War at Sea in the Age of Napoleon

There is an irony at the heart of this bibliography on war at sea in the age of Napoleon—Napoleon was famously not a sailor. But it is fair to say that he defined an age, which this bibliography takes to mean the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of 1792–1815. Many of the works cited below span larger timescales, but nearly all of them deal with those years and those wars in some significant way. Writing the history of war at sea in the age of Napoleon began even before Napoleon’s death, when the British lawyer William James published An Inquiry into the Merits of the Principal Naval Actions between Great Britain and the United States in 1816. By 1824 he had produced a five-volume Naval History of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. His competition came from the British naval officer Edward Pelham Brenton, with his 1823 Naval History of Great Britain from the Year 1783 to 1822. That both of these early works were published by Britons about British naval history should not be surprising. After all, this was the age of Nelson, of the great fleet victories, and of the establishment of British naval supremacy. While the field has diversified substantially in the two centuries since James and Brenton, it is largely still the case that the subject is dominated by histories of the British navy. That is especially true of the underpinnings of naval power, such as logistics, naval medicine, finance, and infrastructure, and it is also true of recent social and cultural histories, albeit to a lesser degree. There is clearly scope for further research on other navies and on the transnational nature of the maritime domain. Some of the most exciting new work does not only that, but also asks novel questions of naval archives. Navies, after all, produced enormous quantities of paperwork about all aspects of life at sea, and the field is ready for a new generation of historians to dive into it.