alcuin

Fair to assume that the library of Alexandria contained books written by the most erudite scholars and philosophers of their day, not Joe and Jane and their cohort of terminally online gatekeepers.

These British Blue Books reports were based on country-wide surveys conducted for the Parliament and as such were anything but anectodal. I specifically quoted an American magazine to emphasize how visible this misery was even to a foreign observer. In the case at hand, they surveyed some of the most populated English factory towns which your "average worker" would have called home. Not the "slums of Victorian cities", to quote historian Sheridan Wayne Gilley, where life was even harder for the "half-heathen multitudes of the Victorian urban poor". Just those average workers which had been "herded into factories and workshops, subjected to industrial regulation, and denied the fullest political freedoms". You get the picture.

Forgot to add:

>Britain's century of hegemony came afterwards

Another popular misuse of the term hegemony that's in line with the retrospective aggrandizement I mentioned earlier. It suits the monolithic power held by some ancient Greek city-states over their neighbors (whether economic, military or cultural), but not the power and influence Britain had to share with France through much of the the 19th century in the colonial world.

You can find evidence for this flawed retrospection in the modern and recurring (mis)characterizations of former British influence. For example, the alleged dominance of the British Pound among central banks (when in reality most international transactions were still settled in bullions, while half the world was effectively using the French-based LMU); its predominant role in abolishing slavery through prosecution of slave-ships (which hardly affected the US and was only accomplished with the willing participation of the French Republic); its central role in the dissemination of cultural and scientific publications (despite surveys showing that in 1870 French was by far the dominant language for global publications in agriculture, applied sciences, commerce, industry and technology). Remember that it was post-WW1 America that helped English replace French as the lingua franca, not the UK. There's a reason Disraeli was still speaking in French with Russian diplomats in 1877. That's not what a "world hegemon" does, and using such exaggerations does a serious disservice to history.

Sorry but this reply is too oblique for me to provide a constructive rebuttal. Fact of the matter is, Russia was the beginning of the end for Napoleon whose fate was sealed through a series of timeline-altering strategic blunders that more ample supply chains would not have remedied.

At the risk of repeating myself, those 65 nations were comprised of 80% impoverished Indians who struggled with decades of recurring famines. Power was being defined on the European continent through much of the 19th century and 20th century. See the intro to "The Grand Chessboard" where the author expounds on the idea that only Napoleonic France and the US came close to world hegemony, as well as my other replies in this thread.

See my reply to BoxOfRain above. The grand chessboard was continental Europe. Britain and its sub 10 million people was a naval nuisance that would not have fundamentally altered Napoleon's self-sabotage on the continent. He called it a "nation of shopkeepers" for a reason.

Chesapeake, on the other hand, sealed the birth of a world-changing nation.

A British loss at Trafalgar would not have prevented the Prussians from tipping the scale in favor of the anti-Napoleonic coalition at Waterloo ten years later. And for good reason: continental Europe was the center of world power, the main chessboard where it was measured and exercised, not overseas backwater where naval blockades could only go so far. And I'm only paraphrasing Brzezinski's famous book here.

>British workers were very well paid by continental standards

See my reply to jjtwixman above which rebukes this misleading metric. In fact, the cited account is particularly telling in that it is made in comparison to continental standards.

>What’s the Bertrand Russell quote?

From memory, it was something about the English belief that their naval supremacy was like "a law of nature", only to have it shattered in one day by a country with little naval history (Germany). Together with the equally short-lived delusion that "the whole world would become exactly like England".

And I don't know why you chose such a misleading metric as wages rather than actual living standards of the British working class as late as 1919. From McClure's Magazine:

>Every European visitor who has traveled through the United States has commented upon the stature of men and women in our factory towns as opposed to the factory classes in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds. The Blue Book Reports of the British Parliament have stressed the number of British working men with dwarfed physique. Investigation shows an abnormal number of young men whose optic nerve was so imperfect they could not see the sights of a rifle; whose auditory nerve was weak; whose vital force was not sufficient to develop enamel upon the teeth; whose heart action was feeble and whose respiration was sub-normal. British students find the explanation in dark tenements, insufficient food, want of playgrounds where boys and girls could excercise and build their bodies, in child labor, in pregnant women who worked up to within a month of their confinement.

Yes, the bad teeth stereotype might be a living residual of these severe deficiencies (you can still see it in many parts of post-USSR Eastern Europe as well). And before you claim it was any better in the 19th century, know that there's an entire scholarly field devoted to the miseries of the Victorian proletariat.

The truth is, Britain simply did not have the wealth to accommodate its population tripling in size in the span of a few decades. You can still get a sense of this struggling working class feel today by walking through just about any English town and looking at its endless rows of compact, gloomy-looking houses and people.

>but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.

Interesting to see this popular myth still being regurgitated when someone as perceptive as Bertrand Russell who lived through part of it admitted it was self-aggrandizing propaganda. In truth 80% of the British "Empire" were impoverished Indians. While back at home the Blue Books were churning out shocking reports of the misery and physical state of the British working class compared to their American and European peers. Read the archives from the early 20th century for a real eye-opener. And to top it all off, the "rule the waves" trope when Britain lost the Battle of the Chesapeake, aka the one naval battle that truly mattered in its history.

As far as your sense of humor goes, perhaps you can find a different niche than disrespecting the memory of the 100,000 French soldiers who died in the early weeks of WW2 precisely because none would surrender? That 90s revisionist trope to shame the French for not being neocon enough is beyond stale.

Is this based off that one revisionist trope?

It's a nice vibe history you've got going on here but unfortunately it has little to do with reality. I recommend starting with the disastrous reign of Alexios III who had drained Constantinople's treasury years before the Crusaders arrived to understand the bigger picture. Ransacking their own capital in the name of internal strife has been a Byzantine specialty since the Nika riots of 532.

King Sigurd is a bad example for two reasons. One being that you are implicitly conflating Scandinavians with Vikings, when the latter were a subset of pirates largely disjoint from the aristocracy to which Sigurd belonged. The second is that Sigurd and his men did in fact attack and plunder fellow Christians on their way to Jerusalem when they stopped in Galicia in the winter of 1108. You can read about it in the Historia Compostelana.

I don't know where you are reading about his work, but his Aristote au mont Saint-Michel isn't about his ideas or beliefs, it's about providing historical evidence of significant intellectual developments in the early middle ages as well as translations of key ancient texts in French monasteries half a century before they were alledgedly imported from the Arab world, which completely changes the narrative of knowledge transmission. That's his main thesis as far as I can recall.

> That story begins in a palace library nearly a thousand years ago, at a time when most of Western Christendom lay in intellectual darkness.

Laughable revisionism already thoroughly debunked by Sylvain Gouguenheim many years ago. A real shame as it makes me doubt the objectivity of the entire article.