Ottoman war aims might be difficult to discern in the current historiography of the period of Bonaparte’s invasion of Alexandria and Cairo in 1798, which generally heralds his arrival as the inauguration of the modern age for a Middle East awakening from its medieval slumber. On closer examination, and orienting one’s hypothetical gaze from Istanbul rather than from Paris or London, it is possible to see desperation in Istanbul, with the sultan and his people facing repeated disastrous losses against its near constant enemy Russia on its northern borders, combined with major economic crises and countryside unrest. In that context, the war aims of the Ottoman court could be characterised as the survival and reconstruction of relationships between the imperial centre and far-flung, long-independent provincial families, with a renewed focus on recentralising the long autonomous northern and southern extremities of the Empire.

‘Colonial politics’ is a category that requires definition. Since historians seldom entirely agree on definitions of ‘empire’ or ‘imperialism’ let alone of ‘colony’ or ‘colonialism’, this can only be a statement of how the term is being used. The primary focus here is on the politics, aspirations and activities of people enjoying a degree of agency who lived in the colonies. Colonial politics are not just their activity within a colony but also the activities by which they tried to influence the formation of policies towards them by their metropolitan sovereign. Colonials were often most effective when acting simultaneously on both fronts. In Great Britain the king retained considerable executive authority after the 1688 Revolution, but the cost of European wars shifted power towards parliament. Although the electorate remained small, the political system was open to influence and manipulation by a much wider range of interests and pressure groups than before 1688.

The Napoleonic Wars marked one of the deepest crises in the history of the Roman Church throughout Europe. For Catholicism, the experiences of the 1790s were cataclysmic. In France, Gallicanism was riven by a schism between those clerics who supported the Revolution of 1789 and those who had remained loyal to Rome. In the west of France, such tensions precipitated civil war. Across the Rhine, the destruction of the ecclesiastical principalities, which had been a staple of the Holy Roman Empire’s complex system of governance, had thrown the Germanic Church into chaos. Beyond the Alps, the invasion of Italy had led to the arrest of Pius VI, who died in Valence in 1799 a French captive. This list of disasters made the future of the Roman Church precarious.

Ecclesiastical historiography has been polarised when it comes to the French imperium’s impact on Catholicism. Napoleon is reincarnated as an Attila the Hun who ushered a new Babylonian captivity for Christendom.

The organisation of judicial system and the Napoleonic Wars evolved hand in hand.1 Indeed, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars unfolded while massive and rapid reforms were transforming France’s legal and judicial system from that of the ancien régime. These reforms upended earlier legal norms and thoroughly remodelled human and institutional judicial structures, as well as practices of conflict regulation, law and order, and repression. This unprecedented revolution in judicial, penal and policing frameworks was later extended to territories conquered by the armies of the Republic and the Empire, particularly territories in Italy, Belgium and the Rhineland, and up to fifty departments of the ‘Grand Empire’ at the height of its expansion in 1811–12, including parts of the Netherlands, northern Germany, Switzerland and Dalmatia. Satellite states also came under the influence of this revolution, and its imprint on Western Europe lasted well into the mid-nineteenth century.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Scandinavia consisted of the two composite states of Denmark and Sweden.1 The Danish state comprised the Kingdoms of Denmark and Norway, the Danish Duchy of Schleswig, the German Duchy of Holstein, the North Atlantic dependencies of Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, and overseas colonies in the West Indies, the East Indies and the Gold Coast. In total, a population of 2.5 million people. The Swedish state consisted of Sweden proper, Finland, the Duchy of Swedish Pomerania in Germany, the Hansa town of Wismar, and Saint Barthélemy in the Caribbean. All in all, a total population of 3.3 people (Map 21.1).

Until relatively recently histories of the Napoleonic Wars were very often written from a French perspective, focusing primarily on the military campaigns conducted by Napoleon between 1803 and 1815 and on the coalitions of European states that were formed to repel him. The Wars were generally seen as Napoleon’s attempt to overturn the existing diplomatic and political order and create a new world empire in his own image. Napoleon must, of course, shoulder much of the responsibility for these years of endless conflict and for the deaths of so many men and women, both soldiers and civilians, that it caused; no amount of revisionism can absolve him of that. Besides, he is undeniably the dominant figure of the era. But it is important, nevertheless, to draw a clear distinction between the history of the Napoleonic Wars and that of the Empire or of Napoleon’s personal trajectory.

One thing is certain about the French Revolutionary Wars, 1792–9: their effects far outran anything predictable from their causes. A war that everyone expected to end quickly dragged on with constantly changing combatants. The French started the war in a spirit of self-defence that rapidly morphed into a war of liberation and then a war of conquest and occupation. The other European powers entered the war to hold back the tide of revolution and soon found themselves defending their very existence as they watched the revolutionary tide flow and ebb and flow again, eroding every previous assumption made about the organisation of states and armies.

The aims of French foreign policy at the end of the Directory and the beginning of the Consulate no longer had much in common with those proclaimed by the Legislative Assembly when war was declared in April 1792. Their ambitions in both territorial and philosophical terms – in the former case securing the natural limits represented by the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees, in the latter the application everywhere else of the right of peoples to self-determination1 – were soon relegated to statements of intent. They were also of course in some respects contradictory: the rights of peoples in regions destined for annexation were by definition denied. Without entirely dismissing these generous, albeit now secondary aims, the revolutionary crusade had metamorphosed into an expansionism that mirrored more traditional economic and strategic interests.

