5 ms·

Nomads basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to peasant communities because your settlement will be raided until it ceases to exist. In thi

Nomads basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to peasant communities because your settlement will be raided until it ceases to exist. In this fashion they were not unlike malaria and tsetse fly. Eventually, settled societies concentrated sufficient amount of military and industrial power in one hands that nomads could no longer compete and fell apart, and these steppes were finally populated by villages and towns. Some of the smarter nomad communities figured out how to avoid that fate and settled down by themself.

defrost 3y ago
Alternatively, settlers made nomadic life untenable because their territory was continuously decimated by walls, tolls, people claiming the open land was now theirs, accusations of stock theft, etc. It's very much a PoV thing that plays a great deal upon what world view a commenter has been conditioned to hold.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Sure, but since most of my ancestors were peasants, and since we have too few examples of modern successful nomadic societies, I believe my PoV is reasonable. The tragedy is that their society will be raiding; will be taking people and selling as slaves; and, obviously, will get smashed with impunity as soon as an opportunity presents.
  - KirillPanov 3y ago
    From the pastoralist's point of view their hunting grounds are being raided by agriculturalists. And it is states -- which are without exception agricultural socieities -- that are responsible for the vast majority of human slavery in history. > since most of my ancestors were peasants I believe my PoV is reasonable. Uh, that is... quite a leap there. Not sure that one follows from the other.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      > the vast majority As a percentage of the population, or in absolute numbers?
      - defrost 3y ago
        That's hardly the sticking point - the very notion of "state" is relatively modern with respect to practices such as slavery. In 'recent' history, Viking/Norse-Gael Dublin was one of the major slave trading centres of Europe from the 9th to the 12th Century. Do we classify the Vikings, here settled in the one city and raising crops for three hundred years, as nomads? Is their state the state of Ireland, the place that they are taking many slaves from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Ireland#Viking_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Ireland#Viking_peri...
    - lmm 3y ago
      > From the pastoralist's point of view their hunting grounds are being raided by agriculturalists. True up to a point, but the agriculturalists are able to support far more human flourishing on the same land - hence why they won the fight. And AIUI for much of the time when both existed and were in conflict, the pastoralists were essentially parasitic on the agriculturalists (in that they were taking more by raiding than they would ever have gained through hunting). > And it is states -- which are without exception agricultural socieities -- that are responsible for the vast majority of human slavery in history. Formal, documented slavery perhaps - but that's because those are the only societies with formal, documented anything. How much choice do people in those societies have of what kind of work to do, much less not to work? How much choice do women have of who to marry, much less not to marry (and how much choice of how they're treated within that marriage)? Of course you can choose not to follow the customs of your tribe, but at that point how much protection is there for your property or even your life?
      - thriftwy 3y ago
        Are you seriously conflating getting all of your relatives killed in a raid and you being captured to be shipped overseas to be treated like an animal for the rest of your life - with getting married within the commnunity where you were born and raised??
  - corsac 3y ago
    "Xiongnu", the early Chinese ethnonym for their nomadic northern neighbors, literally contains a word meaning "slave".
- mcmoor 3y ago
  And I thought that people always try to settle and agriculture anywhere they could. Only where they couldn't that people have to resort to pastoralism. There's a reason why China didn't expand agriculture into Mongolia steppe.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    It's a bit more nuanced than that and they have, at great expense. Human subsistence strategies tend to be well optimized for the conditions they exist in. Greater Mongolia, both the modern country and what's now the province of Inner Mongolia in China, does have areas of arable land. One of the major issues is these areas tend to shift over time. Some years, one valley gets sufficient rainfall, some years, another. Pastoral communities can easily adapt to this and other marginal conditions much more effectively. But you can also approach these issues with say, a couple centuries of large-scale agricultural development projects like China has done in Inner Mongolia. If you build massive irrigation networks and invest heavily in other technologies, you can develop the area for sedentary agriculture at the expense of the grasslands.
  - empath-nirvana 3y ago
    Farming is a _lot_ more work than hunting and gathering (if food is plenty) and people mostly resorted to it out of desperation, and farmers had to be _forced_ through slavery to do the work throughout most of history.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
AprilArcus 3y ago
