The Navy in the War of 1739-48, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Navy in the War of 1739-48, Vol. 1

The war which lasted from 1739 to 1748 marks a definite phase in English naval history. The seventeenth century, which in an historical sense may be said to have lasted until the peace of Utrecht, had been a period in which the sea had played a supremely important part. It had been a century in which colonial expansion had held the foremost place in the external policy of England. As the sixteenth century had witnessed the discoveries of the Portuguese and Spaniards, and the acquisition by those powers of vast dominions and trading interests oversea, so the following hundred years had seen Holland, England and France stretching out their arms both in the East and in the West. England had become a truly maritime power on a new scale. She had taken her place as a factor to be reckoned with in the Mediterranean, as a colonial power in the West Indies and America and as a trading power in the Far East, where the first year of the century was marked by the establishment of the East India Company. The eighteenth cen tury inherited the effects of this development, which shewed themselves in a struggle, lasting through a series of wars, to decide whether France or the United Kingdom should finally become the great colonial power.

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