ABSTRACT
Britain’s role in the world has long been disputed: was Britain primarily a European power or a country whose interests were principally global? The two realms could be linked by arguing that, from the late 1680s to the 1810s, Britain developed and projected military and naval power worldwide not essentially to acquire an empire, but to contain and periodically confront France. For most European policy-makers in the eighteenth century, France posed a geopolitical threat, because of its advantages of geographical concentration and size, large population, economic diversity, and possession of a highly centralised state and, in its British opponents’ eyes, because of its despotic government, its expansionist challenge to vital British commercial interests in the Low Countries, and its espousal of Roman Catholicism. John Lynn has noted that from 1661 to 1815 the French state was at war for 90 of the 155 years, either with external forces or against internal insurgents. 1
