Paul Kennedy - The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Compared with these epic events, the Anglo-American war of 1812–14 was a strategical sideshow. 94 Economically, it might have been far more serious to British interests had it not coincided with the collapse of the Continental System, and had not the New England states, largely dependent upon Anglo-American trade, remained lukewarm (and often neutral) in the conflict. The proclaimed ‘march on Canada’ by American forces soon petered out, and both on land and at sea – despite the raids upon York (Toronto) and Washington, and some impressive single-ship frigate actions – each side demonstrated that it could hurt but not defeat the other. To the British in particular, it showed the importance of the American trades and it revealed the difficulties of maintaining large military and naval establishments overseas at the same time as the armed services were desperately required in the European theatre. As was the case in India, transoceanic possessions and commerce were simultaneously a strengthening of Britain’s power position and a strategical distraction. 95

Napoleon’s final campaign of March to June 1815, while certainly not a sideshow, was a strategical footnote to the great war in Europe. 96 His sudden return to France from exile interrupted the quarrels of the victors over the future of Poland, Saxony, and other lands, but it did not shake the alliance. Even if the hastily assembled French force had not been defeated by Wellington and Blücher at Waterloo, it is difficult to see how it could have resisted the other armies which were being diverted toward Belgium, and still more difficult to see how France could have economically sustained a long war thereafter. Nevertheless, Napoleon’s last escapade was important politically. It reinforced Britain’s position in Europe and strengthened the argument that France needed to be surrounded by an array of strong ‘buffer states’ in the future. It demonstrated Prussia’s military recovery after Jena, and thus partly readjusted the balances in eastern Europe. And it compelled all the powers at Vienna to bury their remaining differences in order to achieve a peace which would enshrine the principles of the balance of power. 97 After two decades of near-constant war and well over a century of Great Power tensions and conflict, the European states system was at last being fashioned along lines which ensured a rough equilibrium.

The final Vienna settlement of 1815 did not, as the Prussians had once suggested, partition France. It did, however, surround Louis XVIII’s domain with substantial territorial units – the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the north, an enlarged Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont) to the southeast, and Prussia in the Rhineland; while Spain, returned to the Bourbons, was guaranteed in its integrity by the powers. Farther east, the idea of a balance of power was also implemented, after heated quarrels between the victors. Because of Austrian objections, Prussia was not permitted to swallow Saxony and instead accepted compensation in Posen and the Rhineland, just as Austria was compensated in Italy and in parts of southeastern Germany for the fact that it retained only the Galician region of Poland. Even Russia, whose claims to the lion’s share of Polish territories had finally to be conceded, was considerably shaken at the beginning of 1815 by the threat of an Anglo-French-Austrian alliance to resist dictation over the future of Saxony, and quickly backed down from a confrontation. No power, it appeared, would now be permitted to impose its wishes upon the rest of Europe in the way Napoleon had done. The egoism of the leading states had in no way been evaporated by the events of 1793–1815, but the twin principles of ‘containment and reciprocal compensation’ 98 meant that a unilateral grasp for domination of Europe was now unlikely; and that even small-scale territorial changes would need the approval of a majority of the members of the Concert.

For all the talk about a European ‘Pentarchy’, however, it is important to recall that the five Great Powers were not in the same relationship to one another as they had been in 1750 or even in 1789. Despite Russia’s growth, it was fair to say that a rough balance of power existed on land after Napoleon’s fall. On the other hand, there was no equivalent at sea, where the British enjoyed a near-monopoly of naval power, which simultaneously reinforced and was underpinned by the economic lead which they had gained over all their rivals. In some cases, like India, this was the result of steady military expansionism and plunder, so that war and profit-seeking had interacted to draw the subcontinent into a purely British orbit by the end of the eighteenth century. 99 Similarly, the seizure of Santo Domingo – which had been responsible for a remarkable three-quarters of France’s colonial trade before the Revolution – was by the late 1790s a valuable market for British goods and a great source of British re-exports. In addition, not only were these overseas markets in North America, the West Indies, Latin America, India and the Orient growing faster than those in Europe, but such long-haul trades were also usually more profitable and a greater stimulus to the shipping, commodity-dealing, marine insurance, bill-clearing, and banking activities which so enhanced London’s position as the new financial centre of the world. 100 Despite recent writings which have questioned the rate of growth of the British economy in the eighteenth century and the role of foreign trade in that growth, 101 the fact remains that overseas expansion had given the country unchallenged access to vast new wealth which its rivals did not enjoy. Controlling most of Europe’s colonies by 1815, dominating the maritime routes and the profitable re-export trades, and well ahead of other societies in the process of industrialization, the British were now the richest nation in per capita terms. During the next half-century – as will be seen in the following chapter – they would become even richer, as Britain grew to be the ‘superdominant economy’ in the world’s trading structure. 102 The principle of equilibrium which Pitt and Castlereagh held so high was one which applied to European territorial arrangements, not to the colonial and commercial spheres.

Little of this can have surprised intelligent early-nineteenth-century observers. Despite his own assumptions of grandeur, Napoleon seems to have become obsessed with Britain at times – with its invulnerability, its maritime dominance, its banks and credit system – and to have yearned to see it all tumble in the dust. Such feelings of envy and dislike doubtless existed, if in a less extreme form, among the Spaniards, Dutch, and others who saw the British monopolizing the outside world. The Russian general Kutusov, wishing to halt his army’s westward advance in 1812, once the Grand Army had been driven from the homeland, may have spoken for more than himself when he doubted the wisdom of totally destroying Napoleon, since the ‘succession would not fall to Russia or to any other continental power, but to the power which already commands the sea, and whose domination would be intolerable’. 103 At the end of the day, however, that result was unavoidable: Napoleon’s hubris and refusal to compromise ensured not only his downfall, but his greatest enemy’s supreme victory. As Gneisenau, another general with a sense of the larger issues, wryly concluded:

Great Britain has no greater obligation than to this ruffian [Napoleon]. For through the events which he has brought about, England’s greatness, prosperity, and wealth have risen high. She is mistress of the sea and neither in this dominion nor in world trade has she now a single rival to fear. 104