ABSTRACT
The massive expansion of British imperial power which accompanied the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars has never attracted the interest accorded to the Elizabethan plantations, the Partition of Africa or the Transfer of Power after 1945. Except during the immediate aftermath of the Seven Years' War, the pace of imperial expansion had earlier been governed by change outside England. The assumption from the start was that empire in a world-historical sense could only be understood by examining social change in the areas colonised as an essential component of an imperial system. In Eurasia the consequence of widened social and political conflict was the creation of new regional states which represented an alliance between imperial officials, provincial élites and mercantile capitalists. British military impotence in Europe directed much of this new energy and the collective mind of this new 'imperial consensus' to the world outside Europe.
