Hey folks, Fireside this week! I have ended up a bit behind in my work and as always it is the blog that much suffer first. In this case, we have in two weeks twice managed to have snow which only increased my workload (it didn’t cancel any of my classes, but did require me to offer a bunch of makeup quizzes and complicate daycare solutions). So we’re doing a fireside – next week we’ll be looking at a primer of the strategies of the weakest groups to take on the state: protest, terrorism and insurgency.
For this week’s musing I want to circle back to a topic that was part of our primer on the Late Bronze Age Collapse and that is population movement, migration, mergers and replacement. One of the elements of the public’s imagination of the past that is the most stubborn is the tendency to assume incorrectly that migration always means population replacement. In fact, the question is a lot more complex than that. Fortunately we’ve developed quite a few historical tools to try to tell what kind of population change is happening in any given moment of mass migration. Unfortunately, a lot of folks continue to hold doggedly to the notion that population migration always means extermination and replacement, some because they refuse to accept that anything they learned in their high school textbook in the 1960s might have been wrong (a perennial problem doing public education – the ‘history shouldn’t change’ crowd) and others because their ideology (usually some form of ‘scientific’ racism, thinly veiled) demands it.
You will tend to find this view – that population migration always means replacement – very often in older (19th century) scholarship, for a few reasons. One of those reasons is, and you’ll have to pardon me, simply the racist mindset: 19th century racists tended to view ethnic groups as fully self-contained population units, with genetic and cultural identities being nearly perfectly co-extensive, which pushed each other around rather than ‘fuzzing’ into each other on the edges. It is not hard to see, on the one hand, why scholars from societies that were at once engaged in nationalistic projects predicated on the idea that the genetic nation, cultural nation and nation-state are and ought to be co-extensive (e.g. the idea that all cultural Germans are also genetically related and that as a result they ought to be contained in a single German state) and operating racially exclusive imperial regimes overseas might be wedded to this vision. Indeed, their racially exclusive imperial regimes almost require such an (inaccurate) vision of humanity, so as to justify why ‘the French’ could act as a single, coherent body to rule over ‘the natives’ in a system that admits no edge-cases.1
Given that mindset – the assumption that ‘superior races’ must dominate, conquer and either enslave or replace ‘inferior races’ – it is not shocking that these scholars tended to assume, any time they could detect a hint of population movement, that what was happening was extermination and replacement.
That said over time we’ve developed better historical tools to allow us to question those assumptions. For the earliest 19th century scholars, all they had were the raw textual evidence. And that’s tricky because ancient writers routinely describe places and peoples as being utterly, completely and entirely destroyed – verdicts carelessly accepted by readers both 19th century and contemporary – when the actual destruction was very clearly less total. Students of Roman history will have in their heads, for instance, that in 146 BC Carthage and Corinth were utterly, completely and entirely destroyed and that Numantia was similarly annihilated in 133.
Except they weren’t. Corinth is, after all, still around for St. Paul to write letters to the Corinthians in the first century AD and it is still a distinctively Greek settlement, not some Roman colony. Carthage is recolonized by the Romans in 44 BC, but the people from Carthage continue to represent themselves as Phoenician or Levantine, suggesting quite a lot of the population remained Punic. Most notable here, of course, is the emperor Septimius Severus, who was from that reestablished Carthage, who is represented in our sources (and seemingly represented himself) as of mixed Italian-Punic heritage, with branches of his family living in Syria as locals. Evidently the Carthaginians weren’t all destroyed after all.
As for Numantia, Numantia was the most important town of the Arevaci (a Celtiberian people) when it was supposedly annihilated. Except Strabo, writing in the early first century AD notes the presence of the Arevaci civitas (that is, their legally recognized local self-governing unit) and lists Numantia as one of their chief towns (Strabo 3.4.13). Pliny the Elder (HN 3.3.18-19) writing in the mid-first century AD likewise notes Numantia as a major town of the Arevaci civitas, as does Ptolemy (the geographer) writing c. 150 (2.5). Numantia remains a continously inhabited site well into the late Roman period!
In short, many students and scholars are swift to accept declarations by our sources that a given people was ‘wiped out’ or annihilated or replaced when it is clear that what we are reading is intense hyperbole meant to stress that these people were badly brutalized (but not wiped out).
Alas, the first real tool we got to assess population movement reinforced rather than discouraged the 19th century ‘all replacement, all the time’ view: linguistics. After all, if your sources say there was a population migration and the local language changes, well chances are you really do have a lot of people moving. But assuming replacement here is extremely tricky because the thing about languages is that people learn them. One need only briefly look at a list of languages under threat today to see how people will migrate towards more useful or popular languages – abandoning local ones – even in the absence of official repression and indeed sometimes in the presence of active state efforts to sustain local languages. But it was easy for a lot of older scholars who already had a migration-and-replacement mental model to point, as we began to puzzle out the relations between languages, to languages moving and expanding and assume that the reason one language replaced another in a region is that the former language’s speakers moved in, killed everyone else and set up shop. The fact that locally dominant languages tended to become universal over a few generations could be taken as (false) confirmation of a replacement narrative.
What begins to lead scholars to question many (though not all!) of these ‘replacements’ was not ‘wokeness’ but rather archaeology, which offered a way of tracking the presence of cultural signifiers other than language. One example of this, noted by Simon James in The Atlantic Celts (1999) is population movement into Britain during the Iron Age. Older scholars, noting that Britain was full of Celtic-Language speakers (even more so before the Anglo-Saxons showed up, of course), had imagined (in addition to Bronze Age or very early Iron Age migrations) an effective invasion of the isles by continental Celtic-Language speakers (read: Gauls with La Tène material culture). But the archaeology revealed that burial customs do not shift to resemble continental burial customs – had there been a great wave of invaders, they would have brought their distinctive elite warrior burials and grave goods with them and they didn’t. Instead, the evidence we have is for significant human mobility and trade over the channel between two culturally similar yet distinct groups which remain distinct through the mid-to-late Iron Age (and beyond).
Archaeological data thus lets us see cultural continuity and regional distinctiveness even in cases where people are adopting new languages. It also lets us see more clearly people below the level of the ruling class (who tend to write all of our sources and mostly write about themselves). That in many cases lets us see situations where we know there has been an invasion or mass migration, even potentially involving sources attesting leadership changes or shifting languages, but where material culture shows no major discontinuity, suggesting that what has happened is a relatively thin layering of a new elite overtop of a society that demographically has not changed much among the peasantry (the Norman conquest of England is a decent example of this, as is the Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire). Sometimes the common-folk material culture will then drift more slowly but steadily towards the material culture of the new elite, sometimes such a slow-and-steady drift (often involving the new elite drifting as well!) suggests broad population continuity, adapting to new fashions.
Of course the newest and latest tool now available are genetic studies. This is an extremely powerful tool which can in some cases remove (or add) key question-marks in our understanding. Genetic evidence has, for instance, offered some significant insight into the arrival of western Steppe and Caucasus peoples – the Indo-European Language speakers – into Europe. Notably, a significant amount of Early European Farmer (that is, pre-Indo-European-speaker migration peoples) DNA remains in modern European populations. Unsurprisingly, it is strongest in places like Italy and Iberia (where we have pre-Indo-European languages that survived), but it is a significant layer over most of Europe, telling us quite clearly that the pre-existing population was not entirely wiped out by the arrival of the speakers of a new language family (although the incoming ancestry groups to come to predominate, suggesting some degree of replacement).
Likewise a recent study of roughly 200 remains at sites generally identified as Phoenician surprisingly identified a remarkable array of different potential origins, with individuals from Sicily and the Aegean as well as North Africa and surprisingly few individuals apparently from the Levant, suggesting that quite a lot of the population involved in Phoenician colonization was drawn from a relatively wide range of places in the Mediterranean.
That said, I think it is also necessary to handle this sort of genetic evidence with care. There is, I think, an unfortunate knee-jerk tendency particularly among the interested public to treat genetic studies as ultimately dispositive, in no small part because people operate from the same flawed assumption as those old 19th century racists, that genetic communities of ancestry and cultural communities are and must be co-extensive, when often are not. But the Phoenician example above points to the problems there: whatever the original source of the genetic material among the Carthaginians, we know quite clearly from archaeology, literary sources, inscriptions and linguistic evidence that the Carthaginians regarded themselves as culturally linked to the Levant (not the Aegean) with close ties to the ‘mother city’ of Tyre. They adopted and maintained a distinctively Phoenician material culture identity even in the distant Western Mediterranean, gave their children distinctively Punic names, and so on.
All of that serves as a reminder that – again, contrary to what the racial essentialists (sadly resurgent in online spaces) would suppose – that genetic identity was hardly the only category that mattered to people in the past. Indeed, in a very real sense, genetic identity in the way we are testing it didn’t matter to those people at all. Given the genetic mix we see, there almost certainly were a meaningful number of people in pre-Roman Etruria who, by whatever quirk of luck had few or even none of the genetic markers we use to identify Early European Farmer ancestry – there’s plenty enough blending in ancient Italian populations for it. Yet those would have spoken Etruscan, followed Etruscan customs, held citizenship in an Etruscan polity, they would have been Etruscan in every way they knew that mattered to them. That their genetically significant ancestors were all actually descendants of early Indo-European speakers is something they would not know.
Genetic evidence thus comes with a risk of over-reading a simple answer to the complex question of people in the past who often had complex, layered identities, which they expressed in any number of ways.
Now I should note here at the end that I have pushed here against the assumption that migrations and movements always meant extermination and replacement. Indeed, it is far more often that we see – often quite violently, to be clear (but not always so) – populations blend to a substantial degree. At the same time obviously sometimes peoples really did push or wipe out pre-existing populations. The aforementioned Early European Farmers – the first wave of farming peoples entering Europe, coming from Anatolia, do seem to have largely displaced almost all of the pre-existing European hunter-gatherer population. Of course living in the United States, the arrival of European settlers resulted in a catastrophic decline of the Native American population, primarily from disease and also from warfare and displacement.
The point here is not a pollyannish assertion that historical population contacts were always peaceful (or the equally silly proposition that they were always peaceful except for European imperialism). The point is instead that these contacts were complex: incoming migrations did not always or even usually mass-replace existing populations. They very frequently blended, sometimes relatively more peacefully, sometimes very violently. Meanwhile there was also a lot of human mobility that didn’t involve mass migration or warfare at all, resulting in the nice neat ethnic lines imagined by earlier scholars rapidly turning into a blur with strongly blended edges all around.
Of course in many cases, the folks who remain intensely wedded to a pure extermination-and-replacement model of population interaction remain so wedded not because that model is true or comports to the evidence (of which they generally have little knowledge), but because it is ideologically necessary: they’re bigots who want to engage in ethnic cleansing (or want to ward off the idea their own ancestors might have been guilty of it) and so want to assert that population interactions must always be so, because if it is always so, if there is no other way, then they can no longer be blamed for their fantasies.
But it was not always so. History is complex and defined by human choices. Better things were possible and better things are now possible. Sometimes we even chose those better things.
On to Recommendations:
I’ve run across quite a few neat videos and podcasts over the past week. Over on ToldInStone’s podcast channel, he interviewed Roel Konijnendijk on Alexander the Great in a wonderfully informative discussion. I particularly like Konijnendijk’s stress on just how relatively limited the sources are here and how much we have to rely on conjecture to understand the process by which the Macedonian army emerged, how Alexander won his victories and how the Achaemenid army worked. These are informed conjectures, we do have evidence, but as always with ancient history, the evidence has frustrating gaps and limitations that need to be acknowledged.
Another great podcast that was recommended to me is Build Like a Roman, consisting of short episodes (around 20 minutes) talking the materials and methods by which the Romans built their famous structures. The podcast, by Darren McLean is just getting started laying out the different materials – concrete, lime, tuff, travertine, etc. – that were used in construction and is well worth a listen if you are interested in Roman building.
Meanwhile in naval history on Drachinifel’s channel, he has a long video (well, long by normal standards, regular length by Drach standards) on the start of Britain’s anti-slavery campaign at sea, led by the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, which had the responsibility of enforcing Britain’s efforts to block the slave trade. The British ban on slave trading, passed in 1807, did not self-enforce, after all: British slavers arranged to fly false flags or get false papers from other countries in order to continue the trade illegally and of course the ships of other powers continued the trade. Drach takes this effort to 1820 and I hope he continues the series since the West Africa Squadron remained active into the 1860s.
Finally over on his History Does You substack, the admirably named Secretary of Defense Rock penned an interesting essay, “There is No Such Thing as Grand Strategy” which I think is worth reading. The title is in some sense misleading: sodrock immediately concedes that, by its narrow definition states do actually do grand strategy – that is, correlating economic, demographic, military and diplomatic policy to clear ends. What he disputes is the notion of some airy realm of pure strategy, where all of the messiness of politics falls away and states think purely in these terms. And that point is, I think, valuable. One of the challenges I’ve had in making my own arguments about Roman strategy is dealing with colleagues whose vision of strategy is so informed by the non-existent idea of this ‘higher plane’ of strategic thinking that they cannot recognize real strategy making – messy, ad hoc, temporary and complicated – when they see it.
Finally, on to this week’s Book Review. This week, I want to recommend Lucian Staiano-Daniels’ The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War (2024). Two quick caveats: first, I was given a copy of the book by the author (but I do not recommend every book I am given by an author and folks who send me books know that) and second, this is a volume that is a bit more pricey than what I normally recommend and I was going to hold off recommending it on that basis (the book is good, obviously) except that it has a much more reasonably priced Kindle version. I do generally try to avoid recommending academic books no one can afford, so the more affordable E-book is welcome.
The War People fits into a larger genre we call ‘micro-history:’ rather than grand narrative of a whole war or reign or country, it is a focused history of a relatively small group of people, with the aim of illuminating what it was like to live a certain kind of life in a certain place at a certain time. In this case, the focus of the book is on the Mansfield Regiment, raised by Wolfgang von Mansfield, a Saxon noble, in Saxony in 1625 to fight in Northern Italy on behalf of Spain as part of the Valtellina War, a side theater of the larger Thirty Years War (and the Eighty Years War) fought over a key component of the Spanish Road which connected Habsburg logistics from Spain to the Spanish Netherlands overland. Doubtless that sentence made your head spin a little but for the reader as much as for the soldiers raised the actual politics of all of this is secondary (as Staiano-Daniels notes, when their war ends in victory, the regiment doesn’t even record this in their records): this book isn’t about the Valtellina War, it is about what it was like to serve in a regiment in Europe during this period.
