First mentioned in 1194, Bayreuth became the centre of the rule of the Margraves of Andechs-Merania. The city reached its Baroque heyday in the mid-eighteenth century under the regency of Margraves Friedrich and Wilhelmine, a sister of Friedrich II of Prussia (‘the Great’). After the loss of the margravial residence in 1769 and as a result of the Napoleonic Empire, the city lost its former importance and passes from Prussian to Bavarian rule. The poet Jean Paul (actually Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) lived in Bayreuth from 1804 until his death in 1825. With Richard Wagner’s move to Bayreuth in 1872, the construction of the Festspielhaus, and the founding of the Bayreuth Festival in 1876, the city in the Franconian province becomes the epitome of German culture with international significance and impact – but also a symbol of the ideological claim to Wagner by National Socialism and the Wagnerian Adolf Hitler.

Like all revolutionary processes, those that led to Latin American independence were highly volatile and experimental in nature. Often accompanied by extreme violence, even open warfare, the formation of the new Latin American states in the early nineteenth century required imagining new states, institutions, and laws. The need, often urgency, to transform colonial domains into various independent units frequently coincided with the desire to end (or at least modernize) the Ancien régime. Yet the wish to supersede the past did not guarantee rupture. Instead, it initiated a period of questioning more often than answering, of experimenting more often than finding solutions. After describing the context in which the independence took place, this chapter surveys some of the questions that had to be answered, mostly by identifying debates that required settling and the difficulties entailed in achieving this goal. It examines who had the power to declare independence, how to identify the territories that would become new polities, how the national territory and citizenship were defined, how new republican structures should be formed, and elections conducted, and the legal changes all these developments entailed.

Alexander continues to be a subject of military as well as historical or cultural interest. In modern times, he began as the greatest of Great Captains, then became the inventor of modern mobile warfare, the model for romantic military genius, and, in recent decades, the unlikely precedent for leaders as different as Hitler and Mao Tse Tung. The writers promoting him include both Clausewitz and the contemporary Israeli writer, Martin Van Creveld; his detractors include Frederick the Great of Prussia and the most influential modern British military writer, B. H. Liddell-Hart. Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Montesquieu are among the civilians who join military men in giving opinions of Alexander as both a strategist and a fighter of battles. This chapter begins, however, with Julian, whose dialogue, Caesares, is the first extended comparison of great generals in the Western literary tradition. From there it moves to Machiavelli and thence to Italian as well as French writers, before going on to recent literature dominated by writers in German and English. The chapter ends with speculation as to why Alexander remains an authoritative yet iconoclastic figure in military history.

In both France and the United States, the ascendance in the late 1780s and early 1790s of a version of constitutional popular sovereignty oriented around disembodied representation laid the foundation for the abrupt invention of an alternative, absolutist understanding of “the people’s” authority in 1792-1793. Known as democracy, that absolutist conception simultaneously energized and destabilized each polity by demanding embodied, iconic formulations of “the people.” The resultant political muddle in the second half of the 1790s partially obscured institutional innovations critical to the turn-of-the-century reconciliation of disembodied representation and democratic absolutism. With Napoleon’s rise to power and the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency, democratic absolutism flourished. The analogous relationship between developments in France and the United States in the 1790s and early nineteenth century stemmed in part from the diffusionary dynamics of the French Revolution. Diffusionary forces would not have registered so powerfully, however, if residents of the United States had not been prepared for them by their prior investment in monarchy. Developments in the early American republic tracked closely to successive French revolutionary phases because absolutist principles, habits, and hopes continued to animate large numbers of people long after the adoption of the Constitution.

Chapter 4 studies the Napoleonic Wars reparations. France lost the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, ending decades of revolution and counter-revolution. After Napoleons final defeat at Waterloo, France was forced to pay just under 2 billion francs in reparations, around a quarter of output in 1815, over the following five years. With French government revenues of around 700 million francs in 1816, the transfer represented almost three times the annual budget. That was a big transfer, even more so as France faced significant credit constraints because earlier defaults prevented it from tapping sovereign debt markets. Not until 1817 did France manage to borrow large amounts of money, paying back reparations with two years to spare. How did the country manage to pay the large reparations transfer? I argue that France benefited economically from a positive shock to its terms of trade as the war wound down. The French peacetime economy was structurally different in terms of its imports and exports, which had changed during many years of war and blockades.

