British Naval Policy,Policy-Makers and Financial Control,1860-1945

Abstract

In the early nineteenth-century Admiralty there was little policy-making, policy-makers were few and the word ‘policy’ was scarcely ever used. At least in peacetime, economy was the default principle of action. Only by a century later had something approximating the modern pattern emerged. The growth from the 1880s of better internal Admiralty financial control was an important causal factor. It sponsored the development of a bureaucratic organization concerned with financial policy-making, anticipating here the similar development in the planning of naval strategy and construction. Moreover, it encouraged Admiralty civil servants to involve themselves in wider matters of policy. Also relevant are attempts made by the Treasury, principally between the two world wars, to enforce more external financial controls, though these were against the background of fundamental defence problems that themselves greatly aided the concentration of minds.