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

All right, today I have the pleasure of interviewing Professor Alexander Mika Beretsa, who is a professor of history and the Ruth Herring Knoll Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University. And he's the author of The Napoleonic Wars, A Global History.

This is an absolutely fascinating book. It was unlike any other history book I've read in the

sense that it was just global in a scope, and you're covering such an interesting period in

history. So first of all, can you give my audience a little bit of background on yourself and on the

Napoleonic Wars? Yes. Thank you so much for having me.
It's a

delight to be here. I'm originally from a country of Georgia, and I usually tell people that no,

it's not the state of Georgia, right? The country of Georgia in Eastern Europe, a small state

sandwiched between Russia and Turkey with a rather complex and diverse and turbulent history. But as most small nations, it is oftentimes kind of lost on the pages of history.
And of course, when I embarked on this career to become a professional historian, I've always wanted to see where my people fit in the larger scheme of things. And I was oftentimes frustrated, especially working on the revolutionary Napoleonic era, that the huge transformations that this period witnessed in Caucasus were not properly addressed.
And so the immediate cause and kind of spark to write this book was desire to kind of wrong, to correct the wrong. But it also kind of then grew from there to get a better understanding of the field.
because Napoleonic era is one of the most written historical periods. There are thousands and thousands of volumes.
In fact, Napoleon is probably the most written about historical figure period. The last estimate was that at least three, maybe 400,000 volumes have been written just about him.
So there has to be a really good reason to write another book about this topic. And my, gradually my realization was that almost everything that has been written about this period is written from the French and British points of view and focused on the great transformations taking place inside Europe.
And that is perfectly worthwhile enterprise. But I thought that it offers a very narrow snapshot of the period because Napoleonic, Revolutionary Napoleonic period is the moment when we see the modernity setting and not just in Europe, but gradually extending to various parts of the world.
It changes the trajectory that many of these world regions followed. And I thought in fresher study, it was needed to flesh that out.
And what I appreciated as an American of Indian origin is that you had almost a chapter in the book that was just dedicated to how the Napoleonic Wars impacted, you know, the expansion of British rule in India. And also about, obviously, the impact on the Americas from the Louisiana Purchase onwards.
I'm curious, by the way, how it's possible that so many volumes about Napoleon have been written. I thinkberts said that there's been one on average one new book about napoleon a day since he died yeah oh yeah how are there how are there possibly that many napoleonic scholars um well uh it's it's a it's a very enticing field um i i compared napoleon and uh you told me that the video will be recorded, right? You see the wall behind me, which has parts of the British propaganda, part of the French propaganda and of course the gift from my students, Napoleon's cutout.
But oftentimes comparing Napoleon to a siren. for those who first approach the shores of Napoleonic history, they are drawn by the lure of that sweet song of Napoleonic legend, right? That the vision of the Romantic kind of tightened the Prometheus who's thought to bring about change and was ultimately defeated and exiled to Iraq in the middle of nowhere.
And I think Napoleonic legend exercised such a lure that there is always enough people interested in it to write about it. But it has a downfall or kind of side effect, and that is most of what is written is written on Europe for linguistic reasons.
For example, to write the books of global nature, global historical narrative, you need to have diversity of language skills. That includes not just the French and British, which by now is taken for granted, but Spanish and German and Russian.

And if you expand your narrative even further to the east, then you have to involve the Ottoman and Iranian historical traditions as well. And of course, that is a colossal challenge.
And I think that is oftentimes pushes people away from such a narrative. And also that the events in Europe itself in this period are of such colossal scale.
So we talk about the battles that evolve. For example, at Borodino, there are a quarter million troops.
At Leipzig, there are well over half a million troops fighting for the future of Europe. that by comparison, let's say, dealing with events in Russo-Iranian war where you have on average 10,000 to 15,000 men engaged, it's kind of not sexy enough, right? Not big enough.
So I think that also plays a role. and the charisma of these great personalities that were engaged also kind of skews it towards Eurocentric narrative.
And that's exactly the point that I was trying to make in the book is that that should not be the reason to avoid our discussion elsewhere. And as you pointed out, for India, this is the moment of tremendous importance and not to include the developments in India under the leadership of British East India Company led by Richard Wellesley from 1798 to 1805, right? These seven years of crucial importance because in many respects, the foundation for what will be the Raj, right, is late exactly at this time.
And same applies to, let's say, extending our narrative to North America or South America, where, you know, this period saw the collapse of the Spanish imperial rule and the emergence of a new political reality that will continue to reverberate and affect us to the present day. The fact that we have such a political reality of independent nation states from Mexico down to Argentina, all are part of the legacy of the Napoleonic period.
Can you talk more about the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on India? Why was it so crucial for the British East India Company? Now, of course, the English presence in India predates the revolutionary period. And by the start of the revolutionary wars, and I remind the listeners, the French Revolutionary War started in April of 1792, and Britain joined the war in 1793.
So by then, British East India Company had already established presence in India, especially in the northeastern part of it in Bengal.

And of course, India, oftentimes people forget just how huge and how diverse and how populous this subcontinent is. And notice that I use the term subcontinent, not region, because again, it's

enormous in scale. In fact,

the estimates

usually point that India at this time has a population well over 120 million people. And this would have been a huge area for the British as market for their goods, but also as a source of the goods for their own commerce.
And we know that in before revolutionary wars, there was a vibrant trade going on that in many respects sustained the nascent industrial revolution in Britain. So from the British point of view, India is a crucial asset, at least the presence in India is a crucial asset.
But it is an asset that from the British point of view is constantly under threat from other powers, both local, such as, for example, Mughal Empire, until it experienced the decline in the mid-18th century, and then the Maratha Confederation, and external threats, most notably the French, who've been kind of nibbling at their heels all through the 18th century. And so to me, the interesting aspect of this is not necessarily the actual threat that existed, but it's the perceptions of threat that Britain saw, the British officials saw.

Not all of them. For example, when we look at 1798-1799 period, you have some British officials, such as Granville, who was a foreign secretary, arguing that the threat, direct threat to British presence in India is exaggerated and kind of embellished and that Britain should focus its efforts on confronting France and Europe.
And then you have colonial officials, of course, the British East India Company officials steadfastly arguing that the threat is real, that French are coming. And in fact, if you read the letters of Richard Wellesley, who was appointed as the governor general of British East India Company in 1798, he speaks constantly of this French threat as if it is real, as if it is imminent.

