deny the enemy access to supply, and ensure British supply. At the same time, the work of the British cruisers also helped to ensure that British trade was profitable enough to pay for the supply. This last, the purely mercantilist objective of using force to dominate trade, was as important as was the blockade of French dockyards.
In the eighteenth century blockade operations were rarely able to deny an enemy access to strategically important cargoes, and instead concentrated on making a profit by seizing enemy ships and cargoes for their monetary value. The profit made from the sale of prizes, and from carrying on the trade that the enemy lost through late delivery and increased costs, was strategically important because the wealth gained could be extracted in taxes and used to support the war effort. The chances of enemy shipping being able to run a blockade were good enough to limit strategic value of attempting to block supplies of most of the materials used for military purposes, let alone block consumer goods. Only when efforts were narrowly focused on a few harbours, and on heavy cargoes that could not be transported by land, was there much prospect of preventing supplies getting through. In this respect, geography gave Britain an important advantage over the French. Naval stores were so bulky and so heavy that they could only reach their destinations by sea. When the Royal Navy was strong enough, as it had been following the battle of Quiberon Bay in the Seven Years War, it was able to impede the repair of the French fleet by cruises along the Normandy and Brittany coasts. Victuals for the fleet at Brest also had to be shipped by sea, because Breton farms could not supply the needs. Napoleon solved the problem of bringing supplies from central France by building canals, but naval stores from the Baltic continued to be sent by sea close by British naval harbours.
The ability of the Royal Navy to intercept the flow of naval stores from the Baltic was dependent upon the balance of power. Generally, the masts, timber, hemp and tar were freighted in neutral merchantmen. Although British interpretation of international law asserted the right of a belligerent to seize enemy-owned cargo carried in neutral bottoms, the Baltic neutrals did not acknowledge that right, and resisted when they could.46
In the seventeenth century the British had had to fight to prevent the Dutch intercepting supplies to British dockyards, but the French did not enjoy a similarly powerful geographic position. Arrangements to convoy the cargoes of naval stores to England were well established, and there was little prospect of French privateers being able to intercept more than a small proportion of them.47 It was a usual practice for French privateers to ransom their captives while they were still at sea so that they could continue their voyage. Furthermore, traditional French interpretation of international law protected neutral vessels carrying enemy-owned cargo. What London had to worry about was not the strangulation of supply so much as the prospect that the neutral Balts would drive up the price of naval stores to a degree which threatened Britain’s ability to pay, and at the same time facilitate the armament of the French and Spanish fleets.
Apart from the blockade of naval stores, maritime control of the Baltic had important offensive as well as defensive implications. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Britain was not able to use her commanding position at sea to threaten the French Republic and Empire, except to support with limited success the independence of the smaller nations of Europe. It was only because of the economic pressure which a naval power could exert that the British Government was able to avoid a strategic stalemate. Napoleon was scathing about British subsidies which were paid to continental states to support their belligerence against France, but armaments cost vast amounts of money. Without the wealth Britain earned from overseas trade, it is doubtful whether Austria, Russia or Prussia would have been able to support the expense of resisting French power, or been induced to make the attempt. In 1804 the annual revenue of the British treasury was £40 million from which a subsidy was agreed with Austria and Russia of £1.25 million for every 100,000 soldiers put in the field against Napoleon.
Wealth earned in trade, and paid as customs dues and income taxes, was also vital to the capacity of the British Government to keep its own fleet at sea. Timber merchants, victuallers, and all the commercial concerns that were needed to sustain the navy were willing to supply their goods on the credit of Navy Board bills, but their faith in eventual repayment was based on the responsibility of government, and on their belief that the navy would hold its own.
Despite the growth of the idea in the last half of the eighteenth century that free trade was in the general interest, ‘mercantilism’, the use of tariffs and other controls to restrict the profitability of rivals’ access to international markets, was still a prevailing economic doctrine. Mercantilism had an obvious strategic role in wartime when the relative wealth of nations, not their absolute wealth, was all-important. Britain, because of her commanding leadership in the industrial revolution, had products that could hold their own in any market. In effect, a successful campaign against enemy trade by Royal Navy cruisers and by British privateers served to funnel money into the pockets of the British merchants and British insurers. The English were all the more successful at this game in the eighteenth century because the London insurance market had learnt how to make a good profit out of insuring ships and cargoes in wartime, even extending their services to enemy merchants who paid the large premiums made necessary by the activity of British privateers and the Royal Navy. British interpretation of the laws of war permitted the arrest of neutral merchant ships if they were carrying enemy-owned cargoes, or cargoes that in peacetime the enemy would only permit their own nationals to carry.
The 1793 statute ‘more effectively to prevent, during the War, all Traitorous Correspondence with, or Aid or Assistance being given to, His Majesty’s Enemies’ cut off enemy access to British insurance.48 This reduced the war profits made in the City of London, but also strengthened the ability of the Navy to deny the enemy strategic cargoes.
The Baltic states might have had little reason to wish French arms to triumph, but neither did they wish Britain to have the ability to determine to whom and at what price they could sell their commodities. British mercantilism was in conflict with that of the Baltic states, which had very deep roots. British merchants had established strong connections with the primary producers, which tended to foil any attempts by the suppliers to push prices up to a level which could affect the ability of the British navy to keep the sea in sufficient numbers. However, there was a long history of Baltic states exploiting their geography and naval forces to profit from wars fought by their neighbours. For nearly three centuries Denmark had collected a toll on trade passing the fortress of Elsinore to or from the North Sea.
To be able to profit from the wars of their neighbours, the Balts needed to be able to confront force with force. In the American Revolutionary War, under the leadership of Tsarina Catherine the Great, a League of Armed Neutrality was brought together to resist British naval and mercantile control. The objectives of the League were those of self-interest. The new idea of free trade was used as justification for a strictly mercantilist purpose.
So great had been the threat, that the British Government declared war on the Netherlands in 1780 to pre-empt their intended joining of the League. The Netherlands suffered severely in consequence, but Britain was at such a disadvantage during the American War that the Royal Navy had not possessed the power to make effective the strategy of sea control in the face of Baltic resistance. Prussia had also joined the neutral League, Austria and Russia had concluded an alliance, and Britain had had to accept on face value the ‘naturalization’ of Dutch ships under Prussian and Austrian flags. In 1780, only 671 Prussian ships passed the Sound, but in 1781 the number rose to 1,507. The measure of Britain’s failure is that between 1778 and September 1782 Riga exported 996 masts to Britain, 868 to France (with an additional twenty-nine sent via Genoa), 405 to Spain, and 1,855 to the Netherlands, only 600 of which were on the account of the Dutch navy.49 The rest were probably reshipped to French ports.
In the war against the French Revolution and Bonapartism, London was determined not to let the Baltic situation again get out of hand. Britain could not afford to let France have free access to naval stores, and had to ensure that her own supply was safe, and that her trade was profitable. Royal Navy enforcement of the blockade of supplies to the
