Rome cast a long shadow over the Western imagination. The British in particular saw themselves as Rome’s spiritual heirs and named the cultural flourishing of the early 18th century an Augustan age, after the emperor who found Rome built in brick and left it in marble. Conflicts within the ­English-­speaking Atlantic world that formed the basis of Britain’s first empire climaxed in the American Revolution, prompting darker reflections. Edward Gibbon’s 

 (1776) both express anxieties about the evanescence of power. Smith believed history proved that the costs of holding Britain’s empire in America outweighed the benefits. Neither man anticipated the second British empire across Asia, Africa, and the Pacific that Piers Brendon chronicles. Gibbon’s famous work offers a model for this account, and Brendon underlines the parallel between ancient and modern empires by stressing how British elites steeped in the classics looked to Rome for ­guidance.

The wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France from 1793 to 1815 raised the British Empire to new heights.

The 1780s might seem an inauspicious moment from which to chart the revival of Britain’s empire. British historian and parliamentarian Horace Walpole predicted that the next Augustan age would occur across the Atlantic, and European rulers saw a Britain shorn of its colonies as a second- or ­third-­rate power. But Britain held Ireland, the Caribbean, and Canada, and its public finances proved far more resilient than those of its French rival. Brendon argues persuasively that the “pugnacious nationalism” sparked by the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France from 1793 to 1815 raised the British Empire to new heights. Control of sea-lanes and commerce secured by strategic chokepoints from Gibraltar to Cape Town and Singapore created parameters for a revived empire in the early 19th ­century.

As “an English barrack in the Oriental seas,” India played a central part in consolidating British power in Asia in the 1790s. It served as a secure base and a source of manpower, and provided tax revenues and a captive market for British exports that more than made up for losing America. Britain’s imposition of order and progress, which often meant Westernization, touched off a bloody uprising in 1857. Afterward, direct rule and paternalistic accommodation of native customs stabilized India. But Edmund Burke’s earlier insistence that colonial govern­ment was a trust exercised for the governed became what Brendon calls an “ideological bacillus” that would prove fatal to empire once colonies educated to venerate British liberties grasped for their own ­independence.

The question of how a society committed to liberty could sustain an empire became ines­capable, and Rome offered little guidance. Liberty as the ultimate solvent of empire gives Brendon a running theme. Policy toward settlement colonies focused on avoiding mistakes made earlier in America: Britain granted responsible government as soon as colonies proved themselves able to exercise it; its leaders now preferred trade over the burdens of governing distant territories and their turbulent popu­la­tions. Guiding colonies to ­self-­government worked in Australia and Canada, where emi­grants filled largely empty lands, and even in New Zealand, where colonists, restrained by administrators, reached a modus vivendi with indigenous ­peoples.

Elsewhere, particularly in Africa, empire took a different turn as the old preference for trade gave way to opening territory for exploitation, and natives faced displacement or subjection. Rudyard Kipling ominously remarked of the Sudanese, to whom he believed British colonizers had brought “civilization,” that “if you give any man anything that he has not painfully earned for himself, you infallibly make him or his descendants your devoted enemies.”

Even before imperial sentiment peaked following Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897, Indian nationalism was rising and the Irish were agitating for home rule. Britain’s empire reached its widest extent as a superpower be­tween the world wars, but its weakness was apparent even before decolonization after World War II through the transfer of Hong Kong to China in ­1997.

Brendon dwells on the petty injustices of empire that alienated subject peoples, and his account emphasizes the decadence and inequality inherent to imperialism. One need not lapse into nostalgia to discern a more complex story. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, among others, has noted that Britain brought peace, invest­ment, and development, along with the suppression of horrific tyranny and injustice, to the lands it colonized. In many places, decolonization has produced failed states, ­low-­level anarchy, and a wistfulness for imperial rule. Britain itself did not have to choose between empire and irrele­vance, as Brendon suggests. Revival based upon a dynamic commercial economy, rather than de­cline, has been the British story of recent years. So Adam Smith may have been right about the burdens of empire after ­all.

 is an assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University and a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He is the author of

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997

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William Anthony Hay on the decline and fall of the British Empire.

