Or perhaps it was an opportunity to save face knowing it wouldn't make a difference.
...What do you mean cynical?
Cynical or not, I do not really understand what you are saying. What is he trying to save face about, and who is the audience for which he wants to preserve face?
Trying to appear progressive in the pages of history, I guess. I'm not really familiar with the historical context of the US constitution to be honest, it doesn't affect me
John A. MacDonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister and who was alleged to have a drinking problem, nicknamed the Canadian Senate, ‘House of Sober Second Thought,’ as the chamber was to review the legislation that the elected officials passed.
The more I learn, the more I think Jefferson was a real piece of work. So let me get this straight, he shacked up with his dead wife's sister when she was 16 and "Didn't think they could handle their freedom", even during his presidency. Gimmi a break. I'm not sure which I think less of now, him or 'Backstab the Cherokee' Jackson.
Looking at people in the context of their times is one of the biggest challenges of dealing with history. The idea that you could even run a society without slaves is only a few centuries old. France may have abolished it in the 14th century, but they still practiced it abroad. Let's face it, feudalism was just slavery with extra steps. The first time I tried to read Plato as a kid, I stopped when I got to the part where he said it was every free man's right to own slaves. I am absolutely not trying to justify slavery, it was a horrible institution. But, these people genuinely believed society was better for the institution and just didn't see the alternatives or didn't see them as being viable. With hindsight it's very easy to judge.
The Romans only encountered a single Germanic tribe that didn't practice slavery, and they thought it was so strange that they noted it. I wish I had a reference for this, I'm pretty sure it was in one of the lectures by Professor Kenneth Harl I have. The point is, slavery was pretty much universal until fairly recently.
While looking at people in the context of their times is a challenge I disagree about applying this to American black slavery in the way that you do. Serfdom was a terrible institution, but not to same degree as slavery. Also, the US was founded by English settlers at a time where serfdom had been abolished in England. There was a reason that it was not tolerated directly on English soils, as people did not like it.
And at the time of the US revolution, there had already been some vocal and published opposition to the institution of slavery. While Jefferson was not worse than most his contemporaries in this regard, he was worse than a sizable minority and as an educated man, he was definitely exposed to more progressive thoughts on the topic.
Notably Jefferson wanted to include a passage attacking slavery into the declaration of independence, which was struck out. I think he was philosophically opposed to slavery, but it was too convenient to him (both personally and politically) to actually do something about it... which is not a good thing to have to say about him.
First off, that was mainly in response to the statement Zaghoul that "Didn't think they could handle their freedom." I think Jefferson was completely wrong on that point, but it was a legitimate concern. If you have a bunch of people that have only known slavery their whole lives, and you just let them go, what's going to happen to them? A lot of people thought they'd either starve to death or band together and rise up into their own revolution and start a bloody war. In hindsight, it's easy for us to see that didn't happen with emancipation, but was a real concern at the time.
So you state that slavery was worse than feudalism. I'd say feudalism was just a form of slavery. Slavery meant different things to different people at different times. An example being, the Athenian's slaves actually had rights, and their owners did not have complete control over their life and death. It was actually illegal to kill your slaves, and if you beat them too severely, there were monetary penalties based off of how long they couldn't get out of bed. Dracon even had the death penalty for killing a slave, although he had the death penalty for every crime, so take that as you will. Many Athenian slaves even owned shops, and just paid a cut to their owner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece#Athenian_slaves The Romans did have control over life and death of their slaves, but were actually encouraged to release some them after years of service, since it gave the slaves a goal and reason to work hard. Slavery in the ancient world was also something that could happen to anyone, it was not racially based at all. You could become a slave because your city was captured, you were captured in battle or just because you fell into debt.
Even though Europe had technically abolished slavery and feudalism, during most of the colonial period they sure wanted to reap the benefits of slavery, they just didn't want to see it. Britain and France still participated in the slave trade, and practiced it extensively in their colonies. Places like Kingston, Santo Domingo (modern Haiti) and Port Royal just pulled in slaves and worked them to death purely so the Europeans could have cheap sugar. So they may have "abolished" it, but still practiced it, and wanted the benefits slavery provided. They just didn't want it in their backyard, hence why the Americas had so many slave owners.
I think most of the reason anything related to slavery got cut from the declaration of independence and other documents at that time, was they did not want to deal with the issue during a revolution. It would have split revolutionaries at a time when they were needed to fight England. Since there were sizable slave populations in the North at the time, the division would have been further than just a north/south split.
So you state that slavery was worse than feudalism. I'd say feudalism was just a form of slavery. Slavery meant different things to different people at different times. An example being, the Athenian's slaves actually had rights, and their owners did not have complete control over their life and death. It was actually illegal to kill your slaves, and if you beat them too severely, there were monetary penalties based off of how long they couldn't get out of bed. Dracon even had the death penalty for killing a slave, although he had the death penalty for every crime, so take that as you will. Many Athenian slaves even owned shops, and just paid a cut to their owner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece#Athenian_slaves The Romans did have control over life and death of their slaves, but were actually encouraged to release some them after years of service, since it gave the slaves a goal and reason to work hard. Slavery in the ancient world was also something that could happen to anyone, it was not racially based at all. You could become a slave because your city was captured, you were captured in battle or just because you fell into debt.
First off, this is why I specifically referred to US Black slavery in my post, which allowed for separation of families and did not grant any of the rights you mention to slaves.
"Could happen to anyone" no longer being true, is one of the reasons why US slavery was especially vile, even compared to other forms. Other reasons include that it was illegal to teach a slave to read and write. And killing a slave while punishing him was perfectly legal in the US, unlike your Drakonic code.
Secondly, even your claims about Roman slavery are incredibly romanticized.
Roman slavery was perhaps not so bad for the household slaves and teachers. But ten of thousands slaves perished in the mines. And believe me Romans were not encouraged, to release those slaves. Sometimes if the master was killed by one slave, every slave in the household was crucified. When the slaves rebelled more than 6000 of them were crucified along the Appian road.
