Sam A. Mustafa, Napoleon's Paper Kingdom: The Life and Death of the Kingdom of Westphalia, 1807-1813. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017. xxi+341 pp. Maps, figures,notes, bibliography, and index

In 1903, the great historian Herbert A. L. Fisher described illiterate rustics in a Hessian village puzzled by the new Westphalian administration's bureaucratic demands, concluding that "The old-fashioned folk looked on all these busy doings with great disdain."[1] Such descriptions might have been one source of inspiration for the title Sam A. Mustafa gave to his book Napoleon's Paper Kingdom: The Life and Death of Westphalia, 1807-1813. The other might have been the huge number of archival files that, seemingly, impressed him when visiting several, mostly German, archives. "Empires have risen and fallen with less of a paper trail," he contends, "than that left behind by the Kingdom of Westphalia" (p. 314). Indeed, the short-lived states, like this satellite kingdom modeled on Napoleonic France, implemented in the territories conquered by Napoleon at the beginning of the nineteenth century in many parts of Europe, left behind them an archival record that appears a bit exotic in present-day non-French archives.