Interesting again: I was thinking of a non-blood sacrifice, but Pliny indeed suggests that no offerings were acceptable to this obstinate minority.

Interesting. Do you know if early Christians were willing to do likewise? It seems a pragmatic compromise, and in accordance with the notion (if not the meaning) of "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's".

I'd add that a further issue was that Christianity sought converts. Judaism was also emphatically monotheistic, but Christianity sough to extend its flock, and was doing so among the classes who might threaten the social order should the religious element of their allegiance to the empire be eroded. Christianity's growth presented a threat that older religious minorities didn't: as it turned out, church and state found a modus vivendi, but that evidently wasn't perceived in the early centuries.

Napoleon's 1815 return springs to mind, expanding his realm from little Elba to the whole of France before meeting his Waterloo. I'd say though that the greatest or at least most lasting comebacks from defeat or conquest haven't been military at all, they've involved the subject population absorbing its conquerors and largely continuing as if nothing had happened (an exaggeration, of course) - I'm thinking Mongol or Manchu-ruled China, western Europe's Romano-Celtic peoples after the 5th century, etc.: make love, not war, perhaps.

Surprisingly (to me anyway) it's first recorded in the second enclosure wave of the 18th-19th centuries, but it's widely thought to originate in the first (16th-17th centuries). It's an objection not to state but to private ownership, specifically the conversion of common land (where all villagers shared rights, notably in letting their livestock feed) to individual property, a process dating back to the Tudor wool boom but renewed with rising agricultural returns in the 18th century.

So it's a rhyme of protest against social & economic inequality, invoking the particular plight of smallholders but adopted more generally among workers and radicals: here the state is with the landowners who dominated political life into the industrial period, but it's they (and by extension later privileged economic interests) rather than the state itself who are the real target.

It's very old. A Babylonian merchant borrowing to transport goods could pay a surcharge to cancel repayment if the cargo was lost in transit, a system adopted in Europe from ancient Greece onward. Rome had contributory societies to support families of deceased members, a practice likewise continued by medieval guilds which also offered support in the event of illness. The modern insurance market is commonly traced to 17th-century London, especially after the devastating fire of 1666 demonstrated the risks to property.

You were the one making the initial assertion: to apply it to one side but not the other is just double standards.

Had Hungary and Czechoslovakia been de facto parts of the USSR, 1956 and 1968 would never have arisen: that Moscow was reduced to sending in its tanks underlines the limitations of its political fiat. It's for you to explain how Poland got away with its different course: had your claim been valid, that couldn't have happened.

It's also for you to support the claim that in Afghanistan the USSR was "trying to expand its borders". Afghanistan was the last thing Moscow wanted in its territory: it hadn't wanted to go in at all, and only the prospect of a deeply hostile regime on its central Asian border drew it in.

Yours seems a rather absolutist two-dimensional take: intervention = de facto annexation. I invite you again to consider whether this applies to US military actions, and if not, why not?

You're welcome: I hope you can find more sources. I was surprised that there don't seem seem to be other substantial recent treatments - it seems an odd oversight, especially given the bicentenary only 8 years ago.

The issue isn't the exercise of hegemony in claimed spheres of influence - both superpowers obviously did that - it's whether such acts make the country subject to such action a "de facto part" of the hegemonic power as you claimed. If they do in the Soviet case but not in the US one, then why?

I wasn't engaging in whataboutery to disprove or minimise any act, merely illustrating that such projection of power does not amount to de facto annexation - unless you believe that in both cases it does, which at least has the virtue of consistency.

US: Panama 1903, Mexico 1914 & 1916, Haiti 1915, Dominican Republic 1916, Russia(!) 1918, Nicaragua 1926, Lebanon 1958, Vietnam 1965, Dominican Republic 1965, Cambodia 1970, Laos 1971, Lebanon 1982, Grenada 1983, Iraq 1991, Somalia 1992, Bosnia 1995, Kosovo 1999, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003, not counting selective airstrikes, limited interventions or backing for local proxies or third-party interventions. Were all those countries de facto parts of the US?

Czechoslovakia was 1968, btw.

Mark Jarrett's The Congress of Vienna and its legacy (IB Tauris, London 2013) has received favourable reviews and is rated fairly in-depth (522 pages), though it covers the pre-1814 background and post-1815 multilateral efforts down to Greek and Belgian independence, so it may not be quite what you're after.

