The British response to these developments was to concentrate on home defense and to consolidate its imperial and naval assets. Britain won a string of important naval victories in 1797, and in 1798 at the Battle of the Nile, Nelson defeated the French fleet anchored off Egypt, thereby safeguarding British possessions in India. Pitt also tried to solve the problem of Ireland. In 1801 the Act of Union took effect amalgamating Ireland with Great Britain and creating the United Kingdom. The Dublin Parliament ceased to exist, and Ireland’s Protestant voters were allowed to return 100 MPs to Westminster. Pitt had hoped to sweeten the union by accompanying it with Roman Catholic emancipation, that is, by allowing Irish Catholics to vote and hold state office if they possessed the necessary property qualifications. George III opposed this concession, however, and Catholics were not admitted to full British citizenship until 1829. Pitt resigned and was succeeded as first minister by Henry Addington, the deeply conservative son of a successful doctor. It was his administration that signed the short-lived Treaty of Amiens with France in 1802.
War broke out again in May 1803. Once again, Britain demonstrated its power at sea but, until 1809, was unable to win substantial victories on land. Its fleet captured St. Lucia, Tobago, Dutch Guiana, the Cape of Good Hope, French Guiana, Java, Martinique, and other West Indian and African territories. Most importantly, in October 1805 Nelson defeated the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar, thereby preventing an invasion of Britain. Napoleon, however, inflicted serious military defeats on the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians and invaded Spain. At one stage Britain’s only remaining European allies were Sweden, Portugal, Sicily, and Sardinia; in short, the country was without any significant allies at all. Political leadership was uneven and sometimes weak, and the long duration of the war and its damaging effects on trade aroused increasing criticism at home. Pitt had resumed his post as chancellor of the Exchequer and first lord of the Treasury in May 1804, but he died worn out by work and drink in January 1806. None of the three men who succeeded him as premier, William Wyndham Grenville, Baron Grenville (1806–07), William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, duke of Portland (1807–09), and Spencer Perceval (1809–12), was able to establish himself in power for very long or to capture the public imagination.
Yet the war began to turn in Britain’s favour in 1809, in large part because of Napoleon’s strategic mistakes. When the Spanish rebelled against French rule, substantial British armed forces were dispatched to assist them under the command of Arthur Wellesley, later duke of Wellington. Spain’s new anti-French posture meant that Spain was once again open to British manufactured goods, as were its colonies in Latin America. For a time this helped to reduce the commercial community’s criticism of the conduct of the war. But demands for peace revived during the slump of 1811–12 and intensified when British relations with the United States, a vitally important market, began to deteriorate. One of the main irritants was the so-called Orders in Council, prohibiting neutral powers (like the United States) from trading with France. In 1812 commercial lobbies in Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, and Birmingham succeeded in getting the orders repealed, an indication of the growing political weight exercised by the manufacturing interest in Britain. Although this failed to prevent the Anglo-American War of 1812, neither Britain’s trade nor its war efforts in Europe was seriously damaged by that conflict. Russia’s break with Napoleon in 1812 opened up large markets for British goods in the Baltic and in northern Europe.
From 1812 onward Napoleon’s defeat was merely a matter of time. In June 1813 Wellington defeated the French army in Spain at Victoria. The forces of Austria, Sweden, Prussia, and Russia expelled the French from Germany in the Battle of Leipzig (October 1813). This victory allowed Wellington, who had already crossed the Pyrenees, to advance upon Bayonne and Toulouse. Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, played the leading part in negotiating the Treaty of Chaumont in March 1814, which clarified allied war aims (including the expulsion of Napoleon), tightened allied unity, and made provision for a durable European settlement. The subsequent squabbles over the spoils of war were interrupted for a time when Napoleon escaped from his genteel exile on Elba and fought his last campaign from March to June 1815. Although his final defeat at Waterloo was accomplished by the allied armies, Britain secured prime credit. This textbook victory was to help Britain dominate Europe and much of the world for the next 100 years. Imperial expansion
Britain’s ultimate success against Napoleon, like its importance in this period as a whole, owed much to its wealth—its capacity to raise loans through its financial machinery and revenue through the prosperity of its inhabitants and the extent of its trade. But British success also owed much to the power of its navy and to the energy and aggressiveness of its ruling class, which was particularly apparent in the imperial expansion of this period. Britain sought to extend its control by legislation, by war, and by individual enterprise. The Acts of Union with Scotland in 1707 and with Ireland in 1801 tightened London’s rule over its Celtic periphery, as did the laws passed to erode the autonomy of the Scottish Highlands after the rebellion of 1745. In the 1760s Britain sought not only to increase the revenue it gained from its North American colonies but also to shore up its military and administrative influence there. These measures failed, but Britain had more success with its Indian possessions. Between 1768 and 1774, in fact, the House of Commons devoted far more time to Indian affairs than to those of North America. Its discussions culminated in the passing of the India Act in 1784, which indicatively increased the government’s authority over the East India Company and therefore over Britain’s possessions in India.
Every major war Britain engaged in during this period increased its colonial power. The Seven Years’ War was particularly successful in this respect, and so were the Napoleonic Wars. Between 1793 and 1815 Britain gained 20 colonies, including Tobago, Mauritius, Malta, St. Lucia, the Cape, and the United Provinces of Āgra and Oudh in India. By 1820 the total population of the territories it governed was 200 million, 26 percent of the world’s total population. Not all of these acquisitions were formally directed by London. Captain James Cook’s explorations of Australia and New Zealand after 1770 were in part an exercise in private enterprise and scientific inquiry. Nonetheless, British settlement of Australia at New South Wales began in 1787, in part because the mother country needed another repository for transported convicts previously sent to the North American colonies. The East India Company also retained considerable initiative in its military strategies. In 1819 Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles seized Singapore for the company and not on London’s instructions. But, however acquired, all these acquisitions added to Britain’s power and reputation. It was no accident, perhaps, that its two national anthems, “God Save the King” and “Rule Britannia,” were composed in this period. For the privileged and the rich, this was preeminently an era of confidence and arrogance. Linda J. Colley Great Britain, 1815–1914 Britain after the Napoleonic Wars State and society
The relationship between state and society in Britain after the Napoleonic Wars assumed the shape that was to remain apparent into the 20th and 21st centuries. In contrast to most other European societies, many of the functions performed by central government elsewhere were performed in Britain by groups of self-governing citizens, either on an elective, but unpaid, official basis, as in the institutions of local government, or through voluntary organizations. Britain in the 19th century did not develop a strong bureaucratic element with interests of its own, a strong sense of popular expectations concerning the role of the state, nor a strong popular sense of identification with it. This understanding of the limited role of government (contemporaries would have used this term rather than the “state”) reflected and served to further entrench what in the 18th century had become a relatively homogeneous and stable society—relative to the great majority of European states, that is. This was particularly so after the integration of Scotland into what was increasingly, with the clear exception of Ireland, a United Kingdom. Internal differences of course remained strong, but, nonetheless, linguistic and geographical unity was paralleled by the increasing integration of communications, seen in the improved road system of the first three decades of the new century, a precursor of the integration later evident in the railway system.