ASSORTED BREAK-AWAY BACKGROUNDS
It must have been a year and a half ago, that, confused by what was going on in Catalonia, I thought it might be relevant to review whether that bellwether Spanish province could appeal to history for its rights and desires to greater self-determination. I found it interesting and decided I’d examine the validity and background to similar projects elsewhere around the World. To impose some arbitrary and diverse order, I’d try to always deal with a region starting with a different letter of the alphabet to regions already reviewed.
Posted on Facebook, these potted histories are slowly getting lost, so here follows the work so far and on-going, in alphabetic order. So, with thanks to my niece Fiona, just click on a place you'd like to know more about below, to hyperlink straight to its potted history. Click [top] at the end of any of the essays to return back to the top of this blog.
| A - F | G - M | N - T | U - Z |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agadez | Gambela | New Caledonia | Ulster |
| Balearics | Hmong | Orcadia | Veneto |
| California | Insubria | Palestine | Wallonia |
| Darfur | Jaisalmer | Quebec | Xu |
| Extremadura | Kurdistan | Ryukyu | Yogyakarta |
| Friesland | Lusatia | Savoy | Zulia |
| Moravia | Tibet |
AGADEZ
Let’s start with a look at a region with AAA credentials i.e. African Autonomic Aspirations. As you might imagine, there are a considerable number to choose from. But recorded history to support most of their claims is somewhat lacking. There’s one region though, on the southern edge of the Sahara, that can and does appeal for restoration of a known former ancient independent state of noble standing…
When some 125,000 years ago, homo sapiens gets on the move out of East Africa, a few go east and a few go north, but some go south and west as well. As luck will have it, those that go east and north encounter the better conditions for human development – more reliable climates and more docile animals – to ultimately find the World’s first civilizations in the Levant. However, for a while, the westerners who have settled in a fertile, verdant Sahara, irrigated by rivers feeding and draining great inland lakes, are looking good.
But when the last Ice Age comes to an end c 10,000 years ago, sea levels and temperatures slowly rise, and the land-locked latitudes of the Sahara between the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn inexorably dry out, so that by c 2000 BC daily life there has become a nomadic quest for watering holes and survival. In the Asian Middle East too, tribes of people get on the move, some escaping from a freshwater Black Sea rapidly flooding with seawater through a breach in the Bosporus, but all in time finding (new) lands to re-settle (down) and exploit.
For those that become the Tuareg and other Berber tribes of the Sahara, fate dictates differently and, aided by the (difficult) domestication of the camel, these people become the voyagers of the sea of sand, providing the trading routes for salt, slaves, sugar and spices between the southern coasts of the Mediterranean and the sub-tropical lands of West Africa.
With sufficient surplus profits arising from their specialist trading skills, the Tuareg establish a series of permanently settled trading posts on the boundary between the desert and the Sahel scrub- and grasslands to the south. One of these, founded in 1449 AD, is Agadez in the foothills of the Aïr Mountains.
Remaining independent proves troublesome for Agadez and other Tuareg trading city-states like Aghat, Ahagger and Timbuktu along the desert’s edge, and at the start of the 16th C, Songhi, Africa’s greatest pre-colonial empire, grown fat on supplying gold and slaves, annexes Agadez for taxation and tribute purposes, only to lose control again within 100 years.
Agadez now remains an either wholly independent Tuareg muslim state or perhaps an informal vassal of the Ottoman Empire for the next 300 years, until France’s imperial ambitions impose the Code Napoléon across a vast swathe of North West Africa at the start of the 20th C.
Sixty years on, the French are gone, leaving a number of large, relatively arbitrarily bounded independent countries, with newly established governments, behind. One of these new nations is Niger (pop: 20 mio), of which the northern half comprises the deserted dune seas of the Ténéré and the slightly more clement uplands of the Aïr plateau: 250,000 sq. miles of mostly nothingness with an average population density of slightly less than 2 – le Région d’Agadez.
With 50% of the population living in Agadez City and in the new French FDI-supported uranium-mining town of Arlit, most inhabitants of Agadez find themselves a dangerous 15 hour, 1000km or more car journey away from Niger’s capital, Niamey (pop: 1 mio). Alternatively, if they can afford it, twice a week there is an internal flight of 3 hour duration.
Given that the legitimacy (other than applying the “I am, therefore I am” argument) of Niger as a homogenous nation is hard to assert, and given also that the Agadez region, through its new uranium and historic salt mining industries and its control of the historic trading routes for goods and people (a growth sector; so-called “smuggling” by western Europeans) is a large contributor to GDP, much of which finds its way to the capital for administrative purposes, the call for autonomy, regularly pursued by violent means, is strong. It is hard to see it going away.
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BALEARICS
As stated in the introduction to this blog, these essays came to be as a result of the violence and disturbances in Catalonia towards the end of 2017. However, I am following the alphabet now, so that particular precis will come later. But there are plenty more regions in Spain and indeed within the federation of states known as the EU where there is a rising clamour for independence (from the nation states that they are part of, not the EU), for what might be described as unenlightened reasons of self-interest (or not, it’s up to you), hiding behind claims of former nationhood (oft long usurped within a collective). So, since a good friend of mine lives there and remarked to me “Once it was a Kingdom”, let's take a quick break to the Balearic Islands...
When the Greeks founded a first trading post near present-day Palma in the 4th or 5th C BC, with extraordinary prescience they dubbed the island of Mallorca and its neighbours the Gymnesiae, since the population they found there were scantily dressed. Later under Phoenician and subsequently Carthaginian rule, this name mutates to Balearics, lightly armoured soldiers or sling-shooters, clearly less apt today than its original name.
After the Punic Wars, the archipelago becomes Roman property. The western Romans in turn are ousted by the Vandals in the 5th C AD, but the Byzantine Romans regain control within a hundred years, only to lose that again to the muslim Umayyads two centuries later.
Being remote, the exercise of power by these revolving empires is loose by necessity, and the islands gradually devolve into an independent den for corsairs and pirates. By the start of the 12th C, the kingdoms and principalities of the European Mediterranean seaboard have had enough and Pope Paschal II calls for a crusade, which is led by the House of Pisa. Palma is sacked (again, it had also been sacked by the Vikings and the Cordoban Emirate in the interim).
The Crusaders however do not stay, and control over the islands instead transfers to Almoravid Berber invaders from Morocco a year or two later, who in turn lose control to the Alhomads (their North African rivals, not the ailment).
Finally in 1229, James I of Aragon captures Palma, and puts his younger son, James II on a newly created throne. The Kingdom of Mallorca is a vassal state to the Kingdom Of Aragon, which kingdom passes to James I’s eldest son, Peter. The boys fight among themselves as do their descendants, but in 1349 Peter IV kills James III at the Battle of Llucmajor, and the Kingdom of Mallorca is no more, with the Balearics coming under the direct rule of Aragon.
At the start of the 16th C, Aragon and Castile are joined through marriage between the ruling houses, and the Kingdom of The Spains is formed. The rest is the well-known history of Spain, of which one minor facet is worth mentioning here, to whit the conquest in the 18th century of Menorca, one of the smaller islands in the Balearic archipelago, by the British Empire, and of Gibraltar also, for military strategic purposes.
Britain returns Menorca, after Menorca also having been under French rule briefly, to the Spanish Crown at the start of the 19th C. Gibraltar however has remained British to this day, but why the Balearics should be anything but Spanish just like they have been ever since the Alhomads were driven out is difficult to justify.
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CALIFORNIA
Although, as said, these little articles were initially inspired by the push for autonomy in Catalonia, the ‘Case for California’ seems more interesting to me, so ‘C’ shall deal with this cause in the first instance. The cause became more topical when D. Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and Hamas, to Ace the Trump-card, allegedly recognized Texas as a state of Mexico. It wasn't true, which is perhaps just as well, since it was the Texans (well, some of them) who sought to join the Union, and generally are quite happy being there. However, California, now, that is a different matter. The baby with the bathwater as it were…
When, just 21 years after Columbus having set foot on San Salvador in The Bahamas (probably), Vasco Núñez de Balboa, on crossing the Panamanian Isthmus, in 1513 AD discovers there is a western seaboard to the newly discovered lands across the Ocean, the Spaniards immediately set about working their way progressively up this new found coast. By 1539, they have discovered what they assume to be an island and name it California, after a mythical island of Amazon warriors from popular literature current at the time. It wasn't an island, but a peninsula: present-day Baja (Lower) California.
Could there be a sea route back to Europe or to China by heading north is now the question, and thus, in 1542 Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, a wealthy protégé of the infamous Cortés sets sail from El Salvador into uncharted waters, landing in today’s San Diego on the 28th September of that year.
There had of course already been people living along the mid-west coast of North America for up to 10,000 years, but the Spaniard’s germs and guns rather decimate them, and so Alta (Upper) California quickly becomes an uncontested (bar one Francis Drake) part of New Spain, and its coast an important staging post in a growing trade route between Central America (gold) and China (spices).
Actual colonization, however, proves difficult in the extreme. The land is inhospitable, there are no staple crops and no domesticated animals to speak of, and it is bloody hard to get to, bounded as it is by the Rockies, the desert, the sea, and the unknown North. Eventually, the Church manages to establish 21 missions along a 500 mile stretch of coast. These missions take over much territory and more is granted to a small number of adventurous settlers (typically 100 - 150 km2 per ranchero). Cattle is imported and soon everything is made of leather and everyone is eating beef.
When New Spain gains independence from old Spain in 1821, California becomes a ‘territory’ of this newly founded Mexico. However, on the land in California nothing much changes, excepting that the continuing decline of the native population effects the welfare of the missions, dependent on the native Indians as serfs. The missions – initially envisaged to last only ten years for the purpose of educating and converting the local population – are finally closed down by Mexico over a 4-year period from 1824 to 1828. The lands pass to existing and new Spanish and other European rancheros.
In 1845, Texas seeks to secede from Mexico and volunteers to be annexed by the United States of America, and war breaks out with the US. It is a war that Mexico loses, and in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico not only agrees to the annexation of Texas, but also of California and what are later to become Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, by the United States.
From here on in, California integrates further and further in its new federal association, first through the Gold Rush, and then by wisely siding with the Union against the Confederates during the American Civil War – although this was a close call. ‘After the Gold Rush’ (echo, later) and post the Civil War, the following colossal investments in infrastructure make the integration complete:
1. The mostly eastern-financed Great Transcontinental Railroad of the Western, Central and Union Pacific Railroad Companies.
2. The Panama Canal of the U.S. Military’s Isthmian Canal Commission, which takes over a failed French vanity venture for a $40m consideration in 1904, plus a further strip of land traversing the isthmus for an additional $10m from the newly recognized independent country of Panama, inter alia cleverly backing the locals in their quest for independence from Colombia.
3. The federal interstate highways 8, 10, 15, 40 and 80 across and around The Rockies, connecting San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco with the East.
Thus, no longer the almost unreachable backwater that mid-way through the 19th C Spain and then Mexico were happy-ish enough to leave to others to do something with, less than 100 years later California has become an integral state in the world’s only single language, and most affluent, common market. Enjoying the unfettered access to this great mass market, California is fortunate to attract/back a number of big winning industries, e.g. providing:
1. A refuge for an emerging movies industry from the excessive seal of Thomas Edison’s and friends’ Motion Pictures Patent Company’s monopolistic business practices in the East!
2. A tolerant home for a myriad of drug-fueled composers and musicians of popular music, e.g. this (again) alphabetically ordered if not entirely contemporaneous eclectic selection: America, The Beachboys, Crosby Stills & Nash, The Doors, The Eagles, Country Joe & The Fish, The Grateful Dead, Herb Alpert, Iron Butterfly, Jefferson Airplane, The (Dead) Kennedys, Love, The Mamas and The Papas, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, Oxbow, Pacific Gas & Electric, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Steppenwolf, Toto, Gary Puckett & The Union Gap, Suzanne Vega, The Walker Brothers, X, Neil Young (came from Canada, echo), and of course Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention!
3. Sheds and small change for the likes of Steves Jobs and Wozniak, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, enabling them all to start-up what have, via the considerable leg-up of their aforementioned home U.S. mass market, become dominant global corporations!
Now, it’s understandable Californians today may feel they have little enough in common with their Trump-voting impoverished neighbours in the northern Midwest of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and North & South Dakota and of the Appalachians-straddling central states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and (with poetic license) Oklahoma. However, given that California is what it is because it is part of the United States of America, nascent agitations for independence do seem slightly ignoble and unrealistic.
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DARFUR
‘D’ proved less easy than ABC, and in the end I had to return to Africa where I found Darfur, which does have history, but that’s not easy either. In fact, Darfur is more than a bit of a mess.
Dar Fur is Arabic for the Land of the Fur. Now some amongst you may be counter-culturally inclined, but no, the Land of Fur is not the home of the Super Furry Animals or of the SFA's sometime manager and sometime King of contraband cannabis, Howard Marks aka Mr Nice, RIP. No, it is not Wales, but a territory straddling the Marrah Mountains hemmed in between the White Nile to the East, the Sahara to the West and the swamplands of the recently seceded state of Southern Sudan to the South.
It’s the Sahel (again, well, part of it) an arid, unloved, inhospitable place, and to be honest in Darfur there’s not much history there to justify anything, and such history as there is, is not to the forefront of the minds of the rebels and the counter-insurgents making the place a living Hell today. Never mind!
The Fur are a negroid people. Their ethnicity is mixed and with a bit of a stretch it may be related to the Kingdom of Kush, a successful state back in the 3rd millennium BC centred on the confluence of the Blue and White Nile and the Atbara river, stretching north to the first Nile cataract at Elephantine.
Perennial rivals of the northern downriver Pharaohs, Kush is conquered by Egypt during the middle of the 2nd millennium BC to remain an Egyptian colony until the collapse of the so-called New Kingdom at the end of that millennium. Kush gradually gains the upper hand, and, after an initial period of Libyan Pharaohs (who may also have originated from Kush), Kushite rulers hold sway over the entire length of the Nile from the meeting of the rivers to the coastal delta, for a brief one hundred years; the period of the Black Pharaohs.
Darfur however lies to the west of all this. Sparsely peopled by a mix of Arab nomadic herdsmen in the North and settled African smallholders eking out a living on the lower slopes of the Jebel Marra in the South, history barely mentions the region, until during the 4th C AD, Kush is invaded by an expansionist Axum (present day Eritrea), and fugitives from Kush’s capital Meroe, 250 km downriver from Khartoum, settle in the Jebel Marra (Marra hills).
It takes another 1200 years or so for a strong centralised kingdom to develop in this jebel, at which stage the Tunjur, Arabs from the North West take control. The Meroites, or Daju as they are called, make a comeback when Sulayman Solong, a Daju but of mixed Arab-African stock, grabs power at the start of the 17th C.
Sulayman is a muslim and an excellent general, and he expands what becomes known as the Keira Sultanate, conquering Kordofan and Sennar to the east. The region converts to Islam and Sulayman’s successors rule Darfur until 1875 when the Anglo-Egyptian Co-Dominion in Khartoum annexes the region.
The British allow Darfur a measure of autonomy. However, when Ali Dinar, the 11th successor of Sulayman, makes the mistake of supporting the Ottoman Empire during WWI, all vestiges of independence are doomed. Britain sends in the troops and places Darfur under the central authority of Khartoum.
The Keira dynasty being of mixed race, racial tolerance during the times of the Sultanate has been reasonable, but when Britain grants Sudan independence in 1956, Darfur, a backward underpopulated province within the new nation, is left to its own devices, with the government’s primary focus the improvement of the lot of the riverine Arabs along the Nile. It’s where the votes are.
Drought in the region heightens tensions, as the settled farmers attempt to defend their small holdings from the nomad’s herds, through fencing. It is now the 1980s and Fur resentment of the relative wealth along the Nile and a perceived apartheid policy against the Fur, as well as the mayhem and confusion caused by Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi’s attempts to create a corridor of Arab muslim states across the Sahel from neighbouring Chad in the West to the Nile in the East, leads to rioting.
In 1983 and 1984 the rains fail entirely. A migration of the nomadic tribes out of the North to Darfur becomes a mass exodus of all towards Khartoum and the Nile instead. The Sudanese government labels them Chadian refugees and ships some 80,000 back to the Chad-Darfur borderlands, where there is no food.
Concurrently South Sudan’s long time agitation for independence from Khartoum boils over into a second full-scale civil war. Chaos is complete and by the end of the decade, the southern rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army has found an ally in a fledgling Darfur rebel group, the Daud Bolad.
With the Second Sudanese Civil War ending in independence for South Sudan after twenty years of conflict, in an attempt to prevent a repetition in the West, Khartoum condones and possibly even arms northern Arab militias – the Jajaweed and others – engaged in pogroms against the fence-building Darfur agriculturalists.
The successors to Daud Bolad, the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) retaliate and the government responds with an ethnic cleansing campaign. The SLM and JEM actually want more than self-determination for Dafur; they want a new regime for all Sudan. Another full blown civil war commences. Hundreds of thousands of people are killed.
A peace is brokered in 2006, a joint African Union/United Nations peace keeping force, UNAMID, is deployed in 2007, and in 2009 the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues a warrant for the arrest of Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He is arrested, tried in Sudan and found guilty of corruption. Sudan have stated they will extradite him to the ICC in The Hague on his release. Time will tell.
With the UNAMID deployment reducing year-on-year and the likelihood that it will soon be an African-Union-only force keeping the peace; with Bashir, an ex-Army colonel who has been in power ever since executing a coup d’état back in 1989 remaining in charge indefinitely; and with c 3 million people languishing in camps and their lands reallocated to Khartoum loyalists, more bloodshed seems inevitable.
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EXTREMADURA
By the time I got to ‘E’, it had become clear that a superior source of essays on independence ambitions was going to be Spain. The whole thing had started with Catalonia (which I will publish in a second round), and had been quickly followed up by the Balearic Islands, and then ‘E’ led me to Extremadura. Where?
Guess ever since Denis, grandson of Alfonso X of Castile, managed to establish Portugal as a separate kingdom back at the Tratado de Alcanizes in 1297 AD, being not-Spain (interrupted by a short-lived period of Madrilenian rule during the 17th C) has been enough to keep all the Portuguese on the same page. But across the border, in the hills and valleys of Extremadura, halfway between Lisbon and Madrid, a similar sanguinity has not been in evidence.
However, as elsewhere in Spain, Extremadura’s case for greater self-determination is weak from a historic perspective. “A nation once again” really doesn’t come into it.
Briefly then, first mention of the region and its people, the Lusitani is heard early during the 2nd century BC, when Rome conquers most of southern Spain. Whether the Lusitani are ancient indigenous or Celtic immigrants is unsure. Initially, a buffering extension to the Roman province Hispania Ulterior, Lusitania is governed as a separate province from c 15 BC onward. It comprises all of present-day Portugal south of the Douro river, all of present-day Extremadura, and the southern half of Leon.
The Romans establish their seat of government for the new province in Meridia on the Guadiana river, and today Meridia remains the capital city of Extremadura (i.e. the rump of Lusitania). In the 7th century AD, the Romans are succeeded briefly and barely by the Visigoths, who are in turn ousted from the region by the Ummayads and then the Almoravids and Almohads. Extremadura in the north west of Lusitania, as in Roman times, again functions as a militarised march, now between the heart of Moorish Spain in Andalusia and the christianized Franks and Visigoths further north.
Frankish dynasts from Burgundy start to expand their power in northern Spain towards the end of the 11th C, with Raymond and his cousin Henry acquiring control over Leon and Portugal respectively through marriage into the Leon dynasty. The cousins and their successors continue The Reconquest against the Moors, and in 1230 Alfonso IX of Leon, Raymond’s grandson, reconquers Extremadura from the Moors.
Extremadura is now part of the Kingdom of Leon, which, as we have noted before, joins forces with Castile through marriage to create the Kingdom of the Spains. That’s it – Roman, Moorish or Spanish – but never Extremadurish. And in topical fact, quite seriously Spanish, since the great conquistador Hernán Cortés and a whole bunch of Pizarro’s men as well as Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean, hail from the very province.
Sparsely populated with about a million people (c 25 per sq.km.) and only a few (c 1%) mostly Moroccan ‘aliens’ (but are they? after all, the place was Moorish for 400 odd year), Extremadura is very much part of the impoverished South that the Catalonians are suspected of not wishing to subsidize any longer. So why independence? Well, they speak a number of local languages, but the truth is that the most that is looked for is a greater autonomy, and that ambition is only active policy of a few minority parties. Interesting place to visit, mind you – rivers, forests, mountains, Roman ruins and Moorish palaces, and the best acorn-fed jamón ibérico in all of Spain, so they say.
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FRIESLAND
Moving swiftly on and northwards, let us look next at the potted history of Friesland, another European region with an active independence movement (yes, really). Like Catalonia, The Balearics and Extremadura, once also part of the Spanish Empire, but rather more briefly, their cause has a little more merit, although even less point...
The Frisians were a Germanic tribe that settled the shifting sands and marshes of the North Sea coast between the erstwhile Zuiderzee and the mouth of the river Eems, round about 500 BC. They spoke a different language, Fries, than that of the other tribes around them, who spoke early variants of Teutonic Dutch or Deutch or Teutch. There weren’t many of them, and living well north of the great barrier that was the Rhine delta at the time, the Romans left them well enough alone.
By 400 AD, the region has become more or less deserted. However, the great tribal migrations of that time see new arrivals; Jutes, and Saxons and Angles (cousins of the ones that moved to Kent). According to legend, Finn Folcwalding becomes their first king, and local kings rule the region, which expands steadily southward, until first Charles Martel and then Charlemagne conquer all. Under Charlemagne, a set of laws governing the people living along the eastern seaboard of the North Sea from the Scheldt river (or Zwin as it was then) to the Weser is drawn up; the Lex Frisonium.
The partial collapse and division of Charlemagne’s empire after his death is bad news for Friesland, as it allows the Vikings free rein to plunder, pillage and subjugate the coast and rivers. Gerolf of Holland, count of West Frisia, finally drives out the Vikings in 885 AD.
After the Vikings are gone, various magnates are nominated to be in charge of the territory by various Holy Roman Emperors (the successors of Charlemagne), but this never meets with any success, and by the start of the 13th C, the people of Friesland are effectively free with no feudal overlord in charge. Later, a legend evolves that this freedom was granted them by Charlemagne back in 800 AD, in gratitude for their military support in reinvesting Pope Leo III to his supreme church leadership.
