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WAR,
CULTURE AND SOCIETY,
1750–1850
From the Napoleonic Empire

to the Age of Empire
Empire after the Emperor
Edited by
Thomas Dodman · Aurélien Lignereux
War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850
Series Editors
Rafe Blaufarb
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL, USA
Alan Forrest
University of York
York, UK
Karen Hagemann
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC, USA
The series aims to the analysis of the military and war by combining politi-
cal, social, cultural, art and gender history with military history. It wants
to extend the scope of traditional histories of the period by discussing war
and revolution across the Atlantic as well as within Europe, thereby con-
tributing to a new global history of conflict in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth century.
Thomas Dodman • Aurélien Lignereux
Editors
From the Napoleonic

Empire to the Age of
Empire
Empire after the Emperor
Editors
Thomas Dodman Aurélien Lignereux
Columbia University Sciences Po
New York, NY, USA Grenoble, France
ISSN 2634-6699 ISSN 2634-6702 (electronic)

War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850
ISBN 978-3-031-15995-4 ISBN 978-3-031-15996-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15996-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover pattern: Signal Photos / Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Series Editors’ Preface
The century from 1750 to 1850 was a seminal period of change, not just
in Europe but across the globe. The political landscape was transformed
by a series of revolutions fought in the name of liberty—most notably in
the Americas and France, of course, but elsewhere, too: in Holland and
Geneva during the eighteenth century and across much of mainland
Europe by 1848. Nor was change confined to the European world. New
ideas of freedom, equality and human rights were carried to the furthest
outposts of empire, to Egypt, India and the Caribbean, which saw the
creation in 1801 of the first black republic in Haiti, the former French
colony of Saint-Domingue. And in the early part of the nineteenth cen-
tury they continued to inspire anti-colonial and liberation movements
throughout Central and Latin America. If political and social institutions
were transformed by revolution in these years, so, too, was warfare. During
the quarter-century of the French Revolutionary Wars, in particular,
Europe was faced with the prospect of ‘total’ war, on a scale unprece-
dented before the twentieth century. Military hardware, it is true, evolved
only gradually, and battles were not necessarily any bloodier than they had
been during the Seven Years’ War. But in other ways these can legitimately
be described as the first modern wars, fought by mass armies mobilized by
national and patriotic propaganda, leading to the displacement of millions
of people throughout Europe and beyond, as soldiers, prisoners of war,
civilians and refugees.
For those who lived through the period, these wars would be a forma-
tive experience that shaped the ambitions and the identities of a
v
vi SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
generation. The aims of the series are necessarily ambitious. In its various
volumes, whether single-authored monographs or themed collections, it
seeks to extend the scope of more traditional historiography. It will study
warfare during this formative century not just in Europe, but in the
Americas, in colonial societies and across the world. It will analyse the
construction of identities and power relations by integrating the principal
categories of difference, most notably class and religion, generation and
gender, race and ethnicity. It will adopt a multi-faceted approach to the
period and turn to methods of political, cultural, social, military, and gen-
der history, in order to develop a challenging and multidisciplinary analy-
sis. Finally, it will examine elements of comparison and transfer and so
tease out the complexities of regional, national and global history.
New York, NY Thomas Dodman

Grenoble, France Aurélien Lignereux
Contents

Introduction: Opening up the Napoleonic Empire 1
Thomas Dodman and Aurélien Lignereux
Part I The Napoleonic Empire, Between Imperialisms 25

Joseph Eschassériaux: From New Colonisation to Imperial
Diplomacy—Hypotheses as to a Reconversion (1797–1803) 27
Bernard Gainot

Napoleon of Arabia? Piracy in the Persian Gulf, the French
Threat to India, and British Imperial Responses 45
Guillemette Crouzet

The Jacobin and the Mameluke: Islam, Race and Political
Culture at the End of Empire 67
Ian Coller

Korais’s Greece and Napoleon’s Empire: The Egyptian
Campaign, Race Science, and the Europeanization an Idea 89
Alex R. Tipei
vii
viii Contents

The Scientific Appropriation of the World: The Imperial
Legacy in Naval Officer Training111
Hélène Vencent

Free Ports, Free Trade, Freedom: Napoleon’s Manifold Legacy
in Institutions and Images127
Giulia Delogu
Part II Individual Trajectories and Imperial Conversions 145

Tracing the Colonial Careers of Two Former Napoleonic
Officials: Godert van der Capellen and Bernard Besier147
Caroline Drieënhuizen and Martijn van der Burg

French Colonial Governors in the First Half of the Nineteenth
Century: Miniature Emperors?167
Nicola Todorov
From New Départements to the New World: The Colonial

Itinerary of an Imperial Agent185
Jean-Hugo Ihl

“Contriving to Pick Up Some Sailors”: The Royal Navy and
Foreign Manpower, 1815–1865205
Sara Caputo

Indian Horizons: Four Officers of the Empire in the Sikh
Kingdom of the Punjab (North-West India), 1822–1849227
Jean-Marie Lafont

From Egypt to Algeria: General Pierre Boyer’s Counter-
Insurgent and Imperial Career253
Ivan Burel
Contents ix
Part III New Beginnings Overseas 271

Algiers, the Last Napoleonic Conquest 273
Aurélien Lignereux

Algeria as a New Imperial Construction: Between a Search for
Abilities and a Place to Politically Relegate Foreign Veterans293
Walter Bruyère-Ostells

The Empire of Laws After the Emperor: French Legal
Domination in Nineteenth-Century Egypt 309
David Todd
Index 327
Notes on Contributors
Walter Bruyère-Ostells is Professor of Contemporary History at Sciences

Po Aix (Mesopolhis UMR 7064) and Director of Research at the Historical
Branch of the French Ministry of Defence. Specialist in military history, he
is particularly interested in analysing circulations of combatants in the
early nineteenth century. His publications include La Grande Armée de la
Liberté (2009) and Les Maréchaux d'Empire (2021). He has also explored
the violence of war from an anthropological perspective in Des chairs et des
larmes. Combattre, souffrir, mourir dans les guerres de la Révolution fran-
çaise et de l’Empire (2020).
Ivan Burel is Professeur Agrégé d’histoire at the University of Lille (Univ.
Lille, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), UMR 8529—
IRHiS—Institut de Recherches Historiques du Septentrion, F-59000
Lille, France). He works on counterinsurgency questions in nineteenth-
century France, and deals with the military, political, and cultural aspects
of irregular warfare. He also works on the circulations of insurgency tactics
between European countries, as well as between Europe and its colonial
territories.
Sara Caputo is an affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of History, University
of Cambridge, and a Lumley Research Fellow at Magdalene College. Her
first monograph, titled Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and
Transnational Seafarers During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, is
in press, and her second book, on the history of maritime cartography, is
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
under contract. Her doctoral work won the University of Cambridge

Prince Consort and Thirlwall Prize and the British Commission for
Maritime History Doctoral Prize. She has had several articles published on
social and cultural maritime history.
Ian Coller is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.
A specialist of the revolutionary era of the Muslim Mediterranean, he is
the author of Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe
1798–1831 (2010) and Muslims and Citizens: Islam, Politics and the French
Revolution (2020).
Guillemette Crouzet is a Marie Curie fellow in the Department of
History at the University of Warwick. She is an historian of the British
Empire, the Middle East, and India in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies. Her first book, Genèses du Moyen-Orient: le Golfe Persique à l’âge des
impérialismes (c. 1800–1914), was published in 2015. Her second book,
Inventing the Middle East: Britain and the Persian Gulf in the Age of Global
Imperialism, is forthcoming in 2022.
Giulia Delogu is Assistant Professor of Early Modern History at Ca’
Foscari University of Venice. Her research focuses mainly on the eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries. She specializes in the study of politi-
cal, cultural, and economic networks, and on political communication.
She is working on the development of new communication strategies in
seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century free ports. A second research field is
the construction of images of economic and political power, starting from
the case of Napoleon.
Thomas Dodman is an assistant professor in the Department of French
at Columbia University. 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. He is working on a rein-
terpretation of Alexis de Tocqueville and a microhistory of a revolution-
ary-era soldier raised to be Rousseau’s Emile.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Caroline Drieënhuizen is Assistant Professor of Cultural History at the

