This book explores imperial entanglements to reassess the Napoleonic Empire as a missing link-or at least an important chain-in the global and longue durée history of Empires. In recent years Napoleonic studies have, belatedly but resolutely, embraced the transnational historiographical turn, vastly expanding the field´s geographical scope. Its canonical chronological boundaries, on the other hand, appear increasingly narrow against this wider backdrop, giving the impression of a parenthetical, almost anachronistic aside from 1799 to 1815. What connects, and what doesn´t connect, the Napoleonic Empire to the Age of Empire, remains by and large an open question. Put another way, this book attempts to locate the Napoleonic empire in World History.
Thomas Dodman is Assistant Professor in the Department of French at Columbia University, USA. A historian of modern Europe and empire, his research focuses on forms and experiences of social change in times of war, revolution, and colonization. He is the author of What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (2018) and a co-editor, together with Bruno Cabanes, Hervé Mazurel, and Gene Tempest, of Une histoire de la guerre, du XIXe siècle à nos jours (2018). He has prepared an issue of French Historical Studies on Epistolary Gestures (2021) with Anne Verjus and Caroline Muller, as well as several issues of Sensibilités: histoire, critique & sciences sociales, a journal he co-edits.
Aurélien Lignereux is Professor of History at Sciences Po Grenoble - Université Grenoble Alpes, France. His research focuses on policing and police systems, on royalist politicization, on imperial rule in Napoleonic Europe, and on the social and cultural history of expatriate French civil servants both within départements réunis under the reign of Napoleon and since their return to the country after 1814. His booksinclude La France rébellionnaire. Les résistances à la gendarmerie, 1800-1859 (2008), Servir Napoléon. Policiers et gendarmes dans les départements annexés, 1796-1814 (2012), L´Empire des Français, 1799-1815 (2012), Chouans et Vendéens contre l´Empire. 1815. l´autre guerre des Cent-Jours (2015), and Les Impériaux. Administrer et habiter l´Europe de Napoléon (2019).