However, this independent democratic state of affairs is of short duration for Friesland's west coast, as West Frisia is subjugated by Floris V, count of Holland and Zeeland, in 1288 AD, West Frisia thus becoming North Holland. Further east, independence also comes to an end when another Holy Roman Emperor decides to exercise his power and appoints Albrecht of Saxony as gubernator (Schwarzenegger in a previous role!) for all Friesland in 1498 AD.
Two generations later, the Habsburg emperor Charles V appoints a first stateholder for Friesland, which has now more or less shrunk to the size of the Dutch province we know today.
After next adding Gelderland to a grouping Charles then calls the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands, Charles decrees hereditary succession rights apply for each of his stateholders in each of his provinces. As the relation between stateholders and provinces is “some to many”, this leads to further integration of the Netherlands towards a single unit.
When Charles, who is also King of Spain, stands down from this position, and his son from his marriage to Isabella of Portugal, Philip II, comes of age, the Netherlands are passed to Philip to govern. Philip is a conservative Roman Catholic and tries to impose his religion on the Netherlands.
Civil war ensues, and Holland and Zeeland hire in William of Orange (the Silent) as stateholder to lead their armies. Success breeds success and by 1579 AD, almost all the provinces, including Friesland, are happy to agree the Union of Utrecht, which merges all for the purposes of defense. A decade later, the seven most northerly provinces amalgamate further in The Republic of the Seven United Netherlands under the stateholdership of Maurits, William’s son. Friesland reportedly takes some convincing, and later Groningen has to be annexed, making the province-count eight.
Thus the Netherlands are born and Friesland becomes a rural province within it, benefiting today from a net redistribution of wealth from the over-populated Randstad through differentials in tax collected and public investment made. Thus, although history gives them reason to look for greater independence, why they should wish for it is hard to understand.
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GAMBELA
It happened to be the middle of winter time and chilly outside when I decided to search for a place beginning with ‘G’ that had a sense it would do better on its own. Not easy. The search took me south in the end once again; this time to a land threaded by great rivers...
The Nile is the longest river on the planet and just keeps on getting longer. Up until the late 16th C, the Ethiopian Highlands, whence the Blue Nile flows to join the White Nile just north of the ancient city of Khartoum, was regarded as the obvious source. This gave the Nile a length of some 3,200 miles from Lake Tana to the Mediterranean Sea. The White Nile seemed to start from an impenetrable swamp to the north west of the highlands, called The Sudd.
But in 1858, the discovery and naming of Lake Victoria by intrepid British explorers Speke and Burton put an end to this mistake. The White Nile, or more correctly the Victoria Nile flowed out of Lake Victoria into Lake Albert, whence the Albert Nile flowed on in a northerly direction to become the Mountain Nile and then the White Nile and the Sudd swamp. The Nile was now some 4,000 miles long.
But Lake Victoria wasn’t the end of it; sorry, it wasn’t the start of it. Today that in fact is thought to probably be the Rurubu river in northern Burundi, which flows into the Kagera which in turn flows into Lake Victoria. This makes the Nile today up to 4,200 miles long.
However, although the head of the Rurubu may be the Nile’s geographic source, it is not where most of the water that it discharges into the Mediterranean comes from. This comes from Ethiopia, some 60% down the Blue Nile and a further 30% discharging via a number of other major tributaries into the White Nile before and as it becomes The Sudd.
In short, it’s complex, just like the politics of central Africa, where all those rivers flow. An interesting case in point is the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia’s state or kilil of Gambela, where a plethora of rivers – principally the Pibor, Akobo, the Gilo, the Jikawo and the Baro – meander and bifurcate slowly to join and become the Sobat watering The Sudd and the White Nile. The land is a low-lying tropical flood plain, not quite a marsh like The Sudd, but quite like the other regions of Southern Sudan, and not like the rest of Ethiopia atop the escarpment in the east.
Rivers are handy demarcation lines for cartographers, and thus in 1899 British Royal Engineers Austin and Gwynn took the runs of the Akobo in the south and the Pibor in the north to demark a clear-cut line in the swamp (not the sand) to differentiate Sudan from Ethiopia. Over time this has led to two major self-determination disputes; one well-known and partially resolved, the other less so.
The partially resolved, well-known dispute is, of course, the case of South Sudan, the northern part of the tropical water world bisected by Austin and Gwynn’s line; partially resolved through independence from Sudan in 2011; but only partially, since civil war (as so often) followed independence.
Again, it’s complicated, but basically the war for independence from Sudan was fought by many different primarily tribal factions – Nuer, Murle, Dinka, Anuak – but the war was also inter-tribal. Currently, an uneasy peace holds sway, but more than two million people have in the meantime been displaced, including to Gambela, where the indigenous tribal relatives of the South Sudanese – mainly pastoral Nuer and agricultural Anuak – are similarly at odds with the regime that rules over them, the Ethiopian Federation, but also with each other.
The Gambelan people’s differences with Ethiopia go back beyond the imposition of that British border though, to the time of the Abyssinian Empire, when the Gambelans’ lands were systematically taken from them by means of a policy of colonial plantation. This long-standing gripe has been added to in recent years by the discovery of oil, which is fueling (pardon the pun) the ongoing unrest in South Sudan as well. Malaysia’s Petronas has been granted a 25 year exploration and production license, which is expected to generate huge revenues for the federal Ethiopian government, and only pollution and loss of land for the Nuer and Anuak.
The conflicts across the border also add fuel (sorry again) to the fire, as Gambela has proved to be an effective base to operate from for Sudanese insurgents over the years. People are well used to a level of lawlessness, and the idea of obtaining what they want – self-governance – by force. The story clearly will continue.
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HMONG
After ‘G’ comes ‘H’ and Hong Kong, an obvious one with plenty of support, but not that strong a case. instead I give you slightly further south the tribulations of the Hmong...
The patterns of migration out of Africa into the Levant and then beyond into Europe are known to most at least in a cursory way; first into empty (of homo sapiens) more or less hospitable lands; then later into already (if sparsely) populated lands, rarely other than violently – Huns and Goths, but before them the Celts and the Sea People, and after them Scythians and Mongols, to name but a few.
It would be surprising if similar migratory patterns were not to be found elsewhere, and so they are, but less well documented. One such story is that of the Hmong, early agriculturalists credited with being the first to cultivate rice and occupying some of the valleys of the Yellow river water shed in the 4th millennium BC, who are first heard of as one of the Miao tribes.
However about 4500 years ago, the legendary Yellow Emperor drives the Miao, the Hmong and the Li from their lands. The Hmong migrate south and a new federated kingdom Hmong San Miao emerges around the upper reaches of the Yangtze river, some 1000 miles to the south. It is short-lived as successive Han emperors seek to conquer it, and in 2247 BC the emperor Yu prevails and the various Hmong tribes are scattered and methodically suppressed by Yu and his successors, the Xia dynasts.
Free Hmong move further south again and resettle on the shores of Lake Dongting, a vast flood plain fed by the Zi and other southern tributaries of the Yangtze before they join that river, where after a millennium has passed, they become part of a new kingdom, Zhu. But Zhu too, in turn, is defeated by the Chinese when the first Qing emperor Ying Zhen’s general Wang Jian captures the Zhu capital Shouchun in 223 BC.
The Hmong are next heard of as a semi-independent people during the Tang dynasty, paying taxes but running their own affairs, but the Tang empire falls apart in 907 AD and China briefly disintegrates into ten kingdoms. The Hmong move on once more, further south and east, and when order is restored in China under the auspices of Song dynasts to be succeeded by the Ming and the Qing, they are consistently discriminated against in favor of Manchu settlers.
Various attempts – Yong Qian, Qian Jia, Xian Tong – to revolt against the Chinese yoke fail, and by the start of the 19th C what has now become a Hmong diaspora has migrated into the highlands that form the natural boundary between China and what are to become the European colonial states of Burma, Laos and Vietnam.
Living remote and relatively undisturbed on their hillside farms, the Hmong welcome the coming of Communism to China, thinking it will give them equality and with it opportunities to return home. This proves delusional and instead the growing strength of colonialism particularly in Laos sees taxes – a kilo of heroin per household per year – and exploitation return.
Next, during WWII most Hmong choose loyalty to Laos and France to ward of the even more hateful Japanese, but some join the communist resistance as well. France fails to regain authority over Indochina when the war is over and the Communists steadily gain control, first through the partition of Vietnam into North and South, and then in 1961 in Laos, where many of the Hmong have fought and then continue to fight in the war across the border and internally against the Chinese-backed Communists – the Secret War – backed by the US Military and CIA.
When South Vietnam is also lost to the Communists in 1975, American involvement in the region is also lost, excepting some piecemeal clandestine actions. Reprisals and persecution inevitably follow and the US offer asylum to the Hmong’s rebel leader, Vang Pao, and tens of thousands of Hmong fighters and their extended families. Ultimately more than 250,000 move to America; many settle in Minnesota.
But the Hmong left behind in Laos continue to agitate for self-determination, which sporadically breaks out into irregular action. Laos has North Korean tendencies, so the Hmong’s desires are understandable, but hopelessly unreported in the ‘free world’.
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INSUBRIA
Next up: Insubria beginning with ‘I’. Where is it? Well, we’re back to that patchwork of dukedoms and kingdoms, currently organized into a number of aggregating democratic states and federations of states, collectively all joined together in a supranational-federation known as the European Union...
Insubria is where the Insubres live, a tribe first encountered and thus named by the Romans and their historians in the 4th C BC as the early Empire expands north, first into hilly Tuscany straddling the Apennine spine of Italy, and then ‘across the river and into the trees’ of Cisalpine Gaul between the plains of the Po, running west from that river’s watershed in the Mediterranean Alps to its mouth in the Adriatic’s Venetian Lagoon, and the Alps proper to the north.
To the west of the Insubres live the Liguri, and to the east the Veneti, two early Indo-European tribes of settlers from the far south east. The Insubres are, unlike their neighbours, Celts and more a culture than a race, being a mix of migrants from across the Alpine passes out of the north with the earlier Indo-European settlers. It matters not. As the last millennium BC draws to a close, all are more-or-less forcefully assimilated into Rome, the Etruscans, the Ligurians, the Venetians and the Insubrians.
When towards the end of the 5th C, the Roman Empire splits into East and West, and then proceeds to disintegrate in the west, new people out of the east – Goths, or more specifically Ostrogoths, eastern Goths – invade the Po valley. The Ostrogoths in turn are displaced by the Lombards or Longobardi, long-bearded ones. The Lombards come out of the north from the shores of the Baltic Sea. They not only conquer the Po Valley and Cisalpine Gaul, but also central and much of southern Italy; the very southern heel of Italy remaining Roman – Eastern Roman, Byzantine.
The Lombard Kingdom of Italy, all the time fending off Slavic invaders out of the east, lasts until the end of the 8th C, at which point the Franks under Charlemagne take over the North. A century later, the South is briefly troubled by the Moors, who invade at the invitation of the Duke of Naples, a semi-independent ally of the Byzantine Empire. No sooner are the Moors expelled, then the Normans arrive, who hold sway across all the lands south of Rome plus Sicily up until the end of the 12th C.
Meanwhile, up North, the existence of the Insubres as a people becomes largely forgotten about, and by the time Frankish custom sees Charlemagne’s sole surviving son and successor, Louis the Pious, divide the militarily painstakingly assembled empire between his three sons (see Clovis and the Merovignian dynasty before the Carolingians for a similar earlier pattern), the Insubrian tribes have retreated into the upper valleys and lakelands of the Alpine tributaries feeding the Po – beautiful scenery but not great farming land.
Pious gives his eldest Lothar the middle bit of the empire, a relatively narrow corridor running all the way from the mouth of the Rhine in the north to the mouth of the Rhone in the south and including northern Italy. Being a more difficult territory to control and defend (from his brothers) than Pippin’s West Francia (the future France) and Louis’ East Francia (the future Germany), the Lombard dukes and princes of Lothar’s Italian lands enjoy considerable autonomy. On Lothar’s death, Central Francia divides further and into three again; Lotharingia in the north, Provence in the south, and Italy in the east, which goes to Louis II.
Much preoccupied with defending and retaliating against the incursions of the Saracens in the south of the Italian peninsula, Louis’ rule over the Lombardian nobility is just as weak as his father's. When he dies young and childless, his uncle Louis the German’s son, Carloman inherits Italy, who loses it in a war with uncle Charles the Bald of France but regains it again in 877; northern Italy thus (eventually) becoming a part of East Francia including Bavaria under the rule of the quasi self-styled, quasi papal-anointed, and ultimately princely-elected Holy Roman Emperor.
Italy being separated by the considerable barrier that is The Alps from the centre of gravity of this ‘Empire’, its princes continue to grow in power, and as the wealth of the cities builds as the Middle Ages progress, leagues (of cities) begin to form across the northern plain and in the Alpine valleys; first the Veronese League, and then the Lombard League.
Disputing the particulars of the Holy Roman Emperor’s authority over their cities and their hinterlands, the cities’ relationship with by then the Emperor Frederick II, of the Hohenstaufen dynasty founded by Frederick Barbarossa, steadily disimprove as the 13th C progresses.
Pope Gregory IX and his successor Innocent IV also find themselves at odds with the Emperor over his ambition to fully integrate previously Norman-ruled Sicily and southern Italy into his Empire. This would leave the Papal States surrounded by the Empire and the Popes’ reasonable fear is that it would then only be matter of time before the papacy becomes a puppet of the Emperor.
Gregory therefore excommunicates Frederick on the pretext of not departing for the 6th Crusade on time, and he backs the Lombard League under the leadership of the House of Visconti of Milan with finance in what becomes open rebellion against the Emperor. Thus the princedoms of northern Italy gain their independence, and future Popes play them and their contemporaries in Naples, Capua, Benevento, Calabria and Sicily out one against the other to maintain Rome’s balance of power and the city states’ independence from the superpowers of Spain and Holy Roman Germany (the Habsburgs) and France (the Capetians).
In Milan, the Visconti are succeeded by the Sforza, but then, mid 16th C, Milan and its Insubrian hinterland loses its independence again, first to France, then to Spain, then to Austria and finally to France again under Napoleon. We are now in the 19th C, and Italian unification is the flavour of the day. In the north, monarchists loyal to the House of Savoy are in the ascendancy, and in the south, Giuseppe Garibaldi leads a republican movement. The monarchists are initially victorious and a unified Kingdom of Italy ruled by King Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy is founded in 1861, and to complete the unification the Papal States are annexed a decade later.
Nevertheless, to this day, the Holy See occupying the land and buildings of and around St Peter’s Basilica is quickly restored to a law unto itself (even today it is not a member of the EU).
Victor Emmanuel’s successor Umberto is assassinated by anarchists in 1900, but the House of Savoy remains in power until 1946, when post WWII and its association with Fascism, the monarchy is lost. In 1952 Italy founds the European Coal & Steel Community together with Germany, France and the Benelux countries, which six go on to form a fledgling common market at the Treaty of Rome in 1957 – the European Economic Community (EEC). As the 20th C progresses, the EEC becomes the European Union (EU), more and more independent European nation states join, and more and more regulation is agreed by EU members at EU level, then ratified by national parliaments.
Logically, this march to centralisation steadily reduces the connection between local politicians and what goes on locally, and so, in 2002, some of the inhabitants of the Alpine lakelands of Italy’s present-day provinces of Piedmont and Lombardy and Switzerland’s Ticino remember that once the Insubres lived there, and they establish La Moviment Spiritual Riformaa Nativ d'Insubria, which reorganizes as Domà Nunch (Only Us) in 2005, adopting the historic emblem of the Duke of Milan, the Blue Dragon, for their cause.
Sure, why not! Little has ever been politically permanent in these parts.
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JAISALMER
I hunted high and low for a region with some ambition for some autonomy beginning with ‘J’, but unlike Morten Harket, no A-ha moments came to me, excepting that I found there to be quite a plethora of princely states in India that start with ‘J’, but none of them appear to hanker after a lost or new independence. Let's look at the history of a typical one such anyway, say Jaisalmer, to the south east of the Indus river valley and the India-Pakistan border in today's Rajasthan...
When the World's youngest major monotheist religion, that's the one of The Prophet Mohammad, started its great expansion out of its origins in the arid lands of northern Arabia, in all directions, it met resistance at various frontiers, the Pyrenees in Spain, the Caucasus and Himalayas, and on the north west of the Indian sub-continent, the Indus river.
Unlike the referenced mountain ranges, the Indus is not a barrier of the same significance to the onward march of successive waves of Muslim-inspired armies, and a Muslim caliphate establishes itself as early as the 8th C on the lands either side of the river that today makes up the Pakistan province of Sindh.
Beyond this fertile valley lie the inhospitable desert plains of Khar and the home of numerous polytheistic Hindu semi-nomadic tribes of the Kshatriya caste ‘ordered’ by their religion to fight and to govern, later known as Rajputs, or sons of kings, who have come to prominence post the collapse of India’s early Gupta Empire.
One of these Rajputs are the Bhati, who live in a region centred around a natural impervious rainwater catchment, Gadisar Lake. Like other Rajputs, technically they are vassals of the southern Indian Chalukya dynasty, but practically independent. Several of the more northerly Rajputs successfully fend off the first concerted Muslim invasion beyond the Indus from 723 to 726 AD of the Umayyad general Al Junayd, but the Bhati are not one of them.
However, within a generation, most of the Muslim advances are lost, with the Caliphate’s belligerence causing the Rajput kingdoms in Rajasthan and neighboring Gujarat to cooperate and integrate, under a new northern Indian dynasty, Pratiharas. For three hundred years, Pratiharas entirely blocks any further Muslim advance into India, whilst elsewhere in the World of course, the Muslims are all-conquering.
At the start of the second millennium, Pratiharas falls apart into a disparate collection of independent Rajputs once again. The Bhati clan grows in strength under a succession of strong rulers, and in 1156 Maharawal Rawal Jaisal Singh builds Jaisalmer Fort on Trikuta Hill above Gadisar Lake. The fort provides the Bhatti with a commanding position over the main trade routes between Delhi in the east and Kandahar and Hydrabad in the west, and hence a steady source of toll, trade and provisioning income.
With the demise of Prataharas, the Muslims take control over most of northern India, establishing a powerful Sultanate in Delhi. As elsewhere across their empires, the muslim rulers tolerate other religions, but obviously not independent maharajas exacting toll, and in 1294 Sultan Alauddin Khilji commences a siege of Jaisalmer, which lasts for eight years, but is resisted. Elsewhere, most of the other Rajputs submit to the Sultan, and cooperate with him in fighting off wave after wave of Mongol incursions by Genghis and other Khans.
Jaisalmer, remaining independent, applies its growing wealth to paying a token tribute to the Delhi Sultan, to strengthening its fortifications, and importantly also to improving the supplies of water to the fort and the holding capacity of the lake, which latter work is completed in c 1400 AD by Maharaja Garisisar Singh.
By the start of the 16th C, the Delhi Sultanate is on the wane, and a new ruling dynasty, that of the Mughals is founded by Babur, a direct descendent of the great Turkic-Mongol ruler Tamarlane, when Babur captures Delhi in 1526. The Mughals unsurprisingly also seek the submission of Jaisalmer to their rule, but it is not until 1660 or so that Rawal Sahal Singh formally acknowledges the supremacy of the by-then Mughal emperor Shah Jahan.
Increasing trade between Mughal India and the Ottoman Empire at the peak of its power increases Jaisalmer's wealth and influence ever further during the 17th C, but a hundred years later this is all over as trade diverts to the sea lanes out of Bombay, Calcutta and Karachi marshalled by Britain's East India Company.
As Jaisalmer's glory fades, its remote location, nevertheless, leaves it quite untouched by outside influences and relatively independent, even as Britain takes control over the entire sub-continent, and it is Jaisalmer that is the last to sign an Instrument of Agreement with the British.
When in 1947 Britain finally transfers its rule to that of a new government of India, Jaisalmar's HH Maharajadhiraj Maharawal Sir Jawahir Singh Bahadur to give him his full title, like all the other members of The Chamber of The Princes, signs up to the Standstill Agreement and the Instrument of Accession to the Dominion of India.
But again as elsewhere in India, post accession the titles of the formally ruling maharajas and maharawals continue to pass on from one generation to the next, and their influence in their former kingdom remains significant. However, nobody is suggesting they should promote secession, although Jaisalmer is becoming quite a destination on the tourist routes and it would make a great location for a tax haven.
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KURDISTAN
I was surprised to discover when I came to ‘K’ compiling this compilation, that I had not anything prepared. Ria said: "What about Kurdistan?". Well, what indeed? As you can read below, it is a very very long history, so long I’ve kept it short...
If myths and scriptures are to be believed, the Kurds may well be the direct descendants of Noah's survivors, who settled on the slopes of Mount Judi (not Ararat) when the Ark gently ran aground there, some 7000 years ago, with, according to Armenian ancient historian Mighdisi, their language and their region taking their name from Melik Kurdim, the first ruler of this new and flood-cleansed community.
A vast and unwieldy territory, perched high atop the mountain ranges and plateaus of the Armenian Highland and the Lesser Caucasus centred around Lake Van, the region has rarely known true independence, but has, from time to time, over the ages, been at the heart of lesser empires – Median, Hurrian and Ayyubid. More often though it has been under the sway of greater ones – Assyrian, Persian, Sassanian, Parthian, Armenian, Roman, Umayyad, Abbassid and most recently Ottoman.
Thus, although hard for others to govern, self-determination never becomes the lot of the inhabitants of this region that since the mid 12th C is known as Kurdistan, and the region's separate cultural identity is successively repressed; first by its assimilation into the Muslim faith under the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphs and then into the Ottoman administration.
Unfortunately for the Kurds, at the beginning of the 20th C when WWI erupts, the ailing old empire – ‘the Sick Man of Europe’ – allies itself with the losing Austro-Hungarian/German Central Powers. In defeat, the Ottoman’s most successful general Mustafa Kemal Pasha, later known as Ataturk, manages to wrest political control over what is left of the empire, resist wholesale partition by the victorious British, French and Russian allies and negotiates the formation of a smaller (but still big) independent, secular, democratic republic – today's Turkey.
However, strategically important Ottoman territories in the Middle East are kept to one side. France and Britain, having promised freedom from the Turk to the Arab leaders who have helped them during WWI, carve up the notionally-Arab Ottoman lands between them by way of their secret Sykes-Picot agreement, and two protectorates are formed. The French protectorate later becomes Syria; the British, rather more quickly, Iraq, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, proves to have the far greater strategic oil reserves. That Kurdistan straddles the borders of the new Iraq and the new Syria, the new Turkey and the old Iran is entirely overlooked.
