Both basketweave and dyeing are obviously millenia old, and sometimes occur together from about 1000BC onwards. But looms, widespread trade in dyes, and textile industry are a lot younger.

The idea of all people in the clan wearing the same complex pattern in a number of different colours kind of presupposes a local textile industry using looms that could repetitively and inexpensively produce the exact same pattern. No way poorer clan members would have managed to do that at home.

If mere dark-light checkered textiles count, the oldest dyed tartan in the Netherlands is from 800 BC. Checkered textiles are hardly an original idea. Most traditional "ethnic" dress is a lot younger than most people like to believe.

He was crowned as King of the Germans, and the Pope explicitly supported his election. But he was killed before he made the trip to Rome for the actual coronation as emperor (which would have been a massive military operation through enemy territory he had not been capable of before being killed).

The Netherlands has had three female Kings in a row in recent history. The Consitution is quite clear the topic: the monarch is King, and King (written) may be read as "Queen" if a woman is monarch. This led to an interesting discussion about downgrading the title of Queen as consort of the King to Princess, in analogy to Prince for the consort of a regnant Queen, because people have gotten so used to equating "King" and "Queen". And in common parlance both King and Queen were used for Beatrix: without qualification it is "Queen", but it is for instance "the first Dutch King that [..]".

Thanks for the addition! I didn't dare to guess about those. I know the blunt ones are liked for their reusabilty, while the sharpened ones are more likely to break when you miss the target. But they obviously have the advantage of having some ability to pierce fur.

Although stone (or bone) arrowheads are considered positive proof of archery, and we can't make any inferences from the absence of evidence, you don't actually need a hard point for bowhunting. To kill a rabbit or a bird just the impact of a blunt wooden arrow will suffice, and making those is a lot less work.

So these arrowheads are evidence of relatively big game or humans as archery targets IMO.

The works of Liutprand of Cremona (10th century Ottonian ambassador to the Byzantine court) are interesting in this regard. Describes a breakdown of diplomacy over the pope referring to the emperor as "Greek" in a letter.

Seems to me that a string of small fiefdoms has less options to maintain a balance of power between language areas, cultures, military alliances etc than a network of fiefdoms, and therefore is more likely to gravitate towards similarity. Lasting political unification on the other hand usually requires a shared enemy that is really perceived as the other, and that was absent most of the time. Japan was relatively isolated and hard to invade. Norway is a bit similar.

Our historical narratives reflect how we think about the reasons for colonial annexations. Colonial empires did in fact often use some concrete pretext (a raid with European victims, piracy, a treaty violation, a trade conflict, picking one of the sides in a civil or succession war, etc) to decide to annex countries. Certainly if the area annexed was one that other colonial powers had economic interests in as well, or just generally to justify the cost of going to war to taxpayers. But we typically take those pretexts about as seriously as Hitler's story that Poland started it in 1939, and ignore them when summarizing colonial history.

The inability of nations of "uncivilized natives" to honour treaties, protect traveling Europeans within their borders, or keep their citizens from raiding over the agreed borders, immediately disqualified their existence in the eyes of Europeans.

The notion of the Byzantine emperor was invented as a disambiguation between two emperors in countries that were themselves in the sphere of influence of the "other" Roman emperor (replacing the even worse "Emperor of the Greeks"). They needed circumlocutions that avoided "Roman emperor" to avoid insult.

But do note that Carolingian empire is a similarly modern circumlocution. No contemporary would have called it that. In contemporary documents it is just the Roman Empire (Imperator Romanorum). So Western European historians have already "fixed" that issue of two emperors as far as I am concerned by inventing more neutral new terms for both of them.

The ratio of military expenditure to national income one year after entry into war was only higher in the Soviet Union (60% in 1942 for SU vs. 40% in 1940 for Germany), Germany expected to defeat them soon, and Germany at that point in time (June 1942) already matched them at 60% in its third year of participation in war. Germany moreover already spent 20% several years before the war started. Not exactly a situation in which Germany was very urgently considering losing a war of attrition.

A major factor is that Germany had occupied countries to exploit, and due to economic blockades had almost full control over availability of raw resources for production. They had those companies by the balls anyway: they could only produce if resources were prioritized for their use. On the output side you can then keep behaving as if business goes as usual.

There are similar input control factors in play for US industry, but more subtly: Dutch colony Suriname was for instance the biggest supplier of aluminium ore to the US, so it was easy for the government in exile to 'prioritize' it for use by US factories that built warplanes. The British government had similar options for regulating industry through its colonial exports to the US. US industry was pushed into war mode before the US government started pulling on it.

Not to mention that Germany's total war economy drive in 1943 involved things like 1) stripping underutilized factories in occupied countries that were resource-starved from their machinery and tools, 2) targeted forced labour razzias in industrial areas in occupied countries to obtain capable metal workers etc, and 3) using concentration camp infrastructure to run factories (e.g. Neuengamme had 92 subcamps attached to factories, i.a. assembling military vehicles). That's a part of 'full mobilization potential' not considered for the Allies.

