This is essentially a case study of keeping a military force relevant in the face of past capital investments and financial limitations, as the author examines how the Royal Navy dealt with being saddled with a fleet of increasingly obsolescent ships of possibly limited strategic relevance. The point being that even if a technologically superior means of projecting military power had been available for most of the period, it's also unlikely that the British government would have been able to afford it. The bottom line is that the Royal Navy can be demonstrated not to be a force that shunned strategic reality out of a desire to preserve a preferred means of waging war; though the tradition of close blockade was still close to the hearts of many naval officers. ( )