Open University of the Netherlands. Her PhD thesis discussed the creation
of the Dutch colonial elite by investigating its material collections. She is
doing provenance research on Dutch cultural heritage and working on the
European cultural dimension of colonialism and Indonesia’s decoloniza-
tion in Indonesia, the Netherlands, and Europe from a museological and
material object-driven approach.
Bernard Gainot is Emeritus Professor in Modern History at the
Université Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, and an associate researcher at the
Institute of Modern and Contemporary History (ENS Rue d’Ulm/Paris
1 University). He has had his research published widely on revolutionary
and Napoleonic France (Atlas de l’Empire Napoléonien, together with
Jean Luc Chappey), on the history of the First French colonial empire
(L’Empire colonial français de Richelieu à Napoléon), and on military his-
tory (Les officiers de couleur dans les armées de la République et de l’Empire).
Jean-Hugo Ihl is a PhD candidate at the Ecole des hautes études en sci-
ences sociales (EHESS) and Sciences Po, also affiliated to the University of
Vienna. He is a member of the Centre Alexandre Koyré for the history of
science and of the Franco- German doctoral college “Unterschiede den-
ken.” His research focuses on the history of Catholic anthropology and
emphasizes the participation of church members to the shaping of anthro-
pological categories such as “race” and “culture.”
Jean-Marie Lafont holds a PhD (Greek Archaeology, Lyons) and a DLit
(Modern History, Indian Studies, Paris 3-Sorbonne), and has spent
37 years of his career on deputation in universities and scientific institu-
tions in Libya (2 years), Pakistan (12 years), and India (23 years). He has
had over 15 books and 130 contributions published in scientific publica-
tions, and has curated several exhibitions. His research mainly deals with
the French in the service of the Indian States (c. 1550–1850), for which
he received several awards in France, Canada, the United States, and India,
including two from the Institut de France, the last one (Prix Emile Sénart,
2020) for his work concerning the contribution of the French to the polit-
ical, military, and cultural life of India. He is the Vice-President 2022 of
the Académie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres & Arts, Lyon.
Aurélien Lignereux is Professor of History at Sciences Po Grenoble—
Université Grenoble Alpes. His research focuses on policing and police sys-
tems, on royalist politicization, on imperial rule in Napoleonic Europe, and
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
on the social and cultural history of expatriate French civil servants at once
within départements réunis under the reign of Napoleon and since their
return to the country after 1814. His books include La France rébellion-
naire. 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), L’Empire de la paix
(2023). He has edited or co-edited several works on security (Ordre, sécu-
rité et secours en montagne. Police et territoire XIXe–XXIe siècles, 2016;
Sociétés et forces de sécurité au XIXe siècle, 2015, with Arnaud Houte and
Quentin Deluermoz) or, more widely, on the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic period (1815–1816: Le peuple contre l’armée, 2016; The Age of
Revolutions: Changing Transnational Perspectives, 2019, with Maxime Kaci
and Anna Karla).
Alex R. Tipei is a transnational historian and her research focuses on the
exercise of French soft power in nineteenth-century Southeastern Europe
and beyond. Tipei’s work has appeared in Modern Intellectual History and
European History Quarterly. Tipei has received support from, among
other sources, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, the Fulbright Scholar Program, and the American Council of
Learned Societies. She is Assistant Professor of History and International
Studies at the University of Montreal, where she is also a member of the
Centre d’études et de recherches international.
David Todd is Professor of Political and Intellectual History at Sciences
Po, Paris, and a director at the Centre for History and Economics,
Cambridge. His publications include Free Trade and Its Enemies in France,
1814–1851 (2015) and A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in
the Nineteenth Century (2021). He is working on the legal aspects and
environmental consequences of European expatriation in the Middle East
and North Africa.
Nicola Todorov studied History at the University of Paris 1 and is a
lecturer at the University of French Guiana. His research interests include
Napoleonic policy in Europe, Napoleon’s naval strategy against Britain,
and the environmental impact of colonial settlement and agriculture in
Amazonia. Publications include L’administration du royaume de
Westphalie. Le département de l’Elbe 1807–1813 (2011), Napoléon à la con-
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
quête de l’Angleterre. Le plan secret de Napoléon (2016), and “Napoleon’s

client states,” in Michael Broers, Philip Dwyer (eds.), The Cambridge
History of the Napoleonic Wars, vol. I (2022).
Martijn van der Burg is Senior Lecturer in Cultural History at the Open
University of the Netherlands. His research is devoted to state-formation
and nation-building in the long nineteenth century, with an emphasis on
European integration in the Napoleonic period. He has had numerous
articles and books published on these topics, most recently Napoleonic
Governance in the Netherlands and Northwest Germany (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2021).
Hélène Vencent is a PhD candidate in Contemporary History and a high
school teacher at Centre d’Histoire du XIXe siècle—Sorbonne Université,
Paris, France. Her research focuses on the navy and naval officers in the
nineteenth century.
List of Figures
Introduction: Opening up the Napoleonic Empire

Figs. 1–4 1. François Dubois, from the drawing by Jacques-Louis de La
Hamayde de Saint-Ange. The Four Parts of the World. Europe.
1810. (Paris, Mobilier national), “Isabelle Bideau, January
2019”. GOB-539-000. 2. Idem. Asia. “Isabelle Bideau,
Mobilier national—January 2019”. GOB-538-001. 3. Idem.
Africa. “Isabelle Bideau, Mobilier national—January 2019”.
GOB-537-001. 4. Idem. America. “Isabelle Bideau, Mobilier
national—January 2019”. GOB-535-001 3

Threat to India, and British Imperial Responses
Fig. 1 John Clark after Richard Temple, “Ras ul Khymah from the
S.W. and the situation of the Troops”, from sixteen views of
places in the Persian Gulph taken in the years 1809–10:
illustrative of the proceedings of the forces employ’d on the
expedition sent from Bombay […] against the Arabian pirates
(London, 1813). Aquatint engraving (National Maritime
Museum, Greenwich) 48
Fig. 2 François-Henri Mulard, Napoleon receiving the ambassador of
Persia, 1810. Oil on canvas (Château de Versailles, Réunion
des Musées Nationaux, France) 56
Fig. 3 (a) and (b) Unknown Persian artist, The Court of Fath Ali
Shah at the Nowrooz Salaam Ceremony, details showing British
(Fig. 4) and French (Fig. 5) ambassadors, c.1830 (based on
xvii
xviii List of Figures
murals from the Negaristan Palace outside Tehran made in

1812–1813). Bodycolour and gold paint on linen (Royal
Collection Trust) 60
The Jacobin and the Mameluke: Islam, Race and Political

Culture at the End of Empire
Fig. 1 Isaac Cruikshank, “Boney at Brussels” (1803). Prints,
Drawings and Watercolors from the Anne S.K. Brown Military
Collection, Napoleonic Satires. Brown Digital Repository.
Brown University Library 74
Fig. 2 George Cruikshank, “Delusion, A New Farce” (1813). © The
Trustees of the British Museum 75
Fig. 3 George Cruikshank, “The Hero’s Return” (1813). © Bodleian
Libraries, Oxford 75
Fig. 4 Frontispiece from Le brigand corse, BNF 76
Fig. 5 Le Nec plus ultra du Cannibalisme, 1815, BNF Estampes 80
French Colonial Governors in the First Half of the Nineteenth

Century: Miniature Emperors?
Fig. 1 The geographical origins of the post-Napoleonic governors 180
From New Départements to the New World: The Colonial

Itinerary of an Imperial Agent
Fig. 1 Unknown Author. Map of the 300,000 acres of the
Guyandotte Company, illustration from the The Federal
Reporter, 98, 1909, p. 916 198
“Contriving to Pick Up Some Sailors”: The Royal Navy

and Foreign Manpower, 1815–1865
Fig. 1 Ratings by Origin, British, Irish, and Foreign, 1816 212
Fig. 2 Ratings by Origin, Non-subject Foreigners and Imperial
Subjects, 1816 214
Fig. 3 Ratings by Origin, British, Irish, and Foreign, 1855 219
Fig. 4 Ratings by Origin, Non-subject Foreigners and Imperial
Subjects, 1855 221
List of Figures xix
Indian Horizons: Four Officers of the Empire in the Sikh

Kingdom of the Punjab (North-West India), 1822–1849
Fig. 1 Carbines of General Allard’s cavalry 240
Fig. 2 Military Manual of Maharaja Ranjit Singh 241
Fig. 3 General Allard’s medal of Commander of the Order of Guru
Govind Singh 242
Fig. 4 The Court of Lahore, by August Schoefft. Oil on canvas
(488 × 305 cm), Lahore 1841–Vienna 1855. While travelling
in British India, Shoefft was invited to Lahore in 1841–1842
by his compatriot Dr Honigberger. He collected all the
drawings and paintings he could. Back in Europe, he painted
The Court of Lahore, which Honigberger thought was a
commission of King Louis-Philippe. The four “French”
generals, Allard, Ventura, Court and Avitabile, are here. Here
also are Colonels Mouton, de La Roche and Lafont next to Dr
Honigberger, while a section of the Fauj-i-khas, with its dark
blue uniforms, its red turbans and its sparkling baionnets, is on
duty in the Fort of Lahore. Shoefft completed the painting in
1852 and exhibited it in Vienna in 1855. The painting was
ultimately purchased by Maharaja Dalip Singh and remained in
his family till Princess Bamba’s death in Lahore in 1857. It
now belongs to the Government of Pakistan, and it is kept in
the Sikh Gallery, Lahore Fort, Lahore. With the kind
permission of the Director of Archaeology, Government of
Pakistan 243
Fig. 5 Cuirass of General Allard’s cavalry 244
Fig. 6 General Allard and his family at Lahore 245
Fig. 7 General Allard’s Cuirassier. « Chairana Sowar », Lahore
1837–1843. From Honigberger’s Thirty- Five Years in the
East…, plate V, p. 131. Probably from an original miniature
painting by Imam Bakhsh Lahori. When Allard returned from
France to Lahore, he brought the complete equipment for a
full-fledged regiment of cuirassiers (see Fig. 5) 246
Fig. 8 The Darbar of the Nawab of Bahawalpur 247
List of Maps

Threat to India, and British Imperial Responses
Map 1 The Persian Gulf in the nineteenth century 50
Tracing the Colonial Careers of Two Former Napoleonic

