Blood, sweat and tears; How the Napoleonic wars made Britain

Blood, sweat and tears; How the Napoleonic wars made Britain

Nov 23rd 2013 |From the print edition

Britain against Napoleon: The Organisation of Victory, 1793-1815. By Roger Knight. Allen Lane; 678 pages; £30. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

THE role of Britain in the world was transformed by the Napoleonic conflict. By the time France declared war in 1793 the British empire was in decline; it had lost its North American colonies a decade earlier. But after Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 Britain emerged as the world’s pre-eminent superpower. How did it overcome its previous setbacks to inflict a crushing defeat on Napoleon’s France? Historians have tended to explain this in terms of military and naval strategy. But “Britain against Napoleon”, a new book by Roger Knight of the University of Greenwich, argues that Britain was just far better at organising its war effort.Its triumph could be ascribed to the fact that it was able to mobilise its political and economic resources more effectively than France did. Reforms improved political decision-making and Britain’s civil servants became “men of business”. State-controlled defence industries were run more efficiently and production costs were cut, thanks to innovations in manufacturing. Factories that were opened in 1807 to make sailing blocks for the Royal Navy are often cited as the world’s first standardised mass-production line.

The British economy made a vital contribution. If British industry and shipping had been unable to supply the nation’s and the allies’ armed forces, the war could not have been won. The unprecedented scale of British smuggling overwhelmed Napoleon’s attempt to stop Britain trading with continental Europe. The City of London also played a significant role. Financiers such as Nathan Rothschild helped fund the national debt, which swelled by £578m (about £36 billion in today’s money) to over 200% of GDP by the end of the war. Britain paid its allies £66m, chiefly Austria and Russia, without which they would have been unable to stay in the war.

But the path to victory was not smooth. Britain was nearly invaded several times and the strains of financing the war nearly brought down the economy at two critical periods, in 1796-98 and 1807-12. Riots, the result of high food prices during the war, put pressure on the political classes. Even the outcome of Waterloo hung in the balance. The Duke of Wellington later commented that it was “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life”.

Mr Knight concludes that the conflict between Britain and France was a “total” war. The scale of the mobilisation of resources on the home front, the use of blockades as economic warfare and the threat of invasion all share similarities with Britain’s experience of the two world wars. The conflict was between two contrasting industrial economies and political systems, a contest Britain won through better organisation of its resources.

The book’s narrow focus on British elites is both a strength and a weakness. Mr Knight has made good use of political and government sources, but there is scant coverage of wider society, which weakens his broader case. Unlike later “total” conflicts, contemporary literature depicts Regency society as curiously unchanged by war. In 1940 Virginia Woolf noted that writers such as Jane Austen depicted a world that was unaffected by the Napoleonic wars in a way inconceivable to Britons during the second world war. “Wars then were remote,” she mused nostalgically. Mr Knight should have looked at how ordinary people organised themselves to defeat Napoleon, rather than just the “politicians, public servants, naval and army officers” he focuses on. Total wars are fought by the masses—not just the political classes