Why didn't Britain just stay out of the revolutionary and the Napoleonic wars? Or at least just protect its vital interests eg. trade routes
Just a change of focus here. I am interested to understand why Britain sought to get involved in the wars on the continent, and over turn the revolution and reinstall a king to the throne. Britain vehemently opposed revolutionary France and Napoleon. Was this a series of wars that they really needed to fight, or were they just on an old fashioned imperialist quest for power and empire trying to bring down a potential rival so they could have a free hand around the world?
I can see that there was a point after 1805 when Britain feared a French invasion, but this was largely in response to the consistent belligerence of the British forming new alliances, encouraging new armies and coalitions against France, and the tearing up of the Treaty of Amiens.
I am also curious as to why the British and the Prussians felt that they had to fight Napoleon again in 1815 after his return to power? Napoleon wasn't fixing for a fight as far as I know. In fact France was tired of war. France was no longer occupying vast swathes of Europe either. What was really at stake?
Unfortunately John many like to view historical events as existing in some sort of ‘bubble’. Perhaps it’s the nature of single topic books, or the librarians and bookstore cataloging them into different shelves? Separatists and isolationists everywhere buy into the comforting Pollyanna concept. Not content with the unrealistic nature in today’s world, they reach back into history and say ‘if only this entity had kept out of so and so, these nasty things wouldn’t have happened’. History doesn’t repeat itself, but there are themes. Isolationism leads to appeasement. Appeasement, certainly in the UK, gets a bad reputation. No amount of Danegeld got rid of the Norsemen. Waving bits of paper signed by dictators whilst getting out of an aircraft didn’t go well either. There is absolutely no evidence that appeasement of Napoleon would have led to peaceful coexistence. He was a vain glorious narcissist with a clear idea of his ascending star. His was an acquisitive dynastic regime, not just of his enemies but his friends too. Coalitions though can lead to some strange bedfellows. As Churchill put it “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference of the Devil in the House of Commons."!