One of the most popular books of Victorian Britain was Sir Edward Creasy’s The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, originally published in 1851. The copy I have is from the illustrated third edition published by Macmillan in 1905, by which time the book had been in print continuously for fifty-four years and reprinted no less than forty-five times. There was an edition published in London as late as 1960, and Da Capo Press reprinted it here in 1994 (404 pages, $16.95). Creasy wrote the work after his return from serving as Chief Justice of Ceylon. Although he would now be dismissed as a “gentlemanly amateur,” the scholarship he brought to the work was respectable enough and better than that of many academics writing today. Still, there is such a gulf between his work and current assumptions about the way history should be written that Creasy and his book, no matter how popular or scholarly they might have once been, are today regarded as museum pieces, of interest only for what they reveal about the ideology of Britain in the age of high imperialism. There are two main offences Creasy commits that put him out of step with modern taste.

For a start, Creasy’s view of what were history’s most decisive battles would be regarded today as narrowly Eurocentric, a string of events more relevant to determining the political boundaries of Western Europe, especially those of Britain, than of the world at large. Only one of his