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See my links in other comment. Initialy i knew only about uranium in Mali, but i already suspected that
the oil fields in the neighboring Niger wouldnt stop at the border (despite not yet being extracted).

Apologies for the late replay, but anyways..

About the uranium in Mali.
About the [oil](https://theconversation.com/how-oil-exploration-is-adding-to-malis-security- woes-85268) in Mali.
If you search around a little bit, you will find more sophisticing sources, but these should
be already sufficient.

> That doesn’t sound like self interest then does it?

Uh, i cant imagine a scenario where british troops would evacuate british citizens and tell
citizens of the commonwealth to wait for the next bus without damaging their "savoir"
reputation forever...

> I care more about what the people of Kosovo had to say

Then you should have probably read the article you left there thoroughly, because there is
an example why the name Blair was popular for a short term back then:

> The name was suggested by an Italian business partner and friend who sheltered the family when they were driven out of Kosovo in March 1999. "He had told me before the war that the only ones who would help us would be the English,"

The article is indeed very interesting, especially if you take a closer look at the actual economy of Bosnia,
which is overwhelmed by the influx of products imported by stronger economies. I could also throw in
how the bosnian people (actual people, who fled during that time) i know have a differentiated opinion
than simply looking at Blair as their "savior" or my personal (and certainly quite minor) participation,
but all this doesnt matter. Because either way, it would only mean that you have picked up
the one occasion after WWII, where western forces (mainly: US) got voluntarily involved for
a case not related to their interests or their citizens.
And now maybe compare this one time with the loong list of western(usually US) interventions..
Good luck filtering out those which support your opinion, i m honestly too lazy to do the same vice-versa :P

There are a number of decent books about the Weimar Republic, most of which appear on "best of" lists. None of the lists, however, include the 2-volume set written by Erick Eyck.

Find that set and start there.

Was not that hat, until about 1970, manufactured in PA?

Some folks thing the UK started with "departments" during the days of Oliver Cromwell and his Rump Parliament, but monarchs long before him had men who ran different parts of the kingdom for centuries before the 17th century.

Yep, dumping coal to lake and cover them. My father said it like manthra every time, when some about Russia or Stalin is said.

Sorry, I was being pithy, but obviously political decisions have as many reasons as people that support those decisions. I'm sure including women would increase the representatives in the House, even if they are a minority within your population.

To cover the lakes? What does that mean, like dumping coal in the lake?

Nice! I assume all sorts of revelries have happened there over the years. The gods would be proud. :P

Nice, I will check this out further, and leave this easy link here :P

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages

Nice! Good job on avoiding sacrifice ;)

Yup. "Have" (two syllables; ha-ve) is a fancy word for garden in Norway. Today however, everyone other than the elderly in the fancy parts of Oslo says "hage".

I believe the Norwegian have and the dutch hof is related.

Frisia especially (maybe the rest of the country as well?) were originally populated by pre-viking age scandinavians (germanics? norsemen? I don't know what the distinctions are sadly), who clearly brought their language with them, in the same sense that even the saxons that populated England in the viking age could with relative ease understand norse and vice versa. Which I assume was useful in later trade and settlements.

So, my logic goes that if germanic spread from saxony to England, it is no far stretch to assume that norse words also took the relative short jump down the coast to the trading areas of Frisia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfGRuWTV_rg&t=

I recently watched this series, and Frisia was heavily settled by scandinavic peoples at a certain point.

Oh deary me, how did that drop out from my head. You are correct, Sámi is related but more distantly.

Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian are Finno-Ugric languages while Sámi is a Finno-permic language. Finno-permic is a split from Finno-Ugric. There are more languages in the Finno-permic group as well.

Isn't Saami also distantly related? By related I mean all languages in the Finno-ugiric language group, which I believe includes the aforementioned languages, plus probably some more I don't know.

I get your point, but there was much interaction between the swedish vikings and the Finnish peoples. Besides, loan words through trade is common, as well as political terms if an area has been colonized (and I believe there were some viking settlements in Finland). Consider only of how much of the English language comes from norse words, latin or french.

I can definitely imagine that a hov for worship becomes an important gathering place for settlers or colonialists, and as such, that big men or kings would base their power from there, perhaps leading to some development of the word into being related to courts. I don't know. My knowledge of how etymology works comes from youtube channels and amateur word studies in Biblical Hebrew and Greek. :P

But the contact between vikings and baltic lands, Finland etc. is often overlooked.

Egypt 5,000 years ago. Egypt became one of humanity's first great powers through taxation, budgeting, and bureaucracy.

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Early 19th century. The principle of departments is a child of the French revolution. What was before is essentially different from that. It's especially visible for example in Prussia, where the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg clearly replaced the old institutions with ministries Germany more or less has until today.

Prior to that, there were no parallels at all between the branches of administration. Matters of foreign policy were mostly done by the king, diplomats and whoever had influence (though a minister of foreign affairs had existed shortly before the reforms), the "secretaries" in the "cabinet" were office assistants who served directly under the king but did few to no decision making, the archaic privy council still existed but had lost all of its responsibilities other than matters concerning the church, and the Generaldirektorium was responsible for almost everything from war to taxes to finances to the royal domain and royal prerogatives.

The Generaldirektorium was partitioned into territorial districts that all had different laws, levels of sovereignty (Prussia was still part of the HRE after all) and a member of the Direktorium that was supposed to work on it. Some members had leading positions or were regarded as experts on certain matters, but in the end, their responsibility wasn't for a department, but for their district, and in addition, everyone was responsible for the work of the Generaldirektorium as a whole. Newly acquired provinces in Franconia and Poland were managed differently. Some members were also diplomats, members of the privy council, landed nobility, and most were in the military.

England, that some other commentors have written about, is probably the worst example because it can only be one for itself. Its constitutional tradition is entirely different from continental Europe. The UK avoided clear breakages and kept many of its archaisms at least in name, so it's much harder to narrow down when it had finished evolving into a modern state. However, the influence of the French revolution of course was there and decisive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushim_%28Uruk_period

One of the earliest known bits of writing was a receipt for some grain signed by "Kushim" who may well have been a government official.

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When you could basically short the economy.

Umm. Medieval Times were the most backwards human times in the entire human history. Like Greek and Indian medicines were highly advanced in early historical eras, with even the instances of surgery and plastic surgery present, meanwhile medieval Times believed that farts cure diseases.

About budgets and departments, they were pretty common. Like Romans had separate tax collection and budget for building Aquaducts. There were centralised governments present in Ancient India where they had separate departments and funds for tackling things like droughts. Meanwhile Ancient China had a functioning bureaucracy and compititive exams to hire them.

The Estates General of the Dutch Republic had a yearly budget in the 17th-18th and a formal process to approve it. But interestingly it had only four categories of expenses on the budget: Repayment of debts, War, Water management, and the Representative office of the Estates General (tasked mostly with negotiations), with Repayment of debts and War always taking most if it (even in peace time).

Still it was apparently light years ahead of enemies in budget keeping, since it always paid lower rates for debts and never defaulted on repayments, while regularly bankrupting kings like those of Spain and France during wars.

One of those Representatives of the Estates General (in practice a sort of PM), Johan de Witt, is credited with laying the scientific foundations of financial mathematics and contributing to the formalization of probability with his paper 'The worth of Life Annuities compared to Redemption bonds' which is discussed in letters between Bernouilli and Leibniz. The topic of the paper is of course a very practical matter for a guy tasked with negotiating the conditions of big loans.

Writing was invented for this exact purpose. The whole goal of writing originally was to keep track of shit like taxes, storage and expenditures.