The Napoleonic Wars Experience

Napoleon was the colossus of his age. He rose to become one of Revolutionary France's most successful generals, before being crowned emperor in December 1804. This book tells the story of the Napoleonic Wars, bringing 30 items of facsimile memorabilia, which have been researched from museum collections around the world.

The volume explores how the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were experienced, perceived and narrated by contemporaries in Britain and Ireland, drawing on an extensive range of personal testimonies by soldiers, sailors and civilians to shed new light on the social and cultural history of the period and the history of warfare more broadly.

Includes rare illustrations and documents of historic importance.

Austerlitz, Wagram, Borodino, Trafalgar, Leipzig, Waterloo: these are the places most closely associated with the era of the Napoleonic Wars. But how did this period of nearly continuous conflict affect the world beyond Europe? The immensity of the fighting waged by France against England, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and the immediate consequences of the tremors that spread throughout the world. In this ambitious and far-ranging work, Alexander Mikaberidze argues that the Napoleonic Wars can only be fully understood in an international perspective. France struggled for dominance not only on the plains of Europe but also in the Americas, West and South Africa, Ottoman Empire, Iran, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Taking specific regions in turn, Mikaberidze discusses major political-military events around the world and situates geopolitical decision-making within its long- and short-term contexts. From the British expeditions to Argentina and South Africa to the Franco-Russian maneuvering in the Ottoman Empire, the effects of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars would shape international affairs well into the next century. In Egypt, the wars led to the rise of Mehmed Ali and the emergence of a powerful state; in North America, the period transformed and enlarged the newly established United States; and in South America, the Spanish colonial empire witnessed the start of national-liberation movements that ultimately ended imperial control. Skillfully narrated and deeply researched, here at last is the global history of the period, one that expands our view of the Napoleonic Wars and their role in laying the foundations of the modern world.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars affected millions of people's lives across Europe and beyond. Yet the extent to which the constant warfare of the period 1792-1815 shaped everyday experience has been little studied. This volume of essays discusses the formative experience of these wars for men and women, as soldiers, citizens and civilians.

This account of the final years of Britain's long war against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France places the conflict in a new - and wholly modern - perspective. Rory Muir looks beyond the purely military aspects of the struggle to show how the entire British nation played a part in the victory. His book provides a total assessment of how politicians, the press, the crown, civilians, soldiers and commanders together defeated France. Beginning in 1807 when all of continental Europe was under Napoleon's control, the author traces the course of the war throughout the Spanish uprising of 1808, the campaigns of the Duke of Wellington and Sir John Moore in Portugal and Spain, and the crossing of the Pyrenees by the British army, to the invasion of southern France and the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Muir sets Britain's military operations on the Iberian Peninsula within the context of the wider European conflict, and examines how diplomatic, financial, military and political considerations combined to shape policies and priorities.Just as political factors influenced strategic military decisions, Muir contends, fluctuations of the war affected British political decisions. The book is based on a comprehensive investigation of primary and secondary sources, and on a thorough examination of the vast archives left by the Duke of Wellington. Muir offers vivid new insights into the personalities of Canning, Castlereagh, Perceval, Lord Wellesly, Wellington and the Prince Regent, along with fresh information on the financial background of Britain's campaigns. This vigorous narrative account will appeal to general readers and military enthusiasts, as well as to students of early nineteenth-century British politics and military history. Rory Muir is the author of 'Salamanca 1812' and 'Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon', both also published by Yale University Press.

This book explores the impact of the Napoleonic wars on Danish-Norwegian society and accounts for war experiences and the transformation of identities among the popular classes and educated élites alike.