and in the 1781 encounter between Graves’s and de Grasse’s fleets off the Chesapeake, French numerical superiority kept the British force at bay and thus led to Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown and to the effective end of the American campaign. Even when the Royal Navy’s size increased and that of its foes fell away (in 1782 it had ninety-four ships of the line to France’s seventy-three, Spain’s fifty-four, and the United Provinces’ nineteen), the margin was still too narrow to do all the tasks required: protect the North Atlantic convoys, periodically relieve Gibraltar, guard the exit from the Baltic, send squadrons to the Indian Ocean, and support the military operations in the Caribbean. British naval power was temporary and regional and not, as in previous wars, overwhelming. The fact that the French army was not fighting in Europe had a lot to do with the islanders’ unhappy condition.
By 1782, it is true, the financial strain of maintaining such a large navy was hitting the French economy and compelling some retrenchment. Naval stores were now more difficult to obtain, and the shortage of sailors was even more serious. In addition, some of the French ministers feared that the war was unduly diverting attention and resources to areas outside Europe, and thus making it impossible to play any role on the continent. This political calculation, and the parallel fear that the British and Americans might soon settle their differences, caused Paris to hope for an early end to hostilities. Economically, their Dutch and Spanish allies were in an equally bad plight. Nevertheless, Britain’s greater financial stamina, the marked rise in exports from 1782 onward, and the steady improvements in the Royal Navy could not now rescue victory from defeat, nor convince the political factions at home to support the war once America was clearly seen to be lost. Although Britain’s concessions at the 1783 Peace of Versailles (Minorca, Florida, Tobago) were hardly a reversal of the great imperial gains of 1763, the French could proclaim themselves well satisfied at the creation of an independent United States and at the blow dealt to Britain’s world position. From Paris’s perspective, the strategical balance which had been upset by the Seven Years War had now been sensibly restored, albeit at enormous cost.
In eastern Europe, by contrast, the strategical balances were not greatly distorted by the manoeuvres of the three great monarchies during the decades after 1763.72 This was chiefly due to the triangular nature of that relationship: neither Berlin nor Vienna in particular, nor even the more assertive St Petersburg, wished to provoke the other two into a hostile alliance or to be involved in fighting of the dimensions of the Seven Years War. The brief and ultracautious campaigning in the War of Bavarian Succession (1778–9), when Prussia opposed Austria’s attempt at expansion, merely confirmed this widespread wish to avoid the costs of a Great Power struggle. Further acquisitions of territory could therefore take place only as a result of diplomatic ‘deals’ at the expense of weaker powers, most notably Poland, which was successively carved up in 1772–3, 1793, and 1795. By the later stages, Poland’s fate was increasingly influenced by the French Revolution, that is, by Catherine II’s determination to crush the ‘Jacobins’ of Warsaw, and Prussia and Austria’s desire to gain compensation in the east for their failures in the west against France; but even this new concern with the French Revolution did not fundamentally change the policies of mutual antagonism and reluctant compromise which the three eastern monarchies pursued toward one another in these years.
Given the geographical and diplomatic confines of this triangular relationship, it was not surprising that Russia’s position continued to improve, relative to both Austria and Prussia. Despite Russia’s backwardness, it was still far less vulnerable than its western neighbours, both of which strove to placate the formidable Catherine. This fact, and the traditional Russian claims to influence in Poland, ensured that by far the largest portion of that unfortunate state fell to St Petersburg during the partition. Moreover, Russia possessed an open, ‘crumbling’ frontier to the south, so that during the early 1770s great advances were made at Turkey’s expense; the Crimea was formally annexed in 1783, and a fresh round of gains was secured along the northern coast of the Black Sea in 1792. All this confirmed the decline of Ottoman fighting power, and secretly worried both Austria and Prussia almost as much as those states (Sweden in 1788, Britain under the younger Pitt in 1791) which more actively sought to blunt this Russian expansionism. But with Vienna and Berlin eager to keep St Petersburg’s goodwill, and with the western powers too distracted to play a lasting and effective role in eastern Europe, the growth of the Czarist Empire proceeded apace.
The structure of international relations in the decade or so prior to 1792 therefore gave little sign of the transformation bearing down upon it. For the main part, the occasional quarrels between the major powers had been unconnected regional affairs, and there seemed to exist no threat to the general balance of power. If the future of Poland and the Ottoman Empire preoccupied the great nations of the east, traditional manoeuvring over the fate of the Low Countries and over ‘rival empires of trade’ consumed the attention of the western powers. An Anglo-Spanish clash over Nootka Sound (1790) brought both countries to the brink of war, until Spain reluctantly gave way. While relations between Britain and France were more subdued because of mutual exhaustion after 1783, their commercial rivalry continued apace. Their mutual suspicions also swiftly showed themselves during an internal crisis in the Netherlands in 1787–8, when the pro-French ‘Patriot’ party was forced out of power by Prussian troops, urged on by the assertive younger Pitt.
Pitt’s much more active diplomacy reflected not merely his own personality, but also the significant general recovery which Britain had made in the ranks of the powers since the setback of 1783. The loss of America had not damaged the country’s transatlantic trade; indeed, exports to the United States were booming, and both that market and India’s were much more substantial than those in which France had the lead. In the six years 1782–8 British merchant shipping more than doubled. The Industrial Revolution was under way, fired by consumer demand at home and abroad and facilitated by a spate of new inventions; and the productivity of British agriculture was keeping pace with the food needs of an expanding population. Pitt’s fiscal reforms improved the state’s finances and restored its credit, yet considerable monies were always voted to the navy, which was numerically strong and well administered. On these firm foundations, the British government felt it could play a more active role abroad when national interests demanded it. On the whole, however, political leaders in Whitehall and Westminster did not envisage a Great Power war occurring in Europe in the foreseeable future.73
But the clearest reason why Europe would not be convulsed by a general conflict seemed to lie in the worsening condition of France. For some years after the victory of 1783, its diplomatic position had appeared as strong as ever; the domestic economy, as well as foreign trade with the West Indies and the Levant, was growing rapidly. Nonetheless, the sheer costs of the 1778–83 war – totalling more than France’s three previous wars together – and the failure to reform national finances interacted with the growing political discontents, economic distress, and social malaise to discredit the ancien régime. From 1787 onward, as the internal crisis worsened, France seemed ever less capable of playing a decisive role in foreign affairs. The diplomatic defeat in the Netherlands was caused primarily by the French government’s recognition that it simply could not afford to finance a war against Britain and Prussia, while the withdrawal of support for Spain in the Nootka Sound controversy was due to the French assembly’s challenge to Louis XVI’s right to declare war. All this hardly suggested that France would soon be seeking to overturn the entire ‘old order’ of Europe.
The conflict which was to absorb the energies of much of the continent for over two decades therefore began slowly and unevenly. The French were concerned only with domestic struggles in the period which followed the fall of the Bastille; and although the increasing radicalization of French politics worried some foreign governments, the resultant turmoil in Paris and the provinces suggested that France was of little account in European power politics. For that reason, Pitt was seeking reductions in British military expenditures as late as February 1792, while in the east the three great monarchies were much more interested in the carving up of Poland. Only with the growing rumours about émigré plots to restore the
