International audience ; More than thirty years ago, Stuart Woolf published his book Napoleon's Integration of Europe, commonly considered to have been groundbreaking for what has been coined the "New Napoleonic history."[1] In contrast to the abundant historical literature devoted to the life of Napoleon and that of his family and to the numerous narratives of battles and military campaigns, Woolf focused on the actors of Napoleonic empire-building. According to Woolf, many French officials sent out to administer incorporated territories were convinced that they were the driving force behind modernization. The French administrators struggled ruthlessly to make the administration in the occupied territories uniform and to shape their societies on the model of the post-revolutionary French one. Martijn van der Burg applies the concept of integration to what he calls the "northern periphery" of the French Empire, the Netherlands and the so-called Hanseatic departments, which, as far as Napoleonic empire building is concerned, have remained understudied. Incorporated nearly at same time, in the year 1810, they belonged to the French Empire for approximately three years. In line with these historiographical trends Van der Burg aims at exploring "the ways in which Napoleon and his imperial agents tried to integrate the present-day Netherlands and Northwest Germany into the French Empire by replacing local institutions and traditional governing practices with French ones" (p. 3). In agreement with Woolf, Van der Burg, acknowledges that Napoleonic officials often had to compromise, and hence to accept limits to obtain "collaboration.