History of Great Britain

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I couldn't find where to start this thread so I'll plonk it here.

Well… we lost the Battle of Hastings and it all went downhill from there.

Yes! I know. Poor old Harold had to fight a war on two fronts after Stamford bridge

The Normans, basically, were a paramount influence upon the compilation of both Middle and Modern English.

Probably my favourite thing about the Battle Of Hastings is that it is believed the English troops were likely hammered as they were still celebrating the victory at Stamford Bridge

Never change England, never change.

Ever since doing an in-depth study of the Gorta Mór -- Britain's genocidal starvation of the Irish from 1845 to 1852 -- for my Behavioral Psych class, "Great Britain" is no longer very great to me, and speaking the name of Charles Trevelyan makes me want to rinse out my mouth and spit.

It was certainly a hard ask for the poor old peasant soldiers who had to stop farming and fight marauding vikings on their northern borders and then walk hundreds of miles and take on the might of the Normans. Give credit where's it's due, the old Anglo-Saxons were a hardy bunch. But then the French speaking descendants of Rollo's vikings were also battle hardened and professional soldiers. It was a done deal.

The term "great" has it's origins in the exploits of British companies like Sir Stamford Raffles, the East India company and the Hudson Bay Fur company who expanded the empire and enriches the coffers of the crown and made many in England wealthy at the expense of the newly conquered territories, The empire was no less great than the Romans, Greeks or other previous empires.

Infact the reason you live in north America and I live in Australia is because of "Great" Britain. Give credit where it's due

Yes, give credit to the country that used Australia as a penal colony, and North America for the slave trade.

If that's the case then we are the lucky recipients of that venture.

Slavery is the hallmark of all "great" empires, name me one that wasn't exploiting their subject peoples?

Welsh friend of mine recently was asked to work on a holocaust memorial project, but wassomewhat stuck on the client asking her to not directly depict the holocaust in her illustrations.
I suggested she could look into the poetry of Paul Celan, whose poems are full of intense, surreal images of death camps.
She asked me how I knew poetry by holocaust survivors, and I told her it's something you have to read when attending a German high school, as I have done.

She reacted quite amazed and mentioned that there's no such education on the British empire. .... Maybe there should be, I mean, Germans copied the concept of concentration camps from the British.... And, yeah, the germans were more efficient and direct, but the British were at it for such a long period...

I'm not sure when concentration camps were first used but the British weren't the only ones to use them. The Americans used concentration camps to house uprooted native Americans where scores of them died of disease. The Turks used concentration camps on the Armenians during the Armenian genocide. The british used concentration camps on South African Boer settlers in the 1890s.

But Hitler got his idea on concentration camps from his own people in the African colony of Namibia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_Isl ... tion_camp'

And of course the secret mass slaughter of Congolese by the Belgians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocitie ... Free_State

I said, "Great Britain is no longer very great to me", not "Great Britain is the worst country in the world" -- there are many other countries vying for that title, including the U.S. of A.

Canada seems like a nicer place.  So does the Philippine Republic.  New Zealand is also a contender for my "Best Place to Live" award.

@Fnord

Oh yes, in modern times I think a lot of folks (like me) use the United Kingdom. Perhaps the Mods can change the title of this thread to the history of the UK.

I used GB because that's what's used in the dusty old history books I have sitting on my dusty old book shelves (reminds me I need to clean them).

You actually bring up an interesting question Fnord. Collective societies like China use the People's republic as do other developing countries. "Great" might also hark back to a celebration of those rugged individualistic values that sent adventures from Britain to far flung corners of the world to conquer on behalf of the crown.

But that's the biggest lesson you learn from history, never take why things are the way they are today for granted, Learn their origins and how they came to pass. And you learn a lot about people, but most of all you learn a little more about yourself.