Given how inexpensive and useful it is to do this, why do so few people it?
Because there are so many possible topics, that even if each of them takes relatively little time, together they would take a lot?
For example, in your example, you mentioned ” an obscure country” and “a particular era”, and also a focus on politics and military (as opposed to science, or art, or sport). Okay, maybe you can do it in a week, or in an afternoon. But why that country, and why that era? How much it would cost to get a comparable knowledge of all countries and, uhm, let’s say the entire 20th century?
I think eventually patterns start to emerge — so eventually, you start reading about federalization of Chinese Law and you’re “ah, this is like German Unification with a few key differences.”
While you do find rare outliers — the Ottoman legal system continues to fascinate me ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_(Ottoman_Empire) ) — you eventually find that there’s only a few major ways that legal systems have been formulated at larger modern country scales than earlier local scales.
Science, art, and sport are also ones I’ve delved into incidentally. And there’s also some patterns there.
Because there are so many possible topics, that even if each of them takes relatively little time, together they would take a lot?
For example, in your example, you mentioned ” an obscure country” and “a particular era”, and also a focus on politics and military (as opposed to science, or art, or sport). Okay, maybe you can do it in a week, or in an afternoon. But why that country, and why that era? How much it would cost to get a comparable knowledge of all countries and, uhm, let’s say the entire 20th century?
Ahh, great question.
I think eventually patterns start to emerge — so eventually, you start reading about federalization of Chinese Law and you’re “ah, this is like German Unification with a few key differences.”
While you do find rare outliers — the Ottoman legal system continues to fascinate me ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_(Ottoman_Empire) ) — you eventually find that there’s only a few major ways that legal systems have been formulated at larger modern country scales than earlier local scales.
Science, art, and sport are also ones I’ve delved into incidentally. And there’s also some patterns there.