England’s naval dominance in the age of long-distance sail enabled it both to defend its island homeland against invasion by rival land powers as well as to win the competition among European powers for control of overseas colonial empires. Sea power conferred a vital advantage in maintaining long-distance colonial supply lines and providing safe passage to British commercial shipping. In times of tension, superior naval power enabled English ships to easily bombard or establish beachheads along enemy coastlines. By the mid-seventeenth century, England was capable of executing its policy of blockading enemy ports in all weather conditions, bottling up rival commercial shipping, military support, or naval counterattack.
In the worldwide Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763, known in America as the French and Indian War, superior sea power proved decisive in routing France and establishing England as the world’s peerless colonial power. The 1758 seizure of the French fort at Louisburg on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island gave England control of the St. Lawrence River. It opened the way for British soldiers and a few colonial American allies to overcome the great bluffs to take Quebec in September 1759—the decisive event in forcing the French to abandon Canada. France’s colonial ambitions in the rest of North America were demolished by a parallel British troop invasion of the Ohio River Valley. This severed the chain of forts France had been building along the key river ways of the Mississippi River basin all the way down to New Orleans in its bid to confine English settlements east of the Appalachians.
France’s counterstrategy of trying to win back its lost colonies through a bold, direct invasion of England likewise was checkmated by superior British sea power in two major sea battles in the summer and autumn of 1759. The first occurred near the Strait of Gibraltar. The second and most devastating was at Quiberon Bay, in southwest Brittany, on November 20, 1759, where the French fleet that had been bottled up by a six-month British blockade at Brest tried to flee when gale conditions forced a temporary English pullback.
France’s worldwide retreat after the Seven Years’ War included its withdrawal from most of India, which soon thereafter became the crown economic jewel of England’s colonial empire. In early 1757 Britain’s superior sea power and logistics enabled the English East India Company’s Robert Clive to expeditiously seize back the Bengal port of Calcutta from rebellious local Indian rulers and their French allies. The Company consolidated British colonial rule in India following a celebrated, improbable victory of Clive’s 3,000 British and Indian troops over 50,000 to 60,000 French-supported Indian forces at Plassey in June 1757. Water, in the form of a monsoon deluge, played a pivotal, if unusual, role in the battle’s turning point. When the heavy rains soaked and rendered useless their gunpowder, the French-backed Indian troops charged en masse toward the British position amid the mango groves on the banks of the Hughli River in the belief the British gunpowder had been similarly ruined. But the badly outnumbered British had kept their powder dry under covering. The attacking native forces were cut down and scattered amid volleys of exploding English gunpowder.
Learning the lesson of the Seven Years’ War that, in the age of long-distance sail, formidable sea power was a prerequisite of great empire, France invested heavily in the following decades to bring its fleet size to parity with England’s. By 1781, France was strong enough to be able to inflict an indirect defeat on England by blocking the resupply of British forces at Yorktown, Virginia, thus forcing the surrender of General Cornwallis’s army to George Washington to end the American colonists’ War of Independence. The balance of sea power also proved decisive a generation later in the Napoleonic Wars. With France’s armies sweeping victoriously through the European continent in 1797, Napoléon Bonaparte had argued that durable French hegemony over Europe depended upon winning command of the sea and subduing England. Indeed, the showdown between France and England proved to be not only the most severe challenge to England’s global leadership in the age of sail, but an historic contest for military preeminence between the greatest naval power and an invincible land army headed by the most brilliant general since Alexander the Great.
In the summer 1798, the twenty-nine-year-old Napoléon cunningly exploited England’s retreat from the Mediterranean to better defend its northern ports against relentless French army pressure. Under secret orders from the French leadership about his destination, he seized Malta and conquered Egypt with a force of 31,000 troops, 400 sea transports, and 13 warships—and a boatload of Enlightenment-age scholars from many disciplines whose extraordinary mission was to study everything possible about Egypt for the sake of the pure advancement of knowledge. With these conquests, Napoléon had moved into a position to take control of the entire Mediterranean. If he could solidify his hold, he knew he would be able to dictate the fate of the Levant, the Ottoman Turkish Empire and the Red Sea route to British India. Napoléon wasted no time in personally inspecting the ruins of Neko’s ancient “Suez Canal” and ordered French surveyors to study a new canal that would directly link the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. His canal plan was aborted only after surveyors calculated—mistakenly—that the Red Sea was 33 feet higher than the Mediterranean and thus would necessitate canal locks and other complex engineering.
Recognizing its grave strategic vulnerability, England turned to one of its youngest flag officers to foil France’s bid for control of the Mediterranean and to restore Britain’s wavering command of the seas—Horatio Nelson, forty. To England’s good fortune, Nelson would prove to be as brilliant a tactician and commander at sea as Napoléon was on land. Modestly born, with personal courage in battle that was visibly displayed by his loss of an arm and an eye, and possessed of a courtesy, charisma, and panache that earned extraordinary devotion from his crew as well as the ardor of his prominent paramour, Lady Hamilton, Nelson became the embodiment of British pride in its Royal Navy. Not since Sir Frances Drake had England had so celebrated a national naval hero.
