Battle of Waterloo

Waterloo is a Walloon municipality located in the province of Walloon Brabant, Belgium. On September 30, 2011, Waterloo had a total population of... 29,706. The total area is 21.03 km² which gives a population density of 1,413 inhabitants per km². Nearly one fifth of the current registered population are non-Belgian, many of whom work for institutions or companies in Brussels, a political centre of the European Union. These numbers were released by the municipality of Waterloo. The top 5 of non Belgians is as follows : French , Italians , British , Americans and Swedish . The placename is of Dutch origin. The first element is most likely water which should be understood in Waterloo not as "water" but as "wet". The second element is lo, an ancient word for "forest" or "clearing in a forest", coming from the Latin words lucus or lucum , cognate with the English place name suffix -ley or independent name Leigh. The early settlement was located on a marshy clearing in the Sonian Forest.
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The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a... continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly owing to the application of modern mass conscription. French power rose quickly as Napoleon's armies conquered much of Europe but collapsed rapidly after France's disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. Napoleon's empire ultimately suffered complete military defeat resulting in the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France. The wars resulted in the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and sowed the seeds of nascent nationalism in Germany and Italy that would lead to the two nations' respective consolidations later in the century. Meanwhile, the global Spanish Empire began to unravel as French occupation of Spain weakened Spain's hold over its colonies, providing an opening for nationalist revolutions in Spanish America. As a direct result of the Napoleonic wars, the British Empire became the foremost world power for the next century, thus beginning Pax Britannica.
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