From about 3000 BC (the fall of the Cucuteni–Trypillia farming culture to the Yamnaya nomads) to about AD 895 (the conquest of the Carpathian basin by the Hungarians), each nomad community that settled down could count on eventually being conquered by one or another of their distant cousins who stayed on horseback. I question whether the agricultural lifestyle is a better lifestyle for humanity than pastoralism in some kind of utilitarian or consequentialist sense, provided the conquest of and parasitism upon agricultural peoples could be factored out. Pastoralists had generally taller stature and better dentition than agriculturalists until the industrial revolution. Pastoralists maintained smaller populations, and avoided the negative externalities of settled agriculture, e.g. soil exhaustion under intensive irrigation, pests and disease from close-quarters living.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Agricultural lifestyle isn't great per se, but once you create a centralized state and industrialize it becomes no-brainer. We do not know other way to put stuff in space and make computers than agriculture followed by industrialization. And I don't see how you can ever factor out conquests and taking peasants as slaves.
  - fodkodrasz 3y ago
    Not that settled agricultural societies didn't take/use slaves, from Greece to Rome, to the USA... Also: do we need to put things in space, and to have computers? Are our lives fuller from that?
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      Yes, we do absolutely need to put things in space and have computers, because it is the way to progress and see what's next possible in this setting, and then decide what to do while having even more opportunities and options. If we are not doing that we are not sentient species but a kind of animal that happens to speak and use some rudimentary tools.
earthboundkid 3y ago
WTF are you talking about? There were tons of ancient civilizations in the Eurasian land mass.
AlotOfReading 3y ago
That's certainly a take. There have been nomadic pastoralists living alongside partially and fully sedentary agriculturalists in Central Asia for thousands of years. The parts of the continent that are inhabited solely by nomads are those areas that are largely unsuitable for sedentary life and were adapted into environments suitable for pastoralists instead. The idea of nomad communities that subsist solely on raiding poor sedentary farmers is one that gets a lot of play in historical documents (conveniently written almost exclusively by people living in sedentary communities), but it's not a narrative that's well supported as the historical norm by the archaeology in most areas. Instead, much of what we see is produced by complex economic systems involving mutually beneficial trade between these groups. You might have heard these kinds of systems called "silk roads", for example.
- koheripbal 3y ago
  In many of those cases the settled peoples they coexisted with are the settled descendents of those same nomadic raiders. That shared ethnicity, language, trade, and intermarriage is what protected them. The nation of Turkey is a strong historically recent and well documented example of that, with Turkic tribes displacing Kurds, Armenians, and Greeks, not coexisting with them (long term). In short periods, of course there were some cases of peaceful coexistence, but power politics always finds a way to capitalize on ethnic divisions through violence. Bulgaria and Hungary are much earlier era examples (still visible in genetic testing) . The displaced Slavic and Germanic tribes refugee crisis brought upon various Roman crises in multiple waves, ultimately driving the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  > conveniently written almost exclusively by people living in sedentary communities This is false. The Turkic and Mongolic peoples of the steppe have a well-developed epic tradition that goes back centuries. And that epic tradition celebrates raids on sedentary communities for plunder and as a display of bravery and political leadership.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
goodbyesf 3y ago
> Nomads basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to peasant communities because your settlement will be raided until it ceases to exist. Nonsense. Huge swaths of eurasian landmass is uninhabitable because of harsh climate ( siberia, gobi, etc ) or the distance from water sources. Even today, most of eurasia is empty. > In this fashion they were not unlike malaria and tsetse fly. Dumbest thing I've read in a long time. These 'malaria and tsetse fly' improved the lives of settlers by enabling trade. Modern history was made by these nomads. Everything from the italian renaissance to the discovery of the new world was a result of trade by these 'malaria and tsetse flies'. > Eventually, settled societies concentrated sufficient amount of military and industrial power in one hands that nomads could no longer compete and fell apart, and these steppes were finally populated by villages and towns. Wrong again. It wasn't settled societies that did this. The nomads conquered settled societies and militarized and developed them. From the mongols in much of eurasia, the vikings in europe, the turks in the middle east, etc. > Some of the smarter nomad communities figured out how to avoid that fate and settled down by themself. Avoid what fate? The nomad communities conquered and ruled.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  > Huge swaths of eurasian landmass is uninhabitable because of harsh climate This gets repeated over and over but looks false. Why is the city of Ryazan on five centuries older than the city of Voronezh just 200 km to the south? One is in cold swampy forests and the other one is temperate grasslands. And you see this pattern everywhere where barely arable places such as Vjatka are populated for a long time but Krasnodar only recently populated.
truculent 3y ago
> In this fashion they were not unlike malaria and tsetse fly. So this is plain old racism, right?
