Alexander Mikaberidze - Napoleon, War, Progress, and Global Order

Dwarkesh Patel opens with Alexander Mikaberidze, a historian at Louisiana State University and author of The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History. Mikaberidze comes from the country of Georgia, a small state between Russia and Turkey whose history, he says, is often lost in the larger narrative. His immediate motive for the book was to correct the neglect of the huge changes the revolutionary and Napoleonic era brought to the Caucasus.

The motive widened into a methodological point. Napoleon is probably the most written-about historical figure, with estimates of at least three or four hundred thousand volumes, so a new book needs a strong reason to exist. Mikaberidze's reason is that almost everything written on the period takes French and British viewpoints and concentrates on transformations inside Europe. He calls that a worthwhile enterprise but a narrow snapshot, because the revolutionary and Napoleonic period is when modernity takes hold and then spreads, gradually, across the world and changes the trajectory of many regions.

Patel notes that he valued the chapters on British expansion in India and on the Americas from the Louisiana Purchase onward. He also asks how so many volumes on Napoleon can exist, citing Andrew Roberts's remark that roughly one new book a day has appeared since Napoleon's death. Mikaberidze answers with an image: Napoleon is like a siren. Newcomers are drawn by the song of the legend, a romantic Prometheus who tried to bring change and ended defeated on a rock in the middle of nowhere. That pull guarantees a steady supply of authors.

The same pull has a side effect, which is that most writing concentrates on Europe. Mikaberidze gives two reasons. The first is linguistic. A global narrative needs French and British sources, which are now taken for granted, plus Spanish, German and Russian, and Ottoman and Iranian traditions if the story extends east. That is a colossal challenge. The second is scale. Borodino involved about a quarter of a million troops and Leipzig well over half a million, whereas the Russo-Iranian war engaged on average ten to fifteen thousand men and looks less impressive by comparison. The charisma of the great figures adds to the Eurocentric tilt. Mikaberidze argues that none of this justifies leaving other regions out.

He then names what the omission costs. Leaving out India means leaving out the British East India Company under Richard Wellesley from 1798 to 1805, seven years in which, he says, the foundation of the Raj was laid. Leaving out the Americas means leaving out the collapse of Spanish imperial rule and the emergence of the independent nation-states from Mexico to Argentina, a political reality he calls part of the Napoleonic legacy.

Asked why the wars mattered so much for the East India Company, Mikaberidze first sets the scene. The Company was already established, especially in Bengal, when the French Revolutionary War began in April 1792 and Britain joined in 1793. India was a subcontinent with a population he puts well over 120 million, a huge market for British goods and a source of goods for British commerce. He says this trade, which continued during the wars, helped sustain Britain's nascent industrial revolution, so a presence in India was a crucial asset.

The asset was seen as under constant threat, from local powers such as the Mughal Empire until its mid-eighteenth-century decline and then the Maratha Confederation, and from the French, who had been nibbling at British heels throughout the century. Mikaberidze finds the perception of threat more interesting than the threat itself. In 1798 and 1799 some British officials, such as Foreign Secretary Grenville, argued that the direct danger was exaggerated and embellished and that Britain should concentrate on confronting France in Europe. Company officials argued the opposite, that the French were coming.

The key figure is Richard Wellesley, appointed Governor General in 1798. His letters speak constantly of the French threat as real and imminent, even though, Mikaberidze says, France was not in a position to threaten British positions in India at the time, its hands being tied in Europe. The perception mattered because Wellesley used the pretense of confronting that threat to begin empire building. Mikaberidze calls him probably the most Napoleonic of the British statesmen of the period, since his vision was an empire in India built under cover of countering an alleged French threat.

The campaigns followed against Indian states that would not toe the British line: the war with Mysore, including the storming of Seringapatam and the killing of Tipu Sultan; the subordination of the Nizam of Hyderabad under a subsidiary relationship; and the confrontation with the Maratha Confederation, which included the 1803 Battle of Assaye, where Arthur Wellesley, Richard's younger brother and the future Duke of Wellington, distinguished himself. The policy of using the French scare to impose British interests worked, in Mikaberidze's account. By 1805 much of the southern and eastern subcontinent was under direct or indirect British rule, and by 1819 British authority extended north to places like Oudh, with Maratha territory ultimately absorbed in the late 1810s and early 1820s.