This volume, based on a conference held in Amsterdam in 2011, “revisits the economic warfare of the Napoleonic era to highlight the responses of merchants and smugglers alike in regional and urban case studies to reveal the often unexpected consequences of economic warfare” (1). The fifteen chapters have been written by an international array of scholars representing nine countries. There is an informative introduction to the topic by Katherine Aaslestad, followed by four general essays on historiography. These include a fine summary of the literature by Geoffrey Ellis, a survey of French narratives on the blockade by Annie Jourdon, an interesting discussion of the Russian literature by Alexandre Tschoudinov, and an account of the grain trade during the revolutionary wars by Pierrick Pourchasse. The next three groups include, respectively, three essays on different regions: Silvia Marzagalli on “a view from the sea,” Alexander Grab on Italy, and Robert Mark Spaulding on the Rhineland; four essays on networks and illicit trade: Margrit Schulte Beerbühl on Nathan Mayer Rothschild, Jann Witt on smugglers in Denmark, Bård Frydenlund on Norwegian merchants, and Michael Rowe on “organized crime”; and four case studies of European cities: Alan Forrest on France's Atlantic ports, Hilde Greefs on Antwerp, Anita Čerpinska on Riga, and Johan Joor on Amsterdam. The quality of the scholarship is uniformly high and the geographical range impressive. It is difficult to imagine a better introduction to the most recent work on the institutional structure and economic consequences of Napoleon's efforts to wage economic warfare against Britain and her allies.

These essays confirm Raymond Aron's observation that what matters most in modern war is “the battle in and for itself” (The Century of Total War [1955], 17). In the world war of the early nineteenth century, as in the two world wars of the twentieth, “the battle in and for itself” was not confined to the battlefield, but instead reached deeply into the lives of millions of ordinary men and women. In this world war, as in the two later ones, victory was won less by strategic brilliance and tactical skill than by the irresistible weight of material forces. In all three wars, the losers lost because they failed to isolate and destroy the economic power of the Atlantic states.

Although the influence of Napoleon's Continental System was felt throughout Europe, the contributors show that its impact varied widely over time and from place to place. Some areas and regions flourished, such as Malta, which, after being taken from its Knightly rulers by the French and then seized by Britain, became a vital commercial center. Others withered, such as Amsterdam, which had once been among the world's most active urban centers but was badly damaged by French restraints on trade. As was usually the case with political measures in the early nineteenth century, the Continental System's accomplishments often fell short of its aspirations—an important reason why it is so useful to study local conditions rather than merely to examine governmental proclamations. Despite Napoleon's immense energies and his ruthless administrative apparatus, there were always those who found ways to resist, avoid, or ignore France's efforts to prevent commercial transactions with the enemy. A great many people suffered from the shortages and disruptions produced by economic warfare, whereas a few exploited the situation and grew rich.

It is unfortunate that this volume lacks a systematic conclusion that might have tied the various case studies together. It is nevertheless possible to point to two important consequences of the Continental System for the following century. The first is well known and unsurprising, but still worth underscoring: the most important geopolitical result of the war against Napoleon was the consolidation of Britain's economic and naval power. The conduct and outcome of the Continental System were, in fact, among the most important reasons why the nineteenth century became “the British century.” The second consequence, briefly mentioned in Katherine Aaslestad's introduction but never fully developed, is less obvious but no less significant: the failure of the Continental System hastened the demise of that attitude toward economic activity conventionally called “mercantilism.” Wealth was now seen as inexorably tied to exchange rather than to possession; commerce, in turn, was recognized as the essential source of economic prosperity and, ultimately, of national power.

One striking aspect of the historiography of the Continental System is how often it has been inspired and influenced by contemporary politics. This was as true for Eli Heckscher's classic study, The Continental System: An Economic Interpretation (1922), which was written in neutral Sweden in the last months of World War I, as it was for François Crouzet's seminal articles produced during the early movement toward European economic integration in the 1950s (“Wars, Blockade, and Economic Change in Europe,” The Journal of Economic History 24, no. 4 [1964]: 567–88), and for Stuart Woolf's Napoleon's Integration of Europe (1991), which reflected the revitalization of the European project in the 1980's. One similarly detects contemporary resonances in several of the essays in Revisiting Napoleon's Continental System, whose global perspective and often skeptical tone echo our own economic experiences.