Mahan was one of five American delegates to the first Hague Conference which took place in 1899. As a member of the War Board he advocated the transfer of the Philippine Islands to the USA, a proposal which created a sharp conflict of political opinions. Writing in 1901, he recorded that earlier in his career he had been an ‘anti-imperialist’ but declared that his studies had altered his views, and in 1893 had begun to advocate ‘guardianship’ of the Hawaiian Islands. Mahon retired from the navy in 1896, but was recalled to active duty in 1898 for the Spanish–American War and made a member of the Naval War Board. In May and June 1894 the Chicago was at Gravesend, near London, and Mahan received honorary degrees from both Cambridge and Oxford universities, though at this time he had not received similar honours from any American university. In 1893 Mahan was appointed to command the cruiser Chicago, flagship of the European station. Two years later The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812 was published in two volumes, and the same year he published a biography of Admiral Farragut. His first book, on the Civil War, The Gulf and Inland Waters, had appeared in 1883 and in 1890 The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, based on his lectures at the War College, was published in Boston. Promoted captain in 1885, he served afloat before being appointed president of the Naval War College in 1886 where he had previously lectured. He graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1859, and during the American Civil War (1861–5) served in blockading vessels and as a staff officer. Although his reputation as an imperialist has been overstated, his insistence that the United States must become and remain a sea power is Mahan’s greatest contribution to America’s modern superpower status.US naval officer and strategist, born at West Point. Eventually he published twenty-one books and attained the presidency of the American Historical Association. Mahan retired from active duty in 1895 to write voluminously on the naval, military, and diplomatic issues of his era. Notwithstanding the limits of Mahan’s proposals, contemporary American imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, and Henry Cabot Lodge used Mahan’s basic thesis to justify a more aggressive and acquisitive American expansionism in emulation of England and other leading European powers. His expansionism was strategic and defensive. He did so, however, for security reasons. Mahan argued for a modern naval build-up that would protect America’s coasts–Caribbean, Gulf and Pacific–and he espoused an ishmian canal. Two years later Mahan followed his blockbuster book with a sequel The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812. According to Mahan’s biographer “the book electrified foreign offices and war departments all over the world” and furnished a rationale (unintended by Mahan) for the great naval arms race of the next quarter century. Mahan became college president in 1886 after Luce’s reassignment, and he published his class lecture notes in 1890 under the title The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, a volume that attributed England’s global influence to the power and scope of the Royal Navy. Mahan’s volume The Gulf and Inland Waters impressed Captain Stephen Luce prompting the latter to invite Mahan to lecture on naval history at the newly-established U.S. Naval Academy in 1856, he was selected by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1883 to write a book for their series, The Navy in the Civil War. Despite a less than inspiring career as a naval officer in the quarter-century following his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy.Īdmiral Mahan was a man of contradictions–an army brat who became a navy officer, a brilliant intellectual who disdained formal study, and a captain who was prone to seasickness and hated sea duty. Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), the best known and most influential naval officer of the late 19th century, ironically was born at West Point, the son of Dennis Hart Mahan, a professor of military engineering and dean of faculty at the U.S.
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