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Union of England and Scotland 1707: Darien; succession crisis; trading issues; nature of the treaty. Church establishment in both countries. Union of Great Britain and Ireland 1800–1: United Irishmen 1798; French wars; trading issues; Pitt's plan and George III's veto.

The final chapter of the book focuses on fears about the importation of yellow fever from the West Indies during and immediately after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It argues that fears about the arrival of disease were bound up with fears about a French invasion and the permeation of revolutionary ideas. Attempts to guard against yellow fever using quarantine thus acquired additional meanings, and the doctrine of contagion on which quarantine was based was staunchly defended by the conservative political elite and senior members of the medical profession. However, many colonial practitioners challenged the theory of contagion and the system of quarantine, some equating these with tyranny and oppression, professional and political. Although they made little impact upon official doctrines, this chapter shows that colonial practitioners had begun seriously to challenge the authority of the Royal College of Physicians.

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars shifted the balance of parties and groupings in the English Church. They worked in favour of those that assigned to Providence a major concern with the regeneration and protection of the civil community. The Evangelicals profited through their attachment to the idea of a righteous nation and a national faith, but failed to press home their advantage because their emphasis on individual conversions and personal righteousness divided English society between the sheep and the goats. It was the Old High Church, committed to an alliance or a more intimate union of Church and State that benefited most from the increased services of the clergy to the State called forth by the protracted hostilities. Its traditionalist wing was also better equipped than most theologians of the Age of Reason to handle the emotional releases of a nation at war.

Part III shifts the perspective from the effects of regime change in diplomatic relations between Paris and Istanbul to those for the administration of French residents in the Levant. Chapter 7 deals with the frictions and the destabilization of government authority caused by the French Revolution. The chapter first explores the changes in the legal framework of the autonomous French communities in the Ottoman Empire. Then it focuses on the changes in the administration of the expatriate communities, and the difficulties encountered in this process. As in France, the regime change in the Levant led to a weakening of the French state’s authority over its citizens. Consequently, the regime change will be analysed here with regard to the resulting frictions within the French communities, as well as the tensions between them and other communities in the Levant.

This chapter explores the persistent French diplomatic efforts to negotiate a Franco-Ottoman alliance. These efforts were one of the most consistent foreign policy doctrines of revolutionary France. The first topic of this chapter is how the changes in the strategic aims of French foreign policy took shape during the Revolution. It therefore gives a concise overview of French foreign policy strategies during the old regime. Next, the Ottoman perspective on the French overtures is considered, with an account of the course of Franco-Ottoman negotiations in 1793. Despite a positive bias towards the French, Ottoman policymakers considered France to be too weak and chose to stay neutral and to defer the conclusion of an alliance. The chapter ends with an examination of the obstacles which hampered the accomplishment of the first republican envoy’s diplomatic mission.

The concept of irregular warfare emerged in the mid-eighteenth century. Irregular warfare was initially conceptualized as a tactical complement of regular warfare. However, with the nationalization of war in the framework of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars a completely new notion of irregular warfare developed. Irregular fighters such as the French counter-revolutionary fighters in the Vendée and elsewhere, as well as guerrilla fighters in Napoleon’s empire, were denounced as illegitimate combatants. The marginalization of irregular fighters thus arose from the ambiguity of the idea of the levée en masse: if the nationalization of war meant that national war was essentially people’s war, it was difficult to deny that popular uprisings could have political legitimacy too. The denunciation of the irregular as the illegitimate fighter solved this dilemma.

Part II of this book analyses French revolutionary policy-making in Paris and its implementation in the Ottoman Empire. Chapter 4 assesses the French revolutionary government’s attitude towards diplomacy during the Terror. The chapter presents how the central government in Paris directed its diplomats during this era, what it expected of them, and what stance the Jacobin Club in Paris took towards diplomatic negotiations with the Ottoman Empire. Some historians argue that in this period French revolutionaries were opposed to any kind of diplomatic negotiations. As this chapter shows, this was true only regarding diplomacy with states that were at war with France. However, even the Paris Jacobin Club, one of the hotbeds of revolutionary fervour, supported conventional diplomatic activities with neutral states such as the Ottoman Empire.

