Nash rightly emphasizes the debilitating impact of an inadequate supply system on the French field armies.

The NYMAS Review

The author does a wonderful job of laying out the major events clearly and logically whilst including interesting and entertaining vignettes of the involved parties both major and minor.

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Army Rumour Service (ARRSE)

"This book is a readable account of the conflict and gives a good overview of the conflict's political shenanigans."

Casemate Magazine

The author does a good job of weaving together the various elements of this story. The first part of the war was fairly simple, with the Prussians outmaneuvering the French before defeated one half of the main French army at Sedan and besieging the other half at Metz. However once the siege began there are four strands to deal with – life inside the besieged city, the actions of the German armies outside the city, the sieges of isolated French garrisons in the east, and the attempts of newly formed French armies to help raise the siege. The end result is an excellent (if sometimes rather opinionated) study of one of the most important conflicts of the late 19th century, and one that cast a shadow well into the 20th Century.

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History of War

An amazing tale of a little-known or spoken about siege that genuinely changed the world...

Books Monthly

The Siege That Changed the World is a brisk account of events leading up to the Siege, the Siege itself, and what happened when the Commune flourished for a brief spell. There are plenty of notes, appropriate illustrations, and a useful bibliography.

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Penniless Press

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

The siege in question is the siege of Paris which was the result of the collapse of Napoleon III's Second Empire as a result of the Franco Prussian War. I have read a number of books on both the war itself and more particularly the resulting siege and rise of the Paris Commune. This book is, by far, one of the best I have encountered. Most books deal with the war and gloss over the civil war it precipitated around the City of Paris or, and this is more common, they gloss over the war and focus almost exclusively on the Commune itself. This approach is refreshing in that context is always key to understanding events in their entirety, and nowhere is this more true than in a conflict like the Franco Prussian War. Here, in one volume, we glimpse the social pressures driving both French policy and French failure, their contrast with the superbly trained and far better led German forces of Prussia and her allies, and the underlying class distinctions which inform the complex relationship of the Municipality of Paris and the rest of France. Since many of these themes will play out well into the twentieth century and beyond, they are well worth the reader's time and contemplation. Insights on modern military structures and war fighting, the growth of communism and some of its underlying pressure points, the origins of the First and Second World Wars as well as the Russian Revolution are all on display here in a well written, thoughtful and readily accessible text. A must read for those interested in modern history and the cataclysmic context of the great imperial clashes of the first half of the last century.

NetGalley, William Harris