Most importantly perhaps, Britain could draw on an ample supply of customers for its goods, both at home and overseas. Its colonies fed it with raw materials while also serving as captive customers. And its expanding population meant buoyant demand at home even in wartime when foreign trade was disrupted. The best illustration of these advantages is the cotton industry. Its Indian settlements supplied Britain with ever-increasing amounts of raw cotton, and annual cloth production soared from 50,000 pieces of cloth in 1770 to 400,000 pieces in 1800. Much of this output in textiles was consumed by the home market. Some scholars have argued that the increased wearing of cotton (which could be easily washed) as distinct from woolen clothes (which could not) improved health conditions, thus contributing to Britain’s population expansion. Britain during the French Revolution
The outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789 initially heightened British national confidence. Some Britons welcomed it in the belief that civil commotion would weaken their prime European competitor. Many others, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft among them, felt confident that revolutionary France would become a new and enlightened state and that this process would in turn accelerate political, religious, and social change in Britain. By contrast, Edmund Burke’s fierce denunciation in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) met with little immediate support, even among the political elite. Only when the new French regime guillotined Louis XVI and threatened to invade Holland did mainstream opinion in Britain begin to change and harden. In February 1793 Britain and France went to war.
There has been much debate over the degree to which British opinion on the war was united. Some historians have argued that Thomas Paine’s best-seller, The Rights of Man (1791–92), fostered mass enthusiasm for democratic reform and mass alienation from Britain’s ruling class. Paine attacked the monarchy, aristocracy, and all forms of privilege, and he demanded not only manhood suffrage and peace but also public education, old-age pensions, maternity benefits, and full employment. While he did not directly advocate a redistribution of property to fund these reforms, some contemporary radicals certainly did. A Newcastle schoolmaster, Thomas Spence, for example, issued a penny periodical, Pig’s Meat (a reference to Burke’s savage description of the British masses as “the swinish multitude”), calling for the forcible nationalization of land.
These developments in radical ideology were made more significant by simultaneous developments in radical organization. In January 1792 a small coterie of London artisans led by a shoemaker, Thomas Hardy, formed a society to press for manhood suffrage. It cost only a shilling to join, and the weekly subscription was set at a penny so as to attract as many members as possible. These plebeian reformers, making use of Britain’s growing communications network, corresponded with similar societies that had sprung up in response to the Revolution in the English provinces and in Scotland. In October 1793 Scottish radicals held what they styled a British Convention in Edinburgh, and a few of the English corresponding societies managed to send delegates there. They issued a manifesto demanding universal manhood suffrage and annual elections and affirming their faith in the principles of the French Revolution.
In terms of the number of men involved, these initiatives were always limited. Corresponding societies were far more widespread in London and the industrial north than in predominantly rural areas such as central Wales. Only a small proportion of rural and industrial labourers, as distinct from artisans, seems to have joined them. Even in the radical bastion of Sheffield (population 31,000) the local corresponding society attracted only 2,000 members, and most of these did not attend its meetings regularly. A minority of these activists were overtly Francophile and some may have wanted a French invasion of Britain and the establishment of a republican regime. Most corresponding-society members, however, seem to have been deeply attached to the British constitution and to have wanted only to reform it. But if these societies were not extensive or proto-revolutionary, they were still important and recognized as such. Contemporaries realized that for the first time in the 18th century working men throughout the nation were beginning to organize to achieve political change.
Pitt’s ministry acted ruthlessly to suppress them. Leading Scottish radicals were arrested and given harsh sentences. In England habeas corpus was temporarily suspended, laws were passed prohibiting public meetings and demonstrations, and Thomas Hardy was tried for treason but acquitted. By 1795 the corresponding societies had formally ceased to meet. A minority of radicals, however, continued to agitate for reform in secret, some of them engaging in sedition. Particularly prominent in this respect were Irish dissidents. By now large numbers of Irish immigrants lived and worked in British towns. Some of them sympathized with the Irish Rising of 1798 and formed secret societies to overturn the government. Several Irish agitators were involved in the Spithead and Nore naval mutinies of 1797 that for a time immobilized the Royal Navy. In 1803 an Irishman and former shipmate of Horatio Nelson, Edward Despard, was executed in London for plotting a coup d’état. Just how dangerous and well-supported these various incidents were is uncertain. But there can be no doubt that successive British wartime administrations felt obliged to devote extensive resources to maintaining order at home. even though they were also fighting an unprecedentedly massive war abroad. The Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars were massive in their geographic scope, ranging, as far as Britain was concerned, over all of the five continents. They were massive, too, in terms of expense. From 1793 to the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 the wars cost Britain more than £1,650,000,000. Only 25 percent of this sum was raised by government loans, the rest coming largely from taxation, not least from the income tax that was introduced in 1798. But the wars were massive most of all in terms of manpower. Between 1789 and 1815 the British army had to expand more than sixfold, to about a quarter of a million men. The Royal Navy, bedrock of British defense, aggression, trade, and empire, grew further and faster still. Before the wars it had employed 16,000 men; by the end of them, it employed more than 140,000. Because there was an acute danger between 1797 and 1805 that France would invade Britain, the civil defense force also had to be expanded. The militia was increased, and by 1803 more than 380,000 men were acting as volunteers in home-based cavalry and infantry regiments. In all, one in four adult males in Britain may have been in uniform by the early 19th century.
Despite these financial and military exertions, British governments found it extremely difficult to defeat France. In part this was because Pitt the Younger’s abilities were more suited to peace than to war. But the main reason the conflict was so protracted was France’s overwhelming military superiority on land. The historian Paul Kennedy has written of British and French power in this period:
Like the whale and the elephant, each was by far the largest creature in its own domain. But British control of the sea routes could not by itself destroy the French hegemony in Europe, nor could Napoleon’s military mastery reduce the islanders to surrender.
The first coalition of anti-French states, consisting of Britain, Russia, Prussia, Spain, Holland, and Austria, disintegrated by 1796. A British expeditionary force to aid Flanders and Holland was defeated, and Holland was occupied by the French. By 1797 the cost of maintaining its own forces and subsidizing those of its European allies had brought Britain to the verge of bankruptcy. For a time the Bank of England suspended payments in cash.