The manner in which Die Zauberflöte established itself as a cultural icon in late-eighteenth-century German society is remarkable. It permeated daily life in countless ways: fashion, pet naming, board games, risqué party entertainments, mechanical toys, children’s playlets, and whistling birds. While this represents the escapism of the opera’s fairy-tale plot, darker strands are woven into the fabric of its early reception. It swept across Europe during a period of bloody revolutionary war, and all sides made use of it in their political propaganda. Papageno was ensconced at the heart of the Prussian military establishment when one of his tunes was added to the carillon of the Potsdam Garnisonkirche. At the same time, his music, under the banner of freedom, entered the republican song repertoire. After Napoleon’s cataclysmic defeat near Leipzig in 1814, a satirist was quick to wish him a derisory farewell as he sailed back across the Rhine. What better choice than the language of the opera: auf wiedersehen!

This chapter begins with the arrival of Ibadi student Saʿīd al-Bārūnī in Cairo in 1798, just before the invasion of the French army under Napoleon. It follows the life of Saʿīd in Cairo during the tumultuous decades of the early nineteenth century, including the departure of the French and the rise to power of the Ottoman governor Muḥammad ʿAlī. Following his return to the Maghrib, the chapter continues the story of the Agency by turning to a private letter written to Saʿīd by one of his students, Muḥammad al-Bārūnī, who was studying at the Agency in the 1850s. The books and letters connected to the Agency in this period reveal much about the world of Cairene Ibadis in the mid-nineteenth century, including the state of education at al-Azhar, the changing demographics of the Ibadi community, and signs of a growing relationship between the Ibadi community of the Indian Ocean and that of northern Africa.

The chapter looks at the long-term structural importance associated with Napoleon’s win in Austerlitz and the ensuing formal end of the Holy Roman Empire. It defines modes of transformation but rather as evolutionary dynamics that pave the way for historical trajectories in which new social forms – such as European global empires or even the notion of global empire – borrow from previous forms, such as the way of organizing political authority in the Holy Roman Empire. In doing so, it identifies two pertinent modes of historicity, namely the presence of several temporal layers in social and political phenomena (‘complex temporalities’), as well as an evolutionary account of non-linear change. In this sense, the chapter is not only about the presence of a specific past in the contemporary structures of the system of world politics, but also to provide a methodological input into contemporary debates about global historical sociology.

Chapter 8 broaches our understanding of communication systems and their intimacy with strategic practice. Beginning with the general (strategist) Napoleon’s forms of communication–technological warfare and the subsequent reliance on innovation in communication devices, especially those of coding and decoding communications in military conflicts, we consider the workings and implications of electronic, digital computing systems for strategy. Via Alan Turing’s Imitation Game, we introduce the debate on the nature of intelligence, consciousness and conscience (self-awareness), setting the scene for an elaboration on the development from cybernetics to contemporary machine-learning algorithms in the subsequent chapter.

Occurring at the mid-point in Napoleon’s imperial career, the Franco-Austrian War of 1809, or the War of the Fifth Coalition, highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of the French emperor and his army as well as the beginnings of improvements among their foes. Austria, driven by a desire to avenge previous defeats and hoping to take advantage of Napoleon’s distraction in Spain, opened hostilities by invading Napoleon’s ally Bavaria, but the French emperor hastened to the theater of war, quickly seized the initiative and entered Vienna only one month after departing Paris. The ensuing conflict was fought across a vast geographic canvas. Combat in the principal theater, the Danube valley, featured Napoleon’s first undeniable repulse at Aspern-Essling (21–22 May), the second largest battle of the entire epoch at Wagram (5–6 July) and a surprisingly sudden armistice at Znaim six days later, but the war also encompassed strategically important actions in subsidiary theaters such as Italy, Poland, Hungary, Germany and Holland. It led to Austrian accommodation with France, Napoleon’s marriage to a Habsburg archduchess and eventually to a Franco-Austrian alliance, but it also deepened Franco-Russian suspicions and thus helped set the stage for war in 1812

Napoleon’s decision to invade Russia in the summer of 1812 was his last and greatest effort to secure the French imperium in continental Europe. It resulted in war on a colossal scale and produced results diametrically opposite to those the French emperor wished to attain. This six-month long campaign furnished numerous episodes of triumph and hardship, transcendent courage and wanton depravity, but it offered many military lessons as well. In the grandeur of its conception, its execution, and its abysmal end, this war had no analogy until the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. The campaign had a profound impact on political situation in Europe. Its direct result was the general uprising against Napoleon in northern Germany and the complete overthrow within one year of the French imperium in Central Europe.

The chapter discusses the events of the War of the Third Coalition that climaxed on the field of Austerlitz in one of the most famous battles in military history. The 1805 Campaign was the first one Napoleon fought as the emperor and it consolidated his martial reputation: a classic example of the general’s logistical and operational brilliance that allowed him to outmarch and outfight his enemy in just three months after the start of the war. Beginning with the bold and rapid advance of the French Army from the Rhine to the Danube, the chapter examines Napoleon’s envelopment of the Austrian army at Ulm, the manoeuvres to Austerlitz and the counter-attack that resulted in the decisive defeat for the Austro-Russian Army.