In order to do that Staiano-Daniels uses the records and letters of this one regiment to dig into what life and military culture were like. How, for instance, the soldiery had their own sense of honor and appropriate action, which differed quite a lot from the civilians around them (one soldier writes, “to make it in this thing, you’ve really got to be young, and you’ve got to look at others with your fists” which is just remarkably on the nose), how they got into trouble, how they were (sometimes not) paid, what their diverse origins were, how they displayed their status (with colorful outfits made of cloth that they bought, traded and sometimes stole) and most of all the social values of this society. The result is a window into another cultural world, at once familiar and alien. Eventually, for lack of pay, the regiment effectively collapses – the perennial problem that states in this period had the resources and administration to raise large armies, but not to sustain them – with some portion of the regiment bleeding away and the rest pulled into a new regiment under the command of Alwig von Sulz.
The War People is well- and clearly-written, though I should be clear that it is written in a clear and effective but relatively dry academic style. The background politics and strategic considerations which motivated the raising of the Mansfield Regiment may confuse a reader, but they are also in a way fundamentally unimportant to the purpose of the book – what mattered was there there were many such regiments engaged in many such wars and this is how they (or some of them) lived. And that part of the narrative, with Staiano-Daniels presents as a mix of vignettes (like the theft and distribution of quite a bit of cloth, for instance) and careful analysis (like the study of how and how much soldiers were paid) very clearly and effectively. The micro-history focus is particularly valuable here: it is one thing to read in larger scale histories of warfare in Europe in this period, for instance, that states often struggled to pay their armies, but it is informative in a different way to read through the process by which the Mansfield regiment steadily withered away (pillaging not a few locals in the process) as its officers struggled to maintain it or manage its transition to a new formation without proper pay. That is the great virtue of this approach: it takes a general feature and then reveals how that feature manifested ‘on the ground’ as it were.
Consequently, I can imagine this book as remarkably valuable in the hands of at least three kinds of readers. For the scholar of the period, it is an effective, often penetrating work of social and military history, of course. But equally for the enthusiast or reenactor, it gives a real sense of what daily life was like in these regiments, including some very intense ugliness (there’s quite a lot of violence in this book, recorded through legal proceedings and such), but also the soldier’s own sense of who they were, what their values were and what sort of person could be upright in their company. Finally, for the world-builders out there who want to tell stories about early professional armies, the book provides an opportunity to ground those stories in the real experiences of soldiers in such a regiment and the many, many other people (women attached to the men of the regiment, civilians unfortunate enough to be near it) it impacted. Here the ‘on the ground’ focus of the book is going to be particularly useful in translating general ideas into a specific sense of how those ideas might translate to actual practice .
Thanks as ever for the interesting article!
Regarding population mixing during ancient population movements – can you look at the relative male/female ancestry of successor peoples to see how peaceful the merging was?
If the genetic markers from one group tend to be mostly in the female line and the markers from the other group tend to be mostly in the male line it would imply the union was not peaceful. Conversely a more equal split implies a more gradual and peaceful intermarrying.
I wonder if there has been any research along these lines for different historic population movements or invasions?
If male ancestry is more biased toward one of two mingling populations, that seems like it would indicate that that population was dominant politically or economically, but that doesn’t necessarily imply conquest or warfare between those two groups; it could also be the result of a slave trade (e.g. African Americans’ European ancestry is derived more from male than female ancestors while the African slave trade was mostly based on trade, rather than war, between Africans & Europeans), or of peaceful migration where one of the two groups was richer or had not-universally-adopted technology or traditions that helped them accumulate more wealth. Another sort of evidence that might indicate the same things is the distribution of ancestry over social class (e.g., the higher Indian castes tend to have more Aryan or steppe migrant ancestry), although I don’t know how long this would persist in societies not divided into endogamous castes (e.g. in the US, African Americans & American Indians remain poorer on average, but this is not true of e.g. the descendants of Jewish immigrants though the latter tended to be poor & disadvantaged when they immigrated).
If male ancestry is more biased toward one of two mingling populations, that seems like it would indicate that that population was dominant politically or economically,
Yea, I’ve brought up the example of the Malagasy here before. While their language is mostly of Austronesian origin (from Borneo), their genetics are about 57% East African Bantu, and about 37% Austronesian. The East African Bantu ancestry is heavily weighted towards the male side, but there’s no record of them ever being *politically* dominant (in recent centuries it was more the opposite). My guess is that what happened is that East African pastoralists came into contact with Southeast Asian agriculturalists, and were economically advantaged because meat and beasts of burden are highly prized resources. (Most of the livestock seem to have been introduced via East Africa, as their names usually come from Bantu loanwords).
Which group accounts for the remaining 6%?
My mind goes to the example of Norse expeditions to England, where Norse adventurers are pretty much all going to be men, and contemporary English chronicles keep complaining about how much the local women seem to prefer them to local men.
Or for accounts I’ve read of north European princesses, given the choice to select a husband, choose not from any of the local aristocrats but the visiting south European merchants, who just arrived with all the highly valuable finished trade goods.
My point being that there can be reasons for a male ancestry to predominate from periods of migration besides “women were coerced”, some of which are emergent from the historical tendency for men to predominate among the mobile adventurers.
Even in modern colonialism, something like Jamestown existed for over a decade before the company started actively transporting English women to help the colony be sustainable.
To add another counterexample to @silvicultor’s:
Ashkenazi Jews are about 50/50 Levantine and Rhenish genetically. The Levantine side is overwhelmingly the male line, but violent conquest by Levantine Jews of the Rheinland is not how that played out; rather, this is the product of sex-selective internal migration within the Roman Empire, probably mostly for economic reasons.
I have read Ashkenazi Jews are biologically descended from a mix of Ancient Israelites and various European peoples. Italians have made the largest contribution to later followed by French. It is not like people from the Levant arrived biologically unmixed at the Rhine and there suddenly started mixing with the locals.
To answer Oliver’s question, yes, David Reich’s “Who We Are and How We Got Here” discusses relative prevalence of male and female genes in various populations of mixed ancestry at some length, particularly in Chapter 10, “The Genomics of Inequality.” (This book, plus an occasional article in the middlebrow press, is all I know about historical genetics.) Reich discusses several of the cases mentioned by some of the other commenters here.
My understanding (based on a journal article I read years ago; can’t remember the name, but will try to track it down) is that it’s a mistake to think of disease and violence as separate reasons for Native American population decline. Normally, when a population experiences mass death from disease, it tends to bounce back within a few generations, as survivors have more/higher quality land available, can support more children to adulthood, &c. The reason that didn’t happen só much in North America is that European settlers drove indigenous people off of their ancestral land, forcing them into more marginal areas that couldn’t sustain as many people (and, of course, just murdered a lot of them directly). Só it’s not “disease and also genocide” so much as “genocide enabled by disease.”
It’s my understanding that disease alone is considered to have wiped out 90% of the Native American population (see if that journal agrees with the estimate). If true, then I think it would’ve taken more than “a few generations” to get back to pre-disease pop levels even if literally nothing else happened to them.
We actually do not know the population of even Mexico in 1492 within a factor of five, and the decline of indigenous populations to the levels in the 19th century was clearly from many causes including warfare, misrule, and confiscation of land as well as disease. There is just no solid evidence for the size of “before” populations. I hope to review David Henige’s book on the subject later this year.
Putting aside the point about population estimates already made by Sean, it is also not clear that “disease alone” is, for a number of the diseases that ravaged the New World, even a real thing to try to measure, which is important because if you set out to try to measure the wrong thing, something you assume is real but is not actually real, you might end up with weird and misleading results.
There are diseases (in the New World, the poster boy is smallpox) that care a very great deal about whether a specific individual has had prior exposure or not, but there are also plenty of diseases that care more about other things. Warfare and enslavement, upheaval and dislocation, loss of sanitation as people flee established areas to new places, poor nutrition, stress and sleeplessness, refugee crowding, etc. are all capable of driving an individual’s immune response into the toilet regardless of their prior exposures, and many of the classic war and famine diseases, stuff like typhus, care a lot about the other things that can cause a person who in the normal walk of life might casually brush them off, with or without any prior exposure, to succumb when stressed and weakened.
So that leads to the question of whether searching for a “disease alone” number is the best way to think. Are people who die of diseases that depend for their effect on the stresses of warfare, conquest, and upheaval casualties of disease “alone?”
Thank you, I did not think about those factors. Recently introduced contagious diseases were at least the proximate cause of death for most Native Americans. I imagine disease outbreaks killing more then 10% of the population could have happened every few years. If the yearly population growth rate between those outbreaks is less than 1% the population is going to shrink over the generations.
There were large agricultural settlements in Amazonia which disappeared around the time of the European invasion and didn’t recover, even though Europeans didn’t go into Amazonia much for centuries. Once smallpox, measles, etc. were established the population recovery rate would have been greatly slowed.
It’s further complicated because there’s a bunch fo knock on effects happening. Eg. Europeans raiding slaves on the american coasts leads to effects like people moving inlands, bringing diseases and just general instability with them. The effects of violence can end up reverberating far outside the actual “impact zone” so to speak.
And of course there’s stuff like “violence disrupts food production which makes people more vulnerable to disease” going on too.
Cyclical epidemics can be really nasty, but there are also other factors to consider with Amazonia. Their practice of swidden agriculture (slash and burn) in an area of extremely rapid plant growth may well have hampered population recovery post-pandemic because ‘high quality land’ doesn’t stay high quality for the generation or two required for a population bounce-back, but instead needs significant communal labour to remain productive (which is likely significantly lacking in the wake of an epidemic).
Now I’m not saying that this was the sole purpose for the collapse of Amazonian populations. Simply that each instance of population collapse needs to be investigated on a case-by-case basis, because they differ in significant ways.
I don’t think slash-and-burn agriculture is efficient enough to sustain state societies. The Amazon is not entirely seasonless. The waters of its rivers rise and fall over the year. These rivers flood in summer with some leaving considerable amounts of sediments. This has traditionally been exploited by farmers in the area. They also created the fertile “terra preta” which is basically a mix of compost, crushed charcoal and crushed ceramics. I suspect they used agroforestry too.
[In short, many students and scholars are swift to accept declarations by our sources that a given people was ‘wiped out’ or annihilated or replaced when it is clear that what we are reading is intense hyperbole meant to stress that these people were badly brutalized (but not wiped out).]
Why weren’t they wiped out, though, if the sources express a clear desire to have done so? Was it a failure of ability, that despite these grandiose statements actually tracking down all of the native population and killing them was too big a task for the military to accomplish? Or was it economic, that actually killing all the people doing the food production would mean you can’t tax them next year? Or was it that it ‘wasn’t worth the trouble’ as long as any possible military threat had been eliminated?
Just a gap between elite outlooks (all of our written sources before ~1800 are elites) and observable reality. Rich people are weird, and often stupid too.
Not necessarily stupid but unaware of the living conditions of the ones working for them.
This is a great question, and one I’ve often pondered myself: why do destroyed cities often rebound so quickly? Usually much faster than new cities created ex nihilo. I say cities because the depictions of widescale destruction in the sources are usually about settlement sacks. Even when armies rampage the territory in a 20km wide corridor around their column of march, that’s a relatively small amount of land compared to an entire province / nation.
I haven’t read any academic studies of this, but I think it comes to the relatively small size of urban populations relative to rural ones, and the ability of institutions to survive material destruction.
When a city at the heart of a political community is destroyed, even utterly, not everyone with a stake in that community is going to get killed. Firstly, only about 20% or less of the population lives in the city, and some would have fled in advance of a siege (although others might have fled from the county side to the city). Secondly, none but the bloodiest sack is going to kill everyone present; cities tend to be larger than armies, and slaughtering people by hand probably gets tiring when the alternatives are raping, looting, and getting drunk. All this means is that many people from the community will survive, and so the community survives. Similarly, manually dismantling every stone building seems like an insane amount of work but – even if did happen in some cases – the buildings are less important that what goes on inside them.
Rebuilding afterwards is comparatively fast because the hard thing about building a city is not the construction materials but the social institutions, aka, getting a bunch of people who want to live together at one spot, with agreed norms about how to do so. This is something that games often get completely wrong IMO: the cost of buildings are almost always the material cost. Yet (to pick just one example) a courthouse is far more than the stone that make up its walls: it is a combination of knowledge, laws, trust, and other intangibles. These are all things that are, to a great extent, immune from an act of physical destructions.
So as long as enough people survive that the community stays a community, rather than fragmenting into refugees who give up on their prior identity (surely exceptionally rare), then reestablishment is very likely once the conditions on the ground allow it. But as I said, this is just my guess for a plausible explanation. I’d love it if someone could point me to a book / article on the topic.
And cities built out of wood had to deal with regularly burning down anyways…
But yes, people often kind of underestimate how hard it is to actually destroy a stone building. Particularly before gunpowder. A big enough fire might collapse them if they burn out wooden support elements and such, but often you’d end up with a husk of a building *that’s still standing.
Peter Englund notes that this is true even in early gunpowder warfare: Before the invention of high explosives a ruin is likely to be a building with holes in it. (maybe partially collapsed) but not the kind of rubble-strewn crater we tend to think of.
Sure… but my point is that the building doesn’t matter as much as the institution. A temple isn’t a rectangle of columns with a roof in the middle. It’s the idea that there should be a shrine somewhere, the social system for appointing priests, and belief in the rites performed there. Even if you atomised every block of stone, the temple would very likely re-emerge as soon as people returned – albeit in a less grandiose setting for a while. Just look what happened at Athens during the Persian Wars.
Or the sack of Whoville by the Grinch, as related by the notable doctor Seuss – loss of their material possessions does not stop the Whos from carrying out their ritual observance.
“A temple isn’t a rectangle of columns with a roof in the middle. It’s the idea that there should be a shrine somewhere, the social system for appointing priests, and belief in the rites performed there.”
And toleration of the aforesaid by those in power in the vicinity.
“Even if you atomised every block of stone, the temple would very likely re-emerge as soon as people returned – albeit in a less grandiose setting for a while. Just look what happened at Athens during the Persian Wars.”
Because Persians did not stay.