Nelson entered the Mediterranean in hot pursuit of Napoléon’s forces. In a frantic search across the sea, during which in the darkness he actually sailed past his foe and thus had to backtrack to Egypt after France had made its conquest, Nelson at last caught sight of the French battle fleet in the afternoon of August 1, 1798. It was anchored in a defensive line at shallow Aboukir (Abu Qir) Bay, near Alexandria and one of the mouths of the Nile. By chance, the French ships were at the moment undermanned because the commander had sent many crewmen onshore to dig wells to restock the ships’ low water supplies. Sensing he had the advantage of surprise, Nelson immediately hoisted his signal flag of preparation for attack. The Battle of the Nile, or Aboukir as it was alternately known, was probably novel in the annals of sea warfare until modern times in being fought almost entirely in the dark. Although the number of warships on each side was nearly equivalent, the more-efficient British gunners could fire twice as rapidly and more accurately than their French counterparts. Nelson took advantage of the static French position to pick off a few ships at a time while staying out of range of the others. When the dawn broke, the scale of the French disaster became visible—11 of its 13 warships had been lost.
The effects of Nelson’s victory were momentous. Britain soon regained the Mediterranean sea-lanes and, with that, renewed national self-confidence and fighting spirit. By controlling the sea supply lines, British naval power rendered untenable Napoléon’s position in Egypt. The great general stealthily abandoned his troops in Egypt to return to France to seize power outright. The sight of Napoléon’s great army in rare retreat emboldened beleaguered European continental powers to conspire in a new anti-French coalition with England. For Napoléon the Battle of the Nile forced abandonment of his grand ambitions to sever England from India and its colonial wealth. Instead, he refocused his master strategy on gathering his naval and armed forces for a direct invasion of England itself.
This set the scene for the great sea battle of the Napoleonic Wars, Trafalgar. Although Napoléon possessed an army three times larger than England’s,
to invade his enemy’s island redoubt he needed sufficient sea power to control the English Channel for a few days to permit a safe crossing. Over the few years following the disaster at Aboukir Bay, Napoléon had acquired the Dutch fleet by occupying the Netherlands, which also put him in control of every Continental port from the North Sea to Gibraltar. England’s response had been a comprehensive blockade of French-controlled ports, a years-long effort unique in naval history. In 1805 Napoléon finally ordered his war fleets to break out of the blockades and assemble in Martinique in the Caribbean to prepare for an invasion of the Channel, where French army troops were readying. But after years of captivity in port, the fighting ability of the qualitatively inferior French fleet had deteriorated. The fleet at Brest could not break out. The fleet at Toulon, where Nelson was on watch, managed to put to sea. With Nelson hunting the French fleet back and forth across the Atlantic, the two sides finally engaged off Trafalgar Point in Spain, between Gibraltar and Cádiz, on October 21, 1805. Over a series of dinners with his captains, Nelson had devised an innovative naval tactic that would take advantage of England’s more maneuverable ships and experienced crews. Instead of lining up his ships parallel with the enemy to blast away with cannon fire, he divided them into two columns, with a third in reserve, to attack the enemy line at its center. Thereby, he created two separate battles with England and enjoyed the tactical advantage in each. The English triumph at Trafalgar was definitive. Not a single English ship was sunk, and only 100 men were lost. One of those casualties, however, was Nelson himself, shot in the shoulder and chest at close range by a sniper nestled atop a French mizzen sail.
The Battle of Trafalgar ended any chance for Napoléon to invade England. British mastery at sea allowed it to impede the French army’s resupplies through its strangulating port blockades, while systematically dismembering France’s overseas holdings in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Moluccas. At the same time, trade along the high seas with distant countries like the United States and Russia helped England withstand the European-wide continental commercial embargo Napoléon tried to impose against it. When circumstances finally became opportune following Napoléon’s debacle in Russia, English vessels were free to use the sea to transport their own strengthened troops to the Continent to help in the ultimate defeat of Napoléon, which occurred at Waterloo in modern Belgium in 1815.
The results of the Napoleonic Wars confirmed that, in the age of long-distance sail and cannonry, sea power’s advantage in mobilizing the natural forces of the high seas to level the balance of power against superior, land-based armies, had soared to such a degree as to permit small, democratic seafaring states to prevail in the struggle for global dominance. The English island-nation outlasted its continental rival the Dutch Republic in part because it could concentrate its resources on its naval power without incurring the additional burden of providing for a stout defense against land invasion—which, in an interesting parallel with the fall of the ancient Phoenicians to the neighboring land empires of Mesopotamia, was the final, proximate cause of the Dutchmen’s demise. Throughout the age of sail, from the Armada to Napoléon, every attempted invasion of England had failed. Even as late as the Battle of Britain in World War II, the overwhelming army, tank, long-range missile, and air force might of Hitler’s Nazi Germany was unable to overcome the defensive advantages provided by British naval power and the Channel moat.
Trafalgar was the last major battle fought by wooden sailing ships. Britain would not be seriously challenged again for another century—until World War I. In the nineteenth century, British naval power became invincible because it readily applied the innovations of another entirely unprecedented development that was gathering momentum along Britain’s small, rural rivers—the steam-powered Industrial Revolution.
