Waterloo!

This is coolbert:

Two hundred years ago on this date occurred Waterloo. Those consequences of the British victory as described in the extracts from the CNN article.

 "Why Waterloo still fascinates us" by Andrew Roberts

"The Vienna Treaty that followed Waterloo gave Britain Cape Colony, Trinidad, Ceylon and various African and Asian possessions, the nodal points for what was swiftly to become a huge oceanic empire."

"With the Union Jack flying over the castle at Cape Town, the Royal Navy would always be able to keep the trade routes to British India open. After Waterloo, France was returned to much her same borders as before the Revolution and was later in the century only permitted to occupy minor and tangential colonies, often with more sand than raw materials."

"With low birthrates, lackluster industrialization vis a vis Britain, small navies, generally unproductive colonies, endemic political crises (often prompted by people with Napoleonic fantasies) and regular military defeats -- most spectacularly in 1870-71, 1940 and 1954 -- France was set on a downward trajectory ever since Napoleon's Imperial Guard broke at Waterloo"

. . . .

"The Prussian contribution to the destruction of Napoleon soon entered the mythology of the Prussian state and . . . it became an integral part of the foundation myth of Otto von Bismarck's mighty new German empire after 1870."

"For the Prussians, the battle fomented dreams of continental domination that it took two world wars to eviscerate. For the French, it extinguished those same dreams, never to be rekindled."

Consequences of Waterloo in the nutshell being:

1. Britain the unquestioned dominant world power and was to be so for the next one hundred years. Pax Britannica and no general European war for that entire period.

2. A general and slow spiral downward of French power and interest in the world. NOT ever to recover.

3. Prussia and subsequently the German Empire a continental power to be reckoned with for all that meant in the Twentieth Century!!

coolbert.