Operating through direct physical violence alone, he carried out a series of sexual assaults and killings that made him one of Hong Kong's most prolific convicted serial killers. The designation of his own hand as a weapon — which he reportedly called his "fork" — reflects a calculated intimacy to the crimes that courts ultimately answered with eleven concurrent life sentences.

His prominence in civic life — co-founding a university, establishing a bank, serving in government — ran in direct parallel with his role in the slave trade, and he used all of it to defend the institution aggressively. When Rhode Island passed one of the first anti-slave-trade laws in the new republic, Brown worked systematically to undermine it, bringing his wealth, political connections, and public platform to bear against his own abolitionist brother and others who challenged him.

His thirty-year reign reshaped European geopolitics in ways that outlasted him by generations — largely through miscalculation. After dismissing Bismarck and taking personal control of foreign policy, Wilhelm pursued German prestige through naval expansion, colonial competition, and a series of diplomatic confrontations that steadily narrowed the possibilities for a stable European order. When the crises of 1914 arrived, the alliances and antagonisms his government had helped engineer left little room to maneuver. He abdicated in 1918 as the empire he had inherited — and arguably squandered — collapsed around him.