Officials: Godert van der Capellen and Bernard Besier
Map 1 Mobility in Europe (van der Capellen in magenta; Besier
in purple) 153
Map 2 Colonial careers in Indonesia (van der Capellen in magenta;
Besier in purple) 157
xxi
List of Tables
“Contriving to Pick Up Some Sailors”: The Royal Navy

and Foreign Manpower, 1815–1865
Table 1 Crews of a Sample of Ships Involved in the Bombardment
of Algiers, August 1816 210
Table 2 Foreign-born Seamen by Subjecthood, 1816 Sample 211
Table 3 Crews of a Sample of Ships Belonging to the Baltic Fleet, June
1855 216
Table 4 Foreign Seamen by Subject Status, June 1855 Sample 217
xxiii
Introduction: Opening up the Napoleonic
Empire
Thomas Dodman and Aurélien Lignereux
The four portières and imperial fantasies for as many continents were still
being woven at the Gobelins manufactory in Paris when the French
Empire came crashing down in 1814.1 Commissioned four years earlier,
based on paintings by François Dubois and earlier sketches by Jacques-
Louis de la Hamayde de Saint-Ange, the great curtains were meant to
adorn the Galerie de Diane in the Tuileries Palace. But much like
Napoleon’s other global ambitions, they came to naught and soon faded
into oblivion. Although he seized control of Amsterdam and Madrid—
both metropoles with a global foothold—the emperor of the French could
never repeat the Spanish Catholic Monarchy’s design to rule over “the
T. Dodman (*)
Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
e-mail: td2551@columbia.edu
A. Lignereux
Sciences Po Grenoble—Université Grenoble Alpes—CERDAP2,
Grenoble, France
e-mail: aurelien.lignereux@iepg.fr
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
T. Dodman, A. Lignereux (eds.), From the Napoleonic Empire to the
Age of Empire, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15996-1_1
2 T. DODMAN AND A. LIGNEREUX
four parts of the world”.2 Spanish America shunned Joseph Bonaparte and
Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, fell into British hands as early
as August 1811. By then, the British had already taken control of French
colonies in the West Indies as well as the islands of Réunion and Mauritius
in the Indian Ocean. Napoleon’s great American plan, centred on the Gulf
of Mexico and Louisiana, was but a distant memory, having been shat-
tered in 1803 with the loss of Saint-Domingue (Figs. 1–4).3
The empire’s global retreat was not limited to symbolic losses, however.
A few celebrated embassies notwithstanding (Mirza Reza, ambassador of
Persia, received at the château of Fickenstein on 27 April 1807), it was
French interests around the world more widely, as possible props for an
informal imperialism, that were weakened or removed under Napoleon.
The once-influential French community in Cadiz ceased to exist as a com-
munity because of the Spanish insurrection that made the great Andalusian
and Atlantic port into its capital.4 The repercussions of the Peninsular War
led to a close watch being kept on the French in Cuba, including the refu-
gees from Saint-Domingue who had previously been well received there;
but these supervisory committees were not enough to prevent the anti-
French riots of 21–22 March 1809 that led to the French being shipped
off to New Orleans between April and August.5 On the Indian subconti-
nent, the British jumped on the Napoleonic threat to bring into line the
principalities employing them, in a move to pre-empt the spread of any
potential menace that was to be found elsewhere in Asia.6 And yet
Napoleon was still, and more than ever from the summer of 1810, seeing
to the construction of a fleet stacked with heavily armed units with a view
to resuming the war at sea. Napoleon sought means to launch a “general
operation”—a real plan mobilizing all of the empire’s naval squadrons and
flotillas together with land forces—to destabilize increasingly stretched
British positions.7 New expeditions to the East were contemplated, first in
May 1808 in the form of combined operations in the Mascarenes and
Egypt, to threaten the British in India. Lack of proper resources ensured
that they remained theoretical.8 In March 1811, the emperor spelled out
his intentions “on the kind of sea warfare he wishe[d] to conduct”, to
“tire the English” and prepare expeditions to be carried out the following
year in “Sicily or Egypt in the Mediterranean and to Martinique,
Dominique, Guadeloupe, Cayenne, Surinam and of the whole of the
Dutch continent”. He even spoke of taking the Cape of Good Hope, and
deploying a total of 60,000 to 80,000 men in both worlds “if circum-
stances permit it”.9
INTRODUCTION: OPENING UP THE NAPOLEONIC EMPIRE 3
Figs. 1–4 1. François Dubois, from the drawing by Jacques-Louis de La

Hamayde de Saint-Ange. The Four Parts of the World. Europe. 1810. (Paris,
Mobilier national), “Isabelle Bideau, January 2019”. GOB-539-000. 2. Idem.
Asia. “Isabelle Bideau, Mobilier national—January 2019”. GOB-538-001. 3.
Idem. Africa. “Isabelle Bideau, Mobilier national—January 2019”. GOB-537-001.
4. Idem. America. “Isabelle Bideau, Mobilier national—January 2019”.
GOB-535-001
The existing historiography has tended to ignore these schemes, or at

best tie them to Napoleon’s attempts at disorienting the Royal Navy by
multiplying threats on all sides.10 Should they be viewed as a desperate
going for bust, or as compensatory fantasies about faraway conquests?
Were they the product of a deranged mind, the bizarre and grandiose
delusions of a madman, as Decrès, minister of the Navy, supposedly sug-
gested to Marshal Marmont in 1809?11 Or should we take these vast
designs a little more seriously, if not as tangible evidence of military might,
at least as proof that Napoleon understood the balance of power and
resolved to thwart Britain on a global stage because he had become “cap-
tive of the continent”? These questions have remained entirely rhetorical
ones thus far, subject matter for a counterfactual “what if history”, of the
kind Napoleon himself practised on Saint Helena, when he indulged his
memory by wondering what a successful taking of Acre in 1799 might
have entailed.12 In these circumstances, the designs on overseas territories
have above all fuelled the black legend of a hubristic usurper driven by
libido dominandi, like so much evidence for the prosecution in the accusa-
tions about universal monarchy so often levelled at Napoleon. He alleg-
edly subjected the French to make them into conquerors enslaving foreign
peoples, and by so doing getting them to forget they were themselves
dominated and subjugated by a foreign—Corsican or Italian—tyrant. A
more positive version of this global fantasy survived in popular Bonapartism
as rumours of his imminent return with hundreds of thousands of
Americans or Turks at his side.13
Somewhere between the scornful scepticism levelled at plans barely
sketched in Napoleon’s correspondence and the fascination-repulsion
aroused by a fantasized or literal approach to his ambitions, there is room
for a new look and a new global approach to the question. The point is not
to attribute to these schemes a substance they never had—even though
one should not underestimate how seriously the British took them in
deciding their own moves—but rather to grasp both the long-term
Napoleonic visions they outline and what they reveal of the “actually exist-
ing” empire. Indeed, regardless of achieving such objectives, the French,
despite the continental blockade they (self) imposed, kept one eye on the
world. Short of dominating it, they liked to picture it according to the
canons of the empire style. Let us go back to the tapestry cartoons referred
to above. The point was to illustrate the “Four parts of the globe charac-
terized by their natural and industrial production”, according to a letter
from Vivant Denon to Daru, of 16 May 1811.14 Beneath their balanced
outward appearance, these allegories of the continents capture a double

desire for domination of France over Europe and of Europe over the
world. Woven and laced with orientalism, these Four Parts of the World
display the ready exoticism of the camel, lion and tapir, among other con-
ventions of European-centred frames of representation. Europe stands in
first place in the ranking of civilizations, fully clothed in dignified draper-
ies; Asia comes second, one breast revealed; Africa and America follow,
their bosoms and legs exposed to the male gaze and relegating them to a
savage condition. A single cannon suffices to affirm both the power of
Europe’s might and a continent now at peace, while the rest of the world
bristles with weapons and warfare in a Hobbesian state of nature still wait-
ing for its pax romana—or napoleonica. For, while Europe is fully sover-
eign in her cloak of crimson ermine, it is primarily because she is French,
in the shadow of imperial eagles and French colours. With their expan-
sionist overtones, these Four Parts of the World therefore have a political
scope, as confirmed by the comparison with past models, beginning with
the tapestries woven for Louis XVI by the manufactory of Beauvais in
1790–1791.15
Finding a New Historiographical Frame for a New