Preempting trouble, Turkey immediately embarks on a policy of Turkicisation to try to create a homogeneous and unified nation. These policies continue to this day. Syria also, as soon as it is granted full independence from France, acts against its Kurdish population by revoking their citizenship, making them stateless.
A further twenty-five years on, after the British protectorate has mutated via a short-lived kingdom into the dictatorship of Sadam Hussein and his Ba'atheist party, Iraq in turn embarks on a policy to repress its northern rebellious Kurds. Wholesale genocide is the Ba'atheist approach, and by the end of 1988 more than 100,000 Kurds have been eliminated, mostly by poison gas. Concurrently several 100,000 flee to Iran, where, alas, no real refuge is forthcoming as Iran has already been persecuting its Kurds for many generations.
Obviously, independence can't come soon enough for the Kurds. Israel, apparently, would be glad to help!
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LUSATIA
After ‘K’ came ‘L’ and no homework done again. Time to return to Europe, perhaps? Let's have a look at Lusatia then, or Lausitz as it is better known as in German, or Łužyca in the local vernacular...
If you take the road north up to the source of the Danube’s Morova tributary, it will bring you to the foot of a wide pass between the Carpathian Mountains to your right and the Sudeten range to your left. This is the Moravian Gate, taking you out of Moravia (part of the Czech Republic, see next ‘potted’ history) and into Lusatia (partly in Brandenburg and partly in Saxony, two contiguous states within the German Federal Republic).
A pass and a long march north has allowed history to take a different course in Lusatia than it has in Moravia. Like Moravia, Lusatia in pre-Christian times is first settled by Celts, but these first-comers are quickly displaced by German tribes and then finally in around 600 AD, with the Romans never getting this far north, by the Slavic Milceni and Lusici tribes, known as Sorbs collectively (kinsmen of Serbia’s Serbs).
By the turn of the 1st millennium, Lusatian tribal independence starts to come to an end. Up until then, interference from the Romans’ mediaeval successor Charlemagne, and his eastern successors, the kings of East Francia, later briefly the kings of Germany has been avoided, but as the 10th C progresses, Saxon margrave Gero steadily extends the German march (a cross between a border province and a no-man's land) that he polices on behalf of East Francia into Lower (downstream the Spree and the Neisse) Lusatia.
Lower Lusatia’s inclusion in East Francia however is short-lived as Polish conquests of both Lower and Upper Lusatia follow, and although Lusatia reverts back to German rule within fifty years, Polish claims persist. The indigenous people after all are Slavic and speak Sorbian, a language similar to Polish.
Unlike West Francia which morphs into the centrally governed hereditary kingdom of France, a royal hegemony is never established in Germany, and instead an uneasy relationship between a grandly titled but elected (by a small select group of princes and bishops) Holy Roman Emperor and his independent vassals develops. In the midst of the resultant never-ending power struggles between ruler and princes, first Upper Lusatia in 1076 is awarded by King Henry IV of the Germans to the Duke of Bohemia for services rendered, and next, c 200 years later, Lower Lusatia is sold by the Elector of Brandenburg to the by-now King of Bohemia (but still a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor).
Bohemia expands its territory into Hungary to find itself in conflict with Austria, which has fallen into the hands of the House of Habsburg, already rulers of Spain though marriage. When Archduke Ferdinand I wins a decisive battle against the Ottoman Turks at Mohacs in 1526, Bohemia too, previously Hungarian territory, and with it Lusatia, becomes a Habsburg dominion.
However, despite now being under Habsburg rule, Bohemia’s place as an elector of The Holy Roman Emperor remains the same. This in the end leads to trouble, when in 1618 the Thirty Year War erupts between the lands of the House of Habsburg (Spain and Austria), and the people and princedoms that have adopted a new reformed Protestant religion (including Bohemia and Lusatia's Sorbs); a religion which the zealous Ferdinand II, newly elected Holy Roman Emperor, means to repress.
With military support from Cardinal Richelieu’s Catholic France and from the King of Sweden, the Protestant princes ultimately win the day, just about. The subsequent Peace of Prague between Saxony and Bohemia returns Upper Lusatia to Saxony and Lower reverts to Brandenburg. But Lusatia’s story is still not over. Next, Prussia emerges as an imperial power, gaining control over Brandenburg though marriage, and Saxony and much of Poland and other German territories through conquest. Sorbian hopes of Lusatia combining as one territory either side of the Neisse under the new regime are dashed when Prussia leaves Lower Lusatia as part of Brandenburg and rearranges Upper as part of (Polish) Silesia.
Finally, the wars of the World erupt over Lusatia as everywhere else. WWI, apart from the economic consequences of Versailles, changes little, but WWII is different for the Sorbs. First, Hitler represses all Sorbian culture, and, then, in defeat, Lusatia is divided up between Poland one side of the Oder-Neisse line and Allied occupied German territory, to be administered by the Soviet Union, the other, thus partitioning off eastern Lusatia. Hard luck indeed.
Since 1992, western Lusatia (Upper and Lower) is now of course part of a unified democratic Germany; a bucolic, pastoral countryside, punctuated by two stunning mediaeval riverside cities, Cottbus and Bautzen, the capitals of Lower and Upper Lusatia respectively. But underneath, as elsewhere in former East Germany, there is discontent, and some of it is ugly, with for example FC Cottbus supporters having gained themselves a Neo-Nazi reputation. Be this as it may, growing numbers in Lusatia would like recognition as a single unified ’land’ (state) within the German federation, and are pursuing this via political parties by democratic means. Not an unreasonable nor impossible ambition, one would like to think.
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MORAVIA
If you hadn’t already become bored-to-tears with the irony of the UK’s state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation being a slightly left-wing Europhilic bastion, whilst its national government was running a slightly right-wing Europhobic campaign to exit the EU (but finding that they couldn’t really/readily), you might have been surprised by the first episode of “Invasion!” on BBC4, already much more than a year ago, which went to some trouble to point out the mixed race origins of the people inhabiting Britain today, and that the waves of invasion and conquest that have brought this about, were really unavoidable, nay unstoppable. But there was a less obvious irony. Britain, invasions? “You’s only trotting after” the lands in the heart of Europe, where also we find regions that would like to turn back the clock to a period of greater mono-cultural identity, if hardly more individual self-determination. We've already dealt with Lusatia, but how about Moravia? A long and sorry tale...
Before the Celts ever get to the British Isles, history first comes across them at the start of the 13th C BC living in the upper valleys of the great European rivers flowing down from their mountain watersheds in the Alps, Jura, Carpathian and other central mountain ranges: the Halstatt culture of the late Bronze and early Iron Age. A leading early tribe are the Volcae, living in the valley of the Morava, a south-flowing tributary to the Danube. Whatever about who were there before the Volcae, at the start of the 1st C AD, the Romans encounter Germanic tribes north of the Danube and in the Morava valley; the Quadi, who have displaced the Volcae.
From the Danube north up the Morava valley, the going is good and two low mountain passes take the traveller into the upper reaches of the Oder and the Elbe and their tributaries, and down onto the plains of Germany and Poland, indeed into Lusatia, a place we have just been. But it is far from Rome. The other way, of course, the same routes afford Germanic tribes easy access to the Roman provinces south of the Danube.
To stem this flow and to prevent it becoming an invasion, the Romans build a series of limes (forts) along the Danube and a few strategic fortresses across the river in the lands of the Quadi. They call the new trans-Danube province Marcomannia, and a short series of wars erupt between the Romans and the Quadi and Marcomanni and an assortment of other Teutsch tribes. Naturally the Romans win the battles, but the wars are at best a draw.
Nevertheless, Marcomannia from about 200 AD on steadily becomes Romanised and the tribal leaders pay tribute to Rome. This “Roman Peace” disintegrates as elsewhere at the start of the 5th C as the power of Rome wanes, and after a further series of wars with the Romans, the region, exhausted, is devastated by Attila and his Huns in 434 AD. The Huns don’t settle but do clear the way for Slavic tribes to move into the Morava valley, settling down there as the 5th C draws to a close. In turn, these settled Slavs are then terrorised and dominated by the nomadic Avars of the Pannonian steppes (Hungary and beyond).
The Avars depart the scene when Charlemagne and his Frankish, Saxon and Lombard Holy Roman army put them to the sword in a series of campaigns from 794 to 803 AD. With the decks cleared, a Moravian independent state emerges in the region under Duke Mojmor I. Charlemagne’s grandson Louis the German, on inheriting the eastern half of Charlemagne’s (new) Holy Roman empire, thereafter known as East Francia and later on to morph into another Holy Roman Empire new-style, invades Moravia and appoints Mojmor’s nephew Ratislav King of Moravia.
It’s a bad move, as Ratislav is independent-minded and turns to Byzantium (what's left of the Roman Empire in the East) for support. This results in a second wave of evangelic conversions, this time to the Greek Orthodox version of Catholicism, Moravia only a few generations earlier having adopted the Roman faith, after having lost said faith during the 400-odd years of Dark Ages between the fall of Rome and the imperial coronation of Charlemagne as “Augustus of The Romans” by Pope Leo III.
Ratislav is deposed by Mojmor’s son Svatopluk, who hands Ratislav over to Louis’ son-and-heir Carloman, swearing renewed allegiance to his Frankish overlord. But in practice Moravia remains an independent entity and steadily expands its territory, and by the end of the 9th C, the Great Moravian Kingdom extends down the Elbe, Oder and Vistula valleys to the present-day cities of Meissen, Wroclaw and Cracow and beyond in the West and the North, and across the Danube river in the East and South to include most of Hungary: i.e. a kingdom roughly the size of Alfred’s England and Guthrum’s Danelaw combined of around the same time.
No sooner is Moravia great, than it falls apart again. Its eastern conquests, the princedoms of Bohemia, defect to Arnulf of Carinthia, Carloman’s illegitimate son, and the Morovian heartland is overrun by the Magyars, the successors of the Avars. Arnulf is succeeded by Louis the Child, who dies young and childless thus ending the reign of the Carolingian dynasty in East Francia and heralding the start of a long line of elected (by their princely peers) “Kings of the Germans” taking on the titles of “Holy Roman Emperor” as well for good measure.
Henry, Prince of Saxony is the second elected “King of the Germans” post the demise of the Carolingians, and he quickly puts legislation in place allowing his eldest son Otto I to inherit his titles and authority. The other German Princes are not best pleased with this return to royal primogeniture and war ensues but Otto is an able leader and prevails and next deals with the vexsome Magyars. Victorious, Otto entrusts the freed lands of Moravia to his loyal vassal, Boleslaus of Bohemia. It is the start of the 11th C and where Bohemia has briefly been a province of Moravia, the roles are now reversed, to remain so till this present day.
But history continues and throughout it Moravia remains an influential, independently-minded, troublesome possession of the Duke and later Kings of Bohemia:
- first of the Přemyslid dynasty, the descendants of Boleslaus,
- next of an eclectic line of elected Kings by the Estates (i.e. by the landed Lords of the Land) during an interregnum period, during which period Moravia again enjoys a period (21 years) of oft harked-back to full-autonomous freedom, and
- finally in 1526 AD, of the House of Habsburg, when Ferdinand I of Austria, through some or other devious means takes over in Bohemia.
The Habsburgs hang onto power in Bohemia (and Austria, and, and) and regularly inveigle themselves to be the elected Roman Emperor right up until the end of WWI, but this does not mean life becomes uneventful in Moravia. Thus, at the start of the 17th C, Moravia and Bohemia find themselves once again much fought over, brought on – mind you – by the single-minded determination of the mostly Protestant Moravian (followers of Jan Huss, founder of the Moravian Church, still an active minority denomination today) and Bohemian (mostly Lutheran) estates to elect an outsider, a German Protestant Prince (of Palatine) to be their next King, upsetting the House of Habsburg greatly.
You see, Bohemia, most nominally of the Empire’s constituent parts a subject of the Holy Roman Emperor, is one of seven Electors. The others are Saxony, Palatine and Brandenburg, all Protestant, plus the bishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne, all Catholic. But the Bohemian Crown itself is an elected position, which up until then the Habsburgs have always been able to swing their way.
As long as they hold Bohemia in their pocket, the Habsburgs are assured of imperial electoral success since they are devout Catholics (Philip III of Spain is a cousin of the usurped Ferdinand II, also Archduke of Austria) and three of the other six electors are bishops. But with Bohemia under Protestant rule, the chance exists that the Princes will risk the Habsburg wrath and elect one of their own, who will be protective of their princely privileges to rule their dukedoms as they see fit.
Thirty years of war ensue, and Bohemia and Moravia are in the thick of it. In the end the Habsburgs retain control of Bohemia, and persecuted, most of the Protestant population leaves, leaving an already devastated land empty behind. The Habsburgs now slowly but surely centralize power in central Europe, sometimes with Prague as their capital, and more times with Vienna, and, over time, Bohemia incorporating Moravia as an independent state blends into the emerging Austro-Hungarian Empire and disappears.
But that is not the end of it, since finding yourself at the strategic crossroads of the main central European East-West and North-South corridors ensures your lands continue to be much marched and fought over. The Napoleonic Wars are next, and then the two WWs.
At the end of WWI, the powers that be combine Bohemia, Moravia and the traditionally Hungarian lands of Slovakia to the east of Moravia into a newly created state: Czechoslovakia. This proves to be a short-lived entity, as Hitler uses the unrest between Czechoslovakia’s mostly German speaking unemployed industrialized cities and the mostly Czech (a Slavic language) speaking rural population, as the Great Depression of The Thirties bites, to stoke up tensions. Under duress, the victorious WWI powers in 1938 agree that the northern parts of the newly formed Czechoslovakia may be annexed by Germany: the Sudetenland. Well why not, the whole country is an artificial construct anyway. A year later Hitler invades the rest of Bohemia and Moravia and allows a puppet regime keep power in Slovakia.
It is the Russians who liberate Czechoslovakia from the Nazi tyranny in 1945; and the people are grateful. The Western powers have done little for them and the Communist ideology is attractive. The Communist party wins the first election and the rest is modern history.
The question a few Moravians are asking now though is why, when in 1993 Czechoslovakia was peacefully divided in two, could it not have been three. And if it had to be two then, why can the Czech Republic today not be divided into two now: Bohemia and Moravia. I don’t know, but guess not too many people are bothered.
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NEW CALEDONIA
To mark the end of the tyranny of the festive fantasy football fixtures at the end of 2019, the F.A. squeezed in a round of their F*** A** Cup. Mijn fantastisch FPL teampje "Wederom" (managed by Johann Wanderfuil) having pulled up their socks a bit, rising from mid-table 2,488,606th obscurity at the end of November to top-decile 366,967th at the start of the new year, there was thus time to do some real research on another less than wholesome tale of might and money. It was ‘N’ time, so we visited New Caledonia...
Nickel-holding ores are likely to be found near the surface of the Earth’s crust wherever it has been extensively shaped by volcanic activity. Simple reason: the Earth’s Core is mostly nickel (5%) and iron (85%). It’s also where the precious and the heavy metals are found. In the Inner Core, the enormous pressure keeps this ‘alloy’ in a solid state, but in the Outer Core it is a very hot (4000ᴼC to 6000ᴼC) molten lake, held in place by the Earth’s Mantle (85% of the total volume of the Earth), on top of which rests the thin crust on which the oceans flow and the winds blow, and mankind lives and burrows in. So, you need deep eruptions (so-called Mantle Plumes) to drive the Core’s metals up into the Mantle and from there to the surface.
You’d think then that anywhere where you find iron, you’d find nickel, and in theory also gold and silver, argh! Alas, it’s not that simple, since the Mantle, although mostly silica (c 22%) and bonded-oxygen (c 45%), contains a lot of ‘original’ iron as well (c 6%), and quite some of this too has found its way to the surface through geologic action over the aeons. Thus, iron ore is common (enough), but nickel is not.
The metal content of all ores naturally varies considerably, and in the case of nickel this variation is quite binary, as on its way towards the surface the nickel (plus other metals and silica) may bind with sulfur or with oxygen.
Sulfidic ores on average contain little more than 0.5% nickel and can generally only be extracted by sub-surface mining. You need massive scale and a high degree of mechanisation to make sulfidic mining pay. Such mines exist and they supply about 60% of the World’s need for nickel.
On the other hand, in hot, seasonally alternating wet and dry climates, nickel oxides tend to weather out over time to form nickel-rich deposits close to the surface in between crumbling layers of leached rock/earth. This process continues to this day in the Tropics, but at a reduced rate compared to when the Earth was hotter (yes, hotter). Over the aeons, the leaching process has resulted in these so-called lateritic and saprolitic ores having a much higher (1% to 3%) nickel content than sulfidic ores have. Mining these deposits is moreover very straightforward: a simple matter of stripping away layers of earth/rock to get at the ore-rich veins.
Now, back in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, the seafaring Lapita, navigating by the sun and the stars and the way of the waves and the birds and the dolphins, find their way to the shores of what Captain Cook 3000 years later deemes to be New Caledonia. The Kanak, as these first settlers call themselves, unlike your scribe don’t have Google, so have no idea that the verdant red-soiled islands they find were likely to be rich in nickel, but neither does Cook.
And neither does Napoleon III when in 1853 he commands Admiral Febvrier Despointes to take formal possession of the island group, and determines the main island Grand Terre should become France’s very own Antipodean penal colony. Prior to this high-handed act, the islands have briefly been a source of sandalwood for western traders, and for a little longer of quasi-indentured labour for the sugar plantations of Australia's Queensland and of The Philippines, by a recruitment process euphemistically known as “blackbirding”.
The penal colony brings 10,000 odd additional souls to the main island. Given that the Kanak are cannibals, and that a Catholic Marist mission ten years earlier has not survived their attempts to convert these locals, one can only assume interesting times are enjoyed by the deportees, many of whom are political prisoners. A general amnesty granted in 1880 sees all but 40 of the convicts return home.
However, this does not herald the end of France’s interest in the archipelago. Nickel, although inadvertently in use as a steel alloy since the Iron Age, is ‘discovered’ towards the end of the 18th C by Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, a Swedish chemist. Demand for nickel, now it is understood how alloyed with silver and copper it forms un-tarnishing hard metals for coinage and as a base for electroplated silver finishes, grows quickly.
Simultaneously and serendipitously, Jules Garnier, an army engineer, in 1866 discovers a nickel ore which he calls Garnierite (what else!) in the earth of Grand Terre. 800nm NW from Brisbane, Grand Terre lies on the Ring of Fire, where the Pacific Plate slides under the ndo-Australian plate, i.e. the place is tropical and geologically active, so in hindsight this makes sense then.
Enterprising Frenchmen now quickly establish La Société Le Nickel (SLN) to exploit the new found resource. Workers are imported from near and far but the local Kanak people are not involved, presumably because it is a hardly practical option to do otherwise. Strip-mining is particularly easy and lucrative initially, as the ore is very rich in nickel, with concentrations in excess of 10%! A smelter is built almost straightaway, since, even at 10% concentrations, shipping earth half way across the World to existing industrial facilities is expensive, and reducing the deadweight to be shipped by a factor 10x lucrative.
Time marches on and in 1946 New Caledonia formally becomes a French Overseas Territory and all its citizens French nationals. Mining becomes ever more mechanised and other companies join the fray: Inco, QNI, Falconbridge. Production grows from a steady 100,000 tpa in the early years to a maximum 8m tpa at the start of the 1970s, in response to an ever-growing demand, nickel being the critical ingredient in stainless steel, which application today accounts for 2/3rd of world demand.
From the start of the 21st C, production in New Caledonia slowly falls back to c 200,000 tpa today, or about 10% of annual world demand for ‘first use’ nickel, but more than 20% of the world’s production from laterite/saprolite deposits.
I can’t readily find the stats, but if I do the maths instead, I estimate New Caledonia since 1870 has mined c 150 m tonnes of nickel, and to do so has had to move some 4,000 m tonnes of material. Current estimates are that there are a further 7m tonnes of commercially viable reserves, so at the current run rate that should last another 40 years or so, and add a further 350 m tonnes of material to the rusty red terraces of spoil decorating the lower mountain slopes of Grand Terre. It’s almost done, really.
Almost done. Today the islands count about 280,000 inhabitants; 15 people per sq. km, the main island being indeed une moyen grand. Some 50,000 citoyens live on the three smaller islands east across the Bassin des Loyauté from Grand Terre and on the islets at Grand Terre’s southern and northern tips; all mostly Kanaks. A further 100,000 live in the territory’s capital city and the mining industry’s administrative centre, Nouméa; the majority (descendants of) immigrants. Overall, the racial mix is as follows: Kanaks 40%, other Polynesian or Asian 15%, Caucasians 35%, Mixed Race 10%.
With a whopping $40,000 per capita GDP (that’s better than Ring of Fire neighbour New Zealand), you might think this potentially combustible ethnic mix should simply only simmer. Not the case. Since the start of the 1980s, civil unrest has been a constant; from time to time boiling over into riot. The thing is GNP per capita is only $13,000 or so, similar to the average across the Lesser Antilles.
Denizens of Ireland who have read this far will be familiar with the difference between GDP and GNP, as in Ireland too there is a significant delta between the two per capita measures (GDP: c $70,000; GNP: c $60,000). In both the Irish and the New Caledonian case this delta is roughly the profit that is repatriated to foreign direct investors. In New Caledonia, that is therefore c $27,000 per every man, woman and child; the difference between what the World pays for what the mining co’s extract and their operating costs plus the cost of capital they’ve applied to obtain the mining rights.
If you’re a New Caledonian and you are not an employee of, or a supplier to, the mining industry, you are unlikely to be happy with how these numbers translate for you into the contours of your daily life. Plans for new mines in the underpopulated rural North (most of the mining so far has been in the South where the best lodes have been) won’t please you much either, if you’re a native smallholder.
The Kanaks want independence. Some of the rest of the population agree with them. Already in 1986, the United Nations Committee on Decolonization’s inclusion of New Caledonia on their list of Non-Self-Governing Territories obliges France to hold a referendum on independence, but it rejects independence by a significant majority. However, civil unrest forces France to agree to a repeat referendum within 10 years: the Nouméa Accord. The ten years are more than up and the result could go the other way the next time.
You do wonder though, is it all just a little too late. Most of the nickel is gone, and although a greater share of the nickel profits through higher royalties etc might be legislatively achievable, leaving France will also end the mother country’s subvention which on a per capita basis amounts to more than half of GNP. Maybe those clever Frenchies are playing a devious game?
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ORCADIA
Another day in port, lolling about, waiting for the wind to moderate in the Alborean Sea before we head for the corner at Cabo de Gata and so an opportunity for some more research, this time on the far from obvious letter ‘O’ which eventually took me to the tale of the Orcadians...
