Yes, where would we be without the rules-based international order? Perhaps we would be watching videos every day of children blown apart by weapons of war.
Those videos are occurring because of a major power hypocritically flouting the rules-based international order. In spite of it, not because of it. We know the counterfactual of the rules-based order. It's nonstop European warfare in the 19th and the early 20th centuries.
Maybe not nonstop warfare, but there was still a lot of violence going on. European powers were engaged in more-or-less nonstop warfare overseas in their empires, but maybe you're excusing that because those weren't in Europe.
In Europe itself, you have quite major conflicts in the Franco-Prussian War, Austro-Prussian War, and the Crimean War, plus more minor conflicts around the unification (more like conquest) of Italy, the independence of various Balkan states from the Ottoman Empire starting with Greece, Prussia's war against Denmark. And then you have all of the internal civil wars or strife people usually don't call outright wars, but in the 19th century, were often quite violent. The Revolutions of 1848, for example. Or France switching governments four times (July Monarchy, Second Republic, Second Empire, Third Republic) after the restored monarchy, all of them quite violent transitions.
Not to mention the fact that the stresses of urbanization and concomitant social changes provoked a lot of resistance from the lower classes, which was often quite violent. It's not until well into the 20th century that major strikes don't involve lots of bloodshed!
19th century Europe is only peaceful relative to the quite bloody conflicts that bookended the time period, which themselves rank among the bloodiest conflicts in all of human history.
Greek War of Independence (1821-1832)
French invasion of Spain (1823)
Russo-Persian War (1826-1828)
Russo-Turkish War (1828-1829)
Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence (1848-1849)
First Schleswig War (1848-1851)
Wars of Italian Independence (1848–1866)
Crimean War (1854–1856)
Second Schleswig War (1864)
Austro-Prussian War (1866)
Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871)
Russo–Turkish War (1877–1878)
Serbo-Bulgarian War (1885)
Greco–Turkish War (1897)
Together, that adds up to multiple decades of war.
I think https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars-project-ma... puts this in perspective. The period from 1815 to 1915 was a much more peaceful period measured by deaths in war than 1915 to 2015, though 1975 forward seems like a return to that level (but world population is so much larger now that it's even better than it seems).
Counting the years when there was a war anywhere is Europe, you'll end up with a large number.
I'm counting how often each country was at war. Several countries had no wars, and even the most war torn country didn't fight for more than 10-15 years.
That's really not true if you look at the European neighbors and European territories of Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
Also not true of Spain, which spent a lot of time in internal warfare (with occasional outside interventions.)
But, yes, excluding those, most of the countries in Europe were too busy fighting endless wars throughout their (or their allies’ or enemies’) colonial empires (whether to expand them, defend them, or put down or assist rebellions in them) to bother fighting other powers in Europe in that period.
I've listed most of the conflicts that occurred on the European continent (I've omitted several Russian wars, and there's a couple more civil wars I've also omitted). And some of that is because I'm doing wildcards rather than trying to, e.g., track down every single Balkan conflict in the 19th century.
If you think I've included most of the conflicts that involved European powers on one side... no. Not even close. This is an era when Europeans are essentially in a permanent state of war with everybody they consider inferior to themselves. And, albeit at the tale end of this era, it's still the era when private companies assert the right to go to war against other people. Don't forget that non-European wars can still leave indelible imprints on the European psyche--the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War both had massive implications for their home countries, and it's ultimately the Italian invasion of Libya that kicks off World War I.
> Probably the most peaceful century in the history of Europe.
World War II is not yet 100 years gone, but there's not really going to be any question that that the 100 years after WWII will be the most peaceful 100 years in recorded history. For comparison's sake, you're probably looking at like roughly a Napoleonic Wars' amount of death in conflict on the European continent between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI. And as I've mentioned, you're really lucking out that there's just under 100 years between two of the bloodiest conflicts of European history, so you get to pick a 100 year time period without the largest conflicts. If the time period were instead 110 years, now you'd have to confront the bloodbath not only of WWI but also the Russian Civil War.
Also I don't know exactly when they started having police and gendarmerie (riot police) but probably not until 20th century, so the usual response to an angry mob was to bring the army. And army doesn't know much but shoot. Hence, lots of bloody massacres.
> The time between the Napoleon wars and WW1 (1815-1914) was very peaceful in Europe.