Even though we know that France was not in a position to directly threaten the British positions in India at this time.

The French hands are tied in Europe. But nonetheless, the perception is important because it is under this pretense of confronting the French threat that Wellesley then embarks on empire building.
And in the book, I refer to Wellesley as probably the most Napoleonic of this British statesman of this period because his vision is that of an empire in India, which can be built within the context of confronting this alleged French threat. And so we see the wars, the campaigns that Wellesley waged against the local Indian states that refused to trot the British line.
So I remind you of the war between the British and the Mysore, right? The infamous storming of Seringabatim and the killing of its ruler, or Tipu Sultan, or the subjugation of Nizam of Hyderabad, who is forced to accept this subsidiary relationship with the British, or the confrontation ultimately between the British forces and the Maratha Confederation, during which in 1803, for example, you have that famous Battle of Assay, where Arthur Wellesley, Richard's younger brother and future greatest British military commander of the age, Duke Wellington, distinguished himself. And so these policies of using the French scare to impose the British kind of interest on the local states are extremely successful in that by 1805, much of southern and eastern Indian subcontinent is under British rule.
Now, different shades of it, direct or indirect rule, but nonetheless, it's under the British influence. And that process will only continue in the subsequent years, so that And by 1819, you see the extension of the British authority in the north to areas like Ood in northern parts of the subcontinent, and of course, the encroachment on the Maratha territory, which will be ultimately consumed by 1819, 1819, and early 20s.
And hence, we see the establishment of the British rule in India. Is having a global empire, a bunch of colonies, is that helpful when you're engaged in a war with another power? I mean, in some sense, maybe you're like, I don't know, more diversified.
But in another, as you just said, the British had to divert resources and attention to defending their stakeholder in India.

And even in World War II, Churchill has to worry about that Singapore is taken over by the Japanese. So when you're fighting a war, is it good to have a lot of colonies or is it bad for you? No, of course.
Having colonies means having access to resources. resources both in terms of manpower, but also resources in terms of commodities, natural resources that sustain your economy, your war effort.
I mean, to kind of deviate from maybe Napoleonic era, when we talk about that other great war, because Napoleonic Wars for much of the 19th century was the great war only to be superseded by World War I. But think about the British imperial involvement in World War I.
When we talk about Britain at war, we really mean the empire. And it needs to be pointed out that more Indian troops served in that war than the actual British troops.
And certainly, the expeditions to,

for example, Iraq involved thousands of Indian forces. So having an empire certainly helps in conducting the war.
And that is true in the Napoleonic period, because the trade that Britain conducted both with India and with China was extremely lucrative. And there are excellent studies done on the extent of this trade and on the value of the volume and value of the commerce that was conducted with Asia, which is one of the crucial parts of the British economic endurance, kind of resilience.
Because once Napoleon consolidated his control of the continent, we know that in 1806 he embarks on a system that we refer to as continental blockade, which was designed to isolate the British or cut them off from the continent in terms of their ability to sell goods. One of the reasons why Britain was able to survive this economic war was precisely because it could rely on its colonial presence, rely on markets elsewhere, and of course have the ability, the naval capacity to ensure that its commercial roots, its lifelines continue to sustain its war effort.
And the reverse is true for France. And that is one of the crucial stories of the revolutionary Napoleon era is the collapse of what we call first French empire.
France loses virtually every possession it has outside Europe. That is in India, that is broadly in the Indian Ocean, certainly the Caribbean, and of course you refer to the loss of Louisiana in 1803, 1804, right? So that means that by comparison, France finds itself in a much weaker position in the years to come.
And that later on will kind of sustain this narrative of restoration of the national grandeur, which will justify, for example, colonial enterprise or colonial projects that France will unleash in Algiers in 1830, and then sub-Saharan Africa in later periods, right? As a part of that, the reconstruction of the imperial construct. Did the continental system contribute to Britain having the Industrial Revolution first? There's a book by this developmental economist, Joseph Studwell, called How Asia Works.
And he makes the case that these Asian tigers in the late 20th century, they imposed a bunch of tariffs whose main purpose was to enforce export discipline so that it would help their nascent industries, I guess car making in Korea, for example. It would give them a leg up so that they could build know-how within the country to manufacture these things.
And then they could get rid of the tariffs. Did this kind of just artificially happen with the continental system? I mean, to what extent are the Napoleonic Wars and the Industrial Revolution linked? So in the book, I devote an entire chapter to what I call war through other means, and that is the economic side of the war.
In fact, I wish I had more space to devote to. In fact, that's one of the topics I'm working on today or nowadays, and that is to explore the economic dimensions of the war, which usually is ignored even though it's absolutely instrumental to it.

And there are a couple of things to kind of address right away. And one is that industrialization began in Britain before the war.
We know that the elements of the industrial development are

already present in Britain in 1760s, 1770s. Certainly by 1780s, Britain is far more industrialized than the continental powers.
The second point is that France had prerequisites for industrialization. And there is a fascinating new study on why the Industrial Revolution didn't take place in France in 1760s, 1780s, like it did in Britain, but that's a separate kind of topic.
However, once the Industrial Revolution took off in Britain, it gave the British an enormous advantage in terms of their economic parity, in terms of their economic or financial relations with the continent. And it left, therefore, the continental powers in this position where the only way they really can respond to the British threat or economic threat is by, as you pointed out, creating barriers, tariffs.

