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Africa during the Scramble: The Herero, the Nama and the Germans Part 1

I mean that describes pretty much all colonial histories, it just depends if something else shows up. Reminder that the USA was mostly colonised because people thought North America was much narrower, so it'd only take a dozen days to walk to the west coast and then sail to China and Japan, i.e. the actual reason why Columbus et al were sailing west in the first place.

I mean there are parts of America where that's sort of true, except their covered in

*checks notes*

jungles and mountains and things.
 
All monarchs with regnal numbers of X or more sound inherently amusing and made-up to British ears, because of the apparent unwritten law that ours have to stop at VIII.

I don't know what the original French dialogue was in that panel of The Castafiore Emerald where she sees the bedroom, but the translator absolutely nails giving a 'vague absurdity' feel to Castafiore's guess.

Castafiore: What delightful old furniture! ...and a four-poster bed. It's...er...Henry the Tenth, is it not?
Nestor: Charles the First, signora.
Castafiore: Precisely what I meant, of course.

He might sound hilarious but he was genuinely bad to the bone. Not because he was cruel or particularly evil, but because he was so damnedly stupid and incurious and the prodigious debts he ran in the 1770s and 1780s and refused to rein in, or the many ineffectual cabals he led at court that prevented anything to be done to reform France bloodlessly were part of what brought about the Révolution. He was one of those who immediately left rather than entertain the idea that maybe his privileges were not worth plunging the country into turmoil, organised an army (well, an excuse for it) against France and then spent twenty-five years learning nothing and forgetting nothing.

We got shot of him in under six years, but he had been a pain in his brother Louis XVIII's ass as he had been to Louis XVI's for ten years before that, and he inflicted horrible damage to Algeria, Haiti and many other places who could not get rid of him as we did.



As for the latter:

Henry Fifteenth, isn't it?

Louis the Thirteenth, Mam.
 
I remember listening to Revolutions and being gobsmacked that the whole Algeria mess started over something that petty and stupid.

One of the most interesting things, or at least concepts, I learned from that Podcast is the way in which the various Post-Napoleonic regimes in Europe, particularly in the German states but in Restoration France as well, simultaneously acted as the Revolution hadn't happened, that it had happened and it was a Bad Thing(tm) and they way in which the various Governments at once said they were continuations of the old regimes but at the same time were something very new. Like southern German rulers, were at once ancient dynasties but at the same time held their new titles thanks to Napoleon. It was an utterly contradictory and hypocritical mess.
 
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