ABSTRACT
If the acid test of the strength of an economy is its ability to mobilize sufficient resources to conduct warfare successfully, then the British state in the eighteenth century was clearly underpinned by a very powerful economy. In a series of wars with leading European states in the course of the ‘long’ eighteenth century Britain was normally successful. The struggle with France, her principal rival, culminated in warfare lasting for a generation during the revolutionary and Napoleonic period in which Britain proved able to sustain her own war effort and to underwrite that of her allies long enough to wear down France, in spite of the French control of the bulk of the continent. It might seem tempting to indulge in an aphorism and assert that the industrial revolution proved stronger than the French revolution.
