The Napoleonic Wars by Alexander Mikaberidze

The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History
By Alexander Mikaberidze
Oxford University Press, 2020

With depressing regularity for two centuries, historians of the Napoleonic Wars have knowingly or unknowingly abetted the megalomania of the wars’ namesake by concentrating the preponderance of their analysis on the gnomic utterances, alleged military genius, and various petulant crockery-throwing tantrums of the pestiferous little Corsican who started it all. It’s all the more refreshing, then to read The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History by Alexander Mikaberidze, Professor of European History at Louisiana State University. At 960 pages, Mikaberidze has written a deeply-researched and immensely readable one-volume history of the whole world-straddling phenomenon ignited by the French Revolution and Bonaparte’s capitalization of the chaos. 

“This was a war that in its scale and impact dwarfed all other European conflicts; for nineteenth-century contemporaries, it came to be known as the ‘Great War.’” Mikaberidze writes. “Though provoked by rivalries within Europe, the Napoleonic Wars involved worldwide struggles for colonies and trade, and in scale, reach, and intensity they represent one of the largest conflicts in history.”

This book is a vivid, entirely engrossing history of that conflict, full of military shot and incident, full of choice quotes, full of vibrantly dramatic vignettes set in locations as far from Austerlitz as South America or Egypt. All the usual characters walk through these pages, from cynical Metternich to insufferable Arthur Wellesley to the formidable Empress Maria Theresa, and some of the signpost events familiar from any of the 51,000 Bonaparte biographies that have been written in the last few years get their moments in the spotlight. But The Napoleonic Wars manages the almost disorienting feat of setting all these people and places in a spectrum so sprawling that they can suddenly be seen in the round and assessed in new ways. Mikaberidze lays out the parameters of this spectrum:

The tremors that spread from France starting in 1789 tend to overshadow the fact that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had truly global repercussions. Austerlitz, Trafalgar, Leipzig, and Waterloo all hold prominent places in the standard histories of the Napoleonic Wars, but alongside them we must also discuss Buenos Aires, New Orleans, Queenston Heights, Ruse, Aslanduz, Assaye, Macao, Oravais, and Alexandria. We cannot fully understand the significance of this period without involving the British expeditions to Argentina and South Africa, the Franco-British diplomatic intrigues in Iran and the Indian Ocean, the Franco-Russian maneuvering in the Ottoman Empire, and the Russo-Swedish struggles for Finland. 

Mikaberidze has written a big book driven by cinematic flash and outsized personalities. It firmly establishes a version of the Napoleonic Wars in which Bonaparte himself was in many ways merely the pebble that triggers the avalanche, and it provides unfailingly enjoyable reading along the way. It deserves to stand as the definitive one-volume treatment of the period.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.