This chapter looks at the impact of the American Revolution and its war on both Britain and Ireland. Its central concern is to explore whether Britain and Ireland can be incorporated in the Atlantic Revolution thesis, first advanced by Robert Palmer, which suggests the migration of revolutionary impulses eastwards. The argument developed here lays less emphasis on the inspiration provided by the democratic ideas associated with the American Revolution than on the importance of British military setbacks and ultimate defeat in the War of American Independence. It also highlights domestic and wider imperial influences on reform within Britain and Ireland, which also seem to have played a more significant role than the democratic tendencies of the American Revolution. By no means all the different reform programs and proposals in Britain and Ireland envisaged movement in a democratic direction. Indeed, the chapter makes the case for our considering most of the calls for reform in this period as attempts to turn the clock back, and recover lost or declining safeguards against misrule, or remedy long-standing grievances, rather than as forward-looking attempts to embrace democracy.

By comparison with the continental powers, Britain had no more than a medium-sized army, but the largest navy in Europe.  This chapter seeks to explore the bases of Britain’s naval strength, going back to the seventeenth-century Navigation Acts, and then to consider how that strength was deployed in the war against Napoleon.  It argues that the Royal Navy, despite the limited impact it might be thought that it could have on land warfare, played an important part in the final defeat of Napoleon.

THE MOST DIFFICULT IDEAS to challenge are often those that are not explicitly articulated, but operate at the subterranean level of deep-rooted assumption. For all the recent emphasis on the need to free ourselves from the distortions of the narrowly national narrative, and recognise the intertwined, entangled, transnational, or even plain old-fashioned international dimensions of every society's past, the default setting for most historians seems to be the national perspective. Armies are perhaps particularly prone to this national approach. We tend to associate them with the nation state, national sentiment, and national identity. They act, especially in wartime, as a symbol of the nation. Historians of the British Army, over many generations, have reflected the general tendency to regard the British state's professional military forces as the embodiment of the nation and therefore as distinct and different from those of other states and nations.

Yet in the eighteenth century, at least, the British Army was as much a European as a British institution. It had much in common with, and was closely connected to, other European armies. Furthermore, in the right circumstances, its officers and men had little difficulty in appreciating their army's essential Europeanness. Unlikely though it may seem, we can even say that British soldiers possessed a European consciousness, based on occupational solidarity, which sat alongside their other senses of collective belonging. This chapter focuses mainly on the period 1740–93; from the middle of the eighteenth century until the time when Britain became involved in the French Revolutionary War. The case for the British Army's European character would probably be no less strong if earlier decades were examined. Recent work suggests that the argument may also hold good for the years after 1793.

Two important caveats need to be registered before the army's European features are analysed. The first is that the British military had some undeniably distinctive characteristics. Its control by the civil power, while not perhaps as absolute as some accounts suggest, marks it out from other European armies, many of which were clearly not constrained by constitutional limitations. From the middle of the century, the British Army was also more obviously committed to imperial theatres than most of its European counterparts…

HISTORIANS OF previous generations tended to see eighteenth-century European wars before the French Revolution as tame or ‘limited’ affairs, their self-control a conscious reaction to the widespread destruction and brutality of the Thirty Years War (1618–48), which had left much of Germany depopulated and in ruins. To these historians, a key ingredient of the limited nature of eighteenth-century warfare was its minimal impact on civilians in the theatres of operation. Contemporary works on the law of nations, such as the influential Le droit des gens (1758) of the Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel, certainly urged the military to show restraint in their dealings with those not in arms against them; a new spirit of proportionality and moderation, so characteristic of the Enlightenment, pervaded his and other writings on the laws of war. Army commanders, older accounts imply, followed the lead of the jurists, and civilians, in return for their not becoming involved in the fighting, were spared the horrors of war. The French Revolution, the same accounts tell us, ended the era of limited war, sweeping away the restraint and decorousness associated with aristocratic control, and restored to armed conflict all its elemental fury.

The idea that the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars marked a new beginning, the start of modern ‘total’ conflict, continues to be debated. But the associated notion that earlier eighteenth-century struggles were limited in their impact on non-combatants is no longer fashionable. Modern scholarship has demonstrated beyond any doubt that European wars of that time were highly intrusive affairs and could be truly terrible for civilians unlucky enough to be in the vicinity of the competing armies. Some historians argue that on the eastern fringes of Europe, in wars where the Turks were belligerents, non-combatants who found themselves caught up in military operations suffered particularly badly. The bloody fate of the inhabitants as well as the garrison of Ochakov, on the Black Sea coast, captured by the Russians from the Ottomans in 1788, seems to prove the point, as do other similar incidents in the same war.

Historians of previous generations tended to see eighteenth-century European wars before the French Revolution as tame or ‘limited’ affairs, their self-control a conscious reaction to the widespread destruction and brutality of the Thirty Years War (1618–48), which had left much of Germany depopulated and in ruins. To these historians, a key ingredient of the limited nature of eighteenth-century warfare was its minimal impact on civilians in the theatres of operation. Contemporary works on the law of nations, such as the influential Le droit des gens (1758) of the Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel, certainly urged the military to show restraint in their dealings with those not in arms against them; a new spirit of proportionality and moderation, so characteristic of the Enlightenment, pervaded his and other writings on the laws of war. Army commanders, older accounts imply, followed the lead of the jurists, and civilians, in return for their not becoming involved in the fighting, were spared the horrors of war. The French Revolution, the same accounts tell us, ended the era of limited war, sweeping away the restraint and decorousness associated with aristocratic control, and restored to armed conflict all its elemental fury.

The idea that the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars marked a new beginning, the start of modern ‘total’ conflict, continues to be debated. But the associated notion that earlier eighteenth-century struggles were limited in their impact on non-combatants is no longer fashionable.

Introduction

A spacecraft in flight is a dynamical system. As dynamical systems go, it is comparatively straightforward; the equations of motion are continuous and deterministic, for the unforced case they are essentially integrable, and perturbations, such as the attractions of bodies other than the central body, are usually small. The difficulties arise when the complete problem, corresponding to a real space mission, is considered. For example, a complete interplanetary flight, beginning in Earth orbit and ending with insertion into Mars orbit, has complicated, time-dependent boundary conditions, straightforward equations of motion but requires coordinate transformations when the spacecraft transitions from planet-centered to heliocentric flight (and vice versa), and likely discrete changes in system states as the rocket motor is fired and the spacecraft suddenly changes velocity and mass. If low-thrust electric propulsion is used, the system is further complicated as there no longer exist integrable arcs and the decision variables, which previously were discrete quantities such as the times, magnitudes and directions of rocket-provided impulses, now also include continuous time histories, that is, of the low-thrust throttling and of the thrust pointing direction. In addition, it may be optimizing to use the low-thrust motor for finite spans of time and “coast” otherwise, with the optimal number of these thrust arcs and coast arcs a priori unknown.

Since the cost of placing a spacecraft in orbit, which is usually the first step in any trajectory, is so enormous, it is particularly important to optimize space trajectories so that a given mission can be accomplished with the lightest possible spacecraft and within the capabilities of existing (or affordable) launch vehicles.