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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Plenty of countries in Asia too.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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