The Peninsular War

The devastating conflict that raged across Spain and Portugal between 1808 and 1814 following Napoleon's invasion was one of the most dramatic and defining moments in Iberian history.
 
At the end of the eighteenth century Spain remained one of the world's most powerful empires. Thanks to a long period of enlightened absolutism, Portugal, too, was prosperous. But by 1808 all this had changed: Portugal was under occupation and, ravaged by famine, disease, economic problems and political instability, Spain had undergone an extraordinary implosion. Worse was to come: for the next six years the Iberian peninsula, for three centuries a byword for religious and military aggression, became itself the helpless victim of others, suffering perhaps over a million deaths while troops from all over Europe tore it to pieces.
 
This new history of the Peninsular War makes it clear that, in part because of the emergence of the phenomenon of guerrilla warfare, the war was an Iberian tragedy. Spain was ruined and endowed with a poisonous legacy that ultimately produced the civil war of 1936–9. And Portugal suffered unparalleled disaster, with casualties that have no comparison in its history.
 
For Britain, the Peninsular War became the arena in which the redcoats of first Moore and then Wellington created one of her great national epics – the establishment of a dazzlingly powerful military machine that never lost a battle, and in October 1813 became the first invading army to set foot on the soil of Napoleonic France.
 
The Peninsular War tells this compelling, terrible story for a new generation. It has all the great military set pieces but also never loses sight of the people of Spain and Portugal and the suffering they endured.
Text: Allen Lane The Penguin Press,
 
Reviewed by Allan Mallinson in The Spectator
 
Charles Esdaile is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of The Wars of Napoleon, The French Wars, 1792-1815, The Spanish Army in the Peninsular War, The Duke of Wellington and the Command of the Spanish Army, 1812-14 and Spain in the Liberal Age, 1808-1939.