Combining military and cultural history this book offers a new perspective on the British soldier in the Peninsular War. For all the histories of the Peninsular War and its continuing romantic appeal in the British imagination, little attention has been paid to how young British officers and enlisted men wrote about and experienced the places and peoples of Spain and Portugal during the war against Napoleon. This book examines those travels and cross-cultural encounters between 1808 and 1814, revealing Spain and Portugal as seen through the eyes of British redcoats. It is the story of how British soldiers interacted with the local environment and culture, of their attitudes and behaviour towards the inhabitants, and of how they wrote about all this to their readers, both during and after the war, in letters and memoirs.

This new study of Napoleon emphasizes his ties to the French Revolution, his embodiment of its militancy, and his rescue of its legacies. Jordan's work illuminates all aspects of his fabulous career, his views of the Revolution and history, the artists who created and embellished his image, and much of his talk about himself and his achievements.

Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, this book investigates the everyday human experience of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars by French military and civilians, the impact of these wars on the French nation and society, and the rise of a new kind of war in the West at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Describes the life, achievements, rise to power, and influences of the military leader who crowned himself Emperor of the French and established dominance over Europe.

Economic warfare during the Napoleonic era transformed international commerce; redirecting trade and generating illicit commerce. This volume re-evaluates the Continental System through urban and regional case studies that analyze the power triangle of the French, British and neutral powers and their strategies to adapt to trade restrictions.

The Crimean War was fought far from its namesake peninsula in Ukraine. Until now, accounts of Britain's and France's naval campaigns against Czarist Russia in the Baltic, White Sea, and Pacific have remained fragmented, minimized, or thinly-referenced. This book considers each campaign from an imperial perspective extending from South America to Finland. Ultimately, this regionally-focused approach reveals that even the smallest Anglo-French naval campaigns in the remote White Sea had significant consequences in fields ranging from medical advances to international maritime law. Considering the perspectives of neutral powers including China, Japan, and Sweden-Norway, allows Rath to examine the Crimean conflict's impact on major historical events ranging from the 'opening' of Tokugawa Japan to Russia's annexation of large swaths of Chinese territory. Complete with customized maps and an extensive reference section, this will become essential reading for a varied audience.

The Crimean War (1854 6) was the first to be fought in the era of modern communications, and it had a profound influence on British literary culture, bringing about significant shifts in perceptions of heroism and national identity. In this 2009 book, Stefanie Markovits explores how mid-Victorian writers and artists reacted to an unpopular war: one in which home-front reaction was conditioned by an unprecedented barrage of information arriving from the front. This history had formal consequences. How does patriotic poetry translate the blunders of the Crimea into verse? How does the shape of literary heroism adjust to a war that produced not only heroes but a heroine, Florence Nightingale? How does the predominant mode of journalism affect artistic representations of 'the real'? By looking at the journalism, novels, poetry, and visual art produced in response to the war, Stefanie Markovits demonstrates the tremendous cultural force of this relatively short conflict.

This pioneering work treats the Ukrainian question in Russian imperial policy and its importance for the intelligentsia of the empire. Miller sets the Russian Empire in the context of modernizing and occasionally nationalizing great power states and discusses the process of incorporating the Ukraine, better known as "Little Russia" in that time, into the Romanov Empire in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This territorial expansion evolved into a competition of mutually exclusive concepts of Russian and Ukrainian nation-building projects.

The Napoleonic Empire played a crucial role in reshaping global landscapes and in realigning international power structures on a worldwide scale. When Napoleon died, the map of many areas had completely changed, making room for Russia's ascendency and Britain's rise to world power.

This new political history of the Orthodox Church in the Ottoman Empire explains why Orthodoxy became the subject of acute political competition between the Great Powers during the mid 19th century. It also explores how such rivalries led, paradoxically, both to secularizing reforms and to Europe's last great war of religion - the Crimean War.

This volume explores how the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1793-1815) were experienced, perceived and narrated by contemporaries in Britain and Ireland. These conflicts have been described as the first modern or 'total' war with far-reaching consequences for military and civilian society and the development of modern identities. Yet in contrast to the innovative body of scholarship on the First and Second World Wars there has been little sustained analysis of the personal experiences of men and women involved directly or indirectly in these conflicts. Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars addresses this historiographical gap using letters, diaries and 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.

In August of 1838, in the middle of a devastating civil war, a grotesque figure arrived with the mail coach at Santiago de Compostela, the ancient pilgrimage town in the North-West of Spain. He was a former Swiss mercenary, who thirty years previously had heard a rumour about a massive hoard of church plate buried by the soldiers of Marshal Ney. A fantasy? A daydream? Just one of the many hollow legends of hidden gold that abound in Spain? Perhaps so. But, astonishingly, the Swiss vagrant did not come on his own errand. He came sponsored by Spain's savvy Minister of Finance, Don Alejandro Mon, who for some shadowy reason of his own lent credence to the tale. Like an historical Sherlock Holmes, Peter Missler traces the true tale of Benedict Mol, the treasure hunter, through the mists of time and a smoke-screen of cover-stories. It is a fascinating saga which takes us into Portugal with the looting French invaders, into the wildest mountains of Northern Spain with the brilliant polyglot George Borrow, and - by the hand of Mol - into the darkest nooks and corners of a hospital for syphilitics. No treasure was ever found, either in the first attempt, which toppled the government, or in the second one, which ended with the murder of two innocent peasants. Therefore, quite possibly, Ney's treasure still lies waiting elsewhere in a Santiago park...

Napoleon's conquests were spectacular, but behind his wars, is an enduring legacy. A new generation of historians have re-evaluated the Napoleonic era and found that his real achievement was the creation of modern Europe as we know it.

An exploration of the little-known yet historically important emigration of British army officers to the Australian colonies in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. The book looks at the significant impact they made at a time of great colonial expansion, particularly in new south Wales with its transition from a convict colony to a free society.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars have been described as the first 'total war', which affected millions of people's lives and brought a whole continent into contact with armies and bloodshed. But the extent to which the constant state of war that existed between 1792 and 1815 shaped everyday experience has been much less studied, even although these wars, conducted by mass armies and often mobilized by patriotism, led to the circulation of millions of people throughout Europe and beyond. The changing nature of warfare had far-reaching consequences for civil society as well as for those directly engaged in fighting. This volume of essays by international scholars examines the formative experiences of men and women - soldiers, citizens and civilians - in the years 1792-1815, drawing particularly on their personal documents and social and cultural practices, to offer a perspective on the wars which is at some distance from broader and more familiar historical narratives.