The first step in reconstructing the politics of the early nineteenth century is to acknowledge the sheer impact of the end of the war. The transformative nature of the long French Wars (1793–1815) can scarcely be underestimated. It was an unprecedented conflict in terms of the scale of participation of manpower (and indeed womanpower), something conveyed in part by simple but striking figures. The participation rate of men of military age was one in sixteen for the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8); one in eight for the American Revolution (1776–83); but rose to one in five or six at the height of the French Wars. The peacetime army of 1789 had stood at 40,000 – by 1814 it had reached 250,000. One of the most remarkable features of the period is the manner in which the British state proved capable of mobilizing manpower at those points at which French invasion seemed credible and imminent. In particular, the extraordinary mobilization of 1803–4, which saw volunteering on a huge scale, vastly increased the numbers of Britons with some military experience. While it avoided recourse to the novel French levée en masse the British state nevertheless managed to create the ‘armed nation’. As J. E. Cookson has demonstrated, the participation rate of Scots in all of these various forms of martial endeavour was out of proportion to the small size of their country.