Also debt slavery was at some point during the Republic abolished for Roman citizens, so no, it could not happen to anyone then either.
Even though Europe had technically abolished slavery and feudalism, during most of the colonial period they sure wanted to reap the benefits of slavery, they just didn't want to see it. Britain and France still participated in the slave trade, and practiced it extensively in their colonies. Places like Kingston, Santo Domingo (modern Haiti) and Port Royal just pulled in slaves and worked them to death purely so the Europeans could have cheap sugar. So they may have "abolished" it, but still practiced it, and wanted the benefits slavery provided. They just didn't want it in their backyard, hence why the Americas had so many slave owners.
Yes. But you talk as if Europe or Britain is an entity of it's own. Only relatively few reaped the benefits of slavery, and those were not the people who would have protested the introduction of slavery on European soil at that time.
So you state that slavery was worse than feudalism. I'd say feudalism was just a form of slavery. Slavery meant different things to different people at different times. An example being, the Athenian's slaves actually had rights, and their owners did not have complete control over their life and death. It was actually illegal to kill your slaves, and if you beat them too severely, there were monetary penalties based off of how long they couldn't get out of bed. Dracon even had the death penalty for killing a slave, although he had the death penalty for every crime, so take that as you will. Many Athenian slaves even owned shops, and just paid a cut to their owner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece#Athenian_slaves The Romans did have control over life and death of their slaves, but were actually encouraged to release some them after years of service, since it gave the slaves a goal and reason to work hard. Slavery in the ancient world was also something that could happen to anyone, it was not racially based at all. You could become a slave because your city was captured, you were captured in battle or just because you fell into debt.
First off, this is why I specifically referred to US Black slavery in my post, which allowed for separation of families and did not grant any of the rights you mention to slaves.
"Could happen to anyone" no longer being true, is one of the reasons why US slavery was especially vile, even compared to other forms. Other reasons include that it was illegal to teach a slave to read and write. And killing a slave while punishing him was perfectly legal in the US, unlike your Drakonic code.
Secondly, even your claims about Roman slavery are incredibly romanticized.
Roman slavery was perhaps not so bad for the household slaves and teachers. But ten of thousands slaves perished in the mines. And believe me Romans were not encouraged, to release those slaves. Sometimes if the master was killed by one slave, every slave in the household was crucified. When the slaves rebelled more than 6000 of them were crucified along the Appian road.
Also debt slavery was at some point during the Republic abolished for Roman citizens, so no, it could not happen to anyone then either.
Even though Europe had technically abolished slavery and feudalism, during most of the colonial period they sure wanted to reap the benefits of slavery, they just didn't want to see it. Britain and France still participated in the slave trade, and practiced it extensively in their colonies. Places like Kingston, Santo Domingo (modern Haiti) and Port Royal just pulled in slaves and worked them to death purely so the Europeans could have cheap sugar. So they may have "abolished" it, but still practiced it, and wanted the benefits slavery provided. They just didn't want it in their backyard, hence why the Americas had so many slave owners.
Yes. But you talk as if Europe or Britain is an entity of it's own. Only relatively few reaped the benefits of slavery, and those were not the people who would have protested the introduction of slavery on European soil at that time.
First off, Greek and Roman slavery did allow the splitting up of families. Nothing new there. Second of all, those were just examples of how slavery functioned differently in a couple of different societies, and is why I view feudalism as just slavery with extra steps. Like I said Roman slavery in particular did allow for life and death control over their slaves. Spartan slavery was a whole other mess, and they'd regularly cull the Helot population if it got out of control. You're 100% right about tons of slaves dying in the mines for Rome, particularly the lead mines. I don't think I romanticized slavery at all, it was a horrible institution, and wrong in any form, I'm just laying out points of how it differed between cultures. I'll take things one further, in Rome and Greece testimony from a slave was only legit in the eyes of the law, if the slave had been tortured to get the information, because it was believed slaves would always lie. As for debt slavery eventually being abolished in the Roman republic, ya, they did eventually (they had it for awhile), but for a lot of Rome's history citizenship was fairly limited, and it's only with the Empire that you actually get more people from the provinces granted citizenship. After Solon, the practice of debt slavery fell off in Athens, too.
Quite a lot of populace of Europe benefited from slavery during the colonial period, you had cheap sugar, tobacco, cotton, hemp and other materials that most people would have used. In this era the pewter dishes people ate off of used raw materials that came from slavery, they wore clothes whose materials came from slavery and they ate food farmed from slavery. Not all of it came from slave labor, but you couldn't get away from it. It's a little like how today you can't get away from Foxconn and their horrible labor practices. Even if you don't buy a phone or computer that was manufactured by them, they probably made the USB ports and other connectors soldered onto it. So ya, I'm saying we're complicit in child labor and over working people in horrible conditions, just like people living in colonial Europe were complicit in slave labor.
So you state that slavery was worse than feudalism. I'd say feudalism was just a form of slavery. Slavery meant different things to different people at different times. An example being, the Athenian's slaves actually had rights, and their owners did not have complete control over their life and death. It was actually illegal to kill your slaves, and if you beat them too severely, there were monetary penalties based off of how long they couldn't get out of bed. Dracon even had the death penalty for killing a slave, although he had the death penalty for every crime, so take that as you will. Many Athenian slaves even owned shops, and just paid a cut to their owner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece#Athenian_slaves The Romans did have control over life and death of their slaves, but were actually encouraged to release some them after years of service, since it gave the slaves a goal and reason to work hard. Slavery in the ancient world was also something that could happen to anyone, it was not racially based at all. You could become a slave because your city was captured, you were captured in battle or just because you fell into debt.
First off, this is why I specifically referred to US Black slavery in my post, which allowed for separation of families and did not grant any of the rights you mention to slaves.
