MICHAEL BROERS is a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Among his other books are The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy, 1802-1814: The War Against God (2002) and Europe Under Napoleon (1996). He was a Visiting Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in Fall, 2003.

In The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796-1814, Michael Broers brings to bear on the Napoleonic Empire many of the conceptual tools deployed in the study of the great extra-European colonial empires. Cultural imperialism and acculturation find close counterparts in many of the policies and attitudes of French administrators in their Italian provinces, explored here from the rich sources of the Parisian and Italian archives, long neglected by scholars. Broers repositions the context in which the Napoleonic Empire can be studied, and reconfigures the political and historical geography of Italy, in the century before its Unification in 1859. The Napoleonic Empire in Italy marks a fresh departure in the study of both modern Italy and Napoleonic Europe, based on primary sources.