The final chapter of this book explores the pro-government argument presented in Scotland in the 1790s, under the heading of loyalist ideology. The chapter focuses on the central elements in this argument, such as the conservative defence of the British constitution, and the attack mounted on the British radicals and French revolutionaries, arguing that loyalist ideology in Scotland was much in line with that presented elsewhere in Britain. Ministers of the Church of Scotland, however, played a prominent part in writing of loyalist pamphlets, and in their writings, a clearer Scottish voice can sometimes be detected. Some pamphleteers also included more specifically Scottish elements in their texts – such as arguing that the Union and its political system was to the particular benefit of the Scots – but, overall, such Scottish adaptations were rare, and no concerted attempt seems to have been made to develop a separate Scottish loyalist ideology.

This epilogue argues that over the century and a half, from the French revolutionary wars to World War II, Jews in military service were carriers of multiple, overlapping, and at times clashing identities. They often felt a sincere, profound attachment to their homeland and fought with no sense of qualitative difference from their countrymen. Believing that their homeland epitomized toleration and respect for human dignity, Jews in western Europe and North America defined their countries' wars as Jewish wars. Moreover, Jews celebrated their men in uniform not only for their virility and bravery, not only for fulfilling their patriotic duty, but also for boldly asserting their religious particularism. The Jewish soldier at a Sabbath service in the field or a synagogue at home brought glory to his community not simply because he donned his uniform and decorations but because he did so while occupying a manifestly Jewish space.

Chapter 5 investigates the effects of the emergence of a new political culture on the practice of diplomacy. The chapter focuses on two aspects of this transformation: changes with regard to the conduct of negotiations on the one hand (ceremonial, etiquette, diplomatic presents, corruption), and the self-representation of the new French state on the other. These aspects are interwoven, and they both reveal the ambiguities and constant changes in what was considered the correct way of practising French republican diplomacy. Nevertheless, in contrast to the predominant notion of revolutionary diplomats as being uncompromising ideologists, the Ottoman example shows that French revolutionary diplomats were invariably keen to find pragmatic solutions and compromises, in order not to alienate their interlocutors.

Nelson was created Duke of Bronte and received the vast estate in 1799 as a gift from Ferdinand IV, King of the Two Sicilies. It was a standard, if especially ostentatious, form of military reward and reflected both the ‘Nelson-mania’ prevailing in Naples and the King's personal gratitude to the British for having saved his kingdom from the French Revolutionary armies. But the gift also brought disgrace on Nelson, in that it pointed to his dubious role in the brutal suppression of the Jacobin Republic in Naples (not to mention his love affair with the British ambassador's wife). All was not what it appeared to be in Bronte either. The first British men to arrive there found nothing but trouble and bad luck, and at the time of his death of 1805, Nelson was complaining that the place was a drain on his finances. After Nelson's death, his brother William inherited the estate and the title and, through William's daughter, Charlotte, Lady Bridport, the estate passed to the Bridport family.

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, British and American codependence in the India trade heightened, and so too did codependence in British industrial production and American cotton cultivation. American ships and merchants provided ready access for British Indian goods into Napoleon’s Europe, and they supplied Britain with raw cotton from the southern U.S. states. Yet the French Wars also reignited conflict between Britain and the United States, and the resulting embargoes and the War of 1812 magnified the dangers of British dependence on American cotton. By the time of the East India Company’s charter renewal in 1813, British production of India goods and the demand for India’s raw materials had eliminated the benefits believed to have come from the Company’s monopoly.

This chapter focuses on changes in the treatment and protection of prisoners of war (POWs). It covers the rules and customs of war before and during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars; the transitory period between the breakdown of the ancien régime principles and practices during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of the codification of the law of armed conflict at the end of the nineteenth century; and the Lieber Code and the Brussels Declaration.

Veterancy is a natural figure for the kind of wisdom-through-experience that is purveyed, as Walter Benjamin noted in ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), through traditional storytelling. But these three veterans have been stupefied by their experiences in mass, industrial, globalized war – William Wordsworth’s ‘Discharged Soldier’ in the French Revolutionary Wars, Rebecca West’s Chris Baldry (The Return of the Soldier (1918)) and Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Warren Smith (Mrs Dalloway (1925)) in the First World War. Consequently, they are unable to process their experiences into communicable wisdom – a different thing from being able to describe them. Those who encounter these veterans (and this includes the texts’ readers) may feel sadness or anger at their plight. But, though there is affect, there is no empathy, whether through body or mind. All that remains is to look upon these unfathoming, unfathomable characters with consternation.