I think 'somewhat unreliable' is probably a huge understatement. Fuses where completely unpredictable compared to for instance modern cheap fireworks, and both too fast and too slow are very bad.

The Estates General of the Dutch Republic had a yearly budget in the 17th-18th and a formal process to approve it. But interestingly it had only four categories of expenses on the budget: Repayment of debts, War, Water management, and the Representative office of the Estates General (tasked mostly with negotiations), with Repayment of debts and War always taking most if it (even in peace time).

Still it was apparently light years ahead of enemies in budget keeping, since it always paid lower rates for debts and never defaulted on repayments, while regularly bankrupting kings like those of Spain and France during wars.

One of those Representatives of the Estates General (in practice a sort of PM), Johan de Witt, is credited with laying the scientific foundations of financial mathematics and contributing to the formalization of probability with his paper 'The worth of Life Annuities compared to Redemption bonds' which is discussed in letters between Bernouilli and Leibniz. The topic of the paper is of course a very practical matter for a guy tasked with negotiating the conditions of big loans.

Clearly Indo-Europeans don't count as indigenous, even if they have been around for at least 5000 years.

Not to mention that the current inhabitants of Africa did some large scale displacing and colonizing as well in recent history. The Bantu expansion (1000 BCE- 1 CE, iron age culture) is considered far more recent than the Indo-Europeanization of Europe (3000 BCE- 2350 BCE, late neolithic and copper age culture). If indigenousness is a race, Europe is likely to win from Africa.

The pilum takes less metal but cannot effectively be used for thrusting. A blade for a thrusting spear takes a similar amount. The short sword is a kind of very short thrusting spear. Compare the Zulu Iklwa: spear or shortsword with a long hilt?

Yes. They had no almost no control over how hard the iron would turn out. The real cost would be in fuel and skilled labour. If the weapon turned out too brittle or soft for its purpose, you had to start all over again.

If you compare the standard types of side arms armies used in those days:

- The small hand axe (Franciska, Tomahawk) needs one hard edge, but is otherwise not prone to bending or breaking.

- The long knife (Seax) needs one hard edge and a stiff back.

- The short short (Gladius) needs two hard edges and a stiff centerline. This is an order of magnitude more difficult to achieve. Needs to be stiff enough not to bend or break when stabbing a shield or armour.

- The long sword (Spatha) needs two hard edges and a long stiff centerline, that is stiff enough not to break or bend when blocked halfway with another weapon. Again an order of magnitude more difficult than a short sword.

The small axe was a weaponized common tool that was within reach of any household. Owning a seax was fairly common as well, but would have been more expensive. A functioning long sword was really something else. Not because of the amount of material, but the amount of trying (and fuel) that went into it.

The main advantage the Romans had, was centralization and industrialization of weapon making. More fuel and labour dedicated to it.

Edit: To gain some insight into how involved weaponsmithing would be in those times: Try to build a fire of 1500 degrees celsius using just wood. It is impossible.

The irony is that the notion of "Age of Imperialism" is part of a very Eurocentric storyline. It is when a handful of Western European countries started behaving like traditional land-grabbing empires of old for a brief period.

It is a fitting storyline for a British or French school system, explaining their history in broad strokes from their own perspective, but one would expect haters of Western Civilization to be less uncritically Eurocentric if they actually aimed for a more balanced understanding of world history.

Europeans did not invent "Imperialism" in any meaningful sense. They just repurposed a Latin word that sort of described an important dynamic in a historical period of their own country well.

The part of that argument that makes sense to me is that a civilization that depends on bronze will need access to a large distance trade network to obtain both copper and tin. It will never have an incentive to destroy the trade network, even during war. A civilization that has made the switch to iron will more likely intentionally disrupt trade networks when it goes to war if its enemies depend on bronze.

In that sense it was a "disruptive innovation".

But iron was neither easier to work with nor better than bronze in those days. Just more widespread geographically.

That would be my guess. Humidity in my home dropped from 60 to 40 in that same period in the Netherlands as the weather changed from very wet to freezing all day.

Few. Credible accounts of major battles (i.e. the ones including finances, tallying losses etc) typically put the number of 'real' knights per side in the 500-1500 range.

If you look at the squad selection behavior of Dutch coaches we definitely rank the Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and arguably Belgian/Swiss/Austrian competitions higher. The club should be a potential CL or EL contender. If you go to the MLS (or QSL, etc) you basically retire from the squad.

Translators are obviously rarely explicitly mentioned in histories, but Caesar at some point for instance mentions changing translators due to questionable loyalty of his allies the Aedui, who apparently supplied them.

This detail has been of some interest in the discussions about the languages spoken in Gaul in Caesar's time, because it might explain why 'Germanic' tribes/chiefs/places have 'Celtic' names: the possibility of adoption of exonyms from the Gaulish language of his translators as a bridge between Latin and third languages.

When you scuttle a ship in the entrance of a harbour defensively, as a blockship, this is usually done to force those that enter the harbour to sail in closer to the cannons of a fortress.