Napoleon understood that opening up market, that letting the British goods flow will be absolutely catastrophic to French interests, not to mention to the industrial, the nascent industries in the territories that he controlled, which is why he comes up with this continental system. And I want to, and that's kind of my pet peeve, in that I am very adamant about distinguishing between continental blockade, which was a policy designed to deal with the British commerce, and a continental system, which was a far more encompassing policy that Napoleon pursued towards creating a new reality, political economic reality in Europe.
Later on on St. Helena Island when he's exiled, he does talk about his desire to create United States of Europe, effectively an early version of the European Union.
But we have to bear in mind that Napoleon's vision of European Union was an imperial construct where France was supreme. But within that European Union, so to speak, Napoleon did want to use the terrorists, the protective barriers, as a way of promoting industrial growth.
And that's where Napoleonic Wars is interesting because on one hand, the fighting, the military devastation that takes place in places like Spain, like Germany, like Russia, does affect the local manufacturing, does affect local industries. But on the other hand, Napoleon, by creating this kind of vacuum or the bubble, not vacuum, but bubble around certain areas of Europe, tried to promote industries within the safety so that the British couldn't compete with them directly.
And we see the kind of haphazard impact of his policies. There are some areas where it worked, and in the post-war period, places like Belgium, Netherlands, southern Germany, northern France, northern Italy, the industrial development took off.
But on the other hand, there are areas where the war had a far greater impact and the continental system with its restrictions actually delayed the industrial development rather than promoted. I was just looking at this paper from the economist Aaron Asimoglu.
I think it's called The Consequences of Radical Reform. And in it, he was making the case that if you look at the places that Napoleon conquered and reformed within the Pollyanna codes, his claim is that after 1850, they all experienced more economic growth in the places that he didn't conquer.
And I think he says in the paper that there were no cases where they couldn't identify any negative effects from this.

I wonder if you agree, or was this just an alloyed good? I think it's a generalized kind of statement. And if you dig deeper, I think you'll see a more complex reality.
One thing is that many of the areas that the author was referring to as having the economic growth and all, they had the preconditions for economic prosperity, for industrialization before Napoleon showed up. Usually the case studies for that are low countries, Belgium, Dutch Republic, the Rhineland, the northern Italy areas around Turin and Milan.
But those were already urbanized, developed regions that were on the way to industrialization.

In fact, in those areas, you can argue, and many of my colleagues have done, that the Napoleonic Wars actually hampered the industrial growth because of the direct effect of the war,

the fighting and the destruction, but also because of the taxes, requisitioning, occupational costs that the war brought on these regions. However, if you look beyond this kind of, and that's where in the book, what I'm arguing is that the impact of Napoleon needs to be qualified.
You have to approach it very carefully because it depends on particular region and on the duration of the French presence. So the areas that I just mentioned stayed under French control for much longer.
For example, you know, in Belgian case, we talk about from 1794 until 1814, right? There's a much longer duration in time. Compare that, for example, to Calabria in southern Italy, where the French arrive in 1806.
They face vociferous resistance from the local population, and they really can't overcome it until 18010. And then in 1814, they are gone.
So how much can you accomplish in four years?

Or think about Poland, let's say, or in Spain, right? So there is far shorter duration of the Napoleonic impact, and there is only so much you can accomplish in that few years. And so that's where I would argue is that, yes, Napoleon, the introduction of Napoleonic reforms in many cases were helpful in changing the system.
Now, what I mean by Napoleonic reforms, this is usually centralization of authority, this is professionalization of administration, this is enforcement of new administrative institutions, and of course, as you mentioned, the new legal framework. Napoleonic Code was this transformation, this revolutionary change through a legal code.
But how long did they stay? That's the question. What's the actual impact on the ground? And that's where you see, once you scratch the surface, that the impact is not as uniform and much dependent on the willingness of the local population to accept this change.
And then, you know, in a previous life, you were a lawyer. I'm wondering how that experience or how that background has shaped your understanding of the impact of these reforms and these codes.
And I have a more especially to the question of there's a like a perennial debate about whether institutions and laws that have been shaped kind of naturally through tradition and through history are better or ones that are what ones that are more technocratic based on more rational principles, whether that's preferable? I wonder what kinds of lessons you draw on questions like that. So it's a complex question, but it's an interesting question to ponder.
And in my own courses, when I teach students, I usually ask to look at what Napoleon tried to implement right on the legal side of it with Napoleonic Code look go through the provisions of Napoleonic Code and there is a lot that can be qualified as as progressive for this period right if we set aside important issues on which Napoleon was not as progressive, for example, on the issue of the equality of the women or the issue of the property rights of certain children born out of wedlock and all that. But if we look at some of the core elements of the Napoleonic regime, of Napoleonic reforms, they are quite progressive.
However, is progress always a good thing? That's, I usually kind of pose the question to students. And usually the answer is, oh, yeah, of course, progress is a good thing.
But what if the progress comes in an intrusive manner and it changes the way of life that you are used to, you're comfortable with? Then the question becomes whether the progress is actually a good thing. And what I mean by this is that in places like Spain or Italy or in Poland, Napoleonic reforms, as progressives might argue,

they were,

they threatened to bring about

more centralized,

therefore more intrusive,

power of the state.

It threatened to bring about

more effective tax collection,

more effective administration.

It effectively threatened to create a system that held citizens more accountable. Now today we all like to complain about taxes and about the government overreach, so why are we kind of surprised that people in early 1800s would have been complaining about this.
In some of it might strike as quite unusual, but in a weird way that, for example, one of the great legacies of Napoleon is the vaccination program. I think that's especially relevant in the last two years, right? The government's effort to vaccinate, to boost and all this.
And even today, we know that people were resisting it. Now, Napoleon promoted a great vaccination program for smallpox.
And he started with his own child. He vaccinated his troops and then kind of rolled this program to the territories that he occupied.
But in many areas, the people resisted vaccination because it represented government overreach, because it represented government kind of telling people you got to vaccinate. And there were parts of Europe where people suspected that vaccination was part of the government's kind of secret plan to control them, which will strike us as a very modern thing, right? Conspiracy theories today are not that original.
Today, there's like a big discrepancy between how Americans and Europeans see the role of the state. You know, Europeans are much more comfortable with it.
Is the origin of that, that they did have a figure like Napoleon centuries ago who instilled a more centralized and I guess more administrative form of government? Partly. Of course, we have to bear in mind that unlike the United States, or to a great degree, Britain, continental European history centers around strong authoritarian

monarchical rule. Here we see kind of dichotomy, for example, of the French absolutism with the British parliamentarian, more limited monarchical development.
Or further east we go, right, in Prussia, for example, we see the development of, again, absolutist tendencies in the Cameralist system, or further to the east in Russia, of course, the autocratic monarchical government that predates, of course, Napoleon. So there is a long history of a strong statist approach to it.
Now, what Napoleon tried to do is he tried to make the state efficient. And in that, he was, I mean, that's actually one of the most fascinating things about him, is kind of increasing the centralization, the efficiency, the enforcement of the state.
In France, we, for example, see that after the turbulent years of revolution, Napoleonic centralization and the enforcement completely changed the relationship between the people and the state. That includes, for example, in areas like tax payments, tax collection, which increased exponentially as Napoleon actually set up the system that held people accountable for it.

