The History Thread!

Well, and we all know what the German equivalent of "Agree" is.

"WE SHALL HAVE OUR VENGEANCE!!!"

Which they did. Which is why Vienna and the subsequent treaties after it are still regarded as failures for not being able to prevent the next world war.

Yeah, the only real change for the Dutch post-Congress of Vienna is that they recognized the de facto hold of the Orange-Nassaus on the stadtholdership and made them monarchs. And they gained the Southern Netherlands from Austria, which didn't end well.

Actually, one could reasonably trace the Great War to the Congress. And it was the war to end all wars, in a certain sense - it killed European imperialism. Sure, the British and the French had colonial empires post-war, but the expansion of colonialism was halted.

edited 16th Mar '11 5:33:58 PM by Kinkajou

What did happen after that, IMO, is the world powers, already too used to exploitation of colonies, found it very hard to maintain an economic development based on an ever-expansion of colonies like before. Which is the turning point of the global balance of power towards the US, since the US of A was pretty self-contained as far as raw material went and did not really need an extensive colonial system to function well.

And Versailles temporarily killed off Germany as a Great Power, with disastrous results. It also strangled the Austrian and Ottoman empires.

If you ask me, those British and French League of Nations "mandates" (colonies by another name) were what caused the Middle East to suck.

So do you think that situation will repeat itself if people colonize other planets?

From what I've read, you seem to be right about the Middle East and the French and British Mandates.

edited 16th Mar '11 5:43:31 PM by AlirozTheConfused

If we do so competitively.

The mandates were almost the exact wrong thing to do, taking the place of the Ottomans as subjugators after promises of freedom.

And you could argue that the Ottomans were more lenient towards the Arabs than the British and French were; the latter allied with tribes who didn't like the Ottomans and obviously promoted them (which is why we have the damned Sauds in Arabia).

Clarify: If there is a finite number of inhabitable planets with a finite number of resources, then it's gonna be a zero-sum game and everyone will kill one another for the better share again.

But the point with a sufficiently advanced civilization is that the number of both would be infinite. Then everyone can go on their merry way and bring Earthly civilization to the depths of space.

Anyway, back on topic.

edited 16th Mar '11 5:52:53 PM by ArgeusthePaladin

Well, it's not like they would ally with tribes that liked the Ottomans after kicking out the Ottomans, would they?

Or they could, you know, prove that they were there to be the better master than the Ottomans. Like Rome did to many tribes it subjugated - they basically said "Come join the Roman Empire! We have free water, arena matches, quaint latifundae, democracy, health care and a big-ass army that will kick your behind soundly if you don't!"

The first five before the last.

edited 16th Mar '11 5:57:21 PM by ArgeusthePaladin

Of course, the irony was the the Ottoman empire was one of the states with the best claims to succeed the Roman Empire.

Didn't the Romans have more of a democratic republic than a democracy? (Sorry, just being pedantic.)

Has anyone done that and gone a bit further by allowing the tribes to govern themselves? It sounds likely, but I can't remember any actual instances...

If they and Prussia had become a single empire, they very likely would have become a second Rome.

edited 16th Mar '11 6:01:13 PM by AlirozTheConfused

Well, there are many stages of the Roman government.

If we are speaking of the Roman Empire, then no, they basically sung "We Are All One" on a huge loudspeaker and practically assimilated everything. If we are speaking of the Roman Republic, though, they did have such entites known as Roman Allied States, which are something of a semi-autonomous tribal state that for any number of reason cannot yet be assimilated before the Republic.

And then of course we can't forget about the time all the socii decided to call a "Fuck you" and caused the Social War.

Also, I find Ottoman's claim to the Roman Empire to be quite ridiculous. It's like saying the United States is the successor of the ancient Native American tribes just because they managed to conquer the latter.

edited 16th Mar '11 6:09:34 PM by ArgeusthePaladin

Consider of course the various intermarriages the Ottoman sultans made with Greek princesses.

Ah, I remember something of the same nature happened in China. So apparently because the Han emperors whored his daughters out to Hsiung-nu tribal chieftains, they believed they had a claim to the throne after the mess that was the Three Kingdoms and Jin Dynasty.

Let's just say an even bigger clusterrape ensued, sometimes literally, sometimes not.

It's unfair to call the Congress of Vienna a failure simply because it didn't last forever. The point was to establish a balance of power between conservative monarchies, war being a source of instability that liberals could exploit to set up radical democracies. That the order survived both 1848 and 1870, delaying a general war for 99 years (when it was ironically initiated by other monarchies declaring war on Austria for no sane reason) is remarkable.

The ultimatum wasn't very sane either.

No, it wasn't. 1914 was the year everyone in power went mental.

Well, to be fair, at that time imperialistic war did not need a sane cause. Everyone went to war because they believed they could gain from the conflict, and all the reasons was just a ploy to get the guns rolling.

Admittedly, the "war to end all wars" could be seen as a family spat gone bad.

Hell, I'm surprised at how the Tsar and the British King look so much alike.◊

The European noble families are all related, don't you know?

Does having a copious amount of knowledge of the way certain people in certain times and places live count as history knowledge?

I actually only have a more general understanding of what controlled what territory and what conquered what and what events were going on where, just enough so I know what's going on around the times said people lived.

Ironically enough, I know a little more about the early history of England than of my own country  ^*

That's definitely true about royalty, but I'm not so sure about nobility. Chances are likely that Polish nobles just married within their szlachty.

edited 17th Mar '11 3:49:55 AM by annebeeche

Obviously, but this is even more extreme; Vicky wasn't the Grandmother of Europe for no good reason after all.

Of course, that was because post-Congress of Vienna they had managed to trim down the number of European states to a manageable amount (and then again in the 1860s, including 1870).

Now, the deal with the Szlachta is that at some points they account for more than 12% of the total Polish population. That's akin to around nearly a million souls, men and women, old and young, wealthy or impoverished, landed or landless.

There is no way they could be traced to any known ancestor, I think.

edited 17th Mar '11 3:52:50 AM by ArgeusthePaladin