New Video: French Empire! (Patreon)

For those of you who've commented about how shockingly modern a lot of my history has gotten in the past couple months — what with the Hong Kong, Scotland, and Malta all ramming right up against the early 2000s — this is the latest in a wacky line of videos about wacky modern history.

I chose the topic in part because this video is a collaboration with the Armchair Historian Channel, and the crossover worked out fantastically. He is doing a video about the French battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, so I decided to take the long approach and talk about the entire history of french colonialism up to that point.

And don't get me wrong, French Imperialism is an interesting story but it's just so. damn. multifaceted. After a story takes place on more than three continents I'm immediately out. There's so much information to trudge through, it's a real pain to effectively organize the overlapping chronologies, and there are just so many maps to make for it. Not even to mention the strain of talking about a predominantly exploitative system of colonialism for an entire video.

Funny story about that — before my DisneyWorld vacation last week, I spent a full week and a half working on this one, and at the end of the week, Cyan, two friends, and I got dinner at a nice Ethiopian restaurant. And let me tell you, the complete cultural whiplash between "the scramble for Africa" and "the one part of Africa that escaped" was both shocking and extremely refreshing — and the food was super tasty too so that was also a plus.

I'm running long here, but that's a little bit of my experience with making this video, and why I'm not super jazzed about doing more post-renaissance history. BUT keep an eye out for my next video, a HistoryMakers about Herodotus!

-B