Trade Not Rule
Industry and agriculture depended on regular shipments of raw materials from abroad and sometimes force was used to facilitate trade. During the war against Napoleon, the island nation maintained the greatest industrial capacity in Europe. Britain had been without a serious international rival since the defeat of Napoleon at Trafalgar in 1805, and during the 19th century its territories in Africa and Southeast Asia had expanded greatly. The declining Ottoman, Persian and Chinese empires left a power vacuum. Britain's invasions of Afghanistan and the Crimean peninsula and its wars with China resulted in the acquisition of roughly ten million square miles of territory and four hundred million people. Government incentives encouraged shipping companies to increase their fleets and new owners to set up business. By the mid-19th century, there was hardly a part of the world where British shipping had not penetrated. Subsequently, after a century of free trade, merchant shipping tonnage more than doubled between 1871 and 1911. (Starkey, 8)
Involvement in the South African War, in 1899, forged important developments in the relationship between merchant shipping and the navy. Commercial passenger liners were already transporting government employees to foreign colonies. In fact, officials of the British Raj accounted for two-thirds of passengers to India. But with the South African venture, the Admiralty established an armed convoy of Royal Navy ships to escort commercial passenger liners. These passenger liners supplied six divisions of infantry across 6,000 miles of ocean. (341)
