Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"They had by 1815 gained the most complete victory of any power in the entire history of the world, having emerged from the twenty years of war against France as the only industrialized economy, the only naval power--the British navy in 1840 had almost as many ships as all other navies put together--and virtually the only colonial power in the world." [Hobsbawm: Revolution, p. 106]