Power And Plenty: Naval Mercantilism, 1905-1908

Abstract Another strand in British blockade planning was the Anglo-German commercial rivalry, or rather, its perception by naval officers. This has to be stressed: commercial rivalry is not in itself a direct cause of war. It works through perceptions and minds. Naval officers had little direct experience of economic affairs, except as rentiers, in possession of portfolios of stocks and bonds. Likely as not, they acquired their economic ideas from the Press. For a decade, ever since the “Made in Germany” scare of 1896, the Press had regarded the rising economic power of Germany as a threat to British economic well-being. Whatever the finer points of analysis, the reality of the challenge was hard to deny.