The decisions which triggered the Russian conquest of Central Asia were taken by the generation of soldiers and statesmen who came of age during the Napoleonic Wars – Nesselrode, Chernyshev, Speranskii and above all Count Vasily Perovskii, Governor of Orenburg during the 1830s. This chapter argues that Russia’s victory against Napoleon transformed the self-perception of the Empire’s ruling elite: Russia was now unquestionably a European Great Power, and as such the constant raiding, rebellion and other forms of ‘insolence’ on her steppe frontier could no longer be tolerated. An account of Russian relations with Persia and Afghanistan is followed by an overview of the empire’s relationship with the Qazaqs from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, and the growing Russian frustration with the khanate of Khoqand, and above all with Khiva.

This chapter opens the first part of the book that presents the background of the First World War. It deals with the emergence of the concept of “enemy alien” in the debate among international lawyers. Starting with the Law of Nations published by Emer de Vattel in 1758, it analyzes and discusses what the foundational texts of international law in the century-and-a-half preceding the First World War said on the rights of foreigners in peacetime and on the conduct toward these same foreigners when they became enemies in wartime. It then compares legal doctrines and practices analyzing the behavior of belligerents towards enemy aliens in a string of interstate wars that occurred between the end of the eighteenth century and 1865, namely the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792–1793, the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States, the Crimean War and the American Civil War. The chapter follows the changes in the attitude toward enemy aliens that mass conscription and the post-French Revolution concept of citizenship and nationality triggered.

While later chapters examine the institution of slavery through its legal framework and the dynamics of the slave trade, Chapter 3 looks at the way in which the fear of slave uprisings shaped the security complex of the islands and became a significant force for intercolonial integration. Although the microregion thus increasingly took on the state-like functions of an internal security guarantor, such practices did not completely supplant existing inter-imperial rivalries. Rather, these two dynamics – mutual security reliance and political rivalry over trade and territory – coexisted in an uneasy constellation, the balance between them often depending on the strength of local and imperial ties of centrally placed actors within the islands’ intercolonial networks. The first half of the chapter analyzes the mutual security networks of the Leeward Islands associated with slave revolts, while the second half explores inter-imperial warfare in the region, with a particular focus on the prolonged periods of military occupations of smaller islands by the British Empire in particular.

Chapter 4 discusses the expansion of vaccination in the British Isles during the Napoleonic Wars. The rapid extension of the practice from 1800, involving hundreds of thousands of people, represented a mobilisation of opinion and action that paralleled the mobilisation of the nation for war. Medical men took up vaccination with alacrity, seeking to make their name and serve their communities. Members of the aristocracy and gentry, with women often in the lead, accepted it in their families and supported it in their spheres of influence. Clergymen promoted it from the pulpit. Reckless practice led to adverse outcomes that encouraged anxieties about inoculating cowpox and provided ammunition for an anti-vaccination movement in London in 1805–7. Instructed to conduct an enquiry, the College of Physicians fully endorsed vaccination in 1807. After receiving the report, Parliament broke new ground in health provision by funding a National Vaccine Establishment to distribute vaccine and have oversight of the practice.

Chapter 14 returns to Britain in 1814–15, with Jenner hoping that peace would bring new opportunities to advance the vaccination cause. The end of the Napoleonic Wars and the reopening of lines of communication, bringing further reports of vaccination around the world, provides a useful vantage-point to identify key developments in the global story. Although the early history of vaccination is one of the diffusion of know-how and biomatter along the lines of Europe trade and empire, the networks rapidly become more complex and multilateral, with the new prophylaxis constructed on a global stage, not least the management of the practice, its integration in systems of public health and in legislative and other forms of coercion. Above all, it is possible to see vaccination as a quiet revolution, an emancipatory force, the pointy end of increasing state power and a foundation for further breakthroughs in the struggle against disease.

Chapter 6 discusses how France, hesitant about smallpox inoculation, embraced cowpox inoculation and the Napoleonic regime provided strong support and direction. After the first successful vaccination in Paris in August 1800, vaccine was rapidly distributed through France. In 1803, the Minister of Interior instituted a central vaccination committee in the capital and instructed prefects to form subordinate committees to support the practice in the provinces. Napoleon himself was committed to the practice and the practice prospered under a regime that had no doubts as to its merits and potential contribution to the nation’s welfare and prosperity. In the context of large-scale military mobilisation, several million citizens were vaccinated before 1815. The French system, ill-funded but quite effective, was extended to the client states and annexed territories of the Napoleonic empire, providing further scope for Dr Sacco’s enterprise in Italy and laying firm foundations for the practice in the Netherlands.

This chapter delineates a crisis of public health that occurred throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It shows how it was in response to this crisis that the modern system of universal quarantine took shape. The chapter investigates the series of plague and yellow fever epidemics that breached the defenses of a string of Mediterranean islands and considers the response of European governments. The frequency with which armies and navies crossed the Mediterranean created a massive augmentation of quarantine traffic just as new epidemic threats emerged. Authorities recommitted to a robust approach to quarantine in light of these challenges. Despite wartime debacles that suggested the system might break down, Chapter 1 shows that it emerged stronger than ever. In this way, we see how a brutal series of wars and epidemics counterintuitively fostered transnational sanitary cooperation.

The nature of empire is that it is always at heart contradictory, suggesting a totalising unity but not homogeneity or equality. This chapter focuses on three very different Irish men of letters, Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Moore and Charles Lever, exploring the contradictions at the heart of their engagement with the British Empire and the imperial project generally, and its influence on their writing. It also suggests ways in which these contradictions are later to be found in one of the great imperial novels – Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901). Charles Gavan Duffy was an Irish nationalist and a prime minister of a British colony, who saw Thomas Moore’s poetry as the product of an ‘imperial mind’. Moore, in his turn, can be seen as the colonised figure incarnate, beholden to imperial patronage for his livelihood and yet able to find ways to express subversive feeling in his poetry and prose. Charles Lever was perhaps the Empire’s favourite Irish novelist in this period, and yet he seldom wrote about the Empire, and when he did, it was almost always negative in tone. Although he was a moderate Tory in politics, Lever’s work suggested that the Irish could never be good Britons, or successful colonists. In contrast, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, who in so many ways represents the anomalous position of the Irish in imperial terms, is presented as succeeding precisely because of his Irishness, even though he does not know what that is. The contradictions in Kim reflect the ironic relationship between the Irish and the Empire as a whole, and as such the novel can claim to be the greatest ‘Irish’ imperial novel, a term which is itself a contradiction in terms.