How did this little island control so much more of the world than anyone else?

Yeah, but the European empires were more about commercial muscle than military muscle.

The Dutch and Portuguese traders were playing that game before England was.

Being the first part of the world to develop regular intercontinental transportation is nice.

They had THE Blue Water Navy for 100+ years

Because France insisted on fucking themeslves over and over again for the last 250~ years.

>big island
> coal and iron in easy-mode
>unremarkable reserves of anthracite and bituminous coal, far more in the Borinage and nothern France. As for Iron, you're just making things up now.

>all you need to do is to research navy techs slightly ahead of time.
>Implying that is at all easy
>Implying the UK was only "slightly ahead"
>Implying Human History is anything like a game of civ.

I guess that's why the most exalted and formidable military mind Europe ever produced rotted into obscurity in the custody of the British, on a windswept island more than a thousand miles from anything.

glorious revolution

kek and then wwii and the suez crisis happened and britbongs have been little more than a regional player since

>Parliament gained powers over taxation, over the royal succession, over appointments and over the right of the crown to wage war independently, concessions that William thought were a price worth paying in return for parliament’s financial support for his war against France.

>William’s wars profoundly changed the British state. Their massive cost led not only to growth of modern financial institutions – most notably the Bank of England founded in 1694 – but also to greater scrutiny of crown expenditure through parliamentary committees of accounts.

Do you think this triggers me? It doesn't.
We shouldn't even be a regional power.
We're a shire folk, we don't want much to do with the big wide world, the fact that this is the case and the brits were still able to check the indomitable ambitions of so many apparently greater nations is something to muse on though isn't it?

The only nation to occupy a historical role even remotely as grand as the UK is the USA, a profoundly British nation.

Why is this? I don't pretend to know but Occam's razor would suggest superiority.

>careful diplomacy

England is the bigest backstabber in the history of backstabbing. I can't think of a single-major step in their history that didn't involve backstabbing. For fuck's sake, they just backstabbed Scotland last year by threatening them to not allow them to get into EU if they vote Yes for independence, and when Scots voted No England initiated Brexit the next fucking year.

>Le US is a British nation xD

Go on then, how am I wrong?

Probably a combination of Christianity to deal with hardships, good genes to utilize resources and harsh conditions to be forced to adapt or perish.

>implying it's not

The British are unironically superior. Stick them on any other island and you get the same results

Stay mad mainlander

>they just backstabbed Scotland
Cry about it Pict boy

They were a Western country on an island. Without the channel they would have been probably occupied during any major war on the continent.

It is not british in ethnic makeup, culture, or history.

The only similar thing they have is language.

Not even him, nor bongish, nor burger.

>British realized they couldn't hack it against Europeans
Was that before or after beating Spain and France's navy, ensuring Britain ruled the sea and everything that entailed.

was pretty much going to say this From the middle ages onwards Flanders was a huge center of manufacturing but Louis XIV's wars against the Netherlands meant most of their surplus went to defence. The glorious revolution shifted this across the channel to Southern England, then Britain, which was already quite powerful in its own right as a gunpowder empire, exploded.

Compare north america (uk and french colonialism) to south america today (spanish "colonialism")

The british actually invested time. Spanish just raped it.

>38/44 of the USA's presidents have been of British stock, even the last one and the incumbent are British on their mother's side.

It's a country founded by Brits for Brits, the fact it is ethnically different now does not erase the fact that this is it's history The UK was literally the USA's metropole, the revolution deliberately avoided radical deviations from their British roots.
As for cultural differences, burgers are obsessed with bongs and vice versa, burgers begin their history with the mayflower and Jamestown, It's a little incongruous to do so if the USA is
>not british in ethnic makeup, culture, or history.

What countries can conceivably say that they have effected the course of the USA more than the UK?

>Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?
-The man on the $100 bill.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom–United_States_relations
Here you go lad, pretty interesting read for nations that have nothing in common.

BOATS

They built their empire in the age of drawing lines on maps to make treaties that they need help with, didn't occupy half their claimed 'territory' and the other half was a bunch of pacifists who basically let them take over for security.

Literally drugs,

namely slanging Tobacco, it's what all of their initial wealth was based on, which allowed them to later become a world super-power

this
For europe in the 400 years before 1800, it was calculated(albeit arbitrarily) that economic growth averaged only 0.2% yearly, which was in line with some parts of china(especially the yangze delta area), compare that to industrial revolution, where growth really started to create a disparity globally

The noble Anglo-Saxon spirit.

Do you think people just left their culture and traditions at home when they left Britain for the 13 Colonies?

Because they're on a fucking island and thus separated from the shit that went on in europe, meaning they could wholly focus on naval superiority, which is kinda a big deal for establishing overseas empire.

TL:DR If not for the channel the french would just march into london whenever they fucking pleased.

God damn it, all this talk about starting points and geography makes me want to play Age of Empires 2 again.

Stay mad landlet

>implying the US hasn't inherited the perfidious passive trait
>implying the US isnt running a minmax navy build

From that aspect the Roman empire is much more impressive.

