7 Spain
Tooze
If Napoleonic warfare made history on a scale not before seen in Europe, he could not, in a short period of rule upend the socio-economic conditions of power in the same way.
Napoleonic war was on a larger scale and with much more sophistication organization than previous war-fighting in Europe. The battlefield casualties were worse than ever, given the huge number of troops engaged. Protracted guerilla war, as in Spain, devastated civilian life and disrupted the economy, as well. According to one recent estimate by Leandro Prados de la Escosura and Carlos Santiago-Caballero, excess mortality in Spain during the period of the Napoleonic wars came to perhaps 1 million of which one third were direct military casualties. Spain’s population at the time was around 14 million. This is horrible and in keeping with Goya’s famous images of the horrors of war, but also far short of the 20-30 percent death rates seen in early modern conflicts, where famine and disease interacted over years with protracted pillaging.
The Napoleonic wars did not, even in Spain, produce the implosion of ordinary life witnessed in parts of central Europe during the Thirty Years War of the 17th century. Our best estimates of GDP per capita for Spain show large swings but a very rapid recovery at the end of the war, which would not have been possible in the case of devastation.