REVIEW BY ANDRÉ VAN LOON
The subject of The Coalitions Against Napoleon is fascinating and rich in potential. Moving beyond the well-trodden path of personality-based writing (such as Napoleon versus Wellington, biographies of Napoleon’s marshals, or the career of Horatio Nelson), this book promises to provide a fresh look at the Napoleonic era through a study of the nuts and bolts of the allied coalitions.
At their centre, so the contention runs, is British power, manifested through its financial liquidity, as well as its manufacturing and military prowess. However, it soon becomes clear that the book does not meet the challenge of its subject. Instead of a forensic look at what was involved in defeating Napoleon, we get a swift overview of the key dates, battles, and personalities, driven by a standard (and unquestioned) view of British glory pitted against supposed French vanity. The Battle of Trafalgar, to take an example, is dispensed with in a fairly bloodless paragraph of 20 lines, ending with a laconic ‘Nelson was among the dead’. The diplomatic, military, and geopolitical forces that made Trafalgar a potentiality and then a necessity are essentially left to one side.
Undoubtedly, there are some virtues to such an approach. The Coalitions Against Napoleon is effective at sketching the contours of the struggles from the rise to the fall of Napoleon, indicating how Britain grew more influential the more it spent in resources, despite the loss of the American colonies. A lot of ground is covered: there are even three chapters on the political, economic, and imperial history of Britain stretching back centuries, with an encyclopaedic amount of detail.
