Conclusion

The restructuring of British state finance during the Napoleonic Wars and in the post-Waterloo period significantly altered both British society and international relations. The wars themselves established the centrality of finance to modern conflict: as Burke had predicted in 1790, the war against France was in part a contest of systems of finance, and the British system— despite the massive debt and suffering to which it led in the post-Waterloo period—won out. The war allowed British financiers to establish London as the financial clearing house of Europe, and the great financial families and firms of the nineteenth century, such as the Rothschilds and Barings, came to prominence as war debt brokers (Hilton 1977; Arrighi 1994: 166–71). In the immediate post-Waterloo period, these firms also helped establish British finance as one of the key mechanisms of global relations, as British financiers (with the implicit approval of the British government) loaned money to the new revolutionary governments in Spain, Chile, Peru, Buenos Aires, Mexico, Guatemala, and Greece. ¹ In addition, the Napoleonic Wars propelled the so-called Industrial Revolution and the division of labor upon which industrialism came to depend. Cheap credit and strong government demand for iron products during the wars with France had encouraged the creation of factories, but as these latter were idled following the war, indus-trialists sought out new markets (Arrighi 1994: 159–61). Finally, by the 1820s, the press—especially in the form of the Edinburgh Review, but also by means of dailies such as the Morning Chronicle and The Times—had come to play an increasingly central role in the dissemination of the idea that “economics were inseparable from the problems of the day” (Poovey 2003: 27; see also Parsons 1989: 20).