Continental system

Napoleon’s continental blockade of 1806 and 1807 caused a disruption in Baltic supplies, which resulted in a period of acute timber scarcity that threatened Britain’s vital shipbuilding industry. The colonies in British North America picked up some of the slack in supply, which was crucial to the Royal Navy’s war effort. In 1807–8 exports more than doubled. The lumber trade, virtually non-existent at the beginning of the century, grew in Lower Canada and the Maritimes to become the commercial mainstay of the colonial economy.