The Napoleonic Wars in Global Perspective

Abstract

There was a confidence that Napoleonic warfare was crucial to the grand narrative of Western conflict, and that this narrative was the topic for military history. For the twentieth century, this approach seemed self-evident, as warfare between major states dominated attention, and this view continued to be the basic theme in the analysis of Napoleonic conflict. At the global scale, the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, from 1792 to 1815, and, that of the Napoleonic Wars from 1799 to 1815, was of great significance for the expansion of relative Western power, as much as for shifting relationships within the West. Furthermore, Napoleon's interest in the overseas world essentially arose from a determination to harm European rivals, rather than from any sense of France's role and possibilities in an expanding Western world. Thus, the global consequences of Napoleon were bad for France. Keywords:Europe; French Revolutionary Wars; military history; Napoleonic Wars; Western world