The maritime aspects of the wars of the French Revolution and Empire were asymmetric, between a British seapower empire of oceanic connectivity and a French dominated European system that focussed on territorial control and economic restriction. The inclusive British political system privileged naval strength, the defence of trade, and sea control. This position was based on battle fleet dominance, which remained undefeated across two decades. British identity became ever more closely linked to naval success as Nelson, the Nile and Trafalgar added new names to national culture. This sustained long-term funding for major infrastructure projects, new ships, and high levels of skilled manpower. Superior ships and men enabled the Royal Navy to defeat naval rivals, and attacks on commercial shipping by national warships and privateers. Naval dominance sustained a hard-line economic war that broke the Russian economy, and seriously damaged that of France, while the City of London and the British economy more generally continued to support the national war effort through extensive capital loans, and private measures, such as those of Lloyds Patriotic Fund. Seapower could not defeat Napoleon, it supported a grand alliance that would achieve that aim. By 1815 Britain had become a global seapower empire of unrivalled wealth and influence.

Chapter 5 recovers the peculiar significance of the Napoleonic Wars for the formation of nineteenth-century British orthodoxies concerning the government of Ireland’s rural interior. In the decade after 1801, Ireland's rising population and grain production became central to Irish, British and European debates over Irish government. The indispensability of Irish grain to the British war effort proved the glowing potential of a model of Union that rested on an agricultural Ireland supplying the needs of industrial Britain, and provided evidence for the resilience of the British Empire in the face of Napoleon's Continental System. Patriotic Irish objections to Ireland’s agrarian turn found an unlikely echo in the pages of an influential new journal of politics and political economy, The Edinburgh Review. Alongside the agrarian improver and travel writer Edward Wakefield, Robert Malthus advanced the radical claim that only a transformation of Irish land tenure and consumption habits, under the auspices of the Westminster parliament, could bring about the diffusion of British civilisation promised by the proponents of the Union.