Historical Object
Plans for overseas territories that barely made it beyond Napoleon’s cor-
respondence, sketches for tapestries that were never hung in the Tuileries,
and so on—the contrast between this and what actually happened on the
European stage is undoubtedly quite stark. And yet, these half-clues push
us to look again at the Napoleonic empire’s relationship with the world,
even if it ended in failure. After all, the same could be said of the
Napoleonic Europe, which was dismantled by the Congress of Vienna
and the Treaties of Paris of 1814–1815. At the end of the day, the distinc-
tion between mere projections and actual achievements isn’t so clear. This
was already the case at the time of the black legend. It is true again today:
the polemics that accompanied the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death in
2021 were at least useful in that they highlighted the moral and world-
wide implications of his undertakings, even if they focused almost exclu-
sively on the restoration of slavery. It is a good thing to keep to this scale,
provided it is given a truly global scope, that is, by establishing the neces-
sary connections between Europe and the world. Did Napoleon not die
on the South Atlantic island of Saint Helena?16 Merely linking up areas is

not enough because there is a need to think about the nature of
Napoleonic imperialism in Europe compared with forms of actual or
intended rule for other parts of the world, while daring to venture beyond
the years 1800–1815.
If the bicentenary was about commemorating Napoleon’s demise, why
not take the pretext—the emperor is dead—quite literally and turn to
what comes after? Let us look at what the Napoleonic empire bequeathed
and made possible, all that remained of it after it collapsed. The Napoleonic
period is all too often viewed, especially in France, as an exceptional time,
a period with a clear beginning and end. This has entailed the develop-
ment of a historiography that is specific to the period and closed in on
itself and certain methodological postulates (primacy of narration, focus
on Napoleon, biographical inflation). By contrast, and breaking away
from this, taking an interest in the imperial heritage conveyed by this
period, the forms of domination that were then initiated and that contin-
ued after 1814–1815, is an excellent way to open up this historiography,
to extract it from the chronological boundary markers that hem it into a
wholly factual approach. In this domain, it can only be observed that all
we have are scattered intuitions, evocative but still too general and too
literary. After Waterloo, Patrick Gueniffey writes, “The romantic genera-
tion was to feed its spleen with an epic that outdid the imagination and the
very middle-class nineteenth century was to find in it the inspiration for its
most gigantic undertakings and its expeditions to afar. From North Africa
to the Far East, it was still the shadow of Napoleon that was cast across the
foundation of the great colonial empires”.17 Possibly so. But such a claim
still needs to be backed by evidence. Indeed, it requires a whole historio-
graphical space of its own, one that we begin to see emerge in studies of
Napoleonic veterans who “recycled” their careers in wars of independence
and national uprisings elsewhere, as well as ones that trace the transmis-
sion of experiences, expectations and structures of feeling across different
times and places, particularly in military campaigns.18 Academic specializa-
tions do us a disservice here, as the Napoleonic empire remains (at least in
France) the province of early modernists, and thus cordoned off from
nineteenth-century colonial empires.
Even the new history of empires has not ventured here. What it has
done, at least indirectly, is relativise the Napoleonic exception to make it
an imperial experience among others and thereby “avoid the false dichot-
omy between continuity and change” that has so often tripped Napoleonic
studies, focused as they have been on the Revolution that preceded the
empire rather than the imperialism that followed. The point is not to deny
the specificity or even the ambiguity of the Napoleonic episode; it is, in
itself, an important caution against both linear narratives of modernity
premised on the Enlightenment and Revolution and simple binaries of
nation and empire.19 The point is to grasp all of these dynamics. Placing
Napoleon’s Europe back within the typology of empires—on the basis of
the responses that the Emperor of the French, King of Italy, Moderator of
the Swiss Confederation and Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine
made to the transversal challenges inherent in all empires, torn between
the will to incorporate and the necessity to differentiate, and rely more or
less on local intermediaries (the local elites employed in the service of the
empire)—provides a fresh starting point from which to grasp the
Napoleonic order. Recast in this way, one wonders to what extent this
empire was actually French, given how many foreign-born soldiers or offi-
cials served it, and how centralized it really was, given that it relied on a
kind of layered sovereignty just like other empires.20 The Grand Empire,
with its nesting of the old French Kingdom, the départements réunis and
vassal kingdoms, is indeed in keeping with conventional imperial strategies.
However, the inclusion of the Napoleonic empire within a broader his-
tory has barely begun.21 There is every reason to believe that there is much
to gain from giving greater importance to the Napoleonic experience.
This claim holds for transnational history, which sets out to relate histori-
cal phenomena beyond conventional political borders, paying attention to
the patterns of movement of people, things and ideas. It is also true of
imperial history proper, centred on the study of colonies and their rela-
tions with the metropole, as well as the analysis of colonial societies, the
“informal” empire, inter-empire relations, and feedback effects on the
home countries. It is also to be hoped that better account should be taken
of the Napoleonic era by global history, which deals with the networks of
interdependency connecting continents together. Even the specific affir-
mation of a French imperial history, that already has a wealth of initiatives
and impulses, seems to elude the Napoleonic period, probably for want of
bibliographic material to justify extending its own periodization
(1830–1960) any further back. However, its opening observation can be
adapted to the Napoleonic years, namely the acknowledgement of the
imperial contribution to national history, by way of imperial interactions
with the rest of the world in that they contributed to the formation of
France and concomitantly the conspicuousness of French contributions to
the process of globalization since the eighteenth century to the extent of

identifying a French globalization.22 An analogous approach would be rel-
evant for the Napoleonic empire: if incorporating it into the history of
empires helps to explain its workings, the same could be said about the
importance of the Napoleonic empire to the history of imperialism more
in general.
From this perspective, one should not restrict oneself to the figure of
Napoleon alone, although he has served as a model for so many empire
makers or would-be dictators around the world. The challenge lies else-
where. From the simple point of view of chronology, the Napoleonic
empire is the pivotal link between early-modern colonial empires and
modern-day ones. This separation is itself schematic and open to criticism,
even in the French case, where Revolution and loss of overseas territories
mark a clear rupture (partially offset by those colonies that were returned
in 1814). The transition from a colonial ancien régime to a new age of
empire is, of course, an economic one tied to the rise of liberalism and the
corresponding decline of mercantilism, chartered companies and slavery—
though it also reverted to familiar forms of territorial domination, military
might and extractive exploitation. Even so, the hypothesis of a Napoleonic
contribution to the powerful colonial bounce-back in the nineteenth cen-
tury is worth contemplating. It is particularly worth it because the
Napoleonic legacy is not confined to the mere conquest by war, repro-
duced on a much larger scale by colonial conquests, or even the influence
that the Napoleonic legal and institutional order might have exercised; for
this would be to misjudge the hard facts of administrative overlap, the
separate and arbitrary systems that are the common lot of the administra-
tion of the colonies. What the Napoleonic empire might have passed down
is more broadly the force of assurances, a way of taking up again the ideals
and terms of the Enlightenment and the Revolution (such as “civiliza-
tion”), while narrowing their meaning and scope, to serve as a basis for
maintaining the upper hand over populations not limited to political, mili-
tary or economic guardianship.23
At any rate, reappraising the place held by the Napoleonic episode in
the long history of empires presupposes that one step outside of a linear
and teleological framework, the framework that would lead inevitably to
the scramble for Africa and from there to the colonial empires that come
to cover—and colour—world atlases at the dawn of the twentieth cen-
tury.24 A hundred years earlier, the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries was a time of reflection and reconfiguration: new forms of
relations with overseas territories were proposed and discussed, and it was
this range of possibilities that converged on the current historiographic
good fortune of this sequence. From the last third of the eighteenth cen-
tury, a debate raged in Europe putting into the balance conquest or trade
as means of domination, comparing profits and costs.25 The tendency was
then to discredit territorial conquest. In the French case, the shock of
1763 meant people were ready to think everything over again, as the sus-
pension of the privilege of the Compagnie des Indes in 1769 made clear.
Abolitionism and the loss of Haiti gave fresh impetus to the soul-searching,
briefly muted by the hope of colonial restoration under the Consulate.
Africa was designated as the privileged space of a new colonization, com-
bining morality and economics, in the service of the progress of civiliza-
tion.26 Things would turn out quite differently starting with the conquest
of Algiers (1830), although full territorial occupation only became an
option in the 1840s, and went against the dominant trend towards the
establishment of influence and commercial outposts as part of an informal
empire.27 This complex development was not peculiar to France. Weakened
by the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, Great Britain also saw its policy called
into question. This test served as a basis for intensified expansion by way
of struggles against France and its allies and a change in the forms of
domination to the extent that it tipped from a first to a second British
Empire. The East India Company appropriated for itself ideas that were
attributed to the Frenchman Dupleix to build an empire in Bengal with a
territorial basis, founded on the extraction of wealth and heralding the
imperialism buoyed up by the New Toryism in the form in which it was to
triumph in the nineteenth century.28 This matrix of a system of authoritar-
ian perhaps even despotic domination in some isolated possessions during
the first half of the century is complex as it also borrowed certain features
from indigenous precedents while simultaneously drawing inspiration
from the French administrative framework and from figures such as the
Dutchman Daendels, the energetic and effective governor of Batavia in
the service of Napoleon, to shape the new proconsular form of supervision
of British colonies.29
Setting Sail on the Napoleonic Empire:

