The Napoleonic Wars and the British Empire

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815) were the defining military conflicts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Britain’s persistent opposition to French power, the Royal Navy’s dominance of the world’s sea lanes, the British Army’s role in the Peninsular Campaign, and the ultimate defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 marked the empire’s coming of age as a global military power. The wars also produced a major restructuring of the imperial map, including the British acquisition of the Cape Colony, Ceylon, Mauritius, Trinidad, Malta, and various other territories that would form the core of the “second” British Empire for the rest of the nineteenth century.

The Napoleonic Wars are, in the judgment of the historian David Gates, “the moment when the British Empire found the shape it would keep until 1914.” The Navy made the Empire defensible; the Army made it respectable; the conquests of 1806–10 made it profitable. The settlement of 1815 was, in Gates’s phrase, “a peace designed to last a hundred years, and it lasted just under that.”

The Outbreak of War

War between Britain and Revolutionary France began in February 1793, following the French execution of Louis XVI and the opening of the Scheldt to French shipping. Britain, in coalition with most of the other European powers, was determined to contain French expansion.

The Royal Navy and the Battle of Trafalgar

The British commitment to the naval war was the most decisive strategic choice of the period. From 1793 to 1815, the Royal Navy, sustained by the Navigation Acts, kept the French and allied fleets blockaded in their ports. The Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 was the climactic event. Admiral Lord Nelson, in HMS Victory, attacked the combined Franco-Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar, breaking the enemy line in a manoeuvre now taught in every naval academy. Nelson was killed; Britain had won a strategic supremacy it would hold for the rest of the nineteenth century. As Nelson’s last signal, “England expects that every man will do his duty,” was being hoisted, the combined fleet was approaching in two lines; by sunset, nineteen of the enemy ships had struck their colours and the British had lost not a single vessel. It was, in the judgment of the naval historian Nicholas Rodger, “a victory that was decisive, complete, and never to be repeated.”

The Peninsular War (1808–1814)

The Peninsular War was the longest and most demanding land campaign of the Napoleonic Wars for Britain. It began when Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808 and a British expeditionary force under Sir John Moore was sent to support the Spanish insurgents. Moore died at the Battle of Corunna in January 1809, but a second expedition under Sir Arthur Wellesley, soon Duke of Wellington, won a series of hard-fought victories and finally drove the French from Spain in 1813, before crossing into southern France. Wellington’s defence of Portugal behind the Lines of Torres Vedras in 1810–11 is a textbook of Fabian strategy. The war was supported by a substantial contribution of Portuguese troops under British command.

The Walcheren Campaign and the War of 1812

The Walcheren Campaign of 1809 was a disastrous attempt to seize the French fleet in the Scheldt. Some 40,000 British troops were landed on the island of Walcheren, where most of them fell sick; 11,000 were eventually hospitalised, and the expedition was withdrawn in December 1809. The War of 1812 with the United States, fought largely in Canada and at sea, ended inconclusively with the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814, but the defence of Canada against American invasion was a substantial British achievement.

The Hundred Days and Waterloo

Napoleon’s escape from Elba in March 1815 and his return to Paris forced the allies to reconstitute the Seventh Coalition. Wellington, with a multinational force of British, Dutch, Belgian, and German troops, took up a position near Waterloo in Belgium, in concert with Blücher’s Prussians. The Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815 was a close-run affair. The arrival of the Prussians in mid-afternoon turned the battle; the failure of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard to break Wellington’s line broke the French. The victory ended the Napoleonic Wars once and for all, and exiled Napoleon to St Helena. Wellington, in his dispatch to Lord Bathurst, called the day “a battle of giants” — and the British Empire, in the long run, the victory of an institution.

Territorial and Strategic Consequences

The wars produced a major reorganisation of the British Empire. The most important acquisitions were the Cape Colony, taken from the Netherlands in 1806 to secure the sea route to India; Ceylon, taken in the same campaign; Mauritius, captured in 1810; Malta, secured in 1800; the West Indian islands of Trinidad and Tobago; and various trading posts in the East Indies. These would form the basis of the “second” British Empire that would expand across Asia and Africa over the next century.

The Legacy of the Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars shaped the international order for the rest of the century. The Concert of Europe, the loose diplomatic system that the great powers used to manage disputes, was a direct product of the war. Within Britain, the wars also entrenched a popular patriotism that would become associated with the imperial project. The scale of wartime mobilisation, including the use of Indian and other colonial troops in major European campaigns, marked an important step in the development of the British military system and the wider imperial administration.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Napoleonic Wars was, for a long time, dominated by the British Whig accounts of the early nineteenth century — the work of Sir Walter Scott and the more popular accounts of J. W. Fortescue. The post-Cold War revisionist literature, led by Brendan Simms, The Impact of Napoleon (2005), and the more recent work of Michael Rowe and the contributors to the Oxford History of the Napoleonic Wars (2015), has produced a more European picture, in which the British role is treated as one of several major contributions. The current debate, exemplified in the writing of the contributors to the English Historical Review, is over how far the Napoleonic Wars were the consequence of British strategic miscalculation and how far they should be read as the inevitable result of the French Revolution.

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