And that made, I think, the continental powers or the continental societies far more willing to accept the role of the state. Now, there is another kind of fold to this in this.
And that goes that after the Napoleonic period, once the war is over and now we are the period of peace and will last several decades until 1850s with the Crimean War and then with the bigger conflicts of 60s and 70s. But nonetheless, we have about four decades of peace.
Well, we have to deal with this kind of guerrilla, 800-pound guerrilla in the room, and that is the British industrial might. And one of the ways we can deal with that is by maintaining the protective barriers of terrorists and by increasing the role of the state in the economic development.
And here, your listeners can read up on, for example, the economic theories that Friedrich List was the great proponent of, which indeed championed the role of the state in promoting economic prosperity and promoting industrialization. And many European states followed exactly that model.
Another theory about how the economics here proceeded is maybe the public choice theory model from like Manfred Olson, where he observed that, for example, after World War II, economic growth rates in Germany and Japan were increased by a lot. And his theory is just that you got rid of these old institutions and these built-in incentives that the old system had.
And then maybe similarly in continental Europe, Napoleon gets rid of these guilds, he gets rid of these titles of nobility and these arcane systems. To what extent is public choice theory also

a good model of what was happening at the time? Yes. And that's, I think, yeah, I would agree with that to a great deal in that ultimately, you know, usually in my lectures in my Napoleonic history courses by saying that ultimately Napoleon is a loser in that he lost the war, he lost the empire, he ended the life on that godforsaken place in Atlantic.
But the impact that he left stays with that in that in the post-Napoleonic period,

the European powers have to grapple with his legacy.

Even though his changes, for example,

are reversed in Italy,

where his United Kingdom of Italy is abolished and pre-Napoleonic arrangements are restored. even though we see restoration of the ruling dynasties that he overthrown, we cannot reverse the clock.
We cannot simply go back to pre-Napoleonic era and pretend that it didn't happen. So you have to accept the changes that he introduced.
Now, the question is to what degree you will accept. And here again, we can look at the kind of gradation.
And there are some areas like in southern and western Germany, where Napoleon, and certainly in Netherlands and in Belgium, and in northern Italy, where the impact was so pronounced that it stays, that it will be simply impossible to turn the clock back. But in other areas, it was easier to accept some changes and then reverse many others.
So for example, we know that in places like in Poland or in southern Italy or in Spain, the Napoleonic impact in terms of the changes of the old regime was far less pronounced than in the core areas of Europe. And so, but overall, I think you're right in that Napoleon represented such a major blow to the old regime that it simply couldn't stay the way it was.
It had to reinvent itself, and reinvent it did, right, in this post-Napoleonic era. And here I do want to point out that oftentimes we think about this post-Napoleonic reconstruction as this conservative reaction, as this arch-conservatives and reactionaries.

But we have to bear in mind that

majority of these conservatives were not against the change.

Even Metternich, who is usually perceived

as this arch-conservative villain,

he is not averse to change.

He's averse to revolutionary pace of the change. And so here in the post-Napoleonic era, these great powers were willing to accept reforms and changes that came gradually in a controlled environment.
And that's essentially what we see taking place in the decades after Napoleon is gone. That's very interesting because Robert Conquest has these set of laws, and his second law is that any institution that is not explicitly right-wing will eventually become left-wing.
And I don't know, it seems like the course of Europe after Napoleon is similar. You have a bloody revolution.
You have this person who causes a massive amount of death and war. And then,

at least if you're trying to make the monarchical case, right, you'd say, oh, this is a result of these revolutionary ideals. Obviously, monarchy is better.
We should go back to the old ways. Maybe intellectually, you would think that that view would get vindicated, at least at the time.
But it seems like, no, even given the immediate consequences of the French revolution and Napoleon, um, system he and the revolution created endured and caught on the rest of Europe. Do you have any comments on this move in history where things – maybe left-wing is not the right word, and in modern is almost a tautology, but maybe you see what I mean.
Yes, I think the way I look at it is, and the way I kind of discuss it with my students is that I look at what the revolution promised and at its simplest, right? The revolution was about quest for equality. And that quest can be then kind of, you know, interpreted in a variety of ways.
It can be political equality with the suffrage voting and all. It can be economic equality, social equality, gender equality, all this.
And so to me, the revolution and Napoleon and then, of course, the post-Napoleonic period is not necessarily this left-wing, right-wing or liberal conservative. We can use whatever terminology you would like to, but to me, it's the quest for these evolving notions of equality.
So for example, when we talk about the politics, the political side of this equality, we know that revolution produces remarkable documents in August of 1789 with Declaration of Rights of Men and a Citizen proclaiming in its very first article that men are born and remain free and equal in their rights. That's a very aspirational, very idealistic kind of statement.
But it's also a problematic statement because it's so vague. What does it mean equal in their rights? And what does mean to be men? In French the term is homme, but homme even though it was used in this context of men can be interpreted as being as human beings.
Here then the story of the revolution in Napoleon is the story of the struggle of various groups for the political equality because the revolution, after the Declaration of Rights of Man, interpreted this provision as saying, well, it's equality of those men who are self-reliant, who are well-off, that cannot be influenced. So therefore, we're going to institute property qualification and let only affluent vote.
Well, what about those who are below the threshold, right? And so you see then that struggle during Revolution Napoleonic era leading to, for example, Napoleon proclaiming universal male suffrage. After Napoleon is overthrown, that system is reversed to a much stricter property qualification.
And then you will see again, universal male suffrage coming back in 1848 and staying part of French political narrative. And the same kind of quest for political equality can be then traced in many of these other European powers that were affected by Napoleon.
Or even in Britain. I mean, think about the British electoral reforms of 1832, the Great Reform Bill, or 1860s and 1880s.
It is also part of that quest for greater political equality. Same then, if we can expand our view, what about then social economic equality? What about treating our fellow citizens more equitably when it comes to wages, when it comes to working conditions, when it comes to what we now call the welfare, kind of social welfare system? Because these are the ideas the revolutionaries were grappling with, Napoleon was grappling with, and of course in post-Napoleonic period, they all were trying to find a way to answer these challenges.
In 1848, for example, French socialists tried to find a solution to the existing problem of the socioeconomic inequality by setting up what they referred to as national workshops, effectively a state-subsidized system where people could register and drew sustenance from the state. And it is this time when we see the concept of right to work come into the public discussion.
So that's how I look at it. And then again, we can look at the gender equality,

