he non-European world more remarkable than that of any previous
age. The main part in this extension was played by Britain, who found
herself left free, without serious rivalry in any part of the globe, to
expand and develop the extraordinary empire which she possessed in
1815, and to deal with the bewildering problems which it presented. So
marked was the British predominance in colonial activity during this
age that it has been called the age of British monopoly, and so far as
trans-oceanic activities were concerned, this phrase very nearly
represents the truth. But there were other developments of the period
almost as remarkable as the growth and reorganisation of the British
Empire; and it will be convenient to survey these in the first instance
before turning to the British achievement.

The place of honour, as always in any great story of European
civilisation, belongs to France. Undeterred by the loss of her earlier
empire, and unexhausted by the strain of the great ordeal through which
she had just passed, France began in these years the creation of her
second colonial empire, which was to be in many ways more splendid than
the first. Within fifteen years of the fall of Napoleon, the French
flag was flying in Algiers.

The northern coast of Africa, from the Gulf of Syrtis to the Atlantic,
which has been in modern times divided into the three districts of
Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco, forms essentially a single region, whose
character is determined by the numerous chains of the Atlas Mountains.
This region, shut off from the rest of Africa not only by the Atlas but
by the most impassable of all geographical barriers, the great Sahara
desert, really belongs to Europe rather than to the continent of which
it forms a part. Its fertile valleys were once the homes of brilliant
civilisations: they were the seat of the Carthaginian Empire, and at a
later date they constituted one of the richest and most civilised
provinces of the Roman Empire. Their civilisation was wrecked by that
barbarous German tribe, the Vandals, in the fifth century. It received
only a partial and temporary revival after the Mahomedan conquest at
the end of the seventh century, and since that date this once happy
region has gradually lapsed into barbarism. During the modern age it
was chiefly known as the home of ruthless and destructive pirates,
whose chief headquarters were at Algiers, and who owned a merely
nominal allegiance to the Sultan of T