Admiral John (Jacky) Fisher radically transformed the Royal Navy in terms of its people, doctrine, equipment and structures. Dr Richard Dunley explains how.

Few service chiefs have had such a profound effect on their service as Admiral of the Fleet, Baron Fisher of Kilverstone, Chief of the British Royal Navy in 1904-1910, and again in 1914-1915, before resigning in frustration over Churchill's Gallipoli campaign.

Joining a wooden-hulled, sail-powered Royal Navy at the age of 13, by the time he retired aged 74, his Service was operating steel-hulled, oil-powered and technologically advanced battleships, with submarine and aviation arms. He was at the forefront of many of these reforms, but his impact went beyond the technology, overseeing profound changes in naval strategy (working alongside Julian Corbett - Season 1, Episode 1), doctrine, force disposition, personnel and training. Like other great strategic leaders, he was adept at shaping the political environment, securing for the Royal Navy the lion's share of the defence budget. Yet his legacy is mixed - his Royal Navy was undoubtedly a stronger, more capable fighting force but, according to our guest, was institutionally damaged and divided, and took some time to recover.

Dr Richard Dunley is a senior lecturer in history and maritime strategy at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, where he teaches at the Australian Defence Force Academy. His research focuses on the relationship between navies and technology, with a particular emphasis on the Royal Navy in the early 20th century.

Professor Charles Forsdick tells the story of Toussaint Louverture, who led Haiti’s successful and highly adaptive slave revolt against the 18th century’s great powers.

Toussaint Loverture was a force of nature. A former slave, he led the revolt in Saint Domingue between 1791– 1802 that resulted in Haitian independence. As a self-taught military commander, he was ever present in the fight, adapting his tactics, employing psychological warfare techniques and harnessing the island’s tropical diseases to degrade the French occupying forces. A man of contradictions, he was variously a Spanish monarchist and a French republican who played the great powers of Britain, France, Spain and the United States to secure the space and resources for his revolution to succeed.

Despite leading one of the only successful slave revolts in history, he was less successful as a ruler, where the traits that made him such a great military leader, isolated him from his people. Internal divisions within the revolutionary army led to his capture by Napoleon’s forces and death in captivity in France a few months before Haiti achieved full independence in 1803. For this reason, the Haitian’s know him as ‘the Precursor’ and reserve the title, ‘Liberator’, for one of his lieutenants, Dessalines.

Professor Charles Forsdick is the Drapers Chair of French at the University of Cambridge. He writes extensively about post-colonial memory in Francophone countries, and is the co-author of Toussaint Louverture, A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolution, with Christian Høgsbjerg published by Pluto Press in 2017.

Jean-Marc Lieberherr examines Jean Monnet’s vital role in securing US arms for Britain and France during the Second World War and in driving international cooperation.

A committed internationalist, long before becoming one of the founding fathers of the EU, Jean Monnet played a crucial role in enabling cooperation between countries in two world wars. As a member of the Executive Committee of the Allied Maritime Transport Council during the First World War, he helped coordinate shipping between the Allied powers of France, Great Britain, Italy and, from 1918, the US, before becoming the Deputy Secretary General of the League of Nations in 1919.

During the subsequent world conflagration, , Monnet, trusted by Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, coordinated arms procurement from the US through the Anglo-French Co-Ordinating Committee, the British Purchasing Committee and the Combined Production and Resources Board. According to economist John Maynard Keynes, Monnet’s work shortened that war by one year.

After 1945, Monnet continued seeking internationalist solutions, connecting the French and German markets under the European Coal and Steel Community. Seeing how the principles of cooperation could be applied more broadly, he advocated for a European Defence Community during the Korean War. While this attempt at European defence integration failed, his work inspired the founding treaties of the EU. He became the first ‘Honorary Citizen of Europe’ in 1976.

Jean-Marc Lieberherr is the founding chairman of the Jean Monnet Institute (JMI), which is devoted to promoting Monnet’s historical heritage. Before creating the JMI in 2021, he had a career with large international groups such as LVMH, Unilever and Rio Tinto.

Further Reading

Jean Monnet, Memoirs (London: Harper Collins, 1978).

François Duchêne, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (New York, NY: W W Norton, 1994).

Robert R Nathan, ‘An Unsung Hero of World War II’, in Douglas Brinkley and Clifford Hackett (eds), Jean Monnet: The Path to European Unity (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 1991).

W W Rostow, ‘Jean Monnet: The Innovator As Diplomat’ in Gordon A Craig and Francis L Loewenheim (eds), The Diplomats, 1939-1979 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 257–88.

Sherrill Brown Wells, Jean Monnet: Unconventional Statesman (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner, 2011).

Institut Jean Monnet Website, available at: https://institutjeanmonnet.eu/en/.