Continental System Proclaimed
Napoleon closed Europe to British trade by decree in November 1806 and spent the next six years failing to enforce it. The strategy followed from Trafalgar. He could not invade Britain and could not beat the Royal Navy, so he attacked what he took to be the source of British power — commerce and credit — by shutting the continent's ports to British ships and goods, on the theory that a nation of shopkeepers would be bankrupted into peace. The Berlin decree declared the British Isles blockaded, which was a legal fiction since France had no fleet to blockade with, and the Milan decree of 1807 extended it to neutral vessels that had touched at a British port. Britain answered with orders in council requiring neutrals to call at British ports first, which put American shipping between two systems and contributed to the war of 1812. The economics went the wrong way. British exports fell and recovered by finding new markets in South America and by systematic smuggling through Heligoland, Malta, Salonica and the Baltic; European industries dependent on colonial goods and on British machinery suffered badly, and sugar, coffee and cotton became scarce and expensive. Enforcement then drove the strategy. Portugal refused to comply and was invaded in 1807, producing the Peninsular War; the Papal States were annexed; Holland was annexed when Napoleon's own brother would not apply it; and Russia's withdrawal from the system in 1810 is a principal cause of the invasion of 1812. The system consumed the empire that imposed it.
- Year: 1806 CE
- Category: Political