The Tulsa Historical Society and Museum seems a good place to start:

>On the morning of May 30, 1921, a young black man named Dick Rowland was riding in the elevator in the Drexel Building at Third and Main with a white woman named Sarah Page. The details of what followed vary from person to person. Accounts of an incident circulated among the city’s white community during the day and became more exaggerated with each telling.
>
>Tulsa police arrested Rowland the following day and began an investigation. An inflammatory report in the May 31 edition of the Tulsa Tribune spurred a confrontation between black and white armed mobs around the courthouse where the sheriff and his men had barricaded the top floor to protect Rowland. Shots were fired and the outnumbered African Americans began retreating to the Greenwood District.
>
>In the early morning hours of June 1, 1921, Greenwood was looted and burned by white rioters. Governor Robertson declared martial law, and National Guard troops arrived in Tulsa. Guardsmen assisted firemen in putting out fires, took African Americans out of the hands of vigilantes and imprisoned all black Tulsans not already interned. Over 6,000 people were held at the Convention Hall and the Fairgrounds, some for as long as eight days.
>
>Twenty-four hours after the violence erupted, it ceased. In the wake of the violence, 35 city blocks lay in charred ruins, more than 800 people were treated for injuries and contemporary reports of deaths began at 36. Historians now believe as many as 300 people may have died.

A commission appointed by the state government reported in 2001 that:

>Black Tulsans had every reason to believe that Dick Rowland would be lynched after his arrest. His charges were later dismissed and highly suspect from the start..... As hostile groups gathered and their confrontation worsened, municipal and county authorities failed to take actions to calm or contain the situation.
>
>At the eruption of violence, civil officials selected many men, all of them white and some of them participants in that violence, and made those men their agents as deputies.... In that capacity, deputies did not stem the violence but added to it, often through overt acts that were themselves illegal. Public officials provided fire arms and ammunition to individuals, again all of them white.
>
>Units of the Oklahoma National Guard participated in the mass arrests of all or nearly all of Greenwood’s residents, removed them to other parts of the city, and detained them in holding centers.... Entering the Greenwood district, people stole, damaged, or destroyed personal property left behind in homes and businesses. People, some of them agents of government, also deliberately burned or otherwise destroyed homes credibly estimated to have numbered 1,256, along with virtually every other structure — including churches, schools, businesses, even a hospital and library — in the Greenwood district..... Although the exact total can never be determined, credible evidence makes it probable that many people, likely numbering between 100-300, were killed during the massacre.
>
>Not one of these criminal acts was then or ever has been prosecuted or punished by government at any level: municipal, county, state, or federal.

The USSR was actually pretty definite about its borders: its sphere of influence and network of satellites or allies (like the USA's) were less fixed. Poland and East Germany weren't a de facto part of the USSR any more than various Central American countries were part of the US, rather they were a part of the Soviet bloc and expected to toe the line to varying degrees. Poland's communist leaders actually exercised considerable independence after 1956, a luxury not available to the frontline GDR.

Yes, I think I only encountered it in the 2000s, and even now it's not that common outside academia. Hopefully the fad will pass.

That sucks. I had a course (unrelated) being changed halfway through with all of my intended options being scrapped, so i feel the pain of not getting the course you wanted. It's always best to get the details before accepting, but my experience is that you can't even rely on that.

I wasn't thinking just of colonies, rather of a range of economic and political outpourings - its contributions to industrialisation, liberalism, modern parliamentary governance (even if few had a say). Nobody but the king lamented the loss of the 13 colonies that much - within a few years trade was bouncing along as never before - rather it's the passing of the later "second" empire that that still agitates some fevered minds.

The conflict of the 1640s was again primarily about political power, and the economic dimension mostly involved division among the well-to-do between those benefiting from privileges granted by the crown and those competing in the market. Food was (as across most of Europe) more expensive than a century earlier owing to the inflow of Spanish colonial silver, but prices on the eve of the civil war weren't much above those of the previous 20-30 years.

