Common use of Thesis Contribution Clause in Contracts

Thesis Contribution. This thesis provides a critical missing component in the historiography of Britain’s naval aviation during the First World War. This thesis contextualizes the relationship of the RNAS within the Royal Navy, and demonstrates how practitioners and their senior administrators interacted to shape naval aviation policy. The fractured nature of the existing historiography, outlined below in the Literature Review (Chapter Two), has hitherto prevented this important contextualization, and the result is that the RNAS has always been perceived as a local contributor to isolated aspects of the naval war, more often than not relegated to subsidiary consideration. This thesis argues that the RNAS and the Air Department were at the centre of events, playing critical, and in some cases decisive, roles within Britain’s overall war effort. To approach the study of naval aviation’s origins, or even the First World War more generally, without factoring in the RNAS and the Air Department is to generate a distorted perspective. This thesis seeks to correct that error.