Episode Details

This essay is one half of a collaboration with the Feral Historian youtube channel. You can find both videos linked below.

Cricket is a game that we British invented and exported to the world, assuming that having invented the rules, we would always win by them.

In fact the whole point of cricket was that it didn’t have real rules. Cricket is a game so slow and tedious that the winner is whoever can stay awake to the end.

While drinking gin.

But we British had a problem. We had built a global trading network AKA Empire, that covered a quarter of the world’s landmass. But it turns out that governing an Empire is very VERY expensive. So we were trying to get the Empire

to govern itself

but still give us money.

What if the disparate British “colonies” governed themselves in their own ways, but within an agreed Rules of Cricket? We even thought about re-naming our empire The Federation.

The Brits came this close to founding a federal World State.

And in the unlikely event any of our colonies ever came close to winning at “cricket” we, the English, knower of the rules of cricket, could just invent some new rules to make it so we win.

Welcome

to the rules based global order.

FH: Or “lawyers, guns, and money” but in reverse order.  

Watch the full video essay here

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you eve