Continental System (1806): Napoleon's Blockade of Britain

The Continental System was Napoleon’s attempt to defeat Britain through economic warfare by closing the whole of continental Europe to British trade. It began with the Berlin Decree of 21 November 1806 and lasted, with growing gaps, until Napoleon’s fall in 1814. It hurt Britain but never broke it, and Napoleon’s efforts to enforce it drew him into ruinous wars in Spain and Russia.

Background: land power against sea power

By late 1806 Napoleon dominated the European mainland after his victories at Austerlitz and Jena, but Britain remained out of reach. The Battle of Trafalgar in October 1805 had left the Royal Navy in command of the seas, so a French invasion was impossible.

Napoleon believed that Britain’s strength rested on trade and credit. If British manufacturers lost their European markets, he reasoned, unemployment, bankruptcies and a collapse of public finances would force Britain to make peace. Britain, for its part, had already declared a naval blockade of much of the French-controlled coast in May 1806.

The decrees

Napoleon issued the Berlin Decree on 21 November 1806, shortly after occupying the Prussian capital. It declared the British Isles to be in a state of blockade, banned all trade and correspondence with Britain, ordered the arrest of British subjects in French-occupied territory and made British goods liable to seizure.

Britain replied with Orders in Council in January and November 1807. These required neutral ships trading with France and its allies to call first at British ports and pay duties. Napoleon answered with the Milan Decrees of November and December 1807, which declared that any neutral ship that obeyed the British rules or allowed itself to be searched by the Royal Navy would be treated as British and could be seized.

The result was that neutral shippers, above all Americans, were squeezed between two rival blockades, as satirised in British prints of the time.

Extending the system

Napoleon could only make the blockade work if every European coastline joined it. This pushed him towards ever greater control of other states:

• Russia and Prussia agreed to join under the Treaties of Tilsit in July 1807.
• Portugal, Britain’s old ally, refused, and French troops under General Jean-Andoche Junot occupied Lisbon in November 1807, an operation that led directly to the Peninsular War.
• Denmark joined France after Britain bombarded Copenhagen and seized the Danish fleet in September 1807.
• The Papal States were occupied in 1808 and annexed in 1809, partly because Pope Pius VII refused to close his ports.
• The Kingdom of Holland was annexed to France in July 1810 after Napoleon’s brother King Louis allowed too much smuggling and abdicated.
• The Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Bremen and Lubeck and the north German coast were annexed in 1810-1811.

How the system worked in practice

Enforcement was never complete. Britain seized the North Sea island of Heligoland in 1807 and turned it into a huge depot for goods smuggled into Germany. Other routes ran through Sweden, the Baltic, Malta, Gibraltar and the Balkans. Customs officers could be bribed, and whole communities along the coasts lived from smuggling.

Napoleon himself weakened the system. From 1809-1810 France sold licences allowing selected merchants to trade with Britain, mainly to export French wine and grain and to import goods France needed. The Trianon tariff of August 1810 allowed some colonial goods in under very high duties, and the Fontainebleau Decree of October 1810 ordered seized British manufactures to be burned, which was done publicly in several cities.

Effects on Britain and Europe

Britain suffered real hardship. Exports to Europe fell sharply, and in 1810-1811 a commercial crisis brought bankruptcies, unemployment and falling wages, which contributed to unrest such as the Luddite machine-breaking of 1811-1812. But Britain found new markets in the Americas, especially in Latin America, and continued to finance its allies.

On the Continent the effects were mixed. Port cities such as Hamburg, Amsterdam and Bordeaux declined, and prices of sugar, coffee, cotton and tobacco rose steeply. Some inland industries, protected from British competition, grew, including cotton spinning in parts of France, Saxony and Belgium. The shortage of cane sugar encouraged the development of sugar beet, which Napoleon promoted from 1811.

How historians judge it

Early studies, such as Eli Heckscher’s, stressed how leaky the blockade was. Later work, notably by Francois Crouzet, showed that it did cause serious British crises in 1808 and especially in 1810-1811, when Britain came closer to economic trouble than is often assumed. Most historians agree, however, that Britain’s control of the sea, its access to world markets and its strong credit allowed it to survive.

The United States caught in the middle

The rival blockades hit American shipping especially hard, because the United States was the largest neutral carrier of the age. Both Britain and France seized American ships, and the Royal Navy also took sailors from American vessels by impressment, claiming they were British deserters.

President Thomas Jefferson responded with the Embargo Act of December 1807, which banned American ships from sailing to foreign ports. It was meant to pressure Britain and France by cutting off American trade, but it badly damaged the American economy, especially in New England, and was replaced in 1809 by the narrower Non-Intercourse Act. Napoleon even used the embargo as a pretext to seize American ships in French-controlled ports, claiming they could only be British ships in disguise.

Key people

• Napoleon, who designed the system and tried to enforce it across Europe.
• Alexander I, Tsar of Russia, who joined it at Tilsit and broke with it in 1810.
• Spencer Perceval, British Chancellor of the Exchequer and then prime minister from 1809, a leading defender of the Orders in Council.
• Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, who resisted strict enforcement and lost his throne.
• Thomas Jefferson, the American president whose embargo tried to keep the United States out of the conflict.

Consequences: the road to Russia

The blockade’s greatest effect was political. Russia, a major exporter of timber, grain and hemp to Britain, suffered badly. On 31 December 1810 Tsar Alexander I issued a new tariff that opened Russian ports to neutral ships and taxed French luxury goods, in effect leaving the system.

Napoleon treated this as a breach of the alliance, and it became a leading cause of the French invasion of Russia in 1812. Across the Atlantic, the Orders in Council and British seizures of American ships contributed to the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States; Britain suspended the Orders in June 1812, just as the United States declared war. The system disintegrated during 1813 as the allies drove the French out of Germany.

Timeline

• 1806, May: Britain declares a naval blockade of the French-controlled coast.
• 1806, 21 November: Napoleon issues the Berlin Decree.
• 1807, January and November: British Orders in Council restrict neutral trade.
• 1807, July: Russia and Prussia join the system under the Treaties of Tilsit.
• 1807, November and December: The Milan Decrees.
• 1807, November: French troops occupy Lisbon.
• 1810, July: Holland is annexed to France.
• 1810, 31 December: Russia’s new tariff effectively breaks with the system.
• 1812, June: Britain suspends the Orders in Council; Napoleon invades Russia.
• 1814, April: Napoleon abdicates and the system ends.

Why it matters

The Continental System was one of the first attempts to win a great-power war by economic blockade of a whole continent. It failed to defeat Britain, while forcing Napoleon to occupy, annex or fight one country after another. In that sense it helped turn his empire’s greatest strength, control of Europe, into the overstretch that destroyed it.