Abstract
This chapter will look at international relations in the Napoleonic era from a perspective which is both long in time and global in breadth. It will also interpret the words ‘international relations’ rather freely, investigating not just diplomacy and inter-state relations but also warfare and the sources of power in this era. Such broad perspectives have clear advantages. Comparative approaches can open up new issues and interpretations. They can also challenge the assumptions and enrich the debates among specialists in any historical field. Since most history-writing — and the history of war in particular — is still national and sometimes even nationalist, global perspectives and international comparisons are doubly useful. Attempting to determine what were the key issues and fundamental trends within a mass of detail is essential to the telling and understanding of history. Like all approaches, however, the broad sweep has its problems. Even the best comparisons can never replace detailed local knowledge based on mastery of the sources. Global perspectives can be little more than vapid bows to contemporary fashion. They can also feed into an inevitable danger when writing history in the longue durée, which is to read the present back into the past and to impose master narratives which legitimize contemporary assumptions and ideologies. The great point, in my opinion, is for the historian to be aware and explicit about these dangers.
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Notes
For a discussion of the term and an attempt to apply it in the global context, see David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (Basingstoke, 2010).
On the general issue of the arrival of modernity, see Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004).
On international relations, see Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994).
On warfare, see Roger Chickering and Stig Forster, eds., War in an Age of Revolution, 1775–1815 (Cambridge, 2010). For an interesting opposing view, which stresses the revolutionary nature of Napoleonic-era warfare,
see David A. Bell, The First Total War. Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Modern Warfare (London, 2007).
A recent useful survey of the Industrial Revolution is Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2009).
Dominic Lieven, Russia against Napoleon. The Struggle for Europe, 1807–1814 (London, 2009), 7–8;
Louis Di Marco, War Horse: A History of the Military Horse and Rider (Yardley, PA, 2008).
Apart from Schroeder and Lieven, see Thierry Lentz, Nouvelle Histoire du Premier Empire. Tome III. La France et l’Europe de Napoléon, 1804–1814 (Paris, 2007)
and Thierry Lentz, ed., Napoléon et l’Europe (Paris, 2005).
Above all see Ute Planert, ‘Innovation or Evolution? The French Wars in Military History’, in Chickering and Forster, War, 69–84. On the geopolitical and ideological origins of the wars, see: T. C. W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London, 1986). For opposed views on warfare in the 1790s,
see Paddy Griffith, The Art of War of Revolutionary France, 1789–1802 (London, 1998)
and John A. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic (Boulder, CO, 1994)
and T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802 (London, 1996). For a balanced view of the evolution of the officer corps,
see Rafe Blaufarb, The French Army, 1750–1820 (Manchester, 2002), chapter 6.
On Prussia’s Seven Years’ War, see Franz Szabo, The Seven Years War in Europe, 1756–1763 (Harlow, 2008),
which stresses Prussian ruthlessness, and Dennis E. Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great (Harlow, 1996), which emphasizes Prussian skill and commitment. For a broader political perspective,
see Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London, 2006).
William C. Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (New York and Oxford, 1992), Chapter 5.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, transl. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ, 1976)
and Baron Antoine de Jomini, The Art of War (London, 1992), a re-print of the 1862 translation with a new introduction by Charles Messenger: Antoine Jomini, Précis Politique et Militaire des Campagnes de 1812 à 1814 (Geneva, 1975).
Michael Broers, Napoleon’s Other War: Bandits, Rebels, and their Pursuers in the Age of Revolution (London, 2010), illustrates this point as regards policing.
On Frederick and the Prussian way of war, see Dennis Showalter, Frederick the Great. A Military History (London, 2012). On Rumiantsev, Suvorov and Russian warfare against the Ottomans,
see the useful survey by Christopher Duffy, Russia’s Military Way to the West (London, 1981).
This contrasts with the view in Lee Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years War (Durham, NC, 1967).
On the shift in power eastwards, see above all Hamish Scott, The Emergence of the Eastern Powers, 1756–1775 (Cambridge, 2001).
Two works edited by Richard Bonney provide a comparative background to the evolution of the military-fiscal state: Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford, 1995) and The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200–1815 (Oxford, 1999). For a discussion of the political underpinning of military-fiscalism, see Brian H. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change. Origins of Autocracy and Democracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1992),
Janet M. Hartley, ‘Russia as a Fiscal-Military State, 1689–1825’, in Christopher Storrs, ed., The Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Farnham, 2009), 125–46.
On the evolution of French grand strategy, see Jeremy Black, From Louis XIV to Napoleon: The Fate of a Great Power (London, 1999)
and Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon 1715–1799 (London, 2002).
On European naval competition, see Richard Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare 1650–1830 (London, 1999). On the French navy,
see Michel Verge-Franceschi, La Marine Française au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 1996).
On the navy during the Revolution, see William S. Cormack, Revolution and Political Conflict in the French Navy, 1789–1794 (Cambridge, 1994).
The potential historiography for this comment is immense: Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire (London, 2007), tackles this from an original perspective.
Geoffrey Ellis, ‘The Nature of Napoleonic Imperialism’, in Philip Dwyer, ed., Napoleon and Europe (Harlow, 2001), 97–135 (see the comment on page 124).
On the evolution of the British fiscal-military state in India, see the chapters by H. V. Bowen and Rajat Kanta Ray in Peter J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998). For comparative European statistics, see Lieven, Russia against Napoleon, 33.
This is a key theme in John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge, 2009).
On the Spanish Empire’s collapse, see above all Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ, 2006). On the Portuguese Empire,
see Gabriel Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (Cambridge, 2013).
Leslie Bethell, ed., The Independence of Latin America (Cambridge, 1987) remains a very useful introduction.
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Lieven, D. (2015). International Relations in the Napoleonic Era: The Long View. In: Hartley, J.M., Keenan, P., Lieven, D. (eds) Russia and the Napoleonic Wars. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137528001_2
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