If, when you talk about "Europe", you exclude Spain and also Greece, the Balkans, and much of Eastern Europe, sure, the powers in "Europe" did most off their fighting in colonial wars in the period rather than at home (they did a quite a lot of fighting in colonial wars, though.)
I can sympathize the with the cynicism, because I also see the bombing of Ukraine and Gaza in the daily news, which nobody seems to be capable or willing to stop.
Unlike Solferino, there are children dying on a daily basis, which breaks my heart. Yet it remains true that what Dunant has established is a better state than the world would have been in if he had done nothing.
Solferino was a big and cruel battle by the standards of its time, but not by today's standards - in stats: 150,000 men against 150,000 men, 24 km battle front fighting through one night, resulting in 6,000 dead, 2,000 wounded and 12,000 missing [1] (but note Solferino today has less than 2,600 inhabitants today). So a joke if compared to WWII stats. But the point here is a single individual made a difference, and beyond their lifetime, and that should give us some hope.
>but note Solferino today has less than 2,600 inhabitants today
Solferino (like other places nearby where battles have been fought or where armies marched) has always been a very small town with "vast" extensions of cultivable area or pastures around. That (uninterrupted plain ground) explains a battle front so extended.
I really hope guide-level docs are on the roadmap for Axum. The current situation of "here are some (third-party) blog posts and YouTube videos" is not greatly encouraging. For reference:
The API docs[1] often have a decent amount of guide level information on items within the library, but are perhaps lacking in the "use this crate for ..." type space. What specifically do you think is missing?
I've been dabbling with axum as of late and I agree the docs are relatively good.
I think 2 things that are missing.
- What you mention, "use this for that" sorts of guides. The ecosystem is pretty good, but when you pull down axum you aren't getting something like Java's Spring framework. Instead, you are getting something more like Javascript's expressjs. That makes it a bit tricky to go through and track down which tower plugins you should be using.
- "How to structure your app" sorts of guides. Axum doesn't really force any sort of layout of design, which is good, but it's also not great in that it leaves that actual design up to the beginners imagination. Something like "Here's an example of a todo app with multiple users" would do wonders in showing a recommended layout. Covering how you should do DI, input validation, error handling, session management, module layout, testing. All that sort of stuff would be really useful to have/see.
They actually have quite a few examples in the axum repo and linked from their docs. Something a bit more use-friendly and approachable like Bevy's website would be beneficial, though.
There are examples, but they are fairly focused and not really full applications.
For example, you can find an example of error handling and an example of login flow. You won't see an example of the two put together.
Also importantly, the examples for simplicity are likely to lump everything into `main.rs`. A great way to show off specifically how to do something. Not a great way to show off "apps should look like this".
I think this is all a bit like "here are the tools, this is a circle, now draw the rest of the owl".
Don't get me wrong, the docs are great. What I meant by that is that all the individual parts are well explained, but a framework is all about how you compose its parts — and that is described best by walking people through the thought-process of why to combine certain elements in a certain way and what behaviour you achieve by that as a result. Because in the end it is about the result.
Worst of both worlds is right. I came back to a Python project with a couple of critical but untyped dependencies recently after writing mostly Rust, and to clear up a large number of these (particularly “type is partially unknown”) I had the choice between lots of purely type-checking ceremony (`typing.cast`) or going without.
The third option here is writing type stubs for the library, which you can sometimes find community versions of as well. They’re not too time consuming to write and generally work well enough to bridge the gap
Yeah, I think this may be a good option when actively working on a project. Sadly at the moment, it's mostly a case of "I just need to make a couple of bug fixes in this old project, why is my editor shouting at me?"
It's only a personal side project and I have a good handle on the untyped modules in question, so in the end I suppressed most of the errors with `# type:ignore` and friends.
I'd reconsider that if I was doing more than the odd bug fix on the project. I still like Python, and started using type hints early, but there's enough added friction to make me question using them in the future.
Comparing Jagan and Burnham to (respectively) Trotsky and Stalin is extremely strange. Jagan was perceived as a threat to British interests in Guyana, Burnham was deemed acceptable if unreliable.
Britain sent warships and 700 troops to oust Jagan in 1953, suspending the constitution, and later worked (with the US) to ensure Jagan could not reach the top job again. To be clear, Jagan’s PPP had won 75% of the seats in a democratic election.
