Revisiting Napoleon's Continental System: Local, Regional and European Experiences

ISBN-13: 9781137345561 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 290 str.

Katherine B. Aaslestad; Johan Joor

Opis

Napoleonic warfare spread to the high seas, harbors and marketplaces across Europe and the Atlantic through the Continental System. This volume addresses the illicit commerce, new merchant networks, 'daily life', and tensions with neutral states generated by Anglo-French economic warfare. It also reveals the contradictions inherent in the Napoleonic Empire - at once rational and progressive, but also coercive and exploitative. Regional and urban case studies offer a more complete understanding of the significance of economic warfare during the Napoleonic era, and explore the experiences and consequences of the conflict through several key themes: a re-evaluation of the historiography of the Continental System, the uneven power triangle of the French, British and neutral powers, and the strategies of merchants and smugglers to adapt to or circumvent the system. Transnational case studies underscore the vulnerability and ingenuity of Europeans as they faced transformative social and economic challenges.

Recenzje

"The collection, divided into four parts, succeeds in covering a wide variety of regions and topics from the historiography and origins of the System to regional approaches, and from a variety of responses to the Systems, including but not limited to smuggling and 'urban experiences'. ... This is a valuable collection that provides a new overview of the complicated whole that was the System, while shedding light on its regional variations." (Philip Dwyer, French History, January, 2016)

"There is an informative introduction to the topic by Katherine Aaslestad, followed by four general essays on historiography. ... The quality of the scholarship is uniformly high and the geographical range impressive. It is difficult to imagine a better introduction to the most recent work on the institutional structure and economic consequences of Napoleon's efforts to wage economic warfare against Britain and her allies." (James J. Sheehan, Central European History, Vol. 48 (4), December, 2015)

"The volume includes selected papers from a conference held in Amsterdam in May 2011 and comprises 16 essays ... . the volume is a most welcome addition to Napoleonic historiography as a whole and, in treading plenty of new ground, the volume goes far beyond a mere revisit to the Continental System, as its all-too-modest title suggests." (Morten Nordhagen Ottosen, Scandinavian Journal of History, December, 2015)

"This multi-faceted book ... is a coherent collection of 15 papers from historians of continental Europe who attended a conference held in Amsterdam in 2011. ... This well-edited, important book has brought many new aspects of these tumultuous years to English-language readers. No naval or maritime history of the period can now be written without taking this evidence and the conclusions of these scholars into account." (Roger Knight, International Journal of Maritime History, Vol. 27 (4), November, 2015)

O autorze

Anita Cerpinska, University of Latvia Geoffrey Ellis, Oxford University, UK Alan Forrest, University of York, UK Bård Frydenlund, University of Oslo, Norway Alexander Grab, University of Maine, USA Hilde Greefs, University of Antwerp, Belgium Annie Jourdan, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Silvia Marzagalli, University of Nice, France Pierrick Pourchasse, University of Bretagne Occidentale, France Michael Rowe, King's College London, UK Margrit Schulte Beerbuehl, University of Düsseldorf, Germany Robert Mark Spaulding, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, USA Alexandre Tchoudinov, Institute of Universal History in Moscow, Russia Jann Markus Witt, Marineschule Mürwik (German Naval Academy)