The peerage continued mostly unmolested under the Commonwealth, though the House of Lords was abolished from 1649 until the Restoration of 1660 ended a brief experiment with a hand-picked upper house. Cromwell was invited to assume the crown, but declined: his title of Lord Protector can be interpreted as regent, though he insisted his regime was republican. He wasn't averse to the odd palace: most of the less essential royal properties were sold off in 1649, but today's older residences remained state assets, Cromwell governing from Whitehall Palace (its site today occupied mostly by the MoD and Cabinet Office after most of the old building burned down in 1698, the Banqueting House and parts of the basement surviving).

That's indeed a possibility I hadn't allowed for: the date and place make me think influenza, but a prior gas encounter could be the cause. It could even be both, with the flu rendering an older condition fatal.

One powerful factor for rulers is that Christianity and the church's seal of approval solidified their basis for kingship and eased dealings with local Christian subjects and with other kingdoms. Formal conversion of the crown was generally preceded by conversion among part of the population as Christian missionaries journeyed through pagan lands, and contact with (and bringing of captives from) Christian territories was fairly commonplace, so the break wasn't wholly abrupt, while as a Christian monarch you now enjoyed the support of church and clergy so long as you didn't seriously misbehave.

England is an obstinately un-revolutionary land for all its impacts on the international status quo (or perhaps because it found such outlets for its restlessness?), and modest relaxation from the 1820s of the harsh 1815 law allowed it to import grain during periods of shortage around 1830 and 1840, though prices remained high: the real crisis in 1846 was in Ireland, where the devastation of the potato crop left people unable to buy grain even at post-repeal prices, and worse followed in 1847 even as England more than doubled its grain purchases.

An upheaval was possible in the England of the 1840s, but not even the denial of the vote to the great majority of the population could rouse the masses to rise up when the issue came to a head in the spring of that year. "No revolution please, we're British."

Indeed, it's most frustrating for those of us who use it for the wider whole. The concept in this narrower sense was originally Russian, seeking to emphasise the cultural distinctiveness of the Tsarist and later Soviet space in relation to western & central Europe - some seeking in it a "greater Russian" identity, others a non-nationalist fusion of European and Asiatic elements.

Western usage seems to derive from post-Soviet scholars and political commentators for whom the Soviet-era concept offered a more convenient label than "former USSR". The less objectionable "northern Eurasia" enjoyed a brief vogue but was apparently too long for those who popularise these things.

And it gets even messier: the journal Soviet Studies became Europe-Asia Studies, while its peer Eurasian Studies covers a distinct though overlapping area "from the Balkans to Central Asia and Iran". I'm sticking with the original meaning.

Just the one river? Wimps! :)

Indeed, that made it all the more traumatic for those who'd made it through, and I think it's part of the reason it later faded from collective memory in the west (in India it's very much remembered): it was just too much for people to cope with.

That's the pandemic, then: November 1918 was one of the deadliest months internationally (October in the US, but later for most). It hadn't occurred to me that it had reached so far into inner Asia, but troop movements in the war's last year were the biggest source of global spread (and of transmission from the US to Europe in the spring as the US army built up its numbers in France), so here we see the virus's long and lethal reach.

That urbanisation estimate is deeply flawed (the wikipedia entry even claims a higher percentage than the source it cites): don't believe everything you read, least of all on wikipedia. The claim that Roman urbanisation was "twice as high as that of Europe at the turn of the 19th century" (an assertion likewise not made by the cited authors) rests on combining a thus inflated Roman percentage (with places as small as 1,000 inhabitants reckoned as "urban") with a far more conservative one for later Europe (here probably with a lower limit of 5,000): applying a common definition they seem about evenly matched, with Europe c.1800 probably slightly ahead - itself a remarkable finding: Rome in this respect needs no exaggeration.

The claimed million for the ancient city of Rome is itself problematical: there are sources indicating such a total, but there's also a good case for a lower figure on the basis of area and likely densities. These estimates are far from settled. Beware the lure of big-looking numbers.

There was a brief Anglo-Afghan conflict in 1919 and the frontier districts were long considered only partly pacified, but a more likely culprit in late 1918 may well have been the influenza pandemic whose second wave killed millions in India in the last four months of the year: troopships docking at Karachi are thought to have been one of its principal routes into the country, so those posted to the frontier may have been significantly affected (the CWGC's criteria for commemoration rightly include those falling to "disease contracted or commencing while on active service" alongside combat-related deaths. Frustratingly the MoD too seems not to give cause of death, so I'm not sure how to find that without a copy of the death certificate.