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Bennett’s book on Trafalgar is fairly typical of such books. As a popular history book, it wisely starts with a couple chapters of background, including how naval combat worked in the Age of Sail, and after that he moves on to more direct backgroud, with one chapter dedicated to discussing the personalities and careers of the various commanding officers involved.

Bennett occasionally takes time out to present important dispatches; for instance, between chapters 6 and 7 he inserts Nelson’s (abridged) memorandum to his fleet as they crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of Villeneuve, and then gives an important paragraph of Villeneuve’s instructions as a comparison. Near the end, he gives Collingwood’s two main dispatches after the Battle of Trafalgar. I found the latter to be bit much, but it is certainly good to have them available in the book, which also quotes from a variety of sources throughout the main text.

For anyone familiar with the battle, all the main elements you expect are here, and told quite lucidly. This isn’t a book to discover new insights with, but that isn’t what’s needed for the intended audience. If you only know the highlights of the battle (spoiler: Nelson dies), this is a good telling of the entire battle. I would recommend Alan Shom’s Trafalgar: Countdown to Battle instead of this book, as it is more comprehensive than this, and Bennett doesn’t gain anything with his slightly tighter focus, though this is a shorter read.

My version of this book is no longer available (dead ASIN), but there is still a Kindle version with the same cover (and I believe, publisher) currently available. Hopefully, it’s a cleaned up copy of my version, which is already in fairly good shape, though there are some notable OCR goofs (one nonsense sentence becomes clearer if you substitute “15” for “is”, and a ‘go-gun’ ship is… startling). If the current version got another pass through edit, it should be in good shape.

From the Fifteenth through Eighteenth Centuries, Europe went through a fairly profound cultural transformation, beginning with the Renaissance, and ending with the Enlightenment. The philosophies developed during all of this were powerful, and came at the same time as the physical horizons broadened, with the discovery of the New World and new routes to Asia. All of this helped develop government and military systems capable of defeating armies anywhere else in the world (largely by practicing on each other in wars kicked off by the same process).

de Bellaigue starts his book with one of the most dramatic of these encounters, when Napoleon comes to Egypt and defeats the existing Moslem armies with barely any trouble. Operating far from his base in a siege is a big problem, and governing Egypt is more of a problem, but the French army wasn’t going to be defeated in the field. This becomes the first point where the Moslem world becomes aware that something has certainly happened in Europe, and gets directly exposed to the latest philosophical inventions of a place that had for so long so little to say.

This book is not the story of a home-grown Islamic equivalent to the European Enlightenment. This is the story of a religion having to grapple with a very dynamic set of ideas being imposed on what had been a relatively static society. European society had a hard enough time with this itself with more than three centuries to work through ideas that had stared (ostensibly) as a rediscovery of its own past. In 1798, Egypt got a sudden education in the end result of all this.

The first half of the book focuses on three of the major centers of the Islamic world, showing how each one dealt with these new ideas in turn. Starting with Egypt, then Istanbul, and then Tehran. The second half traces through the next century in a more unified approach, as people everywhere talked to each other about this, reinforcing the spread of ideas, debating about them, demanding progress, demanding morality. For, as with anything else, all actions have a reaction. In all of this, de Bellaigue discusses the people behind it all. The people who listened to Napoleon’s savants, the ones who studied abroad, the ones who published journals and newspapers, the ones who wanted to bring this to Islam, the ones who grew disillusioned. This book is full of threads for further exploration.

In some ways, the book feels a little disappointing because it is by its nature an unfinished story. It would seem the Islamic world has managed to find a new stability with distinctly authoritarian governments that practice many of repressive measures that the Enlightenment argues against. This reaction is largely due to European meddling that was allowed in because various leaders wanted all the things that had come along with the Enlightenment, guns, airplanes, and all the forms of power in the modern world. As I write this, there are massive demonstrations across Iran that trace back to similar protests touched on in this book. The waters run deep, but they aren’t very still.

Alan Schom’s book is supposedly as much on the campaigns leading up to the famous battle as on the battle itself (thus the subtitle). And it generally succeeds at that. Better, it presents a lot of the French side of what was happening, and takes a real look at Napoleon’s plans to invade England.

Since that never got attempted, there have been doubts about how serious Napoleon was about the attempt, starting with some of his own propaganda. However, Schom lays out his reasons for treating it as very much a real and pressing project of his, and traces it through way too many changes and contradictory orders. More interesting to me, is his descriptions of the naval flotilla built to support the invasion.

This is Schom’s main reason for discounting any claims that the invasion was in the end a feint. Way too much effort, materials, and manpower were spent on all the little craft that were to protect and support the transports for a mere distraction. And they were, in a word, useless. Even the largest of the three classes was not really rated for service in the rough seas of the Atlantic, the cannons they mounted were too small to be any use against regular military ships, and those same cannons dangerously overloaded the vessels.

The British efforts to blockade the French fleet in ports gets more attention elsewhere, but the presentation here is good, and concentrates a bit more on William Cornwallis’ (brother of the more famous Charles Cornwallis of Yorktown fame) command of the Channel Fleet. I do think this side could have been presented a bit better, with more of a look at the administration of the naval effort, and how the various demands for ships in different posts were met over time. A true detailed look would be too much for a more popular book such as this, but keeping an eye on policy development would have been a good addition.

Overall, the book does it’s job quite well, and my main actual complaint is that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of all the changes in French plans over time despite Schom paying attention to that aspect. Of course, those changes were numerous and frequent enough that I doubt anyone at the time could really keep track of it all.