No archaeological clues are to be found in the British Isles indicating any human habitation before the last Ice Age i.e. during the Paleolithic Age of the Pleistocene Interglacial (yep). Generally therefore, it is assumed that people first settled these most western outreaches of Europe when it was still connected to the mainland as the ice started to retreat and before the seas started to rise.
Surprisingly, it is the north eastern isles of Orkney that appear to have been the first thus settled, and, with more certainty, to have developed a more advanced culture as early as the 4th millennium B.C. featuring stone-walled houses and giant stone circles pre-dating southern England's Stonehenge by over a thousand years. This heritage, however, although interesting, is not what motivates a growing hunkering for greater independence among the people living on these islands off the north east corner of Scotland.
The original Orcadians, as also happens on the Scottish mainland, are displaced by Celtic tribes sometime towards the end of the second millennium BC. We are talking about small numbers, as the climate has disimproved considerably since the arrival of the earliest settlers and there are probably few left and even fewer new arrivals.
On the main (is)land the early Scottish Celts, the Caledonii as the Romans name them, coalesce into a Pictish federation of tribes trading with one another, fighting and stealing of each other, intermarrying and from time to time recognizing one or other tribal leader as High King. The usual Celtic stuff. Offshore, the Orcadians participate in this culture.
The Dal Riada tribe, Celts that have first settled in Ulster, make inroads into the Scottish Western Isles and highlands from about the 6th C onward. They are known as Gaels. Over time, the Gaels and Picts also coalesce, and a recognisable kingdom is established over a period from 843 to 847 AD by Kenneth McAlpin, a Gael, in the usual way (battle). The new kingdom is called Alba and encompasses all of Scotland above an oscillating southern border with Northumbria and bar the islands and coasts that have by now been settled by Vikings.
Orkney is one of these islands that Vikings begin to frequent towards the end of the 8th C; proper Vikings – pirates that raid the coasts of Scotland and Norway. To curb this activity, in 875 Norwegian king Harald Fairhair invades Orkney (and Shetland as well). Harald gifts Orkney to one of his jarls (earls; same word) and Orkney thereafter remains a Norwegian possession until in 1472 James III of Scotland annexes the islands in lieu of the dowry due with the hand of Margaret of Denmark, the Norwegian King Christian's daughter.
Ever since, Orkney has been a chilly upstanding constituency of Scotland (two: north and south) and of the United Kingdom, providing inter alia much of the human resource that establishes the Hudson Bay Co in even chillier northern North America during the 17th C, and of course a vital Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow.
Today, the islands are entirely self-sufficient as far as electrical energy goes, which is generated by a mix of two sizable wind farms at Burgar Hill and Hammars Hill respectively of 17MW total capacity, 8x c 1 MW community turbines at Burray, Eday, Shipsay, Spurness (2x), Stronsay, Thorkell and Westray, c 700 micro-turbines (1x every 10 households) and a very successful 2MW tidal-driven generator in the Fall of Warness.
This installed capacity more than meets the island's 50MW peak demand, but further plans are pending, which if all approved will more than double output. Novel ideas abound as to what to do with the excess production – hydrogen fuel production for vehicular and ferry traffic, heating homes, export via the interconnector. And then there's always aluminium smelting!
The islands are also self-sufficient in farm produce, exporting a range of meat and dairy products to mainland UK. Although very far north, the climate is warmed enough by the Gulf Stream to allow a long animal grazing season. All a bit like Ireland, really, except that there has been a single malt distillery since living memory on the shore of Scapa Flow, recently joined by a second in main town Kirkwall. Kirkwall is selling designer gin, as you do, for the moment. All to serve a 20,000 population.
Nevertheless, the islanders are a remarkably sober lot, as reflected by the Hudson Bay Company's recruiting policy during the 18th C - Orcadains were preferred before Cornish, Bretons, Basques and all the rest. So sober, in fact, that the islanders have consistently returned a liberal candidate to both the House of Commons and the Scottish Parliament since the 1950s. The 'Orkney Movement', running on a devolution ticket, to date has not got a look-in, and given that 67% of a massive 83% turn-out voted to remain in the UK during the 2014 Scottish referendum, it seems likely that little will change, although, eminently sensible as the Orcadians appear to be, BREXIT might just change that.
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PALESTINE
I posited this a while back – the history of the Palestinian people is not well documented; however, its obverse, the history of Israel, is. Put on an agnostic hat and research it for a day or two, and you may see (or not, it is a matter of opinion) why the Palestinians living in the semi-indepedent Gaza Strip and West Bank of Israel, displaced from their former homeland now occupied by the nation state Israel, are unhappy with their lot. Without further ado then, I give you ‘P’...
If you skip over the pre-historic myths and legends of Genesis, you will find the Hebrew Old Testament is one of mankind’s earliest, if somewhat selective, history books, and from it you quickly glean that there was an ordered, civilized society living along the Mediterranean coast and across the mountains of Samaria and Judaea into the Jordan rift valley prior to the arrival of a warrior priest by the name of Abram with his extended family. It is the Land of Canaan, and Jericho – a settled community since the 8th millennium BC in the centre of today’s Palestinian West Bank – is its most advanced city state.
Abram, at odds with his father, a Sumerian priest in Ur on the banks of the lower Euphrates river, and with the Sumerian beliefs in the many Gods of Elohim and the idolatry that had developed around these, leaves Ur with his followers for points west sometime early during the 2nd millenium BC. After a long trek (months, years even) he finds Canaan. Tired of his wanderings, he declares it the land promised by the one God, El (singular of Elohim) or Yaweh.
However, not only are there already Canaanites and Amorites living in the land, the climate isn’t great, and both the valley and the coast across the mountains are major military highways connecting Egypt in the south and the many succeeding empires to the north and east. So much for promises, and so maybe a hundred years later, Abram’s grandson Jacob a.k.a. Israel, experiencing famine, leaves again with his Hebrew people for Egypt, where they prosper, but are then enslaved.
After 400 odd years, Moses, fleeing the Egyptian oppression, takes the tribes (well parts of them; there are twelve, fathered by the sons of Jacob) back to the promised land. The Israelites under Moses’ successor Joshua, carry out a successful campaign against the indigenous population, which is justified on the grounds that these are sinful people worshipping false gods, and within a decade, the tribes have taken over the valley and the highlands to the west and some of the coastal plain, which lands they share with the Philistines, who may have been the descendants of the legendary Sea Peoples, while on the promontories and islands of the coast itself live the Phoenicians. Philistia is the etymon for Palestine.
Despite a schism after a while dividing the emerging nation into two separate kingdoms – Israel in the north and Judah in the south – almost a millennium of Hebrew hegemony follows. But towards the end of the 8th C BC, Israel in the North is conquered by Assyria, the Israelites from there are deported to the uplands of the Tigris and Euphrates to never return, and the country is re-planted. The Samaritans of the New Testament are the direct descendants of this plantation.
Judah in the South survives the Assyrian onslaught by becoming a vassal state, but the Assyrians are supplanted by the Medes, and during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, the Judeans in turn are deported, in this case to Babylon (i.e. back to where Abram had come from). The exile is of short duration, as the Medes lose control to the Persians within a generation, and the Persians allow the Jews to return to Judah.
The Persians in turn are conquered by the Greeks of Alexander the Great, but this empire falls apart as quickly as it comes together, and next the Romans take over, followed by their successors, the christianising Byzantines (or Eastern Roman Empire).
Judah from time to time exists as a client kingdom under these world powers but is never really independent again, although very rebellious. Because of the peculiarity of their religion (only one God, the only God), the Judeans or Jews, irrespective of who is in charge, remain a group apart, numbering about 15% of the overall local population, rarely inter-marrying or assimilating with others, and when some of their kind declare their latest prophet to be the son of God, this heresy, although in time it conquers much of the then-known world, is rejected entirely by their own keepers of the faith.
The early Romans persecute the Jews (and early Christians) – they’re stubborn, insubordinate and different – starting the Jewish diaspora of the modern age.
When the followers of Mohammed take control of the lands at the end of the 7th C AD, Christianity has become the established religion of the Romans and the ruling classes, and many of them pragmatically switch to Islam, but less so the Jews, who however are well tolerated by their new rulers, the Umayyads.
During the crusading Middle Ages, a second wave of Jewish emigration ensues; the purpose of the Crusades being to free the Holy Land for the Christian, not the Jewish faith. The Crusader kingdoms founded by the scions of various primarily Frankish and English nobilities in the East do not stand the test of time and from the 15th C onward, Palestine, Judah and Israel fall under the regime of the Ottoman Sultan. This only changes after the end of World War I, when what is left of the Ottoman Empire finds itself on the losing side.
The victorious WWI powers establish a mandate in Palestine to be a home for Jews who wish to return, in support of a movement (Zionism) that has started at least a century earlier in response to western christian discrimination. Wave after wave of immigrants now follow each other in short order, and the local population (c 80% is muslim) reacts with riots and rebellion, to no avail.
After WWII, a generation later, the immigration waves become a flood, which Britain tries to stem. But it is far too late. The Zionists adopt quasi-terrorist tactics against the British regime to force the issue, and within short order they declare Israel an independent country, which a young United Nations (can) do nothing about.
This in turn leads to an invasion by an Arab coalition of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq, former regions of the Ottoman Empire but now independent nations created by the dictates of the West. The Arabs lose. Three further wars follow in short order, which the Arabs all lose, and Israel annexes the West Bank (from Transjordan), the Golan Heights (from Syria), the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Desert (both from Egypt). The desert is returned to Egypt in 1978.
The PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organisation) under the determined leadership of Yasser Arafat, based in the West Bank and founded in 1964 to agitate (politically and militarily) for the liberation of Palestinians living in the new Israel, now moves its headquarters to Lebanon, and continues to agitate for Palestinian liberation, to no avail. Instead, Israel over the next two decades slowly colonizes the better land of its new territories. In 1988, the PLO, post an unsuccesful campaign of civil disobedience and violence by the Palestinians living in the expanded Israel, more or less give up on the Palestinian people's rights to the land of Israel, and instead declares Gaza and the West Bank as Palestinian homeland. This autonomous, but not wholly independent, Palestine is formally recognized by the UN, but peace does not break out.
Instead, violence and indeed terrorirsm against Israel increases, as the latest Jewish colonists are not welcome, and equally, Palestinians, who have fled from Israel, are prevented from returning to their former homelands in Israel. This Second Intifada (the First being the period leading to Palestinian quasi-idependence) ends in 2005, the year after Arafat passes, when Hamas, a far more radical organization than the PLO, takes control of Gaza (through free elections).
On the West Bank, a different political organization, Fatah, takes over power, which split in the Palestinian movement suits Israel well enough. With Hamas continuing a campaign of violence against Israel, Israel withdraws entirely from the Strip, and instead builds a wall/curtain around it, hoping one supposes that the problem of more than 2 million poor and mostly displaced people living on 365 dessicated square kilometers will solve itself.
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QUEBEC
After ‘P’ comes ‘Q’, but a year – the aptly numbered 2020 that gave us a much improved ocular clarity of where in the World we are heading – went by, before I got excited enough to write up another potted history on somewhere with a population (cohort?!) that is agitating for a greater degree of self-determination. It had to be Quebec. In a second round – it is planned, my 2021 NY resolution was to be more diligent – I may choose an alphabet to follow that doesn't have a ‘Q’, as, unless a reader writes me with a suggestion, I'll likely have to hunt the length and breadth of China to find some place to research. Anyway, here goes…
Well before Jacques Cartier sails into the St. Lawrence River in 1534, for thousands of years the lands that constitute present-day Quebec are of course already settled, by many First Nation tribes, best known/remembered of which today are the Iroquois and the Mohawk.
Cartier establishes a small colony but it does not stand the test of time, and he isn't even the first to discover that waterway connecting the Great Lakes of North America to the ocean. Other French adventurers have already been there before him, and it is French, Breton mainly, traders (of fur, les coureurs des bois) and fishermen (of cod, les morutiers) that develop what will become known as New France, which is to eventually include all the hinterlands of all the five Great Lakes, north, south, east and west, and Louisiana in the faraway south as well.
What is to become the city of Quebec is founded several generations post Cartier's explorations, in 1608, by Samuel de Champlain, by which stage there is enough surplus produce from the agriculture of early settlers to support a small town of shops and bars and basic services. But it is touch-and-go.
In 1627, Cardinal Richelieu (in the name of the King, Louis XIII) grants a new Compagnie des Cent-Associés, funded by 100 of the great-and-the-good, a monopoly to manage the fur trade in the colonies. This company replaces various other companies that have previously been granted such exclusive rights, but have found it difficult to police their rights (it's a big, wild place) and have had very modest success in promoting colonisation proper.
The new company has more success than their predecessors in meeting their side of the bargain, which is to settle French Catholics in New France. More but not a lot, because France falls out with its reluctant ally, England, in its 30-Year War with Spain and Austria. We have visited the 30-Year War before to see how it influenced the histories of Moravia and Lusatia, two lost and forgotten almost-nations either side of the Sudeten and Carpathian Mountains in the heart of Europe. If, as is sometimes said, the 7-Year War of 1756-1763 was really WW Zero, then that 30-Year War might well be called WW Minus One, as it too involved most of the existing and indeed emerging nations of the Old World and their early colonies in the New World, although in its essence it was just a row between two related wealthy Roman Catholic families, the Habsburgs (who ruled/owned Spain and Austria) and the Bourbons (who ruled/owned France).
Because the Habsburgs would become too powerful, both geographically and religiously (i.e. popular with the Pope), if they succeeded in their ambition to suppress the nascent Protestantism of the northern German princes of the Holy Roman Empire and thus and more importantly bring that vast patchwork of dukedoms under their control, France supports the German menagerie, as does Protestant Sweden, the still impoverished Netherlands and a dubious England, since allying with France is an almost unthinkable strategy.
Thus, when this alliance leads to the deployment of English ships to defeat a Huguenot (dissident French Protestant) fleet based in La Rochelle that has invested the Ile de Ré, the outcry in the Westminster Parliament is such that war instead is declared on France. Normality has returned, and, after spending an unsuccessful year and a half trying to relieve the Huguenots now under constant siege in La Rochelle, England’s Francophobic focus (doesn’t that alliterate well) in 1628 switches to the New World.
France’s greatest fishing rival on the teeming banks off Newfoundland are naturellement ‘les Goddams’ – plus ça change, plus c’est la même – who however are at a disadvantage, as the French control all the ports and staging posts on the coast of Newfoundland and along the shores of the St. Lawrence River.
The English expeditionary force under the command of one Capt. Kirke (with an 'e' and without a Spock) and his two brothers blockades the St. Lawrence. They capture the Compagnie des Cent-Associés’ winter supply convoy and then return to England, leaving the citoyens de Quebec to survive on starvation rations. The English King Charles I is much impressed by the Kirkes’ successes and they return to the St. Lawrence in the Spring with a stronger fleet, intercepting a French relief fleet on the way. In July 1629 Champlain surrenders and Kirke becomes the new governor of Quebec, and with it, entire New France, such as it is.
But New France remains an English possession only briefly. Most colonists obviously are French. It is French trappers who have mostly explored the vast hinterland, and it is French fishermen that have settled the many small villages along the coast of the great estuary and the great island of Terre Neuve (Newfoundland). The English, as we know, are not good at French, and in any case their colonists are spoiled for choice, as there is more pleasant and productive land to the south along the entire length of the eastern American seaboard – New England, Virginia, Bermuda, Maryland. Thus, just three year later, Charles I gifts New France back to Louis XIII when Louis promises to pay Charles the last instalment of his sister Henrietta Marie's dowry.
Over the next more than one hundred years, the colonisation of New France progresses slowly. In 1662, the Compagnie des Cent-Associés’ is wound-up, never having made its investors any profit. Fur and fish continue to be the main source of income of New France, and some farming develops on the land south of the St. Lawrence in today's Upstate New York.
Progress is considerably more rapid in Great Britain’s colonies further south, and by the middle of the 18th C, the colonial population there has increased to more than 1 million, in the process displacing and warring with the indigenous Indians, whereas New France counts less than 1/10th of this number of immigrants, and has a more cooperative relationship with its Indians.
The British thirst for lands to farm and goods to trade sees them trekking ever further inland from their eastern seaboard stronghold, and in 1747 New France’s Governor-General Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière decides ça suffit and orders a military expedition south into the nominally French Ohio Country. The expedition is not particularly successful, either in evicting British colonists or dissuading indigenous Indians trading with the British to desist, and several further expeditions follow under the auspices of other Governor-Generals.
Thus the French and Indian Wars between France and their Indian allies and Britain and theirs begin, to finally erupt fully in 1753 when New France lays claims to the north of Virginia (thus named after the Virgin Queen) and the next year British colonists send a countering expedition under the command of a 21-year old George Washington to deal with the matter.
Washington wins a battle but then has to retreat. However, in 1756 a conflict between now the Hohenzoller’s Prussia and again the Habsburg’s Austria, once again about the role and rule of the Holy Roman Emperor across the entirety of present-day Germany and beyond, escalates into what becomes known as the 7-Year War with Britain and Portugal supporting Prussia, and France, Spain and Russia supporting Austria. The conflict spreads across the globe into all the protagonists’ far-flung colonies including North America – World War Zero.
In North America, Britain starts to win the upper hand when the precocious but already frequently victorious James Wolfe is dispatched to the overseas theatre in 1758. With Wolfe second-in-command, the British are immediately successful taking Louisburg guarding the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Wolfe is promoted to Major General and marches to invest Quebec City.
At the end of three months of siege, the French engage the belligerents in the field at what has become known as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. The French are routed and their commander Montcalm is killed. But so is Wolfe; nevertheless, Quebec falls to a combined assault by land and water, the Royal Navy profiting greatly from the prior surveys of one James Cook, and Cook's pilotage to bring the fleet into position.
In 1763, to end the conflict a number of treaties are agreed, redrawing European borders and re-dividing overseas possessions. In the Treaty of Paris in particular, France formally cedes New France to Britain, bar, that is, the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon off the south coast of Newfoundland, and bar southern Louisiana which France has already ceded to Spain a year earlier. The native Indian nations, what is left of them, irrespective of which side they fought on, don't come into.
For various reasons – post-war Britain (not for the first, nor for the last time) is a bit broke, the new territories are very far away and very sparsely populated – Britain adopts an unusual laissez-faire policy in its new acquisition. Roman Catholicism and the French language are tolerated and the lower courts are allowed to continue rule by French Statute Law. Thus, there where the French have primarily settled, basically today’s Canadian province of Quebec (bar its extreme north where nobody lives anyway), the colonial culture remains predominantly Catholic and French-speaking.
Further south and along the eastern seaboard, in the thirteen colonies that will become the United States of America, the approach is very different and a series of taxes are levied – the colonies are wealthy and the King’s coffers are empty. Civil unrest is the result and in 1774 a First Continental Congress is convened by the colonists which agrees on a trade boycott of Britain. No tax acts are rescinded by Britain and a year later, the Second Continental Congress appoints George Washington to create a Continental Army.
The new army lays siege to Boston, where the British Army is based. After a sustained period of heavy bombardment, Washington receives a request to allow those who want to flee (by sea) to do so unmolested. The quid pro quo is that those departing won’t put the city to the torch. Washington doesn't formally agree; nevertheless, Boston is saved and some 10,000 mostly troops leave on board 120 ships.
Congress’ Olive Branch Petition, suing for rescission of the so-called Intolerable Acts and promising loyalty to the Crown, is rejected by the British Army, and the Continental Army next moves on the Province of Quebec, believing that the mostly Francophile population will join the American rebellion. However, the winter weather and German reinforcements save Quebec City, and the harsh protracted siege experience turns local sentiment against the Continentals. The Continentals retreat, slowing their pursuers down by sinking all ships (the only thoroughfares are the lakes and rivers), but all their earlier conquests (Montreal, Sorel, St Johns) are lost.
The American rebels, it barely needs stating, win the war, and in a second Treaty of Paris in 1783, after claiming the entire Quebec province as spoils of war, they settle for Ohio i.e. Quebec south of the St. Lawrence.
However, the hostilities between these two emerging countries – one a federation of British-ruled colonies; the other a federation of ex-British, -French, -Spanish and -Dutch colonies – also continue. In 1812, pursuant a blockade of all trade with Napoleonic France by the Royal Navy and a number of skirmishes at sea between British vessels enforcing the blockade and American vessels contesting it, war breaks out again, and the USA again has designs on Canada and Quebec.
By the end of 1814, the war is over and in the Treaty of Ghent the old borders from before the war are reinstated, as was, with the only losers, once more, being both sides’ native American allies, with the only other important repercussion of the war being the heightening of a shared national Canadian identity and with it an antipathy towards the USA and the republican ideal, but equally an awareness of the possibility of self-determination.
Tension between the British administration and the settled population steadily grows and then begins to accelerate when the traditional fur trade goes into decline to slowly replaced by less lucrative lumber. Armed rebellion in both Lower (present-day southern Quebec) and Upper (southern Ontario) Canada is the result, but the conflict is short-lived (1837 - 1838). The rebellion is multi-national i.e. supported by a broad majority of all the settlers, both French and English and other.
Thirty years on, the 1867 British North America Act, officially establishes the Dominion of Canada as a self-governing entity within the British Empire, comprising Quebec and Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Two years later, Canada acquires the vast possessions of the Hudson Bay Company across the territory known as Prince Rupert Land (most of present-day Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and Nunavut) and then merges with British Columbia. Expansion into the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, and the islands above the Arctic Circle, and finally the accession of Newfoundland completes the new nation, whose autonomy steadily becomes total.
Obviously, within this burgeoning predominantly Anglophone nation, French and Catholicism become the differentiating dimensions of a national (c 22%) minority. Thus, despite, or because of, the laissez-faire policies of the early British administration, a desire for an own independent nationhood is never laid to rest. Midway through the 20th C, this desire begins to gather more momentum and in 1968 the Parti Québécois (PQ) is founded by René Lévesque.
Canada, of course, is a federal commonwealth, and Quebec, as one of the states of the federation, has a state parliament of today 125 delegates with full legislative power, the only catch being that all bills passed by its parliament must be approved by the Queen’s Lieutenant Governor, whom she appoints on the advice of her (the Canadian Federation’s) prime minister. Contesting its first elections to the Assemblée Nationale du Québec in 1970, the PQ wins 7 seats; six years later it is 71 (of 110) and The PQ government pass Bill 101, which defines French to be the province's first language. Migration of the Anglophone population and related economic activity to neighbouring Ontario accelerates.
