Talk:Continental

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[edit] Continental Empire

*Continental Empire refers to rigidly structured Iberian societies, colonizers such as Spain and Portugal, the most transformed of all forms of European Colonialism, establishment of plantation agriculture, native languages and religions destroyed, Mestizo populations and a future of hierarchy.

Where this came is anyone's guess; and is obviously POV; the Iberian empires are in any case usually referred to as the Peninsular Powers of Peninsular Empires; and neither one of them was "continental" except Spain internally and in the days when it ruled the Two Sicilies and other Habsburg/Borbon fiefs. The term "continental empire" in geopolitics is apposite to "maritime empire", the contrast being between Russia/Britain (the archetypes of the two kinds of empire in geopolitics) or Austria/Portugal, China/Japan. Other continental empires would be those of Genghis Khan, the Ottomans (partly marine), Germany (excluding its overseas possessions until the wars, which were never "active empire" in the sense of the British or Portuguese). Persia was a continental empire; Athens, once it became an empire, a purely maritime one. "future of heriarchy" and the destruction of native languages and religions are not necessarily hallmarks/defining parameters of continental empires, either.Skookum1 22:03, 14 October 2006 (UTC)