This book explores the role of the sea in the history of the British Empire, taking in exploration, trade, migration and the navy. Black covers the process of imperial expansion, discusses the challenges posed by Napoleonic France and Imperial and, later, Nazi Germany, and then assesses the causes of imperial decline before considering the role of the navy in the post-imperial age.<BR>Britain's seaborne tradition is used to throw light on the British themselves, the people with whom they came into contact and the British perception of empire. The oceans and their shores, rather than the mysterious interiors of continents, certainly dominated the English perception of the transoceanic world in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, climaxing in the fascination with the Pacific in the age of Captain Cook, and continuing into the nineteenth century, with Franklin in the Arctic and Ross in the Antarctic. The oceans offered much more than fascination. In England, from the late sixteenth century, maritime conflict and imperial strength were seen as important to national morale and reputation and without it there would have been no empire, or at least not in the form it actually took.