New Directions
Noticing the place of an individual or even positing some analogy between
administrative systems is, of course, not enough to determine the direct or
indirect part the Napoleonic empire played in these evolutionary dynam-
ics. It remains to be seen whether this historiographical blind spot hides a
missing link in the history of empires. This collective volume provides
some initial stepping stones. It does so by reorienting our gaze in three
ways: from the emperor to the empire; from the European conquests that
Napoleon administered to the world he dreamt of; and from other peo-
ple’s experiences of the Napoleonic empire to those of subsequent colo-
nial empires.
The first reorientation, from emperor to empire, is already very much
underway. The bevy of biographical works produced around the bicenten-
nial of Napoleon’s death in 2021 is, in this respect, deceptive. It goes
against the trend set by a deeper renewal of Napoleonic studies reaching
further back, into the 1990s and the legacy of the Revolution’s own bicen-
tennial. These works have provided for a much broader and diversified
assessment of Europe as it was reshaped by the Napoleonic imperial proj-
ect. A New Napoleonic History has coalesced around a number of key fea-
tures.30 Without designating any school in due form, the term can bring
together research that tends to view the Napoleonic empire as a collective
undertaking and not as the work of just one man. Napoleon’s hold can
only be understood insofar as he made his place as the champion of his
generation, the standard bearer of its ideals and interests. A second con-
nection relates to the way that the European area is no longer reduced to
a lump of soft wax shaped by Napoleon and his agents. There is nothing
more misleading than the picture of a clean slate: it was the interaction
between imperial willpower and pre-existing social forces that made the
empire. What the empire actually was on the ground did not coincide with
Napoleon’s intentions, since the shaping of the imperial scheme depended
on the capacity of local societies—themselves run through by tensions—to
accept the new institutional regime and even to make it their own. Hence,
Michael Broers’ suggestion to think of the Grand Empire not so much in
terms of a political subdivision (the France of old, annexed départements,
satellite kingdoms) but depending on how integrated territories were.31
This differentiation has been continually refined with the publication of
territorial monographs (on the basis of a city, a département, a region)32
and institutional ones (consulta romana, prefectoral administration, legal

system, gendarmerie, etc.).33 Collective syntheses have served as staging
posts and springboards for new directions.34 All in all, these studies, often
guided by a cultural approach to social and political issues, have sketched
out a nuanced and sometimes unexpected imperial landscape, subject to
superimposed and antagonistic time frames, between the short term of
exploitation of resources against a background of war and the long-haul
plans for economic development.
Our second reorientation leads from this now-well-known European
empire to the world Napoleon dreamt of. Despite long-standing interest
for the expedition to Egypt and its after-effects, as well as the remarkable
surge in work on the Haitian Revolution and the wider Caribbean, far less
progress has been made on this front.35 The fact that Napoleon’s empire
was, at least for a while, an overseas empire as well, is often overlooked.36
This is in part the legacy of the historiography of the Third Republic,
which gleefully criticized the empire in this regard, just as it blamed Louis
XV for the loss of the first colonial empire.37 This was to judge the
Napoleonic period by criteria of territorial expansion that were not really
his but those of the France of Jules Ferry. The resurgence of interest for
the Baudin expedition to the Southern Lands reminds us that overseas
plans continued to flourish under the Consulate, and not only in Egypt.38
This does not mean that one should be fooled by the operative character
of the connections highlighted between ministerial bureaucracy, scientific
circles and colonists; despite a few success stories (acclimatization of coffee
on Saint-Domingue and in the Mascarenes), this “colonial machine” often
misfired and was unable to adjust to colonial realities.39 Similarly, despite
the circuits and networks drawn on and ranging from agronomic coteries
with contacts in government down to farmers, the determined policy to
introduce new plant and animal species met with some disappointing
results.40 As for the ambition to open up zones of commercial influence
and to compete with the British through voyages of scientific exploration
and circumnavigation, it quickly ran up against the hard facts of the bal-
ance of power on the seas. At least Napoleon sought to remember this in
conversations with Las Cases—himself author of a world Atlas during his
time as an emigrés in London—while in exile on Saint Helena.41 He even
cast himself as an emperor-explorer, rubbing shoulders with great explor-
ers of the past and those about to reach Africa in his time. Napoleon lent
a willing ear to the scheme Las Cases supposedly came up with under the
empire for “a planned journey into the interior of Africa; not some furtive
and adventuresome excursions but an actual military expedition”, accom-

panied by surgeons, physicians, botanists, chemists, astronomers and natu-
ralists, advancing on the strength of information supplied by the
Portuguese, but that Decrès supposedly, once again, called “madness”
without following it up.42 He deplored that he had had no knowledge of
it, saying that a commission would have provided the means to carry it
out, just as he regretted not having had time when in Egypt to conduct
any reconnaissance beyond the desert. Symptomatically, colonial geogra-
phy alone took an interest in such designs.43 Need it be recalled that the
Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène is the book where everything is possible? What
had Napoleon been short of? The work animals, manoeuvrable light artil-
lery and leather pods for crossing rivers that Las Cases recommended to
ensure the feasibility of his project would probably not have been enough
to overcome the pitfalls of climate, disease and the hostility of the local
populations; and they certainly did not have the operational value of the
“tools of empire” (steamships, quinine, Maxim guns, shipping lines, rail-
roads and the telegraph) which, in the late nineteenth century, made expe-
ditions to the heart of the dark continent in the service of New Imperialism
possible because profitable.44 Above all, anachronisms should be avoided
as to the purpose and even the spirit of the first African expeditions—those
conducted from 1795 to 1830 by the British (Mungo Park, Gray and
Dochard, Gordon Laing, Hugh Clapperton, Richard and John Lander)
and French (Gaspard Théodore Mollien and René Caillié) pioneers, with
no plans for domination, hardly out for gain, but still with their wealth of
contradictions so shifting and open were the ideas and anthropological
data about these lands and their inhabitants—far from determining any
affiliation with the operations of after 1850.45 Lastly, one should not make
too much of Napoleon’s regrets because, compared with the end of the
ancien régime, “the readiness to explore the African interior was eclipsed
under the Revolution and Empire”, given the scale of the European con-
tinental challenge.46 Did not some explorers redirect (and reduce) the
scope of their geographical passions, like the Alsatian Xavier de Golbéry, a
former engineering corps officer, who, having recounted his travels in
Africa, was to settle for making a topographical study of one of the new
French départements, that of the Roër?47 This re-centring and this new
attraction for a change of scenery paradoxically to be found in deepest
France lay behind the craze for local statistics and trips around France in
the first half of the nineteenth century. It remains to be determined
whether this shift in inquisitiveness from far-off lands to closer quarters

was one-way traffic or whether it promoted a wider circulation of ideas.
Our third shift of focus, bringing Napoleonic domination as deployed
in Europe into connection with later colonial empires, helps us to answer
this. A connection of the kind would explain why the Napoleonic empire
had substantial influence and made a lasting impact well beyond its rela-
tively short existence. Following the seminal work of Stuart Woolf,48 we
owe it to Michael Broers to have taken such a stride, even if it initially
came under intense scrutiny as provocative and anachronistic.49 Broers
brought to the field concepts such as “centre-periphery” and “frontier”,
and he repurposed a concept used for the colonial empires of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, that of “cultural imperialism”, for a
European context, more specifically for Italy under Napoleonic domina-
tion.50 Viewed through this prism, the sources Broers used force us to flip
the coin and to consider to what extent Napoleonic rule was not the
matrix for subsequent forms of imperial domination. Through their cer-
tainties and their attitudes, the expatriated French supposedly initiated a
way of viewing otherness. They allegedly initiated a dual movement of
territorial appropriation and exclusion, remaining at a distance from popu-
lations, including from their elites which they discredited as being refrac-
tory to change and responsible for the decadence of once glorious peoples,
in a pre-orientalist pattern.51 It is to set little store by full legislative assimi-
lation, equality for all, old-established and new Frenchmen, with respect
to the law or to employment, and also to overlook the diversity of reac-
tions towards otherness. This diversity owes much to the conditions of
settlement and even the situation of utterance.52 Franco-centrism is incon-
trovertible, but social dichotomies carried far more weight than the out-
line of an ethno-cultural distinction. Perhaps it would be more appropriate
to prefer the idea of “culture of empire”, within the meaning of a corpus
of values and ideas developed for and by imperial domination, if only
because it can be more readily declined in the plural and so serves to
understand places, moments and networks in which fluctuating cultures of
empire have crystallized.
A vast field of empirical studies and interpretations therefore opens up
if we place the Napoleonic era within a longer chronological framework,
attentive to both ruptures and continuities. This book takes on this task
collectively, asking new questions of Napoleonic imperial ambitions and
their wider echoes. It looks beyond France and Europe because the French
Empire always existed in relation to other empires, especially the British
one. And it does so with three methodological postulates in mind. First,

