A large modern navy includes aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, submarines, minesweepers and minelayers, gunboats, and various types of support, supply, and repair ships, as well as naval bases and ports.

The east coast coal trade needed many ships, and Hanseatic competition in the shipment of English cloth to the processors in the Low Countries had to be countered. Their rise was closely connected with the power struggles for control of the Greek archipelago and Italy and trade in the Mediterranean Sea.In the Levant, Venice and the Ottomans began to build sailing navies in the 1670s, although information about the latter navy is incomplete. Thus the English victory was that of a new conception of naval battle: the English ships refused to let the Spanish ships get close enough for boarding and pounded them with guns of superior firing capability.

The result was that the personnel provided to man a fleet of those times had to be a considerable one. When in June 1808 Sir Arthur Wellesley (the future Wellington) spoke in Parliament of the navy as ‘the characteristic and constitutional force of Britain’, he was expressing a national sense of obligation to a service which, resolutely administered by Middleton (Barham) since 1778, and liberally provided for by Pitt in the 1780s, had earlier withstood the unprecedented challenges of the American War and had next reaped the laurels of victory under exceptional commanders. What sets Tucker's, The Civil War Naval Encyclopedia, apart is that it combines many of the issues that are covered in these other publications into an easy to navigate, two-volume set.The average size of European ships-ofthe-line grew from around 1,200 modern displacement tonnes in 1680 to 2,400 displacement tonnes in 1790.