"The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: from Marathon to Waterloo" by Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy is a military history book published in 1851. Creasy examines fifteen battles—from ancient Marathon to Napoleon's Waterloo—that he argues fundamentally shaped the course of human civilization. Each chapter explores how these military engagements influenced world history, determining the fates of empires, securing national independence, and redirecting the progress of entire cultures across more than two millennia. (This is an automatically generated summary.)