Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command: The Classic Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan Reconsidered

2005 Selection for the Marine Corps's Professional Reading List

Between 1890 and 1913, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan published a series of books on naval warfare in the age of sail, which won a wide readership in his own day and established his reputation as the founder of modern strategic history. But Mahan's two principal arguments have been gravely misunderstood ever since, according to Jon Tetsuro Sumida. Instead of representing Mahan as an advocate of national naval supremacy, Sumida shows him asserting that only a multinational naval consortium could defend international trade. Instead of presenting Mahan as a man who adhered to strategic principles, Sumida shows that he stressed the importance of an officer's judgment and character formed by the study of history.

Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command includes a subject index to all Mahan's published books and an extensive bibliography. This is a book for scholars and students of military and strategic thinking and is a natural for libraries of U.S. service academies and U.S. armed services agencies and organizations.

Jon Tetsuro Sumida is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a professional musician. He is the author of In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology, and British Naval Policy, 1889-1914. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 1995-96.