COMPLEX NAPOLEON

The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History

By Alexander Mikaberidze.

Oxford University Press, 2020. $39.95.

Reviewed by Michael V. Leggiere

Every half century or so comes a book in a particular field or area of history that is monumental, that immediately becomes the authority on that subject. In Napoleonic military history, the last such book was the late David G. Chandler’s opus The Campaigns of Napoleon, published in 1966. In that single (but massive) volume, a reader can learn everything there is to know about the wars Napoleon fought, why he fought them, and how he fought them. Before Chandler’s book, there was Count Maximilian Yorck von Wartenburg’s two-volume Napoleon as a General, published in 1902.

Now, some 50 years after Chandler, we have Alexander Mikaberidze’s , which also ranks as the definitive work of its respective time. While the two earlier historians provide the diplomatic, strategic, operational, and tactical minutiae of the Napoleonic Wars, Mikaberidze, a professor of history at Louisiana State University–Shreveport, weaves two broader perspectives together. He investigates and reveals the grand strategic focus and military implications of state policy while placing the French Wars (Revolutionary and Napoleonic, 1792–1815) in a global context. Rather than presenting the traditional view that these wars were subsidiary consequences of the conflicts between the European powers, such as the Anglo-French rivalry, Mikaberidze masterfully demonstrates the international character of the wars. He provides an authoritative, detailed