Blueprint for Armageddon I - Hardcore History

back to the late eighteenth century. There was the long, slow decline of the Ottoman Empire, with its base for much of its existence in present-day Istanbul and which over some five centuries stretched over a good deal of what today constitutes the Middle East, North Africa, southeast Europe, and parts of Asia. The second trend was the emergence of

The history presented here is divided into four periods. The first covers the longest period, roughly three hundred years from the early seventeenth century to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. In addition to the rise of the modern international state system, this period spans the colonial period, the demise of several empires, the opening of Ja

Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted.

One of the astounding things about the Second World War is that following the war the defeated powers prospered as never before. Twenty years after the complete annihilation of their armies and the utter collapse of their empires, Germans, Italians, and Japanese were enjoying unprecedented levels of affluence. Why,

THE CONQUEST of France and the Low Countries cost Germany almost 43,000 killed, 117,000 wounded; France lost around 50,000 dead, Britain 11,000; the Germans took 1.5 million prisoners.

The incursion of the European imperialists put China into an economic tailspin from which it would not recover for more than a century. With the Qing Dynasty humiliated and weakened by the losses of the First Opium War, an internal rebellion broke out between 1850 and 1864. Known as the Taiping Rebellion, it pitted the Qing Dynasty against the foll