Even if you don´t atomise every block of stone, you may well have a situation with a totally different place of worship in the proximity, like a church or a mosque. Even if, after the surviving people return, they are the majority of the settlement, they may well be less well armed than the newcomers.
@chornedsnorkack
In the hypothetical event of the Persians successfully conquering Athens, it seems likely to me that given the Persian modus operandi that the Athenians would have been allowed to return to their city (as Persian tributaries) and to practice their customary religion.
So while it’s strictly true that ongoing practice of a culture, habitation of a city, and so on do require official tolerance by the powers that be… It is also true that in practice most conquering societies extend this permission rather generously, probably because they are strongly incentivized to do so.
Totalizing efforts to destroy the culture of a conquered people are far more common in modern imperialistic societies that have much greater state capacity, than in ancient empires where the basic model for “how to fund a government” is “parachute in a ruling elite that may not share the culture of the conquered population anyway, let them tax the peasants and take a cut of those taxes for royal projects.”
Because aggressively trying to stamp out the local culture rarely makes that ancient model of government-funding easier.
There are exceptions to this which I’m sure you can write 100 paragraphs on, but it is important to recognize which is the exception and which is the usual customary result, which is all I’m focusing on right now.
“slaughtering people by hand probably gets tiring when the alternatives are raping, looting, and getting drunk”
It was not that easy to survive the raping and looting either. Without food, medical care, security… people died off very quick.
See sources in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window#Cost_of_disasters
TL;DR: People rebuild things, not the other way around.
Thanks, that’s the sort of thing I was looking for! I’m curious to know if there are studies that look into how those this plays out in pre-modern economies. Those are structurally so different that, while plausible, it’s not immediately clear that disasters would play out the same way.
Another reason why cities so often regenerate is that they are usually built in a logical place to begin with: a good harbor (e.g., Stockholm), a river ford or ferry crossing (e.g., London), a defensible hill (e.g., Athens and Jerusalem), etc.
Two things.
1. Cities sometimes do get abandoned. This happened to Jaffa multiple times. It also happened to Athens – at the time of Greek independence, Athens was in ruins, rather than the medium-size city that Rome had been in the 1500 years [sic] between its decline as the capital of the Roman Empire and its designation as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. In the case of Athens the resettlement was partly about historical prestige, but it couldn’t be just that, because Greece also tried reestablishing Sparta as a city and the result is a town of 18,000 people. Rather, the location of the city is usually good enough for resettlement – Jaffa is a decent harbor on a coast that doesn’t have good ones and is a good gateway to Jerusalem.
2. Premodern genocides are absolutely possible. Rwanda was modern but done with premodern weapons (albeit with modern media) and something like 60% of the Tutsi were killed in 3 months. The genocide of the Jews under Heraclius is well-attested as well – it wasn’t the destruction of one city as with Jerusalem after the better-known 66-73 and 132-135 rebellions, or a mass enslavement campaign, but actual depopulation of Palestine. But as with the examples of 66-73 and 132-135, usually there isn’t total extermination – most likely, the population of Late Roman Palestine was higher than that of 1st century Judea, without any outside colonization.
Both true of course, but both far from the norm. Most sacked cities weren’t abandoned, and not every abandoned city was vacated solely because of a sack. Similarly most invasions, including those with blood thirsty massacres, were not genocides. Most of the time, a ransacked city gets rebuilt, and rebuilt very fast: on the time scale of a few years, compared to the often centuries it took for a city to emerge “organically”.
Yeah, and the biggest city from Classical Antiquity that’s in ruins, Antioch, declined due to shifts in trade routes, not a sack.
This is a great example of how a city can get completely destroyed and never come back. At one point it was one of the world’s biggest cities, apparently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merv
The site of Merv was deserted and replaced with a different site (within a few km) thrice, before on the fourth time the new site was about 30 km from the previous four. And named “Merv” (till 1937).
By how many percent do you think the population of the southern Levant shrunk? Is this visible in the archaeological record?
To Alon Levy:
At what point was Athens abandoned? There is archaeological evidence of continuous inhabitation from the Bronze Age well into the Middle Ages. Also, its famous Parthenon stood as a largely intact building until 1687. Then it was accidentially blown up in war. (Don’t store explosives in houses of worship.) While its walls and pillars were of marble its roof would have been tiles on a wooden frame. I don’t think any such can hold for 2,100 years without regular maintenance. This in turn should require a settlement of a certain minimum size. Especially for a building as large as 2,482 square metres.
Two examples to support your point.
Our sources claim that the city of Rome was completely uninhabited after its siege by the Gothic army and the destruction of the aqueducts in the 530s AD. However, in the 7th to 9th centuries Rome was still by far the biggest city in Western Europe – probably around 50,000 inhabitants (though this was less than 10% of its population in imperial times). Some people may have remained in the destroyed city, others came back shortly afterwards. Even without aqueduct, the site was still very valuable and defensible.
German cities after WWII were mostly flattened, but were rebuilt in the same places (of course with modern financing and machines). Again, this was due to tradition, land rights and valuable locations.
Some of the aqueducts are still working today. So they were not all destroyed.
Elite perspective.
The writers were elite members of the ‘winning’ society, and the elites of the conquered society- royalty, priesthood, military and cultural elites, and so on- probably *were* relentlessly purged to the last man.
No-one cared about commoners.
The writers were elite members of the ‘winning’ society, and the elites of the conquered society- royalty, priesthood, military and cultural elites, and so on- probably *were* relentlessly purged to the last man.
I think that really depends though. There are definitely situations where the elites are more cosmopolitan and willing to mix with local elites, and then at the level of the common people things are more separate / segregated.
It’s not just a ‘nobody I would want to know goes there any more’ situation, it can really mean that the ability to extract tax or goods from the population is completely severed. Ancient people too materially poor to extract from were often literally not considered people.
Royal and early republican Rome is a great example of this. There’s lots of evidence of elite mobility both between cities, even between Latin and Etruscan cities. It sure seems like roman gens and etruscan noble families had a lot more in common with each other than with the residents of the cities they were vying to control. It doesn’t seem to have been unusual for a gens or noble family to pack up and move to another city where they would join the competition for dominance (and maybe achieve it), even if they came from a different culture themselves. They were peers and competitors, the normal people were the tools or the prize.
I mean, a lot of those elites might well have just been pushed down into the common masses (dispossessed nobles become mercenaries in a distant country, wealthy priests become poor priests, et cetera)… But then, from the point of view of the elite of the ‘winning’ society that’s roughly equivalent to “and then those members of the losing side’s elite effectively ceased to exist as persons we know or care about.”
I’m thinking that after the initial killing spree when a place like Carthage was sacked, they weren’t interested in hunting down every single Carthaginian wherever they might be found. Some might be taken as slaves, those in outlying farming communities might go into the woods and hide until the main army leaves, then go back and rebuild, and declare their allegiance to Rome if and when the soldiers or tax collectors came back around.
All three. The last one is possibly the most important: if you aren’t the Roman Republic or early Empire, your empire has exactly one large field army (the one commanded by the emperor — since if there ever were another field army, its commander would promptly claim the throne for himself) and much of the time, several duties/threats/opponents to attend to. This need not take the form of actual invasions to quash; to keep your governors loyal, you want to visit them with the army somewhat frequently, to impress on them that they would stand no chance of success if they were to rebel.
Since premodern states kept griding against the Malthusian ceiling (even as more imperial peace, more trade, more urbanization could raise that ceiling!), they always had a “surplus population” that was willing to settle arable land emptied of its previous inhabitants, thus if you could spare the administrative capacity to organize this, you would only have a few years of tax gap. But, again, until you invented cheap and lightweight rag paper and printing, and had a simple script (an alphabet), you always operated with a burning shortage of administrative capacity, and it wasn’t worth bothering. Sometimes not only would Aragorn not have a tax policy of his own, but the conqueror would continue with whatever taxation regime the previous overlord had over the locals, since the increase in revenue from changing the system would be less than the effort it would take to bash into the heads of these not-merely-illiterate-but-unable-to-speak-your-language peasants how the new tax code worked. Moreover, you probably weren’t the first imperial conqueror in the area, the previous elites (and the other half-dozen before them) were probably just as foreign to the locals as you are, so if you offer the same deal as the other empires, they won’t even care all that much that the elites have been replaced.
The first may have in fact run into logistics limitations in rough terrain (properly looking over every nook and cranny with a more than symbolic force may take so long the army runs out of supplies) but, given the above, the least important.
Also, as an aspiring conqueror you would want to keep the bloodthirstiness down a bit, to avoid the Chinese General problem. You can only threaten a (fortified) city with killing everybody if they resist you, if you haven’t already gone to “kill everyone” at some lower point — if you have, then the city’s residents have nothing to lose, and so you have nothing to offer in exchange for their surrender. (Or, likewise, for the peasants in the rest of the region you want to conquer to suddenly find an unusual penchant for building forts all over the damn place.)
Also, as an aspiring conqueror you would want to keep the bloodthirstiness down a bit, to avoid the Chinese General problem. You can only threaten a (fortified) city with killing everybody if they resist you, if you haven’t already gone to “kill everyone” at some lower point
This is a really good point- you do need to have something to offer people (even if just “not killing you all”) to incentivize surrender.
Look at the challenges of logistics for 20th century societies that were very explicitly attempting to exterminate certain populations, and apply those to societies that did not have the benefit of large scale chemical murdering, extensive records for identification, and transportation infrastructure.
This is why I started to question claims of genocide in agrarian societies. Where they really capable of doing it? Such capacity can’t be taken for granted.
“too big a task for the military to accomplish”
That’s the reason. Most armies have to focus on fighting and winning the war, rather than going around hunting/genociding people. And after they win the war, ordering the armed forces to go around killing off their subjected people sounds like a bad idea.
Also, before industrial times, soldiers did not carry weapons capable of actually performing a genocide (except smallpox). Neither a sword nor a spear can actually *kill* a human trying to resist in any reasonable amount of time, and even just carrying either weighs you down enough it will be hard to catch somebody who is fleeing without one.
So when the army took the city, the soldiers could for certain kill some people, but they can’t be everywhere at once and the time they need to kill those is time the rest uses to get away. So even if a city is taken and thrown open to slaughter until “the streets run red with blood”, I would not expect this to have killed anything close to a majority of the city population.
(I do acknowledge that a lot of those who successfully fled might also end up dying from having gotten out with only the shirt on their back and thus susceptible to starvation, disease or other economic hardship.)
> Neither a sword nor a spear can actually *kill* a human trying to resist in any reasonable amount of time
This just isn’t true.
> and even just carrying either weighs you down enough it will be hard to catch somebody who is fleeing without one.
This also isn’t true.
> So when the army took the city, the soldiers could for certain kill some people, but they can’t be everywhere at once and the time they need to kill those is time the rest uses to get away.
Remember, walls work both ways. You can’t get _out_ of a city except through the gates – and almost by definition, those are the main place the incoming army are going to be coming from.
“Neither a sword nor a spear can actually *kill* a human trying to resist in any reasonable amount of time, and even just carrying either weighs you down enough it will be hard to catch somebody who is fleeing without one.”
Where on earth do you get this extremely weird idea?
Let’s talk about the facts.
A medieval longsword weighs about 1.4 kg. Shorter swords would be even lighter.
Sure, if you asked one modern top athlete runner to carry a sword and let his rival run without a sword, the one without sword would win.
But in a real world situation, outside sports, there’s not just one milisecond difference between people’s running times. If you’re faster than someone when not carrying a sword, you can still catch up with them while carrying a sword.
And men would easily have been able to catch up with women and slaughter them, which is half the genocide accomplished.
Spears are a much more annoying to carry while running than swords, true.
But both swords and spears are actually quite good at killing people who are not wearing armour, i.e. all civilians. (Killing people who wear plate armour is quite a bit more difficult, but still doable, see the Mordhau: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordhau_(weaponry).)
Premodern soldiers absolutely were physically capable of committing genocide.
They likely didn’t because they didn’t care and it was way too much effort to hunt down every last peasant farmer when they had already won, anyway.
But “swords and spears weren’t actually capable of killing people” is a strange claim. Look at some youtube videos of people testing their swords’ sharpness. Swords were pretty sharp, and historic executions are proof that yes, swords can cut through a human’s unprotected neck quite fast.
Yes, premodern battles tended to not kill as many men as modern battles, but this was more because the idea was to win, not to commit genocide. If the winning side had wanted to commit genocide (and incur heavier losses for their own side in the process) they could have – it just would have been stupid.
I think there’s a point of mediation between “a metal weapon can readily kill people in short order” and “pre-modern armies were physically capable of committing genocide” that resides in things like “the soldiers are not inexhaustible”.
At some point the necessity of rest from the exertions of slaughter is going to give the survivors time to get a head start and potentially disperse to an extent that becomes inordinately difficult to effectively pursue.
I did not say swords and spears are incapable of killing people, I said they can’t do so in a reasonable amount of time. A sword for certain can cause a large wound with one swing, but that is not the same as actually killing the person quickly. A person can keep going and later recover from a sword wound, or even several. If your project is to eradicate the inhabitants of a city, the question of how long it takes per kill becomes relevant.
Also, just FYI “Cutting through a neck fast” is a trained skill only relevant for executions, when you can be sure where the vertebrae are because the person is standing still. And if you don’t, even if you have a sharp axe and the person is not struggling, it might take a dozen hits to actually kill a person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Pole,_Countess_of_Salisbury#Execution
@Alien@System “A sword for certain can cause a large wound with one swing, but that is not the same as actually killing the person quickly.”
They didn’t need to kill the person quickly, did they? The question is that if the person could survive a large wound without medical care. Bayonet wounds, for example, are often more fatal than gun shots.
I can think of a several different scenarios for a population under attack. When the word spreads of an approaching army and there is a city with formidable walls the people may want to fortify inside it. Probably even lot of the population from country side will move in. But when the siege starts people will be pretty much imprisoned inside the city, there wouldn’t be much chance of escaping from there. And if the city walls are breached then the invaders have a chance to wipe the city out, only a small amount of people that are well hidden might survive.
On the other hand if the city walls aren’t that respectable the peasantry might instead head to the forest and mountains, and even some of the city inhabitants might follow. It would probably be very difficult to motivate the invading soldiers to hunt those people down, it simply wouldn’t be worth the effort for an individual soldier.
