Mike Rapport’s The Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction is another book I read in prep for the Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell reread. And it lives up to the title and was just what I needed. I won’t remember the ebb and flow of the war, but I’ll be able to look things up for quick context when I need to; and more importantly, the book gave me the big-picture political context, which may not turn out to be directly useful to this reread but was interesting all the same.
international relations . . . were driven by the concern with what diplomats called the ‘balance of power’. This was based on the assumption that in pursuing their own interests, states and rulers ultimately achieved stability in the international order and a minimum guarantee of security for individual states—or at least for the stronger ones. . . .
. . . The ‘balance of power’, therefore, rationalized a brutally competitive international states system, in which the essential dynamic was the pursuit of individual, dynastic interest. Moreover, in a pre-industrial world, before rapid economic development provided states with a sustained expansion in domestic wealth, the quickest and most effective way of securing the resources upon which military power was based—above all, population and taxable wealth—was through territorial conquest, which also had the benefit of denying one’s rivals the same.
That’s from the first chapter, “Origins,” which lays out the state of European international relations prior to 1787 and then sketches the political changes leading up to the French Revolutionary Wars. Chapter two covers the French Revolutionary Wars; chapter three covers the Napoleonic Wars themselves. The other four chapters of the book look at the wars in terms of societal structures and government institutions, on one hand, and the experiences of soldiers, sailors, and civilians, on the other. As far as I can tell, this book does precisely what it says on the tin, so if that’s what you’re looking for, check it out.