Old Britannia
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The Naval Arms Race
🕑 Added 2025-03-28 16:59:00 +0000 UTCPatrons,
This will first be available for Bismarck tier's and above. All other tiers in a day or so.
I hope you enjoy the next part in this Road to WWI Series, this time looking at the Naval Arms Race. I'd considered looking at the People's Budget and the way Britain paid for the extra expenditure in this chapter, but I found it distracted from the Naval Arms Race itself too much. I'll have to see if I can slot it in later on in the series.
Thanks for your support as ever, next up: Agadir 1911!
Comments
Old Britannia
Thanks Gleem, glad you're enjoying them! The maps I make myself unfortunately, so I can't really point you to a template, but thank you for the compliment on the colours! Making them isn't really too difficult if you watch Dr Ludwig's tutorials on YouTube.
Gleem
Fantastic video as always, was wondering what map you use your for videos. The black and grey looks great.
Old Britannia
Thanks Ethan, really means a lot you like it!
Ethan Baria
Love this series.
Old Britannia
Yeah finances I’m going to discuss in the Armaments chapter. It’s interesting because whilst all of the Great Powers obviously had poorer populations than today, they all had extremely strong balance sheets by todays standards. It’s not really like the 1930’s arms race where one power was clearly about to run out of money. Having said that it’s all relative. The French get left in the dust by German spending increases after 1912, Austria is stuck in a bizarre relationship with the Hungarians that permanently kneecapped military spending etc. Russia’s probably the most interesting because it’s becoming so powerful in 1914. It’s reforms after 1905 are extensive and gives it a lot of cash to play with. The French loans are actually overstated by 1914 imo. The Russians are financing their own expansion by this point, outspending the Germans on their navy from 1912 for example. The French loan is actually quite small in relative terms and just meant for strategic railway building in Poland.
Lovable Snowman
You really do lay out just how short sighted, stupid and futile the naval arms race was from the German perspective. Just when you mentioned the Germans inability to borrow as much as the British I'm wondering will there be an episode on the finances of the powers before the war? As I understand it France had given Russia extremely large and extremely generous loans and Germany was already heading into some financial difficulty before the war began