There were debate whether soldiers armed with swords and spears could run down civilians. To me it seems that question mostly applies to losing army during a rout. I suspect most civilians would try to stay out of sight of the invading army unless they are trapped inside the city walls. It’s becomes a question on how quickly the word spreads about the invading army. Will the foraging parties manage to surprise the peasants or how large portion of them have already abandoned their farms.
@Rose,
Agreed, and in addition, you can conduct genocides without actually having to physically kill each person with a sword. If you disrupt and damage agriculture/infrastructure/the general economy enough, then you can “destroy the conditions of life” or however it’s phrased, and that was certainly possible in premodern times.
I feel as though, even in cases where an invading army can successfully post enough troop at all city entrances that no determined mob can punch through, and even assuming express orders to kill every single person within the city in a direct and efficient manner, historical accounts of sacking suggest that it’s a difficult proposition to ensure that gets done. A successful army is going to have trouble with the attackers not being diverted by loot and by making sport of their violence, and that might afford more opportunity to escape or ride it out.
You’re counting that wrong. Killing all the women in a population achieves 100% of a genocide, not 50%.
I don’t agree with the closing paragraph here at all; I don’t think we can ascribe frequent premodern military failures to completely wipe out enemy populations solely, or even mainly, to the notion that warring parties generally had the power but refrained. Wiping out all, or even most, of a large premodern population using a premodern army was a very tall order and was beyond the armies’ capabilities for most armies most of the time.
There’s a reason why the old premodern “run for the hills” is an idiom in English for getting out of danger, surviving from the days when running for the hills, woods, marshes, or other refuges was an actual peasant (or outlaw) survival strategy in the face of hostile warfare (or in the face of the sheriff, but from the fugitive’s perspective a band of enemy soldiers and a posse of lawmen are both hostile armed organizations). It’s not because it was always easy for the armed parties to successfully chase even single individuals or small groups down, much less entire scattering populations, but they just never wanted to. It’s because it was proverbially hard and often failed.
To Mikko Saukkoriipi:
People from the countryside only took shelter in fortified cities of there were no suitably difficult terrain to hide in.
“Neither a sword nor a spear can actually *kill* a human trying to resist in any reasonable amount of time”
This is a really strange statement and completely wrong. I assure you that swords and spears can kill actively resisting humans very quickly indeed, and there is conclusive evidence of this every week in hospitals across the country. Knives are a very common weapon in street fights around here – half of all murders committed in this country are committed with knives, against people also carrying knives – and very often death is extremely fast. The human body is both surprisingly tough and surprisingly fragile, and its major arteries lie close to the surface. Yes, it’s true that people *can* survive serious cutting and even stabbing wounds. But it is also true that sometimes they do not.
Swords are big knives. Spears are knives on sticks.
When you write “this country” which country do you mean? This blog is read by people all over the world.
@Alien@System I think what you’re trying to say is that pre-modern armies didn’t have industrial means of killing, like the Nazis infamously did. Personal weapons can kill people fast on a personal scale, but not fast on an industrial scale.
And that’s true. I might go further and say that very few weapons (atomics, napalm, zyklon, and the chemical and biological weapons Japan deployed on China) have ever had the capability to kill on an industrial scale. And, relevant to the argument you’re making, the Nazis had tried roving gun-armed death squads before the gas chambers. And the Nazis found that despite all their industrial tools, a holocaust with guns wasn’t sustainable even just in *psychological toll* on their *hateful zealot army* even when targeting the *small minority* that was European Jews. It was the most credible attempt at industrial-scale murder using personal weapons ever attempted, and it simply wasn’t working.
That failure (and the gas chambers’ comparative success) lends credence to the idea that it’s hard in practice for millions of people to deliberately kill millions of people. (Thank god!) Even though the ancient world was much smaller, as you suggest it already might have been difficult for peoples to completely wipe each other out. Much easier to kill a portion to intimidate and dominate the rest.
This is a much more reasonable position.
Although it’s worth remembering the Rwandan genocide was carried out very substantially with sword-like weapons. But even if the tool of killing is ancient, a modern state has far more bureaucratic oversight of its population and ability to communicate at speed over distance, so making a direct comparison is difficult.
And the Nazis found that despite all their industrial tools, a holocaust with guns wasn’t sustainable even just in *psychological toll* on their *hateful zealot army* even when targeting the *small minority* that was European Jews. It was the most credible attempt at industrial-scale murder using personal weapons ever attempted, and it simply wasn’t working.
Without going into details, which are too horrific to describe here, my understanding is that some of the Nazi allies, in particular the Croatians, did enact their own version of the Holocaust (and genocide against other groups) in a much more low-tech way, with more use of “personal weapons”.
Just look at the Khmer rouge. The promoted the use of low-tech weapons like farm tools, bamboo spears… to save ammo, yet achieved a quite high kill count.
I think it all comes down who is doing the genocide, is it an organized army, or the whole of society. The nazis would not have needed concentration camps if they had managed to get every German civilian to join in their project and kill their nearest jews.
But if an army has to commit the murders then they need more effective weapons. Good example is the Katyn massacre, where the executioners used German pistols instead of Russian revolvers, since they had less recoil and weren’t as painful in extended use. Yet very few people are like Vasily Blokhin, who is reported to personally have shot 7000 victims in less than a month during the massacre.
Most of the victims of the Khmer Rouge died from starvation and untreated diseases. I don’t think you can kill between 1/4 and 1/3 of a country’s population with only knives and blunt objects.
There is a certain dark and horrible chicken-and-egg paradox in the argument “it is not possible for a murderous force to kill 1/4th or 1/3rd or more of a nation’s population using primitive weapons alone, disease and starvation will be doing a lot of the killing.”
Because once invaders or oppressors start killing, well before 1/4th of the population of a country has died at their hands, the country is going to be in a more or less ‘ruined’ condition. Its economy, cultural institutions, and collective resistance to famine and disease will have just about collapsed.
So you will never find a country where a large fraction of the population has been murdered with primitive weapons WITHOUT the resulting outbreaks of disease and famine… but is that the chicken, or the egg?
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Biblical four horsemen of the Apocalypse include both Famine and War; the common experience of ancient people was that the two go hand-in-hand.
When I think about it the death toll of the Khmer Rouge was probably a combination their violent seize of power, their preposterous societal goals and their at least as violent fall. As far as I can tell their ideology was a weird mix of Communism and Medieval romanticism. This group violently conquered Phnom Penh to seize power. Once they were in power it was like the entire country had been forced into a destructive cult. With fussy and often faulty ideas of agriculture they were unable to provide their population with even enough calories. People ate pest animals they came across during the near-universal forced labour to survive. Those too ill to work were just left to die. Some terminally ill may have been tangibly killed unless the regime was to preoccupied killing members of certain ethnic minorities. The Khmer Rouge also killed those born rich and/or educated unless they joined them. They created such an absurd terror they made their Communist conquerors look heroic. (As I have pointed out several times before I consider planed economy doomed to fail.) After a quick Vietnamese conquest Cambodian society was comparable to a train-wreck. Even more would have starved to death without foreign food aid.
I take issue with the premise of the question. The sources don’t reflect a desire to wipe out the target peoples; they reflect a desire to brag about having wiped out those peoples, usually for domestic propaganda purposes.
Judging from artistic representations and literature, what we’d consider war crimes today were considered badass and awesome in e.g. late Bronze Age Egyptian society, however impractical or unwise or undesirable they may have been as actual foreign policy.
Maybe the source wasn’t the decision-maker in the first place.
I could say hyperbolically – and maybe even have! – that “the Iraqi army was wiped out in 1991” without (1) thinking it was wiped out to a man, (2) wanting it to have been wiped out to a man, or (3) having had any special insight into or influence over General Schwarzkopf’s thinking or actions, because in fact I wasn’t even born yet.
But in the cases you’re asking about, where there really might be an intent to wipe a group out to the last man, the answer is probably “it depends”. Consider Roman responses to Jewish revolts. In the 66-70/73 CE Great Revolt, we have records of the legions destroying concentrations of Jewish rebels (Yodfat, Masada) but leaving the cities brutalized and damaged but not utterly destroyed (Jerusalem). Nonetheless, Pliny describes Jerusalem as systematically destroyed and Josephus claims that 1.1 million people died in Jerusalem (higher than modern historians think the total population of Judea was, including the non-Jews). Modern historians suggest that tens of thousands died in the siege itself and close to a hundred thousand were taken as captives after. The Temple was destroyed, likely because the Romans considered it a flashpoint of Jewish resistance to Rome, but the city survived. But other important Jewish cities like Lod and Yavneh were mostly untouched. It wasn’t “just” the peasants who survived more than the records would suggest; some prominent Jewish leaders did too. But the legions weren’t the only ones killing Jews; dozens of pogroms broke out where Jews’ neighbors used the opportunity to kill Jews. The percentage of Jews who suddenly disappeared seems to have been highest in those more mixed cities at the hands of their neighbors. (And when that news spread, Jews began to return the favor.)
Contrast that to the 132-136 CE Bar Kohkba revolt, just one lifetime later. Rome leveled Jerusalem, and later renamed and rebuilt it as a Roman city, even though it’s unclear if the revolt ever freed Jerusalem from them at all. After destroying the last rebel concentration at Beitar, there’s evidence that the legions spent a significant time mopping up escaped rebels, Judea was renamed to Palaestinia, and something closer to a true depopulation was carried out. (Although even that wasn’t total except for permanent residency in the vicinity of Jerusalem; and Jews were still allowed one annual pilgrimage on Tisha B’Av, the Jewish day of mourning the destruction of the Temples.) Here, modern historians estimate that two thirds of Judea’s Jewish population died. Still not wiped out to a man.
Still, why the difference? Well, the Bar Kokhba revolt was the third major Jewish revolt (between the two I named above, Jews also rose up in the diaspora and may have effectively undermined Rome’s furthest eastward expansion into Parthia), plus there had been smaller episodes of unrest all along Rome’s imperial rule of Judea. Perhaps Rome was just done with it. Perhaps the Jewish revolts weird streak of starting by wiping out a legion was psyching Rome out. Perhaps Rome wanted to send a message to Parthia that rebellions wouldn’t work, so don’t even both getting involved. But even within a conflict there were major differences; the legions had different goals (crush the rebel military) than the non-Jewish civilians (settle scores with their neighbors), leading to differences in the violence they employed.
Now suppose you had to write all that out with a quill. And (given that higher cost of writing) likely had some non-historicity motivations to write it in the first place. And it’s not even the main point of what you’re writing! You want to get back to the good stuff! I know I’d have eventually considered just saying “wiped out” and moving on.
As far as I understand, when the source mentioned that the city was destroyed and wiped out, this quite often might mean that the city was indeed destroyed and wiped out, with most of its population (who were there at the moment) either killed or enslaved. However, in agrarian societies from 80% to 95% of the population did not live in cities, but in villages around the city, and although some of these villagers also likely were killed or enslaved, it is almost impossible to wipe out every village in the area. So after the city was destroyed, the people from the villages nearby (as well as the returning refugees, who fled before the attack, and the migrants from other cities) might rebuild and repopulate the city pretty quickly.
It’s probably also worth remembering that all cities failed to reproduce themselves, relying on constant inflow of new population from the countryside. When that is the model, “recovery” of a destroyed city looks a lot like “normal functioning”. You have a bunch of strangers moving in and setting up shop, just like you have at all other times. Living in a city was always demographic suicide whether or not it was also literal suicide.
I vaguely recall encountering the claim that was not true of small cities; because their lower population meant that the disease problem there was less bad than in large cities.
(IIRC, it was to provide an explanation for why that Ancient Greece’s relatively high urbanisation rate had not led to everybody dying from plagues.)
Moreover, the Romans provided their cities with safe water sources, some form of sewers and organised garbage disposal. These could well have enabled their relatively high degree of urbanization.
Oddly, having grown up playing Civilization, Master of Orion, and the like, my basic assumption has always tended to be that when another ethnic group assumes control of an area, we’re mostly talking about the elites, and no one bothered exterminating anyone except perhaps the previous elites, because humans are still useful economic units.
Which is perhaps a mistake in the other direction.
This has been a problem for Paradox grand strategy games, especially Europa Universalis (a global game running from the late Reconquista through the Napoleonic. When the real-world Swedish kingdom annexed the parts of Denmark on the Scandinavian peninsula, they replaced the nobles, enforced some language changes, and put some effort into telling the population that they were Swedes now and they had better start being proud of it. There was some emigration but it wasn’t *trying* to be a death squad based transformation, and that’s what tripped up the Swedish development teams at Paradox. They consistently tried to have a single set of cultural assimilation/shift/change mechanics in each of their games and they tend to base it on that quick transformation experience from Nordic history; this turns out to be upsetting to the survivors of the more violent types of assimilation that happened oh….everywhere in the world during the period modeled by the EU games. It didn’t really start getting addressed until they added a Spain-based development team late in EUIV’s cycle.
Some have accused the Swedish conquerors in the case of ethnic cleansing. They many have wished they could but probably could not. Anyway, if they did the present-day inhabitants of Sweden’s two southernmost provinces would not have talked so oddly.
As I believe Dr. Devereaux’s pointed out in one of his several pieces discussing Paradox games (including the Europa Universalis series in particular), Paradox Entertainment has something of a dilemma here.
If you give your game players a computer game that does not simulate the infliction of genocidal violence on conquered populations, you are implicitly “whitewashing” historical or pseudo-historical conquests and can be accused of attempting to erase the killing that historically happened.
If you give your game players a game that does simulate genocidal violence, you are setting up a situation where people pretend to commit genocide for fun and giving some very disturbing and misguided people a toy they can use to celebrate historical atrocities.
The classic example is the inclusion of the Holocaust into World War II simulator games. Leave it out and you’re essentially ‘hiding’ many of the most profound and terrible reasons why the Nazis were horrible and deserved to lose. Put it in and your game takes on some very disturbing aspects.
The combination of unwillingness to use women as manpower and committing genocide domed Nazi Germany to lose WWII. Not counting massacres on civilians in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union the Nazis killed 10 – 12 million people. Not only Jews but also Gypsies, members of various Slavic peoples, the handicapped, prostitutes and men known to have sex with other men. A smaller number of political opponents were killed too. But not that many as one might expect since the Nazi regime did not survive long enough to get disappointed. Apart from being crimes against humanity the Nazi genocide was an immense waste of economic resources. The Nazi leadership was economically naïve enough to take their own ability to produce what they needed for granted. Something they ultimately did not have.
