Hacker News Reader

Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

Is there anything particularly British about that, though? Harking back to a "better time" in the past seems like it's almost a global trait.

Nostalgia 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.

Not 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.

There's a reason why a huge portion of the population in the western hemisphere speaks Spanish.

And why quite a bit of Africa speaks French...

Perhaps 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.

2 was also true of Spain at some point.

Plenty of countries in Asia too.

Russia happens to be in both, and it definitely suffers from this nostalgia.

Seems 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/Mongol_Empire

Except it ended 700 years ago, not less than 100.

Unique? 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.

It'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.

That 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com