In 1980, PQ calls a referendum on the secession from Canada and are disappointed the vote is 60% against, but their majority in the general election a year later increases to 80 (of 122). However, the party begins to fall apart when premier Lévesque decides to put ‘sovereignty on the backburner’, loosing the next (1985) election massively to the federalist Quebec Liberal Party (QLP).
However, a decade later, the PQ, regrouped by Jacques Parizeau around a hard-line secession agenda are back in power and a second referendum held in 1995 is lost by only the smallest of margins (49.4% to 50.6%). PQ’s new leader resigns and is succeeded by Lucien Bouchard, a pragmatist, who decides balancing the state's books is more important than polarizing referenda.
Bouchard’s politics inevitably means less government spending on all sorts of social support programmes. PQ's popularity wanes, and in 2003, the QLP regain power. Much soul-searching within the PQ now lead to a tri-partite schism – a socialist wing, which becomes the Québec Solidaire (QS) party; a more right-wing (than the PQ) group, which becomes the Action Démocratique du Québec (ADQ); and the old, middle-of-the-road PQ.
Nevertheless, a further ten years on, it is the pragmatic PQs who are able to form a minority government replacing the QLP Liberal incumbents. However, in these 2012 elections, a new right-wing secessionist party, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), makes a strong showing. The CAQ is basically the old ADQ, re-invigorated with new blood (mostly disaffected PQers).
Minority governments never last long and in 2014, the QLP are once again in. But, as elsewhere in the world, the hardships that have followed on from the 2008 international financial crisis prove to be a great breeding ground for more right-wing populist parties, and in 2018 it is the CAQ who win an absolute majority (74 of the 125 seats). The QLP loose out badly and the PQ is decimated (7 seats). Although it is a practical working majority in parliament, in terms of total no. of votes cast, the percentage support is only 37%. Quebec uses the same first-past-the post constituency voting system as the UK. Perhaps, it is this sobering number that convinces the CAQ now is not the time for another referendum, leaving the vocal championing of sovereignty to the PQ.
Alternatively, perhaps the CAQ actually wonders what would be the point, as it contemplates what the consequences of Britain’s secession from the far less integrated (than the federated Dominion of Canada) European Union are likely to be for its citizens. Unlike Scotland, where the hope is that independence could allow them to hop from one smaller union for the common good (the UK) to another (the EU), such hope is not available to Quebec. They'd be on their own, and so would be their Francophone brethren left behind in New Brunswick (a third of the population there) and in the rest of Canada (c 3%). Hardly a sensible nor a noble cause then, especially as once again any rights of First Nations would be blissfully ignored, and since what the World needs is greater ‘forced’ (not ad-hoc) cooperation if the planet is ever to halt anthropogenic climate change.
But not only logically, historically too, the case has little merit, for, had it not been for France being on the losing side in the 7-Year War, Quebec and the original northern territories of New France would more than likely still be simply French, just like New Caledonia (see an earlier essay) and France's various other overseas territories, ruled by and for France, and not part of a progressive, thinly populated, geographically vast and beautiful, multi-cultural, independent nation. And if not French, just another state of the USA, as a stretched France would never have prevented its conquest by Canada’s acquisitive, stronger North American neighbour.
Be thankful for small mercies, and be careful what you wish for!
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RYUKYU
It is hard to keep to a potted history schedule when the Fantasy Football gameweeks and the sailonline.com races follow each up relentlessly. Luckily I have a substantial inventory of old Facebook publications to dip into. It's the opposite to Kan Ban, but let's go Japanese anyway. I give you the unfortunate story of Ryukyu…
A mostly submerged mountain range, stretching some 4000 km from the Japanese coast at Yokohama to the North Maluku islands of Indonesia, marks the boundary between the Philippines Sea to the East and the East and South China Seas to the West. Pushed up by the Philippine tectonic plate as it imperceptibly but inexorably slides under the Eurasian plate at a relative rate of c 12 cm per annum, where the ridge breaks the surface of the Pacific Ocean, we find land: southern Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and halfway between Taiwan and Japan, the Ryukyu Islands.
Unlike the average settler of a Polynesian or Micronesian Pacific island, the first inhabitants of the Ryukyu’s may not have come to these islands by boat, but probably walked there over the shelf that is today’s East China Sea, arriving as early as the 34th (!) millennium BC.
First historic records of life on the islands date from the 17th century and tell of the uniting of three autonomous 15th century kingdoms (in the usual way) – Nanzan, Chuzan and Hokuzan – on the main island (90% of the landmass) Okinawa, by an emerging Sho dynasty from Chuzan, the middle kingdom.
Ryukyu quickly develops into a wealthy seafaring nation trading between China and Japan, supported by China’s Ming dynasty, to whom the Sho’s pay tribute. Prosperity starts to falter towards the end of the 16th C under pressure from European traders and Japanese pirates, and when, post refusing to support samurai Toyotomi Hideyoshi in his campaigns to unify Japan and subjugate Korea, they find themselves instead invaded in 1609 by the Shimazu from Satsuma (today’s Nagasaki), the Sho’s become vassals of Satsuma as well as of the Chinese.
This new status as both a tributary of Japan and China coincides with Japan’s enactment of their Sakoku policy, isolating Japan from the rest of the world, in a reaction to the unbridled trade with European seafarers that has developed over the previous few decennia, undermining the established order and culture. This policy heralds a second period of prosperity for Ryukyu in a new role as a controlled, authorized trading hub between Japan and the World.
Inevitably, the role draws Ryukyu ever closer towards integration with what has by now become the Empire of Japan, but as long as the need for a Sakuko loophole for vested Japanese interest remains, Ryukyu continues as an independent vassal of Japan. However, in 1853 the US Navy forces a change of heart in Japan by blockading Edo Bay (harbour of Tokyo and Yokohama) with four steam-powered ‘Black Ships’. Twenty-five years later, Ryukyu as an independent kingdom is no more.
With the Japanese in charge, the Ryukyu language, religion and culture is suppressed. Despite this, Okinawa island proves to be an important recruiting ground for Japan during World War II, with many Ryukyu’s welcoming conscription and the opportunity to prove their worth to their overlords.
As WWII draws to a close, the USA decides to invade Okinawa, as a practice run for a full invasion of Japan. This does not go well, and, although (obviously) the US is victorious, casualties are very high, particularly amongst the indigenous population, who fight in ad-hoc militias against the invaders and who are used by the Japanese regulars as urban shield. Over 300,000 people are killed, and this outcome is certainly a consideration in the US’s decision to implement their own final ‘solution’ to end the war in the Pacific.
Post WWII, the islands become a US possession and a vital US military base – in which latter role it continues to this day – but it reverts to Japanese rule in 1972, badly stymieing a growing movement for self-determination.
Indeed, you could argue that the Ryukyu’s were three times unlucky:
1/ to be invaded by Japan,
2/ a century too soon, and then
3/ a second time by the USA, since all WWII Japanese possessions pre-WWII or conquered during WWII gained independence from Japan in the aftermath of WWII.
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SAVOY
‘S’ being next, let’s look at the merit of the Savoyard independence cause. My personal opinion is that there is quite some. Savoy in the past was a dukedom, then a kingdom, then changed its name to Corsica and Piedmont, and only disappeared on the birth of the rather artificial Italian nation. It’s not as if your average Savoyard is any less impoverished than any other average Frenchman, and it is arguable that the tribes who live in the mountains today anachronistically known as the French Alps are a relatively homogeneous group (if that matters) descending from the original Burgundians.
When Charlemagne’s great grandson, Charles the Fat, dies in 888 AD, after briefly and ineffectively having reunited East and West Francia (by invitation of the Nobles, on cousin Carloman II’s death), Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire definitively falls apart. Oft-quoted abbot Regino of Pruem, remarks in his “Chronicon”, a history of the time: “each part of the realm elected a kinglet from its own bowels.” Thus is the Kingdom of Savoy born, but not immediately.
First, the Nobles of the lands straddling the Vosges and French Alps elect Rudolph, grandson of an upwardly mobile minor noble and lay-abbot of St Maurice called Welf, as King of Upper Burgundy. St Maurice controls the toll at a narrow gorge separating the plains of Lake Geneva from the Upper Rhone Valley, making Rudolph an extremely powerful magnate. You can imagine the facility of it each time, when driving from Geneva to Zermatt, Crans or Verbier, the way takes you through a particularly fancy bit of tunnel and bridge work (kunstwerken we call these in Dutch, not inappropriately) at St Maurice hemmed in by cliffs either side.
Ignoring the fact that the Welf line has no previous connection to Burgundy, upper, lower, duchy or county, there is nevertheless some historic legitimacy to this rebirth of a Burgundian kingdom, as a proto-Burgundy of Germanic and Celtic origin had been conquered by the Franks under Clovis in 534 AD.
When Rudolph III dies in 1032 AD, the so-called Elder Welf line is extinguished, and a newly-minted more federal Roman Empire incorporates Upper Burgundy as a kingdom of the Empire. Conrad II, the first of yet another line of Emperors but elected by his peers (four princes and three bishops), takes over the title King of Upper Burgundy as part of the new arrangements.
Some time prior to his death, Rudolf III nominates Humbert the White-Handed to be Count of Savoy, which lands by then comprise a bit of Valais, most of Italy's Aosta Valley and the French départements of Savoie and Haute-Savoie, i.e. the north eastern corner of Burgundy. The House of Savoy, as Humbert's line becomes known as, to all intent and purposes now rules over an independent state. Count after count of Savoy expands the territory and by the end of the 14th C, it stretches from the Vaud plains on the northern shores of Lake Geneva to Turin and the upper Po county of Piedmont in the East and has a seaport in Nice in the South.
Sigismund, self-styled King of the Romans and a successor of Conrad II, promotes the County of Savoy to a Duchy in 1416 AD, and under the first Duke Amadeus VIII, the new dukedom’s territories expand further. Over the next several centuries, the fortunes of the House of Savoy wax and wane and are punctuated by belligerency from the ever more powerful, centralized, originally West Francia i.e. France. As the heartland of the Duchy suffers from frequent French invasion, the capital is moved to Turin.
Although siding with the loosing British, Dutch and Austrian Alliance against the Bourbon house of France in the Spanish War of Succession, in the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 that closes off this war, Savoy acquires Sicily, and Victor Amadeus II is granted the title King of Savoy.
‘Nominally’, the Kingdom of Savoy is very short-lived, as Sicily is exchanged for Sardinia and the name of the new state is changed to Kingdom of Corsica, which thereafter survives for another 140 years, until in 1860 the Treaty of Turin cedes what is left – territories have been lost during the French Revolution – to Napolean III’s France, bar Corsica and Piedmont.
The last King of Corsica, Victor Emmanuel II, however, goes on to much greater things, through military and diplomatic endeavour uniting Italy to become the first and last-but-one King of (modern) Italy. So, really, Italy is just part of Savoy, and the French should give Savoie and Haute-Savoie back to the Italians and the seat of government should be moved back to Turin.
Alternatively, France could just give the Savoyards the independence some of them would like and we could all go skiing in Savoy, which has a ring about it.
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TIBET
If only I had started researching these stories a mere thirty years ago, ‘T’ could have dealt with mystical places like Tajikistan or Turkmenistan so eloquently written about by Colin Thubron in his ‘Lost Heart of Asia’ regaling his travels through these countries, just after they were abandoned by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics when Boris Yeltsin dissolved that entity, he symbolically hoisting the Russian white, blue and red above the Kremlin in the night of December 25, 1991. Never mind, there is another country beginning with ‘T’ in the heart of Asia on the plains and in the mountains north of the Himalayas that remains controlled against the will of many, not necessarily its, people by a much greater and autocratic entity. Here is my not-so-potted precis on Tibet…
On the other side of the Himalayas to Nepal, Bhutan and India and west of the upper courses of the Yangtze river lies the vast mountainous plateau of Tibet. It is a cold, arid, inhospitable place, much (c 80%) of it lying at elevations of more than 4,000m above sea level (i.e. the same as the highest peaks of the European Alps).
One wonders why the World hasn’t seen a stream of long-distance athletes hailing from these heights, but with an average population of c 1 person per square kilometer, which increases to 10/sq.km. along the cultivatable parts of the east-to-west running Yarlung Tsangpo river, wedged in between the Himalayas to the south and the Kang Rinpoche and Nyenchen Tanglha mountains of the plateau to the north, before turning south and continuing on as the Brahmaputra into India and Bangladesh, a good guess is that there simply never are too many Olympic candidates.
Perhaps also the fact that 90% of the population are Buddhist or Bon (a faith that has blended and integrated with Buddhism), means that a certain contemplative, stoical approach to life does not permit the nurturing of great competitive athletic ambition.
Nevertheless, inhospitable though the place is – sometimes referred to as ‘The Third Pole’ – it too has seen the usual wax and wain of rulers, the recorded history of which commences in the 6th C BC with the founding of the Zhangzhung dynasty, ruling over all of western Tibet, U-Tsang as it is called, from their capital city at Kyunglung Nguka, the “Silver Palace of the Garuda Valley”, west of Nepal well into the Himalayan foothills in Thang, the coldest, most desolate part, at an elevation of 4200m, for about a millennium. The Zhangzhung are probably immigrants from the marginally more pleasant Amdo region (coterminous with most of China's present-day Qinghai) in the north east and bring Bon as the state religion with them.
Early in the 7th C AD, Tagbu Nyazig, the local lord of Taktsé Castle in Qonggyai County in U downriver from Tsang, rebels against Gudri Zingpoje who, in turn, is a vassal of the Zhangzhung empire. The revolt is successful and paves the way for another local leader, Namri Songtsen of the Yarlung tribe to integrate/coerce the other local tribes along the Yarlung Tsangpo into an independent kingdom of Tibet, meeting little resistance from 1200km distant Kyunglung.
Songtsen Gampo, at the age of 13, succeeds Namri Songtsen, and establishes a new capital in U at Lhasa in 637 AD on the Kyi River at an elevation of a mere 3600m. Today, Lhasa is still the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China, and its Potala Palace, the vacated home of the 14th Dalai Lama, living in exile in northern India.
Despite his youthful years, Songsten Gampo continues the new kingdom’s expansion, and after a treaty breaks down, conquers the rest of Zhangzhung. His young years neither prevent him from taking at least five consorts of noble blood, one from the rival Mong clan, one a princess of conquered Zhanzhung, another a noble woman of the Western Xia tribe, and two princesses of neighboring foreign powers, the Nepali princess Bhrikuti and the Chinese Tang Princess Wencheng (“Chinese Wife”, wench Chen!). The latter two wives are credited in Tibetan tradition of playing crucial roles in the development of a blended Indo-Bon-Chinese Buddhism in Tibet, whilst the “Chinese Wife” is also referred to by China to this day, to legitimize their control over Tibet.
Thus is the Tibetan Empire born, which continues to expand, until by the beginning of the 9th C it reigns over a roughly rectangular vastness (fastness, even) from Ferghana in present-day Uzbekistan in the north west to the borders with present-day China and Myanmar in the south east, and with access to the sea via the great Ganges-Brahmaputra (Yarlung Tsangpo) delta under the rule of the allied Buddhist Pala Empire.
Neighbored in the west by the Abbasid caliphate, in the north by the Uyghur Khanate, and in the west by the Tang Empire, Tibet regularly finds itself at war, first with the Abbasids and then with the Uyghurs, but there is a certain natural balance of power, since the Tang equally regularly fight with the Uyghurs and the Uyghurs with the Abassids.
However, when famine and plague create a crisis in the Uyghur Khanate in 840 AD, the Kyrgyz, another Buddhist Turkic people like the Uyghur, who live in the upper reaches of the Yenisei river between present-day Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia and Irkutsk near Lake Baikal, invade the Khanate of their southern neighbors. A flood of displaced people descends on Tibet, heralding the Era of Fragmentation, which commences with a civil war between Yumtan and Osung, two possible heirs to the throne of last emperor Langdarma.
The era lasts for some 400 years, only coming to an end in 1240 when a Mongol army under Doorda Darkhan (general) invades the Tibetan lands, which by this stage have splintered into dozens of warring kingdoms. The invasion is not a military success, but the religio-political consequences are substantial, as Tibetan local warlords are thereafter persuaded one-by-one to accept the appointment of Buddhist lamas (wise men) by the Mongol khan to run Tibet's war-torn much-neglected religious and temporal order.
This Cho-Yon priest-patron relationship is largely the invention of Kublai Khan (he of the Pleasure Dome, and grandson of Genghis). Kublai goes on to found the Yuan dynasty of China by conquering the Song, and thus the patronage of the Tibetan lamas transfers to quasi-Chinese control, although Kublai takes care to run his Mongol (incorporating Tibet) and Chinese territories devolved and separate. To assure their individual identities, he even bars inter-marriage between Mongols and Chinese for a while!
By now, Tibetan Buddhism has differentiated itself into four distinct schools: Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya and Gelug. The Nyingma school is the oldest and the Kagyu school the largest, but the Sakya school centered on the western Tsang region is the school that Kublai and his overlords select their religious councel from, which lama (the Dishi) in turn appoints a dpon-chen (great administrator) to manage temporal matters on the ground, while the Dishi resides at court in either Shangdu (or Xanadu as Marco Polo and later Coleridge call it) in Mongolia in Summer, or in Zhongdu in present-day Beijing in Winter.
In 1268, the dpon-chen Shakya Bzang-po divides Tibet into thirteen myriarchies, and attempts to suppress the non-Sakya teaching in myriarchies where other schools are dominant. As the teachings of the four schools are all similar and the schools happily continue to co-exist to this day, Bzang-po’s motivation is obviously political and equally obviously ultimately unsuccessful.
The Yuan Empire collapses towards the middle of the 14th C, and in 1354 control over Tibet transfers to the Tibetan rulers of the Phagmodrupa myriarchy, patrons of the Kagyu school of Buddhism centered on Lhada, and the influence of the Sakya school and Thang myriarchy wanes.
Fifty years later, a young goatherd, Gendun Drup, is ordained in the Sakya tradition and proceeds to travel widely to learn of the different Buddhist traditions. He converts to the youngest and growing Gelug school of thought and in time is recognized by his peers as their spiritual leader and, perhaps posthumously is afforded the title of 1st Dalai Lama (Ocean of Wisdom). As said, the teachings of all four main schools are similar, featuring much meditation, but the emphasis on how to meditate is different, with the Gelugpa emphasizing study and discipline before meditation. Very wise indeed! All future Dalai Lamas are Gendun Drop’s reincarnations.
Unlike the Sakya and Kagyu schools, the Gelugpa are essentially unaligned, and Gendun Drup and his followers found monasteries across the various myriarchies including in U’s Lhada and Shigatse in the heart of Thang. Mongol khans ruling the lands to the north of Tibet also adopt Gelug Buddhism.
The Phagmodrupa never fully get to grips with their, sometimes rather nominally, feudal vassals. However, for more than a century, the land is at peace and religiosity prospers under the dynasty's patronage. Good relations are also maintained with the new Ming dynasty in China.
All good things come to an end and in 1435 the Phagmodrupa are usurped by their in-laws and sometimes advisors, the Rinpungpa based in Thang, who in turn never wholly succeed in eliminating Phagmodrupa power in U, and moreover have to defend against intermittent incursions by various khans and caliphs.
Towards the start of the 16th C, the never-ending squabbling between U and Thang creates an opportunity for a final dynasty to assume power, the Tsangpa, who reign over an independent Tsang and beyond for a further 100 years. The Tsangpa are fundamentalists of the Kagyu persuasion.
However, in U, where the Phagmodrupa no longer reign, the Gelugpa school is in the ascendancy, and their 4th Dalai Lama, himself of Mongol noble stock, seeks Mongol support against Tsangpa persecution. The Tsangpa immediately and violently suppress this insurrection and two of the three main Gelug monasteries in U, Drepung and Sera, are sacked. Some 5000 monks are killed.
Twenty years on, the 5th Dalai Lama, again with the support of Mongol troops, repeats the exercise, but peace does not return as the Tsangpa, supported by (different) Mongol troops, retaliate, and it is only in 1642 that the Tsangpa are finally vanquished, when Gushi Khan, a new Mongol leader, who has already conquered Amdo, thus establishing yet another (the Khoskut) khanate, takes matters in hand.
Tsangpa's ruler Karma (destined one) Tenkyong and his ministers are captured, and Tenkyong is executed by immersion tied up in an oxhide bag in the Lhasa river, in reprisal after a final insurgency against the new regime is suppressed.
Gushi Khan withdraws to return to his lands in Amdo and present-day Chinese Xinjiang, and appoints Lobs
The Dalai Lamas are now in charge, although in reality it is the Depa that manages the secular day-to-day of finance (there is annual tribute to be collected), alliances, wars and construction, and one of the first undertakings of the new regime is to commission a new palace, the Potala, as a winter residence; a complex which will, when it is finally completed by his successor, house several thousand monks and many thousands of painted scrolls, murals, and statues of precious metals and jewels.
The Lama and Depa in concert set about encoding the religio-feudal social structure in law, which recognizes three social strata:
1. The Dalai Lama, the Dalai Lama's monks/advisors, 30 senior noble families and about 170 lesser noble families.
2. The Middle Classes comprising hereditary leaseholders, their sub-tenants, and smallholders who were granted land parcels that could be taken away and did not pass on.
3. The Underclass of Untouchables (fishermen, butchers, executioners, corpse disposers, blacksmiths, goldsmiths and prostitutes), servants and slaves.
Sonam Rapten also encourages the Dalai Lama to tutor a likely leader of the Dzungar Mongols, neighbors to the Khoskuts. On his majority, the Dalai Lama grants his pupil the titles of Boshugtu Khan. Sonam Rapten encourages Boshugtu to invade the remaining territory of the Chagatai Khanate (founded originally by Genghis Khan), thus establishing a useful balance of power between now two Gelugpa Buddhist regimes, the Khoskut and the Dzungar Khanates.
However, war-mongering is not the exclusive domain of the Desi, and in 1679, against the Desi’s advice, the 5th Dalai Lama himself organizes an invasion of Ladakh, high in the Himalayas. The Ladakh regime has been persecuting Gelugpa monasteries. The Tibetan army includes Dzungar Mongol troops and initially their campaign meets with success. However, in time, the Mughals of northern India, whose Kashmir province has close links with Ladakh, intervenes. The Tibeto-Mongol army is expelled and the King of Ladakh agrees to pay tribute to the Mughals.
