Britain Against Napoleon

The Organization of Victory, 1793-1815

Roger Knight

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Paperback

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English

Penguin
27 August 2014

History; British & Irish history; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900; Napoleonic Wars

Britain Against Napoleon is the first book to explain how the British state successfully organised itself to overcome Napoleon - and how very close it came to defeat.

For more than twenty years after 1793, the French army was supreme in continental Europe. How was it that despite multiple changes of government and the assassination of a Prime Minister, Britain survived and eventually won a generation-long war against a regime which at its peak in 1807 commanded many times the resources and manpower?

This book looks beyond the familiar exploits (and bravery) of the army and navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It shows the degree to which, because of the magnitude and intensity of hostilities, the capacities of the whole British population were involved: industrialists, farmers, shipbuilders, gunsmiths and gunpowder manufacturers.

The intelligence war was also central; but no participants were more important, Knight argues, than the bankers and international traders of the City of London, without whom the armies of Britain's allies could not have taken the field.

Britain Against Napoleon: The Organisation of Victory, 1793-1815 by Roger Knight at Abbey's Bookshop 131 York Street, Sydney

By: Roger Knight
Imprint: Penguin
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm, Spine: 31mm
Weight: 525g
ISBN: 9780141038940
ISBN 10: 0141038942
Pages: 720
Publication Date: 27 August 2014
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Roger Knight was Deputy Director of the National Maritime Museum until 2000, and now teaches at the Greenwich Maritime Institute at the University of Greenwich. In 2005 he published, with Allen Lane/Penguin, The Pursuit of Victory: the life and achievement of Horatio Nelson, which won the Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military History, the Mountbatten Award and the Anderson Medal of the Society for Nautical Research. The present book is a culmination of his life-long interest in the workings of the late eighteenth-century British state.

Reviews for Britain Against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory, 1793-1815

A wonderfully disorienting read ... for [Knight] the real heroes of the struggle against Napoleon are not Wellington or Nelson or Collingwood or Cochrane but the clerks and administrators and 'silent men of business' who put Britain's armies in the field and kept her ships at sea and her allies in funds and ultimately won the war ... there is scarcely a wasted sentence here, not a duff page, not a chapter ... that does not bring you very close to the realities of a total war -- David Crane Spectator