The Napoleonic Wars

It is only by chance and habit that we label the First World War the First World War, but that title more properly belongs to (fans of the Seven Years’ War look away now) the Napoleonic Wars.

Mikaberidze, a thoroughly global character as he is a Georgian specialist in Russian history living in the USA, tries his hand at charting how the wars against Napoleon spilled out well beyond Europe, with sprawling battles on land and sea, new alliances, unexpected rebellions and numerous examples of that age-old trick of grabbing lands.

At the same time, your enemy has his hands… show more.

Although the Napoleonic Wars are most commonly discussed from a French perspective, with their roots in ideology and the Wars of the French Revolution, they are increasingly being understood as the climax of conflicts over power and colonial possessions that had raged between the major European powers across the long eighteenth century. In this hugely ambitious and highly readable book, Alex Mikaberidze considers the Napoleonic Wars as part of a wider global conflict in which France and Britain struggled for dominance, a conflict that extended to the Americas, Egypt, Iran, the Indian Ocean, even to China and Japan, and assesses… show more.

Mikaberidze’s book gives the first global, comprehensive account of just how terrible and transformational the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were. There are abundant books on how the wars were waged in Europe, or in the Americas. Yet Mikaberidze reveals the truly massive scale of these military events, with all their social, economic, cultural consequences, in almost every corner of the world. We knew already that the Napoleonic Wars belonged in the category of Total War, but Mikaberidze really brings that notion to life. He also, in his last chapter, shows how indeed the trauma of the war informed the new… show more.