There is also conflict with Bhutan, a sort-of march (no man’s land) on the top of the Himalayas between Tibet and India. A Bhutanese king, Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, has formally adopted the Drukpa branch of the rival Kagyu school of Buddhism, and has declared independence from Tibet. The Dalai Lama’s campaign is unsuccessful and Bhutan remains an independent kingdom to this day.
The new so-called Ganden Phodrang regime of the Dalai Lamas and its caste system, which only allows one route for advancement, that from the middle class to monk/advisor, lasts more or less uninterrupted until the collapse of the Kingdom consequent the Chinese Revolution at the start of the 20th C. More or less, as the Khoskuts lose control when in 1717, the Dzungars (rival Mongols) invade Tibet, much to the annoyance of Xuanje, 3rd Kangxi Emperor of the Great Qing (and last Chinese) dynasty centered in Manchuria, who have by now fully taken over from the Yuan, the Khoskuts having accepted Qing overlordship.
By the end of 1723, the geo-political situation has changed considerably. Manchu troops have defeated the Dzungars (and the Khoskuts as well), Amdo has become a directly governed province of the Xing Emperor, and a 7th Dalai Lama has been appointed by Xuanje to rule over Tibet. Tribute now goes to the empire, presumably.
In 1904, a British Expeditionary Force invades Tibet, ostensibly as a tactical move in The Great Game between the British and Russian Empires that has by that stage been playing out for more than half a century; Russia seeking to extend its influence south beyond the Himalayas and to hence conquer India, Britain seeking to prevent this.
A weak, distant Qing has no defense to the incursion, and after a short campaign, Britain signs a treaty with Tibet. Although this Treaty of Lhasa recognizes Qing suzerainty over Tibet, it forbids the ceding, selling or leasing of any territory to any other foreign power (i.e. Russia) and ditto trade, and requires Tibet to pay an extortionate indemnity (for what?) of 7.5m rupees, later reduced by two-thirds.
In 1912, the Qing dynasty is deposed by the Xinhai Revolution, and a new Provisional Government of the Republic of China replaces Xing rule, according Tibet the status of a protectorate. At the same time, Tibet and Mongolia sign a treaty proclaiming mutual recognition of their independence from China. Buoyed by the terms of the Treaty of Lhasa, the 13th Dalai Lama proclaims Tibet’s independence.
In 1914, British, Tibetan and Chinese delegates attend a convention in Simla in northern India with the aim to agree and regularize borders between India, Tibet and China and temporal and religious authorities across U Thang, Amdo and other disputed territories. The Convention achieves nothing of permanence, excepting that another one of those imperial lines in the sand, the McMahon Line, which annexes 9,000 sq. km. of Tibetan territory in southern Tibet, today’s north western Arunachal Pradesh, which in turn leads to a short Sino-Indian War in 1962. India's sovereignty over Ladakh is also part of the conflict.
India at this stage is no longer a British possession and it is Russia or rather the USSR who support India in their war with China (the denouement of Great Britain’s Great Game, really). Heavy casualties on both sides, primarily due to the inhospitable altitude and weather, bring about an early ceasefire. However, China has the upper hand in the negotiations. The Aksai Chin region of Ladakh is affiliated in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, and the eastern border between India and Tibet is redrawn.
Twelve years earlier, the newly proclaimed People’s Republic of China (PRC) of Communist leader Mao Zedong, that has displaced the Provisional Government, has already sent its People’s Liberation Army into Tibet. Despite the Tibetan Army having been continuously beefed and trained up by Britain ever since Tibet's unilateral declaration of independence, resistance is futile.
With no military aid forthcoming from Britain or India, or the Unites States, the by-now 14th Dalai Lama sues for peace and a Seventeen Point Agreement is drawn up, the most important points of which require the expulsion of all foreign powers and aid, for which the quid-pro-quo is that China recognizes Tibet as an autonomous region of China under the continuing local government of the Dalai Lama.
Notwithstanding their inaction, Britain and the USA are not happy with this further spread of communism into a vast, albeit very underpopulated territory, probably at this stage beginning to recognize the scale of the untapped natural resources there: copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium and uranium, but most of all water – c 8,000 m3 per second on average over a fall of about 1,000 metres, cascading from the Himalayan glaciers down the Yarlung Tsangpo river.
Water use varies widely across the world, but if we take the consumption of an environmentally aware, modern western European country like Denmark of 200 m3 per annum per capita as some sort of reasonable need, the Yarlung Tsangpo's discharge is enough to water a population of 1.2 billion (and of course it does, as itdescends though northern India and Bangladesh down to the Bay of Bengal). But what can flow one way can flow another, as the Chinese are beginning to realize and plan.
8,000 m3 is also 8,000 tonne per second and over a fall of 1,000 metre, this is roughly the equivalent of 50,000 MW of electrical power, depending on losses and turbine efficiencies. Again, taking Denmark’s per capital annual electrical consumption of c 5,000kW as a reasonable benchmark, that’s enough electrical energy for say 35 million people, depending on load factor (i.e. the amount of time the generator is ‘on’, typically a lowly 40% for hydro). It's not a lot compared to the water needs the Yarlung Tsangpo can serve, but it is still substantial.
Whether or not this potential is already of interest and concern to western powers, post the annexation Military Intelligence 6 (MI6, the UK’s secret service) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, the USA’s secret service) commence covert operations in Tibet fomenting and assisting resistance against the Communists. However, various counter-insurgencies prove unsuccessful and by 1959 the Dalai Lama’s continuing presence in the Potala Palace, after a major revolt in Lhasa has been put down, is adjudged to be unsafe for his person and the CIA encourages and finances his flight and that of his entourage to Dharamshala, India, from whence he rules the Central Tibetan Administration in exile to this day.
As elsewhere in the world, communism and religion don't mix, and by the time Mao declares a TAR (Tibet Autonomous Region) in 1965, and his ‘cultural revolution’ sweeps across the entire PRC, many of Tibet’s monasteries have already been closed or destroyed, and the monks dispersed or killed. The persecution is undoubtedly also ethnic. Buddhism is the religion of the Tibetan race after all. Resettlement of ethnic Chinese to Tibet is also encouraged.
China’s modernizing heavy hand continues on in the 20th C. Smallholders and herdsmen are forcibly relocated to the cities, where they find employment in construction and industry, city services, hotels and shops. The economic growth, as elsewhere in China, is spectacular, running at 10% p.a. year-after-year. However, Tibet’s Buddhist religion proves irrepressible and today there are over 100 active monasteries again (there had been 1000) providing a sought-after tourist attraction for a steady stream of westerners intrigued or seduced by the mystic spiritualism of the religion, providing welcome income for the monks and for the rest of the country.
And major infrastructure problems are being contemplated including the controversial building of a dam across the Yarlung Tsangpo river to feed a 35000 MW hydro-electric power station and to divert (some of) the flow via tunnels and canals and via the upper reaches of the Yangtze and the Mekon river, to the Yellow river, to provide drinking and irrigation water for densely populated northern China. Abhorred by conversationist, the plan obviously has consequences for downstream Bangladesh and Myanmar (benign or disastrous or in-between).
A new major railway also already connects Lhasa to Xining and from there to the rest of China, and an extension is planned from Lhasa westward to Shigatse. Mining, which began with a mini Gold Rush in the 1980s is also to expand further as the new rail link reduces export costs dramatically, and (whenever built) the 35000 MW hydro dam will enable preliminary refining of copper and other rare metals.
These then roughly are the facts. On the one hand, there is a hunkering after a simpler life of spiritualty and harmony with (rather austere) nature under the auspices of a venerable theocratic regime. On the other hand, there is the ferocious striving after a greater material welfare for all the PRC's citizens (and the great wealth of some).
So, what is wise now, Dalai Lama?
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ULSTER
Foolishly, I got myself embroiled in a discussion about BREXIT with my FB friends, now several years ago. At the time, much hinged on the requirement by the EU of a BACKSTOP regarding the British border in Ireland partitioning the north eastern six British counties of the island of Ireland from the twenty-six counties of the Republic of Ireland. So, what is this all about, Gilberto, an Italian friend working in Germany, and Vicky, an American friend working in Switzerland, asked me?
Well, as per the title but not the content of the 2009 Meryl Streep romcom, once again ‘It’s Complicated’, since to explain the BACKSTOP you have to tell the story of Ulster. And to qualify for inclusion in this blog, there has to be an independence movement whose historic legitimacy requires testing. Fortunately (or not) it turns out there is, although it is small, since most folk up there either want to be part of a United Ireland or of a United Kingdom.
But one can't tell the story of Ulster without telling the story of Ireland, and that of Ireland and Ulster without at least referencing the stories of England and Scotland. And, as I was educated in history at protestant Midleton College in Ireland by an inspirational, biased, proud Norman catholic Irishman who later changed his name by deed poll from Jack (Joseph?) Petit to Sean F. de la Petite, who, for balance, had me do the History of the Tudors for my GCE ‘O’ Levels, I knew or rather vaguely remembered too much, so this particular history outgrew its pot.
Instead therefore I give you twenty-one seedlings in numbered headlines below, which if you click on will take you to a proper potted history about that particular headlined episode that hopefully together with the twenty other chapters will explain somehow what the BACKSTOP which has now become a BORDER IN THE IRISH SEA is all about, and with that a background to the ‘Ulster Ambition’ (not a book by Robert Ludlum).
I. CELTS, PICTS, ROMANS, DANES & SAXONS
... in which we learn that towards the end of the last millennium before the birth of Christ, the entire British Isles are settled by Celtic tribes, largely displacing the then-indigenous population, bar the Picts of Scotland. Romans follow, then Saxons and then Danes and Norsemen, settling mainly in what is today called England. But Norsemen also settle in Dublin and elsewhere along the Irish coasts and the Celtic Dal Riada tribe of Ulster invades the Scottish isles and highlands.
II. CHRISTIANITY
... covering the arrival of the one faith in the one God in England under Roman rule at the start of the 2nd C AD, its disappearance there and elsewhere in a disintegrating Roman Empire thereafter to find refuge in Ireland to be exported back to England again and to Europe by mainly Irish missionaries.
III. ALLIES & TRIBAL CONFLICTS
... concerning the feuds between the kings of Ireland’s five provinces for the High Kingship of All Ireland in the 1st C of the 2nd millennium, and how this leads to an alliance between the King of Leinster, Ireland’s south eastern province and Strongbow, a Norman baron, and thus the beginning of a Norman colonisation of Ireland, following on and supported by their conquest of England, and how, in time, the Pope rubber-stamps the kingship of the Norman King of England as also King of Ireland.
IV. TUDOR REFORMATION
... of Henry VIII who finds himself surrounded by Roman Catholic enemies when in 1534 he renounces the Pope and sets up his own brand of Catholicism in order to divorce the King of Spain’s aunt and marry Anne Boleyn, younger, prettier and hopefully more fertile, and how, to secure his kingdoms from the threat of Holy Roman, Spanish and French supported insurrections, he seeks to suppress Roman Catholicism across his lands with more success in proximate England than faraway Ireland.
V. PLANTATIONS
... which, initiated by Henry VIII, progressively reassign the lands of Roman Catholic nobility in Ireland to new converted settlers of English stock, and which policy is continued by Henry’s successors, including Mary his Roman Catholic daughter with Catherine of Aragon, resulting in a rebellion by the Lords of the North, O’Neill and O’Donnell, and their defeat and flight in 1607.
VI. SCOTLAND
... being like Ireland a satellite of England, but unlike Ireland, managing to unite under the single royal banner of Constantine II of the House of Alpin, and thus be in a position to in time forge a royal alliance with the Norman invaders of England, through the marriage of Matilda, Constantine’s great-great-great-great-great-grandniece to Henry I, son of William the (Norman) Conqueror, which alliance is repeatedly re-enforced through political marriages, until in 1603, James VI of Scotland, of Gaelic, Saxon, Danish and Norman stock is crowned James I, King of England, which title comes together with the kingship of Ireland.
VII. CHICHESTER
... who, appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland by James I, restarts and comprehensively and mercilessly completes the plantation of Ulster primarily with Scottish protestant Presbyterian settlers, commenced and abandoned by James’ predecessor Elizabeth I, because of the to her unacceptable ensuing levels of violence.
VIII. CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT VS. CROMWELL
... actions and reactions during the middle of the 17th C, in which the remaining Roman Catholic lords and landowners, seeing no end in sight to England’s plantation politics, take up arms, and avail of the vacuum provided by the succession of James I by the very absolutist, very ‘High Church’ Charles I and the ensuing Civil War between Charles and Parliament, to declare a new independent confederate Irish government with the support of their loyalist (pro-Charles) Protestant countrymen, but are then swiftly and brutally put down by Oliver Cromwell after Parliament's Civil War victory.
IX. WILLIAM OF ORANGE
... the third of his line to be nominated ‘Stateholder’ by the Parliament of the Dutch Republic, being married to Mary, the daughter of James II, grandson of Charles I, is invited by Parliament to rule England when, England having returned to royal rule post the Cromwell ‘experiment’, a male heir is born to the re-converted to Catholicism James, who has continued to restore the rights and property of the Catholic gentry in Ireland and in England.
It being in the interest of The Netherlands to assure England does not become a Catholic ally of France, with whom (at times already in concert with England) they are at war, William accepts the invitation and Ireland duly becomes a major theatre of war between the French-backed Jacobite supporters of the now-deposed James II and William, which war William wins, and, although back in The Netherlands religious differences are tolerated, the politics of international power dictate this can not be allowed in Ireland and a series of Penal Laws are enacted.
X. HOUSE OF HANOVER
... which House takes over the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain (England & Scotland) when George, Elector of Hanover inherits the heir apparency to England which vested in his mother on the passing of Parliament in 1701 of the Act of Settlement excluding Catholics in general and James Francis Edward Stuart, James II’s grandson, in particular from the inheritance, which Act then covers Scotland as well through the 1707 Act of Union.
Great Britain prospers mightely and with the liberal (as in laisez-faire, anything goes) Whigs of Protestant merchants and industrialist in charge in Parliament, a World-spanning Empire is built up in which Ireland is no more than another territory to be exploited for and by the Ascendancy.
XI. PROTESTANT ASCENDANCY
... who at the start of the 18th C own 90% of the land in Ireland, and in Dublin, the Empire’s prosperously trading second largest city, rule the land through a conservative, subordinated-to-Britain Protestant-members-only parliament, but over time grow to resent various interferences to trade (just like the Empire’s American settlers) and then to fear for their safety as town garrisons are depleted for mustering to America to counter (unsuccesfully) the revolution there.
To assure the peace and status quo, town garrisons are replaced by local Volunteers, who are drawn from all religious denominations, and quickly grow to 300 corps, whilst simultaneuosly a newly founded Patriot party finds a charismatic leader of impeccable Ascendancy credentials in Henry Grattan who agitates for a full devolvment of the Irish Parliament which is duly achieved in 1783 by the passing of the Renunciation Act, after which many of the Penal Laws against Catholics are repealed, but the ban on seats in parliament is not one of them.
XII. UNITED IRISHMEN & THE ACT OF UNION
... being the story of how, because for some the Irish parliament’s reforms do not go far enough and others fear for more, the Volunteers schism into the United Irishmen movement and the Presbyterian Volunteers (who later become known as Orangemen), and how, after a rebellion by the United Irishmen under the leadership of Wolfe Tone, a Heugenot descendant, inspired and supported by revolutionary France, is put down, the Act of Union 1800 merges the parliaments of Ireland and England into a single House of Commons, and Grattan’s Patriot party in due course is absorbed by the mercantile-minded Whigs.
XIII. THE GREAT FAMINE
... of 1846 to 1848 during which more than 1 million Catholic cottiers and dependents die of hunger as the potato crop, their sole staple, since grains, dairy and beef taken as tithes/rent are exported tarrif-free to a hungry industrial Britain, fails, and a further 1 million emigrate, primarily to England and America.
In Ulster, nonetheless, the repercussions are less severe. Plantation tenants there have “tenant-rights” and cannot be expoited to the bone the way they are in the south, and investment in Presbyterian-led industrialisation of linen manufacturies and shipbuilding provides a comparitive welfare.
XIV. CHARLES STEWART PARNELL
... who, like Grattan before him is a reform-minded Ascendancy aristrocrat, and in 1875 founds a new political party, the IPP (Irish Parliamentary Party) which agitates for Home Rule and indirectly enjoys some of the fruits of agitation by a new militaristic organisation, the IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood).
Unlike a century earlier, however, the IRB can draw on financial and political support from several million emigrants, who, particularly in the USA, have improved their lives. Much progress is made by the IPP in Parliament and by 1889 the party holds 85 of the 103 Irish constituency seats in the Commons, two Land Acts and a rent strike have wholly transformed tenant/landlord relations, and Prime Minister Gladstone is minded to grant Home Rule.
However and forever alas, Parnell finds himself cited as the ‘correspondent’ in the divorce by William O’Shea of his wife Kitty. Parnell marries Kitty, but the opprobrium which attaches to the scandal destroys him and the party, and Home Rule never happens.
XV. PARTITION
... being the divison of the country into six northern counties, where there is a violent majority who wish to remain an integral part of the United Kingdom, and the twenty-six other counties, where there is an equally violent majority represented in Parliament by a new party Sinn Féin, who wish for independence, which, after a three-year long war between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the British forces of law-and-order drafted in the main from veterans of WWI which has ended in 1918, is granted by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, creating a Free State within the Commonwealth (same as New Zealand, Australia and Canada).
XVI. CIVIL WAR
... between proponents of the new Free State, headed up by Michael Collins, former Chief of Staff of the IRA, who has negotiated the Treaty, and is now Commander in Chief of the new Irish Army, and its opponents, headed up by Eomann de Valera, president of Sinn Féin, who objects to Partition, Treaty Ports (Royal Navy bases to be maintained in Ireland) and the Oath of Allegiance to the British Crown.
The war lasts little more than a year, but the fighting between, and ambushes, executions and reprisals by both the remaining IRA, made up of troops mostly from Munster in the south and from partitioned Ulster, and the new Irish Army is fierce, but almost inevitably ends in victory for the Free Staters (with support from Britain), but only after both Michael Collins and his former second-in-command Liam Lynch, leader of the rebel IRA have both been killed.
A new pro-Treaty party, Cumann na nGaedheal, then splits away from Sinn Féin and wins the 1923 general election to the new Irish parliament, Dáil Éireann. But in 1932, a second seceding party from Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil, set up by de Valera to distance himself from the continuing insurgency of the IRA, wins power, and over the next fifteen years takes Ireland out of the Commonwealth, declares it a Republic, has the Treaty Ports returned to Ireland, and keeps Ireland nuetral and out of WWII.
Cumann na nGaedheal later changes its name to Fine Gael, and Sinn Féin soldier on as a minority party still committed to a united Ireland, by whatever means including violence, as the political wing of the IRA, and today, a hundred years after independence, it is still the centrist Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael parties (in a first-ever governing coalition) and the ever more popular left-wing Sinn Féin that define the Republic’s political landscape.
XVII. THE TROUBLES
... in and of Northern Ireland, which escalate steadily during the 1960s to erupt into a full-scale sectarian terrorist guerilla war between the loyalist UVF and UDF (Ulster Volunteers and Defense Force) militia’s and the nationalist Provisional IRA and INLA (Irish Nationalist Liberation Army) at the start of the 1970s.
By the time The Troubles come to an uneasy end at the close of the 20th C, more than 3600 people have been killed – twice as many as during the War of Independence and Civil War combined – mostly civilians.
XVIII. EUROPEAN UNION
... which begins to take shape towards the end of the 1950s in the form of the EC (European Community) of six states, Italy, France and Germany and Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg, and which Britain and Ireland join, together with Denmark, in 1972, after the pretannic neighbours have had an earlier joint application in 1965 vetoed by France.
Given that in 1972, an Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement has been in place since Britain and Ireland's EC accesion was blocked in 1955, and a seperate 'freedom of movement of people' agreement known as the CTA (Common Travel Area) since Independence in 1922, it is doubtful either Britain or Ireland could have joined alone.
1972 of course is also the year of Ulster’s Bloody Sunday, but, paradoxically, it is the two nations’ joint accession to the EC in that same year, that, as time runs its course, provides the key mechanism for peace in Ireland. But first, decades of never-ending haphazard violence are needed to teach both sides its futility, and the EC has to progress further.
XIX. GOOD FRIDAY
... being the day in 1998 that the governments of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland and most of the political parties in the North sign up to an agreement to respect equally the North’s Nationalist and Unionist traditions, to no longer maintain any claim in either country’s laws to a right to rule, in the case of the Republic over Northern Ireland, and in the case of the UK over the Republic, and to do everything they collectively can to enable both ‘traditions’ to co-exist in equitable peace.
XX. THE BACKSTOP
... being a clause in the “Agreement on the withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community” negotiated by then UK prime minister, Theresa May, in 2018, after a Referendum in the UK in 2016 has voted by a small majority to leave the EU.
The purpose of the clause is to assure no controlled or patrolled physical border between Northern Ireland and the Republic in the South returns to the island of Ireland as a result of the UK’s Brexit from the EU. The potential repercussions of the Backstop prove controversial and lead to May not winning majority support for her deal in the House of Commons and in consequence her resignation.
XXI. BORDER IN THE IRISH SEA
... being the alternative to the Backstop that Borish Johnson, Theresa May’s successor, negotiates with the EU towards the end of 2019.
A border in the Irish Sea between the North and the (rest of) the UK is clearly a fool-proof idea for preventing any need ever for a border on the island of Ireland, but it is also anathema to Unionists, who feel betrayed and rightly argue that the idea is a clear breach of the undertakings of the Good Friday Agreement to respect both ‘traditions’ in the North equally.
What will happen next is anybody’s guess. A return to civil disturbances seems quite probable, either because the border in the sea is not lifted or a border on the island is reinstated. But how about an indepedent re-partitioned mini-Ulster; unlikely, but there are those who campaign for it, and wouldn't many in the Republic and Great Britain welcome it as a Solominic solution.
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VENETO
By now it’s 2022 in the present-day, and somehow, in between the real sailing (from Finisterre to Fenit via France) and the virtual (everywhere) I’ve been finding time to complete my first compilation of potted pasts. Time for ‘V’ then – and where better than Venice and its Veneto…
Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th C BC tells of an independent people living on the north western seaboard of the Adriatic Sea. Like their Illyrian cousins east across the water from them, these Veneti are Indo-European immigrants from the steppes of Asia, and they are good horsemen. The Greeks trade with them, and in 302 BC, Spartan king Cleonimos unsuccessfully attempts a conquest of their main stronghold Patavium, present day Padua, 40 miles inland on the river Brenta.
