These letters and diaries of a young ensign in the 3rd Foot Guards during the Peninsular War provide a remarkably vivid first-hand account of one of the great campaigns in British military history. John Aitchison was present at most of the major actions of the war, both in Spain and Portugal, including the capture of Oporto, the Battle of Busaco, the defence of the Lines of Torres Vedras and the Battles of Talavera and Vitoria. His letters abound with remarkably precise descriptions of campaign tactics, comments on Wellington's decisions and observations on the locals and the country he passes through. Expertly edited and amplified by W.F.K. Thompson, these letters also reflect in ample measure the cold, wet and hunger, the forced marches and terrifying slaughter that are the inevitable consequences of war.
Combining military and cultural history, the book explores British soldiers' travels and cross-cultural encounters in Spain and Portugal, 1808-1814. It is the story of how soldiers interacted with the local environment and culture, of their attitudes and behaviour towards the inhabitants, and how they wrote about all this in letters and memoirs.
A stunning look at Napoleon's campaign across the Iberian peninsula from historian Charles Esdaile. At the end of the 18th century Spain remained one of the world's most powerful empires. Portugal, too, was prosperous at the time. By 1808, everything had changed. Portugal was under occupation and ravaged by famine, disease, economic problems and political instability. Spain had imploded and worse was to come. For the next six years, the peninsula was the helpless victim of others, suffering perhaps over a million deaths while troops from all over Europe tore it to pieces. Charles Esdaile's brilliant new history of the conflict makes plain the scope of the tragedy and its far-reaching effects, especially the poisonous legacy that produced the Spanish civil war of 1936-39.
For a full month in the autumn of 1812 the 2,000-strong garrison of the fortress the French had constructed to overawe the city of Burgos defied the Duke of Wellington. In this work a leading historian of the Peninsular teams up with a leading conflict archaeologist to examine the reasons for Wellington's failure.
Napoleon’s forces invaded Spain in 1808, but two years went by before they overran the southern region of Andalucía. Situated at the farthest frontier of Napoleon’s “outer empire,” Andalucía remained under French control only briefly—for two-and-a-half years—and never experienced the normal functions of French rule. In this groundbreaking examination of the Peninsular War, Charles J. Esdaile moves beyond traditional military history to examine the French occupation of Andalucía and the origins and results of the region’s complex and chaotic response. Disillusioned by the Spanish provisional government and largely unprotected, Andalucía scarcely fired a shot in its defense when Joseph Bonaparte’s army invaded the region in 1810. The subsequent French occupation, however, broke down in the face of multiple difficulties, the most important of which were geography and the continued presence in the region of substantial forces of regular troops. Drawing on British, French, and Spanish sources that are all but unknown, Esdaile describes the social, cultural, geographical, political, and military conditions that combined to make Andalucía particularly resistant to French rule. Esdaile’s study is a significant contribution to the new field sometimes known as occupation studies, which focuses on the ways a victorious army attempts to reconcile a conquered populace to the new political order. Combining military history with political and social history, Outpost of Empire delineates what we now call the cultural terrain of war. This is history that moves from battles between armies to battles for hearts and minds.
In the iconography of the Peninsular War of 1808–14, women are well represented—both as heroines, such as Agustina Zaragosa Domenech, and as victims, whether of starvation or of French brutality. In history, however, with its focus on high politics and military operations, they are invisible—a situation that Charles J. Esdaile seeks to address. In Women in the Peninsular War, Esdaile looks beyond the iconography. While a handful of Spanish and Portuguese women became Agustina-like heroines, a multitude became victims, and here both of these groups receive their due. But Esdaile reveals a much more complicated picture in which women are discovered to have experienced, responded to, and participated in the conflict in various ways. While some women fought or otherwise became involved in the struggle against the invaders, others turned collaborator, used the war as a means of effecting dramatic changes in their situation, or simply concentrated on staying alive. Along with Agustina Zaragoza Domenech, then, we meet French sympathizers, campfollowers, pamphleteers, cross-dressers, prostitutes, amorous party girls, and even a few protofeminists. Esdaile examines many social spheres, ranging from the pampered daughters of the nobility, through the cloistered members of Spain’s many convents, to the tough and defiant denizens of the Madrid slums. And we meet not just the women to whom the war came but also the women who came to the war—the many thousands who accompanied the British and French armies to the Iberian peninsula. Thanks to his use of copious original source material, Esdaile rescues one and all from, as E. P. Thompson put it, “the enormous condescension of posterity.” And yet all these women remain firmly in their historical and cultural context, a context that Esdaile shows to have emerged from the Peninsular War hardly changed. Hence the subsequent loss of these women’s story, and the obscurity from which this book has at long last rescued them.
