<P> During the War of the Second Coalition (1799--1801), Britain occupied most of the French and Dutch colonies (the Netherlands had been a satellite of France since 1796), but tropical diseases claimed the lives of over 40,000 troops . When the Treaty of Amiens ended the war, Britain was forced to return most of the colonies . 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 German city of Hanover (a fief of the British crown). In May 1803, war was declared again . Napoleon's plans to invade Britain failed due to the inferiority of his navy, and in 1805, Lord Nelson's fleet decisively defeated the French and Spanish at Trafalgar, which was the last significant naval action of the Napoleonic Wars . </P> <P> The series of naval and colonial conflicts, including a large number of minor naval actions, resembled those of the French Revolutionary Wars and the preceding centuries of European warfare . Conflicts in the Caribbean, and in particular the seizure of colonial bases and islands throughout the wars, could potentially have some effect upon the European conflict . The Napoleonic conflict had reached the point at which subsequent historians could talk of a "world war". Only the Seven Years' War offered a precedent for widespread conflict on such a scale . </P> <P> In 1806, Napoleon issued the series of Berlin Decrees, which brought into effect the Continental System . This policy aimed to weaken the British export economy closing French - controlled territory to its trade . The British army remained a minimal threat to France; the British standing army of just 220,000 at the height of the Napoleonic Wars hardly compared to France's army of a million men--in addition to the armies of numerous allies and several hundred thousand national guardsmen that Napoleon could draft into the military if necessary . Although the Royal Navy effectively disrupted France's extra-continental trade--both by seizing and threatening French shipping and by seizing French colonial possessions--it could do nothing about France's trade with the major continental economies and posed little threat to French territory in Europe . In addition, France's population and agricultural capacity far outstripped that of Britain . </P> <P> Many in the French government believed that isolating Britain from the Continent would end its economic influence over Europe and isolate it . Though the French designed the Continental System to achieve this, it never succeeded in its objective . Britain possessed the greatest industrial capacity in Europe, and its mastery of the seas allowed it to build up considerable economic strength through trade to its possessions from its rapidly expanding new Empire . Britain's naval supremacy meant that France could never enjoy the peace necessary to consolidate its control over Europe, and it could threaten neither the home islands nor the main British colonies . </P>

When did the united kingdom gain its independence