I mean, that’s certainly true SOMETIMES. The main takeaway here is pretty clearly that migration and conquest can work in many different ways. Sometimes – probably the majority of the time – it’s as simple as new elites moving in and maybe killing off the earlier elites. But sometimes you really do get settler colonialism.
But even settler colonialism isn’t always exactly like it is in North America/Australia. Settler colonies in Algeria/Kenya and arguably even Latin America *could* work like that… Or they’d end up being settlers becoming essentially an elite caste living off exploiting the native population.
And even in the US you kinda see a spectrum: It’s easy to look at the end result but there’s quite a bit of back and forth, trade, various attempts at subjugation and various forms of allied and tributary and pseudo-vassal relationships etc.
White people are not biologically adapted to live in tropical climates. We are simply not adapted to moist heat and high UV. But tropical diseases are likely to kill us first.
Did you, by any chance, start with Civilization III? There, in the city screen each pop was individually represented, and they each had a nationality. Thus indeed the game would show a player that a city taken in a war was mostly populated by its previous inhabitants; unless specific effort was taken by the player, it would take a significant part of the game’s duration for the population to, gradually, assimilate into being “player-nationality”. Furthermore, since settler and worker units carried embodied pops they could deposit into a city, those also had their nationality tracked and displayed; sometimes one could capture such units of a third nation in a war (or, IIRC, second-nation workers from barbarians).
On the other hand, aggressively dumping culture close to another nation’s city could …preassimiate its citizens to one’s nation, leading the city to revolt and peacefully (…erm, without war) flipping to one’s side.
Anyway, our host has written an article about this issue regarding games, albeit mostly RTSes. Certainly Civilization would do even better if it didn’t give the impression that the entirety of the agricultural human population is visible in game mechanics (tech tree starting in the neolithic, accumulating “food”, demography-affecting building named “granary”). Just start the tech tree in the bronze age, accumulate literacy points, rename that building to library (find a new name for the culture/science building), and make it clear that indeed we see through the eyes of an empire; non-state-organized people are of gameplay interest only inasmuch as they spawn barbarian units, which is to say, armies. (In Civ3, scouts used to be completely unarmed, which would be a decent possible representation for them not being an army but requiring non-negligible state expenditure in the form of a literate official to keep records of where they went and what they saw. Alas, by Civ5 scouts could hunt barbarians and groups of them could siege down cities.) Inside and outside one’s borders, the peasants are there, but why would they pay tax to you if there isn’t an official put on that square/hex to collect the tax?
I started with Civ1, but I was very young. Really, It’s Master of Magic and Master of Orion 2 I remember most vividly representing the cultures of my conquered land. And yes, I understand the trouble with gamifying history, but I think it’s funny how our basic assumptions can differ.
When Genghis Khan conquered China, his goal was to clear the Chinese off of the valuable grassland they were farming so that that space could be made available for Mongols raising animals.
He was eventually persuaded that he should leave the Chinese alive so that he could benefit by taxing them. The person who succeeded at convincing him, over the objections of his children, became a hero of Chinese history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yel%C3%BC_Chucai
If they had not been already assembled in cities in areas without any forest to hide in I don’t think they could have killed that many people.
Why are there X and Facebook share links but no bluesky one?
Presumably Devereaux isn’t on Bluesky. Indeed, given Bluesky’s reputation, I wouldn’t expect a student of ancient warfare to be all that welcome there.
He is on Bluesky, as can be confirmed by a trivial Google search. Could you elaborate on why you think such historians would be “not welcome”, there? He certainly seems welcome enough with his 31 thousand followers.
The Kindle edition of War People is, alas, not reasonably priced in Europe
Might be worth seeing if your local public library will buy (or already have) a copy? The worst they can do is say “no”, after all.
If you are able to read French or German, I would strongly recommend Peter Englund’s Verwüstung: Eine Gesichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs or the French edition of the same. It is old, but essentially, it follows the same approach of microhistory, with extremely strong archive work to discuss the life in the warring armies. The very fact that the Swedish book has been translated to French and German is a testament to its quality. And the book is, due to age, available rather cheaply.
Was this book originally published as “Ofredsår” in Swedish? Peter Englund published it in 1993.
An interesting & informative article, especially the part on ancient claims of annihilation of enemies. The beginning seems somewhat Bulverist as regards the present-day audience, but given the current state of social media that is understandable.
As an example of language change, I would like to ask about the change in the coastal Peloponnesus from Arcadian Greek (in the Linear B inscriptions) to Doric Greek (in the classical period), which is accompanied by (semi-mythical) ancient descriptions of migrations but not by changes in material culture. This could be explained by a southward migration of Doric-speakers (after the Late Bronze Age Collapse, not causing it, as the previous post explained), by cultural influence (trade? an oral literary tradition like that of Ionian epic?), or by the idea that this region was mostly Doric-speaking even before & that the written use of Arcadian by the Mycenaeans was either a scribal convention or restricted to the upper class. Is there evidence showing which of these explanations is more likely? (I tried to ask this last week but, I guess, too late for my comment to be noticed.)
Or maybe there was no material culture difference between the Dorians in northwest Greece and the Arcadian speakers of the Peloponnesus?
There might well be too little data to tell.
The Bulverism (Bulverism being the act of explaining that a person one disagrees with is wrong because they are in some way structurally thinking wrongly or have a defective point of view) is particularly unavoidable because the relevant forms of thinking are happening in real life. When one occupies the role of “history teacher” one encounters all the types of ‘madness’ Devereaux describes: older people who are upset at the idea that history can “change,” all-aged people who have a surprising amount of ego invested in the idea of different ‘races’ running around totally exterminating or subjugating one anohter.
A possible additional reason to believe in biological replacement is seeing sharp boundaries everywhere. If you can’t grasp small changes as making any meaningful difference you can’t imagine them adding up to large changes either.
So, I appreciate the pushback on peoples simply being wiped out, without descending into silly ‘everyone was just fine with a bunch of new people coming in’ but I guess I’m still a little unclear on the level of violence required?
Like, I was under the impression that most ‘farmable’ land fairly rapidly filled up with people to near its carrying capacity? If you dump a bunch more people into it, it sort of seems like you basically have to kill a similar number of people to those you’re adding? What am I missing?
Migrations often involved a lot of violence, and also spreading diseases, so there’s your population depletion right there.
The point is that “we killed everyone and resettled the land with just our people” is (almost) always nonsense, there’s nearly always some survivors from people who were there before.
This isn’t the same as everyone surviving, which would be unlikely even if there was no organized violence because disease is a thing.
I think one possibility of what the population is going to do as a result of increasing by means of migration is going to be similar (albeit at a higher gear) to what it will do in the event of increasing by means of “populations have a tendency to grow over time”. Like, the land can’t have been filled to so much capacity that it precludes a population from going from 2 million to 8 million over a few decades even when there’s no major migration.
The population of an area four-folding in just a few decades sound like something happening during Industrialisation.
One, many of these migrations didn’t happen in a single majestic avalanche, but more like coastal erosion. Because neither the advancing side, nor the other, was organized into large polities. Instead, there were a bunch of …let’s call them clans, of a few villages each, sometimes fighting each other, sometimes making alliances (to fight other clans), sometimes making alliances across the line. And it is a net result of this complete chaos that over a few centuries, the line blurrily shifted by a few hundred km (or miles).
So, maybe Threefield Clan “at first” (a.k.a. at the point we pick up the history) has three villages. Recently arrived welcome neighbors Horse Clan try to raid each village, and while they are rebuffed at villages 1 and 3, they successfully sack village 2, kill several people, carry off some (mostly women) as captives, and leave some who avoided their notice by that day having been in the woods to cut some firewood. Those remaining weep for those dead or missing, but carry on with life. Next year, Horse Clan again successfully sacks village 2, and those who still remain realize that it’s a militarily untenable position, so they pack up and move to villages 1 or 3. The same year, another new neighbor Wolf Clan also tries and fails at sacking villages 1 and 3. Two years later, a charismatic troublemaker gets most men from both Horse Clan and Wolf Clan, against both clans’ elders’ advice, to join forces behind him, and this is enough to sack village 3 with losses. However, he dies to a lucky javelin-throw, and the sensitive losses cause an ugly spat that breaks the alliance for a good while, and neither clan can on its own take either village 1 or 3 (despite it being weakened) — yet. Horse clan (being closer) can move into the abandoned village 2, though, and also have the captives taken in previous raids as labor. So eight years later, they are in a good enough position to again mount (pun intended) a joint raid with Wolf Clan against village 3, and get a clean success. The remaining population moves into village 1. Ten years (and a brief fight between Horse and Wolf clans; the latter rustled a flock of sheep from around the former village 2) later, Horse Clan gets a lucky break and storms village 1 because the watchman got drunk and fell asleep. Their party includes a few youths who were fathered on captives from that very first raid on village 2. Though they don’t kill or capture everyone, and can’t even occupy the place without leaving their own camps vulnerable to Wolf Clan, the remaining inhabitants of village 1 very much see the writing on the wall, and offer to join as subjects Wolf Clan if they promise to protect them against further raids; the offer is accepted.
All of these clans might have a total population below a thousand each, so the forces fielded would probably not exceed a hundred per clan. Over 20 years, ~1000 ha (to compensate for non-arable lands) or 3-odd km, for an average rate of advance of ~160 m/year. (OK, this is too slow by an order of magnitude. It only takes a few centuries to go a thousand km IIRC. So pick up the operational tempo, and more importantly, add raiding in depth, through/beyond immediately adjacent clans. That way, you can put pressure on village 2 before you even have a border with the new neighbors, and they may indeed leapfrog at least a temporary settlement into it while the equivalent of village 1 of the not-yet-former neighbor still stands.) Obviously, multiply this story taking place on a ~3 km frontage over most of the continent’s width.
Agreed, though that’s still missing out some key fuzziness.
So in the times when the Horse Clan isn’t raiding the Village People (which can be considerable, considering this is happening over centuries), they may well have fairly amicable relationships. Perhaps Village 3 People actually didn’t like Village 2 People all that much anyway (old bad blood feuds perhaps). Decent amount of trade/cultural exchange/intermarriage. So instead of ‘Horse Clan (100% Horse Clan)’ and ‘Village People (100% Village People)’ we’ve got something that’s more like ‘Horse Clan (80% Horse Clan/20% Village People)’ and ‘Village People (90% Village People/10% Horse Clan)’ on genetic tests.
Then, when the Wolf Clan get involved you get a similar set of interactions which all blurs stuff together at the edges as well.
Let’s say ultimately the Horse Clan culture ends up winning out over all of the others…but genetically these people might look a bit more like ‘Horse Clan (60% Horse Clan, 30% Village People, 10% Wolf Clan)’ in genetic testing, despite being culturally indistinguishable from their neighbours (100% Horse Clan) back East.
Or, even weirder, something like ‘70% Village People, 20% Horse Clan, 10% Wolf Clan…all living the Horse Clan life’ if the Village People are sufficiently populous that their genetics still remain dominant even though they’re a conquered people.
Yes, I didn’t put all fuzziness into the story, only mentioning it (“sometimes making alliances across the line”).
Also, this was just three clans (of ~<1000 each), together occupying a little over 3×3 km (2×2 mile) of space, because it would be a waste of everyone's time to make a book-size story populated with dozens of tiny clans playing out high school drama, even if it really happened like that.
For clarification: I didn't intend for Horse and Wolf clans to have any detectable genetic, linguistic or cultural differences between each other. (To the extent this story isn't completely generic, these two clans are PIE, whereas the Threefield clan acts as the representative for Old Europeans, of the Tripolye culture in particular.) I hoped that it would be inferred that there are arbitrarily many further clans on both sides.
“it would be a waste of everyone’s time to make a book-size story populated with dozens of tiny clans playing out high school drama”
Maybe not high-school drama…but I’d read it 😀
In one of the Ojibwe Bands that lived in the area along the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, one of the clans has a Sioux totem in addition to the Anishinabe clans they have in common with other Ojibwe Bands.
In one of the Ojibwe Bands that lived in the area along the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, one of the clans has a Sioux totem in addition to the Anishinabe clans they have in common with other Ojibwe Bands.
That’s really interesting! I spend a fair amount of time in Wisconsin and Upper Michigan (since i live not too far away) and was aware Wisconsin is on the border between the, very large, Anishinaabe and Siouan regions, but I didn’t know that there were groups that blended cultural elements from both.
What you are missing is that in many historical migrations, the new population brought technology that allowed a more intensive utilisation of land. For example, when the Sami were, in the Middle Ages, the dominant population in Central Finland, they were hunter-gatherers, with a population density estimated to be about one family per some 20-40 square kilometers. The Savonians, with their comparatively advanced slash-and-burn agriculture, were able to reach population densities of a few people per square kilometer, sometimes even more.
The process of Finns settling Finland continued well into the early modern period. We have historical document evidence that shows very nicely how many Sami-speakers actually adopted the new sedentary lifestyle, which the Swedish Crown very actively supported with major tax breaks and land grants, and with the material culture, also adopted Finnish language. This was relatively easy, as the new technology meant that the existing population could fit within the expaning agricultural people.
It seems that to large extent, a similar process took place a few centuries earlier on the Eastern side of Elbe: in the German Eastern colonisation, many Sorbs, Wends and Prussians simply assimilated into the German population who had much more advanced farming technology.
One of the complicating issues is that swedish authorities had a tendency to think of “sami” (often confusingly in medieval times called “Finns”) as hunter-gatherers (the reindeer herding came later) so once sami become sedentary and start blending into the rest of the population they stop appearing in the records as sami.
And there’s an entire complicating issue that there’s been sedentary agriculturalists at least along the coasts of the baltic (iE: well into Sapmi) since at least the bronze age, while similarily there’s been hunter-gatherers far into what is today middle-Sweden. (often coexisting with sedentary agriculturalists) well into the middle ages.
,i>while similarily there’s been hunter-gatherers far into what is today middle-Sweden. (often coexisting with sedentary agriculturalists) well into the middle ages.
@Arilou,
That’s really interesting- do we know if these were subsistence H/Gs who mostly supported their own needs, or were they “commercial” H/Gs who traded valuable game and forest products for agricultural foods from the farmers?
