I’ve been watching a lot of QI lately, and that was a topic in a recent episode I watched. You basically got it exactly.
The whole ‘pilgrims escaping religious persecution’ story is an absolute myth. The puritans basically wanted to be able to persecute others for not following their beliefs - they were the persecutors. It’s wild (and similar to what we’re seeing today).
So, the wannabe theocrats we have today are correct about the pilgrims wanting a theocracy (in 1620), but the people who we consider the Founding Fathers didn’t actually found the country until 157 years later.
That’s a big gap of time they’re overlooking / disregarding.
Maybe we should just set them adrift like England did and hope for the best.
Well, more broadly, the age of imperial colonialism was bad for pretty much every civilization said empires came into contact with. The Spanish and Portuguese were doing heinous shit for centuries. Later, the Dutch, French, Belgians, Germans, Brits, the US (don’t forget the Native American genocide and the Monroe Doctrine, amongst other things), and others got in on the action (Japan is in this club too, largely taking their inspiration from the Portuguese and the Brits, but for mostly contextual reasons of “they seriously pissed off two much bigger empires right as they were getting into the positive economic feedback loop” - aka the Pacific Theater of WW2 - had their imperial colonial era substantially truncated).
More pointedly: empires existed before the age of European colonialism, but what with the advent of the age of sail, the Europeans unfortunately went down a road that was on average (arguably) far more nakedly exploitative and obviously unsustainable in the long run than any empire in history (excepting the Mongol empire, of course, which was more or less just Genghis doing a huge zerg rush with early-game cavalry and mounted archery units).
TL;DR: any reasonably-stable country in Europe (plus the US) with enough scratch to put together a halfway decent navy was getting in on the action for literal centuries.
The British sent a bunch of crazy religious dicks off and hoped for the best.
I’ve been watching a lot of QI lately, and that was a topic in a recent episode I watched. You basically got it exactly.
The whole ‘pilgrims escaping religious persecution’ story is an absolute myth. The puritans basically wanted to be able to persecute others for not following their beliefs - they were the persecutors. It’s wild (and similar to what we’re seeing today).
So, the wannabe theocrats we have today are correct about the pilgrims wanting a theocracy (in 1620), but the people who we consider the Founding Fathers didn’t actually found the country until 157 years later.
That’s a big gap of time they’re overlooking / disregarding.
Maybe we should just set them adrift like England did and hope for the best.
So much of the world is the fallout of the fucking brits screwing things up
Well, more broadly, the age of imperial colonialism was bad for pretty much every civilization said empires came into contact with. The Spanish and Portuguese were doing heinous shit for centuries. Later, the Dutch, French, Belgians, Germans, Brits, the US (don’t forget the Native American genocide and the Monroe Doctrine, amongst other things), and others got in on the action (Japan is in this club too, largely taking their inspiration from the Portuguese and the Brits, but for mostly contextual reasons of “they seriously pissed off two much bigger empires right as they were getting into the positive economic feedback loop” - aka the Pacific Theater of WW2 - had their imperial colonial era substantially truncated).
More pointedly: empires existed before the age of European colonialism, but what with the advent of the age of sail, the Europeans unfortunately went down a road that was on average (arguably) far more nakedly exploitative and obviously unsustainable in the long run than any empire in history (excepting the Mongol empire, of course, which was more or less just Genghis doing a huge zerg rush with early-game cavalry and mounted archery units).
TL;DR: any reasonably-stable country in Europe (plus the US) with enough scratch to put together a halfway decent navy was getting in on the action for literal centuries.