When reading a history book the author's view of history is superimposed on the events. Of course, we could go further and start talking about various schools of thought on what history actually is in the first place, but that would likely end up in a lot of useless mental masturbation that separates academia from the real world, where results matter.

The point is that Greg (chorabliss) recommended that I read Piers Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997, whereas Lawrence James covers the same time period in a book called The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, and I have yet a third book by Maya Jasanoff called Edge of Empire which covers the period from 1750 to 1850. Clearly, each of these three authors is approaching the subject from a different angle. Brendon's title implies that the British defeat at Yorktown was the "beginning of the end", despite the fact that the Empire grew and became more powerful over the century that followed. I have yet to read the book, but I'm sure the argument has to do with the systemic approach that led to the loss of the Colonies and how it wasn't altered, etc.

James takes a more traditional approach - one can almost envision him sitting in an armchair at his club, rolling some cognac in one hand while holding a cigar in the other, wearing a pith helmet and saying, "Yes...nasty little business we had there in Malaya..."

Jasanoff's approach is more the "accidental empire" approach, where Clive "of India" had won a great deal more at Plassey than even he realized, and that the real "empire" started only when the British started to take their empire seriously and realized just what they had control over.

If any one of those books were read in isolation, just as if any biography is read without reference to another biography, the author's opinions probably go unquestioned a bit more. Wawro's Franco-Prussian War had made several claims about the Prussians' organization and their guns, when in fact the French guns were better by 1870 (certainly, the Prussian rifles beat the Austrians in 1866). The organization was certainly part of the reason the Prussians crushed the French - they held their ground under withering fire that decimated their ranks in a matter of seconds - but the real advantage was that Prussian massed artillery was able to pin down French units and allow the Prussian infantry, decimated or not, to get in close enough where their precision fire and organization would win the day. This negated the French rifles' advantages at long distances.

Ultimately, it sounds as though this biography is a failure because it so focuses on Napoleon that it doesn't provide a proper context for what was happening in the world, which is vitally important in biographies of this sort. An excellent example of a biography that provides context is Massie's Peter the Great, which is quite possibly the best biography ever written of anyone and by anyone.