editor of over two dozen books that have appeared in over half a dozen languages. His books Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace (2022) and The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (2020) received critical acclaim and won the Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Awards and the Gilder-Lehrman Military History Prize. He served as an editor for the multi-volume Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars (2023).
Mikaberidze applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America, and shared the following:
Page 99 finds Louisiana in the uneasy aftermath of its transfer from France to Spain. Antonio de Ulloa, the colony’s first Spanish governor, arrived in 1766 hoping to manage that transition without unnecessarily antagonizing the French population. He avoided a formal handover, declined to raise the Spanish flag over the Place d’Armes, and retained French officials in positions of authority. Rather than smoothing the transition, however, this caution left a fundamental question of sovereignty (and identity) unresolved.Learn more about The Louisiana Purchase at the Oxford University Press website.
For my book, the Page 99 Test is somewhat successful. Although the page does not directly discuss the Louisiana Purchase itself, the uncertainty described on this page goes to the heart of the larger story I tell about Louisiana and, ultimately, the Louisiana Purchase. I am interested not simply in the diplomatic transactions by which Louisiana passed from one sovereign to another, but in what such transfers meant on the ground. Empires could exchange territories by treaty, but making those transfers real was another matter. Sovereignty depended upon institutions, commerce, local loyalties, and the willingness - or ability - of imperial governments to enforce their authority. That larger problem becomes especially visible in the second half of page 99. Ulloa attempted to impose Spain’s mercantilist regulations on a colony whose survival depended upon commercial connections extending far beyond official imperial boundaries. Louisiana merchants traded through a web of networks reaching across the Caribbean, linking French, British, and Spanish possessions. Spanish restrictions therefore threatened not merely profits but an established way of life. These tensions are crucial to understanding the Louisiana Purchase. Long before 1803, Louisiana occupied an ambiguous position between empires. Its inhabitants learned to navigate shifting sovereignties while maintaining economic and cultural connections that governments struggled to control. The Purchase was therefore not an isolated transaction suddenly conceived by Jefferson or Napoleon. It was another dramatic turn in a much longer contest over who would possess Louisiana, how that possession could be made effective, and why control of this enormous territory mattered within the interconnected worlds of North America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic.
The Page 99 Test: Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace.
--Marshal Zeringue
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