When they show up in the records they’re usually trading with sedentary peoples. Which doesen’t mean that was what everyone was doing.
Agricultural activity largely stopped north of 62nd parallel or so in the 6th century. There were two volcanic winters just a few years apart. The first one was probably comparable to the one of 1816, know as “the year without a summer”.
There definitely were much more wars Germans had to fought against Wends and Prussians compared to wars of Finns against Sami. Also, I am not sure that Wends had less advanced farming technology than the Germans – German authors describe the lands of the Wends as very prosperous and fertile and modern archaeologists discovered that the Wends produced very fertile anthropogenic soil, similar to Amazonian “terra preta”.
However, I agree that the Wends and the Prussians weren’t wiped out completely and mostly were assimilated into German society (although some might fled eastward into Lithuania and Russia). This assimilation was relatively slow, by the way. Slavic Wendish (Polabian) and Baltic Prussian languages continued to be spoken till the 18th century, and Sorbian languages continue to exist even today.
How much is “a bunch”, though? If you’re bringing in only, say, 10% of additional population, and they’re kicking a bunch of elites out of that elite status, you can end up more with a reduction of a lot of peasants to more precarious ends of the subsistence/respectability spectrum.
There might be situations when farmable land wasn’t filled up with people to near its carrying capacity, for example due to a plague or a civil war that wiped out a significant percentage of the population. Also, there might be areas of non-farmable land which might be turned into farmland (by cutting down forests, draining swamps and so on) and migrant settlers might have skills and resources to do this. It is also possible that the migrants were not farmers, but instead pastoralist (herding livestock in the hills and mountains, unsuitable for agriculture), craftsmen and merchants (settling in the cities) or military elite (replacing local military elite or integrating into it).
Here in Northern Europe there actually was a period in the Copper Age and early Bonze Age when three cultures coexisted. There was one of hunter-gatherers, one of farmers and one of herders. The hunter-gatherers lived mainly of seafood along the coasts and possibly major waterways. The farmers preferred the areas with the most fertile soil. The herders wanted good grazing grounds which were not necessarily the same as the most fertile areas. Eventually a mix of farmers and herders took over although their culture was more derived from that of the herders than the farmers.
I don’t think it’s been recommended here, but I recently read Proto, by Laura Spinney, which is a lay history of the Proto-Indo-European language family, and has a lot of overlap with this topic: how, at different times and places, the combination of archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence shows different patterns of migration, mixing and replacement (and, in particular, how the newer genetic evidence is changing theories in the other disciplines).
do seem to have largely displaced almost all of the pre-existing European hunter-gatherer population.
My understanding is that was true in most of Europe, but *not* in Scandinavia and the Baltic, where you do see a lot more hunter-gatherer ancestry persist. Especially in the Sami and Estonians, if I’m remembering correctly.
The key here is the Corded Pottery culture. It was a stone-age culture of people who had agriculture, cattle and pottery. They lived in Central Europe, Scandinavia, the Baltic countries and even in Western Finland around 2000 BC, probably talking some Indo-European language. In Finland, the culture suffered a collapse, probably due to climate change that made their semi-pastoral lifestyle unfeasible. However, archeological evidence shows well how they moved to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, while they retained their religion: the production of ritual battle axes continued.
However, the Corded Pottery Culture replaced earlier cultures thatwere hunter-gatherers. Violently or not? We have no way of knowing surely, and it tells more about the guesser than about the history to make a guess. Anyhow, even if the Corded Pottery people probably have a genetic continuity to all peoples living in their former area, they were not the “original hunter gatherers” who came here following the receding ice.
The Sami language arrived in Lapland only later, in the turn of the common era, about the same time that Finnic languages arrived in Finland, Karelia, Estonia and Latvia (probably with Estonia as the heartland of the expansion). So, while they did borrow a lot of words from the preceding population, the Sami are about as late arrivals in the region as their more Southern counterparts. It seems clear from genetic and linguistic evidence that the Finnic-speakers of Estonia and Finland actually assimilated and partially replaced a population that had been speaking a proto-Germanic language. (The Finnish word äiti, “mother” is assumed to be a Germanic loanword, which would point to extensive intermarrige with Germanic women, a hypothesis supported by mitochondrial DNA studies.)
So, as I noted a week earlier, if you freeze-frame the world in 1492, you get a workable definition of indignousness, and it works especially well in the Americas and the Pacific, but it isn’t really feasible in Europe, where the start of Early Modern was not that major a thing. And like my story above shows, it is not always the Germanic-speakers who are the assimilators and winners of the story.
@Finnish Reader,
Thanks, that information is exactly what I was looking for. And yes, I meant a genetic continuity, not a linguistic continuity. I knew about the Sami and Finnic languages arriving later, but I didn’t know there was a Germanic substrate that they replaced, that’s really interesting.
And I agree that there’s nothing special about 1492 in terms of “indigeneity” in the European context, or in other places like South Asia, Africa etc., although it of course marks a huge watershed for the Americas (and a couple centuries later, for Australia).
I think the Corded Ware Culture spread Indo-European language across most of Northern Europe. (The British Islands were later settled by the Beaker Culture.) If I understand it correctly it existed in parallel with earlier arrived agrarian and hunter-gatherer cultures. Eventually it merged with the pre-existing farmers in part of the Nordic Countries and what is now northernmost Germany. The resulting Nordic Bronze Age culture likely gave rise to the Germanic peoples.
Being a Swede I don’t know that much of Finland’s prehistory. However, it is clear to me that agriculture never disappeared from Finland’s south coast. Agricultural activity may have stopped further north at some point due to climate change. In late Antiquity the climate of Europe became colder. During the northern hemisphere winter of 535‒36 there was a volcanic eruption of a scale only occurring two or three time a millennium. This caused the volcanic winter of 536. Before climate had quite recovered there was one more large volcanic eruption. No-one nearly as large but enough to prolong the climate disaster. As a result farmers abandoned many marginal lands in the northern hemisphere and perhaps all over the world.
My immediate thought is that you’d expect farmers to have higher populations than hunter-gatherers, so it’d be less “displacement” and more just swamping.
Potentially, but we’re talking about places that are really at the limits of what agriculture at the time could achieve. Living off scratch-plowed millet and bitter vetch on the North Sea/Baltic coast is not the same as living off the full agricultural package in the Levant (parts of the full agricultural package tended to drop off the further away the agriculturalists got).
Agricultural populations were higher, but not as dramatically so as in more southerly locations. Especially where there was extensive use of marine resources (as in the Boat Axe Culture).
@Ynneadwraith,
Considering that wheat and rye (our most cold-tolerant major crops, as far as I know, certainly rye is *the* most cold tolerant) both originated in the Middle East, and have a range of cold tolerance today, I do kind of wonder how long it took for people to develop them to the point you could grow them in Scandinavia, the Baltic, northeastern Europe or other cold locations. Especially considering they were operating without modern breeding techniques.
Unfortunately I can’t find the source I was using for it. Emmer wheat and naked barley were grown in early neolithic Scandinavia, but I definitely remember findings from at least a fair few early-to-mid-Neolithic North Sea burials that indicated people were living almost entirely on millet (miserable).
The paper I was reading described the full neolithic package as it existed in the Levant, which was about 20-25 different plants (I can remember Emmer and Einkorn wheat, naked barley, peas, bitter vetch, rye, flax and lentils, but there were loads more). Then it tracked which of those had survived the journey through different bits of Europe at a particular timepoint in the neolithic. I think by the time it gets all the way up north it was down to 6 or 8 plants.
Not exactly strong and stable foundations for a resilient population. It worked of course…but only just.
It is, in fact, barley that survives best in very cold environment. Even today, it is the only crop grown in Northern Lapland. Rye comes second.
It is likely that the Corded Ware (aka Boat Axe) culture had some kind of an agricultural package in about 2000 BC but it was not sustainable in the North. When the climate cooled, they mixed into the surrounding hunter-gatherer population, at least around here where I am writing.
It was only in the Bronze Age that a sustainable semiarctic agricultural package was developed – and a package that could actually tame the inland of coniferous forests was a thing of late Middle Ages, leading then to the colonisation of Siberia and North America during the following centuries.
The Boat Axe Culture was a subgroup of the Corded Ware Culture found in present-day Finland, Norway and Sweden. If you are from any of these countries it is easy to mix them up.
It is, in fact, barley that survives best in very cold environment. Even today, it is the only crop grown in Northern Lapland. Rye comes second.
@Finnish Reader,
I don’t want to push back too much, but I do some research on cold tolerance in rye for my work (and have been tangentially involved in some similar work with barley). My understanding is that rye is generally more intrinsically cold hardy than barley, or really any other major crop (although both species have variation). e.g. the citation here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC159221/pdf/1040467.pdf
At the sites where I work, barley often doesn’t survive cold winters while rye always does, is grown, rye (some lines anyway) will survive winters in parts of the northern Great Plains where almost nothing else does, and rye is generally used as the “positive control” in barley breeding studies for frost tolerance. (This is in North America, so I can certainly believe things might be different in Europe).
That said, there are lots of reasons one might grow a species in a cold environment in spite of it not being all that frost hardy. Buckwheat for example doesn’t really survive the winters at all, but I know it’s widely grown in cold-limited locations (Tibet, parts of Eastern Europe etc.) because it grows so fast, much faster than wheat or rye or almost anything else, and can be out of the field before the winter arrives. I can definitely believe that similar considerations might make it reasonable, in some cold limited locations, to grow barley instead of rye.
Absolutely. Rye is the crop you can grow over the winter by sowing it in the autumn, but it doesn’t survive in Northern Lapland, at least not reliably enough to be grown commercially. Tervola, in a mild location on the 66th parallel, is the Northernmost place for it. When we are talking about the agriculture in Northern Lapland, it is about summer barley. Winter barley survives, to my knowledge, only in the Southernmost Finland.
And when we are talking about agriculture in Lapland, we are talking about an area where even the modern agricultural package is only marginally sustainable. I’m not sure if there is agriculture on the 68th parallel anywhere outside Scandinavia.
Scandinavia is the warmest place on the 68th parallel.
Absolutely. Rye is the crop you can grow over the winter by sowing it in the autumn, but it doesn’t survive in Northern Lapland, at least not reliably enough to be grown commercially. Tervola, in a mild location on the 66th parallel, is the Northernmost place for it. When we are talking about the agriculture in Northern Lapland, it is about summer barley. Winter barley survives, to my knowledge, only in the Southernmost Finland.
@Finnish Reader,
Thank you, that’s exactly the kind of clarification I was looking for!
I think Tervola is pretty close to the latitude where agriculture stops being commercially viable in Sweden too.
When you write “millet” do you mean broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) or foxtail millet (Setaria italica)? These are now considered different genera.
Agreed, it’s way more complicated than that. I don’t blame Brett for the simplification though, that whole transition period could be an entire 4-part series (delivered in 7 instalments, natch).
Although the overall picture over time is the dominance of Early European Farmers, Western Hunter Gatherer ancestry persists in the mixed population across Europe. In fact, ‘Early European Farmers’ are distinguished from the ‘Anatolian Neolithic Farmer’ populations they sprang from genetically by the presence of Western Hunter Gatherer DNA (among other things).
You’ve mentioned the situation in the Baltic with the Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers (who were very successful, the key initial search terms for looking into these are the Boat Axe/Battle Axe culture and the subsequent Pitted Ware culture that eventually absorbed them), but there’s also documented instances of resurgences in Western Hunter Gatherer DNA over the course of the Neolithic (including a very broad trend in the middle-to-late Neolithic). This includes instances where we suspect the people of Western Hunter Gatherer ancestry became the dominant political elite within Neolithic communities.
And it’s not just genetic influence either. This paper shows evidence that the resurgence in Western Hunter Gatherer ancestry along the Atlantic coast is aligned with the beginnings of the Megalithic building tradition there, so there’s significant cultural contributions as well:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061822300099X
Hmm, I wonder how that that happened.
Though, I suppose we might not have enough evidence to even make informed guesses.
I could speculate. However, I suppose most of the theories I would make up would look silly to any experts on that time period.
Also am I misinterpreting the linked paper* or did that resurgence happen after the hunter gatherers took over agriculture? If so, I suppose it is unlikely to be caused by hunter gatherers ending up with a high status by trading in-demand produce with farmers or being valuable allies in conflicts in between agriculturists; but what do I know?
* I had never intended to read it fully, but had assumed you had linked to an abstract. I wonder how much time I had lost skimming that article because of that misunderstanding…
Yeah we can only really speculate at this distance.
I think there are a couple of different instances of WHG genetics (and individuals) experiencing a resurgence (though I’ll be damned if I can find the sources now, which is annoying…).
There’s a broad population-wide resurgence in WHG DNA proportion within already agricultural societies. This seems to be so broad that it feels like it must have some structural reason behind it. There was also another more specific instance I remember where someone with almost complete WHG ancestry was discovered in a position of power among a neolithic community.
How all of this happened we can only speculate upon, but for me I find the interaction between the Mexica and their settled agricultural neighbours before they founded Tenochtitlan to be enlightening. Not because they’re somehow representative of peoples thousands of miles and thousands of years away, but because of a specific set of interactions it preserves between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists.
For people who don’t know, the Mexica were once a ‘Chichimec’ people (Nahuatl equivalent of ‘barbarian’, with similar connotations). They were one of many Chichimec peoples that lived as hunter-gatherers in central Mexico, before they migrated into the Mesoamerican heartlands and started interacting with the various settled peoples there.
They developed a bit of a reputation for themselves as being kinda tough and dangerous people. Very much in-keeping with how you’d expect a ‘bunch of barbarians in civilised society’ to go down. Rabble-rousing and getting into disputes with the locals.
Part of the reason they developed this sort of dangerous reputation is that, being hunter-gatherers, pretty much all of them were armed and fairly proficient with a bow. Meanwhile, similar skill-at-arms among the settled peoples had become the preserve of nobility (most people fought, but wouldn’t have been relying on martial skills day-in-day-out for their survival). Thus, on an individual level, early Mexica were kinda dangerous, even though they were never really more than a local nuisance for the powerful settled-agricultural states.
