Great Britain (3)

With regard to published sources there is a very perceptible scarcity of all collections. Naturally enough there is nothing corresponding to Napoleon's correspondence; but there is not even any collection of official documents or legal enactments other than statutes. This makes Hansard's Parliamentary Debates (after 1803) our main source in a very high degree, because it contains, in addition to the debates themselves, a number of official papers which otherwise appear only in the London Gazette, which was rather inaccessible to me. Besides Hansard, however, there is, so far as I can judge, very comprehensive and useful material in the great collection of Blue Books or Parliamentary Papers, of which, however, very few were accessible to me. The same is the case with the pamphlet literature of the period. Among the writings falling under this head is Stephen's War in Disguise: or the Frauds of the Neutral Flags (London, 1805; reprinted in 1917), which has been repeatedly cited in the preceding pages and needs only to be mentioned here. The many accessible volumes of Life and Letters, Memoirs and Correspondence, &c., which largely have the character of sources, owing to the number of original documents included, have proved to contain very little material of importance for the history of the Continental System.

As regards secondary works, the foremost place must be given to those of Dr. J. Holland Rose, of which, however, only the articles Napoleon and British Commerce (1893), Britain's Food Supply in the Napoleonic War (1902), both reprinted in his collection of essays, Napoleonic Studies (London, 1904), contain a somewhat detailed discussion of the problems that concern us; and even these are based mainly on politicohistorical studies. On the other hand, there are abundant economic materials, though but little worked up, in three books: Smart, Economic Annals of the Nineteenth Century, vol. I, 1801-20 (London, 1910), which, as the name implies, is a purely chronological account of the more important economic events, based mainly on Hansard; Tooke, A History of Prices, and of the State of the Circulation, from 1793 to 1837, vols. I-II (London, 1838), in which the indispensable material is made to support certain rather dubious economic theories of the author; and finally Porter, The Progress of the Nation (many editions). The English work corresponding to Levasseur's work is Cunningham's Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. II, In Modern Times, 3d ed. (Cambridge, 1903); but this fundamental work gives much less on the Continental System than Levasseur's, simply because that incident takes a far more humble place in the economic history of Great Britain than in that of France. There is, therefore, really no comprehensive summary for the United Kingdom. A special problem is treated in Miss Audrey Cunningham's British Credit in the Last Napoleonic War (Girton College Studies, vol. II, Cambridge, 1910), which has been sufficiently discussed in the preceding pages. Two valuable short studies on the currency problems of the time have been published by Mr. R. G. Hawtrey in The Economic Journal, vol. XXVIII (London, 1918), and reprinted in the volume Currency and Credit (London, 1919); of these the Bank Restriction of 1797 bears more directly upon the problems treated in this book.