4 ms·
> This brilliant, charming, odd, driven workaholic could have turned the old industrial heartlands of Lancashire into a British Silicon Valley and perhaps Ameri
by w1ntermute 14y ago
> This brilliant, charming, odd, driven workaholic could have turned the old industrial heartlands of Lancashire into a British Silicon Valley and perhaps America’s brightest and best would have flooded east across the Atlantic.
This just another example of the British yearning for bygone days in which their country was the center of the world.
- untog 14y agoIs there anything particularly British about that, though? Harking back to a "better time" in the past seems like it's almost a global trait.
- thronemonkey 14y agoNostalgia is universal, but Britain is in the somewhat unique position of having once been a hyperpower and today being substantially less relevant on the world stage.
- olavk 14y agoNot that unique actually. Many (perhaps most) countries in Europe have some period in the past when they were much more powerful than they are now.
- tokenadult 14y agoPlenty of countries in Asia too.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoRussia happens to be in both, and it definitely suffers from this nostalgia.
- commandar 14y agoThere's a reason why a huge portion of the population in the western hemisphere speaks Spanish.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoAnd why quite a bit of Africa speaks French...
- Retric 14y agoSeems to me if anywhere Mogolia would probably suffer the most from this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mongol_Empire_map.gif http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mongol_Empire_map.gif http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Empire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Empire
- sliverstorm 14y agoExcept it ended 700 years ago, not less than 100.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sliverstorm 14y agoPerhaps not truly unique, but two things about the British Empire perhaps make it sting a little more: 1) It ended more recently than other European empires. 2) "The sun never sets on the British Empire". It was huge.
- eternauta3k 14y ago2 was also true of Spain at some point.
- davidw 14y agoUnique? Portions of Italy have seen power come and go multiple times, if you count the Roman Empire. The Republic of Venice was still a going concern when the United States was in its infancy, and had been so for hundreds of years.
- philwelch 14y agoIt's fallen empire syndrome. Britain had the largest empire in world history, and lost it within living memory, so they would suffer from it the most.
- opminion 14y agoThat feeling is not unique to the British, only they are louder about it for two reasons: they were the winning side in two huge and most recent conflicts, and they speak English so we discuss them here. Germans have seen their country recover twice, buy its poor half, and become a financial and manufacturing core amongst their neighbours. They don't even need to talk about it. French are told about La Francophonie, probably since school. Spaniards, well, even George Bush speaks some Spanish. Italians, Culture? Greeks, foundations of knowledge? Turks, the Ottoman Empire? Arab countries, al Andalus? They present themselves according to their own view and emphasis of history, it's just that we don't get to read their own views in English.