Now, I’m not saying this is how it went down in neolithic Europe. For one, the peoples of neolithic Europe seemed to be at least a reasonably violent lot themselves, and their societies were nowhere near as complex and stratified as Mesoamerican city-states (so unlikely to have divvied up who did the fighting as strongly). However, it does show that the interactions between hunter-gatherers and settled agriculturalists can be very complex indeed, and it is not necessarily a straight-line of ‘agriculturalists dominate hunter-gatherers’.
Nomadic peoples sometimes managed to conquer settled ones although this was rare. The “resurgences” you talk about could be instances of this.
I’ve read that, while no one today has enough European hunter-gather DNA to actually look like one, light-colored eyes are a sign of that DNA.
Very interesting. Shall have to look that one up!
I’d also note that the further you dive into all of this stuff the more recursive it gets.
At first glance, the neolithic transition in Europe involved a decent chunk of genetic replacement of Western Hunter Gatherers with Anatolian Neolithic Farmer DNA. These folks then experienced a significant genetic replacement with Western Steppe Herder DNA in the Chalcolithic.
However, if you dig into who those Western Steppe Herders were, it turns out that they’re a mix of Eastern Hunter Gatherers and Caucasus Hunter Gatherers.
Those Eastern Hunter Gatherers are themselves a majority Ancient North Eurasians…but with a non-trivial amount of Western Hunter Gatherer as well.
Also, those Anatolian Neolithic Farmers were the descendants of Anatolian Hunter Gatherers, who were descended from…Caucasus Hunter Gatherers (with a bit of Natufian Hunter Gatherers).
Also also, those Caucasus Hunter Gatherers were descended from…Western Hunter Gatherers and Eastern Hunter Gatherers.
‘Braided stream’ is probably the best way to think about human populations.
It’s not surprising really, considering that there weren’t all that many groups that survived the last glacial maximum outside of Africa (and even before that everyone currently living outside of Africa is descended from one group that left around 50,000-70,000 years ago), so go back far enough and it turns out we’re all pretty closely related really. That goes for populations within Africa as well. Not only have there been a number of backmigrations into Africa from Eurasia over our history, but our entire species went through a severe population bottleneck around 800,000 years ago (or, rather, our branch of hominins as we’d have been Homo erectus at the time). Down to something like 1300 breeding pairs, which is very close to extinction indeed. And we had another one during our transition to anatomically modern humans, with only around 10,000 breeding individuals (so 5,000 breeding pairs give or take, if you want an estimate comparable to the previous one).
So yeah, we’re all pretty related to one another, all told.
It is specifically blue eyes as “light-colored eyes” could mean grey eyes too. Swedish public service TV has developed a practice of having West European Hunter-Gatherers represented by Horn Africans. Not entirely wrong but I don’t think they had kinky hair. This trait seems to have gone extinct in Europe only to be reintroduced in historical times.
That’s how afrocentrists explain why ancient Egyptians were black but modern ones are not: they were totally replaced by the lighter skinned Arabs.
Which, to be clear, is demonstrably bunk. Present day Egyptians share 80-90% of their DNA with the bods that built the pyramids.
It’s not just Afrocentrists doing that either, it’s good old fashioned White Supremacists as well (along the line of ‘swarthy people couldn’t possibly have made the pyramids’).
I’ve never encountered that one, and I don’t understand it. If the people who built the pyramids were darker-skinned than current Egyptians, and were replaced by lighter-skinned Arabs, wouldn’t that be a point against white supremacism?
The white supremacist “history” is different, which is that the pyramid-builders were white, but were wiped out and replaced by the invading swarthy Arabs.
Yeah that’s the one.
There are Black supremacists too!
Before you pointed it out I thought the genetic overlap was something like 70%. I imagined about 25% Sub-Saharan Africans and a few percent combined of Egypt’s various conquerors from the Iron Age and on.
I thought the norm at least in the farming tradition was Replace the men and Merge with the women
In Scandinavia the DNA suggests this is what happened when agriculturalists arrived. Only females have descendants.
Though, an alternate explanation is that at least some of the men were holdouts in the forest while some of the women had better sense and changed lifestyle for the indoors. Perhaps because the winters are awful if you stay outdoors permanently. 😉
We do see some very skewed paternal ancestries (partly because elite advantages compound over time), but it’s unlikely to be that simple except at very micro-levels (raiding by extended family groups rather than state warfare).
Conquering armies generally want to keep at least some of the men around as labour. Even if most of your soldiers are happy to settle down as middling-to-rich peasants who’ll work their own farms, there are going to some who expect to be gentry.
Plus conquerors rarely have the manpower to re-populate entire regions; the Romans, for instance, often took the best land for their colonia, but more marginal areas might be left alone.
This is an almost petty point, but Mansfield is actually Mansfeld.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfeld
I do think one thing to also remember is that even when people are actively doing a genocide, the vast majority of deaths are probably going to be from starvation (and attendant disease, etc.) *direct* violence can obviously kill a lot of people but the *disruption* violence causes (and the fragility of the food production system) is what really changes things, at least on a larger scale.
The violence creating zones of “Shit I can’t farm here” and that ending up cascading to other areas creating famine and disease.
This at least holds for agricultural socities.
“because they refuse to accept that anything they learned in their high school textbook in the 1960s might have been wrong”
To be pedantic, people who went to school sixty years ago would now be in their seventies, and a small part of the audience of any public outreach program. In any event, I am quite glad that it is hard to argue people out of believing whatever they learned in school. It is a the best sign that whatever they learned, stuck.
The problem comes when you find people who are easy to argue out of some of the positions they learned in high school civics and history class (“when a lone strongman figure begins calling for the overthrow of democratic institutions and of media not under his control, while blaming minority groups for all of society’s problems, and calls for exceptions to rules that would normally act to limit his power or make him subject to the law, it does not bode well for the republic”) and very hard to argue out of some of the other positions they learned in high school (“history is a succession of stronger and scarier peoples conquering and destroying weaker ones, this is just the way things work, and therefore your current position as part of the dominant ethnic group is simply a matter of your ancestors having been good at what they did”)
Sounds like they continue to believe what they want to believe.
There is a very widespread assumption that population “mixing” has increased over time: there were isolated, genetically and culturally “pure” populations in some distant past, and these were mixed at certain historically important points. However, this assumption simply doesn’t hold water. People were very mobile in the Palaeolithic and still quite mobile in the Neolithic and later. Svante Pääbo, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his ancient DNA work, has often suggested a helicopter approach to human genetics: draw a 100×100 km grid over the globe, descend with a helicopter at each grid point and ask for a blood sample. This would simply show gradients of everything today, and Pääbo suggests it would have shown gradients at every point in the past.
For an example, there are people who affirm that blond Spaniards are evidence of the Visigothic immigration. How so? If there were blond people 500 or 1000km northeast of the Pyrenees in the Iron and Bronze Age, why wouldn’t there have been a gradient of the MCR variants that give rise to blond hair already at that time? We know that a large part of the Iberian peninsula was inhabited by people called Celtiberians by the Romans, which suggests they had considerable contacts with populations north of the Pyrenees. Why wouldn’t similar contacts have created and maintained genetic gradients even before there were Celtic languages?
Sadly, this is someone pushing back against the “self-contained population units” idea so hard that they become just as absurd.
Yes, today, in the 21st C, human genes are widely scattered all over the globe. That’s because we have a couple of centuries of steamships providing cheap mass travel, and two generations of cheap airliner travel have speeded up the process even more.
Easy example: do the helicopter experiment in 1000 CE on various islands across the Pacific, eg Hawaii. There’s a lot of mobility from island to island, but it is almost entirely Polynesian. Any western European, east Asian, American, African, Levant influence would be tiny or non-existent.
And the big one, literally, would be America. Historians and economists and ecologists … all talk about the “Columbian Exchange” because 1492 CE really was a world changing event. Before then the peoples of America were an almost entirely distinct population pool, because effectively nobody could travel between the American continents and Eurasia / Africa. (Yes I know they were closer at the Arctic, but the climate there is so harsh that nobody wanted to walk/ride from say Norway to Labrador.)
If you’d done the helicopter experiment in 1000 AD Jamaica, how much west African DNA would have been present?
I think the whole idea of “pure” populations is horrible and dangerous, and that the our easy travel and mixing of populations is an improvement. (Not utopian, nothing is.) But pushing back against reactionary idiots should not mean blinding ourselves to the past being different from today, often in ways we don’t like.
“Easy example: do the helicopter experiment in 1000 CE on various islands across the Pacific, eg Hawaii. There’s a lot of mobility from island to island, but it is almost entirely Polynesian. ”
You would have seen no mobility at all. Beyond the original Polynesian homeland (Samoa and Tonga), Polynesia was entirely devoid of humans of any kind.
Debate about settlement dates of Polynesia continues, but this review from 2011 of the literature has it right around that time frame:
One tantalizing piece of data mentioned in the paper is the presence of a Polynesian rat bone (Rattus exulans) on Oʻahu dated from ¹⁴C to “AD 970–1030 (at 1 s.d.), or AD 890–1040 (at 2 s.d.)”. While it’s not impossible a rat could have made its way to the island on its own somehow, they were commensal with humans, generally introduced by them, and considered strong proxy evidence for human presence.
It could very well be the case that there were no humans in the Hawaiian islands in AD 1000, of course, I’m just pointing out that it’s right in the fuzzy area where the data get complicated.
This map indicates that most islands were inhabited in 1000 AD:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chronological_dispersal_of_Austronesian_people_across_the_Pacific.svg
The main exceptions would have been New Zeeland and possibly Easter Island.
Gradients within land masses (and along sea routes used at the time). Not gradients across the Atlantic or Pacific ocean, which would be manifestly absurd.
Ongoing gradients would be very surprising indeed. Historic gradients from the Americas through to Siberia would be easily identified (and all the way on into Europe, considering the Ancient North Eurasian Paleolithic population that contributed significantly to native Americans also contributed to those Western Steppe Herder bods that ended up being the near-universal Y-DNA population across all of Europe).
Similarly, you will see a gradient heading south from the Bering land bridge down through northern China and beyond via the Ancient Northeast Eurasians (the other major component of native American DNA), who also formed the primary genetic components for present-day Nivk, Tungusic and Mongolic peoples.
That’s how I interpreted Pääbo’s comments, and in that particular light he’s spot on accurate (give or take some eccentricities).
Very much agree that there were historical gradients, and yes some population mixing, but far less than we can see today.
Recently in comments it was noted that the Pharaoh Tutankhamen owned an iron knife even though Egypt was nominally still in the Bronze Age. Doesn’t mean that “Iron Age” is a meaningless distinction, that life didn’t change for the majority of the population with the wide scale introduction of iron working.
scifihughf: The Tutankhamen dagger has been identified as of meteoric iron, as have many other iron artifacts from that period. The consensus seem to be that the Egyptians (and other bronze-age cultures) could work iron, but couldn’t smelt it from ore – at least, not in any significant amounts.
I once saw a documentary in which they tried to explain Tutankhamun being buried with an iron dagger. As part of it they asked a blacksmith familiar with experimental archaeology to make a dagger-blade out of an iron meteorite using no higher temperatures than the Egyptian New Kingdom could produce. (They did not say what country he was from but he sounded like a Briton.) He managed to reshape it into something recognisable as a dagger-blade. However, it had a crack in it since the original meteorite had a crack. This should say something about how limited metallurgy was in the 14th century BC.
“Before then the peoples of America were an almost entirely distinct population pool….”
Okay, maybe, but that’s like saying the Mediterranean Sea is a just a distinct lake. The scale we’re talking about is so enormous that to call it “a…population pool” gives a very false impression of what was going on. Kingdoms and empires rose and fell. Entire civilizations competed with one another. There were competing staple foods–and not just “grass vs another kind of grass”, but multiple completely different plants as the basis for subsistence. And yes, the genetic variance was equally tremendous. It’s as easy to tell an Inca from an Ottawa as it is to tell a Norman from a Slav. There are even novel mutations related to environmental concerns (the Andes are high, and humans adapted physically to the lower oxygen levels).
While it may technically be true that Americans were relatively isolated FROM EUROPE (though there’s evidence for more exchange than people think), this wasn’t one “population pool”–no more so than Europe or Africa are.
This may seem like I’m going off on a tangent, but this relates to the issue at hand: Our concepts of what constitute a distinct group are HIGHLY malleable. Usually you find that whatever definition the person uses is the one that best suits their argument. It’s convenient for your argument if the Americas can be lumped together, so you do–glossing over a tremendous amount of diversity. To be clear, this is often not intentional, but it happens none the less (though it often IS intentional, with people simply assuming that genetics follows their preferred group definitions and ignoring all contrary evidence). Similar shifts in definition are ubiquitous in these debates. This makes these discussions incredibly difficult (outside of HIGHLY technical discussions), as the goal posts move so much that it’s astonishing when they sit still.
I think I should have made it clearer that Pääbo was reacting to the initial choice to select 10 “European”, 10 “West African” and 10 “East Asian” invidividuals for whole-genome sequencing. This inevitably reified the categories “European”, “African” and “East Asian”. Selecting uniformly across Afro-Eurasia would help counteracting that initial reification.
A similar approach would apply within the Americas (and within Australia). No one disputes that the American populations were basically isolated from Afro-Eurasian ones before 1492.
Though interestingly, IIRC, not *completely*. There’s a tiny, *tiny* bit of trickle across the Bering Strait. (though those people were fairly isolated from both the rest of asia and the rest of america…)
That’s a strange assertion to end on. Not just the latest evidence for Polynesian landings in South America, Norse and Basque records both show travel to what is now Atlantic Canada, and the Yupik have lived on both sides of the Bering Strait for (at least) 3000 years.
I don’t know about the Basque. However, the Norse did acquire some women from what is now eastern Canada. At least one female line survives on Iceland to this day.
@Scifihughf,
I’m somewhat less enthused with “easy travel and mixing of peoples” than you are, I can see clear costs and benefits both ways, but I think you’re exactly right that one shouldn’t react against the idea of pure populations existing in stasis, by going to the other extreme. History is complicated, the world is complicated, and I think the truth is generally that there’s been more migration and mixing than most nationalists would ideally like but also more stasis, continuity and separation / self-segregation (sometimes imposed by geography, sometimes by custom, sometimes by policy, sometimes freely chosen) than most cosmopolitan liberals would like.
