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Napoleon's Atlantic: The Impact of Napoleonic Empire in the Atlantic World. Christophe Belaubre, Jordana Dym & John Savage (eds.). Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2010. xvi + 332 pp. (Cloth euro 99.00)
Napoleon's Atlantic is the English translation of the proceedings of a symposium entitled "l'Atlantique napoléonien" organized at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail in 2007, which were first published in French in 2009. As the French title-Napoléon et les Amériques: Histoire atlantique et empire napoléonien-more accurately conveys, the book's scope is not fully Atlantic: apart from a mention of the Egyptian campaign in the introduction, Africa is nowhere, and Europe does not occupy center stage. Instead, the collected essays focus on the impact of the Napoleonic Empire on the Americas, already a fully legitimate and very ambitious project.
Napoleonic studies in France have been largely limited to the impact of the Napoleonic Empire in Europe. In the same way, historians of Latin American independence movements who are increasingly exploring the connections between the various revolutions in the Atlantic world have paid little attention in recent times to the specific influence exercised by the Napoleonic regime. Thus, the book aims at changing both the spatial and the chronological framework of Napoleonic studies and of Atlantic history in the era of revolutions. It is also an attempt at connecting the two fields.
The book's title is also misleading in another way, since the collection of fourteen essays does not...