal Navy's ideas about the meaning and application of seapower shaped its policies during the years between the wars. It examines the navy's ongoing struggle with the Treasury for funds, the real meaning of the 'one power standard', naval strategies for war with the United States, Japan, Germany and Italy, the influence of Mahan, the role of the navy in peacetime, and the use of propaganda to influence the British public.

Christopher M. Bell is Professor of History at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Churchill and the Dardanelles (2017) and Churchill and Sea Power (2012), and co-editor of At the Crossroads between Peace and War: The London Naval Conference of 1930 (2014) and Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century: An International Perspective (2003).