"Could happen to anyone" no longer being true, is one of the reasons why US slavery was especially vile, even compared to other forms. Other reasons include that it was illegal to teach a slave to read and write. And killing a slave while punishing him was perfectly legal in the US, unlike your Drakonic code.
Secondly, even your claims about Roman slavery are incredibly romanticized.
Roman slavery was perhaps not so bad for the household slaves and teachers. But ten of thousands slaves perished in the mines. And believe me Romans were not encouraged, to release those slaves. Sometimes if the master was killed by one slave, every slave in the household was crucified. When the slaves rebelled more than 6000 of them were crucified along the Appian road.
Also debt slavery was at some point during the Republic abolished for Roman citizens, so no, it could not happen to anyone then either.
Even though Europe had technically abolished slavery and feudalism, during most of the colonial period they sure wanted to reap the benefits of slavery, they just didn't want to see it. Britain and France still participated in the slave trade, and practiced it extensively in their colonies. Places like Kingston, Santo Domingo (modern Haiti) and Port Royal just pulled in slaves and worked them to death purely so the Europeans could have cheap sugar. So they may have "abolished" it, but still practiced it, and wanted the benefits slavery provided. They just didn't want it in their backyard, hence why the Americas had so many slave owners.
Yes. But you talk as if Europe or Britain is an entity of it's own. Only relatively few reaped the benefits of slavery, and those were not the people who would have protested the introduction of slavery on European soil at that time.
First off, Greek and Roman slavery did allow the splitting up of families. Nothing new there. Second of all, those were just examples of how slavery functioned differently in a couple of different societies, and is why I view feudalism as just slavery with extra steps. Like I said Roman slavery in particular did allow for life and death control over their slaves. Spartan slavery was a whole other mess, and they'd regularly cull the Helot population if it got out of control. You're 100% right about tons of slaves dying in the mines for Rome, particularly the lead mines. I don't think I romanticized slavery at all, it was a horrible institution, and wrong in any form, I'm just laying out points of how it differed between cultures. I'll take things one further, in Rome and Greece testimony from a slave was only legit in the eyes of the law, if the slave had been tortured to get the information, because it was believed slaves would always lie. As for debt slavery eventually being abolished in the Roman republic, ya, they did eventually (they had it for awhile), but for a lot of Rome's history citizenship was fairly limited, and it's only with the Empire that you actually get more people from the provinces granted citizenship. After Solon, the practice of debt slavery fell off in Athens, too.
Quite a lot of populace of Europe benefited from slavery during the colonial period, you had cheap sugar, tobacco, cotton, hemp and other materials that most people would have used. In this era the pewter dishes people ate off of used raw materials that came from slavery, they wore clothes whose materials came from slavery and they ate food farmed from slavery. Not all of it came from slave labor, but you couldn't get away from it. It's a little like how today you can't get away from Foxconn and their horrible labor practices. Even if you don't buy a phone or computer that was manufactured by them, they probably made the USB ports and other connectors soldered onto it. So ya, I'm saying we're complicit in child labor and over working people in horrible conditions, just like people living in colonial Europe were complicit in slave labor.
The weird thing about this (which I don't disagree with even though I'm fairly conservative) is that it is part of progress. Without Western progress (especially if we'd completely ignored 'lesser' societies) those societies would never had advanced to the point where they are now. We could have ignored them and they'd still be dying of curable diseases and tribal warfare. I guess selective progress would have benefited them, but most people want some kind of compensation for helping somebody else. I know that's horribly selfish but the alternative is Communism which has pretty much been proven to be a false panacea.
The weird thing about this (which I don't disagree with even though I'm fairly conservative) is that it is part of progress. Without Western progress (especially if we'd completely ignored 'lesser' societies) those societies would never had advanced to the point where they are now. We could have ignored them and they'd still be dying of curable diseases and tribal warfare. I guess selective progress would have benefited them, but most people want some kind of compensation for helping somebody else. I know that's horribly selfish but the alternative is Communism which has pretty much been proven to be a false panacea.
I've got to disagree on it being specifically western progress. Advances have been spread and inherited from a huge amount of cultures. The Greeks and Romans were inheritors to science and culture of Persia, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Western Europe got reintroduced to a lot of it when Venice started trading with the Byzantines for books, and troves of information were taken from the Caliphate of Cordoba during the Requonqista. Along with that, plenty of Arabic texts that were completely new to Europeans, and is where we get words like Algebra and the names of a lot of stars like Betelgeuse. The Mongols brought a huge amount of technology and ideas out of China to the West. Until the 19th Century, most of the GDP in the world came out of China and India, and we very well could get there again.
History's a pendulum, that swings back and forth, and asides from some very isolated groups, very few cultures don't develop in a vacuum. Sure, the last couple of centuries the West has dominated in scientific advancement, but now we see not only other nations catching up, but contributing and adding new ideas. Just like how Europe played catch up during the Early Modern period, and started to contribute new advancements after they were introduced to new manufacturing techniques and mathematics.
The weird thing about this (which I don't disagree with even though I'm fairly conservative) is that it is part of progress. Without Western progress (especially if we'd completely ignored 'lesser' societies) those societies would never had advanced to the point where they are now. We could have ignored them and they'd still be dying of curable diseases and tribal warfare. I guess selective progress would have benefited them, but most people want some kind of compensation for helping somebody else. I know that's horribly selfish but the alternative is Communism which has pretty much been proven to be a false panacea.
I've got to disagree on it being specifically western progress. Advances have been spread and inherited from a huge amount of cultures. The Greeks and Romans were inheritors to science and culture of Persia, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Western Europe got reintroduced to a lot of it when Venice started trading with the Byzantines for books, and troves of information were taken from the Caliphate of Cordoba during the Requonqista. Along with that, plenty of Arabic texts that were completely new to Europeans, and is where we get words like Algebra and the names of a lot of stars like Betelgeuse. The Mongols brought a huge amount of technology and ideas out of China to the West. Until the 19th Century, most of the GDP in the world came out of China and India, and we very well could get there again.
