The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars affected millions of people's lives across Europe and beyond. Yet the extent to which the constant warfare of the period 1792-1815 shaped everyday experience has been little studied. This volume of essays discusses the formative experience of these wars for men and women, as soldiers, citizens and civilians.

From the civility of Westminster's newly paved streets to the dangerous pleasures of Vauxhall Gardens and the grand designs of the Universal Register Office, this book examines the identities, practices, and power relations of the modern city as they emerged within and transformed the geographies of eighteenth-century London. Ogborn draws upon a wide variety of textual and visual sources to illuminate processes of commodification, individualization, state formation, and the transformation of the public sphere within the new spaces of the metropolis.