(1840–1914), naval officer and theorist

Born to Mary Okill and Dennis Hart Mahan, the latter a professor of civil and military engineering at West Point, Mahan became a career naval officer. He also became a historian and strategic analyst upon his appointment to the new Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1885. Over the following quarter century, he wrote some of the most influential works on history and strategy ever produced.

Mahan's studies range widely, incorporating innovative and resourceful historical research and analysis with the perceived strategic and political needs of his day. Though his writings were long ago distilled into dogma from which U.S. naval doctrine has frequently been derived, Mahan himself aimed for accuracy and insight as much as for political or strategic influence. In fact, by the 1906 all‐big‐gun battleship controversies, Mahan had already been outpaced by enthusiasts willing to go even further in defense of these behemoths of concentrated fire.

Much of Mahan's forty‐year naval career passed with barely a hint of his future influence. Prickly young Mahan completed two years at Columbia College before entering the U.S. Naval Academy's Class of 1859. His Civil War service was limited to blockade duty except for a few hours of combat during the assault on Port Royal. In successive postwar assignments, he rose slowly through the ranks without distinction. Most of his cruises were on the remote Pacific or Asiatic Squadrons, reinforcing his alienated nature and encouraging his chauvinistic views toward the peoples of the Pacific Basin. His High Church Episcopal beliefs aggravated the disdain he felt for most people—naval officers, sailors, and foreigners alike.

Mahan's most famous and important work—The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783—first published in 1890, suggests the main thrust of his historical efforts. From 1885 to 1893 he was assigned to the Naval War College, briefly as a professor and soon as president of the fledgling institution. In the years before his retirement in 1896, he prepared his most influential studies. Originally, these were designed for his midlevel officer students. They quickly lost their heuristic value, becoming instead primers of international relations, force, and diplomacy. Over the course of a long second career, Mahan produced twenty‐one books, including eleven collections of essays, two naval biographies, two memoirs, and the famous Influence series that examined international history from 1660 to 1815. His histories emphasized the persistent nature of international conflict, particularly between great powers competing for access to trade and resources. His religion, research, and theorizing, as well as his experiences at the First Hague Conference for limiting warfare (1899), led him to believe that diplomacy was best engaged in after successful conclusion of the battle. For Mahan, international relations hinged on power projection. In the modern era, this was best exercised by navies.

Mahan identified three critical elements of seapower: (1) weapons of war, primarily battleships and their supply bases; (2) a near monopoly of seaborne commerce from which to draw wealth, manpower, and supplies; and (3) a string of colonies to support both of the above. His theories, however, rested on two serious fallacies. First, his overreliance upon the notion of concentrating forces falsely denied the importance of coastal defense, and undervalued commerce raiding. These assumptions forced strategists to search for a decisive, war‐winning battle, often in vain. Second, he overstated the strategic benefits of controlling seaborne commerce and colonies. Whereas in peacetime these components of empire frequently contributed to wealth and consequently to long‐term strength, in war they often proved to be liabilities. Mahan's timeless principles, as enacted along the lines of late‐nineteenth‐century navalism, had the effect of turning America's strategic vision of itself on its side; instead of remaining an unassailable continental power with maritime reach, it became an overstretched maritime power with global vulnerabilities.

From 1896 until his death, Mahan lived in New York City and at Quogue on Long Island with his wife and unmarried daughters. Though the value of his writings continues to be debated, of their influence on the navies of the United States and other countries there can be no doubt.

[See also Doctrine, Military; Sea Warfare; Strategy: Naval Warfare Strategy; Tactics: Naval Warfare Tactics.]

Bibliography

• Robert Seager II and Doris Maguire, The Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan, 3 vols., 1975.
• Robert Seager II, Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man and His Letters, 1977.
• John B. Hattendorf and Lynn C. Hattendorf, A Bibliography of the Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan, 1986.
• Kenneth J. Hagan, This People's Navy, 1991.
• Mark Russell Shulman, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power, 1882–1893, 1995

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Mahan, Alfred Thayer mǝˈhæn (1840-1914) naval officer, author, and world-renowned theorist on history and strategy, born at West Point, New York. His The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 (1890), as well as a two-volume sequel that dealt with the years 1793 to 1812, became a primer on international relations, the use of force, and the role of diplomacy, which Mahan believed should follow, not precede, battle. International relations, he argued, hinged on power projection, which was best exercised by gaining control of the seas. Though his theories and arguments have since been seen as flawed, there is little question about his significance as a naval historian and theoretician in the latter part of the 19th century. Mahan's early career was undistinguished. He saw only a few hours of combat during the Civil War and rose slowly through the ranks afterward. The change began with his appointment to the Naval War College (1885) to teach naval history and the subsequent publication of the first Influence book, a collection of his lecture notes. He resigned from the navy in 1895 to pursue his writing career full time. In all, Mahan published twenty-one books, as well as numerous magazine articles and letters to the editor.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), American naval historian and strategist, provided the intellectual and historical foundations for American imperial expansion.

Alfred Thayer Mahan was born on Sept. 27, 1840. His father was an officer at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a professor of civil and military engineering. Young Mahan evidently intended a military career from the beginning. After 2 years at Columbia College he entered the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1856, graduating second in his class in 1859.

During the Civil War, Mahan spent most of his time on blockade duty and in the years after the war received a variety of assignments. He became increasingly interested in writing and in 1883 published his first book, The Gulf and Inland Waters, part of the naval history of the Civil War.

