Bruce Collins is Professor of Modern History at Sheffield Hallam University. He has written widely on nineteenth-century American politics and the origins of the American Civil War, and British power and imperialism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has also made a special study of siege warfare. Among his publications are The Origins of America’s Civil War, The Growth of Federal Power in American History (joint editor), White Society in the Antebellum South, British Culture and Economic Decline (joint editor), War and Empire: The Expansion of Britain, 1790-1830 and Transnational Soldiers: Foreign Military Enlistment in the Modern Era (joint editor).