The book actually isn't that bad, but it does show that the situation was so bad by 1815 that napoleon would have required literally everything going his way inorder for him to get a white peace.It seems that the book is full of the crappy ideas because in a reality it was other way around: each of the main allied forces agreed to commit 150,000 but in a reality Russians committed 200,000 and Austrians at least the same number. Nobody would believe that Britain is going to make a pact with Napoleon and it looks like the author does not understand a fundamental perception difference between the Bourbons and Nappy. The Bourbons were accepted as an equal party at Vienna but Nappy was Enemy #1.
The battle was a very reasonable way to have napoleon utterly crush Willington and blucher but the diplomatic moves he pulls off all have to succeed and thats gust not reasonable, the book is well researched and has convinced me that saying napoleon was doomed in 1815 a little far fetched is also a lot more likely then winning waterloo being a instant panacea for all his ills.
Even more importantly is that napoleon was falling to the same trap Britain did after the 7 years war, all his conquests where in the end a continuation of the monarchy polices of creating a defensible border for France, the problem being that absolut security for one nation means absolute insincerity for another, prussia and Austria would never have expected the borders napoleon wanted in Germany British subsidies or no, let alone most other European nations, so they formed coalitions and attacked when his empire looked week elsewhere. Gust like Britain had to deal whith after it gained massive security after the 7 years war then ended up defited by almost every European power do to weakness show in America.You forgot to add that for quite a few continental countries Britain was economically important as importer of their raw (and some processed) materials, aka, source of gold. OTOH, France in that sense was pretty much irrelevant and was mostly exporter of the “luxury items”.
Nappy was seriously trying to turn France into a substitute of the Britain economically but this was not working because France could not consume the available materials and could not produce the manufactured goods on the scale offered by Britain. Ditto for the “colonial goods”: Britain had more of them to offer and France simply did not have enough colonies and ships (*) to compete even if there was no war. Neither was Nappy offering something like the XIX century EU, aka, an open continental market, because his main goal was to protect and promote exclusively French economic interests.
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(*) In the early XIX Russian direct trade with Britain amounted to 15-30% of the imports-exports but, AFAIK, at least 80% of the total imports-exports had been carried by the British ships.