Oddity of the Week: Birthplace of the Empire
Created | Updated Mar 2, 2014
And now, we take you back in history…
Birthplace of the Empire
What's that, you say? The British Empire was the greatest empire in history? And so it was. It spread further and wreaked more general havoc than the Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans, and Aztecs combined. Very important thing, that British empire.
But how did it get that way? Doh. By beating the French. In the Seven Years' War. Which would not have happened, probably, if a bunch of Regulars and militiamen hadn't had a run-in with the French at a little place called Fort Necessity, on the Ohio Valley frontier, back in 1754.
The British colonial commander, one George Washington, was out of luck. He was outnumbered, two to one, by French and Indians. He tried his best, honest, but he was forced to accept surrender terms. Now, here's where it gets interesting.
Washington couldn't read French very well. So, when he signed the surrender document, he was unaware that he was confessing to complicity in the 'assassination' of a French officer who had been killed on Washington's watch. This, of course, came back to haunt the British. The French got mad. The British got mad. Things came to a boil (slowly, no Twitter back then), and two years later, the Seven Years' War broke out. Also known as World War 0. World War 0 may have spread to India, Africa, and large sections of Europe, but it got started near Pittsburgh.
At the end of World War O, Britain was the premier superpower on the planet! Frankly, we think you owe it all to George Washington. The moral of this story is: if you want to build a really big empire, don't learn French.
At least, that's our story, and we're sticking to it.