History's a pendulum, that swings back and forth, and asides from some very isolated groups, very few cultures don't develop in a vacuum. Sure, the last couple of centuries the West has dominated in scientific advancement, but now we see not only other nations catching up, but contributing and adding new ideas. Just like how Europe played catch up during the Early Modern period, and started to contribute new advancements after they were introduced to new manufacturing techniques and mathematics.
I agree but for better or worse the West developed the technology of war far better than all competitors. History has pretty much played out to the present because of that. The results haven't been all bad, but it hasn't been great for everybody to be sure...
The weird thing about this (which I don't disagree with even though I'm fairly conservative) is that it is part of progress. Without Western progress (especially if we'd completely ignored 'lesser' societies) those societies would never had advanced to the point where they are now. We could have ignored them and they'd still be dying of curable diseases and tribal warfare. I guess selective progress would have benefited them, but most people want some kind of compensation for helping somebody else. I know that's horribly selfish but the alternative is Communism which has pretty much been proven to be a false panacea.
That's a very Western perspective on things. Given how exposed I am to that perspective it's hard to judge how much truth there is in that, but I suspect not very much. While some individual societies get stuck in a rut, there's always the possibility of progress from within as well as being imposed from without.
A couple of thoughts on this - off the cuff, so excuse me if I ramble slightly: - the Incas in South America were an example of a civilization that was well ahead of the equivalent Western ones in some areas, e.g. farming. They were also unusual in the way that they expanded as an Empire. That wasn't by force, but almost entirely by economic and social power - showing the benefits to neighbors of things like improved transport, irrigation, trade and a common language. If they had been left to themselves who knows how they would have developed ... - there's a pretty common myth in Western societies that the Greeks invented things, the Romans developed them and spread them to poor, unwashed barbarians. A fun example of that thinking is the "what did the Romans ever do for us" sequence in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I suspect Terry Jones regretted being so unfair in that film and he later published "Terry Jones' Barbarians: An Alternative Roman History" to try and give a more balanced account. - on the theme of getting stuck in a rut, Western societies tend to see that as happening to them after the fall of Rome (which is why the Middle Ages are known as the Dark Ages). Another way of looking at that is that it was Rome which was holding back progress and its fall that allowed the seeds for the Renaissance to grow - leading to an information revolution and later an industrial one (plenty of social ones as well of course ).
The Dark Ages were a period where I suspect most people living in them would have felt society was stultified, but processes of development and change were always going on and we can see looking back how those have led to our current position. I'm pretty sure that similar processes would have worked in other 'barbarian' societies if they had been left alone long enough to benefit from them (in fact China is arguably a modern model of this type of effect).
The weird thing about this (which I don't disagree with even though I'm fairly conservative) is that it is part of progress. Without Western progress (especially if we'd completely ignored 'lesser' societies) those societies would never had advanced to the point where they are now. We could have ignored them and they'd still be dying of curable diseases and tribal warfare. I guess selective progress would have benefited them, but most people want some kind of compensation for helping somebody else. I know that's horribly selfish but the alternative is Communism which has pretty much been proven to be a false panacea.
That's a very Western perspective on things. Given how exposed I am to that perspective it's hard to judge how much truth there is in that, but I suspect not very much. While some individual societies get stuck in a rut, there's always the possibility of progress from within as well as being imposed from without.
A couple of thoughts on this - off the cuff, so excuse me if I ramble slightly: - the Incas in South America were an example of a civilization that was well ahead of the equivalent Western ones in some areas, e.g. farming. They were also unusual in the way that they expanded as an Empire. That wasn't by force, but almost entirely by economic and social power - showing the benefits to neighbors of things like improved transport, irrigation, trade and a common language. If they had been left to themselves who knows how they would have developed ... - there's a pretty common myth in Western societies that the Greeks invented things, the Romans developed them and spread them to poor, unwashed barbarians. A fun example of that thinking is the "what did the Romans ever do for us" sequence in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I suspect Terry Jones regretted being so unfair in that film and he later published "Terry Jones' Barbarians: An Alternative Roman History" to try and give a more balanced account. - on the theme of getting stuck in a rut, Western societies tend to see that as happening to them after the fall of Rome (which is why the Middle Ages are known as the Dark Ages). Another way of looking at that is that it was Rome which was holding back progress and its fall that allowed the seeds for the Renaissance to grow - leading to an information revolution and later an industrial one (plenty of social ones as well of course ).
The Dark Ages were a period where I suspect most people living in them would have felt society was stultified, but processes of development and change were always going on and we can see looking back how those have led to our current position. I'm pretty sure that similar processes would have worked in other 'barbarian' societies if they had been left alone long enough to benefit from them (in fact China is arguably a modern model of this type of effect).
I really enjoy your point of view @Grond0. You're clearly an officianato of history. The main reason that the West has dominated historically is that we developed warfare above all else. Whether that is good or bad is subjective and even now the results can't truly be evaluated. The trouble with history is that you can't be sure what would have happened if things had developed differently.
It's not obvious to me that the West has been much more warlike than the rest of the planet. You see organized state or tribal violence everywhere from the Polynesian islands to premodern China's many warring factions to nomadic tribes in the Americas. The only reason the West seems more warlike is because for the past couple hundred years, European states have tended to be the victors of wars--not because they invested more in military development as a percentage of GDP, but because those nations were so strong in general. Let's not make the mistake of associating economic strength and technological development with militarism.
The nations that contribute most to technological progress have shifted over time. The Arab world notably developed algebra and chemistry. We just tend to associate the West with technological development because that's been the pattern for the past 200 years or so.
