Threads of Empire examines how Russia's imperial officials and intellectual elites made and maintained their authority among the changing intellectual and political currents in Eurasia from the mid-16th century to the revolution of 1917. The book focuses on a region 750 miles east of Moscow known as Bashkiria. The region was split nearly evenly between Russian and Turkic language speakers, both nomads and farmers. Ufa province at Bashkiria's core had the largest Muslim population of any province in the empire. The empire's leading Muslim official, the mufti, was based there, but the region also hosted a Russian Orthodox bishop. Bashkirs and peasants had different legal status, and powerful Russian Orthodox and Muslim nobles dominated the peasant estate. By the 20th century, industrial mining and rail commerce gave rise to a class structure of workers and managers. Bashkiria thus presents a fascinating case study of empire in all its complexities and of how the tsarist empire's ideology and categories of rule changed over time.

This book is about the formative years of the first field marshal in the Corps of Royal Engineers, John Burgoyne, and his service in the Napoleonic Wars. Burgoyne's early service was in the Mediterranean, followed by service in the Iberian Peninsula from 1808-1814. Having built up a good relationship with Wellington, Burgoyne was selected to command the engineers in the disastrous American campaign of 1814-15. Burgoyne's father was also a well-known British general who, sadly, is remembered for his surrender of the British Army at Saratoga, rather than for more positive reasons. He died penniless, leaving his children, including John, to be cared for by family friends. Burgoyne seemed to spend the rest of his life working to obtain his independence. Like many engineers, Burgoyne kept detailed diaries, also writing comprehensive letters and analyses of his actions. These give contemporary knowledge of many notable events, particularly during the Peninsular War. His letters to fellow officers give an insight into the opinions and thoughts of an engineer officer, views which are often not visible in official communications. The main theme of the book is to show the development of a young officer during the Napoleonic Wars from an inexperienced subaltern through to someone who advised Wellington and his generals directly on military matters. His involvement with the senior officers in the army was not restricted to 'engineering' matters and he was trusted to carry out staff roles on many occasions. Burgoyne was present at many of the sieges and commanded at some. There is a wealth of unpublished information in his journals and letters. Burgoyne was highly critical of some of the sieges, even those that were considered successful. He was also critical of those where he commanded, particularly, Burgos in 1812. When Burgoyne was advising Raglan in the Crimea at the siege of Sevastopol, the failures at Burgos were used to undermine his position. The previous biography of Burgoyne by his son-in-law, George Wrottesley, was published nearly 150 years ago and is flawed in a number of ways. This new interpretation will help our understanding of this officer and present a different view on some of the key events during the Peninsular War. Wellington's Favourite Engineer includes a Foreword by Rory Muir.

This book unveils the role of a hitherto unrecognized group of men who, long before the International Brigades made its name in the Spanish Civil War, also found reasons to fight under the Spanish flag. Their enemy was not fascism, but what could be at times an equally overbearing ideology: Napoleon's imperialism. Although small in number, British volunteers played a surprisingly influential role in the conduct of war operations, in politics, gender and social equality, in cultural life both in Britain and Spain and even in relation to emancipation movements in Latin America. Some became prisoners of war while a few served with guerrilla forces. Many of the works published about the Peninsular War in the last two decades have adopted an Anglocentric narrative, writing the Spanish forces out of victories, or have tended to present the war, not as much won by the allies, but lost by the French. This book takes a radically different approach by drawing on previously untapped archival sources to argue that victory was the outcome of a truly transnational effort.

This is the book on war that Napoleon never had the time or the will to complete. In exile on the island of Saint-Helena, the deposed Emperor of the French mused about a great treatise on the art of war, but in the end changed his mind and ordered the destruction of the materials he had collected for the volume. Thus was lost what would have been one of the most interesting and important books on the art of war ever written, by one of the most famous and successful military leaders of all time. In the two centuries since, several attempts have been made to gather together some of Napoleon's 'military maxims', with varying degrees of success. But not until now has there been a systematic attempt to put Napoleon's thinking on war and strategy into a single authoritative volume, reflecting both the full spectrum of his thinking on these matters as well as the almost unparalleled range of his military experience, from heavy cavalry charges in the plains of Russia or Saxony to counter-insurgency operations in Egypt or Spain. To gather the material for this book, military historian Bruno Colson spent years researching Napoleon's correspondence and other writings, including a painstaking examination of perhaps the single most interesting source for his thinking about war: the copy-book of General Bertrand, the Emperor's most trusted companion on Saint-Helena, in which he unearthed a Napoleonic definition of strategy which is published here for the first time. The huge amount of material brought together for this ground-breaking volume has been carefully organized to follow the framework of Carl von Clausewitz's classic On War, allowing a fascinating comparison between Napoleon's ideas and those of his great Prussian interpreter and adversary, and highlighting the intriguing similarities between these two founders of modern strategic thinking.

In 2013, Germany celebrated the bicentennial of the so-called Wars of Liberation (1813 1815). These wars were the culmination of the Prussian struggle against Napoleon between 1806 and 1815, which occupied a key position in German national historiography and memory. Although these conflicts have been analyzed in thousands of books and articles, much of the focus has been on the military campaigns and alliances. Karen Hagemann argues that we cannot achieve a comprehensive understanding of these wars and their importance in collective memory without recognizing how the interaction of politics, culture, and gender influenced these historical events and continue to shape later recollections of them. She thus explores the highly contested discourses and symbolic practices by which individuals and groups interpreted these wars and made political claims, beginning with the period itself and ending with the centenary in 1913."