daily wage for an agricultural labourer was I-I:i francs; in the Pyrenees
the respective rates were ten francs and three francs. In Hamburg it was
estimated that 6-Io,ooo people a day smuggled coffee, sugar and other
comestibles, of which an absolute maximum of 5% was confiscated.
Napoleon hit back with occasional exemplary punishments. In the
Rothschilds' native city of Frankfurt, a sanctions-busting centre, French
troops publicly burned £I,20o,ooo worth of contraband goods in
November I8Io. But such scenes were rare: even when French viceroys
and governors found out about contraband they could usually be bribed
to remain silent or simply go through the motions.
In the light of all this, the surprise is that the Continental Blockade
worried the British as much as it did. The impact of the System on the
British economy has been much disputed, and some indices seem to show
an almost nil effect. Britain's merchant fleet rose from I3,446 ships in
I8o2 to I7,346; the rise in unemployment can be explained as a fu nction
of population growth in the U.K. from I5,846,ooo in I8oi to I8,o44,000
in I8rr; the modest profits of industry can be interpreted as systematic
tax evasion. But there are other figures that tell a different story,
particularly in the early period of the blockade until I 8o8. Exports, which
reached a peak in I809 (£50.3 million) were only £9 million up on the
peacetime figure for I8o2. Continental trade, worth £22.5 million in I8o2
fell to half that in I 8o8. The value of Britain's re-export trade in colonial
produce declined from £I4,4I9,ooo in I8o2 to £7,862,000 in I8o8 and
was still only at £8,278,ooo in I8II; sugar, which sold for 73 shillings per
hundredweight in I798 fell to 32 shillings by I807 and did not rise above
5 0 shillings until I8I3. The stagnation of colonial produce on the market
was matched by the crisis of British manufacturers; industrialists in
Manchester could not liquidate their stocks of cotton; the price of flax
rose; there was a grave crisis in the wool industry.
Matters were at an acute pass in early I8o8. There was a serious drop
in exports in the last six months of I 807 and the first six of I 8o8; exports
to Europe sank to £I5 million as compared to £r9� million in the twelve
months before. The combination of Jefferson's embargo and Napoleon's
blockade began to bite, and there were serious riots in Lancashire and
Yorkshire in May and June I8o8. Ex-Prime Minister Grenville was one
of those in England who began to panic. It was precisely at that moment
that Napoleon made his disastrous and self-destructive intervention in
Spain. Ostensibly, he moved in to shut a door still open to British
produce, but at a stroke he ruined the prospect of Spain as a market for
French manufacturers and opened the trade of Latin America to the
British. With justifiable irony the economist d'Ivernois remarked that the
marcin
(Marcin)
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