A most thorough and scholarly study of the relationship between the post-Civil War American Navy and the mercantile expansionists of that period....The author has succeeded notably in relating the growth of American mercantilism in the 1870s and 1880s to the corresponding development of naval strategy and power in that period. The U.S. was started on the road to empire in those times, and the author tells us how. Scholarly history at its best!