The Athenaeum


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British Credit in the Last Napoleonic War (Classic Reprint)


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Excerpt from British Credit in the Last Napoleonic War No doubt Napoleon was mistaken in his calculations. We, looking back to his time, know that his great scheme miscarried, but I hope to show that, although the result was failure, Napoleon's plans may have been more reason able and laid on a more intelligent foundation than is generally admitted; that he was not misled by crude economic theories which were already out of date, but that he directed his attack upon a point where we were then, and indeed still are, most vulnerable, and adopted measures which were not haphazard but were well calculated to bring it to a successful issue. At Trafalgar his attack upon the naval power of Britain had completely failed, he could not invade us with his armies but he could still attempt to paralyse the government by destroying our European trade and so undermining public credit and fomenting a social revolution, which might overthrow the state from within. It appears to have been his deliberate aim to render the maintenance Of the gold reserve impos sible, and so to bring down the whole fabric of British credit; and the Continental System on the one hand and the permission to export corn to the British Isles on the other, were quite compatible with this object. Foreign payments were a continuous difficulty to our government. Napier describes the financial troubles which had come to be severely felt in 1809 by the British forces in the Peninsula; they were insufficiently provided with boots, transport and other necessaries, and the soldiers' pay was in arrears. Desperate efforts were made to provide the a month which were needed, but Napier explains that in all commercial places the exchange rose against England because of her great and increasing paper issues; and those issues, the extravagant supplies to Spain, and the Austrian subsidy, rendered it impossible to provide specie for the army, save by pur chasing it all over the world with treasury bills and at an enormous loss. This evil, great in itself, Opened a wide door to fraud, and made the war between France and England not so much a glorious contest of arms as a struggle between public credit and military genius, victory being to the first nearly as pernicious as defeat. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.







The United States Catalog


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The Athenaeum


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The Last Battle


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The classic account of the final offensive against Hitler’s Third Reich. The Battle for Berlin was the culminating struggle of World War II in the European theater, the last offensive against Hitler’s Third Reich, which devastated one of Europe’s historic capitals and marked the final defeat of Nazi Germany. It was also one of the war’s bloodiest and most pivotal battles, whose outcome would shape international politics for decades to come. The Last Battle is Cornelius Ryan’s compelling account of this final battle, a story of brutal extremes, of stunning military triumph alongside the stark conditions that the civilians of Berlin experienced in the face of the Allied assault. As always, Ryan delves beneath the military and political forces that were dictating events to explore the more immediate imperatives of survival, where, as the author describes it, “to eat had become more important than to love, to burrow more dignified than to fight, to exist more militarily correct than to win.” The Last Battle is the story of ordinary people, both soldiers and civilians, caught up in the despair, frustration, and terror of defeat. It is history at its best, a masterful illumination of the effects of war on the lives of individuals, and one of the enduring works on World War II.










Britain Against Napoleon


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From Roger Knight, established by his multi-award winning book The Pursuit of Victory as 'an authority ... none of his rivals can match' (N.A.M. Rodger), Britain Against Napoleon is the first book to explain how the British state successfully organised itself to overcome Napoleon - and how very close it came to defeat. For more than twenty years after 1793, the French army was supreme in continental Europe, and the British population lived in fear of French invasion. How was it that despite multiple changes of government and the assassination of a Prime Minister, Britain survived and won a generation-long war against a regime which at its peak in 1807 commanded many times the resources and manpower? This book looks beyond the familiar exploits of the army and navy to the politicians and civil servants, and examines how they made it possible to continue the war at all. It shows the degree to which, as the demands of the war remorselessly grew, the whole British population had to play its part. The intelligence war was also central. Yet no participants were more important, Roger Knight argues, than the bankers and traders of the City of London, without whose financing the armies of Britain's allies could not have taken the field. The Duke of Wellington famously said that the battle which finally defeated Napoleon was 'the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life': this book shows how true that was for the Napoleonic War as a whole. Roger Knight was Deputy Director of the National Maritime Museum until 2000, and now teaches at the Greenwich Maritime Institute at the University of Greenwich. In 2005 he published, with Allen Lane/Penguin, The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson, which won the Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military History, the Mountbatten Award and the Anderson Medal of the Society for Nautical Research. The present book is a culmination of his life-long interest in the workings of the late 18th-century British state.




Planning Armageddon


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Before the First World War, the British Admiralty conceived a plan to win rapid victory in the event of war with Germany-economic warfare on an unprecedented scale.This secret strategy called for the state to exploit Britain's effective monopolies in banking, communications, and shipping-the essential infrastructure underpinning global trade-to create a controlled implosion of the world economic system. In this revisionist account, Nicholas Lambert shows in lively detail how naval planners persuaded the British political leadership that systematic disruption of the global economy could bring about German military paralysis. After the outbreak of hostilities, the government shied away from full implementation upon realizing the extent of likely collateral damage-political, social, economic, and diplomatic-to both Britain and neutral countries. Woodrow Wilson in particular bristled at British restrictions on trade. A new, less disruptive approach to economic coercion was hastily improvised. The result was the blockade, ostensibly intended to starve Germany. It proved largely ineffective because of the massive political influence of economic interests on national ambitions and the continued interdependencies of all countries upon the smooth functioning of the global trading system. Lambert's interpretation entirely overturns the conventional understanding of British strategy in the early part of the First World War and underscores the importance in any analysis of strategic policy of understanding Clausewitz's "political conditions of war."