"'It's been twelve hundred years since the breakup of the Commonwealth isolated them. The whole Empire rose and fell while they were alone on that one planet.'" (I, p. 549)
This is me starting to ask a question about the Breakup. See here. However, my first step was to search the blog for "The Breakup." See here. This showed that I had already discussed the question in sufficient detail and need not reiterate it yet again.
Basically, we wind up with two uses of the word "breakup/Breakup" which have to be differentiated by context but historical terminology is like that. For part of the twentieth century, "the War" meant the Great War, not the Second World War, because the latter had not happened yet.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I looked up the link you included with this blog post and several thoughts comes to mind. If we go by my revision of Sandra Miesel's Chronology of Technic Civilization, Gwydion was settled around AD 2600, as the Solar Commonwealth was breaking up. Another 1200 years brings us to AD 3800, approximately Roan Tom's lifetime. I think the regions covered by the fallen Empire and its neighbors were then still too chaotic to fit into what we see in THE NIGHT FACE. But those 1200 should be thought of as merely approximate, with the events seen in NIGHT actually occurring two or three centuries later.
Ad astra! Sean
Incidentally, for much of the 19th century the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars were referred to as "the Great War".
Didn't know.
They -were- a "Great War".
That is, they involved every country and people in Western civilization, lasted for 23 years, and killed about as many (relative to the total populations) as WW1 & WW2 did.
Eg., 1.4 million French men died in the wars between 1792 and 1815; that was when the population of France was 20 million, less than half of what it was in 1914.
So 1792 to 1815 was about equivalent to 1914-1945. Likewise, they both involved the (failed, but only just) attempt of one Great Power to establish a complete hegemony over Western Civ, a unitary state.
There were wars between 1815 and 1914, but they were one-on-one affairs, brief and far less destructive.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Just to pick some nits, not all the wars between 1815 and 1914 were one against one. The Crimean war saw the UK and France fighting Russia. And the Seven Weeks War of 1866 saw Prussia and Italy ganging up against Austria (true, the Saxons were allies of Austria). But, yes, aside from the devastation of long civil wars like that of the US in 1861-65, these wars were far briefer and less destructive.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: they were briefer and less destructive because of what they were -about-.
That was, basically, peripheral territory, questions that were strictly political (eg., "klein" vs. "Gross" in German unification), or, in the case of the Crimean War, who'd have predominant influence in the Ottoman Empire.
In 1870, Bismark wasn't trying to destroy France, or even to change its regime -- he was indifferent to that. He was trying to break its resistance to German unification, and incidentally to snaffle off some previously "German" territory to put Germany in a better strategic position.
Both 1914-1945 were -existential- struggles; about the survival or destruction of the State system, the existence of separate nations, etc.
Likewise (the exception that proves the rule) the American civil war was about existential questions.
That means that the people concerned will fight until they physically can't fight any more, and won't accept defeat until beaten flat.
(Which is why WW1 and WW2 were basically phases of the same struggle; Germany's defeat in 1918 wasn't destructive and definitive enough.)
(NB: Alsace-Lorraine had always contained large numbers of German-speakers, and most of their area had been part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. France only got them in Louis XIV's time.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree the period 1815-1866 in the Germanies was dominated by the question of who, the Habsburg Empire or Prussia, would unify Germany. A Greater Germany under Austrian rule or a Smaller Germany unified by Prussia. As we know, the Prussians won!
I thought Bismarck didn't want to force France to cede Alsace-Lorraine to the new German Reich, because that would have made France implacably hostile to Germany. I thought the Iron Chancellor would have been content with making France unable to meddle in German affairs.
Yes, Louis XIV snaffled some bits of Alsace-Lorraine, but it was Louis XV who annexed the duchy of Lorraine proper in the 1730's.
Yes, EXISTENTIAL struggles are far more devastating than wars fought for limited gains and ends.
Ad astra! Sean
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