These Orders in Council were a series of decrees, in the form of Orders in Council, made by the Privy Council of the United Kingdom in the course of the wars with Napoleonic France which instituted its policy of commercial warfare. The Orders are important for the role they played in shaping the British war effort against France, but they are also significant for the strained relations—and sometimes military conflict—they caused between Great Britain and neutral countries, whose trade was affected by them. In Europe, restrictive British trade policy, as enacted in the Orders, led to the formation of the Second League of Armed Neutrality and deteriorating relations with other neutral powers, notably Denmark (with whom the British would fight a series of wars) and Russia. In the Atlantic, the Orders in Council were one of the main sources of tension between the United Kingdom and the United States which led to the War of 1812. Terminology Formally, an "Order in Council" is an order by the Sovereign at a meeting of the Privy Council by which the British government decrees policies. This type of legislation is still used on occasion, particularly in the exercise of the Royal Prerogative. Especially in American history, the term "the Orders in Council" is also used collectively to refer to the group of such orders in the late 18th and early 19th centuries which restricted neutral trade and enforced a naval blockade of Napoleonic France and its allies. In total, the collective term "Orders in Council" refers to more than a dozen sets of blockade decrees in the years 1783, 1793, 1794, 1798, 1799, 1803–1809, 1811, and 1812; it is most often associated in particular with the decrees of 7 January 1807, 11 November 1807, and 26 April 1809 which were most inflammatory to the Americans. Background By 1806, Napoleon was master of continental Europe, effectively locking Great Britain out of the continent. However, the defeat of the French and Spanish navies at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) ended any thoughts of an invasion of Great Britain. Napoleon, aware of British commercial strength, thus resorted to a policy of economic warfare, in what became known as the Continental System. In response to a British Order in Council of 16 May 1806, which had declared all ports from Brest to the Elbe to be under a state of blockade, Napoleon issued the Berlin Decree of