The Plumb-Pudding in Danger

 

Source* James Gillray’s 1805 cartoon of the French Emperor Napoleon and the British Prime Minister Pitt the Younger, not only satirised the two warring superpowers as they carved up the Atlantic and the European landmass between them, it also visualised the Victorian ‘great power’ theory of history.  Napoleon, of course, did not gobble up continental Europe for long, and Britain was not content to just patrol the seas riding on its naval supremacy. It had to cross the Channel to defeat France.  But the principles of territorial imperial competition defined much of the era, culminating in the ‘scramble for Africa’ at the end of the 19th Century, and the frustrated ambitions of Germany that led to two world wars.  For most of the postwar period, the United States apparently opposed this imperialistic view of world affairs.