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Plain old racism is people who live on an island then cross the ocean in the boat and then treat locals as inferiors. People who live alongside nomads for millenia and exchange raids / conquests are not racists. The former should never be lecturing the latter.
  - corsac 3y ago
    Well, I am not the former. And here's a lecture for you: comparing human beings to diseases and insects subject to eradication is plain old racism when the latter do it as much as when the former do.
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      That's the human beings who would gladly enslave your ancestors and congratulate it. And race is totally, totally irrelevant here. The next thing you will probably say, USA isn't island?
      - corsac 3y ago
        You know what is totally, totally irrelevant here? Your (incorrect) presumptions about my nationality and ancestry. "Racism" in popular usage includes ethnic and religious hatreds ("racism against Muslims" etc.). I agree this usage is sloppy. Would "virulent bigotry" be more precise? Suppose for argument's sake your claim that nomads "would gladly enslave your ancestors and congratulate it [sic]" were historically supportable -- let me lay out for you why your "malaria/tsetse fly" comparison is still plain old unilluminating bigotry. In short: a) you can generalize tsetse flies and malaria organisms but not human members a group; b) you can relate to the latter, but not the former, on human terms. Were there periods of positive coexistence between nomads and settlers, and were there cases of successful peace agreements between the two during conflicts? Were there members of nomadic ruling elites who championed or protected sedentary subjects from their peers? Were some nomadic people themselves slaves, religious ascetics, children, etc. who would not "gladly enslave" anyone? Did some nomads even transition to sedentary life? Do they have human descendants alive now? The answer in each of these cases is a well-attested "yes". Do any of these cases apply to malaria or the tsetse fly? No. By comparing a human group to parasites or vermin, you can generalize them and dismiss any possibility of relating to them on human terms. If some group would gladly enslave me, I'd have no problem condemning it or resorting to force. But unless I mainly wanted to enjoy treating them as inferiors I wouldn't liken them to diseases or insects like you are doing.
corsac 3y ago
>> settlement Settled cultivators basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to nomadic pastoralists because your grazing lands were settled (often completely unsustainably) until they ceased to exist. "Not unlike [insert pathogen or reviled insect here]" (in quotes b/c I can't seriously compare humans to such things without revulsion; just an instructive parallel). The "Great" Wall of China, interestingly, walls in vast areas of steppe and former Xiongnu grazing land. Eurasian nomad wealth was overwhelmingly the "spoils" of trade, not raiding – and countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors. Eventually, Eurasian trade patterns shifted from overland (the "silk road") to maritime routes, and the interior of the continent fell into a terminal recession. Until then (e.g. the Jungars) nomads continued to play an outsized role. Some of the smarter nomad communities are still nomads. And 99% of developed/developing world population (including those with nomad ancestors) resemble pre-modern sedentary populations just as little as they do pre-modern nomad populations in their modes of life.
- lmm 3y ago
  > Settled cultivators basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to nomadic pastoralists because your grazing lands were settled (often completely unsustainably) until they ceased to exist. Sure - it was a Hobbesian war of all against all, until the settled cultivators made a better world. > countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors. If the nomads make war on you unless you "trade" with them then that's blackmail, not voluntary trade.
  - corsac 3y ago
    And if A and B voluntarily engage in mutually beneficial trade, and C who rules over B (and holds trade and aliens both in contempt for ideological reasons) obstructs B and A from trading in order to weaken A, what is that?
    - lmm 3y ago
paganel 3y ago
As long as you paid them the taxes they required (via local chieftains) you were quite safe as a peasant. Of course, ignoring the initial conquest. You're probably thinking of the later Crimean Tatar raids that were indeed a very big nuisance North and West of the Black Sea, that area only got pacified for good once it came under Russian control (that's why cities like Kherson and Odessa have been founded by Tsarist Russia in late 18th century).
jcranmer 3y ago
> Nomads basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to peasant communities because your settlement will be raided until it ceases to exist. > In this fashion they were not unlike malaria and tsetse fly. Nomadic raids on settled communities turn out to involve a population loss of about 1-3%. A medieval war will probably cost 10-20% of the population caught in the fighting grounds (and do remember that warfare is endemic in Medieval Europe). Malaria killed about 20-30% of the attempted settlers.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Such raids will also happen annually. Why not? They led to large chunk of most fertile lands of Eurasia[1] ( not having any permanent population way into the second millenium. They absolutely treat peasants as a resource and they will over-hunt it. If you live under the defense of forest, you can still settle there and lose 1-3% of population every decade or so because you're good at hiding. If you are trying to live in the steppe, you will be over-raided and scattered. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

