Jamison applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Pacific's New Navies: An Ocean, its Wars, and the Making of US Sea Power , and reported the following:
The Page 99 Test works pretty well for this book. In part because page 99 concludes one section and starts another, so it covers a lot of ground. It first deals with Chinese reactions to the Sino-French War (1883-1885). Leaders in Beijing saw defeat in the war as proof of the need for a bigger, better navy. The page hints at the scope and dynamism of that coming naval expansion, as well as its implications for Japan and the United States. Then, page 99 introduces a new section on the professionalization of U.S. naval intelligence in the 1880s, headlined by the founding of the Office of Naval Intelligence (1882). Naval officers and attaches fanned out across the world with a fresh mandate to document the effects of industrialization on foreign navies. Up to that point, intelligence on naval technology wasn’t much of a priority because sailing ships evolved slowly. Indeed, the topic was such a low priority Aflred Thayer Mahan (the most famous strategist in naval history) blew off his intelligence reporting requirements as a young officer–it’s one of my favorite sentences in the book. Because industrialization brought about a rapid and profound shift to warship design in the 1870s (via armor, steam propulsion, torpedoes), intelligence on new weapons became a core concern. Institutions, like the U.S. Navy, adapted accordingly.Learn more about The Pacific's New Navies at the Cambridge University Press website.
The Pacific’s New Navies basically follows the themes set out in page 99: radical technological change, institutional politics, and regional competition. Overall, the book is a comparative story of war and naval racing in the Pacific, and how all that activity was, in turn, interpreted in the United States as a rationale for peacetime naval expansion. In the 1870s and 80s, the United States “Old Navy” demobilized (having won the Civil War, why not!?). That made for unlucky timing just as industrialization ushered in transformative changes in warship design and the makeup of navies: from wood to steel, sail to steam, and unarmored to armored. Many states (like China on page 99) took advantage of these paradigmatic changes to leapfrog generations of investment and development and construct technologically innovative and comparatively powerful fleets, almost overnight. I call these “newly made navies,” hence the book's title. All that was bad news for politicians and naval leaders in the United States. There was so much naval experimentation and development among small states in the Pacific (notably Chile, Peru, Japan, and China) that U.S. military and political leaders–and with them a large swath of the general population–felt compelled to build a “New Navy” of their own to catch up as a matter of security and civilizational prestige. Observation of foreign navies through intelligence officers (as seen on page 99) was key to that process. These officers brought home information from foreign conflicts, and synthesized their observations into professional intelligence products about the state of naval development. As they so often do, intelligence reports doubled as political weapons sharpened to convince skeptics in the United States about just how weak its navy had become relative to regional competitors.
--Marshal Zeringue
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