| | | Sure, they won the mercantilism game. Vestiges of their economic dominance still hang on. But the problem came in when the Industrial Revolution lit the fire under technology. With the American Civil War, the handwriting was already on the wall. A lot of the various things the Great Powers were experimenting with were fielded and gave a preview of things to come. From ironclads to rifled artillery and hand weapons, chemical weapons to trench warfare and snipers, it was becoming clear that the changes in warfare that had been going on for a century or so was about to kick into a much higher gear.
The Napoleonic Wars were but a few decades earlier than the (not so)Civil War. By the end of the Civil War, calvary charges on horseback was becoming suicidal. Between trench warfare and the Gatling Gun, any future wars against near peers was going to drive that point home, as it did during WWI. Like pretty much everything else until tanks rolled out. Ironclads, powered by steam engines and armed with rifled guns, along with submarines were going to radically reshape navies.
Those are the things that killed the British Empire. If it hadn't of been for how fast things changed, the empire probably could have survived.
On the other hand, apparently mounted calvary have made a comeback in Ukraine. So things can regress. I think tall ships are dead, but who knows? |
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