There’s a hilarious BBC skit titled The Treaty of Westphalia (part of it’s the Complete History of Everything) which imagines the dialogues between European superpowers as they divide the continent, taking digs at each other’s fish-eating habits (pickled herring), bonding over the desire to kick German arse, figuring out how to split Luxembourg, and wondering whether they ought to have a common currency.
Great Britain, for its part, says it is more interested in its colony in America. This leads the lead negotiator to wonder what good America is other than “tobacco, potatoes, and the high-grade narcotics” that you are fond of (while pointing at France, played by Hugh Laurie). Of course, that particular joke becomes wonderfully time-layered because years later Hugh Laurie would play Dr Gregory House, a version of Sherlock Holmes with whom he shares both a manic desire to solve cases and a drug addiction. Of course, a longer historical joke is how Britain’s “new colony” is the one dictating Europe’s fate centuries later.
