Maritime Power and the Struggle

This text charts the epic struggle between Great Britain and revolutionary and Napoleonic France, revealing both the hidden forces beneath the surface of events and the strategies and battle tactics which ensured Britain the final victory. In Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind, Peter Padfield covered the rise of the Dutch to supreme naval and commercial power in the 17th century and their displacement by the British, followed by the 18th-century struggle between Great Britain and Bourbon France. He now explores the contrasts between British power based on trade and sea control and French power based on territorial conquest, and shows how their respective societies were imprinted with irreconcilably different ways of thought and systems of government and finance. He presents the French Revolution and Napoleon in a radical light as essentially regressive, Britain, for better or worse, as the progressive herald of modern liberties. The reader is placed on the gun deck, amid the cannon, smoke, blood and death, or alongside the great leaders, Pitt, Nelson, Wellington or Napoleon Bonaparte.