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least three-quarters of all government expenditure during the century had gone on fighting or on paying off the debts which fighting had incurred. In 1793, at a time when the annual tax revenue rarely exceeded £20 million, the national debt stood at £242.9 million. Pitt and his successors taxed and borrowed without hesitation to fight the French. By 1802, when the navy was costing £7 million a year, three times as much was being spent each year on subsidies to Britain’s allies on the European continent. Between 1793 and the end of the war in 1815, the British government raised in taxes, and borrowed from the English people, a total of £1.5 billion, a figure which can safely be multiplied by 60 for its modern equivalent. By the end of the war, the national debt had risen to £745 million, or somewhere nearthirty years’ government revenue. Pitt and his successors, in other words, put the country in hock, the most radical national gamble of all, pouring money into ships and allies as though their life depended on it, which it did.
    This is the second critical difference between Britain and her enemies in the Napoleonic wars: not only were the English riding a big, bucking commercial boom; they were happy to be taxed on their profits. What they didn’t give the government in tax, they lent it in return for government bonds. The two were connected. Uniquely in Europe, the British government was able to borrow so much from its own people because it was efficient enough at collecting tax to make sure that the annual interest was paid on the loan. It was a particularly English form of consensual government finance, without which the fleet at Trafalgar would have been as poorly equipped as its enemies’. On this consensual basis the British were able to raise far more in tax throughout the 18th century than the French, while still persuading themselves that they were the freest people on the planet.
    British government finance was not without its crises but an extraordinary mutuality in the financial relationship of people and government lay behind the British naval victories in their 18th-century wars. And there is a further element to it, which makes the relationship between the British navy and the commercial classes in Britain particularly intimate and mutually sustaining. The navy was largely paid for by indirect taxes on a huge variety of goods and luxuries, from windows to servants, hair powder, nonworking horses, carriages and playing cards, as well as by excise duties levied on imports. The bulk of the tax burden, in other words, fell on the new middle classes as consumers. But the existence of the navy, very much as the great Henry James Pye described it in Naucratia , guaranteed and promoted the creation of a world commercial empire. Anavy funded by the middle class and largely officered by the middle class created an empire in which the middle classes thrived. Between 1792 and 1800, the commerce of Great Britain on the seas which its navy controlled increased by an astonishing seven per cent year on year, rising from £44.5 million in 1792 to £73.7 million in 1800. Excise revenues rolled into the British Treasury. ‘If we compare this year of war with former years of peace,’ Pitt told the House of Commons in February 1801,
we shall in the produce of our revenue and in the extent of our commerce behold a spectacle at once paradoxical, inexplicable and astonishing. We have increased our external and internal commerce to a greater pitch than ever it was before; and we may look to the present as the proudest year that has ever occurred for this country.
    Trafalgar, a battle fought by trade, for trade and in some ways as trade, might be seen as the first great bourgeois victory of European history, and its heroes as the first great heroes of the British middle class.
    There is an important qualification to be made here. The idea of a fleet commanded by members of the British middle