Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812) is a poem by Anna Laetitia Barbauld criticizing Britain's participation in the Napoleonic Wars. 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. She argued that the British empire was waning and the American empire was waxing. It is to America that Britain’s wealth and fame will now go, she contended, and Britain will become nothing but an empty ruin. She tied this decline directly to Britain’s participation in the Napoleonic Wars: