Except for the transitory Peace of Amiens in 1802, France and England were locked in a mortal struggle until Napoleon was defeated by the British Duke of Wellington and his Prussian allies at Waterloo on June 18, 1815. When Napoleon overthrew the French Revolutionary Directory in November 1799 to become the real power in France, the French revolutionary wars rapidly took on the character of the old mercantile wars of the 18th century.

Indeed, the Briton Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is still considered one of the best early expositions of conservative political thought. When the French Revolution overthrew the ancient Bourbon monarchy in 1792 and later executed King Louis XVI and his wife Marie-Antoinette, conservative thought in Great Britain naturally allied itself with the monarchies of Europe against the revolutionaries in Paris (Porter, 1996). When that conflict ended with the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814, the new United States and Great Britain entered a historic friendship that has never seriously been dimmed to this day.

Having lost its main overseas market in the infant United States, Great Britain in effect retaliated with a trade war that did not really draw to a close until the “Second American War of Independence” (Porter, 1996) in the War of 1812. While the first modern age of empires could be said to have ended with the British defeat in the American Revolution in 1783, the modern age of imperialism can arbitrarily be dated from the same historic event.

Modern age of empires