Napoleon and the Dardanelles

Napoleon and the Dardanelles by Vernon J. Puryear offers a deeply researched account of Napoleonic policy in the Near East, highlighting the emperor’s efforts to manipulate Turkey, Persia, and Russia in order to control the critical Dardanelles Straits. Drawing extensively on original manuscripts from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other European archives, Puryear reconstructs the intricate web of diplomacy, deception, and failed alliances that marked France’s engagement with the Ottoman Empire and Persia between 1802 and 1815. The book demonstrates how Napoleon’s vacillating strategies—sometimes favoring Turkey, at other times Russia—ultimately undermined his continental system and contributed to the unraveling of his empire.

Through careful narrative and documentary evidence, the study illuminates the global stakes of Napoleonic foreign policy, where trade, naval power, and imperial ambition intersected at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. By following French, Turkish, Persian, Russian, and British responses, Napoleon and the Dardanelles not only revises our understanding of Napoleon’s failures in the East but also situates them within broader currents of European diplomacy. The work remains a vital reference for historians of Napoleonic Europe, Ottoman diplomacy, and the geopolitics of the Straits, underscoring how missteps in the Near East reverberated across the entire Napoleonic project.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1951.