we can look at the issues, for example, of slavery that is at its simplest about the quality of human beings. And how did growing up in the former Soviet Union, how has that shaped your views about a sort of idealistic revolution for equality

and then deferring to a sort of enlightened despot? How has that shaped your views here? Well, my kids, I have two kids. I have two boys and the oldest one is already reaching that age when he's studying this modern history.
And one of the other day, he kind of came to realization that i was born and raised

you already reaching that age when he's studying this modern history. And one of the other day, he kind of came to realization that I was born and raised in the evil empire.
So he was quizzing me about what it was like, Father, to be on the other side. I'm like, well, thank you, son.
I think of course it has a direct impact because I was born and raised in the Soviet Union. And my father was a critic of the Soviet system.
And I remember him as a young man in the early 80s, secretly listening to the broadcasts of Voice of America or BBC, which were kind of muffed. But he would still listen.
And this is some of my early memories as a child when my father would sneak out and kind of secretly listen to a radio receiver that he fashioned. And I think that kind of imperial, that experience within imperial entity, it did have an impact on me.

And certainly shaped me because Soviet Union collapsed when I was becoming, my character, my personality was being forged in the 90s. And I lived through the debris of the post-Soviet era with this economic devastation, with its civil strife, with its economic collapse.
So in that sense, in many respects, I can relate to that generation that lived through the Napoleonic era, saw the collapse of the empires, and thenial kind of post-Napoleonic era, which was a period of economic turbulence, economic stagnation in many parts of Europe, not to mention the civil strife that revolution Napoleon unleashed in many parts of Europe. So I think, you know, for example, you know, just if nothing else, I would oftentimes tell students that, you know, living through the 90s in Georgia was grappling with basic necessities, such as standing in line for bread for two or three days, kind of waiting for a piece of, you know, a loaf of bread.
And, you know, when I talk about the French experiencing, for example, during the revolution, this hardship and trying to really find the sustenance and seek out, like me, pieces of bread in various bakeries, I could, on some level, kind of could relate to their misery, right? Could relate to their frustration.

I guess another aspect of this conflict is, so, you know, I know very little about history, which is why it was very fun to read this book and to, I guess, venture forth and learn more about your history through the podcast. But one of the things that's interesting to me is that it seems that there's like these punctuated equilibrium in international relations.
And, you know, you have these long periods of peace, and then you have these periods where there's massive wars, massive death, borders get reshuffled, I guess, from the Seven Years' War to the Napoleonic Wars, and then from there to World War I. And then, you know, maybe we can draw that line to today, where since World War II, we've had peace in Europe, and then now we have the conflict in Ukraine.
Is this a pattern you see? And if you do, what is the explanation? Well, I mean, if we look at the conflict in Ukraine, and that's the conflict that has a direct relevance to me because it's part and parcel of the Russian imperial project. In many respects, this conflict doesn't start in February of 2022 or in 2014 when Russia took over Crimea and the eastern provinces of Ukraine.
But to me, it started in 2008 when we had a war between Russia and Georgia for that very reason of the countries, of the group of people seeking a course of development that is different from the one that the Russian government has envisioned for them. So that's where I see, and if you look at the rhetoric that comes from Moscow and the statements by President Putin or his ministers, they all have the echoes of the 19th century great power politics, which, as far as I'm concerned, should stay part of history rather than the reality.
As you pointed out, in the post-war war II period, we went to great lengths to fashion an international system to prevent the very imperial, so the very kind of great power politics that dominated the global development in the later half of the 19th century. Because look at effectively what Putin's kind of grand strategy is, is to carve out spheres of influence, which would be not unlike what Catherine the Great, for example, did in the late 18th century when under her leadership, Russia partitioned Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, coincidentally, the very territory that involves the war today, Ukraine, the Baltic states.
So that's where I see the kind of connections. And to me, it is absolutely paramount to contain these imperial impulses and to ensure that the people have agency, that people have the ability to self-determine their fate.

I mean, that's kind of to go back to your earlier question about my own experiences.

I lived through the 90s. I lived through the National Liberation Movement.
I lived through

this Civil War. I lived through this our own Georgian efforts to figure out who we are and