Napoleon’s imperial plans must be taken seriously within a geopolitical
approach that acknowledges their effects on the adversary. Even if these
projects came to naught, or could never have succeeded, they were per-
ceived as real threats and acted as defensive stimuli, pretexts in a frame-
work of fierce competition.53
Second, we focus on the circulation of people and ideas to map inter-
continental imperial connections during and after the Napoleonic empire.
These bring to the fore the question of transposed experiences and what
becomes of transplanted individuals—their successes and failures. This
brings us, finally, to ways in which representations are reworked in and
beyond the Napoleonic era. This was a period of intensified encounter
with the figure of the other and, consequently, of uncertainty as to one’s
sense of belonging, a time of flexible borders and hardened national asser-
tions, whether they made claim to Britishness, to francité, or any-
thing but.54
By zooming out both geographically and chronologically, this book
aims to grasp the Napoleonic empire and its afterlives within a resolutely
global framework. Rather than attempt to establish an exhaustive inven-
tory of places, it focuses on some better and lesser-known ones, from the
Caribbean and Algeria to India and the East Indies, to track intercon-
nected dynamics. Part I studies these at the level of imperial ambitions,
fantasies and careers, caught between past and present in an evolving con-
tinuum of empires. In their own way, the chapters by Guillemette Crouzet,
Ian Coller and Alex R. Tipei all survey unintended consequents of
Napoleon’s failure to establish a durable presence in Egypt. For Crouzet,
lingering ghosts and a continued French presence in the Middle East were
instrumental in orienting the British eastwards towards the Persian Gulf,
the Indian subcontinent, and a different kind of imperial presence to that
afforded by the East India Company. Turning north-west, Coller tracks
evolving representations of the Mamelukes from the Egyptian campaign
through the Congress of Vienna and beyond to excavate the roots of con-
temporary “islamophobia” in France and elsewhere. In Tipei’s chapter, we
stop in the Greek peninsula, where the aftershocks of Napoleon’s oriental
phantasy played into Greek nationalist identity and the war of indepen-
dence in the 1820s. Reaching further afield, Bernard Gainot, Hélène
Vencent and Giulia Delogu each considers some unexpected facets and
legacies of the Napoleonic empire. With Gainot we confront the questions
of slavery and colonialism, but at an angle, through the tortuous career of
turncoat Joseph Eschassérieux and his plan for a “free” and “philan-
thropic” colonization in Sierra Leone. The empire’s discreet liberal lean-
ings come to the fore in Delogu’s exploration of the Napoleonic policy of
free ports which pace the continental system and which, much like
Napoleonic charisma or the civil code, found enthusiastic emulators in
South America.55 With Vencent, we sail over to Madagascar and around
the globe following French hydrographers and cadets of new imperial
naval schools that maintained French political and commercial interests
overseas in the wake of Trafalgar.
Doing this kind of connected history can sometimes boil down to
drawing lines on a map. To avoid this, the chapters in Part II zoom in to
a much smaller scale of analysis, to follow global trajectories on the ground,
in specific locales and experiences. This was a time for singular paths and
careers: take, for instance, that of a Joseph Ransonnet, born in Liège in
1778 and who, like other Belgians, became French 1795. He sailed as a
midshipman to explore the Southern and Antarctic Lands, fought in the
Indian Ocean, and then again in 1814 to defend Antwerp under Carnot,
whom he eventually served as private secretary in Paris during the Hundred
Days (having lost and regained his French citizenship in May and
December 1814).56 The Napoleonic empire produced countless travelling
soldiers and sailors of the like. Jean-Marie Lafont tracks the exploits of
French and Italian officers who remained in the Indian subcontinent after
Waterloo and who rebuilt a Grande Armée for the Sikh Empire of Ranjit
Singh, the Maharaja of Punjab. The transfer of military expertise is also at
the heart of Ivan Burel’s chapter on Pierre Boyer, another Napoleonic
officer who refined violent counter-insurgency tactics from expeditions to
Egypt and Saint-Domingue to the occupation to Spain, the army of
Muhammad Ali and, finally, the bloody conquest of Algeria. Employing
foreigners, and specifically foreign seamen, is also central to Sarah Caputo’s
prosopographical investigation of the anonymous “mercenary” sailors that
the British navy continued to employ throughout the nineteenth century.
But soldiers and sailors were not the only ones to travel and “recycle” their
expertise from one empire to another. Napoleonic administrators were
just as adventurous. In their chapter, Caroline Driënhuizen and Martijn
van der Burg adopt a comparative approach to the careers of two
Napoleonic administrators in the Dutch East Indies, Godert van der
Capellen and Alexander Besier, noting their contrasting fortunes, the
importance of local events and support networks, and the long-term role
they played in forms of colonial governmentality. Nicola Todorov follows
the comparable trajectories of Pierre-Clément de Laussat and other

Napoleonic prefects who became colonial governors in Guyane and
Martinique, underscoring the shift to a more collegial form of governance
dependent on networks of sociability and the prerogatives of local elites.
With Jean-Hugo Ihl, we track the travails of another “Imperial”,57 Jean-
Joseph-Marie Schmit, who ended up establishing short-lived colonization
ventures in Kentucky and West Virginia.
When Napoleon fell from power, he did not, therefore, end the careers
of his followers; nor did he bring down the imperial edifice they had
helped him build (parts of which pre-existed both in any case). The chap-
ters in Part III examine in detail the legacies and unintended consequences
of the Napoleonic regime in Egypt and Algeria, where the end of one
empire provided for new imperial departures. David Todd explores the
lasting shadow of Napoleonic legal codification in Egypt, where the stron-
gest supporters of a continued informal empire of French law were the
British! Adopting a quasi-Tocquevillian stance, Walter Bruyère-Ostells
tracks the continuities in foreigners employed by the French army, from
the Bourbons to the Napoleon and on to the Foreign Legion, formed in
1831 and immediately tasked with a new kind of “low-cost imperialism”
in Algeria. What could have been and what came to be in North Africa is
the topic of Aurélien Lignereux’s counterfactual exploration of a planned
Napoleonic conquest that never happened but that shows, like a photo
negative, what changed in the 1830s with a turn to minority colonial rule.
Algeria would itself be exceptional within the new French colonial
empire, and while they never renounced violence to achieve their goals,
French rulers increasingly turned to forms of soft power to perpetuate
their imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century, thus departing from
the centralized militaro-administrative model provided by Napoleon.58
But the Napoleonic experience did inflect understandings of empire in a
more subtle and durable way, moving away from eighteenth-century
notions of expansion through conquest and naked force alone.59 With
Napoleon, and in spite of a black legend as virulent as it was short-lived,
the idea of empire gained in order and a certain sense of morality. Post-
Napoleonic empires sought to reconcile military might with forms of
political rationality that could also ensure stability and spread what would
come to be thought of as a civilizing order over vast and ethnically diverse
territories. And in this respect, the Napoleonic empire lived on precisely in
that which allowed parliamentary nation states such as the British consti-
tutional monarchy and the French Republic to recognize one another as
colonial empires as well.
Notes
1. Thomas Bohl, ‘Les quatre parties du monde réunies aux Tuileries’, in
Napoléon. La maison de l’Empereur, ed. Sylvain Cordier (Montréal/Paris:
Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal/Hazan, 2018) 180–181.
2. Serge Gruzinski, Les Quatre Parties du monde. Histoire d’une mondialisa-
tion (Paris: La Martinière, 2004).
3. Alain Yacou, ‘L’ère de la France en Saint-Domingue. Le gouvernement du
général Ferrand’, in Saint-Domingue espagnol et la révolution nègre d’Haïti.
Commémoration du Bicentenaire de la naissance de l’État d’Haïti
(1804–2004), ed. Alain Yacou (Paris: Karthala, 2007), 455–522.
4. Michel Zylberberg, Une si douce domination. Les milieux d’affaires fran-
çais et l’Espagne vers 1780–1808 (Paris: CHEF, 1993); Arnaud Bartolomei,
Les Marchands de Cadix et la crise de la Carrera de Indias, 1778–1828
(Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2017).
5. Alain Yacou, ‘L’expulsion des Français de Saint-Domingue réfugiés dans la
région orientale de l’île de Cuba (1808–1810)’, Caravelle. Cahiers du
monde hispanique et luso-brésilien 9 (1982) 49–64.
6. Alexander Mikaberidze, The Napoleonic Wars. A Global History (Oxford:
OUP, 2020) 469–500.
7. Nicola Todorov, La Grande Armée à la conquête de l’Angleterre. Le plan
secret de Napoléon (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2016) 51–69.
8. Ibid., 30.
9. Napoléon to vice-amiral Decrès, Minister of the Navy and the Colonies, 8
March 1811. In Correspondance générale publiée par la Fondation Napoléon
(Paris: Fayard, 2014) X, 1295–1296.
10. “One should not be surprised that between 1803 and 1805, 1807 and
1808, 1810 and 1811, Napoleon contemplated overseas expeditions at the
same time as Mediterranean ones and refrained from any concentration in
the English Channel”. Todorov, La Grande Armée à la conquête de
l’Angleterre, 68.
11. Mémoires du maréchal Marmont, duc de Raguse, de 1792 à 1841 (Paris:
Perrotin, 1857) 337; Philippe Masson and José Muracciole, Napoléon et la
Marine (Paris: J. Peyronnet et Cie, 1968) 289–316.
12. Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou, Pour une histoire des possibles:
analyses contrefactuelles et futurs non advenus (Paris, Le Seuil, 2016)
50–58. Emmanuel de Las Cases, Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, eds.
Thierry Lentz, Peter Hicks, François Houdececk & Chantal Prévot (Paris:
Perrin, 2017) 128 and 376–377. “I would have reached Constantinople
and India. I would have changed the face of the world”, he confided on 31
March 1816, in this version of the Mémorial which is closest to his actual
words, before Las Cases amplified and transfigured them.
13. Sudhir Hazareesingh, La Légende de Napoléon (Paris: Le Seuil, 2005) 67