Almost immediately thereafter occurred what was probably the decisive event of Mahan's life. He was invited in 1884 to lecture on naval tactics and history at the newly established Naval War College. In outlining his lectures he first formulated the ideas that became the basis of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 (1890). Up to this point in his life, Mahan had believed that the United States should avoid international involvement and concentrate solely on defense. But his study of the influence of sea power changed his views, and he came to the conclusion that strong naval power was essential to maintain national strength. His book attracted favorable attention and established him as an important military thinker. His other major work was The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812 (2 vols., 1892).

Mahan retired in 1896, but during the Spanish-American War he was called to serve on the Naval War Board, an informal advisory body to the secretary of the Navy. After the war he was one of the American representatives to the Hague Disarmament Conference.

Mahan's major influence came from his association with such politicians as John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt, all of whom were committed to American imperial expansion. In his writings Mahan argued that expansion was a military necessity for the United States. It was largely on the basis of Mahan's ideas, for instance, that President Theodore Roosevelt took steps to acquire the Panama Canal for the United States.

In 1912 Mahan accepted a position at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. He died on Dec. 1, 1914.

Further Reading

Mahan's autobiography, From Sail to Steam: Recollections of Naval Life (1907), is essential. The basic biography of Mahan is William D. Puleston, Mahan: The Life and Work of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan (1939). The author, however, is a Navy captain, and his exclusively naval viewpoint should be supplemented with William E. Livezey, Mahan on Sea Power (1947), which contains the essential biographical information while placing Mahan's ideas more correctly in the context of the times.

Additional Sources

Mahan, A. T. (Alfred Thayer), Letters and papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1975.

Seager, Robert, Alfred Thayer Mahan: the man and his letters, Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1977.

Turk, Richard W., The ambiguous relationship: Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan, New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.

For more information on Alfred Thayer Mahan, visit Britannica.com.

(1840-1914), naval strategist and historian. At a time when he was drifting "aimlessly" as a forty-five-year-old naval officer, Mahan recalled, his life was transformed in a Lima, Peru, library; he interpreted Theodor Mommsen's history of Rome to mean that the Roman Empire had been shaped by its control of the sea. Invited to the new U.S. Naval War College to lecture (because of a bland history he wrote on Civil War naval battles), Mahan developed his interpretation into The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 (1890), which became the single most influential book on strategy and foreign policy in his time. He argued that naval power resulted from geographical position, excess production, proper national character, and a supportive government. Enjoying all these characteristics, Americans, "whether they will or no, ... must now begin to look outward," he wrote. "The growing production of the country demands it. An increasing volume of public sentiment demands it."

He strongly influenced key U.S. officials, especially Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt (a close friend), to follow the policies dictated by his insight: continual expansion overseas; the taking of Caribbean islands, Hawaii, the Philippines, and other Pacific territory for bases the navy needed to protect commerce; building an isthmian canal so the fleet and freighters could quickly move ocean to ocean; and, of course, constructing the great navy. The fleet, he preached, must be built around giant battleships that could score decisive victories, not small hit-and-run cruisers on which U.S. naval tactics had long depended. A navy that had ninety small ships (thirty-eight wooden) in 1882 became in the 1890s the Great White Fleet of steam-driven, armor-plated battleships that won the war of 1898 and fought in World War I.

Mahan's history and strategy, spelled out in half a dozen major books after 1890, had other far-reaching implications. Such an expansive policy required a powerful president. Mahan worried that the Constitution's restraints were "a lion in the path" of expansion, and he urged that those limits on presidential power be ignored. Believing that the world was dividing between naval powers (the United States, Great Britain, and Japan) and land powers (especially Russia), he urged the former to unite and defeat the latter, especially in Asia. He was even more admired in Great Britain, Japan, and Germany than in the United States. But when Japan dominated East Asia after defeating Russia in 1905, the Japanese discriminated against U.S. interests. Mahan could only urge Americans to pull back to Hawaii. That was an especially bitter decision, because as a hardened conservative he wanted overseas expansion, not "socialist" redistribution measures (which he hated) to solve the problem of excess U.S. production.

Finally, Mahan believed that modern arms were to prevent war, not wage it: "war now not only occurs more rarely ... [but is] an occasional excess, from which recovery is easy." British historian Charles Webster observed that "Mahan was one of the causes of the First World War." Mahan helped spark a fatal British-German naval race, believing that great bloodshed would never occur. He died just as that bloodshed began.

Bibliography:

William E. Livezey, Mahan on Seapower (1980); Robert Seager III, Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man and His Letters (1977).

Author:

Walter LaFeber

See also Armed Forces; Expansion, Continental and Overseas.

(məhăn') , 1840–1914, U.S. naval officer and historian, b. West Point, N.Y. A Union naval officer in the Civil War, he later lectured on naval history and strategy at the Naval War College, Newport, R.I., of which he was president (1886–89, 1892–93). Out of his lectures grew his two major works on the historical significance of sea power—The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890) and The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812 (2 vol., 1892). In these he argued that naval power was the key to success in international politics; the nation that controlled the seas held the decisive factor in modern warfare. Mahan's work appeared at a time when the nations of Europe and Japan were engaged in a fiercely competitive arms race. His books were quickly translated into several languages and were widely read by political leaders, especially in Germany, where they were used as a justification for a naval buildup. In the United States, Theodore Roosevelt and other proponents of a big navy and overseas expansion were much influenced by Mahan's writings. Among his many works are biographies of David Farragut and Horatio Nelson and the autobiographical From Sail to Steam (1907, repr. 1968).

(1840-1914)

1890

The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. Mahan's theory of naval power, developed in lectures at the Naval War College and presented in this study and its continuation, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812 (1892), is credited with the growth of the American navy, the maintenance of Britain's naval superiority, and Germany's drive to match England's superiority.

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