defrost 3y ago

Alternatively, settlers made nomadic life untenable because their territory was continuously decimated by walls, tolls, people claiming the open land was now theirs, accusations of stock theft, etc. It's very much a PoV thing that plays a great deal upon what world view a commenter has been conditioned to hold.

thriftwy 3y ago
Sure, but since most of my ancestors were peasants, and since we have too few examples of modern successful nomadic societies, I believe my PoV is reasonable. The tragedy is that their society will be raiding; will be taking people and selling as slaves; and, obviously, will get smashed with impunity as soon as an opportunity presents.
- KirillPanov 3y ago
  From the pastoralist's point of view their hunting grounds are being raided by agriculturalists. And it is states -- which are without exception agricultural socieities -- that are responsible for the vast majority of human slavery in history. > since most of my ancestors were peasants I believe my PoV is reasonable. Uh, that is... quite a leap there. Not sure that one follows from the other.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > the vast majority As a percentage of the population, or in absolute numbers?
    - defrost 3y ago
      That's hardly the sticking point - the very notion of "state" is relatively modern with respect to practices such as slavery. In 'recent' history, Viking/Norse-Gael Dublin was one of the major slave trading centres of Europe from the 9th to the 12th Century. Do we classify the Vikings, here settled in the one city and raising crops for three hundred years, as nomads? Is their state the state of Ireland, the place that they are taking many slaves from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Ireland#Viking_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Ireland#Viking_peri...
  - lmm 3y ago
    > From the pastoralist's point of view their hunting grounds are being raided by agriculturalists. True up to a point, but the agriculturalists are able to support far more human flourishing on the same land - hence why they won the fight. And AIUI for much of the time when both existed and were in conflict, the pastoralists were essentially parasitic on the agriculturalists (in that they were taking more by raiding than they would ever have gained through hunting). > And it is states -- which are without exception agricultural socieities -- that are responsible for the vast majority of human slavery in history. Formal, documented slavery perhaps - but that's because those are the only societies with formal, documented anything. How much choice do people in those societies have of what kind of work to do, much less not to work? How much choice do women have of who to marry, much less not to marry (and how much choice of how they're treated within that marriage)? Of course you can choose not to follow the customs of your tribe, but at that point how much protection is there for your property or even your life?
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      Are you seriously conflating getting all of your relatives killed in a raid and you being captured to be shipped overseas to be treated like an animal for the rest of your life - with getting married within the commnunity where you were born and raised??
- corsac 3y ago
  "Xiongnu", the early Chinese ethnonym for their nomadic northern neighbors, literally contains a word meaning "slave".
mcmoor 3y ago
And I thought that people always try to settle and agriculture anywhere they could. Only where they couldn't that people have to resort to pastoralism. There's a reason why China didn't expand agriculture into Mongolia steppe.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  It's a bit more nuanced than that and they have, at great expense. Human subsistence strategies tend to be well optimized for the conditions they exist in. Greater Mongolia, both the modern country and what's now the province of Inner Mongolia in China, does have areas of arable land. One of the major issues is these areas tend to shift over time. Some years, one valley gets sufficient rainfall, some years, another. Pastoral communities can easily adapt to this and other marginal conditions much more effectively. But you can also approach these issues with say, a couple centuries of large-scale agricultural development projects like China has done in Inner Mongolia. If you build massive irrigation networks and invest heavily in other technologies, you can develop the area for sedentary agriculture at the expense of the grasslands.
- empath-nirvana 3y ago
  Farming is a _lot_ more work than hunting and gathering (if food is plenty) and people mostly resorted to it out of desperation, and farmers had to be _forced_ through slavery to do the work throughout most of history.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

