In 1976, at a gathering near Paris, a panel of experts conducted a blind tasting at which two California wines emerged victorious over their more pedigreed French competitors.
Others argue for the single-handed Vendée Globe, whose primarily French competitors sail around the world without stopping and without company (if satellite video links, on-board microphones and e-mail don't count as company).
After the company had bought out its French competitors, however, Great Britain successfully claimed at the Berlin West Africa Conference (1884 85) that its commercial predominance on the lower Niger justified British rather than international political control.
Botany Bay, near present-day Sydney, had been placed in this process of imperial expansion as an outpost valued for commercial purposes and as a means of protecting British shipping, particularly from French competitors.
Protalinski sees a bit of wounded nationalistic pride at work here, since both Facebook and Twitter are American companies, ones that dwarf their French competitors in terms of scope and profitability.
Unlike their Spanish, Portuguese and French competitors, these colonisers possessed no religious orders, no substantial shock troops of professionally single males who could compile masses of information on indigenous peoples and devote themselves full-time to converting them to Christianity.
