In the West, the bloody and costly Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) were followed by economic depression, political reform, famine in Ireland, civil war and imperial assertion. But the immediate global political consequence was the creation of the ‘nation state’ at the Congress of Vienna (1815–16), where Europe was carved up into countries that mirrored the languages, religions and traditions of the people who would rule them. The newly created governments were eager to justify their legitimacy as nations by employing historians to celebrate their ‘imagined community’.