Fred and Loathing on The Internet

English Monarch Names Get Boring After Æthelred I of Wessex

2024-Feb-05

It is a blog post for rejoicing! That big refactoring that has been talked about in these very blog posts over the past few months has been deployed. The branches have been merged, bringing you the very words you are reading. Deploying was much easier than I imagined. Getting my domain to point to the new app was just a matter of changing a line in the config file in my web server. There were a few snafus along the way that were handled with aplomb, if I do say so myself, by the operations team. For yet to be discovered reasons my custom sort line for arranging the year-month groups on the blog landing page was not acceptable by my production Python environment. The decision was made to comment it out in the prod version. Work has begun on finding a workaround for this. When comparing the package list between the dev and prod environment, it was noticed that quite a few libraries in dev are versions ahead of their production counterparts. Perhaps that could allow my custom sort to work in prod.

Testing for how the app looks on a phone screen is never performed until after deployments. The new templates for the Spotify section are unreadable on phone screens. I’ll make some simple templates that get served when the request header mentions the client is a phone.

What we have for today on the blog book chat today is a discussion of the 20 hour audiobook Geography Is Destiny by Ian Morris. That’s right, another non-fiction book about English history! This one takes a more serious tone than Uruly, although the author does make japes here and there that got a rise out of me. The accusation of anglophilia is something I can admit to, but not with any good reason. Convenience is my best guess. I have a curiosity for most histories and English is my first language. Those put together have given me an interest in stuff like The Battle of Hasting, Magna Carta, Oliver Cromwell, and the Balfour Edict.

This book covers every single one of those items. Maybe not the Balfour Edict, or at least not in anything more than name. The others definitely get their due. Newbies to the thousands of years of British islands and peoples have a lot to absorb in the 20 hours of the audiobook version. The author lays down some preliminary concepts that he insists are what can define the character of the peoples of England. These concepts are geographic, as the title of the book would suggest. I can’t tell if Ian Morris drinks fervently from the fountain of Geopolitics. He does introduce Mackinder and his maps, with the UK/England’s position in relation to its axis of power.

He often uses the word ‘counterscarp’ which was somewhat difficult to understand when only heard in audio form. In literal terms it means a fortification style that bottlenecks invaders. England or the isles, has a Stone Age-old counterscarp usually just on the other side of the English channel. England can only be invaded thoroughly by access points, with the Low Countries or Normandy having the only coastlines that make it easy. The better the naval technology of the invaders, the more access points England has to offer. As technology improved, the North Sea became a counterscarp that needed shoring up to prevent Viking incursions. The author eventually makes the idea of the European continent being the ‘counterscarp’ to the USSR.

This counterscarp is almost the inversion of the ‘buffer zone’ idea I have heard used in geopolitical opinions about Russia. Russia is the antithesis of England, the liberal sea power. Russia is an authoritarian land power because there is no bottleneck for invaders, only wide open invasion gateways. Invaders can come into Russia from every direction except the icy north. Russia has to worry about all directions, while England has only a few invasion routes, even counting the soft underbelly that is the border with Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. I suppose Morris is a geopolitical enthusiast.

Thatcher’s Law, named after the Iron Lady, is another item he repeats. This law dictates that England has to keep an eye on the European continent because England is a member when its convenient. I have heard of England engaging in ‘the balance of power’ politics with diplomacy and world-famous espionage to make sure no one power on the continent grows powerful enough to threaten them. I did not hear an explicit connection between ‘Perfidious England’ mucking about in European politics being the same as Thatcher’s Law. I wish I paid more attention to what the author meant when he introduced the concept early in the book.

The character of the decisions made throughout the span of 6000ish years did consistently adhere to the author’s idea about how geography destined the English to be the English. The names of kings and eventually prime ministers come rolling down the pages yet they are not the main characters pushing along the march of history. Instead the story of England here is that of masses of people moving into the isles, then insisting nobody else do that. They riot and have religious opinions. The whole of Europe is a character, with the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, and the The EU being the stand-in for the continent as a whole that England can define itself in relation to. At times it felt odd having Margaret Thatcher appear in the same book that had been talking about bronze age farmers.

The oddness shifted once the last bit that, dealing with 21st century history, had the author’s opinions more nakedly on display, sounding more like a pressing of-the-moment political screed warning about the impending economic rise of China being what should worry England, or Europe in general. That is if they still want to be great nations now that great powers have been off the table since WW2. Almost a second book about England’s current political situation appended as an epilogue to a one volume history of England up until the year 2000.

The book is not something I’d write down in the annals of my historical reading as a cornerstone of my learning. The pre-Modern stuff did give me a lot of tangents I want to look deeper into. A 567 page one volume survey of one nation across thousands of years is a difficult subject to become a memorable book. I enjoyed the ride it took me along from the first wave of agricultural immigrants that pushed out the original hunter gatherers on the isles in the Stone age all the way up to Brexit.

On a side note, the voice actor Matt Bates started to cut loose in the latter third of the book. Prior to that he used his same British speaking voice for all parts, perhaps with some embellishments for quoted lines. The twentieth century characters from around the globe often get his rendition of their respective accents. He even does a voice for Margareth Thatcher joking about being a terrifying lady when she is applying her nighttime routine in her dressing gown. His Ronald Reagan is spot-on, his generic American accent obviously inauthentic and a bit unnerving and he does a one with more Southern affectations for W Bush.