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Scholars now argue that early nomadic empires were the architects of modernity
- amadeuspagel 3y agoIn Lineages of Modernity, Emanual Todd argues that England was the first modern liberal democratic country, because the kind of hierarchical agragrian society that took over the entire world only developed late there, so people had still more of a hunter-gatherer egalitarian spirit.
- Scea91 3y agoBy what measure was England the first liberal democratic country? There are earlier republics than England and earlier countries with election process than England?
- riffic 3y agoSupreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
- esafak 3y agoYou can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
- anigbrowl 3y agoBy the standards of the still glorious British Empire of course. Do other measures even exist?
- notahacker 3y agoEngland/Britain has considerably more continuity than most of the other contenders, though a lot depends on what you count as "democratic".
- vlz 3y agoEnglands or later the UKs way towards democracy was quite gradual. But I think they were the first to kill their king „in the name of the people“ (1649) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_Charles_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_Charles_I And then not much later deposed another king in 1688. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution While the country was not a republic right away these revolutionary events lead to a de facto rule by parliament and earlier I think than any other country I can think of (though how that parliament was voted for and who got to vote is another story)
- scarmig 3y agoThere are many examples of countries run by a republic of the elites that predate modern England. Venice, Greece, various Indian city states. You can always draw distinctions between them, but they don't seem fundamental.
- nicole_express 3y ago> But I think they were the first to kill their king „in the name of the people“ (1649) I suppose Tarquinius Superbus was exiled instead of executed, but 509 BC (in the traditional chronology, anyway) for the overthrow of the Roman kingdom sounds a little earlier than 1649.
- notahacker 3y agoMaybe my hunter-gatherer egalitarianism is clouding my views, but this sounds tendentious to me. The English descended from waves of European conquerors and settlers (and even the Celts are generally considered to be migrant agriculturalists), and with habits like city-dwelling and being fearsome warriors instead of serfs dying out in mere generations at various points in our history, it's hard to imagine that we've somehow absorbed more cues from a little-known Early Neolithic culture we might not even share much genetic material with. Not to mention a whole bunch of more directly relevant quirks like assembling a mighty navy, colonising half the rest of the world, dispensing with Catholicism early and inventing modern capitalism came precisely because our society was so hierarchical.
- joemazerino 3y agoWell said. Don't forget about modern industry, scientific advancements, personal freedom and other privileges we enjoy today
- cracrecry 3y agoModern capitalism was not invented by the British. It was invented by Italian people and Catholic religious orders. The British adopted the system and amplified it, just like the Industrialisation that came from the Netherlands. The British made most of their capital(that financed industrialisation) from slavery trade and piracy in the Atlantic. It made huge profits and industrialisation paid off giving multiples of the inputs for the first time in History. That also financed the "colonising of half of the world". But this colonisation came very late. >dispensing with Catholicism early and inventing modern capitalism came precisely because our society was so hierarchical. I am reading a book that argues that Europe's success comes from all the competence of different powers fighting each other and none of them taking over the others. The Muslims and later the Ottoman empire tried to take over Europe. The Spanish or Napoleon tried to take over Europe and UK, but they could not, because the others joined against them. Napoleon tried to conquer Russia. Then the British tried to take over as well. Austria, Bismarck and Hitler tried to conquer Europe. Then the Soviet Union. Even the Roman Empire could not take over the British islands and Germany. This is different from China, where different groups take over of everything. Centralisation and stagnation happens as a consequence.
- mikhael28 3y agoThe Mongol Khanates were indiscriminate murderers who burned the library of Baghdad and ended the Islamic Golden Age. They also destroyed proto-democratic cities like Novgorod in the proto-Russian territory, creating a culture of 'might is right' strongmen with absolute power. Why are we trying to rehabilitate their image, exactly?
- mikhael28 3y agoNot trying to be facetious or anything, but this civilization was profoundly destructive to human history.
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- keiferski 3y agoI don’t know if anyone is trying to rehabilitate them, more like understand their significance. The Mongols weren’t bloodthirsty lunatics; they were pretty advanced in terms of warfare tactics, religious tolerance, and a bunch of other things. They also had a direct historical influence on a million other things (the Black Death, the Mughals in India, etc.)
- CogitoCogito 3y ago> The Mongol Hordes: They’re Just Like Us Is that rehabilitating their image? Is your assumption that modern humans are inherently better? World War II was caused by (what I would argue are) modern humans. I believe we could see wars of similar horror in the future.
- 082349872349872 3y agoPedantically, modern humans have been around for a few hundred thousand years, so all recorded (ie within the last five thousand years) wars have been caused by us.
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- karaterobot 3y agoThere was that article the other day about how "no evidence" is an untenably ambiguous phrase to use in headlines. I wonder whether "scholars now argue" and similar constructions might also be an anti-pattern, as they can suggest either a universal consensus or the existence of two scholars on the fringe who hold the view. I suppose the word "argue" may go some distance toward disambiguating in this case, but that could also be interpreted in a few different ways. The article gives more context, but of course most people don't read the full article, thus—at least partly—the need for headlines and subheadlines in the first place. If they are bearing the weight of the whole article, might as well make 'em sturdy.
