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