Episode 155: The Second World War, or, the Napoleonic Wars

Winston Churchill termed the Seven Years War (what Americans think of as the French and Indian War) the “First World War” since its battles took place from Germany to western Pennsylvania to Manila. If that title is accepted, then the “War of the American Revolution” was the Second World War, stretching as it did from the thirteen British American colonies to Europe to India; and thus the Napeoleonic Wars were the Third World War. But neither of those two previous wars could approach the size and scale of the cataclysm that were the Napoleonic Wars. As my guest Alexander Mikaberidze argues, they were the most consequential events between the Protestant Reformation and the Great War of 1914-1918. And like those events, the Napoleonic Wars had effect which continue to our own time. Alexander Mikaberidze is Professor of European History at the Louisiana State University at Shreveport, where he is . He has been acclaimed as one of the “great Napoleonic scholars of today”, the author of what has been described as a “masterpiece” The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History, published this year by Oxford University Press. This his second appearance on Historically Thinking; our previous conversation, held five years ago on this topic, is one of our most popular.