Claim: Britain had been at war with France for a decade and was on the brink of losing the Napoleonic Wars, when Barbauld presented her readers with her shocking Juvenalian satire in the song Eighteen Hundred and Eleven in 1812; wherein she argued that the British empire was waning and the American empire was waxing.
Evidence: Britain had been at war with France for a decade and was on the brink of losing the Napoleonic Wars, when Barbauld presented her readers with her shocking Juvenalian satire. Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812) is a poem by Anna Laetitia Barbauld criticizing Britain's participation in the Napoleonic Wars. She argued that the British empire was waning and the American empire was waxing.