ABSTRACT
Viewed from a British perspective – and in the broadest terms, with the benefit of hindsight – it is hard to see the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as anything other than a brilliant success. Britain emerged from this final phase of the second Hundred Years’ struggle with France as a global hegemon, the world’s supreme naval, colonial, commercial, financial and industrial power, and of course it retained that position for most of the next century. Even viewed in the much shorter term, the Congress of Vienna brought enormous dividends to Britain: the extension and consolidation of empire through the cession of rich colonies such as Trinidad, Tobago, St Lucia, Demerara, Essequibo, the Cape, Mauritius and Ceylon; the shrinking of expansionist France back to its 1790 borders; the achievement of a balance of power that obviated (for the foreseeable future) the need for significant British intervention in Continental affairs, and the final triumph of counter-revolution through the restoration of the Bourbons in France and Spain and of the House of Orange in the new Kingdom of the Netherlands.1 After Waterloo, Britons thus had ample reason to congratulate themselves on having scored an unusually decisive victory.