and 71; François Ploux, De bouche à oreille. Naissance et propagation des
rumeurs dans la France du XIXe siècle (Paris: Aubier, 2003) 130–132.
14. The director general of museums to the intendant general of the emperor’s
household, letter of 16 May 1811. In Vivant Denon: Directeur des musées
sous le Consulat et l’Empire correspondance, 1802–1815, eds. Marie-Anne
Dupuy, Isabelle le Masne de Chermont & Elaine Williamson, (Paris:
Réunion des musées nationaux, 1999) letter 2092.
15. Jean-Jacques François Le Barbier, Les Quatre continents. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, https://www.photo.rmn.fr/archive/08-524373-2C6
NU0I1XTL7.html
16. While there will have been much talk of Saint Helena in the bicentary pub-
lications, it has essentially provided a backdrop—an end of the earth some
2000 km from Africa and 3500 km from Brazil for the end of a life—while
the opportunity has not really been taken to return to the status of this
island that was then part of a world system that the British fleet connected
up. In the course of his movements and the disembarkments, Napoleon,
observing the diversity of the population, had on the contrary become fully
aware of the worldwide challenges for a trade route of this stopover on the
maritime route circum Africa.
17. Patrice Gueniffey, ‘Preface’, in Waterloo. Acteurs, historiens, écrivains, ed.
Loris Chavanette (Paris: Gallimard, 2015) 10.
18. On “recycled” Napoleonic careers, see Rafe Blaufarb, Bonapartists in the
Borderlands. French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast (Tuscaloosa: The
University of Alabama Press, 2005); Emilio Ocampo, The Emperor’s Last
campaign: a Napoleonic empire in America (Tuscaloosa, The University of
Alabama Press, 2009); Patrick Puigmal, ‘Indépendance, politique et pou-
voir au Chili et en Argentine: attitudes des officiers napoléoniens dans les
armées de libération (1817–1830)’, Napoleonica. La Revue 4–1 (2009)
62–79; Walter Bruyère-Ostells, La Grande armée de la liberté (Paris:
Tallandier, 2009); Fernando Berguno Hurtado, Les Soldats de Napoléon
dans l’indépendance du Chili, 1817–1830 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010);
Jean-Claude Lorblanchès, Soldats de Napoléon aux Amériques (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2012). For two studies attentive to the affective motivations
and experiences of post-Naopleonic soldiering in the Greek War of
Independence and the colonization of Algeria, see Hervé Mazurel, Vertiges
de la guerre. Byron, les philhellènes et le mirage grec (Paris: Les Belles Lettres,
2013); and Thomas Dodman, What Nostalgia Was. War, Empire, and the
Time of a Deadly Emotion (Chicago: UCP, 2018).
19. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in question. Theory, knowledge, history
(Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 165–170.
20. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and
the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)
219–250.
21. But see the major compilations: Jean Tulard (ed.), Les Empires occidentaux
de Rome à Paris (Paris: PUF, 1997); Steven Ellis (ed.), Empires and States
in European Perspective (Pisa: Edizioni Plus, 2002); Stefan Berger and
Alexei Miller (eds.), Nationalizing Empires (Budapest: CEU Press, 2015);
Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons (eds.), Empires and Bureaucracy in
World History: from Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge:
CUP, 2016).
22. Rahul Markovits, Pierre Singaravélou and David Todd, ‘Une “franco-
mondialisation” impériale? Domination informelle et expansion coloniale’,
in D’ici et d’ailleurs. Histoires globales de la France contemporaine, ed.
Quentin Deluermoz (Paris: La Découverte, 2021) 50–51.
23. Jean-Luc Chappey, La Société des Observateurs de l’homme (1799–1804).
Des Anthropologues sous Bonaparte (Paris: Société des études robespier-
ristes, 2002).
24. Olivier Grenouilleau, ‘Part 3: Des colonies à l’empire colonial? (vers
1780–1914)’, chap. IX: “Un passage obligé?”, in Fortunes de mer, sirènes
coloniales, XVIIe-XXe siècles (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2019) 133–151.
25. Pernille Røge, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire. France in the
Americas and in Africa, c.1750–1802 (Cambridge: CUP, 2020).
26. Marcel Dorigny and Bernard Gainot (eds.), La Colonisation nouvelle (fin
XVIIIe-début XIXe siècles (Paris: SPM, 2018).
27. David Todd, A Velvet Empire. French Informal Imperialism in the
Nineteenth Century (Princeton, PUP, 2021).
28. Attributed because the idea of a grand scheme designed to form a French
empire in India was very much formulated after the event and maintained
by the Third Republic: Philippe Haudrère, Les Compagnies des Indes orien-
tales: Trois siècles de rencontre entre Orientaux et Occidentaux, 1600–1858
(Paris: Desjonquères, 2006) 204–205. It was more widely the conception
of colonies as forming an imperial unit that was alien to the administrative
monarchy, which saw in them just simple trading establishments included
in its mercantilist area: Charles Frostin, Les Révoltes blanches à Saint-
Domingue aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Rennes: PUR, 2008 [1975]); James
Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III. The East India
Company and the Crisis and Transformation of Britain’s Imperial State
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) 131–230.
29. Christopher A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian. The British Empire and the World,
1780–1830 (London & New York: Longman, 1989) 193–216.
30. Michael Broers, ‘Introduction: Napoleon, His Empire, Our Europe and
the “New Napoleonic History”’, in The Napoleonic Empire and the New
European Political Culture, eds. Michael Broers, Peter Hicks and Augustin
Guimerá (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 2
31. Michael Broers, Europe under Napoleon, 1799–1815 (London: Arnold,
1996) 182.
32. See, for example: Michael Rowe, From Reich to State. The Rhineland in the
Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: CUP, 2003); Helmut Stubbe
Da Luz, ‘“Franzosenzeit” in Norddeutschland (1803–1814). Napoleons
Hanseatische Departements’ (Bremen: Temmen, 2003); Edgardo Donati,
La Toscana nell’Impero napoleonico: l’imposizione del modello e il processo di
integrazione, 1807–1809 (Florence, Polistampa, 2008); Nicola Todorov,
L’Administration du royaume de Westphalie de 1807 à 1813. Le départe-
ment de l’Elbe (Sarrebruck: Éditions universitaires européennes, 2011);
Pierre Horn, Le Défi de l’enracinement napoléonien entre Rhin et Meuse,
1810–1814. L’opinion publique dans les départements de la Roër, de l’Ourthe,
des Forêts et de la Moselle (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017).
33. To keep to the examples referred to: Carla Nardi, Napoleone e Roma. La
politica della Consulta romana (Roma: EFR, 1989); Martijn van der Burg,
Napoleonic Governance in the Netherlands and Northwest Germany.
Conquest, Incorporation, and Integration (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2021); Xavier Rousseaux, Marie-Sylvie Dupont-Bouchat and
Claude Vael (eds.), Révolutions et justice pénale en Europe. Modèles français
et traditions nationales, 1780–1830 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999); Aurélien
Lignereux, Servir Napoléon. Policiers et gendarmes dans les départements
annexés, 1796–1814 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2012).
34. Philip G. Dwyer (ed.), Napoleon and Europe (London: Longman, 2001);
Geoffrey Ellis, The Napoleonic Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003); Michael Rowe (ed.), Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic
Europe: State Formation in an Age of Upheaval, 1800–1815 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Philip G. Dwyer and Alan Forrest (eds.),
Napoleon and his Empire. Europe, 1800–1814 (Basingstoke-New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Christine Peyrard, Francis Pomponi and
Michel Vovelle (eds.), L’Administration napoléonienne en Europe.
Adhésions et résistances (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de
Provence, 2008); Cecilia Nubol and Andreas Würgler (eds.), Ballare col
nemico? Reazioni all’espansione francese in Europa tra entusiasmo e
resistenza, 1792–1815 (Bologna-Berlin: Mulino-Duncker & Humbolt,
2010); Michael Broers, Peter Hicks and Augustin Guimerá (eds.), The
Napoleonic Empire and the New European Political Culture (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Guido Braun, Gabriele B. Clemens, Lutz
Klinkhammer, Alexander Koller (eds.), Napoelonische Expansionspolitik:
okkupation oder integration? (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2013); François
Antoine, Jean-Pierre Jessenne, Annie Jourdan, Hervé Leuwers (eds.),
L’Empire napoléonien: une expérience européenne (Paris: A. Colin, 2014);

Katherine Aaslestad and Johann Joor (eds.), Revisiting Napoleon’s
Continental System. Local, Regional and European Experiences (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Ute Planert (ed.), Napoleon’s Empire.
European Politics in Global Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016).
35. See, among others, Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008); Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s
Men: Mehmed Ali, his Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1997); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens:
Revolution and Slavery in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of
the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge MA: The
Belknap Press, 2005); and Jeremy Popkin, You are all Free: The Haitian
Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
36. Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 233–234.
37. In 1881, one can read: “The imperial government’s indifference to the
colonies and their abandonment were patent; ensconced in his ideas of
dominating the continent [Napoleon] repeated these consternating words
that have echoed on down to us: ‘Let the English grab our colonies, they
shall give them back to us thriving even more for it when peace comes’”
(Gilles-François Crestien, Causeries historiques sur l’île de la Réunion
(Paris: Challamel, 1881) 138).
38. Striking map of French imperial utopias and colonisation projects (late
eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries) in Marcel Dorigny, Atlas des pre-
mières colonisations, XVe-début XIXe siècle (Paris: Autrement, 2013) 91.
39. James E. McClellan and François Regourd, The Colonial Machine. French
Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime (Turnhout: Brepols,
2011); Paul Cheney and Loïc Charles, ‘The Colonial Machine dismantled.
Knowledge and Empire in the French Atlantic’, Past & Present 219/1
(2013) 127–163; Damien Tricoire, ‘Empire and Information: the French
Ministry of the Navy and Madagascar (1767–1819)’, French History 35/3
(2021), 330–353.
40. Laurent Brassart, ‘Improving Useful Species: A Public Policy of the
Directoire Regime and the Napoleonic Empire (1795–1815) in Europe’,
Historia agraria: Revista de agricultura e historia rural 75 (2018) 93–113.
41. Emmanuel de Las Cases, Atlas historique, généalogique chronologique et
géographique (Paris: P. Didot l’Aîné, 1802–1804 [1st edn London 1801]).
42. Las Cases, Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, Sunday 12 May 1816, 438. He
returned to the matter the following months about the accounts of the
exploration of the Scotsman Mungo Park (Upper Niger) and the German
Hornemann (from Cairo to Murzuk), going so far as to take some of the