Later, invasions by the Etruscans, the Carthaginians and Gauls are also repulsed, the latter two by forming alliances with Rome. By-and-by, the Veneti are thus relatively peacefully assimilated into the Roman Republic. Around 45 BC, Padua becomes a Roman municipium and by the start of the first century AD Roman colonies have been established at Concordia (modern Portogruaro), Este, Treviso and Trieste, further contributing to the absorption of the Veneti into Roman culture. Venice itself at this stage is just an uninhabitable lagoon of low islands, and mud- and sandbanks in the delta where the Brenta, Piave, Bacchilione, Adige, Sile and of course the mighty Po flow into the sea, but Padua has become the empire’s second city.
In 313 AD, the emperor Constantine I establishes Christianity as the official religion of the Empire. All other faiths and forms of worships are tolerated. However, over time, the zeal of Christian missionaries, supported in their convictions by the State, steadily erodes that tolerance of heathens.
In the 5th C AD, the Roman Empire already having already divided into two – the East centred on Constantinople founded by Constantine, the West centred on Rome – the Veneti lands are the first Roman territories to be invaded from across the Alps by Huns and Goths and Lombards from the East and North.
From time to time, Byzantium, the Eastern Empire, manages to regain some control over parts of the north eastern coastal plain and other defendable coastal parts of Italy, centering their power in Ravenna further south where they establish what is called an Exarchate (viceroyship). But successive Exarchs mean little for the more inland populations of Este, Padua and Treviso and their hinterlands. A steady flight, from the privations imposed by the barbaric invaders, to the lagoons of the delta ensues, and as early as 421 a church is built on present-day Rialto (high shore).
Over time the lagoon’s settlements coalesce into a city, Venice, whose elders elect its first Doge (dux or duke) in 697 AD. Venice, being only accessible over water and that with difficulty, is only nominally governed by the Exarchate, and enjoys and grows a great autonomy. In any event, the Exarchate to all intents and purposes disappears from Italy in 751 when the Lombard King Aistulf once and for all takes Ravenna, leaving Venice a lonely independent outpost of Byzantium.
Charlemagne, at the height of his powers and crowned by Pope Leo III as a new Holy Roman Emperor (slighting the other Emperor in Constantinople) ruling over most of today’s mainland North Western Europe and Italy, in 810 undertakes a concerted assault on the new city, but fails, losing his son Pepin, newly crowned King of the Lombards, to disease in the attempt.
Venice continues to thrive and by the start of the 11th C is vying with Genoa to be the leading “repubbliche marinare” in the Mediterranean. Others at that time are Pisa, Amalfi, Gaeta, Ancona, Noli and Ragusa (Dubrovnik), but Venice outperforms and outlives them all, developing incredibly lucrative trade routes to the far east via staging posts along the Dalmatian and Greek coasts and Crete and Cyprus, forging a maritime empire.
To quash piracy and to secure grain and other food and wine supplies and export routes to Europe, Venice expands back onto the Terraferma of mainland Italy. By the mid 16th C, at the peak of its power the Venetian Empire stretches from the Alps to the Dardanelles and includes all of the present-day Italian provinces of Veneto and Friuli, most of Trentino as well as the eastern half of Romagno (including Bologna and Ravenna), the entire eastern Adriatic littoral from Istria in the north to Crete in the south (excluding Dubrovnik), most of Greece, all of Cyprus and a little sliver of Turkey, and the (elected) Doge commands a fleet of more than 3000 ships manned by more than 30,000 sailors to protect and exploit the empire and its trade routes.
But trouble is brewing. Already in 1453, in the East, Constantinople has fallen to Mehmed II, Sultan of the all-conquering Ottoman Empire. Although initially this allows Venice to add to its territories (or rather necessitates, trade rather than conquest is the Venetian way), in the longer run it brings Venice into direct conflict with the Ottomans. With Byzantium gone, other allies, further away from the Ottoman expansionist threat, are hard to find, and territory and trade is progressively lost.
In part, Venice only has herself to blame for her trouble, since back in 1202, she has been a leading participant in the sacking of Constantinople by the 4th Crusade. Although the plan post-conquest is to divide up the Byzantine lands between Venice, the Pope and the mostly Norman adventurer crusaders, this barely works and the net result is some additional Greek territory for Venice and the four bronze horses stolen from the Hippodrome, (replicas of) which still adorn the facade of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice today.
Trouble is brewing in the West too. In 1499 Vasco da Gama returns to Portugal from a voyage south around the Cape of Good Hope which discovers a sea route to India and beyond. A year later Christopher Columbus returns to Seville from his third voyage west which has discovered the South American mainland. Ocean-faring sailing ships, rather than Mediterranean sail-assisted biremes and triremes thus become the best route to trade (and plunder). Portugal, trading with the East, and Spain, exploiting the West, become Europe’s new superpowers, and are soon joined in the exploitation of India, the Far East and the Americas by England, France and a new Venice-of-the-Atlantic, the Dutch Republic.
Venice’s expansion is over, and over time her sway over her further-flung territories of Cyprus, Greece and Crete is lost primarily to the Ottomans, but also to the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1797 Napoleon conquers what is left, essentially Terraferma, Istria, and Dalmatia, only to victoriously and pragmatically transfer these territories to Austria at the Treaty of Campo Formio.
Throughout the first half of the 19th C, France and Austria and Spain continue to squabble over the territories of the Italian peninsula and islands. Independent city states such as there still are disappear and by around 1850 three puppet regimes rule the land, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the South (allied to Spain), the Kingdom of Sardinia and Savoy in the West (allied to France), and the Kingdom of Venetia in the North (under Austrian rule), with the Papal States in the middle.
At the same time that this new political geography is crystalizing out, revolution is also brewing. Dirt poor and exploited, the mostly agricultural working classes of the Two Sicilies are freed from their regime by Savoyard (from Nice) general Guiseppi Garibaldi, and in 1861, a first United Kingdom of Italy is achieved under the kingship of Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy, who has just lost all his territory west of (including Nice) and in the Alps to France.
Five years later, Austria cedes Veneto to Victor Emmanuel and in 1870 the Papal States are taken and Rome becomes the new capital of a new nation, whose borders, bar returning rule over the land and buildings of the Roman Catholic church to the Vatican, have remained the same since then. Finally, Victor Emmanuel III having supported his generalissimo Mussolini alliance with Germany’s Hitler throughout WWII, the king abdicates in 1946, and in a long-promised referendum, Italy votes to become a Republic.
Having been taken (after a thousand years of independence) by Austria and then carelessly given away a hundred years later to the House of Savoy, parvenu rulers of a new nation named Italy, it is perhaps understandable that there are many Venetians, in Venice and across all the former Terraferma, who support the notion of a return to greater autonomy. The local dialect is different enough to be deemed a language, which thrives despite not being taught in schools. The local economies are strong and flourish on a mix of viticulture and agriculture, light industry and of course tourism. And taxes are high which go to support an ineffective government faraway, and less fortunate regions equally faraway.
Regional elections are held in Italy every five years, and the Liga Veneta (LV) who seek fiscal federalism and full independence longer term, contest them in Veneto, and in 2020 win 61.5% of the vote. Other Venetist lists and parties obtain a further 4.1% of the vote. As a result, 34 out of 51 seats in the Regional Council are currently controlled by Venetists.
There are many other separatist movements across Italy, especially in the North, but none dominate local politics as much as the LV does. Will the weight of history bring them success the soonest?
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WALLONIA
Next an independence-minded region starting with “W”. There are a number, but I thought I’d pick a surprising one: Wallonia, that’s the French-speaking, once-mighty industrial heart of Europe, in the south eastern half of Belgium, wedged in between prosperous Vlaanderen and wealthy independent Luxembourg. Surprising, in that many of my small but diligent following will be aware that there is a strong movement in Vlaanderen wishing to secede from Belgium, but whyever would the Walloons too seek independence, given that their dependence on the federal purse strings is not insignificant...
Belgium! As Dutch rock band Het Goede Doel (The Good Cause, a nederpop Talking Heads, to flatter them a little) sang on their 1982 debut album, “Ik heb getwijfeld over Belgie” . Loosely translated, with some lines taken out of sequence and several verses dropped, it goes like this:
Where shall I go, I shan’t go to Norn Iron
Not to Norn Iron, in case it explodes
Where shall I go, I shan’t go to China
Can’t go to China, so many people, just loads
Do not wish to live in Scotland
‘cause Scotland I’d find far too damp
And in the US-SS-R
Perhaps I'd fall for a vamp
Had my doubts ‘bout Belgium
‘cause their dialect has no 'glots'
Had my doubts ‘bout Belgium
‘cause the place ain’t real, it’s not.
But beguiled by its romance,
I had to take the chance.
BEL-GEE-UM!
Lead singer songwriter, Henk Westbroek, who later became mayor of Utrecht, from a historic perspective was right to have his doubts. The Belgian nation is a bit like Israel; borne out of the political expediency of foreign powers, and only slightly less recently; in 1830 to be precise, when it was allowed to secede from the brief but earlier (1813) political expediency that was the Seventeen Provinces of the United Netherlands, post the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars.
But before 1830, the last anybody had heard of Belgium had been in Roman times, when Tacitus, Strabo and Caesar named an all-sorts collection of Celtic and German people living between the sea, the Rhine and the Seine, Belgae. Post conquest, the Roman province Gallia Belgica at its largest extent held sway over the following tribes: Caleti, Veliocassi, Ambiani, Bellovaci, Suessiones, Remi, Leuci, Mediomatrici, Triboci, Morini, Viromandui, Menapii, Atrebates, Nervii, Treveri, Vangiones, Eburones, Aductucii, Batavi, Tongri and Ubii. The territory governed comprised the southern half of the Netherlands, all of Belgium and Luxembourg, northern France and Alsace-Lorraine, Saarland and the Rhineland-Palitinate. It was a big place.
However, when the Roman Empire begins to break up, Belgae disappears. Franks from the other side of the Rhine move into the lands of the Atrebates and Menapii (today’s Flanders), the Morini (today’s Nord and Pas-de-Calais départements), and the Nervii, Eburones and Aductucii (today’s Wallonia). The Franks merge with the local tribes and steadily conquer the rest of formally Roman Gaul, initially from their stronghold of Doornik (Tournai) in Toxandria. In 496 AD, their great dynast Clovis converts to Christianity. This embracing of the Roman Catholic faith gains him the support of the Catholic Gallo-Roman aristocracy, who have by now entirely lost the security of empire.
But what has remained in place across the former Empire is the Roman bureaucracy, run by the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Catholic Church. As a Roman Catholic king, Clovis avails of this apparatus for control of his kingdom, which on his death in 511 stretches from the Rhine (and beyond) in the north to the Pyrenees in the south, bordered by the Atlantic in the west and to the border with the Kingdom of Burgundy in the east.
The Franks are not into primogeniture, the right of the first born. Their Salic Law requires male descendants be bequeathed equally, and so on Clovis’ death his kingdom is split into a geographically fairly arbitrary four territories, with his youngest son Chlothar inheriting the lands north of the Somme, and south of the Charente, with his brothers getting the Seine and Loire valley lands in between and the Rhine valley lands to the north east.
This divided Francia, as the combined territory is known as, over the next several hundred years, at times rejoins into a single entity only to each time fall apart into another arbitrary division of territories, all the time slowly expanding further, inter alia adding Burgundy (the Rhone, Saone and Doubs valley lands), the Languedoc and Friesland.
Clovis’ Merovingian dynasty (named after an ancestor of Clovis) loses control to Charles Martel, who founds a new dynasty, the Carolingians, who during the reign of Martel's grandson, Charlemagne, become rulers of almost entire western Europe, from northern Spain and Italy in the south to the German Baltic coast in the north, and from the Atlantic in the west to the 17th meridian east.
Charlemagne is crowned emperor by Pope Leo III in 799, and is succeeded by his sole surviving son, Louis the Pious, on his death in 814. However, Louis’ sons start arguing for their share well before their father’s demise, but no agreement is reached during Louis’ lifetime. Instead a year after his death, at the Treaty of Verdun they antagonistically agree on a split; young Louis gets what becomes Germany, Charles (the Bald) gets what is to become France and Lotharia gets the buffer in between stretching from Friesland in the north to Lombardy in the south, and the title Holy Roman Emperor.
Belgae as an entity, by now has long disappeared from public conscience, and Flanders and Wallonia have as yet not been heard of; the territories are simply a minor part of Lotharia’s Lotheringen. Lotharia is the first of the brothers to pass away, and his lands, per Salic Law sub-divide into Lotharingia (from Friesland to present-day Lorraine), Lombardy and Provence to pass to his three sons. The same thing happens in Louis’ Germany on Louis’ death; Germany dividing into Bavaria, Saxony and Swabia.
Charles the Bald’s West Francia, however, stays intact as it is handed down through the next several generations, and also acquires the western half of Lotharingia (including first mention of a Flanders province), when Lotharingia’s ruler Lotharia II dies without heir. West Francia’s power next begins to contract. Territory is ceded in appeasement to invading Normans, and vassal barons avail of these Norman troubles to operate their fiefdoms ever more independently.
In 922, Carolingian rule over West Francia (which is beginning to be known as France) starts to come to an end when rebellious nobles under the leadership of Robert, seize power. Robert’s grandson Hugh Capet founds a new line of Kings of France, the Capetians, who unlike the Carolingians do operate a primogenic succession policy, and whose direct line, succeeded by its Bourbon cadet branch, reigns over France until the end of French monarchy, each generation centralising power further at their Paris capital.
However, during the Middle Ages, the survival of France as a national identity is a close run thing. Things would have had to have gone only slightly differently, for us today to be contemplating a United Kingdom of Great Britain, Normandy, Gascony and Aquitaine, neighbouring a Burgundian realm counting the Netherlands, Flanders, Luxembourg, the Ardennes, Picardy, Lorraine, Franche-Comte, Burgundy itself and Champagne, and no France at all.
But that didn’t happen. Instead the Dukes of Burgundy (cousins of the Valois rulers of France, and all Capetians), despite the backing of the wealthy nouveau-riche burghers and nobility of their Flemish possessions, towards the middle of the 15th C find themselves on the losing English side after 113 years of war between the English Plantagenet kings and the French House of Valois for the French throne.
At the start of the 17th C, a lot has changed. Burgundy county has been annexed by France, which is ruled by Louis XIII, ably supported by Cardinal Richelieu. The name of the French royal house is now Bourbon, but its ancestry is still Capetian. The rest of the Burgundian domains have fallen into the hands of the Habsburgs (as in “haben” - to have and “habsucht” - greed, just joking), an upstart noble family originally from Aargau in Switzerland, who through a series of strategic marriages have gained control of Austria and Bohemia, Lorraine, Sicily, various parts of Italy, and of Spain, its overseas possessions and of the so-called Spanish Netherlands.
And in the southern third of the Spanish Netherlands, Walloon (like Wales, from the old-German Wealas for ‘foreigners’, I kid you not!) is starting to be recognized as a sufficiently different dialect of French (like Flemish vs. Dutch) to be deemed a separate language, and their embryonic iron and steel industry is credited with a particular processing methodology: the Walloon method.
Meanwhile, the title of “Holy Roman Emperor”, after having wandered about a bit between France and Germany, has long become an elective gift of three German princedoms, three archbishops (Trier, Mainz and Cologne) and the King of Bohemia. The gift nearly always goes to a Habsburg as the Habsburgs are staunch opponents of Protestantism, a serious schism that has no respect for Catholic property, wealth and power, so that only one vote (e.g. the Bohemian one) is ever needed to keep the title in the family, i.e. a title of the Austrian Archduke.
Most of the northern German princes having converted to Protestantism, in so doing have annexed all church lands, and in the northern Spanish Netherlands, arcanely the property of the Habsburg King of Spain, but feudally a part of the Holy Roman Empire, a very independently-minded parliament (States General) of Seven United Provinces is in revolt. Major conflicts are inevitable, and these suit France, the Habsburgs’ great rival for the control and power of the Catholic status quo, and various French kings nibble away at their northern border with the Netherlands.
When the dust settles, the Habsburgs have lost out badly. The United Provinces are granted full independence in 1648 at the Peace of Westphalia, reducing the Spanish Netherlands in size to roughly present-day Belgium and Luxembourg, still the property of Spain, and still a territory within the Holy Roman Empire, and still contested by Bourbon France.
In 1789, the French Revolution ends the reign of the Bourbons in France (temporarily). Ten years later, Louis XVI is executed, and the new revolutionary regime makes enemies with the generally royalist, vested interests across the rest of Europe. This sets the stage for Napoleon, who before the 18th C has ended has conquered the Spanish Netherlands and the United Provinces. But by 1815 his (first) war is run and at the victors’ Congress of Vienna, the Seventeen United Provinces of The Netherlands under Orange-Nassau kingship is born.
As noted, the United Provinces fall apart – peacefully – pretty quickly; the dominance of their Protestant neighbours proving unpalatable to the southern Catholics. This turns out to be a good move for the southeners, as the Walloon region is blessed with vast reserves of iron and coal and becomes mainland Europe’s industrial powerhouse for the next hundred years, and hence, together with its northern Flemish confederate, is invaded promptly by Germany on the outbreaks of WWI and WWII.
It’s a history then of precious little independence and innumerable wars and battles. You almost couldn’t blame the Walloons for wanting to be left to their own devices, although financially today it might not be wise.
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XU
’t Was the night before Christmas, so the next morning I thought I’d look for somewhere beginning with ‘X’. This unsurprisingly brings us to China a second time, where, relatively uniquely on the planet, there are regions and former kingdoms with names that once transcribed into phonetic English do indeed begin with ‘X’. I picked an easy one – two letters: Xu...
Xu once was an expansive kingdom stretching from the upper reaches of the Hwuai river across much of the alluvial plain between the Yellow river to the north and the Yangtze to the south all the way down to the East China Sea. But as early as 700 BC Xu’s feudal hegemony over this great swathe of territory began to disintegrate, and by c 500 BC all that remains of Xu is a smallish dukedom, surrounded by more powerful rivals, the Chu, the Wu and the Ju, I kid you not, and many others.
Two thousand years later, the Hwuai as an independent river also ceases to exist; the great Yellow river regularly changing its course southward during much of the second millennium – and finally catastrophically in 1938 due to Japanese military intervention – conjoins with tributaries of the Hwuai, downriver from the Yellow’s run across the Huangtu Plateau. Also known as the Loess Plateau, the Huangtu is an area of ancient wind-borne semi-petrified loess deposits, and the quantities of silt collected by the Yellow on its course through it are enormous, bringing prosperity and disaster in equal measure downstream – fertile lands and frequent floods.
Today the Yellow river once again stays within its northern courses, but the Hwuai, blocked by the Yellow’s gift of sedimentation from its direct run to the sea, now flows into a vast lake, Lake Hongze, where once Xu was, and then southward via a second lake, Lake Gaoyou, into the Yangtze.
The Subei Canal, completed in 1952, now provides an artificial secondary conduit for the Hwuai where once it meandered, to the sea.
No idea whether the people living along its banks and irrigation schemes remember Xu, but it would be surprising if they didn't wish for a bit more self-determination than is allowed in the People’s Republic of China.
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YOGYAKARTA
It's more than three years since I embarked on this blogging journey about independence movements across the World. Not every cause researched has had merit. Indeed not everything researched has had cause, and this potted story about Yogyakarta is a case in point; no active cause right now, but plenty of merit, in my opinion, as have the several other independence movements – Aceh, Papua, South Mollucas, Riau – across the Indonesia archipelago, but none of those places start with ‘Y’…
Where the Indian Ocean crust subducts underneath the main Asian tectonic plate you find the Sunda Arc that forms the southern coast and hinterland of Indonesia’s Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lombok, West and East Tengarra, and Sumba and Timor islands. Part of the 40000km long Pacific Ring of Fire, this mere 3000km arc is however the ring’s and indeed the world’s most volcanically active region.
Here, for example is Krakatoa, nestled deceptively picturesquely in the strait between Sumatra and Java, together with various island remnants of past eruptions and with her daughter Anak Krakatoa, born out of the famous 1883 eruption, which inter alia caused a drop in global temperatures by 0.5 degrees for more than a year.
Like the c 130 other volcanoes, and the history of the more than 250 million people living along the Sunda Arc, Anak Krakatoa regularly erupts, and with devastating effect as recently as 2018, when partly collapsing, the resultant tsunami killed more than 400 people, mostly tourists – a minor statistic beside the 1883 death toll of 34,000.
But Anak Krakatoa is by no means the most active of Indonesia’s volcanoes; that honour falls to Mount Merapi, on Java to the east of Anak, dominating the city and province of Yogyakarta on her southern flanks sloping down to the sea, where early in the 8th C AD a seat of theocratic power comes into existence, when, according to the Carita Parahyangan (writ in the 16th C), Prabu Sanna establishes a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom across central Java.
Over the next several centuries, this Mataram Kingdom flourishes. The first of many temples (candi) that still grace Yogyakarta to this day are built – Borobudur, the world’s largest Buddhist temple to this day, and the Hindu temple of Prambanan, with its three towers dedicated to Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. But the kingdom is devastated when in 929 AD Merapi erupts, and Yogyakarta’s rulers move east to found a new Mataram.
But the soil is volcanic, light and porous, rich in fertilizing magnesium and potassium salts and regularly enhanced by new eruptions, which also help to keep the land clear for agriculture. Great farming land then in a tropically-warm, monsoon-watered climate, so, king and culture may be gone, but the people stay, respectful but thankful to Merapi.
During the 14th C, much of today’s Indonesia and Malaysia is united in a new Hindu-Buddhist empire, Majapahit, whose first ruler, Raden Wijaya, cleverly avails of the war between Kubla Khan’s invading Mongol army and the forces of Jayakatwang, a usurper local ruler, to take control of Jayakatwang‘s Singhasari, a thalassocratic (of the sea, like Venice) kingdom, centred on the Sea of Java, comprising East Java (Kediri), East Sumatra (Srivijaya) and the coastal lands of Borneo, Malaysia and the Celebes and various smaller islands, Bintan, Bali, Bangka et al.
Yogyakarta is reinstated as a seat of regional ducal theocratic power by the rulers of this new Majapahit, as they focus their attention on expansion overseas. By 1365, the empire stretches from Phuket in present-day Thailand to Kaimana on West Papua in present-day Indonesia, and includes all of accessible Borneo, the Celebes, the Moluccas and even the southernmost islands of the Philippines. Basically, it’s Indonesia plus.