AprilArcus 3y ago

From about 3000 BC (the fall of the Cucuteni–Trypillia farming culture to the Yamnaya nomads) to about AD 895 (the conquest of the Carpathian basin by the Hungarians), each nomad community that settled down could count on eventually being conquered by one or another of their distant cousins who stayed on horseback. I question whether the agricultural lifestyle is a better lifestyle for humanity than pastoralism in some kind of utilitarian or consequentialist sense, provided the conquest of and parasitism upon agricultural peoples could be factored out. Pastoralists had generally taller stature and better dentition than agriculturalists until the industrial revolution. Pastoralists maintained smaller populations, and avoided the negative externalities of settled agriculture, e.g. soil exhaustion under intensive irrigation, pests and disease from close-quarters living.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thriftwy 3y ago
Agricultural lifestyle isn't great per se, but once you create a centralized state and industrialize it becomes no-brainer. We do not know other way to put stuff in space and make computers than agriculture followed by industrialization. And I don't see how you can ever factor out conquests and taking peasants as slaves.
- fodkodrasz 3y ago
  Not that settled agricultural societies didn't take/use slaves, from Greece to Rome, to the USA... Also: do we need to put things in space, and to have computers? Are our lives fuller from that?
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    Yes, we do absolutely need to put things in space and have computers, because it is the way to progress and see what's next possible in this setting, and then decide what to do while having even more opportunities and options. If we are not doing that we are not sentient species but a kind of animal that happens to speak and use some rudimentary tools.

earthboundkid 3y ago

WTF are you talking about? There were tons of ancient civilizations in the Eurasian land mass.

AlotOfReading 3y ago

That's certainly a take. There have been nomadic pastoralists living alongside partially and fully sedentary agriculturalists in Central Asia for thousands of years. The parts of the continent that are inhabited solely by nomads are those areas that are largely unsuitable for sedentary life and were adapted into environments suitable for pastoralists instead. The idea of nomad communities that subsist solely on raiding poor sedentary farmers is one that gets a lot of play in historical documents (conveniently written almost exclusively by people living in sedentary communities), but it's not a narrative that's well supported as the historical norm by the archaeology in most areas. Instead, much of what we see is produced by complex economic systems involving mutually beneficial trade between these groups. You might have heard these kinds of systems called "silk roads", for example.

koheripbal 3y ago
In many of those cases the settled peoples they coexisted with are the settled descendents of those same nomadic raiders. That shared ethnicity, language, trade, and intermarriage is what protected them. The nation of Turkey is a strong historically recent and well documented example of that, with Turkic tribes displacing Kurds, Armenians, and Greeks, not coexisting with them (long term). In short periods, of course there were some cases of peaceful coexistence, but power politics always finds a way to capitalize on ethnic divisions through violence. Bulgaria and Hungary are much earlier era examples (still visible in genetic testing) . The displaced Slavic and Germanic tribes refugee crisis brought upon various Roman crises in multiple waves, ultimately driving the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
> conveniently written almost exclusively by people living in sedentary communities This is false. The Turkic and Mongolic peoples of the steppe have a well-developed epic tradition that goes back centuries. And that epic tradition celebrates raids on sedentary communities for plunder and as a display of bravery and political leadership.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago

goodbyesf 3y ago

> Nomads basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to peasant communities because your settlement will be raided until it ceases to exist. Nonsense. Huge swaths of eurasian landmass is uninhabitable because of harsh climate ( siberia, gobi, etc ) or the distance from water sources. Even today, most of eurasia is empty. > In this fashion they were not unlike malaria and tsetse fly. Dumbest thing I've read in a long time. These 'malaria and tsetse fly' improved the lives of settlers by enabling trade. Modern history was made by these nomads. Everything from the italian renaissance to the discovery of the new world was a result of trade by these 'malaria and tsetse flies'. > Eventually, settled societies concentrated sufficient amount of military and industrial power in one hands that nomads could no longer compete and fell apart, and these steppes were finally populated by villages and towns. Wrong again. It wasn't settled societies that did this. The nomads conquered settled societies and militarized and developed them. From the mongols in much of eurasia, the vikings in europe, the turks in the middle east, etc. > Some of the smarter nomad communities figured out how to avoid that fate and settled down by themself. Avoid what fate? The nomad communities conquered and ruled.

thriftwy 3y ago
> Huge swaths of eurasian landmass is uninhabitable because of harsh climate This gets repeated over and over but looks false. Why is the city of Ryazan on five centuries older than the city of Voronezh just 200 km to the south? One is in cold swampy forests and the other one is temperate grasslands. And you see this pattern everywhere where barely arable places such as Vjatka are populated for a long time but Krasnodar only recently populated.

truculent 3y ago

> In this fashion they were not unlike malaria and tsetse fly. So this is plain old racism, right?

