ABSTRACT
Most general accounts of British history treat 1815 as closing a peculiar era of British military and naval activism. After 1815, the armed services were massively reduced in size, much of the officer class went into suspended military animation on half-pay, govern ment spending fell, and little overseas projection of British power occurred. Such a description needs to be modified. It will be suggested instead that the military expertise developed over twenty-five years of campaigning was not dissipated after 1815, that the officer corps and the aristocratic and gentry values which dominated it remained prominent and significant, and that Britain was far from being an inactive global power in the years following Waterloo.
