What was the global impact of the Napoleonic Wars?
Although the opposing sides were European, their status as imperial powers meant the Napoleonic Wars played out in many different corners of the world. Michael Rapport explores the conflict’s surprising global impact.
The Napoleonic Wars were a global conflict that in some ways anticipated the world wars of the 20th century, while still being rooted in the imperial battles of the 18th.
To a great extent, they were a classic clash of early modern empires. Although Europe witnessed the bloodiest of the carnage, the involvement of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal – all maritime and imperial powers – ensured that fighting would range across the globe.
The European dimensions of the war, whether on the continent itself or overseas, have of course received ample attention from historians, but more genuinely global approaches have begun to explore how these struggles were entangled with the wider environment and context of the global regions concerned.
So Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 interlocked with the politics and culture of the Middle East and the Ottoman empire. When the Franco-British rivalry in India ignited, the conflict was shaped by the relative strengths, weaknesses and aims of the Indian powers involved.
The Latin American wars of independence, which began in 1810 and were triggered by the Napoleonic Wars, were primarily shaped by local conditions.
The fighting in North America during the War of 1812 may have helped to entrench American and Canadian identities, but they also involved Native Americans, whose motives were very different from those of the Europeans.
The European war, in other words, was globalised because it became intertwined with longer-term rivalries and conflicts across the world – the consequences of which are explored here.
The Middle East: Napoleonic-era power politics extended to Egypt and beyond
“May God cause the upheaval in France to spread like syphilis to the enemies of the empire... Amen.” So wrote Ahmed Efendi, secretary to Selim III, the Ottoman sultan, in January 1792. His prayer was answered as the French Revolutionary Wars raged across most of Europe, leaving Turkey in peace.
This changed in July 1798, when a French army under Napoleon invaded Egypt, then part of the Ottoman empire, mauled the famous Mamluk cavalry at the battle of the Pyramids and took Cairo. The attack brought Turkey into the wars against Revolutionary France.
Henceforth Middle Eastern politics were never entirely absent from the global strategies of the European belligerents.
Napoleon’s army was cut off from Europe when Nelson’s fleet shattered its French opponents at Aboukir Bay, off the coast of Egypt, in August. In February 1799, Napoleon sought to fight his way back to Europe and forestall a Turkish counter-attack by invading Palestine and Syria.
His advance ground to a bloody halt at Acre which held out, supported by Turkish and British naval forces. Exhausted and ravaged by plague, the French trailed back into Egypt.
Napoleon slipped ignominiously out of the country that August and seized power in France with his Brumaire coup in November. His deserted army clung on until a Turkish-British expedition (aided in partby Indian troops) retook Cairo in June 1801.
The French invasion proved particularly alarming to the British since it directly threatened their own empire in India. Henceforth the Ottoman empire would be entangled in the Napoleonic Wars, as the imperial rivals – France, Britain, Russia and Austria – sought to assert their strategic interests.
When Selim III yielded to French pressure in 1806 to favour French naval access to the Black Sea, the British launched attacks on the Turks in both the Dardanelles and Egypt – and were defeated.
Black Sea. (Photo by Sonia Halliday Photo Library/Alamy)
At the same time, the Russians sought to expand at Turkish expense and invaded through both the Balkans and the Caucasus in a war that would last until Tsar Alexander I, facing the prospect of Napoleon’s invasion of his own country, negotiated a peace in May 1812.
Turkey’s neighbour, the Persian empire, was a diplomatic battleground between the Russians, French and British, as the three European powers vied to project their strategic interests – the Russians to expand their empire southwards, the French to threaten the other two and the British to ensure the security of India.
Yet the importance of the Middle East was also cultural. When he invaded Egypt, Napoleon brought with him a team of scholars who, among other things, laid the foundations for modern Egyptology.
The Rosetta Stone, enabling the deciphering of hieroglyphics, was discovered and the academics produced a series of publications that became famous as the Description of Egypt, documenting all aspects of Egypt, past and present.
Yet in comparing Egypt’s past glories with its allegedly impoverished present, it made the Middle East seem not only different from the West but backwards, which in turn would provide a justification for European imperialism.
