War After Napoleon To World War Ii
...the world looked favorably upon options for peace. The greatest sea power of the time was Britain, and with the goal of controlling the free trade, the island country looked to make the waters more advantageous. The British government realized that a countries wealth was not going to be possessed by an expanding empire, but by the profitable growth of commercial trade. The oceans were looked at as a boulevard to other markets for supplies and for sales.
The long period of peace was due to the British navy being out on the oceans and controlling waters for it's lines of communication. The industrial age brought about a need for different countries to work together in order to maintain each other's call for supplies. With the British having the greatest navy, they were able to control where and who was granted access to the waters.
During the American Civil War the North explored a tactic of economic warfare by a blockade of ships against the South in order to prevent the transportation of goods to the non-industrial geographical location. It was soon discovered that the stronger ironclad ships could withstand a tremendous amount of firepower from another vessel, and by the end of the nineteenth century the tactics of controlling the waters included submersible vessel that were used to either go around, or under, or to engage the hull of another vessel.
In the nineteenth century a military theorist named Carl von Clausewitz studied extensively every lesson that had been learned up to that point about war and produced a written thesis, On War. His writings pointed to the actual reasons behind war: The total submission of the opposition. Furthermore, Clausewitz defined the execution of war as an extension of political conference and the goal of this confrontation is the extinction of the opposition. Granted the total annihilation of another group...
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