what we want to be. But that's exactly the issue.
It should be our decision as a group of people to figure out whether we want to be a Western nation, whether our ideals are more attuned to European, or whether we would like to seek closer relationship with Russia. We should not be punished by an outside power for seeking a course that disagrees with its vision.
And same applies for Ukraine. To me, the war in Ukraine is about the agency of the Ukrainian people.
What changed between before World War II and afterwards that didn't change after the Napoleonic Wars? Do you think that after the Napoleonic Wars, that if the international norms could change, they would have changed at that time to be like, okay, no more great conquest, but maybe it took till World War II. And then what has caused this idea that you can expand into what you perceive to be your zone of influence? So how do you explain these two different changes of norms? Actually, the interesting thing is the immediate post-Napoleonic era saw the creation of a new international security system.
Absolutely remarkable. And there are my dear colleagues, like Professor Beatrice de Grave from the University of Utrecht has written fascinating studies.
And we we talk about just the last two years or so, exploring the impact of Napoleonic wars on crafting this new international system. And the hallmarks of this system was indeed the balance of power, where these great powers sought to maintain certain parity.
The goal of this was international cooperation to prevent political instability in Europe. So hence, we see, for example, the great power cooperation, the issues of suppression of revolutionary cycles in 1820s and 1830s.
And kind of to draw parallel to World War I or World War II, one of the things that we oftentimes forget that it is Napoleonic wars that pioneered new mechanism of dealing with the defeated power. And that includes occupational regimes, that includes development schedules of reparation payments.
Yes, defeated powers before, right, had indemnities, but post-Napoleonic era saw a very different mechanism that involved occupation, that involved extraction of resources, that is formalized and that is a kind of part of the coalition, which is very similar to what, for example, was done in post-World War II period. In 1815, for example, France is divided in the zones of occupation, and European powers have occupational troops that are occupying specific regions as a way of de-bonapartize France.
Just like in the post-World War II, we have Germany dividing the zones of occupation with the policy of denazification. Why was this not implemented after World War I, the occupational part? Was that just a massive oversight? No, well, partly because I think we have to bear in mind that unlike World War II, the war didn't directly reach Germany.
It was mostly fought in northern France and in Belgium and the Rhineland area, but Germany itself remained intact for much of it. Certainly, by the end of the war, the sheer exhaustion of France and Britain and the collapse of Russia, the collapse of Austria and other powers certainly create the reality that was very different from 1945 when you have a grand alliance and that grand alliance is determined to carve out the zones of occupation.
Think about the United States in 1919 with its self-imposed isolation.

This is a very different entity from the 1945 United States that is keen on keeping its presence in Europe. Same applies for Russia in 1919, is imploding, while in 1945 it is quite strong, or at least it will be on its way to recovering from the war.
And it certainly has the military capacity to carve out a zone of occupation in Eastern Germany. So another question I have about the Napoleonic Wars is, it seems that years war in 1756, um, you know, France loses, it's not that long before the Napoleonic Wars happen.
Um, and you know, when France is fighting the Napoleonic Wars, it's like gone through a bloody revolution. It's a completely new regime.
So in many ways, um, it should be in a weaker position, it seems just from the, what would the politics of what's happening in France. And obviously, France absolutely dominates for a decade afterwards.
So maybe in financial terms, you can think of in business, there's private equity where if a firm has good potential, but it has a lot of assets under management, but I don't know, it just has bad leadership, you can have another one that buys it out and then runs it better. So is that the story here? Why did the French military and government just seem to get so much more effective between these two wars? Yes.
I think, again, there are multiple threats that come together in this period.

So one of them, for example, is France's ability to mass mobilize. And that is particularly clear in 1793-95 period when, in response to being confronted by the European coalition, France begins a system that we refer to as Leve-en-Mas, which involves mass mobilization of manpower, that involves development of a home front to support war effort.
In military history, we oftentimes grapple with this kind of concept of limited war. And I think limited in the sense that conflict before the French Revolution were isolated affairs that didn't affect the society as a whole.
You have much smaller forces, the conflicts for the obvious clear dynastic or political goals. Now the French Revolution Revolution is different in that it mobilized far greater percentage of the population.
If you read the text of Levy and Mars' decree, it talks about young men registering and serving, children participating in helping in production and manufacturing, women kind of supporting the home front and even the elderly kind of providing that moral boost and kind of inspiration and leadership for the population. It's a more encompassing vision of nation at war.
And it's very difficult to defeat an entity like this. And France shows that, you know, with this, that they are as a nation that can mobilize greater manpower, that can put greater government controls on the economy, and armed with an ideology that it can overrun what we will call the old regime forces.
It doesn't mean that the old regime armies were inherently weaker or inherently destined to lose. Not at all.
The fact that it took a decade for the revolution to prevail over the old regime until 1802 when the revolutionary wars are formally over testifies to the resilience of the old regime. But it is also a conflict in which the old regime has to respond, has to kind of tweak itself.
Napoleon then, to move away from structural issues to more individual issues, Napoleon, whether you like him or not, even his greatest critics admit that he was a brilliant individual, Very capable, workaholic, an individual who could multitask like unlike anyone you really can encounter in pages of history books.

