Anglo-French rivalry has overshadowed the continent until very recent times.
Mr Mason provides great slabs of it on the Anglo-Burmese wars, on the ethnogeography of the region, on British-French rivalry.
His earlier years were complicated by family and tribal quarrels, by Anglo-French rivalry in the Indian Ocean, by the expansion of the Wahhābī Muslim puritan movement in Arabia, and by the incessant depredations of the Qawāsim pirates.
The two regions were joined mainly as a result of the combination of Anglo-French rivalry for African territory and Britain's need to accord nominal sovereignty over Sudan to the khedive of Egypt.
It shows how in the 18th century, when Anglo-French rivalry was at its height, the capacity of the Brits to devour colossal chunks of cattle, dripping with fat, was used by patriotic writers and artists to symbolise the nation's superiority to the effete French, with their less robust tastes.In 1748 William Hogarth painted "O the Roast Beef of Old England".
We borrow not only from friends, but from rivals and enemies (flak from German in the second world war, samizdat from Russian during the cold war, too many words to count from French during the long Anglo-French rivalry).So perhaps China's rise is simply too new, and we just need another 20 years or so.
The Anglo-French rivalry had led to the coalescence and strengthening of the Turkish National Movement under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Pasha.
Signed in London on 8 April 1904 by Lansdowne and the French ambassador Paul Cambon, it marked the end of centuries of Anglo-French rivalry and Britain's splendid isolation from Continental affairs, and attempted to counterbalance the growing dominance of the German Empire and its ally, Austria-Hungary.
In particular, it examines landscape drawings and prints made by officers travelling on a sequence of voyages through Polynesia, and argues that these need to be understood within the specific context of Anglo-French imperial rivalry in the region focused on the French annexation of Tahiti in the early 1840s.
For example, in the fighting that engulfed Syria in the mid-19th century, pitting the Druze against the French-oriented Maronite Christians, some see the hand of Anglo-French imperial rivalry, with the British opportunistically backing the Maronites' rivals.
What's the historical basis for the French-American rivalry?
