From the Napoleonic Empire to the Age of Empire

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxiv

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2. Introduction: Opening up the Napoleonic Empire

   • Thomas Dodman, Aurélien Lignereux

   Pages 1-23

3. The Napoleonic Empire, Between Imperialisms

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 25-25

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   2. Joseph Eschassériaux: From New Colonisation to Imperial Diplomacy—Hypotheses as to a Reconversion (1797–1803)

      • Bernard Gainot

      Pages 27-43

   3. Napoleon of Arabia? Piracy in the Persian Gulf, the French Threat to India, and British Imperial Responses

      • Guillemette Crouzet

      Pages 45-65

   4. The Jacobin and the Mameluke: Islam, Race and Political Culture at the End of Empire

      • Ian Coller

      Pages 67-87

   5. Korais’s Greece and Napoleon’s Empire: The Egyptian Campaign, Race Science, and the Europeanization an Idea

      • Alex R. Tipei

      Pages 89-109

   6. The Scientific Appropriation of the World: The Imperial Legacy in Naval Officer Training

      • Hélène Vencent

      Pages 111-126

   7. Free Ports, Free Trade, Freedom: Napoleon’s Manifold Legacy in Institutions and Images

      • Giulia Delogu

      Pages 127-143

4. Individual Trajectories and Imperial Conversions

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 145-145

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   2. Tracing the Colonial Careers of Two Former Napoleonic Officials: Godert van der Capellen and Bernard Besier

      • Caroline Drieënhuizen, Martijn van der Burg

      Pages 147-165

   3. French Colonial Governors in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century: Miniature Emperors?

      • Nicola Todorov

      Pages 167-184

   4. From New Départements to the New World: The Colonial Itinerary of an Imperial Agent

      • Jean-Hugo Ihl

      Pages 185-204

   5. “Contriving to Pick Up Some Sailors”: The Royal Navy and Foreign Manpower, 1815–1865

      • Sara Caputo

      Pages 205-226

   6. Indian Horizons: Four Officers of the Empire in the Sikh Kingdom of the Punjab (North-West India), 1822–1849

      • Jean-Marie Lafont

      Pages 227-252

   7. From Egypt to Algeria: General Pierre Boyer’s Counter-Insurgent and Imperial Career

      • Ivan Burel

      Pages 253-269

5. New Beginnings Overseas

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 271-271

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   2. Algiers, the Last Napoleonic Conquest

      • Aurélien Lignereux

      Pages 273-292

   3. Algeria as a New Imperial Construction: Between a Search for Abilities and a Place to Politically Relegate Foreign Veterans

      • Walter Bruyère-Ostells

      Pages 293-308

   4. The Empire of Laws After the Emperor: French Legal Domination in Nineteenth-Century Egypt

      • David Todd

      Pages 309-326

This book explores imperial entanglements to reassess the Napoleonic Empire as a missing link—or at least an important chain—in the global and longue durée history of Empires. In recent years Napoleonic studies have, belatedly but resolutely, embraced the transnational historiographical turn, vastly expanding the field’s geographical scope. Its canonical chronological boundaries, on the other hand, appear increasingly narrow against this wider backdrop, giving the impression of a parenthetical, almost anachronistic aside from 1799 to 1815. What connects, and what doesn’t connect, the Napoleonic Empire to the Age of Empire, remains by and large an open question. Put another way, this book attempts to locate the Napoleonic empire in World History. 

• Napoleon Bonaparte
• French Revolution
• revolutionary Europe
• British empire
• Egyptian campaign

• Columbia University, New York, USA

  Thomas Dodman

• Sciences Po, Grenoble, France

  Aurélien Lignereux

Thomas Dodman is Assistant Professor in the Department of French at Columbia University, USA. A historian of modern Europe and empire, his research focuses on forms and experiences of social change in times of war, revolution, and colonization. He is the author of What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (2018) and a co-editor, together with Bruno Cabanes, Hervé Mazurel, and Gene Tempest, of Une histoire de la guerre, du XIXe siècle à nos jours (2018). He has prepared an issue of French Historical Studies on Epistolary Gestures (2021) with Anne Verjus and Caroline Muller, as well as several issues of Sensibilités: histoire, critique & sciences sociales, a journal he co-edits.

Aurélien Lignereux is Professor of History at Sciences Po Grenoble – Université Grenoble Alpes, France. His research focuses on policing and police systems, on royalist politicization, on imperial rule in Napoleonic Europe, and on the social and cultural history of expatriate French civil servants both within départements réunis under the reign of Napoleon and since their return to the country after 1814. His books include La France rébellionnaire. Les résistances à la gendarmerie, 1800-1859 (2008), Servir Napoléon. Policiers et gendarmes dans les départements annexés, 1796-1814 (2012), L’Empire des Français, 1799-1815 (2012), Chouans et Vendéens contre l’Empire. 1815. l’autre guerre des Cent-Jours (2015), and Les Impériaux. Administrer et habiter l’Europe de Napoléon (2019).

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