Generally, I'm tempted to name institutions and organization as the primary cause of national power. There have been plenty of hopelessly violent nations like the Mongols who nevertheless failed to achieve lasting power despite conquering vast swathes of land, and plenty of resource-rich nations like China and Myanmar which stagnated for centuries despite having natural resources far superior to their neighbors. But there has never been a successful empire which did not have an efficient bureaucracy, effective institutions, and a relatively low amount of corruption at multiple levels of government.
Japan is the classic example of a resource-poor nation that achieved massive wealth despite being at peace for over 70 years. Communism is the classic example of an inefficient system that impoverished nations that were otherwise rich.
Compare civilization to a farm. A farm can survive poor soil, droughts, and pests much longer than it can survive an incompetent farmer.
I agree but for better or worse the West developed the technology of war far better than all competitors. History has pretty much played out to the present because of that. The results haven't been all bad, but it hasn't been great for everybody to be sure...
Part of the point is that it's just for this little chunk of history that the West has had superiority in technology and warfare. You could say the Mongols were the masters of warfare of the 13th and 14th centuries. Hell, in some ways you could say they were more successful, they built a larger land empire than any other in history. Sure, Western nations have an edge today, but India, China and Pakistan have all had nukes for a long time now and have been catching up in other areas.
- the Incas in South America were an example of a civilization that was well ahead of the equivalent Western ones in some areas, e.g. farming. They were also unusual in the way that they expanded as an Empire. That wasn't by force, but almost entirely by economic and social power - showing the benefits to neighbors of things like improved transport, irrigation, trade and a common language. If they had been left to themselves who knows how they would have developed ... - there's a pretty common myth in Western societies that the Greeks invented things, the Romans developed them and spread them to poor, unwashed barbarians. A fun example of that thinking is the "what did the Romans ever do for us" sequence in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I suspect Terry Jones regretted being so unfair in that film and he later published "Terry Jones' Barbarians: An Alternative Roman History" to try and give a more balanced account.
The Inca's used a mix of conquest and peaceful assimilation. It wasn't all happy and agreeable. You're absolutely right they were totally ahead in some farming techniques that are only being recognized today. They grew thousands of varieties of potatoes that could grow in a differing range of environments. This way if a blight or pest wiped out some crops, others would survive. The Irish learned this the hard way during the potato famine, since they only grew a single breed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_Empire
I watched a set of lectures called The Lost Worlds of South America recently. One of the cool things the professor shared was that Harvard has put a database of Kiphu on their site. khipukamayuq.fas.harvard.edu/KGMiscellaneous.html What I find really fascinating is they developed a system of writing and record keeping using strings and knots.
I also love those Terry Jones series, you can really tell he was the one in the group that did all the historical research for Monty Python. He also had a good ones on how different types of people lived in the Middle Ages, Ancient Inventions and The Crusades, as well.
Japan is the classic example of a resource-poor nation that achieved massive wealth despite being at peace for over 70 years. Communism is the classic example of an inefficient system that impoverished nations that were otherwise rich.
To a European, Switzerland is probably the classic example. They are very resource-poor, but were very good in the late 19th and early 20th centuries at using intellectual property theft (though in those days it was less obviously theft) to get their industrial revolution going. Later on of course they mastered the art of remaining at peace while benefiting from other people's wars.
Japan is the classic example of a resource-poor nation that achieved massive wealth despite being at peace for over 70 years. Communism is the classic example of an inefficient system that impoverished nations that were otherwise rich.
To a European, Switzerland is probably the classic example. They are very resource-poor, but were very good in the late 19th and early 20th centuries at using intellectual property theft (though in those days it was less obviously theft) to get their industrial revolution going. Later on of course they mastered the art of remaining at peace while benefiting from other people's wars.
Professor Kenneth Harl likes to say that Spain had to conquer the new world, because the Romans had depleted Iberia of resources.
The Inca's used a mix of conquest and peaceful assimilation. It wasn't all happy and agreeable.
I agree I was stretching things there - I did say it was an off the cuff ramble . What I would have said if I had developed the argument more was that the establishment of the empire was primarily due to peaceful means. As with so many other things, the more power they had, the more they wanted to project it and in the latter stages of the empire growth was primarily through force. That though led them into great problems as it meant that larger slices of their territory were restive and not fully signed up to the same cultural and economic imperatives as the core areas.
That situation was something the Spaniards were able to take advantage of, but it's likely the empire would have fragmented pretty soon in any case even without their intervention. My underlying point though was that that would not have been the end of the story. The possibility and advantages of a peaceful empire had already been seen and I suspect that without the Spanish intervention the cultural and technological advances the Incas had made would not have been lost, but re-emerged in another form.
Speaking of violent civilizations and the New world, here's a morbid historical fact. The Aztecs and other mesoamerican civilizations would sometimes display the heads of sacrificial victims on tzompantlis, skull racks. The great skull rack in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan apparently had tens of thousands of skulls on display when the Spaniards tried to count them.
And the story usually seems to be that the Spaniards were able to crush the Aztec empire because of their more advanced technology. While guns, metal and horses are a huge advantage, it's good to remember that they managed to get tons of indigenous allies, including the Tlaxcalans, to fight against the Aztecs. Frequently going to war to get more skulls for your skull rack won't make you popular with the neighbors after all. Judging by the estimations on Wikipedia, there must have been almost a hundred native allies for every spaniard that participated in the siege of Tenochtitlan.
Yeah, those last days of Tenochtitlan must have been nightmarish beyond comprehension, with hundreds of thousands of dead from smallpox, starvation and violence in just a few months.
Speaking of nightmares, there's the Aztec death whistle. I haven't really found a good source about these things or how/if they were used through history. Just several clips on youtube with replica instruments. Watch the volume. Seriously.
Speaking of violent civilizations and the New world, here's a morbid historical fact. The Aztecs and other mesoamerican civilizations would sometimes display the heads of sacrificial victims on tzompantlis, skull racks. The great skull rack in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan apparently had tens of thousands of skulls on display when the Spaniards tried to count them.
(...)
Frequently going to war to get more skulls for your skull rack won't make you popular with the neighbors after all.