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- rufus_foreman 3y agoYes, our cities were overrun and we were enslaved, but for a beautiful moment in time, we experienced state formation.
- pookha 3y agoAnd we cooled the earth: https://www.livescience.com/11739-wars-plagues-carbon-climate.html https://www.livescience.com/11739-wars-plagues-carbon-climat...
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- fallingfrog 3y agoDan Carlin did an excellent hardcore history podcast on the mongol conquests- it’s called “wrath of the khans” and, well, to modern sensibilities it’s a pretty shocking tale. There were details like, when a city was taken, each soldier was required to bring back something like 20 left ears from people they killed. They had big bags of them. They would round people up in pens, and kill the adults first so they wouldn’t see their children die and fight back. Sometimes they would send a single soldier into a town to demand their surrender and he would walk around killing people at random. If nobody lifted a finger to stop him, then the city was spared. If anyone intervened, the mongol army would come and sack the city. Word got around, and most cities just surrendered. I can’t really think of any positive outcome of murdering every one of a city’s 2 million inhabitants- with knives, no less, which is a lot less impersonal than bombs. They genuinely considered non-mongols to be a form of cattle. You could make the case that the whole central Asian region never really recovered.
- jvanderbot 3y agoContext from the article: > The steppe restoration typifies what historians call the global turn, a larger project of shifting histories away from nation-states and colonialist defamation and toward the peoples and processes that have knotted us together. It’s a survey of shadows, a tracing of negative space. It focusses on peoples who, in Sattin’s words, “have long been confined to the anecdotes and afterthoughts of our writers and histories.” These are some of the most maligned groups in historical chronicles: the uncivilized; the barbarians at the gate; the tribes who seem to appear from some demonic portal, destroy everything in sight, and then recede back into darkness. The steppe restoration repositions them. It treats them as subjects in their own right—as peoples who have their own histories, who formed societies no less complex than the sedentary states they confronted, and who helped craft the world we inhabit. > The emerging discipline had to overcome centuries of historiographic hubris. Writing about other peoples has long been in service of self-glorification. I think the term "architect" is probably better phrased as "major influencer". Yes - they did have major influence. No - they certainly weren't the brutal orks that the losers (us) said they were, they just won. Do we secretly celebrate the Roman empire, Alexander the Great, etc? What must the "other guys' texts say about them?". The mongol's resulting state must certainly have had intelligent, diligent, and benevolent leaders, so I think this is more of a "One of us!" type push. But honestly, horses and wheels? Yeah, that's a pretty big contribution, and that's the first few paragraphs of TFA. > More than the Greeks, the Romans, or the Chinese, it’s the nomadic Yamnaya whose legacy survives in our words and our bodies [70% of us have this DNA] Another good quote: > It was through the Mongol Empire, Harl writes, that papermaking, block printing, and gunpowder moved from the East to the West, hastening the spread of knowledge and catalyzing Europe’s conquest of the seas. “The global economy of the modern age was thus born thanks to the Mongol legacy,” he declares.
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- joemazerino 3y ago[flagged]
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- datadeft 3y agoIt is kind of funny to call these nomadic empires that. They did the most damage to human knowledge during their time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom
- adolph 3y agoA relative claim of "most" assumes a survey of "damage to human knowledge" not evident in the link. Maybe some points of human history were stuck in local minima, scholastic periods where all things were considered known and new observations fit to existing theory in ever more Byzantine epicycles. Maybe not, but its hard to tell from this vantage.
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- jbandela1 3y ago> It was through the Mongol Empire, Harl writes, that papermaking, block printing, and gunpowder moved from the East to the West, hastening the spread of knowledge and catalyzing Europe’s conquest of the seas. What is interesting is that this East to West movement of gunpowder is what did in the horse archers. Previously it was very hard to counter horse archers. Gunpowder based artillery and muskets were a perfect counter to the horse archer. Bullets and cannonballs can go faster than a horse, and it is fairly easy to train masses of soldiers to use them thus giving advantage to the centenary civilizations who had both the population and manufacturing ability to be able to exploit gunpowder weapons.
- nashashmi 3y agoThe whole article talks about the mongols, not "early nomadic empires". The whole article does not mention what made the mongols the "architects of modernity" or how are "scholars now argu[ing]" that mongols were architects. Yes, nomads did do lots of empire building. The arab empires were largely an offshot of nomadic upbringing and went to conquer. The mongols were largely an offshot of nomadic upbringing and went to conquer. The turks (aka ottomans) were largely an offshoot of nomadic upbringing and went to conquer. And I am pretty sure in europe, there is some trace of nomdic upbringing that gave rise to early empires, especially the scandinavian vandals and vikings and saxons. They didn't architect. They set the house structures for which empires needed to set the groundworks (conquering, pillaging, conforming). And the house structures are the preambles for modern constitutions and societies.
- mihaic 3y ago[flagged]
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