I heard an expert suggest that the Battle of Trafalgar was not of great military significance in the Napoleonic Wars. How accurate is this?

by RichmondRay

I was listening to an episode of the BBC Radio 4 show "In Our Time," and I heard this from James Davey, a lecturer on naval and maritime history. He's comparing the reaction to the victory from the British public (sorrow over Nelson's death, displays of patriotism) with the government's (cynicism), and he says this:

"I think the (British) government knows full well that Trafalgar has done very little to shape the course of the war. As reports come back, as Vice-Admiral Collingwood's dispatches arrive, it's pretty clear that whilst Britain has captured and sunk a number of enemy ships, a lot have escaped. And of course the admiralty and the British government would have known that there were plenty of other French fleets stationed around Europe."

This surprised me, as it contradicts my own conception of Trafalgar as a major turning point not only in the Napoleonic Wars, but also in world history. Is my impression the result of a successful British propaganda campaign around Trafalgar? Was it really not that materially consequential?

jschooltiger

This is an old chestnut that gets brought up from time to time, to which there are several non-competing answers (that is, there are multiple answers to it that are not mutually exclusive).

  1. Was Trafalgar a decisive battle?

  • Indeed, it was, at sea. The defeat of the allied (Franco-Spanish) fleet ended the real threat of an invasion of Britain, although France and its allies had attempted to invade Britain many times in the 18th century, usually leading to disaster. (Amphibious operations are actually really hard.) Although Napoleon and his allies had at their command most of the forests of Europe, they did not have the naval infrastructure that Britain commanded to actually build ships with seasoned timber, add to them useful warrant and commissioned officers, man them with adequate, uh, manpower, and so forth. Although there were certainly capital ships at Napoleon's command, they were for the most part bottled up in port or, if they cruised, unable to make major inroads on Britain's fleet.

  • It was not, on land. It's a truism of war that "boots on the ground" are the only thing that can occupy land, and though naval expeditions can make a big difference in the timing of warfare -- one only has to look at Drake's raids on Cadiz and the Iberian coast in 1587 to see this as a factor -- naval warfare alone rarely forces the issue in a war. (It's a fairly debated question whether the naval blockade of Japan, the bombing raids on the Home Islands, the atomic bomb, or the invasion of Manchuria by the Soviet Union caused Japan to surrender in WWII - it's very likely a "both and" scenario.) The analogy of the elephant versus the whale is apt; how would the two actually fight?

  1. Why did Trafalgar not end the Napoleonic wars?
  • Because Napoleon still had many enemies, and allies, on land. The War of the Third Coalition started in 1803, when Napoleon smashed the Peace of Amiens, but Britain was able to garner allies in the HRE, Naples, Sicily, Russia and Sweden. Napoleon arguably destroyed the Third Coalition at Austerlitz, although there was a bit of a sideshow in Naples later, but his continued aggression led to the war(s) of the Fourth Coalition starting in 1806. Napoleon's decision to install his brother on the throne of Spain in 1808 led to the Peninsular War, which Britain financed through its naval trade and supply routes through Portugal (initially) and later Spain, which led eventually to the defeat of Napoleon by conventional armies and his abdication, briefly interrupted by the 100 Days which ended at Waterloo. (Yes, I'm simplifying things here).
  1. Why is Trafalgar important?
  • It was/is only major naval battle fought between 1805 and 1916 (Jutland), and it informed naval thought during that time. Alfred Thayer Mahan based his theory of naval history upon Trafalgar, though he cherry-picks other battles in his works, and his book was read not only in Europe but also in the United States, and Japan, where a young Yamamoto Isoruku (among many others) was inspired by it. What John Keegan calls "the price of admiralty" -- and although his works are imperfect, he nails it here -- is the issue of any global power; two-thirds or more of the world's commerce moves by sea, and control of the sea is expensive and difficult for any country to claim and to enforce. Naval warfare alone cannot be decisive in war -- if we imagine a counterfactual where Villenvenue beats Nelson, Napoleon still has to put troops on the ground to occupy Buckingham Palace -- but it can massively influence the course of events in any case.