I was doing a little research and writing about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the brilliant military commander and statesman who founded the modern Republic of Turkey.
I kept getting surprised at how long it was taking me to get basic details down. Hundreds, maybe thousands of little contributing factors were all very slightly relevant to the Turkish resistance to the occupation, to the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, etc.
I kept having to dig in to events I didn't know -- the Young Turk actions, the Ottoman succession plans, the organization of the Ottoman army, the Ottoman economy and governance styles, regional relations and wars, ethnic groups and identities, and so on.
To do just a very short summary treatment of some of Ataturk's accomplishments -- one that I'm not even pleased with, since it doesn't get deeply into the heart of the matter -- this took me the bulk of three days.
I just shrugged this off. Okay, sometimes things take longer than we expect.
But then, I was writing another short thing about Kennedy and Khrushchev.
This piece -- it didn't take long at all! I had to fact check a couple points about Khrushchev's foreign policy, his reorganization of the Soviet armed forces, and the Soviet nuclear and space programs.
I already knew pretty much all of the American background information, and most of the Cold War background knowledge, and most of the science.
And then I realized why the Ataturk piece was taking so long.
I understand quite well how America got built -- started as colonies, revolutionary war, Washington's presidency and Hamilton's policies, Manifest Destiny, Andrew Jackson, Mexican-American War, Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, modernization, Theodore Roosevelt, World War I, Great Depression, FDR, World War II, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy...
I know all the peripheral background information.
I also know enough early Soviet history from Lenin to Stalin, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet conquests of Central and Eastern Europe, Operation Barbarossa, the Eastern Front, Yalta, and the defeat and occupation of Germany.
With the background of Stalin's actions after Yalta, Kennan's assessment of Soviet policy, the debate between rollback and containment, and the shift from conventional forces to nuclear arsenals and trying to win via influence, culture, and soft power instead of conventional warfare...
...that piece wrote quickly.
Meanwhile, trying to figure out how, for instance, Macedonia fit into the Ottoman world was a detail that maybe wasn't directly highly relevant, but lacking the background, the situation was somewhat confusing. So I had to keep running down all these points about Ottoman governance, and the people under Ottoman governance, and which groups and factions were generally Ottoman loyalists and which were neutral or hostile, and even identity and national cohesion of the subjects of the Ottoman Empire. All sorts of things like that.
Peripheral knowledge speeds things up a lot, even if it's not directly relevant. Because if you want to make conclusions without the peripheral knowledge, you're not sure if you're overlooking something important or not.
This seems to generalize to all sorts of things. If there's a gap in your knowledge about how things work, you're never sure exactly how important it is. But if you know how things happened and why they're the way they are, you can start putting together hypotheses and potential conclusions with a lot more confidence.
This also makes me re-appreciate why history is so hard to learn. I'm lucky I started with Sengoku and early Tokugawa Japan when I got deeply into history, because it was both rich and complex enough to fascinate and spend lots of time with, but was also -- relatively speaking -- a "closed system" that can be studied without needing to get background knowledge on an overwhelming amount of moving pieces.