passages. This sentence is about a man in a whaleboat being pulled by a harpooned whale: “Predisposed, he now underwent that of an astounding reality, a voluptuousness no longer funereal but light, with the awareness that there was nothing of importance other than this minute in which he was harnessing to his life the most legendary creature in the universe.” This sentence begins with a jumble of awkward words, and then almost untangles itself near the end to make some kind of sense. For anyone who can get past the idea that comics are only for kids, this volume provides satisfying tales of the dangers and excitement of a life at sea. Patrick O’Brien Baltimore, Maryland American Sea Power in the Old World: The United States Navy in European and Near Eastern Waters, 1865–1917 by William N. Still Jr. (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2018, 304pp, illus, biblio, notes, index, isbn 978-1-59114-618-6; $24.95pb) The Naval Institute Press has reprinted an important naval history invaluable to understanding how the US relationship to Europe and the Middle East evolved. Dr. Still covers the Navy’s transition from a minor power at the end of the Civil War to a world power at sea as World War I loomed. He begins post-Civil War, when five scattered wooden ships flew the US flag and asserted American interests, through the expansion that created the New Steel Navy, to the brink of World War I with a navy prepared for active combat. Throughout the book, Still details the prominent sailors, politicians, and diplomats who effected change, in pithy vignettes and well-chosen quotations. He narrates the give-and-take between Washington and commanding officers abroad. As American foreign trade flourished, America opinion grew in favor of a modern navy. The New Steel Navy, built in the 1880s and 1890s, both supported and was driven by commercial expansion. Wooden holdovers from a previous era were retired, and more modern warships became ever more frequent visitors to European waters. Recurring themes include: protecting merchants, missionaries, and favored groups; the growing economic importance
of the European and Middle East markets and cooperation with other navies; shortages of ships and resources; and the importance of representing American interests in times of crisis, sometimes threatening or even blowing up locals who mistreated Americans or individuals who supported the United States. An unexpected influence drove much of the action—American Christian church and missionary societies came to influence naval movements and actions in the Mediterranean. Dr. Still returns to this driving action in several chapters, developing the story. American churches acted in concert to carry their evangelizing message abroad, sending hundreds of missionaries to the Near East, particularly Ottoman Turkey and the Levant. Those missionaries wrote frequently to their sponsors, detailing the difficulties they faced, sometimes including stories of real or imagined atrocities. Church leaders responded by demanding naval intervention in favor of their interests. The American belief that they had a right to interfere in internal affairs of Ottoman and other Muslim nations was based on international agreements related to extraterritoriality, the idea that non-Muslims and their employees were outside the law and that they should administer their own laws to their own citizens. Over time, extraterritoriality was stretched and abused. When missionaries wrote that their native Christian flocks and native Jews were under pressure or attack, it was considered that they had a right to extraterritorial naval protection. Dr. Still explains how that laid the groundwork for humanitarian relief efforts around the Mediterranean when riots, massacres, and pogroms erupted. Shipboard guns and Marine Corps landings saved lives when anti-Christian rioting in Egypt forced multiple European warships to provide shelter to refugees afloat. Again in the 1890s, a widespread Armenian revolutionary movement sparked repeated and increasing murder of Armenian Christians and destruction of churches all over Ottoman Turkey. US warships shuttled about working with, and sometimes against, US diplomats to save lives and ease tensions. The Turkish crisis might have led to war, but did not.
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