The Continental Blockade and the economic warfare that ensued stand at the very centre of the Napoleonic project. The Blockade contributed to the expansion of the French Empire and extended the conflict beyond the continent to the Mediterranean, North and Baltic Seas, to the Atlantic Ocean, and into the Western Hemisphere. French and British economic hostilities ensnared neutral and satellite states alike, states that usually suffered far more than the primary belligerents. Napoleon’s Blockade, the System that it developed, and the British counter-measures it provoked shaped the way that Europeans experienced the final seven years of the wars that began in 1792. Populations faced annexation into the French Empire, the decline of traditional commerce and industry, unemployment, impoverishment, increased surveillance, and resentment to both French and British measures. Many war-weary contemporaries responded productively to the hardship with illicit trade, new commercial networks and industries, and even wealth-generating endeavours. An examination of the Continental Blockade elucidates the simultaneously destructive and constructive transformation of international commerce and local manufacturing during this global conflict.