ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the economic and ideological weaponry whose use went hand-in-hand with the battles fought on land and sea from the outbreak of formal hostilities in 1792 to their thunderous climax at Waterloo. An age of conflict demands of its students a willingness to consider many forms of violence indulged in by homo sapiens from the latter's beginnings as the earth's most dangerous species. Because the age of the Great Revolution and Napoleon was one of war, it seems best to begin here with the evolution of formal warfare. As with the forces employed, so with strategy and tactics, naval wars of the Revolutionary-Napoleonic period produced little outward change. Powers with possessions overseas continued to detach warships from home squadrons in order to accompany or to seize shipping en route to and from the colonies, protect distant outposts and attack enemy settlements. Napoleon believed as firmly as had the Jacobins in terror's paralysing effect on an enemy.
