The United Kingdom, from its islands off the coast of Europe, financed the coalition that defeated France during the Napoleonic Wars, and further developed its dominant Royal Navy enabling the British Empire to become the foremost world power for the next century.

The deadliest conflict in human history up to that point, the war ended in an Allied victory in November 1918 but inflicted a massive cost to British manpower, materiel and treasure.

[7] During the War of the Second Coalition (1799–1801), Britain occupied most of the French and Dutch overseas possessions, the Netherlands having become a satellite state of France in 1796, but tropical diseases claimed the lives of over 40,000 troops.

The peace settlement was in effect only a ceasefire, and Napoleon continued to provoke the British by attempting a trade embargo on the country and by occupying the city of Hanover, capital of the Electorate, a German-speaking duchy of the Holy Roman Empire which was in a personal union with the United Kingdom.

When Napoleon surrendered for the first time in 1814, three separate forces were sent to attack the Americans in upstate New York, along the Maryland coast (burning Washington but getting repulsed at Baltimore), and up the Mississippi River to a massive defeat at the Battle of New Orleans.

The most important event was the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, on 16 August 1819, when a local militia unit composed of landowners charged into an orderly crowd of 60,000 which had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation.

[21] Robert Peel was alarmed at the strength of the Catholic Association, warning in 1824, "We cannot tamely sit by while the danger is hourly increasing, while a power co-ordinate with that of the Government is rising by its side, nay, daily counteracting its views.

There followed 15 difficult years, in which the Tory Party, representing a small, rich landed aristocracy that was fearful of a popular revolution along the French model, employed severe repression.

Repeal was heavily promoted by the Anti-Corn Law League, grass roots activists led by Richard Cobden and based in the industrial cities; they demanded cheap food.

In addition to reforms at the Parliamentary level, there was a reorganisation of the governmental system in the rapidly growing cities, putting a premium on modernisation and expertise, and large electorates as opposed to small ruling cliques.

[29] In the 1790–1815 period there was an improvement in morals caused by the religious efforts by evangelicals inside the Church of England,[30] and Dissenters or Nonconformist Protestants as people: became wiser, better, more frugal, more honest, more respectable, more virtuous, than they ever were before."

A major Unitarian magazine, the Christian Monthly Repository asserted in 1827: Throughout England a great part of the more active members of society, who have the most intercourse with the people have the most influence over them, are Protestant Dissenters.

In February 1828, Whig leader Lord John Russell, presented petitions assembled by the main Nonconformist pressure group, the United Committee, which represented Congregationalist, Baptists and Unitarians.

When Peel took over the Home Office, he abolished the espionage and cruel punishments, ended the death penalty for most crimes, and inaugurated the first system of professional police—who in London to this day are still called "Bobbies" in his honour.

'"[59] David Thompson has stressed the revolutionary nature of the entire package of reforms: In all these ways—the organization of the new police (by Peel as Home Secretary in the 1820s), the new Poor Law, and in the new municipal councils—the pattern of government in England was changed fundamentally within a single decade.

He did more than any other man to prevent the intervention of this country (Britain) on the side of the South during the American Civil War, and he headed the reform agitation in 1867 which brought the industrial working class within the pale of the constitution.

The Boer republics were merged with Cape Colony and Natal into the Union of South Africa in 1910; this had internal self-government, but its foreign policy was controlled by London and it was an integral part of the British Empire.

Gladstone denounced Disraeli's policies of territorial aggrandisement, military pomp and imperial symbolism (such as making the Queen Empress of India), saying it did not fit a modern commercial and Christian nation.

His reputation as the "Tory democrat" and promoter of the welfare state fell away as historians showed that Disraeli had few proposals for social legislation in 1874–1880, and that the Reform Act 1867 did not reflect a vision of Conservatism for the unenfranchised working man.

His financial policies, based on the notion of balanced budgets, low taxes and laissez-faire, were suited to a developing capitalist society but could not respond effectively as economic and social conditions changed.

His foreign policy goal was to create a European order based on cooperation rather than conflict and mutual trust instead of rivalry and suspicion; the rule of law was to supplant the reign of force and self-interest.

Multiple crises hit simultaneously in 1910–1914 with serious social and political instability arising from the Irish crisis, labour unrest, the women's suffrage movements, and partisan and constitutional struggles in Parliament.

[113] After a rough start Britain under David Lloyd George successfully mobilised its manpower, industry, finances, empire and diplomacy, in league with the French and Americans, to defeat the Central Powers.

By early 1916, with number of volunteers falling off, the government imposed conscription in Britain (but was not able to do so in Ireland where nationalists of all stripes militantly opposed it) in order to keep up the strength of the army.

The almost three million casualties were known as the "lost generation", and such numbers inevitably left society scarred; but even so, some people felt their sacrifice was little regarded in Britain, with poems like Siegfried Sassoon's Blighters criticising the war as a human failure.

Britain was granted League of Nations mandates over Palestine, which was turned into a homeland for Jewish settlers, and Iraq, created from the three Ottoman provinces in Mesopotamia; the latter of which became fully independent in 1932.

After Butt's death the home rule movement, or the Irish Parliamentary Party as it had become known, was turned into a major political force under the guidance of William Shaw and a radical young Anglo-Irish Protestant landowner, Charles Stewart Parnell.

Two home rule Bills (1886 and 1893) were introduced by the Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, but neither became law, mainly due to opposition from the Conservative party and the House of Lords.

[133] Running on a platform that advocated something like the self-rule successfully enacted in Canada under the British North America Act, 1867, home rulers won a majority of both county and borough seats in Ireland in 1874.

[138] The Conservatives came to power until 1906 and home rule became a dead issue, but the subsidised sale of farm land greatly reduced the Protestant presence in Ireland south of Ulster.