The Napoleonic Wars

Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize, the first global history of the world's first world war. 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.

Alexander Mikaberidze is Professor of European History at Louisiana State University Shreveport, where he is also Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair for the Curatorship of the James Smith Noel Collection. He is the author of several books, including Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace and The Burning of Moscow: Napoleon's Trial by Fire 1812.

- Chapter 1: The Revolutionary Prelude - Chapter 2: The Eighteenth-Century International Order - Chapter 3: The War of the First Coalition, 1792-1797 - Chapter 4: The Making of "La Grande Nation," 1797-1802 - Chapter 5: The Second Coalition War and the Origins of the "Great Game" - Chapter 6: The Rites of Peace, 1801-1802 - Chapter 7: The Road to War, 1802-1803 - Chapter 8: The Rupture, 1803 - Chapter 9: The Elephant Against the Whale: France and Britain at War, 1803-1804 - Chapter 10: The Emperor's Conquest, 1805-1807 - Chapter 11: "War Through Other Means": Europe and the Continental System - Chapter 12: The Struggle for Portugal and Spain, 1807-1812 - Chapter 13: The Grand Empire, 1807-1812 - Chapter 14: The Emperor's Last Triumph - Chapter 15: The Northern Question, 1807-1811 - Chapter 16: "An Empire Besieged": The Ottomans and the Napoleonic Wars - Chapter 17: The Qajar Connection: Iran and the European Powers, 1804-1814 - Chapter 18: Britain's Expeditionary Warfare, 1805-1810 - Chapter 19: Britain's Eastern Empire, 1800-1815 - Chapter 20: The Western Question? Struggle for the Americas, 1808-1815 - Chapter 21: The Turning Point, 1812 - Chapter 22: The Fall of the French Empire - Chapter 23: The War and Peace, 1814-1815 - Chapter 24: The Aftermath of the Great War - Notes - Select Bibliography - Index