Step back a hundred years…

Most amateur historical commentators seem more comfy when their perspectives are grounded in the mid twentieth century.

Yet it is really in the mid nineteenth century that some of the juiciest insights about our modern world lie. At least the ‘old’ part. 

This old world was then divvied up by massive competing empires: The UK, France, Russia, Austro-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. The latter was in decline. The Iberians had already thrown in the towel. 

Beneath these structures a patchwork of aspirations for freedom from colonial rule and self-government, often on perceived ethnic lines, were bubbling up. Poles, Greeks, Serbs etc. Germany and Italy were still messy. 

When we speak of Imperialism loosely today, we tend to think more of the seaborne kind which impacted further afield, but both the Russian and the Turkish empires were vast and touched upon many different cultures as they moved over land. The Turks were still into slavery big time at a stage where more western powers had moved on. 

There were wars based largely on alternative visions for what the future needed to look like. Internal convulsions were also commonplace, and crucially this was a period just prior to Karl Marx’s efforts to explain all of this as part of a grand narrative. 

And this is one of the things that makes the period so illuminating, for it resists our attempts to apply all the codified understandings that came later and made the twentieth century the shit show that it was.

Look closely at some of the localised convulsions and you find rich people acting progressively and poor people behaving like reactionaries. Find a slightly different angle or a peculiar first hand account, and the roles might appear reversed. 

This, I would vouch, is real history. But one often finds oneself having to pander to the WWII originalists. The trouble is that the moment your take on this in any way veers from the version in their Gospel, they go all ‘Don’t mention ze vor’. But you were only doing it for the sake of some common ground before the discussion proper…