W. Frederick Zimmerman gave 5 stars to: Napoleon’s Wars

Brilliant, although Anglophilic, February 23, 2009

This is the best single-volume history of the Napoleonic wars that I have ever read. It is full of casually brilliant essays in which Esdaile uses just a few pages to explains complicated phenomena that have detained other authors for multiple volumes (the Peninsular War, the War of 1812). It is truly an international, and a global history, that gives sufficient weight to the Americas, North and South, and addresses the actions of every major and minor European power.

I do think it is a shade overly Anglophilic. Esdaile reports Continental skepticism about English motives dutifully, but without, perhaps, complete belief. And his treatment of the appalling English “press gangs” against American sailors is tame considering the complete illegality and injustice of the practice-reminiscent of a later era’s “superpower” defense of extraordinary detention.