Julian Corbett

Sir Julian Stafford Corbett (born November 12, 1854 in Lambeth , † November 21, 1922 in Stopham , Sussex ) was a British naval historian and naval strategist . He had a role in England similar to that of Alfred Thayer Mahan in the USA and, like him, classified maritime strategy into more comprehensive considerations of a political and economic nature.

Corbett was the son of the London architect Charles Joseph Corbett, attended Marlborough College and studied law at Cambridge University ( Trinity College ) from 1873 to 1876 . He finished with top marks. He then became a lawyer, which he gave up in 1882 to travel and become a writer. This was also made possible by the fact that he was inherently wealthy. He visited India, the United States and much of Europe. He wrote both novels (for example about Francis Drake ) and non-fiction books about British naval history, including a biography of Francis Drake and about the beginnings of the Royal Navy in Elizabethan times, and gave for the Navy Records Society (of which he became a member in 1893) and sponsored by the naval historian John Knox Laughton out British documents on the war against the Spanish from 1585 to 1587. Corbett was also a correspondent for the Pall Mall Gazette . He also became a leading and influential writer in the Royal Navy on naval strategy. From 1902 he taught at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich and in 1903 he held the Ford Lectures in English History at Oxford. In 1905 he became the unofficial strategic advisor to the Admiralty and secretary in the Cabinet Historical Office.

He advised the British Admiralty in World War I and wrote the official history of the Royal Navy in World War I (Naval Operations, 3 volumes).

In 1914 he received the Chesney Gold Medal from the Royal United Services Institute . In 1917 he was knighted as a Knight Bachelor .

The University of London annually awards the Julian Corbett Prize in Naval History.

Fonts

• Monk , Macmillan 1889 (English Men of Action)
• Francis Drake, Macmillan 1890 (English Men of Action)
• Drake and the Tudor Navy, with a history of the rise of England as a maritime power, London: 2 volumes, Longmans, Green 1899
• Editors: Papers Relating to the Spanish War, 1585–87, Navy Records Society, No. 11, 1898
• Publisher: Sir William Slyngsbie's 'Relation of the Voyage to Cadiz 1596', in John Knox Laughton (Editor), Naval Miscellany, Navy Records Society, no.20
• Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816, Navy Records Society, No. 29, 1905, Project Gutenberg
• Views of the Battles of the Third Dutch War, Signals and Instructions, 1776-1794, Navy Records Society, no.34
• The Private Papers of George, 2nd Earl Spencer , 2 volumes, Navy Records Society, No. 46, 48, 1913 (the first two volumes, continued by Admiral Herbert Richmond, with whom Corbett was a close friend)
• The Successors of Drake, London: Longmans, Green 1900
• England in the Mediterranean; a study of the rise and influence of British power within the Straits 1603-1713, 2 volumes, London: Longmans, Green, 1904
• England in the Seven Years' War: a study in combined strategy, Longmans, Green 1907
• The Campaign of Trafalgar, 2 volumes, London: Longman 1910, 1919, Reprint AMS Press, New York 1976
• Maritime Operations in the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–1906, 2 volumes, 1915 (then secret, published 1994, US Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, publisher John Hattendorf )
• Some principles in naval strategy, London, Longmans, Green 1911, new edition in the Classics of Sea Power series, US Naval Institute Press, Annapolis 1988, editor Eric J. Grove, Project Gutenberg
• with Henry Newbolt : Naval Operations, 3 volumes, Longmans, Green 1920, 1921, 1923 (he died before the completion of the third volume, which was completed by Newbolt)
• The League of Nations and freedom of the seas, Oxford University Press 1918

Novels:

• The Fall of Asgard , New York: Harper and Brothers 1886
• For God and Gold , 1887
• Kophetua the Thirteenth , Macmillan 1889
• A Business in Great Waters

literature

• Geoffrey Callender , entry in the older Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , edited in the newer edition by James Goldrick
• Donald M. Schurman The Education of a Navy: the development of British Naval Strategic Thought, 1867-1914 , University of Chicago Press 1965
• DM Schurman Julian S. Corbett, 1854-1922: historian of British maritime policy from Drake to Jellicoe , London: Royal Historical Society 1981
• John Hattendorf : Sir Julian Corbett on the Significance of Naval History , 1971, Reprint 2000
• James Goldrick, John B. Hattendorf (editors): Mahan is Not Enough, The Proceedings of a Conference on the Works of Sir Julian Corbett and Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond , Newport: Naval War College Press 1993
• Michael Handel Corbett, Clausewitz and Sun Tzu , Naval War College Review 2000
• Uwe Dirks: Against the Zeitgeist, Julian S. Corbet and his maritime strategy , In: Schiff Classic , DGSM magazine , edition: 7/2019, pp. 24–26.

Web links

• The Work Of Sir Julian Corbett In The Dreadnought Era Article (English) with portrait photo, accessed November 2, 2018.
• ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: Navy Records Society )