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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.

Much like the first book, this is a solid but unspectacular Men-At-Arms volume.

The Angus McBride art is better this time, with one two-page spread battle scene (shown in part on the cover). There’s a couple where the backgrounds aren’t detailed, but Plate A depicts (in not a lot of detail) a group on one of the smaller ships of the 1300s in the North Sea, which is a plus.

Again, most of the photos are of period illustrations and carvings rather than actual artifacts. But there are some, and they tend to be varied and useful, including a light canon taken from a Danish shipwreck. There’s also several photographs of period fortifications, since more of them were made in stone in this period, and have thus survived.

The chronology section is very extensive and runs over four pages (all with illos…). Certainly, this is an excellent first stop for finding out what was happening in Scandinavia in the period, and covers the outlines of the failing settlements in Greenland.

The opening section deals with the politics of the region, notably the Union of Kalmar, and Scandinavia breaking into western Denmark/Norway, and eastern Sweden/Finland in the Fifteenth Century. The rest of the text naturally deals with the usual Osprey focus on military equipment and organization. It’s well done, but there’s not necessarily any surprises here; by this point Scandinavia was more integrated with the rest of Europe, so technology and fashions are no longer lagging so far behind. On the other hand, interior roads were still few and underdeveloped, so the control of blocking positions was still important. At the same time militia was becoming more important, and later rebellions razed many wooden fortifications, prompting their replacement with stone castles in areas with a stronger economy.

Elting’s history of the Grand Armee of Napoleonic France is justly well regarded. It’s a massive tome that dives into just about every aspect of one of the most successful armies of military history. The main problem is that it isn’t really a history. The beginning talks about the French Royal Army before the Revolution and what got carried forward, the end talks about what came afterward, but the rest is a muddle, as far as chronology goes, going back and forth on whims over a span of well over a decade in which things changed drastically.

This is of course so various topics can be examined in quite a lot of depth, and all the things that go into an organization as complex as a large field army can be looked at. Even within a subject, this discussion free-flowing and by subtopic, but the book is wide ranging and thorough enough that you could start with the easy mechanical parts of the Grand Armee at any point in time, and use this book to build outwards and get a sense of all the things (logistics, supply, replacements and reserves, etc) that are a part of it.

An interesting point about the book is that Elting is American, and makes no bones about it. At one point in his description of the Revolution he pauses and says, ‘okay, here’s what this is all about, because there’s no parallel to these events in American political history.’ He makes a number other references to his background, but that is by far the most germane, though there’s some good ones comparing his first-hand experience of military matters to Napoleon’s campaigns.

Overall, the book lives up to its good reputation, and is worth a read for anyone interested in Napoleonic military history. The wide variety of subjects handled means that any non-specialist will get something new out of it, and possibly a good number of specialists, which is a pretty good feat for a general market work.

The bad news is that the Da Capo Kindle version is in desperate need of post-OCR cleanup. Like with many such, it starts okay, but slowly goes downhill the further through the book you get. In this case, much of the book has one or more noticeable errors per page, which is one of the worst rates of errors I’ve seen. Obviously the cleanup effort was especially perfunctory in this case, which is a real shame in a book this important.

I picked up this book for cheap some time ago, and I’m quite happy to have finally gotten to it. This is definitely on the “layman’s” side of military history, but he does a very good job with it.

The background and aftermath make up fairly significant portions of the book, and serve the purpose well. Especially nice is the chapter where he goes into the construction and outfitting of HMS Vanguard (Nelson’s flagship at the Nile). This lets him talk about ship designs of the period, the “74”s (which the Vanguard was), and what went into outfitting a complete ship at the time. Its mostly things I’ve seen elsewhere, but it’s well-presented here, and a worthy diversion.

The central part of the book of course is about Nelson’s chase back-and-forth across the Mediterranean, reconstructing not only the lines across the map that the French and British fleets took, but the missed opportunities, the gaps in information that crippled Nelson’s initial attempts to find the French fleet before it got to Egypt.

One of Lavery’s main ideas is that the Battle of the Nile was the central hinge of the the wars of the period, and was more important than Trafalgar, which does have better heroic trappings. He makes a good case for this, but not an especially great case, and much of the extended aftermath portion where he tries to drive this idea home drags a bit. The immediate aftermath, with the victorious British fleet still greatly damaged and working its way back to friendly bases to spread the news is however, still very interesting, and a part you don’t get to see as often.