ABSTRACT
Background While the Americans were fighting one another, their former colonial masters, the British, were building themselves the largest empire ever known. In 1815, Britain’s victory over Napoleonic France secured British hegemony in the Western world. But Britain’s supremacy did not bring it peace. It is true that during the nineteenth century the British avoided major European conflicts (with the one exception of the Crimean war of 1854-1855), but elsewhere they were almost continually at war, fighting a succession of small campaigns in Africa and Asia. According to one list,1 there were only two years (1869 and 1883) during the entire 64-year reign of Queen Victoria when Britain was not at war somewhere on the globe.