His ability to control at the height of the empire, virtual continent, an entire continent before the time of phones and internet and mass instant communication. It's just staggering.
And Napoleon does play an important role because of his sheer brilliance on the battlefield. I mean, it's hard to imagine France going on a rampage as it did in 1805 to 1809 period without Napoleon because he brings so much to the table.
Wellington, I think, has that famous statement that Napoleon was equal to 40,000 men on the battlefield, that he brought so much to the table. And the interesting thing is that Napoleon is not necessarily the only one that France had.
In fact, that revolutionary decade produced a number of brilliant military commanders. It produced a number of talented men in bureaucracy and finance.
In fact, one of the books that I want to write, and that's part of that kind of economic side of the history, is a brilliant financial wizard that, as far as I'm concerned, essentially bankrolled Napoleon for much of his reign and most crucially ensured rapid French reconstruction in the post-Napoleonic era. So it's dealing with this individual agency that also makes this period fascinating because you find the characters that are simply amazing.
I wonder what you think of this, but it seems to me, you know, I'm in tech circles and it seems to me that if Napoleon was alive today, he'd be, um, the, the, the ability to micromanage and to, uh, multitask the, um, obviously the leadership and the, uh, ability to inspire. And then also, uh, most importantly, maybe the, um, the, the, the sort of the risk, uh, the risk taking, uh, there, right? If you see something, well, I mean, a startup founder has to, they're probably going to fail.
So they're just trying to maximize the expected value, like increase the odds that you have a truly smaller company. Not necessarily that you have make any money, not necessarily increase the odds you make some money.
So, yeah, just the risk taking, especially, it seems to me that... What do you think about this? Would Napoleon, I don't know, become the CEO of a company like Tesla? I love this vision of Napoleon as Elon Musk, right? There is a fascinating movie.
It's a kind of light comedy called Emperor's New Cloth that envisions Napoleon escaping from San Helena Island in disguise, leaving a double. And then before he can return to France, his double dies and he's buried with all the honors.
And then real Napoleon finds himself caught in this kind of conundrum of trying to prove himself. And what he does, he starts a business in Paris of selling bread and using his military genius strategy.
He comes to dominate the baking business in Paris. So, Napoleon, yes, somebody already envisioned him as the startup guy.
Emperor's New Cloth. in a In a wonderful Yanholm reprising the role of Napoleon, and he's quite good at it.
So he does have a mindset for that. Napoleon has ability.
Well, first of all, let me put it. By nature, he was a very gifted man with the almost photographic memory.
So he retained minutiae of detail. And I've spent better part of quarter century examining his documents and going through the archives and dealing with the paperwork that he left behind.
And it's prodigious. We just finished a collective effort of publishing a kind of compilation of his personal letters.
letters and we had to stop at 44,000. And that doesn't account for the government decision and government paperwork that he reviewed and then signed on.
And in my books on 1812, you kind of see him deep in Russia. He's governing empire that stretches from Spain to Poland and from Denmark to Croatia.
And he deals with minutiae of these details. So he would have been, in that sense, a micromanaging CEO.
Again, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing because it has its pros and cons. But he was a micromanager.
Have you seen the videos? Yeah. Have you seen the videos of Elon Musk going through the minutia of these? That's what I'm saying.
And then also like the raptor. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying.
Napoleon would have been that. And the worst thing is that I don't know how good Elon's memory is.
Napoleon's is brilliant. And he would be kind of on a page that is called, you know, footnote that.
You found you found. There is a fascinating moment when he's in Moscow.
He actually noticed that a small battalion was sent on the wrong road in the countryside in central Italy. Who does that kind of thing? They're kind of keeping that level of detail.
Or as an emperor, he actually supervised what we can say, I think, a modern police state. The extent of the police surveillance of the French population is stunning.
And as part of it, what is interesting is that he required weekly reports on what people, average people, kind of common people would say in the streets and police agents would compile these reports from all across France and he would receive digests. So on top of everything else that he would be doing, he would sit down and kind of going through and learning what Alex said on Thursday and what Vargas said on Friday, right? And this expression of public sentiment.
So, no, he had all the preconditions for it. And kind of at the last point, he loved technology and he supported technology.
He supported, for example, he was the one who set up prizes for technological improvements that benefited the French military. It's a famous story of him setting awards for developing new ways of preserving food, which led to conservation.
You know, the kind of jars that we are now consuming, right, actually come from the Napoleonic era. Or it is Napoleon who, for example, conducted or supported experiments on developing submarine technology.
In fact, in the middle of Paris on the Seine River, they tested submarines. Now, it didn't work out and the submarines were leaking, so he didn't adopt it.
But nonetheless, it shows his willingness to embrace it, this technological development. He tried to stay abreast of it also.
Yeah, it's similar with I think many other important leaders in history. I think Churchill was a big aviator and I think he crashed at least once.
And also he saw the importance of tanks early on, I think, while he was in India or something. So, yeah, that's very interesting.
Now, you mentioned earlier that this era in history in France brought forth a lot of young, great young leaders and a lot of young talent. Was it just that the old people got killed during the revolution? Or was there something else going on? No, not necessarily.
No, revolution was bloody, but not that bloody. No, there is a...
The revolution was about opening careers to talent. And I think that's one of the great legacies of revolution and Napoleon in that they created a system that valued merit.
Yes, connection still played a role. I mean, if there is one constant in the inconstancy of human nature, and that is that the nepotism and corruption stays with us.

But to a far greater degree, merit played a role. And so you see that in the people Napoleon promoted and surrounding himself with,

were, again, his cabinet is quite capable, and he stays so throughout the empire.

And not just in military, as I said, but it's in finance and administration and in science. It's the ability for a person from a humble background to go to a school, to distinguish himself through his, and at this time it's largely his, right? The women were not given the equality through his talent and merit and rise to the top.
That's what matters and that's what is missing I think in many other areas of Europe at this time in parts like in Spain and in southern Italy, in Austria, in Russia. There is a far less opportunity for a commoner to rise to the top.
But Napoleon makes sure that by the time he's gone, that the system is already entrenched, that yes, monarchy will be restored, Bourbons will be back, but even Bourbons will have to accept the charter, this constitutional arrangement, one of the principles of which will be equality before the law, will be this acceptance of careers open to merit. What happened to this model of the sort of enlightened despot? It seems that that's less common today.
Maybe the most recent one would have been somebody like Li Huan-Yu, who is a similar model to Napoleon. But what happened to figures like this in our government? So in my own research and certainly in this book, I'm making an argument, not necessarily an original argument, but I certainly am a big proponent of it, that Napoleon is not necessarily the child of revolution.
Now, he's a product of the revolutionary circumstances, but he does not necessarily represent revolutionists such. To me, as I mentioned in the book, he's the last of the enlightened despots because much of what he tried to establish, much what he tried to introduce in equality, but also order and efficiency, these are not necessarily the revolutionary ideals, but these are ideas that other enlightened despots,

including Frederick the Great, including Joseph II of Austria, tried also to various degree of success implementing in their countries. But Napoleon, I think, is the last of them and probably the most successful in that his system survived.
The reason why he's most successful in Frederick

or Joseph is because of revolution. Now, Napoleon did not support the radicalism of revolution.
And we see that throughout his life, that even as a young man, when he witnessed revolutionary events in Paris, that he consistently came out against or expressed opinion against the radicalism of the crowd. And that, to me, is kind of an element in his mindset that tells that he's not in a revolution on horseback as such,

but enlightened despotism.

Once he passed away, right, once he's off the historical stage,

even though we are not talking about the enlightened despotism as such,

but the core of it still is there.

It's the government trying to bring about changes, government bring

about standardization, bring about efficiency. Now, it is not done as overtly or as acutely

as Napoleon did, but that's because circumstances have kind of changed and evolved. But we still see, for example, Prussian development in 1820s and 30s that are part of that, what I would say is part of this enlightened rational reform movement.
And even later on in post-Crimean period, Alexander II, the Russian emperor's great reforms can be perceived to be as part of that steady, gradual introduction of change that will modernize the state. So, you know, I think you can make an argument connecting those dots.
And then what happened to that form of government? It seems that other than, yeah, other than Singapore, it's kind of a lost...

No, I mean, I wouldn't say...

