THE COALITIONS AGAINST NAPOLEON: How British Money, Manufacturing and Military Power Forged the Alliances that Achieved Victory

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Britain alone could not hope to defeat the might of Napoleonic France which, through enforced conscription, had become a nation in arms. But British leaders had a long history of forging alliances to counter their rivals and when revolution ravaged France in 1793 and a levee en masse raised a huge patriotic army, it was through a coalition of monarchies that French ambitions were restrained - a coalition made possible by British gold and British industry.

During the years 1793 to 1815, the British Government formed and underwrote seven coalitions that cost Britain 1,657,854,518 pounds as the national debt tripled from 290,000,000 pounds to 860,000,00 pounds . Of that, British subsidies to around thirty allies amounted to 65,830,228 pounds, along with staggering amounts of war supplies mass produced by British factories and shipped to allies.

Britain's power to underwrite those coalitions came from a related series of revolutions - agrarian, mercantile, financial, technological, manufacturing, cultural, and political that developed over the proceeding century. For many reasons that happened in Britain and not elsewhere. Of them, cultural values may be most crucial. Constraints were fewer and incentives greater for enterprising Britons to invest, invent, buy, and sell in ways that enriched themselves and their nation more than elsewhere. During the eighteenth century, Britain's leaders mastered a virtuous power cycle of victorious wars, expanding production, captured territories and markets, and more income.