credit through the services rendered by the army of Egypt (Ibid., Saturday
22 June 1816, 537).
43. ‘Napoléon Ier et l’exploration de l’Afrique Centrale’, Le Mouvement
Géographique 4, 24 janvier 1897. This was a journal of colonial propa-
gande published in Brussels by the Institut National de Géographie.
44. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire. Technology and European
Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century(New York-Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1981).
45. Olivier Grenouilleau, Quand les Européens découvraient l’Afrique intéri-
eure. Afrique occidentale, vers 1795–1830 (Paris: Tallandier, 2017).
46. Grenouilleau, Fortunes de mer, sirènes coloniales, 140. In Quand les
Européens découvraient l’Afrique intérieure (op. cit., 32), this historian
observed that the desire to explore the interior of Africa had not totally
vanished, though, and wanted new research to shed new light on it.
47. Sylvain de Golbéry, Fragmens d’un voyage en Afrique, fait pendant les
années 1785, 1786 et 1787, dans les Contrées de ce Continent, comprises entre
le cap Blanc de Barbarie et le cap de Palmes (Paris: Treuttel and Würtz,
1802); Sylvain de Golbéry, Considérations sur le département de la Roer,
suivies de la notice d’Aix-la-Chapelle et de Borcette (Aix-La-Chapelle:
J.-G. Beaufort, 1811).
48. Stuart Woolf, ‘French Civilization and Ethnicity in the Napoleonic
Empire’, Past and Present 124 (1989) 96–120; Stuart Woolf, Napoléon et
la conquête de l’Europe (Paris: Flammarion, 1990).
49. Michael Broers, The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy. The War
against God, 1801–1814 (London- NewYork: Routledge, 2002); Michael
Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814. Cultural Imperialism
in a European Context? (Basingstoke-New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005); Steven Englund, ‘Historiographical review. Monstre sacré: the ques-
tion of cultural imperialism and the Napoleonic Empire’, The Historical
Journal 51–1 (2008) 215–250.
50. Michael Broers, ‘Centre and Periphery in Napoleonic Italy: The Nature of
French Rule in the départements réunis, 1800–1814’, in Collaboration and
Resistance in Napoleonic Europe: State Formation in an Age of Upheaval,
1800–1815, ed. Michael Rowe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
55–73; Michael Broers, ‘A Turner thesis for Europe? The Frontier in
Napoleonic Europe’, Napoleonica. La Revue 5 (2009) 157–169. https://
doi.org/10.3917/napo.092.0157
51. Michael Broers, ‘Les Français au-delà des Alpes: le laager français en Italie
de 1796 à 1814’, in Voyager en Europe de Humboldt à Stendhal. Consciences
nationales et tentations cosmopolites, 1790–1840, eds. Nicolas Bourguinat
and Sylvain Venayre (Paris: Nouveau Monde éd., 2007) 71–94.
52. Aurélien Lignereux, Les Impériaux. Administrer et habiter l’Europe de

Napoléon (Paris: Fayard, 2019); on this debate specifically, see Aurélien
Lignereux, ‘L’empire continental napoléonien est-il un empire colonial?’,
in Colonisations. Notre histoire, eds. Pierre Singaravélou et al. (Paris: Le
Seuil, 2023) forthcoming.
53. The war against France was a stimulating threat for British national cohe-
sion: Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1992).
54. Aurélien Lignereux, ‘Vivre en vrai Français dans l’Europe napoléonienne:
identité et nationalité en contexte impérial’, in Ethno-géopolitique des
empires. De l’Empire au monde contemporain, eds. Yann Lignereux, Alain
Lessaoudi, Annick Peters-Custot and Jérôme Wilgaux (Rennes: PUR,
2021) 149–163; Frederick Cooper, ‘Postface. Francité. Le long débat’, in
Français? La nation en débat entre colonies et métropole, XVIe-XIXe siècles,
ed. Cécile Vidal (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 2014), 211–221.
55. On charisma, see David A. Bell, Men on Horseback. The Power of Charisma
in the Age of Revolution (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2020).
56. SHD dossier individuel MV CC 7 ALPHA 2088; Aurélien Lignereux,
L’Empire de la paix. De la Révolution à Napoléon: quand la France réunis-
sait l’Europe (Paris: Passés Composés, 2023).
57. Lignereux, Les Impériaux.
58. Todd, A Velvet Empire.
59. Coll., ‘L’Empire avant l’Empire. État d’une notion au XVIIIe siècle’,
Siècles. Cahiers du Centre d’histoire. “Espaces et cultures” 17 (2003).
PART I
The Napoleonic Empire, Between

Imperialisms
Joseph Eschassériaux: From New
Colonisation to Imperial Diplomacy—
Hypotheses as to a Reconversion
(1797–1803)
Bernard Gainot
Napoleonic studies have focused for too long on Napoléon Bonaparte

himself. The stages in his career and then his rule lend structure to the
topics. Legitimate questions have, however, been raised about cut-off
points like 18 Brumaire. On colonial matters, there is little doubt that
Article 91 of the Constitution of the Year VII, governing the regime of the
colonies under special laws, was a major turning point. But it should not
be forgotten that this provision sealed a development underway since the
abolition of slavery in February 1794. The horizon of possibilities
remained open at least until 1802, and debates at the beginning of the
consulate extended the numerous discussions under the Directory.
Debates about the future of the colonies in the Council of Five Hundred
and the Council of Ancients were intense and meaningful. In part, it was
B. Gainot (*)
IHMC—Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France
e-mail: bgainot@orange.fr
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

Switzerland AG 2023
T. Dodman, A. Lignereux (eds.), From the Napoleonic Empire to the
Age of Empire, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15996-1_2
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(Download PDF) From The Napoleonic Empire To The Age of Empire Empire After The Emperor Thomas Dodman Full Chapter PDF

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From the Napoleonic Empire to the Age

of Empire: Empire after the Emperor

The Dalek Empire Sourcebook Bbc

The Allure of Empire Chris Suh

Empire of Sin: Empire Series Book 2 Kent

Islands and the British Empire in the Age of Sail

Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of Justinian

Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire Sara H Lindheim

The Muslim Problem: From the British Empire to

From slaves to prisoners of war: the Ottoman Empire,

From the Napoleonic Empire

From the Napoleonic

ISSN 2634-6699 ISSN 2634-6702 (electronic)

Cover pattern: Signal Photos / Alamy Stock Photo

New York, NY Thomas Dodman

Part I The Napoleonic Empire, Between Imperialisms 25

Part II Individual Trajectories and Imperial Conversions 145

From New Départements to the New World: The Colonial

Part III New Beginnings Overseas 271

Walter Bruyère-Ostells is Professor of Contemporary History at Sciences

under contract. Her doctoral work won the University of Cambridge

Caroline Drieënhuizen is Assistant Professor of Cultural History at the

quête de l’Angleterre. Le plan secret de Napoléon (2016), and “Napoleon’s

Introduction: Opening up the Napoleonic Empire

Napoleon of Arabia? Piracy in the Persian Gulf, the French

murals from the Negaristan Palace outside Tehran made in

The Jacobin and the Mameluke: Islam, Race and Political

French Colonial Governors in the First Half of the Nineteenth

From New Départements to the New World: The Colonial

“Contriving to Pick Up Some Sailors”: The Royal Navy

Indian Horizons: Four Officers of the Empire in the Sikh

Napoleon of Arabia? Piracy in the Persian Gulf, the French

Tracing the Colonial Careers of Two Former Napoleonic

“Contriving to Pick Up Some Sailors”: The Royal Navy

Thomas Dodman and Aurélien Lignereux

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Figs. 1–4 1. François Dubois, from the drawing by Jacques-Louis de La

The existing historiography has tended to ignore these schemes, or at

outward appearance, these allegories of the continents capture a double

Finding a New Historiographical Frame for a New

on the South Atlantic island of Saint Helena?16 Merely linking up areas is

the process of globalization since the eighteenth century to the extent of

Setting Sail on the Napoleonic Empire:

and institutional ones (consulta romana, prefectoral administration, legal

and adventuresome excursions but an actual military expedition”, accom-

whether this shift in inquisitiveness from far-off lands to closer quarters

one. And it does so with three methodological postulates in mind. First,

the comparable trajectories of Pierre-Clément de Laussat and other

13. Sudhir Hazareesingh, La Légende de Napoléon (Paris: Le Seuil, 2005) 67

L’Empire napoléonien: une expérience ­européenne (Paris: A. Colin, 2014);

Hornemann (from Cairo to Murzuk), going so far as to take some of the

52. Aurélien Lignereux, Les Impériaux. Administrer et habiter l’Europe de

The Napoleonic Empire, Between

Napoleonic studies have focused for too long on Napoléon Bonaparte

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

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New York, NY Thomas Dodman

Part I The Napoleonic Empire, Between Imperialisms 25

Part II Individual Trajectories and Imperial Conversions 145

From New Départements to the New World: The Colonial

Part III New Beginnings Overseas 271

L’Empire napoléonien: une expérience européenne (Paris: A. Colin, 2014);