CHAPTER NINE
Steam Power, Industry, and the Age of the British Empire
The Industrial Revolution completed the transformation of English sea power and colonial wealth in the age of wood and sail into history’s first globally dominant economy and hegemonic political empire. An ongoing process that amassed spontaneous, critical takeoff in Britain’s private market economy during the sixty-year reign from 1760 of King George III, the Industrial Revolution wrought such thorough changes in every aspect of human society, from daily life, social organization, and demographics to political relations, that it compared in historical significance to the irrigated Agriculture Revolution at the start of civilization some 5,000 years earlier. At the catalytic fulcrum of the Industrial Revolution were innovative applications of waterpower. This featured not merely new uses for traditional waterwheels, but above all the breakthrough use of water in a previously unexploited form—steam.
Geographically, Britain had been richly endowed with both sea and inland water resources that could be propitiously exploited by the technology cluster of the age. Thus while its naval and merchant fleets were taking advantage of the island-nation’s many excellent harbors, long indented coastlines, defensive sea moat, and the favorable direction of the currents and winds in the English Channel, early industrial entrepreneurs were starting to exploit the rural interior’s many fast-running, perennial, small rivers and streams that were both easily navigable and capable of generating substantial power by waterwheels. Indeed, Britain in its nineteenth-century glory may have commanded the globe by its rule of the ocean waves, but the economic might upon which its empire rested flourished principally upon its inland waterways.
England’s Industrial Revolution was born in two, overlapping phases in the small industries that developed alongside the small rivers of Britain’s rural Midlands region. Centered in Lancashire, the first phase was driven by the emergence of the waterwheel, and then steam-powered, cotton textile factories in which traditional home handicraft work was reorganized into a standardized, mechanized manufacturing system of specialized functions performed at a central location. The second phase, which gathered momentum later and depended entirely on the energy outputs achievable only by steam, was centered in Shropshire on the production of cast iron from which the heavy industries of the late nineteenth century derived. By combining the power of steam and iron with its superior navy, British sea power became invincible and extended its dominance from coastlines up into the waterway interiors of foreign states. Britain’s accelerating industrial productivity, economic wealth, and widening distribution of income to the middle classes became a self-propagating, dynamic phenomenon that completed the free market’s historical migration from the seafaring trade periphery to the very center of world economic society.
As so often in history, necessity was the mother of the great innovations that sparked the Industrial Revolution. For nearly two centuries from the days of Shakespeare, Drake, and Queen Elizabeth to the eve of the American colonies’ War of Independence, even while its navy was vanquishing its foes on the high seas, England suffered at home from an acute fuel famine caused by the early depletion of British forests. Thus while France and its continental rivals enjoyed ample wood resources, England struggled with shortages that steadily drove up the cost of wood charcoal and timber needed to heat English homes, fire its cannon-producing iron foundries, and construct ships for its navy. The fuel famine was exacerbated by the fact that Europe was still in the throes of the Little Ice Age (mid-fifteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries) when English temperatures were 1–2º centigrade colder than in the early twentieth century, cropland and woodlands were receding, and the Thames often froze over.
As a substitute for costly firewood, Britain intensively mined the plentiful seams of coal that lay near the surface of many parts of the Midlands and Northern England. Although coal could provide heat, only wood charcoal burned hot enough to reduce iron ore in blast furnaces to make iron. Thus when Abraham Darby, an ironmaster at Coalbrookedale on the Severn River, in 1709 independently reinvented a process long ago discovered in China for converting coal into coke that could be used to fire blast furnaces, it raised hopes that coal would also del
iver England from the fuel bottleneck causing the nation’s chronic iron shortage.
Yet two mundane obstacles continued to impede England’s relief from the fuel famine. First was simply the difficulty of transporting huge volumes of coal from the mining districts. Packhorses and carts moved slowly, unreliably and expensively on the poor, muddy roads. Some coal near coastal cities moved by sea for use in the coal burning hearths of London and other seaports. But to meet the great demand from the nation’s growing interior industrial regions, another transportation solution was needed. The second obstacle was that as miners dug deeper shafts to extract more coal, their excavations hit the water tables. To remove water they dug drains into the hillside and used lift pumps powered by horses or, if a suitable source of running water was available, by waterwheel. But the deeper they mined below the water table, the greater volumes of floodwater made it ever harder for them to excavate enough coal reserves to fulfill even the country’s most basic, rising demand.
Thus Britain’s fuel famine continued unabated. As late as 1760, the high cost and shortage of coal and timber was forcing the country to import half its iron from foundries in virgin forests of Sweden and Russia. One-third of its new shipbuilding was being outsourced to shipyards on the timber-rich eastern seaboard of its American colonies on the eve of the American Revolution. Unless relief came soon, Britain’s incipient Industrial Revolution faced premature stultification. The endurance of its still modest empire would be in doubt. The fuel famine was leaving “many domestic hearths cold,” comments English historian Trevelyan and “if the old economic system had continued unchanged after 1760, it is doubtful whether the existing seven millions could have continued much longer to inhabit the island in the same degree of comfort as before.”
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