Yes, that is a good point - even in Britain there were wider currents, times when military literature seemed topical and interesting to a broad public, and times when it was very unfashionable. I thought one of the best things in Neil Ramsay's book was the way he highlighted this, especially the lack of interest in the years immediately after Waterloo (at least in accounts of the Peninsula), and then its slow build up, beginning with books like A Soldier of the 71st and Moyle Sherer's Recollections of the War in the Peninsula, until by the early 1820s there was quite a vogue for such tales (and crowds queued to see Wilkie's painting The Chelsea Pensioners at the Royal Academy Exhibition). Later in the 20s it settled into a recognised genre. (Not sure if interest diminished during Wellington's government and then the furore over the Reform Bill, but possible, although if it did happen that might be due as much to simple preoccupation with contemporary politics in a particularly eventful period rather than reaction against Wellington, although that is also possible). And so on... Clearly the boom in such material in the 1890s and early 1900s was connected with the rise of stridency and nationalism in Britain and all over Europe - which led to the defence spending, a tiny bit of which went towards the staff histories produced in the twenty years before the outbreak of the First World War. (Not sure though how to explain the revival of interest in the Napoleonic era in the 1960s and beyond, after nearly half a century in the doldrums, unless it was simply that the shadows cast by the two world wars were lightening just a little. Shadows as in competition for interest, rather than no interest at all in military history).