There are SO many things I want to say in this amazing thread in general, but I haven't time to spare.
-There appears to have been only Six Wonders of the World -the Hanging Gardens of Babylon likely never existed.
-One of Fletcher Christian's fellow mutineers from the HMS Bounty outlived all of his companions, founded a community on the island of Pitcairn (which still exists to this day), and eventually received a royal pardon after being discovered still living on the island in his old age.
-The classic sci-fi film "Forbidden Planet" was based largely on the Shakespearean play "The Tempest."
-Speaking of Shakespeare, did you know that King Macbeth of Scotland actually existed? (albeit many of the details in the play are either sensationalized or outright fabricated)
-Seriously, there's a country in Europe called "Luxembourg."
-There appears to have been only Six Wonders of the World -the Hanging Gardens of Babylon likely never existed.
-Seriously, there's a country in Europe called "Luxembourg."
I thought the most accepted theory was that the hanging gardens existed, just not in the city we now know as Babylon - details given here.
As for Luxembourg I think I must be missing something. It's a well known (if tiny - population about 600k) country in Europe, but I can imagine that's not the case elsewhere. Is there something about the name though that makes it seem intrinsically odd or unlikely?
Malta, Liechenstein, San Marino and Monaco are all even smaller European countries. The Vatican is smaller still, but I think that's technically defined as a city state rather than a country.
There are six sovereign European countries* on the mainland that, taken together, could very nearly fit into Rhode Island, the smallest state in the United States.
*Andorra, San Marino, Vatican City, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Monaco = 3,277.49 square kilometers. Rhode Island is 3,144 square kilometers. Malta, a sovereign state left off the list above for no other reason than that it is an island and not on the mainland, would add another 360 km2
Here's a fun quiz where you write down the names of all the countries in the world in 15 minutes. According to the results, Grenada and the union of Comoros are the states that people most often miss in this quiz. Now I've given you a head start.
There are 196 sovereign states in that quiz. Back in 1900 there were less than 80 sovereign states in the world. How things change, huh.
I quit after 10 minutes and only got 92, slightly below average. The weird thing is that I forgot countries that are familiar to me or which I've thought about or read about very recently:
Jamaica, Ukraine, Belgium, Singapore, Bhutan, Uganda, Kenya, Venezuela, and the Marshall Islands
I was typing constantly for the first 5 minutes before abruptly hitting a wall.
You may have seen older texts that refer to China as Cathay. This actually comes from the Mongol and Turkish name for China.
The Khitan were a people that lived to the North of China, and had conquered Northern China, forcing the Song dynasty to move their capitol to Southern China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khitan_people
Finally you have the Ghengis Khan and the Mongols who conquered Northern China from the Jurchin. So the Mongols were third in line to conquer the region. The name Cathay comes from Khitai, these people that had conquered before the Mongols, and they continued to call it that after conquering it. It wouldn't be until Kublai Khan, that they'd finally finish off the Song dynasty and capture the South. The Russians and other Europeans who came to the Mongol empire picked up on the name Khitai in a corrupted form, and that's how we get Cathay.
So some scientists are starting to suggest that the Amazon river basin, might actually be man made. time.com/5218270/amazonian-civilization-discovered-mato-grosso/ https://theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its-now-clear-that-ancient-humans-helped-enrich-the-amazon/518439/ It's becoming apparent that the soil in the region is not natural, and was purposely fertilized. So we're not seeing a pristine jungle, but a garden that hasn't been maintained in hundreds of years. Likely the bulk of the population died from small pox and other old world diseases, so by the time Europeans actually got to the area, it had been depopulated. Don't get me wrong, there was likely jungle in the area before people got there, but the extra fertilizer has really helped things grow.
The methods they used to make the fertilizer must've been amazing. I wonder if it had side affects, like our modern phosphorous based fertilizers. If you don't know, phosphorous based fertilizers are the main cause of ocean acidification. They get into the water systems and get washed out to sea where they just become food for bacteria that wreak havoc on ecosystems when they get out of control and screw up the ph balance of the water or in other cases de-oxygenate it.. If it doesn't cause side affects like that, it could be a fantastic way to improve our agriculture.
Did you guys know that the Minoans had running water over a 1000 years before the Romans? They were a civilization that lived on the islands of the Aegean around 2600-1100BCE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization#Plumbing
We're still not exactly sure why their civilization collapsed. There was a massive eruption at Santorini that would have taken out one of the major islands, but the others should have been intact. We do know that their writing system, linear A, got replaced by linear B around their decline, so some historians think that the Mycenaeans may have conquered them. Yup these are the same Mycenaeans as from the Homer's Iliad, as in Menaleaus and Agamemnon. After the Mycenaean civilization collapsed, the Greeks actually forgot all their writing during the Greek Dark ages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages So when Greek civilization recovered, they needed writing again, but nobody remembered how to use the old writing system. So they just adapted the Phoenician alphabet to Greek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Spread_of_the_alphabet_and_its_social_effects This influenced the Latin alphabet, and eventually English and other European writing systems. So our alphabet is descended from an old Semetic alphabet.
We can actually translate Linear B, since the language was ancient Greek. But we have no idea what language Linear A depicts, but we're pretty sure it's not Greak, and whether or not the Minoans were even related to the Greeks. They may have been a completely unrelated people.
This next one broke my heart when I learned it, but Greek buildings and statues were painted in gaudy colors, particularly bright yellow and blue. I always loved the austere beauty of their marble buildings and statues, but found out they were completely blinged up. https://smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors-17888/
Comments
Their biggest fear was owners demanding compensation for the property that they were losing.
