Sea and land are different wars
Mastery of one did not give the other.
Legal modernisation and nationalism both claim 1806-15 as a birthday. Both claims are partly true.
British sea power and the gold standard politics of the next century sit on Trafalgar's afternoon.
Lessons
Logistics bind genius
1812 is the exhibit.
Occupations have politics
Spain was not a parade route.
Allies must stay paid and agreed
Britain's subsidies and the Trachenberg plan were as important as any marshal.
Legends outlive settlements
The political Napoleon of 1840 and 1851 is part of the war's history.
Unresolved
Full 1812 civilian counts
Still estimates.
Haitian indemnity afterlife
A financial sequel that lasted into the twentieth century.
Looted art
Some Napoleonic seizures still sit in museum ethics debates.
Medical history of the retreat
Typhus and cold -- research continues.
Shifts
End of the Holy Roman Empire
1806: a thousand-year legal world closed.
British maritime century
Trafalgar to 1914 as a naval-political era.
Nationalism as a mass fact
German and Spanish reactions as much as French export.
Congress habit
Crisis management by ambassadors -- until it failed in 1914.
Outlook
Bicentenaries passed
2015 Waterloo research is now the public baseline.
Wider Atlantic syllabus
Haiti is moving from footnote to chapter in English-language surveys.
A museum war
New battlefield archaeology at Waterloo still tweaks the afternoon, not the outcome.
Risk
closed era
The coalition wars are historically closed. Their live residue is analogical (hegemony, occupation, sea power) and legal-cultural (codes, museums), not a pending armistice.
Staff colleges taught Napoleonic "principles" into the twentieth century -- sometimes as dogma that 1914 then punished.
The Invalides tomb is still a French political stage.