Was 1812 an Economic War? : The Motives for Napoleon's Russia Campaign Reconsidered
As scholars have argued, the microscope of Atlantic World paradigm may be too narrow. It has broadened our understanding of regional entanglement but blinded us to how regions beyond it were also entangled in the Atlantic trading axis. Examining eighteenth-century Russia’s place in what should be seen as a global economic system, this article argues that Napoleon’s 1812 campaign in Russia was motivated by economic factors tied to France’s competitive global trade in critical Caribbean colonial commodities. When one considers the realities of economic entanglement, significant questions arise about the centrality of global trade in the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars, suggesting a continuity in economic warfare across the entire period from 1792 through 1812/1815. The article is both historiographical and historical, and, admittedly, raising more questions than answers in hopes of encouraging more research and collaboration toward global/international historiography. It is available for publication in English and other language journals, other than Russian in which it was originally published