So you state that slavery was worse than feudalism. I'd say feudalism was just a form of slavery. Slavery meant different things to different people at different times. An example being, the Athenian's slaves actually had rights, and their owners did not have complete control over their life and death. It was actually illegal to kill your slaves, and if you beat them too severely, there were monetary penalties based off of how long they couldn't get out of bed. Dracon even had the death penalty for killing a slave, although he had the death penalty for every crime, so take that as you will. Many Athenian slaves even owned shops, and just paid a cut to their owner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece#Athenian_slaves The Romans did have control over life and death of their slaves, but were actually encouraged to release some them after years of service, since it gave the slaves a goal and reason to work hard. Slavery in the ancient world was also something that could happen to anyone, it was not racially based at all. You could become a slave because your city was captured, you were captured in battle or just because you fell into debt.
Even though Europe had technically abolished slavery and feudalism, during most of the colonial period they sure wanted to reap the benefits of slavery, they just didn't want to see it. Britain and France still participated in the slave trade, and practiced it extensively in their colonies. Places like Kingston, Santo Domingo (modern Haiti) and Port Royal just pulled in slaves and worked them to death purely so the Europeans could have cheap sugar. So they may have "abolished" it, but still practiced it, and wanted the benefits slavery provided. They just didn't want it in their backyard, hence why the Americas had so many slave owners.
I think most of the reason anything related to slavery got cut from the declaration of independence and other documents at that time, was they did not want to deal with the issue during a revolution. It would have split revolutionaries at a time when they were needed to fight England. Since there were sizable slave populations in the North at the time, the division would have been further than just a north/south split.
"Could happen to anyone" no longer being true, is one of the reasons why US slavery was especially vile, even compared to other forms. Other reasons include that it was illegal to teach a slave to read and write. And killing a slave while punishing him was perfectly legal in the US, unlike your Drakonic code.
Secondly, even your claims about Roman slavery are incredibly romanticized.
Roman slavery was perhaps not so bad for the household slaves and teachers. But ten of thousands slaves perished in the mines. And believe me Romans were not encouraged, to release those slaves. Sometimes if the master was killed by one slave, every slave in the household was crucified. When the slaves rebelled more than 6000 of them were crucified along the Appian road.
Also debt slavery was at some point during the Republic abolished for Roman citizens, so no, it could not happen to anyone then either. Yes. But you talk as if Europe or Britain is an entity of it's own. Only relatively few reaped the benefits of slavery, and those were not the people who would have protested the introduction of slavery on European soil at that time.
Quite a lot of populace of Europe benefited from slavery during the colonial period, you had cheap sugar, tobacco, cotton, hemp and other materials that most people would have used. In this era the pewter dishes people ate off of used raw materials that came from slavery, they wore clothes whose materials came from slavery and they ate food farmed from slavery. Not all of it came from slave labor, but you couldn't get away from it. It's a little like how today you can't get away from Foxconn and their horrible labor practices. Even if you don't buy a phone or computer that was manufactured by them, they probably made the USB ports and other connectors soldered onto it. So ya, I'm saying we're complicit in child labor and over working people in horrible conditions, just like people living in colonial Europe were complicit in slave labor.
History's a pendulum, that swings back and forth, and asides from some very isolated groups, very few cultures don't develop in a vacuum. Sure, the last couple of centuries the West has dominated in scientific advancement, but now we see not only other nations catching up, but contributing and adding new ideas. Just like how Europe played catch up during the Early Modern period, and started to contribute new advancements after they were introduced to new manufacturing techniques and mathematics.
A couple of thoughts on this - off the cuff, so excuse me if I ramble slightly:
- the Incas in South America were an example of a civilization that was well ahead of the equivalent Western ones in some areas, e.g. farming. They were also unusual in the way that they expanded as an Empire. That wasn't by force, but almost entirely by economic and social power - showing the benefits to neighbors of things like improved transport, irrigation, trade and a common language. If they had been left to themselves who knows how they would have developed ...
- there's a pretty common myth in Western societies that the Greeks invented things, the Romans developed them and spread them to poor, unwashed barbarians. A fun example of that thinking is the "what did the Romans ever do for us" sequence in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I suspect Terry Jones regretted being so unfair in that film and he later published "Terry Jones' Barbarians: An Alternative Roman History" to try and give a more balanced account.
- on the theme of getting stuck in a rut, Western societies tend to see that as happening to them after the fall of Rome (which is why the Middle Ages are known as the Dark Ages). Another way of looking at that is that it was Rome which was holding back progress and its fall that allowed the seeds for the Renaissance to grow - leading to an information revolution and later an industrial one (plenty of social ones as well of course
The Dark Ages were a period where I suspect most people living in them would have felt society was stultified, but processes of development and change were always going on and we can see looking back how those have led to our current position. I'm pretty sure that similar processes would have worked in other 'barbarian' societies if they had been left alone long enough to benefit from them (in fact China is arguably a modern model of this type of effect).
The nations that contribute most to technological progress have shifted over time. The Arab world notably developed algebra and chemistry. We just tend to associate the West with technological development because that's been the pattern for the past 200 years or so.
Generally, I'm tempted to name institutions and organization as the primary cause of national power. There have been plenty of hopelessly violent nations like the Mongols who nevertheless failed to achieve lasting power despite conquering vast swathes of land, and plenty of resource-rich nations like China and Myanmar which stagnated for centuries despite having natural resources far superior to their neighbors. But there has never been a successful empire which did not have an efficient bureaucracy, effective institutions, and a relatively low amount of corruption at multiple levels of government.
Japan is the classic example of a resource-poor nation that achieved massive wealth despite being at peace for over 70 years. Communism is the classic example of an inefficient system that impoverished nations that were otherwise rich.
Compare civilization to a farm. A farm can survive poor soil, droughts, and pests much longer than it can survive an incompetent farmer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_Empire
I watched a set of lectures called The Lost Worlds of South America recently. One of the cool things the professor shared was that Harvard has put a database of Kiphu on their site.
khipukamayuq.fas.harvard.edu/KGMiscellaneous.html
What I find really fascinating is they developed a system of writing and record keeping using strings and knots.
