Kontextmaschine

20th October 2018

Question with 5 notes

Anonymous asked: What countries besides the USA and Japan do you have a good grasp on the history of, for someone who only reads the two relevant languages? Has the list changed in the last ten years? Will it in the next ten?

In the last decade I’ve gotten better at understanding the emergence of “France” and “England” and how those wacky kids kept up with things; about the use of canals as pre-motorized internal routes; about how the Dutch independence from the Habsburgs worked with local elites summoning a nationalism against empire, and how the “compact” idiom coming out of that influenced the Pilgrims and later republicans

And I kinda expect things to progress that way decade by decade, I might never nuts-to-soup master a Westphalian state again but who says that’ll still matter when we admit the UN failed