thriftwy 3y ago
Plain old racism is people who live on an island then cross the ocean in the boat and then treat locals as inferiors. People who live alongside nomads for millenia and exchange raids / conquests are not racists. The former should never be lecturing the latter.
- corsac 3y ago
  Well, I am not the former. And here's a lecture for you: comparing human beings to diseases and insects subject to eradication is plain old racism when the latter do it as much as when the former do.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    That's the human beings who would gladly enslave your ancestors and congratulate it. And race is totally, totally irrelevant here. The next thing you will probably say, USA isn't island?
    - corsac 3y ago
      You know what is totally, totally irrelevant here? Your (incorrect) presumptions about my nationality and ancestry. "Racism" in popular usage includes ethnic and religious hatreds ("racism against Muslims" etc.). I agree this usage is sloppy. Would "virulent bigotry" be more precise? Suppose for argument's sake your claim that nomads "would gladly enslave your ancestors and congratulate it [sic]" were historically supportable -- let me lay out for you why your "malaria/tsetse fly" comparison is still plain old unilluminating bigotry. In short: a) you can generalize tsetse flies and malaria organisms but not human members a group; b) you can relate to the latter, but not the former, on human terms. Were there periods of positive coexistence between nomads and settlers, and were there cases of successful peace agreements between the two during conflicts? Were there members of nomadic ruling elites who championed or protected sedentary subjects from their peers? Were some nomadic people themselves slaves, religious ascetics, children, etc. who would not "gladly enslave" anyone? Did some nomads even transition to sedentary life? Do they have human descendants alive now? The answer in each of these cases is a well-attested "yes". Do any of these cases apply to malaria or the tsetse fly? No. By comparing a human group to parasites or vermin, you can generalize them and dismiss any possibility of relating to them on human terms. If some group would gladly enslave me, I'd have no problem condemning it or resorting to force. But unless I mainly wanted to enjoy treating them as inferiors I wouldn't liken them to diseases or insects like you are doing.

corsac 3y ago

>> settlement Settled cultivators basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to nomadic pastoralists because your grazing lands were settled (often completely unsustainably) until they ceased to exist. "Not unlike [insert pathogen or reviled insect here]" (in quotes b/c I can't seriously compare humans to such things without revulsion; just an instructive parallel). The "Great" Wall of China, interestingly, walls in vast areas of steppe and former Xiongnu grazing land. Eurasian nomad wealth was overwhelmingly the "spoils" of trade, not raiding – and countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors. Eventually, Eurasian trade patterns shifted from overland (the "silk road") to maritime routes, and the interior of the continent fell into a terminal recession. Until then (e.g. the Jungars) nomads continued to play an outsized role. Some of the smarter nomad communities are still nomads. And 99% of developed/developing world population (including those with nomad ancestors) resemble pre-modern sedentary populations just as little as they do pre-modern nomad populations in their modes of life.

lmm 3y ago
> Settled cultivators basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to nomadic pastoralists because your grazing lands were settled (often completely unsustainably) until they ceased to exist. Sure - it was a Hobbesian war of all against all, until the settled cultivators made a better world. > countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors. If the nomads make war on you unless you "trade" with them then that's blackmail, not voluntary trade.
- corsac 3y ago
  And if A and B voluntarily engage in mutually beneficial trade, and C who rules over B (and holds trade and aliens both in contempt for ideological reasons) obstructs B and A from trading in order to weaken A, what is that?
  - lmm 3y ago

paganel 3y ago

As long as you paid them the taxes they required (via local chieftains) you were quite safe as a peasant. Of course, ignoring the initial conquest. You're probably thinking of the later Crimean Tatar raids that were indeed a very big nuisance North and West of the Black Sea, that area only got pacified for good once it came under Russian control (that's why cities like Kherson and Odessa have been founded by Tsarist Russia in late 18th century).

jcranmer 3y ago

> Nomads basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to peasant communities because your settlement will be raided until it ceases to exist. > In this fashion they were not unlike malaria and tsetse fly. Nomadic raids on settled communities turn out to involve a population loss of about 1-3%. A medieval war will probably cost 10-20% of the population caught in the fighting grounds (and do remember that warfare is endemic in Medieval Europe). Malaria killed about 20-30% of the attempted settlers.

thriftwy 3y ago
Such raids will also happen annually. Why not? They led to large chunk of most fertile lands of Eurasia[1] ( not having any permanent population way into the second millenium. They absolutely treat peasants as a resource and they will over-hunt it. If you live under the defense of forest, you can still settle there and lose 1-3% of population every decade or so because you're good at hiding. If you are trying to live in the steppe, you will be over-raided and scattered. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]