When did the British assume naval dominance? I've heard three conflicting dates. Which one is true?

When did the British assume naval dominance? I've heard three conflicting dates. Which one is true?

-Nine Years' War (1688-1697)
-War of Jenkins' Ear (1739-1748)
-Seven Years' War (1756-1763)

1812.

Some time in the mid 1700's. Prior to this, the Dutch's was better.

The 7 years war was when Britain really became a great power in the European theater.

Probably the War of the Spanish succession with the capture of Gibraltar and Mahon.

This is also pretty difficult. I always read that first the Spanish had the most powerful navy, then the Dutch in mid 17th century then France then the British but when?
According to The Isles: A History it was Beachy Head (1690). According to The Emergence of Britain's Naval Supremacy it was the War of Jenkins' Ear and almost everybody else keeps citing Seven Years' War.

Trafalgar
In the late 18th century they werent dominant as the French navy managed to cut the 13 colonies from Britain, thus isolating the troops in America and forcing them to surrender

Had Britain been dominant on the sea, they would have won the US revolution

>In the late 18th century they werent dominant as the French navy managed to cut the 13 colonies from Britain, thus isolating the troops in America and forcing them to surrender


They weren't completely untouchable, you might mean. But the battle of the Chesapeake sank all of one ship, didn't stop the British from moving around their near 30,000 troops they had in the vicinity of New York, or even slow down the pace of the war in the Carribean.

The French navy didn't "cut the 13 colonies from Britain", they won one battle and cut off one army in one city for a limited amount of time, preventing an evacuation by sea.

Ok I got it wrong. The English lost Beachy Head obviously (that's why you don't hear about it so often) but apparently following the war the French began investing more in ground troops thus allowing the British to assume the dominance in the coming decades.

French Revolution maybe.

The Revolutionaries didn't have any interest in the french navy, it was considered as the king's toy (which is true actually, it existed and was powerful mainly cause the guy liked to play with it) and France lost almost all it's naval power. Lost the funding, lost the manpower...
They still had some leftover for a time, they relied on private ships (long tradition of seamen in some cities, with people like Surcouf...), but that's it. It was the shadow of it's former self. So the brits became almost unchallenged.

No. Long before the French revolution.

In the American Revolutionary War, HALF the British fleet held off against the combined French, Spanish and Dutch fleets.

So it must be Seven Years War with War of Jenkins' Ear serving as the foundations.
Seven Years War was definitely the point of colonial dominance for Britain.

Colonial dominance? No.

This is an American meme to make them seem more powerful than they really were. The Spanish dominated colonialism by 500 miles. The British held Naval dominance but little else, and the land army was smaller than average and far less well funded as the French or Prussians.

Better question: when did Britain's naval dominance end? 1918 or 1941?

They stopped having the LARGEST navy around the end of ww2.

They stopped being able to take on every other navy at once in around 1926.

Germans were close in WWI but never surpassed them.
So probably in the 1930s.

Not him, but earlier than that, I would think. 20th century Britain has this hugely vulnerable network of cargo shipping all over the world. They could do better than the tonnage ratio suggested against Germany because Germany had extremely limited ability to break out and project force out of the North Sea. Someone like France, even though they had a smaller navy by tonnage, could present more of a threat because a few battleships or cruisers based in Africa needs a lot more to cover them than blockading the North Sea.

Everybody talks about the Spanish Empire from the 16th century. For some time they were also merged with Portugal.

But for some reason they stopped being a first rate power later on.

Obviously they had to spread their forces out more.

But in number and quality, Britain were unmatched.

>for some reason they stopped being a first rate power later on.

generation after generation of Hapsburg mismanagement

They fell behind in the economy and population of France, and were reduced to being France's little bitch.

They also lost colonial monopoly in the early 17th century.

The monopoly they got from the pope? Shame the reformation happened and nobody cared anymore.

Yeah, exactly, that's what I meant.

Thirty years war really sealed the deal of no one taking him seriously anymore.

Austria-Hungary had the best navy prior to ww1

And after the war of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714)

"The Royal Navy emerged from the war twice the size of the French fleet. This
was largely because of the collapse of the French navy in the middle of the
war. The structure of the British fleet had also changed so that besides the
great ships of the line with three gun decks that formed the backbone of the
battlefleet in home waters, there were more two-deck, 70-gun ships, better
suited for sustained operations in distant waters.11 Allied to the Dutch, the
British achieved an overwhelming advantage at sea. After the peace there was
no power that could match the British Royal Navy."

Interesting. Unless the French Navy was rebuilt and could much the Royal Navy but the middle of the 18th century.