Book Review: British Expeditionary Warfare and The Defeat of Napoleon, 1793–1815 by Robert K. Sutcliffe

Abstract

Even in so crowded a field as the military history of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, there are still important and unexplored niches to be found. In looking at the history of the Transport Board between 1794 and 1815, Sutcliffe offers an important and effective study that does an excellent job of filling one of these niches. Founded shortly after the outbreak of war, the Board technically lay under the control of the Treasury and was intended to address the problems of hiring and coordinating the shipping of men and materiel that had dogged the separate departments of the British fiscal-military state during the American Revolutionary War. Viewing the wars from the perspective of the Board, Sutcliffe is sympathetic to its challenges and argues that it did the best job it could to balance the urgent calls on its scarce resources, enabling Britain to project military power in Europe and further afield. A number of thematic chapters examine administration, the shipping markets, amphibious operations and the use of naval ships as troops transports, and these are rounded off by several further chapters that adopt a chronological perspective and track the ebb and flow of business at the Board during the peak years of the Napoleonic Wars between 1805 and 1815. Sutcliffe, therefore, situates his book between the more administrative or institutional studies by David Syrett of naval transport earlier in the eighteenth century, and the more strategic focus adopted by Christopher Hall in his study of naval power during the Peninsular War, to suggest how these elements interacted. He argues that the Board had to juggle competing demands from commanders such as Wellington, and developed formidable bureaucratic resources to do so, not least the system of regular returns that enabled it to keep track of its transports and direct them most efficiently. Too often it faced problems because strategic planning by the Cabinet failed to take account of transport needs, and the Board lacked the political muscle to have an input into the planning process. To secure shipping the Board also had to cultivate good relations with the small clique of ship-brokers in London who could help assemble transports at short notice. Indeed, in one of the most effective and useful sections of the book, Sutcliffe reconstructs the state of the market for shipping in early 19th-century London. About 10,000 ships were registered in London in 1790 but Book Reviews