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Comment by fiftyacorn | Hacker News Reader

When were the Vikings cool? Certainly interesting but the Viking invasion was multifaceted from robbing down to settling

The problem with the British empire is that were still seeing a lot of its negative impact. I mean it officially ended only 24 years ago

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Well, today?

Why do you think there are so many viking TV shows.

Are they not making British Empire shows?

If they are then I haven’t heard of them. Outside of monarchy specific things which operate in the same time period (but certainly are not the focus)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0311113/

The series "The Last Kingdom" is based on the books by Bernard Cornwell. He also wrote the "Sharpe" books, which were adapted to several TV films (starring Sean Bean). They're set around the Napoleonic Wars, with some of them in India.

Hornblower is decent as well.

There have been loads of TV series made in the UK set in India, Kenya and other parts of the Empire. Funnily enough they tend to avoid mentioning the brutality of the British in dealing with the locals e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Mau_Uprising

For some reason these shows aren't quite as popular as they used to be...

I would watch the shit out of a TV show that really told the story of the British Raj, in all its racist, bloodthirsty, brutal "glory".

perhaps Indian arts can tell that story. it's not like they lack experience with making film. I'd be surprised if there isn't anything?

And the slavery aspect - at one time Dublin was the largest slave market in Europe.

Slavery was pretty widespread in Europe until the late Middle Ages, including Christians enslaving other Christians and selling them to slave traders. 10% of the census population of the Domesday Book were slaves, not serfs. This changed when a pope (I can't remember his name off the top of my head) was concerned that Christian slaves owned by Jewish and Muslim slave-owners would convert to their masters' religions. That was just a prohibition against enslaving fellow Christians and selling slaves to Jewish and Muslim slave-traders though.

Yes to slavery being widespread in Europe of the dark ages. The church had something to do with its demise but I'm not sure it's one papal edict. Economics too.

But if "late Middle Ages" means say the time of the black death, and after, then at least in Western Europe that's much too late. By then slavery in England is long gone (or so rare as not to matter) and serfdom is in steep decline, and we are still several centuries away from European overseas slavery (no sugar islands before Columbus!)

Slavery in the islamic world was (I think) pretty continuous from the beginning until the 20th C. (Perhaps with ups and downs? There were many violent changes of leadership, over the centuries.) In the middle ages this would have been the primary meaning of slavery to Europeans -- the risk of being caught in some coastal raid and sold for labor (or for ransom, if noble). This no doubt horrified the pope but he had little power to stop this.

The collapse of the roman empire is still visible today as far as I know. Thats a pretty big event that has had a major impact on Europe as we know it, and the world at large.

In central london (London Wall is the name of the road), you can see 9-10 turrets from the original Roman city of "Londonium". I've walked this road and seen a handful of them. To be able to reach out and touch something that was built by Roman soldiers over a thousands of years ago is simply amazing to me.

One of them is set in a garden behind a church and it is really beautiful. My wife and I had a picnic there and it was surreal.

> One of them is set in a garden behind a church

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Roman_London_wal... (pictures)

I thought these two also interesting:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Roman_London_wal... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Roman_London_wal...

The first link is precisely the one I was speaking of. My employer’s UK office is at 1 London Wall so it wasn’t hard to explore and fine these.

Really fun stuff

Monty Python.

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