The Savage Storm

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Britain's defeat of Napoleon is one the great accomplishments in our history. And yet it was by no means certain that Britain itself would survive the revolutionary fervour of the age, let alone emerge victorious from such a vast conflict. From the late 1790s, the country was stricken by naval mutinies, rebellion in Ireland, and riots born of hunger, poverty and grinding injustice. As the new century opened, with republican graffiti on the walls of the cities, and revolutionary secret societies reportedly widespread, King George III only narrowly escaped assassination. Jacobin forces seemed to threaten a dissolution of the social order. Above all, the threat of French invasion was ever-present. Yet, despite all this, and new threats from royal madness and rampant corruption, Britain did not become a revolutionary republic. Her elites proved remarkably resilient, and drew on the power of an already-global empire to find the strength to defeat Napoleon abroad, and continued popular unrest at home. In this brilliant, sweeping history of the period, David Andress fuses two hitherto separate historical perspectives - the military and the social - to provide a vivid portrait of the age. In the process, he shows the importance of individual characters such as Pitt, Nelson and Wellington in building the strength to overcome dissent at home and the French overseas, and also reflects on the way of life they championed. Britain fought against a naked tyranny in the Napoleonic Empire, and drew extensively on a language of freedom and justice to do so. Triumph brought a golden age of imperial power, but also cemented the rule of the elite, in a country where freedom and justice remained out of reach for many. From the conditions of warfare faced by the British soldier and the great battles in which they fought, to the literary and artistic culture of the time, inhabited by the likes of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Savage Storm is at once a searing narrative of dramatic events - not least at Waterloo and Trafalgar -- and an important reassessment of one of the most significant turning points in our history.