This vision of centralised, top-down administrative efficiency is commonly regarded as quintessentially Napoleonic. It seems far removed from the idealism and indeed localism of 1789. The evolution of French legal thinking on the ideal relationship between the administration and people can be tracked at the most fundamental level in the constitutions of 1791, 1793, 1795 and 1799.2 The 1791 constitution envisages administrators as essentially private citizens elected temporarily to perform precisely defined and limited public functions, all under the supervision of a king demoted by the same constitution from divinely ordained sovereign to bureaucrat-in-chief. The ‘Jacobin’ 1793 constitution, unsurprisingly, strengthens the themes of equality and disinterested duty, but adds a paranoid tone in its implication that the administration might at any point be corrupted and turn into an oppressive instrument. The 1795 constitution avoids the hysterical rhetoric, but nonetheless shows a concern that at the very least administrative bodies are prone to nepotism and petty place seeking.

The customary chronology in the discussion of war and its causes was that of a decline in ideological factors between the ‘Wars of Religion’ and the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792, although bellicosity remained a key factor. However, this is very much an agenda that is set by Western concerns and developments. In that, it focuses not only on the Western interest in Western history, but also on a teleological focus on a state system supposedly created by the ‘Westphalian Settlement’, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that brought to an end the Thirty Years War. That settlement is commonly presented as a triumph of reason and restraint, in the shape of an agreement to operate an international system based on the mutual respect of sovereign powers and, in particular, an agreement to accept confessional plurality, at least in the form of different types of Christianity, as sole state religions.

Perhaps no other part of Europe was transformed more by the Napoleonic whirlwind than German-speaking Central Europe. Years of war destroyed the venerable Holy Roman Empire and almost all the states within it, while radically altering the shape and socio-economic systems of those that remained. Although the German Habsburgs managed to survive they, too, were compelled to adjust to the new realities of the revolutionary age. Even before the first shots were fired, they lost the security they had derived from their admittedly tepid alliance with Bourbon France. Whereas they lost the rich Austrian Netherlands barely a year into the conflict, the revolution in military and diplomatic tactics that Napoleon Bonaparte employed inflicted far worse damage over the ensuing two decades.

After 18 Brumaire, Napoleon Bonaparte judged the Iberian Peninsula’s two kingdoms differently. Given Portugal’s close, long-standing ties with Britain, he counted the Portuguese among France’s enemies, while he treated Spain, at least formally, as an ally (the alliance between Spain and France that was drawn up in 1796 remained unchanged until 1808). As a result, his plans for the two countries were different: Portugal was to be subjugated, by force if need be, in order to cut it off from British influence; as for Spain, it was only necessary to exercise enough control over its leaders to ensure that the country would be a docile accessory to French policy. In practice, however, Napoleon linked the destinies of the two kingdoms and, as had been the case during the Directory, he planned actions against the enemy nation with the expectation of the support of his ally. In other words, he involved Spain every time he intervened in Portugal.

‘It is not our business to collect trophies, but to try … [to] bring back the world to peaceful habits’, remarked Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo.1 Castlereagh’s image of his country as an impartial arbiter was not shared by other European powers, with whom Britain had formed seven coalitions during the twenty-two years of the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Great Britain was more often impugned by them as ‘Perfidious Albion’, with a grasping imperial and commercial policy and a divide-and-rule approach to its nearest neighbours. Nonetheless, Castlereagh’s claim did convey certain realities about the position adopted by the British state throughout the two final coalitions against Napoleonic France. With the significant exception of Hanover (of direct concern to King George III in his capacity as hereditary elector) and strategic outposts in the Mediterranean, Britain did not have any major European territorial demands in the war, or the peace that followed.

Napoleon Bonaparte was not the initiator of the eighteenth-century European revolutions, nor the inventor of the ‘sister republics’.1 Long before he became general-in-chief of the Army of Italy, and some years before the French Revolution, the European continent went through a series of spontaneous uprisings, which had more to do with the American War of Independence and the propaganda of American diplomats who sought allies on the continent and, to this end, circulated the New World’s credo and principles. In the 1780s, the Republic of Geneva and the United Provinces led the way to this revolutionary wave; Switzerland soon followed and faced several internal rebellions, which were repressed severely. All these revolts or revolutions failed. The traditional powers were still strong enough to suppress political upheavals and maintain their authority. Before Robert R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot, historians did not pay much attention to these aborted revolutions, still disqualified by some as being simply ‘a storm in a teacup’.

Napoleonic France was in an almost permanent state of war, a war which repeatedly affected large parts of the continent. As Luigi Mascilli Migliorini remarks, the legitimacy of a state born out of a coup d’état, led by a general, relied on potentially endless victorious campaigns, which made peace and stability in Europe virtually impossible.1 Victory enabled France to externalise – and therefore prolong – a large part of the war effort, the cost of which had proved fatal to the Bourbon monarchy in eighteenth-century France. Victory, moreover, gave the French economy privileged access to new markets, either through the integration of new territories and consumers directly into the French Empire, or by the imposition of commercial treaties and industrial restrictions favourable to French interests on allied or defeated states.

In his youth, Tsar Alexander I had dreamt of being a peaceful and reforming monarch; however, he would see most of his reign unfold under the sign of war. He ‘converted’ to the anti-Napoleon coalition after many doubts and hesitations, only to be confronted in 1812 with a cataclysmic invasion that would cost the Russian Empire 300,000 lives. From the start of the twentieth century until now, many historians have reproached him for having sacrificed the national interest and exhausted the country over useless dreams of grandeur and military glory.1 However, this accusation is baseless. While the military rivalry between France and Russia would in fact prove costly in both lives and resources, it was by no means futile: far from being reduced to the selfish caprice of a sovereign concerned about his image, rivalry with France had a major impact on the destiny and stature of the Russian Empire.

The fate of the Bonaparte family encapsulates the revolutionary maelstrom, first buffeted by it, then riding it to power, and finally crashing into oblivion. They are at once extraordinary in, and emblematic of, their era.