I also love those Terry Jones series, you can really tell he was the one in the group that did all the historical research for Monty Python. He also had a good ones on how different types of people lived in the Middle Ages, Ancient Inventions and The Crusades, as well.
That situation was something the Spaniards were able to take advantage of, but it's likely the empire would have fragmented pretty soon in any case even without their intervention. My underlying point though was that that would not have been the end of the story. The possibility and advantages of a peaceful empire had already been seen and I suspect that without the Spanish intervention the cultural and technological advances the Incas had made would not have been lost, but re-emerged in another form.
And the story usually seems to be that the Spaniards were able to crush the Aztec empire because of their more advanced technology. While guns, metal and horses are a huge advantage, it's good to remember that they managed to get tons of indigenous allies, including the Tlaxcalans, to fight against the Aztecs. Frequently going to war to get more skulls for your skull rack won't make you popular with the neighbors after all. Judging by the estimations on Wikipedia, there must have been almost a hundred native allies for every spaniard that participated in the siege of Tenochtitlan.
Speaking of nightmares, there's the Aztec death whistle. I haven't really found a good source about these things or how/if they were used through history. Just several clips on youtube with replica instruments. Watch the volume. Seriously.
There are SO many things I want to say in this amazing thread in general, but I haven't time to spare.
A few lesser known facts:
-There's a country in Europe called "Luxembourg."
-There appears to have been only Six Wonders of the World -the Hanging Gardens of Babylon likely never existed.
-One of Fletcher Christian's fellow mutineers from the HMS Bounty outlived all of his companions, founded a community on the island of Pitcairn (which still exists to this day), and eventually received a royal pardon after being discovered still living on the island in his old age.
-The classic sci-fi film "Forbidden Planet" was based largely on the Shakespearean play "The Tempest."
-Speaking of Shakespeare, did you know that King Macbeth of Scotland actually existed? (albeit many of the details in the play are either sensationalized or outright fabricated)
-Seriously, there's a country in Europe called "Luxembourg."
As for Luxembourg I think I must be missing something. It's a well known (if tiny - population about 600k) country in Europe, but I can imagine that's not the case elsewhere. Is there something about the name though that makes it seem intrinsically odd or unlikely?
*Andorra, San Marino, Vatican City, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Monaco = 3,277.49 square kilometers. Rhode Island is 3,144 square kilometers. Malta, a sovereign state left off the list above for no other reason than that it is an island and not on the mainland, would add another 360 km2
There are 196 sovereign states in that quiz. Back in 1900 there were less than 80 sovereign states in the world. How things change, huh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_1900
Jamaica, Ukraine, Belgium, Singapore, Bhutan, Uganda, Kenya, Venezuela, and the Marshall Islands
I was typing constantly for the first 5 minutes before abruptly hitting a wall.
The Khitan were a people that lived to the North of China, and had conquered Northern China, forcing the Song dynasty to move their capitol to Southern China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khitan_people
Then, the Jurchen from Manchuria invaded and took over Northern China from the Khitan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurchen_people
Finally you have the Ghengis Khan and the Mongols who conquered Northern China from the Jurchin. So the Mongols were third in line to conquer the region. The name Cathay comes from Khitai, these people that had conquered before the Mongols, and they continued to call it that after conquering it.
It wouldn't be until Kublai Khan, that they'd finally finish off the Song dynasty and capture the South. The Russians and other Europeans who came to the Mongol empire picked up on the name Khitai in a corrupted form, and that's how we get Cathay.
Ok kazistain... kazicistan... goddamn it...
time.com/5218270/amazonian-civilization-discovered-mato-grosso/
https://theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its-now-clear-that-ancient-humans-helped-enrich-the-amazon/518439/
It's becoming apparent that the soil in the region is not natural, and was purposely fertilized. So we're not seeing a pristine jungle, but a garden that hasn't been maintained in hundreds of years. Likely the bulk of the population died from small pox and other old world diseases, so by the time Europeans actually got to the area, it had been depopulated. Don't get me wrong, there was likely jungle in the area before people got there, but the extra fertilizer has really helped things grow.
The methods they used to make the fertilizer must've been amazing. I wonder if it had side affects, like our modern phosphorous based fertilizers. If you don't know, phosphorous based fertilizers are the main cause of ocean acidification. They get into the water systems and get washed out to sea where they just become food for bacteria that wreak havoc on ecosystems when they get out of control and screw up the ph balance of the water or in other cases de-oxygenate it.. If it doesn't cause side affects like that, it could be a fantastic way to improve our agriculture.
Did you guys know that the Minoans had running water over a 1000 years before the Romans? They were a civilization that lived on the islands of the Aegean around 2600-1100BCE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization#Plumbing
We're still not exactly sure why their civilization collapsed. There was a massive eruption at Santorini that would have taken out one of the major islands, but the others should have been intact. We do know that their writing system, linear A, got replaced by linear B around their decline, so some historians think that the Mycenaeans may have conquered them. Yup these are the same Mycenaeans as from the Homer's Iliad, as in Menaleaus and Agamemnon. After the Mycenaean civilization collapsed, the Greeks actually forgot all their writing during the Greek Dark ages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages
So when Greek civilization recovered, they needed writing again, but nobody remembered how to use the old writing system. So they just adapted the Phoenician alphabet to Greek
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Spread_of_the_alphabet_and_its_social_effects
This influenced the Latin alphabet, and eventually English and other European writing systems. So our alphabet is descended from an old Semetic alphabet.
We can actually translate Linear B, since the language was ancient Greek. But we have no idea what language Linear A depicts, but we're pretty sure it's not Greak, and whether or not the Minoans were even related to the Greeks. They may have been a completely unrelated people.
This next one broke my heart when I learned it, but Greek buildings and statues were painted in gaudy colors, particularly bright yellow and blue. I always loved the austere beauty of their marble buildings and statues, but found out they were completely blinged up.
https://smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors-17888/