Quote:
Originally Posted by Betonov
Could it be ??
That WW2 was just an episode of a conflict between the UK and Germany for world dominance that started with the German unification in 1870 
Just look at it, WWI started due to colonial tensions and an industrial age arms race which peaked* in 1914-1918 and then reached a conclusion in 1945 when Germany and Britain both lost to the USSR and USA.
*peaked as when the bubble finally burst, WW2 was the peak of death and destruction |
You could argue that way, although I'd slip France in there too, after all, one of the few things that Fahn has got right in this thread is when he pointed out the British and French rivalry. Before the unification of Germany the biggest threat to British dominance was France and vice versa, but Germanys sudden unification and crash course in industrialisation, not to mention its desire to try and get its own piece of the colonial pie despite arriving to the party when it had pretty much ended.
I remember a while ago I had a thought, that some wars can be seen as the end of empires, the First World War was definitely the end of Great Britains empire, although it took until the end of the Second World War for it to really start collapsing. Before that, one could say that the Napoleonic wars curbed the era of French domination, and the Thirty Years War saw the end of Spanish and Italian dominance which had risen during the Renaissance.