Interesting Maps

Fun fact; there was never a 10% rate if corporation tax in Ireland. There was manufacturing relief (which also applied to certain international financial services, computer services etc) which gave rise to an effective burden if 10%.

And the bananas weren’t the weirdest activity which the courts held to be manufacturing - maturing stout in bottles which was done by local suppliers was also regarded by a lawyer as manufacturing even though it amounted to little more than storing them in a warehouse!

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1hub2zy/a_map_depicting_the_administrative_divisions_of/#lightbox

it was only relevant in the context of manufacturing relief which is 15 years gone. The stout was brewed and bottled by Guinness and supplied to the local distributors in a form known as “wort” which required an element of bottle conditioning to ensure that it was drinkable when finally sold to the retailer. It’s an historical anachronism based on the Fyffes banana maturation case at a time when CT was 50%.

Yes, though obviously the details will vary from country to country. For the purposes of the map, I think "supermarket" has go mean "shop of a size, or having other relevant characteristics, that make it subject to the law restricting sunday opening hours".

French Provinces Translated into English

https://x.com/TerribleMaps/status/1876256217397366903/photo/1

European Unification Movements

https://brilliantmaps.com/european-unification-movements/#more-12447

Doubt its that high alright

Japanese Diaspora;

I did a bitof digging on why the Japan/Brazil link, found this on Reddit…

"To answer your question of why there is a large Japanese community in Brazil we first need to establish the fact that long before any Japanese arrived in Brazil a lots of other peoples had arrived there. After Brazil gained independence from Portugal in 1822 the Emperor Pedro I and the elites wanted to modernize Brazil. They wanted a modern, export orientated economy based mostly on agriculture. Agriculture was one of the main industries that where growing at this time, and it demanded a lot of labor. And since slavery wasn’t really an option anymore and the slave trade eventually ended in 1850. This although it had been outlawed in 1826 but continued do to the necessity of workers(in this case slaves) on the plantations. And besides that it was seen as undesirable to bring more people of color to Brazil, the elite’s wanted a Modern country, which in their mind meant a white country.

The ideal candidates, according to the Brazilian elite, were white and catholic. The first efforts to bring white farmers to the large plantations didn’t work out as well as the elite’s had hoped. Firstly while they wanted free and white laborers on the plantations they didn’t treat them as laborers but as slaves. So while they did attract lots of immigrants, this also caused issues between the immigrant workforce and the plantation owners. Despite this loads of people from North-West Europe (Mostly German) came to Brazil to search for a better life. Still tough this wasn’t enough to satisfy the needs of the large plantations.

The next groups of mass immigrants came from Southern Europe, mostly Italian, Portuguese and to a lesser extend Spanish. These too didn’t work out as well as the elite’s had hoped, because most immigrants that arrived from Europe weren’t the best and brightest and most where illiterate, but mostly poor lower class citizens looking for a better life. This caused a lot of tension between the local plantation owners and these peoples. At one point it became so bad that the Italian authorities prohibited Italians from migrating to Brazil due to abuses by the plantation owners of the labor force. The third group that was attempted where Jews and Arabs, this scheme failed mostly due to the fact that most of the Jews and Arabs didn’t stay on the plantations but became shop keepers in the large cities in the country. Therefore the plantation owners still didn’t have a big enough workforce.

So far the attempts of the Brazilian state to “whiten” the population hadn’t worked out as promised, and still hadn’t brought in enough workers. From 1868 Japan transformed from a Feudal state to a Modern state with a lot of population growth. This caused the Japanese state to look for ways to relieve the population pressure, their main targets at first were the USA and mainland Asia. But soon they started looking at other regions, one of which was Brazil with a large demand for immigrants. This caused the Japanese and Brazilians to make a deal about immigration. This coincided with the Japanese desire to be a Western Country, and the Brazilian elites started to think about Japanese as white. In 1908 the first Japanese arrived in Brazil aboard the Kasato Maru, and the Brazilians where immediately impressed with the Japanese would-be immigrants. This event was witnessed by the Soa Paulo’s Inspector of Agriculture J. Amandio Sobral who was impressed that most of the immigrants were literate, “and in flagrant contrast … to our workers did not seem poor”. He too was amazed that the Immigrants looked European, and were clean, and so was the ship on which they had just undertook their journey. The arriving Japanese too were happily surprised with their arrival in Brazil, as by pure coincidence Sao Paulo was just having a festival, which the immigrants thought was in their honor. Over the years a lot more Japanese arrived and they were really well liked by the Brazilians. Despite this they still suffered from abuses by the large landowners but to a far less extent due to the protection of the Japanese immigrants by the Japanese state, and as Japan was a world power at this stage this meant far better conditions for the Japanese than other peoples had encountered at first.

Sources: LESSER, J., Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to present, New York, 2013."

My sister-in-law is ethnically Japanese, but doesn't speak Japanese and only visited there for the first time last year. She is from Sao Paolo.

A mix of currents and avoiding shipping.