Political scientist William Nester (St. John's Univ.) has written several books on the "art of power" during the United States' first century[1] and in France's Fifth Republic.[2] In the present volume, he turns to the British in their twenty-three-year conflict against France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But what exactly is the "art of power"? In the first sentence of chapter 1, Nester states that "power involves doing what one can to get what one wants" (3)—in this case, what the British did to defeat the First Republic and the Napoleonic empire. Well and good, but we are left to wonder why we should think in terms of an art of power as opposed to an exercise of it. The author's claim to be providing "an empirical rather than theoretical analysis" (xiin4) would be more compelling if he did not constantly speak of an art of power as though it possessed a totemic value.

It is hard to detect any artistry in Britain's conflict with the French. From the start of hostilities in 1793, it hewed to its traditional eighteenth-century strategy of subsidizing coalitions of Continental powers to oppose the French, while using its own superior navy to check its enemy at sea and absorb French colonies into its own growing empire. Nester describes these coalitions chronologically chapter-by-chapter, describing how the British used loans and subsidies to cobble them together, only for them to be shattered by the French on the battlefield, leaving the British to start the process over again. A similar pattern recurs in the British attempts to deploy expeditionary forces on the Continent, leading to a litany of embarrassing failures prior to Wellington's victories in the Iberian peninsula; many words come to mind, but "art" is not high on the list.

If there is an art of power, then its practitioners must be artists. While Nester's account includes the usual cast of characters—Horatio Nelson, Lord Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington—William Pitt the Younger is his choice as the era's foremost artist of British power. Only Pitt receives an entire chapter, devoted to a potted biography of his prewar life and career, with close attention to his fiscal abilities and reform policies. While the author's treatment of the long-serving prime minister is hardly uncritical, his censure of Pitt for rejecting Bonaparte's peace overtures in January 1800 is misplaced:

This damning judgment is grounded in a hindsight that Nester's subjects lacked. The context of the cabinet's assessment was not Bonaparte's stated intentions or actions, but the frequently unstable revolutionary governments that preceded him. Even if they believed Bonaparte was sincere, they expected, given the previous decade in French politics, that it would only be a matter of time before they faced a new regime that might not feel obligated to honor his initiatives.

Other misconceptions raise concerns about the author's command of British history.[3] The text is rife with both typographical and more serious errors, like the assertion that that "only Horace [sic, read Robert] Walpole" (335) served longer as prime minister than Pitt. These mistakes make Titan a flawed introduction to its subject, which has been well covered in fine studies by Roger Knight (absent from Nester's bibliography), Rory Muir, and Christopher Hall.[4]