Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"France against varying coalitions (Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia); "Socially speaking, then, it is not too much of a distortion to speak of the war as one of France and its border territories against the rest. In terms of old-fashioned power relations, the line-up was more complex. The fundamental conflict here was that between France and Britain, which had dominated European international relations for the part of a century. From the British point of view this was almost wholly economic. They wished to eliminate their chief competitor on the way to achieving total predominance of their trade in the European markets, the total control of the colonial and overseas markets, which in turn implied the control of the high seas." [Hobsbawm: Revolution, p. 83]