Mikaberidze describes how, as a child in Tbilisi, he chanced upon a Russian biography of Napoleon, thus beginning his fascination with the military ruler. As his studies deepened, he understood better the cynicism, cruelty, and vanity that qualified Napoleon’s brilliance, military genius, and vision. A child of the Enlightenment in his passion for ‘rational’ knowledge and his disdain for unearned privilege, the emperor was also comfortable with flattery and nepotism. Still, Mikaberidze admits that he likes to imagine the better world that would have ensued had Napoleon triumphed after all.

The power and promise (or threat) of the Napoleonic project had its origins in the French Revolution, which had created the wave of egalitarian patriotism on which this son of minor Corsican nobles rode to power. For Mikaberidze, however, it is the wars that erupted in 1792 and engulfed Europe and elsewhere until 1815 that are more important than revolutionary upheaval. He regrets that ‘the tremors that spread from France starting in 1789 tend to overshadow the fact that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had truly global repercussions’. He is convinced that the wars that bear the emperor’s name were a great turning point in global rather than European history. This is the simple, compelling assertion at the core of the book. Ultimately, he concludes, the wars ‘were perhaps the most powerful agents of social change between the Reformation and World War I’.

Not only does this slight the great revolutionary and ideological upheavals that generated the wars themselves, but Mikaberidze in fact has little to say about social change. Detailed description of military and territorial conflict is his forte.A stronger argument would be that it was the revolutionary agenda of egalitarian reform, centralising bureaucracy, and the transformation of subjects into citizens that underpinned the nationalism and military conflict that shattered the cosmopolitan dreams of 1789. A new ‘reactionary’ nationalism, drawing on traditions of throne and religion, also fuelled armed resistance to revolutionary change in the first ‘total war’ after 1792, anticipating the scale of World War I but without the industrial firepower.  

When the wreckage of the Napoleonic empire was cleared at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the way was open for Britain’s hegemony in India and South Africa. The Russian empire also expanded in Finland and Alaska and, at the expense of Iran and the Ottoman Empire, in the Balkans and Caucasus. Napoleon’s creation of the Confederation of the Rhine from thirty-six small states in 1806 anticipated the unification of Germany in 1871. The pitiful sale of Louisiana from France to the United States for $15 million in 1803 accelerated the sweeping expansion westwards of the new republic.

Imperial conflict and slave rebellion in the Caribbean had resulted in the abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1794 and, after Napoleon’s failed invasion, the triumph of the first postcolonial black nation of Haiti in 1804. The costs of war would expose the incapacity of Spain and Portugal to control their vast colonial possessions in Central and South America. By 1830, their empires had disintegrated into independent nations. Even China, Japan, and Indonesia felt the reverberations.  

Despite Mikaberidze’s convincing insistence that understanding the significance of the Napoleonic Wars requires a genuinely global perspective, the Great South Land receives oddly perfunctory treatment. The famous expedition of Nicolas Baudin in 1801–3, the focus of fine scholarship by Jean Fornasiero, John West-Sooby, Edward Duyker, Nicole Starbuck, and others is brushed over in a brief paragraph. In contrast, there are scores of pages devoted to the history of Mikaberidze’s native Georgia, the small Caucasian nation that did not in fact exist as a separate state at the time.

This focus on the tortured history of Mikaberidze’s homeland points to one of the main strengths of the book: the attention paid to the imperial conflicts between the Ottoman and Russian Empires fought out in the Caucasus and in which Napoleon became embroiled. Mikaberidze’s great achievement is to convince by the sheer weight of his narrative that the wars were a global trauma with profound repercussions, not least in the tectonic shifts in imperial claims in eastern Europe between Ottomans, Russians, French, and Habsburgs.

Our comprehension is aided by twenty-nine maps and thirty illustrations. This is a compendium rather than a work of literature in style and scale, but despite its heft Mikaberidze still regrets that he had to be ‘highly selective’ in its contents. No doubt he could have written much more about each of the more than 130 battles he references, but the real selectivity is his concentration on conventional military history. Not for him the attention to the social and cultural impact of imperialism or the popular resistance to French imperium evoked, for example, in Philip Dwyer’s three-volume biography of Napoleon (2007–19).

Despite the book’s length and erudition, the bloody encounters of Napoleon’s troops and administrators with entrenched, diverse religious cultures – Christian, Islamic, and Jewish – barely rate a mention. The rage and impact of slave rebellions fare marginally better. We learn little of the abolition of feudalism – the French Revolution’s most radical social change – and nothing at all of the experience of women. When Mikaberidze turns to the human cost of the wars – about four million deaths in a European population of 150 million, he estimates – we are given cold and somewhat contradictory statistics. Nothing can compete with battles.