Variations on the North American Triangle from Yorktown to Waterloo: Substitution, Complementarity, Parallelism

The role played by the United States in the economic history of the ‘Napoleonic wars’ period is easily underestimated. Of course, they stood apart from the two main contenders, Britain and France, and not only in the geographical sense. They were a ‘small country’, with under four million people in 1790, over seven in 1810, as against twenty seven and thirty respectively at the same dates for France,1 and over fifteen for the United Kingdom in 1801. They were also a ‘new country’, of recent settlement, with economic structures less complex and sophisticated than in Western Europe. Thirdly, they kept out of the European wars up to June 1812, and Mr Madison’s war lasted just thirty months; though they had been previously involved in the (not too serious) quasi-war with France of 1798–1800, and though their diplomatic relations with France and still more with Britain were under severe strain from 1807 onwards (with serious consequences for American trade), their experience was entirely different from that of France and Britain, which were in a state of war for twenty years, with only the fourteen month long break of the Peace of Amiens (not to mention the civil strife in France during the 1790s and the Waterloo campaing).