The strategic and trade protection implications of Anglo- Australian maritime trade 1885-1942

This thesis sets out an original approach to understanding the protection of maritime trade on which the British Empire depended, using the case study of the Anglo-Australian strategic and economic relationship. The chronological parameters of 1885 and 1942 are driven by this Anglo-Australian connection. 1885 saw Colonial concurrence on sharing the burden of trade protection. 1942 marks the collapse of the Imperial trade protection strategy in Asia. The main themes are how trade protection was developed into a global structure during WWI and institutionalised post-war as a shared responsibility. The Anglo-Australian strategic relationship is used because Australia was the only Dominion to enter into a trade protection burden-sharing relationship with Britain. No other work has examined the strategic and trade protection implications of maritime trade from this perspective. This thesis fills a gap in historical knowledge concerning a fundamental maritime capability; the protection of maritime trade. It uses the Anglo-Australian strategic, maritime, cultural and economic relationship as a case study to illustrate how an efficient global trade protection system was developed during the general war which ended the first globalisation. WWI destroyed the globalised maritime trading system which had developed by 1914. The system was elastic, failing gradually enough to be replaced by centralised state control. Less efficient, state control enabled a damaged maritime trade system to meet the minimal demands of the Empire’s civil and war economies as well as those of the Empire’s allies. Imperial sea power denied the Central Powers use of the world-ocean and swiftly defeated the raiding cruisers. A new submarine threat arose yet the trade protection system was developed through stages to defeat this as well. This system, called Naval Control of Shipping (NCS), was institutionalised post-1918 by both the RN and RAN as part of a global exercise in ‘burden sharing’ between the UK and its Dominions. It was refreshed after the strategic shock of the 1931 Manchurian Crisis, activated during the 1938 Munich Crisis and mobilised smoothly across the world in 1939. Again in 1939 the NCS system enabled the British to centrally control and protect their global maritime trade and to defeat the German raider and submarine threats