A single city came to rule half the known world, conquering ancient empires, naval powers and fierce barbarian tribes

well memed

The funny thing is that on almost all of the occasions where the British landed professional armies on the Continent the results were absolutely devastating. They single-handedly crushed a massive Franco-Spanish army in Portugal and annihilated the French and the Bavarians at the height of their pre-Napoleonic power in the War of the Spanish Succession. It's even more impressive when you consider Britain often didn't maintain a standing army larger than 5k - 10k and that it was always considered an afterthought. The whole idea that Britain avoided war on the mainland out of fear or incompetence is pop history at its finest.

How can I be salty if there is so much flower out there? :^) teehee

It isn't Picts that have fallen for the stupid freeeedum meme, it's the Gaels in the west

You're responding to someone who fell for that retarded self-reported ancestry map that has a bunch of German midwest provinces

>They single-handedly crushed a massive Franco-Spanish army in Portugal
The same """crushed""" army that managed to take control of all of Spain and then battled mostly against Habsburg armies? You know, the whole thing that caused the Spanish Succession actually going into french favour??

>and annihilated the French and the Bavarians at the height of their pre-Napoleonic power
That was not their height. France had just survived a decade-long war against all of europe combined and won. At the War of Spanish Succession their armies had markedly declined (similiar to napoleonic armies at the end).
Furthermore, the army send to Bavaria was just one of multiple field armies, led by some of the most incompetent marshals. Though it was still a nice victory,

>It's even more impressive when you consider Britain often didn't maintain a standing army larger than 5k - 10k
What is impressive about that? That they were not even able to field a single decent sized army? That they had to rely on their allies to do all the heavy lifting all the time?

>Install the Stadholder as the king of Britain
>Allows reforms that increase political liberty and economic prosperity
>Few decades attempt to compete with the Republic's trade hegemony
>The Republic has no other choice but to invest in the navy and make budget cuts in the army
>Republic gets invaded by the French
>Aid the French to dismantle the Republics position
>After the country is in ruins, try to destabilize the trade position even further with more wars
>Become the new hegemonic power
Bit of a dick move lads

This.

I hate when Francaboos on Veeky Forums are like "lmao Britain were shit on the continent"

Pretty much everyone was shit on the continent. The European mainland was basically just perpetual wars trying to claim small parts of Europe so they could measure dicks with each other.

Don't get me wrong, Napoleon was very successful on the continent but how long did that last? It just ended with his army getting btfo by EVERYONE when they got sick of his shit and then he was left to die on a rock in the middle of no where.

Britain fucked off around the world and created the largest and richest empire in history. It's literally eternal jealousy because other European countries tried the exact same thing and weren't as successful.

>be Dutch
>have a Golden Age
>lets trust the Eternal Anglo, what is the worst that can happen
Served them right, tbqh

>If not for the channel the french would just march into london whenever they fucking pleased

If not for the channel the British would have focused on actually building a land army.

Except they didn't need to. Hence the massive navy and tiny army.

They didn't have to focus on their army because they are an island, gave them an edge against superior nations like France and Spain that had to spend resources on bigger armies to fight of threats on the continent. They used their navy to colonize and trade, giving them a lot of shekels. Then they had the industrial revolution and thats that.

>tfw local pub stopped serving bombardier

I was going to respond to this, but I realised it's pointless because any time someone does the line by line refuting thing they have an ax to grind.
There were many British failures on the continent, Market Garden, the amphibious "descents" on France in various wars, the later stages of the Hundred Years War, the failed attempted invasion of Napoleonic Holland. This is not something I am contesting.
What I contest is the false idea that Britain was never involved in the Continent and never knew success in pitched battle in the Continent, against serious European armies, because it is wholly and wildly wrong. John Hawkwood was one of the earliest and most lethal of the city-state condottieri, the rollcall in the early Gustavean armies reads like a Scottish phonebook. The idea is also predicated on a wholly wrong idea that France and Britain (or England) were equivalent in strength, which they were not. France was always far, far more powerful, not only by its inherent size and population but by its military structure which could bring to bear a much wealthier and larger country on its opponents.

Our biggest mistake was sending John Dudley to fight the Spanish when he was a stupid fuck up and whipped by Liz

That's some wishful thinking on your part.

Napoleon (therefore an navy that can pursue its intrests abroad), being seperated, being in the atlantic, having navigable waterways, more inept neighbors.

It collapsed when it over reached.

1+

During the middle ages and early modern period, they were generally busy with internal rather than external politics because they were (mostly) and island peoples (and fully following the hundred years war). Due to a lack of external support from the continent, nobles and peasants secured more rights than their counterparts on the continent. These led to freer markets in trade and more secure individual property rights, which in turn made England the perfect soil for the industrial revolution.

...

Keep in mind that I don't actually know anything about history. This is a modestly informed guess.

How come that little island never controlled anything in Europe?

They held land in France and occasionally the HRE by marriage until 1500 when they got btfo by France.