title: Recognising the German Challenge: The Royal Navy 1898–1904
abstract: The opening years of the twentieth century are now a controversial period for historians of the Royal Navy; but this was not always so. In the traditional canon of naval history, as first articulated in scholarly fashion by E. L. Woodward in 1935 and by Arthur Marder in 1940, the story was a straightforward one. The appointment of Rear Admiral Alfred Tirpitz as state secretary at Germany's Imperial Navy Office, leading as it did to the passage of the First and, more especially, the Second German