In 1815, the United Kingdom emerged victorious following overtwo decades of nearly uninterrupted warfare with revolutionary and Napoleonic France. It was now the great world power, its mastery of the seas unrivalled, and its main imperial rival, France, bled white and humbled. Developments in British manufactures, with the mechanisation of textile production, the growth of the factory system, the mobilisation of investment capital and the use of aggressive marketing techniques, were transforming the British economy and ensuring unprecedented levels of sustained economic growth. The quarter century before 1815 also witnessed a momentous expansion of British imperial dominion. The loss of the American colonies in 1783, following a prolonged and costly war, had been a blow to Britain’s prestige as a world power. But during the subsequent three decades, the East India Company had greatly expanded and consolidated its control over the South Asian subcontinent, had seized Ceylon and the Cape of South Africa from the Dutch, planted a new colony in Australia and expanded trade with China. Where in 1792 there had been 26 colonies, by 1816 there were 43. The empire now became characterised by dominion over vast expanses of land, in Canada, India, Australia and South Africa, and the governance of immense numbers of non-Europeans and non-Christians, including some 87 million inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. It was difficult for many inhabitants of the island kingdom not to view victory over revolutionary France and the acquisition of such territory and dominion as divinely ordained.1