Chapter II.: Maritime Blockade

IT has already been intimated that, parallel with the commercial blockade, which came principally from the French side, there was taking place, mainly on the British side, a systematic persecution of trade with enemy countries, and that both of these lines of development came to be united in the Continental System. Seemingly and on paper these two lines of policy were not only separate, but also, in part, absolutely conflicting; this, in fact, has led many observers astray. But if we consider the policy of the maritime blockade with reference to its actual application, as opposed to its outward form, we find that its character, in spite of all inconsistencies and lack of precision, easily reveals as merely an outcome of the mercantilist commercial policy. In this way, consequently, the aim of the commercial war of a hundred years ago was altogether unlike that pursued in the recent World War. On this point, however, scarcely any of the usual accounts give us clear information. The majority of them take the policy of blockade as a more or less self-evident matter without inquiring into its aims. The only writer who, so far as I know, has embarked on a deeper analysis is the foremost naval historian of our time, the late Admiral Mahan of the United States Navy, who has undoubtedly cast much light on the history of the Continental System in his books, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire (1893), and Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 (1905). In general, however, it may be said that Admiral Mahan is too much concerned with sea-power in itself to devote sufficient attention to its connexion with economic policy and economic activity, which after all have also a non-naval side.

In the external system of the maritime blockade the actual blocking of the enemy's ports and coasts unquestionably forms the central point. Characteristic of the system, however, was the practice adopted by Great Britain of establishing a so-called 'paper blockade', that is to say, of declaring in a state of blockade long stretches of coast which she could not or would not effectively blockade by means of sufficient naval forces, and on the strength of this declaration capturing neutral vessels bound for well-nigh any enemy port. This practice received its most extreme statement in an obiter dictum attributed to the British Admiralty Judge, Sir James Marriott, who in 1780, during the war with France and Spain, the European allies of the American colonies, declared that the ports of those countries were ipso facto blockaded by virtue of their geographic position. It was perhaps chiefly to this central point in the naval policy of Great Britain that the neutrals demurred. The demand that the blockade should be effectual, that is to say, that it should apply only to places which were so well guarded that vessels could not reach them without imminent danger of capture, consequently played an important rôle among the five celebrated points enunciated in 1778 by the Danish statesman, A. P. Bernstorff, and used as the foundation of the unusually successful Swedo-Dano-Russian Armed Neutrality of 1780.