Whenever History seems to conform to a contemporary political hobby horse, rest assured that someone is almost always using dishonest sleight of hand. History is a wild stallion and rarely fits into convenient stalls for anyone.
Beware of Pseudo History
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Didn’t the Byzantine Empire last a while?
And what about that Holy Roman Empire? (… just teeing up the Charlamagne song for you 😀 )
Venice held up for more than a millennium, and was a dominant power from 1100-1500. The Han ruled China for four centuries. The majority of France was under a continuous series of kings for, what, 600 years?
France had a portfolio of overseas dependencies prior to 1830. Not much of an empire. The dependencies in question consisted of trading posts, coastal settlements, islands, and ripuarian settlements which might have had a total population of about 4% that of the metropole. About 1/2 the population of the whole was in St. Domingue, later called Haiti. After an attempt to make itself master of continental Europe (1792-1815), France settled back into the role of a national state with some dependencies. Their next effort was their multi-generational campaign to make themselves masters of the Maghreb (1830-1928) parallel to their multi stage conquest of portions of Southeast Asia (1862-93). The third was to establish themselves in West and Equatorial Africa (1895-60). The Maghreb was the only part of the world which ever saw a French colony with a population exceeding five digits in number. How do you periodize this history?
Another giveaway: you could just as easily argue that the US as presently understood began in 1812, or 1865, or 1917, or 1965.