Asia: In imperial struggles, Europeans exploited their eastern allies
Fighting in the Napoleonic Wars spilled over into Asia as imperial frictions between the European belligerents exploded.
The most important battleground was India, where the long Franco-British struggle was intermeshed with the crisis of the Mughal empire, which had been steadily unravelling since the late 17th century, and with rivalries between Indian states, the most powerful of which were the Hindu Maratha confederacy, Hyderabad and Mysore.
The British East India Company held sway over territories that included Bengal (where the governor-general sat in Kolkata), Mumbai and Chennai, and with its own armed forces and its tax-raising powers, was virtually a state in its own right.
The French, though defeated heavily in India during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), still had viable and potentially rich footholds in its five main comptoirs (trading ports), chief of which was Pondichéry (now Puducherry).
Both European powers relied heavily on Indian allies, engaging in a system of ‘subsidiary treaties’, by which Indian rulers secured military support in return for payments of money or territory. In this way, British military and political presence gradually expanded in South Asia, but the Napoleonic Wars also provided opportunities for full-frontal conquest.
The French invasion of Egypt in 1798 seemed to pose a direct threat to India, not least because Tipu, ruler of the militarily-powerful southern kingdom of Mysore, had entered into an alliance with the French. In May 1799, an army of British and Indian troops stormed the citadel at Srirangapatna, killing Tipu, the ‘Tiger of Mysore’, and effectively annexing the kingdom.
Next came the Marathas in central India. A small French presence provided an excuse, but the real reason was the formidable power that the confederacy presented. In the Anglo-Maratha War of 1803–05, Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, won his bloodiest battle before Waterloo at Assaye (1803), but a British advance against the Maratha prince Holkar proved disastrous by July 1804.
A bloody siege of the formidable fortress of Bharatpur was repulsed in February 1805. These defeats compelled the Company to reach a peace with the Marathas, who would not bend to British domination until defeated in 1817–18.
The British did, however, secure the intercontinental shipping route between Britain and Asia. In January 1806, they managed to wrest control of the Cape Colony in southern Africa from the Dutch, who were allied to the French.
In 1810 they took, first, the Île Bourbon (now Réunion) and then Mauritius, partly to expel French privateers who raided British shipping on the Indian Ocean. In 1811, the British also began seizing the lucrative Dutch-controlled spice islands of Indonesia, including Java.
Yet the Asian capacity to resist European incursions was still vigorous. In 1793, Chinese emperor Qianlong rebuffed a British mission seeking privileged commercial relations. In 1805, the Japanese Shogunate dismissed a Russian attempt by Nikolai Rezanov to prise their country open to the Tsar’s trade.
It would take the shock of new, industrialised military technology for European and Asian capabilities to diverge dramatically, and before the former would foist themselves decisively on the latter.
North America: The clash of European powers inflamed conflict in the US
On 3 December 1805, William Clark carved his name and ‘By Land from the U. States in 1804 & 1805’ into a tree on America’s Pacific coast. With Meriwether Lewis, Clark had led an American expedition, commissioned by President Jefferson and setting off in May 1804, to explore the regions west of the Mississippi acquired by the US from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
France had originally acquired this vast, funnel-shaped territory (extending from the Mississippi Delta to Canada, and at its broadest, to the western border of Montana) as the result of its alliance with Spain. Napoleon’s original plan had been to exploit the region in order to supply France’s Caribbean slave plantations with food and raw materials.
Yet the jewel of the French empire, Saint-Domingue, had erupted into insurrection in 1791, when its enslaved Africans rose up, inspired by a combination of resistance to oppression, their Vodu religion, and – among leaders such as Toussaint Louverture – the French Revolution.
France abolished slavery in 1794, Napoleon restored it in 1802 and the insurgents of Saint-Domingue, renaming their country Haiti, resisted and defeated a French force that had been sent to repress it.
By 1803, it was clear France was on the cusp of losing its richest colony and so Louisiana lost its primary purpose. Napoleon also desperately needed funds for a planned invasion of Britain. So the American negotiators sent to Paris to secure free commercial access through New Orleans were surprised to be greeted with an offer of the entire territory for the knock-down price of 3 cents an acre. The deal was announced in July 1803.
