Treaty of London (Napoleon's World)

The Treaty of London was a peace agreement between France and the United Kingdom of Great Britain that ended the final conflict in the Napoleonic Wars (Imperial Wars in France), signed in London on August 1st, 1815 after a month of military occupation by the French under Napoleon I. Signed by Napoleon personally, as well as Marshals Ney, Soult and Jourdan for the French and by King George III, his son the Prince Regent George, Lord Liverpool (the Prime Minister) and Lord Neville (the British military commander) for the British.

The treaty, which came on the heels of the hugely destructive and humiliating forty day French conquest of England, was designed to permanently cripple Britain as an international competitor to Napoleon's France. Napoleon divided the United Kingdom into what he derisively called the "Divided Kingdoms," leaving the British monarchs as kings of England, but restored the Stuart dynasty to power in Scotland and set up the McDean family in the newly independent kingdom of Ireland. The French also forbade the interference of the English in "the affairs of sovereign, independent and foreign nations" by penalty of further invasion, thus rendering their colonial ambitions in Africa and India largely null, and relieved them of colonies in West Africa, the West Indies and Caribbean, and of their holdings in Canada, which France and America would later divide up amongst themselves.

The treaty is seen as the symbolic end of the power of England as a major world power (although it would develop into a mighty mercantile nation and rebound economically by the early 1820's to become the counterweight European power to the massive French Empire) and the assertion of Napoleon as the most powerful man in world history up to that time. With Britain defeated, gutted and divided in three, the Treaty of London signalled the moment that he was free to execute without interference his designs on the continent. By 1817, Napoleon had removed every French soldier from England, as per the terms of the treaty.