But what waxes, wanes. Java is a prosperous place, with prodigious rice harvests supplemented by trade in spices from the Moluccas and gold from Sumatra and elsewhere, and the empire commands the Malacca Straits. What the Mongol Khans can’t get, the Chinese Ming want next, but they too are unsuccessful.
However, fighting the Ming does weaken the empire, and an embryonic Muslim sultanate in present-day Singapore is strengthened by Ming support, and by the start of the 15th C, Iskandar Shah, a converted (from Hindu) Muslim from Sumatra and deposed King of Singapura (by Wikramawardhana of Majapahit in 1398, to no avail), controls trade through the straits, protected by the Chinese.
By the time Dutch merchants and their VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, United East India Company) have usurped the early European trading dominance of the Portuguese across the islands, Islam has become the dominant religion of the region, and in central Java, a sultan reigns a new empire, Mataran, from Yogyakarta, when in 1619 the VOC establishes its first colony, Batavia, present-day Jakarta on the north west coast of the island.
Shortly after the arrival of the Dutch, the reigning Mataram Sultan Agung conquers eastern island neighbour Surabaya, and, perhaps in a fit of hubrus, in 1628 lays siege to Batavia, is heavily defeated, tries again year a year later, and fails again.
Weakened both in strength and reputation by his inability to oust the Dutch, Agung finds he continues to have to deal with regional rebellions against his rule, and after his death (and burial in another great temple, Imogiri, still standing in Yogyakarta to this day) in 1641, his successors gradually lose control, first of the seas and then of the land.
In 1677, Agung’s grandson Amangkurat II, on succeeding to the throne but in exile, does a deal with the Dutch to help him regain his kingdom. As so often in history (for my Irish and English readers: see Diarmuid MacMurrough and Strongbow, and Vortigern and Hengist and Horsa), this backfires. In 1680, Amangkurat is (re-)crowned King of Mataram as a VOC protectorate by the Dutch governor-general, Rijcklof Volckertszoon van Goens.
A century later, Mataram is once again the scene of an internal power struggle, which in 1755 provide the VOC the opportunity to split the sultanate into two weaker protectorates, Yogyakarta and Surakarta, by way of the Treaty of Giyanti.
When in 1800 the VOC goes bankrupt and is wound up, its possessions and territories pass to the Dutch State, and Yogyakarta thus becomes an autonomous Dutch dependency, and briefly a French one when Napoleon rules the Netherlands during the first decades of the 19th C. Britain, who are also active in the region (as in the rest of the world), after Napoleon has been dealt with, is happy to allow the Dutch carte blanche in the exploitation of the entire archipelago, provided Singapore and its strategic control of the Straits of Malacca stays British.
Portugal too, who, like Britain have developed trading posts in the region, principally in the Molucca Islands, cede these positions to the Dutch.
The Dutch take their newly negotiated rights to the entire archipelago seriously, and within a further century all the native kings and sultans across Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi, Bali and the smaller islands, and the Borneo coastline have been subjugated, either by offering them protection from their rivals in exchange for fealty, or by defeating them in war. Inter alia, Yogyakarta is also divided further into a smaller Sultanate and a new and separate Pakualaman Principality.
When in 1940, Germany invades The Netherlands, the Dutch East Indies are at their apotheosis. Central Borneo and the eastern half of New Guinea are now also part of a dominion, that is destined within fifteen years to become the brand new nation state of Indonesia. However, it is not until 1942, that the Dutch lose control of their overseas empire; the year that the war in Europe and the Sino-Japanese War merge into WWII.
The USA, who are covertly supporting China in their war with Japan that has started back in 1931 with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, declares war on Japan when Japan attacks the USA fleet in Pearl Harbor on Hawaii, end December 1941. Other US military bases in the Pacific are simultaneously attacked – Guam, Wake Island, and the Philippines, which, after four months of heavy fighting, the US surrenders, lock, stock and seventeen generals.
Hitler’s Germany, in whose early interest it has been to ally Japan in Japan’s quest to conquer the Indo-Chinese colonies of their European enemies, in turn declares war on the USA. It’s the beginning of the end for Hitler and his allies, but first Japan marches from one success to the next. French Indo-China effectively already under being under the control of Japan’s Nazi ally via the Vichy France puppet state, Hong Kong, the Malay peninsula and Singapore are next to fall to the Japanese war machine. The Dutch East Indies soon follow and by mid-1942 everything that is worth controlling in the archipelago is in Japanese hands – the oil fields, the rubber plantations, the coconut and cinchona (quinine) groves, and the rest.
Initially, the indigenous East Indies population, fuelled by Japanese propaganda, welcome the Japanese as liberators, but this sentiment quickly changes when the Japanese turn out to be considerably more oppressive and violent than the Dutch, and three years later, when Japan withdraws, some four million people have died as a result of the occupation.
However, the Japanese do replace the en-masse interned expatriate Dutch local government, civil service, and industry and estate management with local Indonesians. They also release Sukarno, leader of the Indonesian National Party (PNI) from his political island captivity on Flores. Sukarno agrees to use his influence to placate the masses and ‘sell’ them how they are now much more in charge of their own destiny. Returned to Jakarta, Sukarno reunites with other nationalist leaders, released or still at large, including the Dutch University educated man-of-the-world Hatta, who becomes his right hand man, and the pair busy themselves with their own agenda – independence for Indonesia.
In short, Sukarno is openly happy to support Japan’s “Asia for the Asians” policy, in exchange for a platform to spread nationalist (but not under a Japanese overlordship) ideas. Towards this end and to his eternal shame, in 1943 Sukarno (and other nationalists) agrees to head up a new organisation, Poesat Tenaga Rakjat, that promotes “romusha”, which results in the indenture of some three million Indonesians to build railways, airfields, bunkers, etc for the Japanese across South East Asia, as well as wholesale food requisitioning for the war effort and a resultant famine with up to a million deaths, mostly on Java.
But his cooperation with the Japanese also allows him to involve himself with the formation of the nationalist paramilitary PETA and Heiho organisations, which, by the time the Japanese retreat in 1945, command more than two million volunteers, ready to defeat any Allied forces looking to re-establish the former Dutch colonial status quo.
At the beginning of August 1945, Sukarno and Hatta are instructed by Marshal Terauchi, the Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese forces in South East Asia to form the PPKI (Indonesian acronym for Preparatory Committee for Indonesian Independence) and that Indonesia is to become an independent nation with Japanese supervision, under their leadership, when Japan as planned withdraws its military control.
But Hiroshima and Japan’s subsequent surrender intervenes, catching Sukarno and Hatta on the hop. Independence if declared autonomously is unlikely to be acceptable to the western Allies. Nevertheless, 48 hours later, after being kidnapped, intimidated, and persuaded by activist youths, the pair go ahead, and the PPKI declares Sukarno president, and Hatta vice-president, of a new nation, Indonesia. By the time Allied forces reach Indonesia, under none other than Lord Louis Mountbatten, the prolifically decorated grand uncle and mentor of Great Britain’s in-2022-crowned new King Charles III, a month of predictable anarchistic mayhem has cost the lives of many Japanese who by-and-large have not suddenly gone away, aristocratic potentates who have benefited from rather than worked against the Japanese regime, and no-longer-interred former Dutch overlords and Christians generally.
The British forces quickly take back control of the archipelago’s major ports, Jakarta, Medan, Padang, Palembang, Semarang, Surabaya, and set about regaining colonial control for the Dutch. The Japanese, in accordance with the terms of their surrender, support the re-establishing of the pre-war status quo. In the island interiors, the PETA, Heiho and Pemuda Rakyat (Young Communists) armies grow further in strength and war ensues.
Surprisingly, it is a war of bloody battles not of guerrilla actions, and over the first several months most are lost (Surabaya, Medan, Bandung, Margarana) by the independence fighters although some are won (Ambarawa), all at great cost in lives on both sides. Towards the end of 1946, a Dutch colonial administration supported by 50,000 troops returns to Jakarta. Note, when Germany had invaded the Netherlands in 1940, the entire army excluding reservists counted no more than 70,000 men – the Dutch are serious.
Sukarno and Hatta recognize they have lost (for the moment) and retreat to Yogyakarta, where the sultan, Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX, has supported their quest for independence from the very beginning. From their safe haven in the shadow of the volcano, they negotiate the Linggadjati Agreement, brokered by the British, which promises an independent federal state of Java & Sumatra within a new United States of Indonesia, whose constitutional head will be Queen Juliana. The other states of the archipelago are to remain under direct rule. A quasi commonwealth.
Within six months the peace breaks down, and the Dutch, whose military presence has in the meantime grown to 100,000 launch the “Police Actions” (see “Special Operation”, Ukraine 2022) and oust the remaining Republican military presence out of Sumatra and Java, bar Yogyakarta, thus regaining control of the key plantations, oil fields and coal mines.
As impressed as the British have been by the Republican resilience during the first phase of the conflict, so unimpressed is international public opinion with the Dutch unilateral action. The Security Council of the newly founded United Nations demands a ceasefire and brokers a new peace, the Renville Agreement. The plan in essence the same as before – a federation of which an autonomous republic remains a part of – and as before it comes to naught.
Provocations from both sides lead to a second major Dutch intervention at the end of 1948 – Operation Crow. Yogyakarta is taken, and the provisional republican government captured and exiled to Bangka Island. But in the mountainous countryside the Republicans fight on. The world is outraged at the Dutch’s heavy hand, and U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall threatens to stop all post-war rebuilding aid to The Netherlands which so far has totalled $1 billion (of which notionally half has been invested in the Indonesian campaigns) unless the Dutch withdraw and transfer Indonesia sovereignty to the Republican government, thus backing the United Nations Security Council resolution to the same effect with intent.
On December 27, 1949, the Dutch formally hand control over central Java and most of Sumatra to the Republican government. The new Republic, with Sukarno as president, Hatta as prime minister and Yogyakarta city as its capital, remains part of the United States of Indonesia together with a potpourri of Dutch dependencies and protectorates, all loyal to the Dutch Crown and all in line with the earlier Renville and Linggadjati Agreement. The Republic also grants Special Region status to Hamengkubuwono IX’s sultanate, who remains governor of the Yogyakarta territory and also becomes the first government’s Minister of Defence and Homeland Security.
The blended republic-within-a-federation situation is short-lived, and within a year control of the rest of the archipelago – bar western New Guinea (which remains Dutch) and eastern New Guinea (which remains mandated to Australia), and bar the north western territories of Borneo (which remain part of Malaysia and Brunei as British protectorates) – is ceded to the Republic.
Underdeveloped and diverse, religiously, politically, tribally and ethnically, the new nation’s model multi-party parliamentary democracy, designed in large parts by the intellectual Hatta, proves unwieldy, at least so Sukarno judges its inability to return stable, coalition or otherwise, government. Economic progress is slow, rebellion, local civil war and military insurgency breaks out here and there, and by 1957, Sukarno has seen enough. Backed by army chief Nasution (Sukarno is the military man of the Sukarno-Hatta duumvirate), Sukarno declares martial law, and a civil war ensues.
By the end of 1958, the dissident army factions, covert support by the CIA notwithstanding (the USA fears, correctly, that Sukarno has a pro-Communist agenda), have been defeated. More than 500 Dutch-owned industries have also been nationalized. At the height of his power, Sukarno now has the Constitution rewritten which installs him as de-facto dictator over a regime he calls “Guided Democracy”.
Various island rebellions are put down, political opponents arrested, the Islam-led Masyumi party banned, and parliament redesigned to include 50% presidential nominees. For the next two decades Sukarno busies himself with the international politics of non-alignment, skirmishes with Britain and the Netherlands re Malaysia and New Guinea, prestige projects and the cult of his personality, but the domestic economy, despite its vast natural resources, languishes.
In 1965, an attempted coup ends in disaster for its leaders, but elevates a new army General, Suharto, to supreme command, and simultaneously eliminates the Communist party from politics, as it is blamed and banned. Two years later, Suharto succeeds Sukarno as president, and remains in charge of what now becomes a right- rather than left-wing dictatorship for the next 31 years.
Under Suharto, and with support from the West, the Indonesian economy grows strongly (admittedly from a low base), but at a cost – political repression, military coercion and rampant corruption. But in 1997, the Asian Financial (government debt) Crisis hits all the high growth Asian Tiger economies, but Indonesia the hardest. A year later Suharto, who has amassed personal wealth of c $30 billion during his reign, resigns. Numerous presidents succeed him in rapid successions, but it is not until 2004 that a president (Yudhoyono, a retired general) is elected finally by the democratic vote of the people. But corruption scandals remain a recurring theme.
Meanwhile, Hamengkubuwono IX of Yogyakarta, who has an impeccable record of passive resistance to the Japanese during the occupation, in particular to “romusha”, this by having his administration manipulate agricultural output statistics, and by obtaining permission for the construction of the Yosuiro Canal to connect the Progo and Opak rivers so that rice paddies can be irrigated throughout the year, thus requiring lots of manpower to stay at home and making his province a land of plenty, also enjoys a stellar national political career.
Initially under Sukarno, Hamengkubuwono IX advances from Defence to the Vice Presidency, and then during the 1960s takes on the Tourism and Sport briefs, including the securing and organising of the 4th Asian Games in Jakarta in his role as President of the Asian Games Federation. Later, under Suharto, in whose takeover from Sukarno he takes no part, he becomes Minister of Economics, Finance and Industry and then Vice President for a second tenure but resigns in 1979, disenchanted with Suharto’s corruption but citing poor health.
In 1988, Hamengkubuwono IX is succeeded by Hamengkubuwono X, as sultan, but not as governor; Suharto appointing Sri Paku Alam VIII, prince of the subordinate enclave of Paku Alaman instead, contrary to the agreements of 1950, but after 10 years of appeals and negotiations this is reversed and Yogyakarta’s hereditary governorship is enshrined in law.
Hamengkubuwono X is not the overachieving man of politics that his father has been. However, he does inherit his pragmatic, self-effacing social conscience, and of course the rulership over what has become not just a Special Region by name but in fact. Shielded to some extent from the regular upheavals across the rest of the new nation, student life has flourished, and by the start of the 21st C, Indonesia’s first independent Universitas Gadjah Mada, founded in 1949, has been joined in Yogyakarta by the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta State University, Sunan Kalijaga Islamic University, Atma Jaya University, Muhammadiyah University, College of Health Sciences Ahmad Yani Yogyakarta, Duta Wacana Christian University and more than 100 other higher education institutes.
The spin-off to private enterprise in the form of hi-tec start-ups has been equally impressive, and today, major businesses such as Gameloft and Gametechno and fin-tec firm BIMA Milvik are the result. On top of all that, there is tourism, drawn as much to the history and exotic culture, as to the beaches.
Despite it all – the vibrancy, the youthfulness, the entrepreneurship – there is no great yearning for greater independence from Indonesia. What there is though is a desire for government by elected instead of hereditary representatives, despotically benevolent as they may be, which has only grown since Hamengkubuwono X has nominated his daughter, Princess Mangkubumi, to succeed him. Unpalatable as this is to the average Musselman, this could yet lead to conflict with the national authorities and thus a push for independence not just from the ruling house, but from the sprawling artificial archipelagic union, whose shared colonial enemies have long been defeated, that is Indonesia.
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ZULIA
You thought I'd given up, but no, I've just been distracted. Finally found this region starting with a 'Z' - Zulia. Aother complicated story, so, apologies, once again it's got a bit long...
In 1498 Columbus’ third and penultimate voyage took a more southerly route than his previous expeditions, and instead of heading west out from the Canaries, he kept southing till he reached the Cape Verdes. Those of us who today sail the seas for fun will understand that this plan gave him more pleasant weather but more importantly a first landfall on a new continent, instead of on some Godforsaken island; in fact on the eastern shores of present-day Venezuela. Well, actually, he set foot on Trinidad first, but, prompted by a hunch of King Joao II of Portugal, sailed on to explore the new mainland’s coast from east to west as far as the Orinoco delta.
Just a year later, a second Spanish expedition arrives led by Alonso de Ojeda, a sometime partner and sometime rival of Columbus. Ojeda is a proper conquistador; he’s after the pearls from the islands of Margarita and Chacachacare, and on a mission (it’s not a pun) to convert the heathen natives to Christianity. Accompanied by navigator Amerigo Vespucci, Ojeda works his way further west to reach a wide gulf outside a narrow entrance to a large, shallow brackish lake, where natives live in villages on stilts along the shoreline. It reminds Vespucci a little of Venice, and so he names it Little Venice (doh), Venezuela. The lake is of course Lake Maracaibo and the natives are the Wayuu, whose territories cover the entire Guajira Peninsula to the west of Maracaibo and the Gulf of Venezuela – present-day Zulia.
Naturally, neither the Wayuu nor the Spanish have an inkling that the viscous black mene that oozes out of the ground around the shores of the lake and which the natives use for caulking their canoes and burn for fire and light are hydrocarbons, and that there is unimaginably much more of it underground which someday will make many people rich.
As elsewhere in early Latin America, the Spanish government grants encomienda – rights to exploit indigenous populations and their territories – to adventurers willing to try their luck, and to prevent these encomenderos from becoming a law unto themselves places them under the jurisdiction of the Real Audiencia de Santo Domingo established on Hispanola (Haiti) in 1511, Spain’s law courts and civil service for all their New World possessions. However, the encomenderos do not have an easy time of it, as the Wayuu are hostile and well-organized.
By 1519, Charles, son of Philip the Fair, the Duke of Burgundy and The Netherlands of the House of Habsburg, by Joanna, second daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, rulers of The Kingdom of The Spains, through a happenstance of deaths and end-of-lines in his extended family, is Archduke of Austria, King of Bohemia and Hungary, Duke of Burgundy and The Netherlands, King of Naples, Sicily and Sardinia, and King of Spain. In addition, the Electoral Princes of Germany have elected him (sensibly!) Holy Roman Emperor and King of The Germans.
Titles are one thing, control is quite another and expensive. Taxes cannot always cover the cost of keeping down rebellious princes and heretical Protestants, fighting off Ottoman incursions, countermanding French intrigues, and protecting the fleet from English piracy. So money is borrowed where it is available.
Charles defaults a loan from the German banking house of Welser secured by title to the newly discovered province Venezuela i.e. Zulia, which therefore duly changes hands and for a generation is known as Klein Venedig. However, Spain takes the lands back by force in 1556, arguing misrule by the Welsers.
To obtain more local control, Spain supplements the rule of law of the Audiencia in Santo Domingo with the appointment of Corregidores de Indios (governors of Indians) across entire Latin America. Assisted by members of the native elite, the corregidores quickly accumulate great wealth and power to dominate rural society.
To prevent these burgeoning statelets becoming wholly independent, before the 16th century comes to an end Spain appoints and funds two viceroys; one in Mexico City reigning over Central America, and one in Lima reigning over South America. The viceroys establish a hierarchy of executive power, but simultaneously Spain also extends the arm of the law through the establishment of further Audiencias in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Lima, Guatamala, Bogota, Charcas, Quito and Concepcion. Viceregal rule from Lima over entire South America from the other side of The Andes proves unwieldy, and in 1717 a further viceroyalty is split off – New Granada – comprising present-day Ecuador, Columbia and Venezuela.
Unlike in homeland Spain, the Audiencias in America do not fall under the control of the regional executive, but are directed by Spain itself. Conflicts between viceroys and Audiencias are not uncommon, and especially so in Venezuela, whose lawcourts remain those of the Audiencia de Santo Domingo.
So, not only is there trouble and strife along the shores of the Gulf of Venezuela and Lake Maracaibo between the local Wayuu, the Spanish and the Germans, but also between the Spanish executive in far-away Bogota and the Spanish law of faraway Santa Domingo. Thus, two hundred years later, when Spain begins to lose control over its far-flung possessions, Zulia in 1821 is the first province of what by then is known as New Granada to declare unilateral independence from Spain.
This new autonomy however is of brief duration, since, on Spain’s withdrawal from the region, a new entity under one rule is set up, Gran Columbia; in other words basically an independent New Granada. Gran Columbia does not last long either and by 1856 has fallen apart into the three separate states we are familiar with today.
Almost simultaneously with these geo-political changes, the oil industry is taking its first steps towards its eventual world dominance. In Scotland, James Young develops a process to liquefy coal and refine the product to paraffin, and in Canada, Abraham Gesner develops a process to refine kerosene again from coal. Gesner’s process is further improved upon and applied to petr-oleum (rock oil) by the Polish chemist Ignacy Lukasiewicz, and this breakthrough quickly leads to the exploitation of oil wells at various locations around the world: Baku, Pennsylvania and Trinidad.
Timing is everything, and perhaps serendipitously for the birth of Venezuela, it takes the denizens of that country and its neighbours another fifty years to wake up to the fact that they may be sitting on, even wading in, black gold. But once a 47-year concession is granted to local entrepreneur Rafael Max Valladares to exploit the entire Maracaibo Basin in 1912, the Venezuelan oil industry takes off.
Valladares’ rights quickly end up in the hands of Royal Dutch Shell, and today one hundred years later, the remaining reserves in the Maracaibo Basin are still well in excess of 100 billion barrels. Venezuela’s second major oil field, the Orinoco Basin, holds roughly twice as much again and, in addition, a further commercially (more expensive) recoverable 1000 billion barrels of heavy crude. Saudi Arabia’s reserves, by comparison, are no more than 250 billion barrels of admittedly sweet light crude.
Basically they are swimming in it. However, over the years this wealth has proved to be a mixed blessing, as on three separate occasions the country has caught what (after Royal Dutch Shell) has been dubbed the Dutch disease: an appreciating currency driven by increasing oil prices, coupled to internal inflation, decimating all other industry. This happened in the early 30s, in the late 80s, and most recently during the 00s.
Since the last outbreak of Venezuelan Dutch disease, the World has of course experienced Le Crunch de Credit, impacting all industry worldwide, and Oil and Gas more than most, and in Venezuela much more again, production falling back there by more than one third since 2010, to last year (2020) less than 1.6 million barrels a day. The resultant economic decline for the 30 million souls living in the country has been nothing less than devastating leading to much civil unrest, well-documented by world news.
You might well be inclined to conclude that not only has current socialist populist president Maduro mismanaged the economy, but so has his predecessor Chavez and those before him and all their governments. The wealthy oil barons and rancheros of Zulia, who like to think of themselves as Venezuelan Texans wouldn’t disagree. With their region’s short chaotic history, right wing U.S.-philic leanings and a peculiar syncretic form of Christianity, there are enough ingredients for a push for autonomy, and much one fancies will depend on how the U.S.A. will view things strategically. Is the oil still vital? Can a failing rabid socialist state be tolerated?
Clearly, it’s going to be an unsettled place a wee longer.
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