This westward leap by the US was not universally welcomed: the northern ‘free’ states worried that slavery would spread into the new territory. The Purchase also increased border tensions with the British in Canada and war eventually exploded in 1812, over the US-Canadian frontier and over British pressing of American sailors into the Royal Navy.
Initial American attacks on Canada in Autumn 1812 ended in failure and the British exploited their naval supremacy by blockading American ports and mounting coastal raids, including an assault on Washington, where government buildings (most famously the White House) were burned in August 1814.
The conflict ended with negotiations in Ghent and a treaty signed on Christmas Eve, 1814. News of the peace reached America too late to stop a battle at New Orleans on 8 January 1815, when the Americans under Andrew Jackson repulsed a British assault on the city.
One legacy of the War of 1812 was that it crystallised both American and Canadian identities, but it was a tragedy for the Native Americans. Since 1808, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh had forged a tribal confederation to defend Native American independence.
He helped the British take Detroit in August 1812, but when the Americans swept the Royal Navy from Lake Erie in September 1813, it became harder for Tecumseh to protect tribal lands and he was killed in battle in October 1813. The Native American alliance fell apart, losing its lands to the Americans.
South America: War in Europe triggered a crisis in the Spanish and Portuguese empires
The most striking global consequence of the Napoleonic Wars was the independence of South America. Most of the continent had been part of the Spanish empire, with Brazil ruled by the Portuguese.
The European war triggered, but did not cause, the Latin American wars of independence. These flowed from longer-term efforts by the Spanish monarchy to strengthen its grip on its colonies (provoking a backlash among creole elites) and from discontent among the colonies’ merchants chafing against the Spanish monopoly of trade.
On top of this, a rebellion in what is now Peru in 1780–83 (led by Túpac Amaru until 1781) against Spanish reforms, taxation and the repression of indigenous and mixed-race (mestizo) people had also shaken Spanish rule to the core.
The wars were sparked when Napoleon seized the Spanish King Fernando VII and the royal family in 1808 and tried to take over Spain. The Spanish resistance to French rule created a Cortes, a parliament meeting in Cádiz, which passed a liberal constitution in 1812, declaring free men in any Spanish-ruled domain to be citizens – so in the colonies this included creole, mixed race and native men, but not women or slaves. This attempt to create a liberal, imperial monarchy came too late to stop the first stirrings for independence.
In Latin America royal officials were squeezed out by creole elites who, as in Spain, formed committees or juntas, initially to defend the colonies against the French. Yet while the Latin American colonies sent delegates to the Cortes and helped shape the Spanish constitution, these provincial committees frequently clashed with the central junta in Spain. In the process, they also began fitfully to shape claims for independence.
The first declarations of independence came in 1810 and positions hardened when, in 1814 at the end of the Peninsular War, King Fernando VII was restored to the Spanish throne and repudiated the 1812 Constitution. This restoration of the absolute monarchy accelerated the imperial crisis as, one by one, Latin American states declared and fought for independence in bitter wars.
Perhaps most notably, the victory of Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar at the battle of Boyacá in 1819 led to the creation of Gran Colombia, a state encompassing much of northern South America and part of Central America.
By 1825, many of Spain’s American colonies, from Chile to Mexico, were independent republics that would soon abolish slavery and end the colonial caste system based on race.
Portuguese-ruled Brazil also followed a path partially conditioned by events in Napoleonic Europe. When the French invaded Portugal in 1807, the British evacuated the royal family to Brazil. Rio de Janeiro became the functioning capital of the Portuguese empire under King Juan VI. At the end of the war, Juan stayed in Brazil, while his son, Pedro, became Portuguese regent: the two countries were declared to be a union of equals in 1815.
A liberal revolution in Portugal in 1820 demanded Juan’s return to Lisbon, sent Pedro back to Brazil and in 1821 sought to reimpose Portuguese sovereignty over the colony.
A Brazilian uprising ensued and led Pedro to declare independence in 1822, culminating in Portuguese recognition in 1825.
Michael Rapport is reader in modern European history at the University of Glasgow and the author of The Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013)
This article was first published in the Napoleonic Wars Collectors' Edition, produced by BBC History Magazine
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