Would you consider, for example, Soviet state as that? Because it's a statist approach that is ushering in rapid transformation of society. I think it evolved.
It's changed its nature. Singapore is a unique case in that it was both kind of liberal but authoritarian in that sense, right? It was kind of a controlled liberal environment.
But Soviet system was authoritarian but more radical in its transformations. So I think it's a part of evolutionary process of what's happening.
So not necessarily that it's withered away and disappeared. You certainly can, for example, make a case for some of the Latin American examples where this enlightened reform movements led, spearheaded by an individual might be might be still relevant.
And then this is the question I meant to ask you earlier, which is when we were talking about how this was a unique time in terms of giving these talented young people access to positions based on their merit. is that possibly one of the advantages of war, which is that you have to, if the weak perish, then the nations have a very strong incentive to make sure their systems and their government are as efficient as possible.
If you look at, let's say, the US, it's still a meritocracy, maybe, maybe in the in like private markets, but there's the the average age of congressmen and presidents seems to keep increasing. And maybe that has something to do with, it's not like titles and nobility anymore, but it is a greater and greater levels of accreditation.
Is this one of the defenses of war, which is that it forces countries to become more efficient? No, I think that's a challenging question to deal with in the sense that in the late 19th century, social Darwinists, for example, argued that war was a great purger of societies that rejuvenates it. And I'm not sure that we want to kind of go back to that argument.
The war, I mean, the sheer nature of the war is that it makes things possible that in peacetime would be unthinkable. It has a great homogenizing effect.
It suppresses some of the sharper edges, or in some areas, it actually makes those sharper edges even more pronounced. And certainly when we talk about the French Revolution, for example, without the war, the revolution would not have radicalized as rapidly or to the extent that it did.
Without the conflict that started in 1792, France would have, it's my argument, would have continued on the path of a gradual reform movement towards the constitutional limited monarchy rather than rush towards the radical republicanism, terror and violence, which then beget more violence, more cycles of political instability, and ultimately led to military dictatorship. That's where the war is crucial.
And certainly within that context, in the context of war, there are a lot of things that revolutionaries thought were justifiable. For example, suspension of habeas corpus.
For example, arrest and persecution of their political opponents, but also instituting great government controls. Think about law of maximums, for example, that Jacobins introduced during the terror.
All that is in the context of that fear, of that anxiety, of that emergent situation that the war cultivates. That's where I see the impact of it.
And of course, the war also creates conditions where bright, talented, however you want to, whatever adjective you want to put it, individuals have an opportunity to distinguish. Now, for example, to go back to what you said about the war being this kind of great perjure.
It certainly had a role in weeding out many officers in the French Corps. Many of them immigrated, left the army.
Some of them failed in the tasks that the revolutionary government set for them and were punished dearly so for it. We have several cases like General Kustan or General Borne and others who failed to achieve the mission that the government set for them, and they were recalled and condemned and executed for it.
And so it certainly creates this environment in which you have to deliver, you have to be at your best, or an environment in which people who are willing to take the risk are pushed forward. And that's, in any respect, how Napoleon got his start, right? In 1793, he's a lowly nobody in the French army, and yet he's the one who is willing to take charge of artillery command in the town of Toulon, which is besieged by the army.
He comes up with a plan that brings the city to its knees, and the rest is history, right? And all is done within this war environment. Who knows how things would have turned if there was no war and whether Napoleon would have been able to distinguish themselves or the other generals that went on to make great careers.
It seems that one of the reasons that the revolutionary and the philonic idea has spread a lot was that also at the time that France was the seat of intellectual discourse at the time. Why was that? Maybe today, America has that sort of cultural influence that France had at the time.
When you read like War and Peace, all the elites in Russia are talking in French. What gave France its cultural dominance? That's a longer kind of structural historical process.
We can go back to 17th century and see the rise of France as a dominant both political entity in Western Europe and the cultural kind of entity in Europe as a whole. I think it's a creation of Louis XIV's era, the grandeur of the French monarchy, the hopelessness, the luxury of it, the diversity and the richness of French offerings.
And of course, you know, this is where I think it gets really interesting in the sense that France is oftentimes envisioned as an absolutist monarchy with kind of tight controls and everything. But on the other hand, in the 18th century, we see a diverse range of opinions expressed within France by the French writers.
On one hand, you can find anti-enlightenment writers, but alongside you will see Voltaire, you will see Rousseau, or the less known ones like Holbach, who was an atheist who was writing critical works against the organized religion and envisioning this technocratic utopias. So that is a unique circumstances that France was able to craft and cultivate that other countries were unable to replicate or were able to replicate to a lesser degree.
I think the other country that was successful in doing it, of course, Britain, but which had a very vibrant and rich intellectual life at this time. I want to be respectful of your time.
So the book is The Napoleonic Wars, A Global History. And if you want to mention your Twitter handle.
It's just my first name and last name. So it's pretty straightforward.
If you can spell my last name, you'll find me. You know, when I was doing research for the book, there were many times when I had to look up your, I was like, maybe trying to look up older interviews or something.
And every time I had to go to Amazon and make sure I copied the name right. My students call me Dr.
Amp, which make me a kind of character from the James Bond movie, but it's easier for them to remember it.

Sure.

Yeah. And then, yeah, any other, I don't know if there's like some final note or some final point that you want to close on? Something that stuck out from the conversation? No, I think this book represents a humble effort to showcase what history can do in modern context, and that is to move away from traditional boundaries, to adopt a more wider lens at looking events, more transnational, more comparative.
that it's perfectly fine to do national histories and to look at the

historical developments of a particular country, but to me, it is far more rewarding to see how countries developed in relationship with each other, how events in one part of the world reverberates in another because the more our day, nowadays, we live in such an interconnected world that transnational and comparative approach is absolutely essential to your success in really in any field of career that you pursue, and certainly in politics, in business, in law.

And so I encourage your listeners to pick up books like that, books written with a global history in mind and broaden their horizons. From the little history I have read, usually it's like a biography or something.

And you really do miss the global implications of the decisions that are being made and the changes that are happening. So it was super interesting to get that total perspective.
So yeah, it's a super fascinating book. And this is a super fun conversation.
Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you.
I appreciate that. Thank you.