Why the Sun Finally Set

The Duke of Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, fought in Belgium in June 1815, has become synonymous with utter defeat. But Wellington himself noted the difficulty of explaining this historic encounter: “Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost,” he later remarked, but none can recall their exact order or timing, “which makes all the difference as to their value or importance.”

British military historian Jeremy Black has solved the conundrum by synthesizing competing accounts into a sharp narrative that locates the battle within the wider context of warfare during the long 18th century. Into this discussion he weaves an account of the clash between Wellington, a soldier steeped in ancien régime war methods, and Napoleon, the revolutionary who had upended Europe. Their personalities shaped the battle and its outcome, and are one reason why Waterloo remains a subject of enduring fascination. But Black draws on his considerable erudition and archival experience (he is a former editor of the journal 

) to show that the Battle of Waterloo—which destroyed Napoleon’s army and inflicted severe casualties on Wellington’s multinational force (British, Dutch, Belgian, and German)—was more than a clash of personalities. It marked a pivotal event that made possible almost a century of peace in Europe. 

The prolonged warfare sparked by the French Revolution, Black points out, had driven tactical innovation, but many of the events at Waterloo were determined by methods of warfare that had remained largely unchanged in the nearly 20 years of constant conflict since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. Both sides relied on close-­quarters fighting, which resulted in heavy casualties. Drill and discipline thus prepared units to remain intact and under their commander’s control in the face of death and injuries. Deploying soldiers in close formations maximized the effect of smooth-bore muskets with limited accuracy, and also served to counter the confusion and low visibility caused by the smoke that clouded the battlefield after the first volley.

Yet 18th-century warfare had a more dynamic character than these precise deployments and strict training suggest. In the American War of Independence, both France (which intervened in 1778 on the American side) and Britain were required to project power overseas and operate in environments that demanded flexibility. From 1789 onward, the French Revolution cleared the way for military innovations—including conscription and the use of divisions, units of combined arms that could operate independently or together—that Napoleon developed and systematized. Massed infantry columns, which overwhelmed his enemies’ defensive lines, as well as improved forms of technology such as more mobile artillery, were key to Napoleon’s military victories. Black compares Napoleon to Britain’s naval hero, Horatio Nelson, in his determination to engage the enemy and win.

The careers of Napoleon and Wellington traced intersecting trajectories during the decade before their encounter at Waterloo. Napoleon dominated Europe by defeating the armies of his rivals, but overreached by invading Russia in 1812. Wellington gained his first experience during failed expeditions in the Netherlands during the 1790s, then won renown in India in campaigns that consolidated British power in the subcontinent. He expressed confidence in his ability to take on the French, mainly because he regarded their innovative system as weak against troops with enough discipline to hold their position.

Waterloo came about as a result of Napoleon’s bid to regain the French throne after his exile to Elba the previous year. The allied powers, busy negotiating a European settlement at the Congress of Vienna, scurried to respond. Napoleon first met a Prussian army whose defeat alerted Wellington to the location of the French army and deprived Napoleon of the element of surprise. At Quatre Bras and then two days later near the village of Waterloo, British infantry staved off French attacks. Wellington chose his ground well, encamping on a ridge that afforded him access to Prussian support. In the battle that followed, Napoleon’s blunt attacks, using heavy cavalry and infantry in columns, met their match in Wellington’s defensive formations of lines and hollow squares that enabled British infantry to withstand the shock of cavalry charges. It was the army that embodied change that was routed, and Napoleon’s overthrow in France followed days later.

Waterloo was a crucial victory in what Black calls “the struggle against the unreason of tyranny” to bring Europe a century of peace and liberal capitalism. But the battle’s toll on both sides prompted Wellington’s reflection that nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

 is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University and a fellow of Britain's Royal Historical Society. He is the author of 

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The Battle of Waterloo was much more than an example of total defeat; It marked a pivotal event that made almost a century of peace possible in Europe. 