In 1815 Napoleon made a last desperate attempt to persuade Europe to accept him rather than the Bourbons as ruler of France. When Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia agreed to invade France to remove him he chose the last possible moment to attack the British and Prussians in Belgium, hoping to separate them and capture Brussels without fighting or defeat each in turn. He achieved sufficient surprise to come close to success on 16 June, but his plans required a smoother-running machine than his army provided: poor staff-work, distrust, weary cynicism and some treachery undermined French efforts and the encounters at Quatre Bras and Ligny ended in a draw and a narrow victory. On 17 June Napoleon failed to crush Wellington before the weather intervened to ruin his pursuit. Wellington withdrew his army skilfully to a chosen position where Blücher promised to join him. Napoleon underestimated the dogged determination of his enemies to support each other and the Prussians outmarched Grouchy to arrive in time to transform Wellington’s well-organised, stubborn and brave defence at Waterloo into a crushing victory. After this catastrophic defeat Napoleon had again to abdicate.

The maritime aspects of the wars of the French Revolution and Empire were asymmetric, between a British seapower empire of oceanic connectivity and a French dominated European system that focussed on territorial control and economic restriction. The inclusive British political system privileged naval strength, the defence of trade, and sea control. This position was based on battle fleet dominance, which remained undefeated across two decades. British identity became ever more closely linked to naval success as Nelson, the Nile and Trafalgar added new names to national culture. This sustained long-term funding for major infrastructure projects, new ships, and high levels of skilled manpower. Superior ships and men enabled the Royal Navy to defeat naval rivals, and attacks on commercial shipping by national warships and privateers. Naval dominance sustained a hard-line economic war that broke the Russian economy, and seriously damaged that of France, while the City of London and the British economy more generally continued to support the national war effort through extensive capital loans, and private measures, such as those of Lloyds Patriotic Fund. Seapower could not defeat Napoleon, it supported a grand alliance that would achieve that aim. By 1815 Britain had become a global seapower empire of unrivalled wealth and influence.

St. Helena’s theatrical culture after 1770 reflects South Atlantic links with slavery, revolution and theater, soon to be reanimated by the arrival and residence of defeated emperor Napoleon in 1815. A transhemispheric crossroads where the British worlds of the north and south, east and west literally converged, the island’s theatrical and social life provides a finale to this study’s examination of theater and performance in the British empire. Three specific performances – one in Richmond, London, of St. Helena, or the Isle of Love (1776), and two in St. Helena, The Revenge in 1817 (to which Napoleon was invited) and Inkle and Yarcio in 1822, after the island-wide agreement ot abolish slavery, demonstrated the systemic nature of empire, the fictions of race that it perpetrated and the performativies of human difference that undermined its structures. The Saints were transucltural players in a wider, violent and acquistitive imperial drama, performers of a hybrid and syncretic Englishness that acknowledged its diverse sources.

Between 1797 and 1815, Britain and France each developed modern central banks, albeit in very different forms. The Bank of England’s powers expanded enormously after the suspension of gold convertibility in 1797, and it also developed a vast system of investigation and prosecution of forgery and counterfeiting, whose records form the evidentiary core of the chapter. The Bank used its powers to protect itself, but also to aid in broader English governance, helping to produce a modern money-using financial public. As with the aftermath of 1720, the Bank’s powers produced widespread political condemnation, especially accusations of illegitimate elite conspiracy. In France, the brief chaos of free banking was replaced by the centralized Bank of France, mostly under government control and with limited policy discretion. In both cases, impunity was institutionalized as a function of governance, delegated to a private bank with political obligations. These new institutions, exercising new forms of monetary policy, would reconstitute the operation of international financial system after 1815.

Napoleon took power in 1799, promising to end the instabilities of the previous decade. To some degree, he succeeded. The ancien régime indirect tax of l’octroi, abolished in 1790 and then reintroduced in 1798, was rapidly extended after 1799 and smoothed the introduction of new, national indirect taxes from 1804 onwards. To compensate for the limitations of public credit, which only recovered slowly from the collapse of the 1790s, the Napoleonic regime heavily plundered occupied territories. This, though, revealed the limitations of Napoleon’s renovation of the fiscal-military state. As David Bell has argued, the period 1792–1815 was characterised by ‘total war’; the escalating costs of men and material eventually overstretched the Napoleonic state, destroying its legitimacy and precipitating its collapse in 1813–14. Nevertheless, despite their failure to produce a sustainable fiscal-military state, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes established the taxes that formed the basis for the post-revolutionary fiscal system.