Let’s even set aside the big divisions between the Americas and the rest of the world prior to 1492 (and yes I know there was *some* gene flow at the eastern edge of Polynesia and through the Norse explorers, but the raririty and unusual nature of these exceptions sort of underscores the general rule). I think it’s also true even at the smaller scale of regions and individual ethnic groups. For much of human history and prehistory, while there have never been pure populations and there has always been some migration and mixing, there was certainly much less than in, say, modern America (and even educated professionals sometimes overestimate how much internal migration there is in America today). Some places and times have a lot of migration and mixing, some have only a little, though there’s always been *some*. Modern America is at one end of the distribution, and isn’t really a ‘typical’ society either today or trans-historically. Even by comparison to many other *modern* societies which are more closed and endogamous (South Asia might be at the other extreme of modern societies). I think the more productive debate between people of more “closed” and “open” temperaments isn’t about whether migration and mixing happened or not (clearly it did), or whether continuity and separation are realities too (they are), but about the relative importance of these factors, and which one we might normatively prefer more or less of.
Jared Diamond mentions in one of his books that when he was in England in the 1950s he would often encounter older people who had spent their entire lives between their village and their market town, maybe with the exception of some military service. And that’s in *England*, the first country to industrialize, as late as the 1950s (and yes I know that JD has serious limitations and has made some big mistakes, but this is his personal experience here, not his historical analysis). If even *there* you had so much continuity and stasis in people’s lives, as recently as all that, then I think it really does underscore how unusual our modern place, time, and social circles might really be.
Just one point: mobility has not gone monotonously up over time. Yes, many people in the early modern period and up until the 19th century were quite sedentary. But it has been estimated that e.g. in 11th century AD Europe, at any given moment 10% of the population was on the move (merchants, soldiers, pilgrims, scholars, beggars etc.). Things settled down later. Similarly, it is plausible from archaeological data that people in the palaeolithic traded, migrated, married and communicated over longer distances than in the neolithic.
Just one point: mobility has not gone monotonously up over time
Oh, I don’t disagree at all! Closer to our own time, the collapse of empires and rise of nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, in a lot of situations, has led communities and societies to become more self-segregated (sometimes through choice, sometimes through violence, sometimes in between).
Those two ideas (gradients and Blond Spaniards) are not immediately following from one another. Just because there are gradients of genetic marker distributions now and there were gradients of those same markers in the past doesn’t mean the distribution is the same. We can for certain expect that after the mutation for blond hair arose, it diffused through the population gradually and that includes spreading across borders or ethnic/tribal lines, but that diffusion process would take many generations and of course while not completely constrained, be shaped by the movement (or restriction of movement) of peoples. So it’s not an implausible position to claim both that there might have been a small fraction of blond people in Spain already when the Romans conquered it, but also that the movement of the Visigothic peoples into the region did cause that fraction to increase markedly.
I wrote: “people affirm that blond Spaniards are evidence of the Visigothic immigration”. They aren’t, by themselves. You can of course investigate if the distribution of MCR variants was actually different before vs. after the 5th century AD. You can’t simply compare pre-Roman to sub-Roman and medieval times, since there was certainly a huge amount of gene flow during the empire (veterans, slaves, other migrants).
I would be very interested in such a comparison. AFAIK the available data show a tiny contribution (<2%) from 5th century migrations. That is entirely compatible with the historical sources mentioning about 50 000 Visigoths, while archaeologists suggest there were maybe 2 million people in late-imperial Iberia already.
Of course, this is just one example. My intention is to make it clear that somebody who assumes large numbers of migrants needs to prove and not just assume them.
Your blond Spaniards example is actually a very good one. I have written a blog post on the subject from a Germanic point of view:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/The-blonde-and-blue-eyed-myth/#wbb1
Thanks for an informative article. Talking about migrations through, I always wonder how does the logistics of migration for agricultural people work? Today if I move to a new city for long term I would need to make sure I can find/have a job there, and rent for housing, but I doubt the migrants moving from Germania into Gaul in the year 200 BC would even know what’s there beyond “there are probably farmable land there” and have to pack everything from tools to seed grain. How do large group of migrants get their food stuff? Trade with the local farmers?
Extending from this, there was extensive Germanic migration during the Roman Republic and Empire era. One of the example being the Helvetii migration that eventually caused the Roman conquest of Gaul. From what I know these are whole tribe migrations, perhaps of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands moving at once. How do logistics of these migration work as they are comparable to large armies? Do they “forage” as they go? I can’t imagine the sheer difficulty getting that large a group, many of which are old or young, when getting a normal army moving is hard enough as per previous blogs on logistics.
I was just going to mention the Helvetii for a different reason: according to Caesar, they burned their current homes and fields in the Alps to force all members of the gens to migrate together. That would mean they left an empty region behind, to be filled by new settlers. Not a very common occurrence, but the area of modern Greater Poland is devoid of human traces from the 5th century AD, and that of modern Serbia and Montenegro of traces from the 7th century, according to Florin Curta.
Maybe the population as a whole wouldn’t have known the contents of Gaul, but it’s unlikely verging on impossible that there weren’t trade links between such immediate neighbours. Off the top of my head, the existence of amber artifacts from ancient Gaul reflects the movement of that material from the Baltic coast, which remains the single largest source of that material by an enormous margin.
As Professor Rincewind teaches, it’s not “running to” that’s important, it’s “running from.”
” Today if I move to a new city for long term I would need to make sure I can find/have a job there, and rent for housing, but I doubt the migrants moving from Germania into Gaul in the year 200 BC would even know what’s there beyond “there are probably farmable land there” and have to pack everything from tools to seed grain.”
This is pure speculation, but I would imagine that, like most modern migrants, ancient migrants were not just striking out into the blue – they had a good idea of where they were going, and they probably knew people there, or people who had been there.
Not so much “I hear there’s good farming land in Gaul. Which way is Gaul? That way? Right, everyone, pack up, start walking the way Olaf is pointing right now, and keep going till it looks Gaulish” – more “OK, everyone, Frideric the pedlar has just come back to town and he says there’s a whole chunk of land over there round Big Square Camp Town that’s basically unoccupied because the inhabitants all fled when the legion left Big Square Camp last year. Good farming land, good grazing for cattle, it’s over the Big River, north round the end of the Pointy Mountains, and then about eight days’ march. He’ll come along and show us where if we feed him and give him a bit of silver.”
Archaeology and modern studies point to migration having a definite pattern: younger men go ahead, establish a presence, scout the opportunities, send back, family elements follow. For large groups the decision is usually preceded by a decade or two of exploration. So they know where thy are going and have some idea of conditions.
Anecdotally, in 1979 I met some guys from a small town in the Punjab who were off to Libya. They had some questions: where was Libya? What language did they speak there? What was the currency? But they were confident that they could fix trucks and wire houses wherever, ND the promised money was good. If it worked out and Libya was congenial, then the friends and siblings would follow …
The stories in Numbers and Joshua about the Israelites entering Canaan follow almost that same pattern. The main difference is the young men didn’t “establish a presence” in either story, unless you count the Joshua story about visiting a prostitute’s house.
It is the problem of logistics which make me doubt the displacement of entire peoples. Even if moving tens or hundreds of thousands of people was theoretically possible it might not have been practical. The only movements of people this scale without engines I know about were armies on the mach. These consisted largely of able-bodied adults. At least there were no elderly or small children to speak of. Either you have them walking though already settled areas acquiring supplies from the locals. “Acquiring” her means robbing, stealing or possibly buying. Or you have those riding lactating mares “on a string” though sparsely populated areas. They both carry some dried foods and eat animals they come across. Neither of these methods is suitable for moving entire peoples the way nationalists imagined.
Without motorised transportation you can’t move entire populations any longer distances. The elderly, small children and those caring for them would hamper movements too much. Even if there are sail-ships you can’t transport more than a few dozen people on each ship. Moreover, the ships themselves need resources to build and equip. Unless these ships could be dragged up on the shore each of them would only hold for a few years.
There were certainly conquering war-bands reaching quite far. However, unless they were followed by a gradual migration of their own cultural group they would be absorbed by the pre-existing one. I imagine groups of dozens of people travelling no further than they can count on having supplies for. They then settle down in a new place previous scouts have pointed out. A few years later a few dozen more settle even further into the same area. So it continues for generations and possibly centuries. Eventually, a new culture has been established there. If its members have something giving them higher social status they can culturally absorb a pre-existing population.
While I completely agree with the overall conclusion that contacts and migrations were complex and population blending was common, the idea that the “migrationists” believe in population migrations that always cause total extermination and replacement of the previous population seems a bit like a strawman fallacy to me.
First of all, while there might be some people who had and still have such views, at least in Russian historiography the idea that Russians emerge as a mixture of migrating Slavs and local Chud’ (=Finno-Ugrian) peoples was well-established even in the 18th century, for example by Lomonosov. He also wrote that it is impossible to claim that any people existed from the beginning by itself without any admixture. As far as I know, there were no claims of the total extermination and replacement of the Finno-Ugrians by the Slavs in Russian historiography, especially since that process of assimilation continued throughout history (and there still are Finno-Ugrian peoples living in Russia). The debates generally were about the peacefulness of this assimilation and the percentage of the Slavic ancestry of modern Russians compared to the Finno-Ugrian ancestry.
Secondly, the major debate in archaeology, as far as I understand, is not happening between the “exterminationists”, who believe in total exterminations, and “blendists”, who believe in migrations causing genetical and cultural blending. It is happening between “migrationists” (or “invasionists”), who suggest that cultural change is often caused by mass migrations and invasions (but do not argue that such migrations cause total extermination of the previous population) and “diffusionist” (or “immobilists”), who claim that cultural change often is caused by cultural diffusion without significant movements of peoples. While diffusionism was relatively popular in 1970s and 80s, since 1990s more and more genetic data is showing that mass migrations indeed occurred.
The spread of agriculture was largely due to migration for the simple reason most hunter-gatherers did not want to become farmers. Later cultural changes were mostly through diffusion although they required a certain minimum amount of migration.
“Eventually, for lack of pay, the regiment effectively collapses – the perennial problem that states in this period had the resources and administration to raise large armies, but not to sustain them – with some portion of the regiment bleeding away and the rest pulled into a new regiment under the command of Alwig von Sulz.”
This was one of the most striking things about “The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road” (an early recommendation here, for which thank you) – I’ve tried to work it into strategic-level wargames, where it has a fascinatingly perverse effect. If you have a rule that to raise a regiment costs, say, 100 crowns, to sustain it costs 20 crowns a year, but to disband it means paying off all its arrears of wages, which could be 300 crowns or more, you rapidly have a very interesting situation where you are forced to continue a war that you would much rather stop, because you simply can’t afford to disband your armies – you just have to keep fighting in the hope that they disband themselves through desertion, or you can sack a city and pay them off with the loot.
There is a reasonable argument in the chapter “War by Contract, Credit and Contribution: The Thirty Years War” in Early Modern Military History, 1450-1815 (ed. Geoff Mortimer, Palgrave 2004) that the Thirty Years war was extended by nearly twenty years due to the inability of any of the involved states to pay off their armies.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230523982_7
Thank you very much – I will look that out.
As that renowned military commentator Edmund Blackadder commented in a different situation, “the real reason for the whole thing was that it was too much effort not to have a war”.
Yep, specifically for Sweden it’s more or less the accepted outcome: The territorial demands were acceeded to relatively early, and the rest was just fighting to be able to afford to stop fighting.
I liked the Spanish garrison company that was reduced over the years to 17 personnel. “But we formed up in the regular way: 5 musketeers to the fore, 9 pikes behind, 4 washerwomen following.”
“What begins to lead scholars to question many (though not all!) of these ‘replacements’ was not ‘wokeness’ but rather archaeology, which offered a way of tracking the presence of cultural signifiers other than language.”
I would urge caution here, and with genetics. These are powerful tools, sure, but with very few exceptions anything humans do can be learned. Making tools is a skill, and if one group of humans can, say, make spears a certain way, there’s nothing stopping someone else from learning how to do it. Rome was notorious for taking other people’s tools and integrating them into their combat systems, for example. This can include customs as well. There are complaints from the settlement of the Americas, for example, that complain about the European colonists “going native”–adopting the habits and customs of native groups, occasionally being adopted into them (I haven’t seen any documents from the American side of this, so I can’t comment on how accepted those people were in the tribes). That’s basically what happened to Roanoke, as far as I can tell from the evidence.
Genetics can be even worse. We don’t look at the full genetic code, we select the pieces we want to look at. Ideally we select pieces that are best suited for the study in question, but….well, sometimes we’re wrong, sometimes there’s other things going on that we’re unaware of (“Science knows it doesn’t know everything, otherwise it’d stop!”), and sometimes the right genes just aren’t available. The problem is that genes can travel beyond where individual people go. Intermarrying along the frontiers is common enough (Rome had laws about it, for example). If you’re born on a frontier town and move to a city and have a kid, and that kid joins the army and ends up in Rome, and he has a kid who ends up in North Africa, suddenly that Germanic gene is floating around Africa. If you’re a slave that’s purchased five or six times, and bred a few times along the way, your genes can be scattered across a fairly wide area (when discussing the evidence we need to be unflinching in our acceptance of the facts; ignoring transmission vectors because they’re icky is not appropriate and, frankly, is a disservice to those who suffered those fates).
The other thing I always stress with genetics is that we only have the genes we have to work with. Maybe not as big an issue with archeology, but it’s a fatal flaw in paleontology. Genetics gives the impression of precision, but when you’re missing 95% of the system in question that’s nothing more than an illusion. Genetics can give you a fairly precise view of the available genetic information, but ONLY of the available genetic information; any genes that don’t survive to be sampled are invisible to this assessment. Which means that it’s likely that genetic evidence is under-estimating things to a significant degree. It should be treated as a lower limit, not an absolute answer.
I know researchers are aware of this–I’ve seen studies comparing genetic, morphological, and other data specifically to test these impacts, for example. But it’s important to acknowledge the limitations of our tools.
It is certainly at least as important to be cautious with genetic as with other studies. You write “We don’t look at the full genetic code, we select the pieces we want to look at.” That is true for many studies, especially with ancient DNA, but also simply for cost reasons: the authors select positions in the genome they want to study and order a chip with these positions that will enrich fragments of the DNA they are interested in, instead of reading all the rest they don’t want to look at.
However, when the sample DNA is plentiful and well-conserved enough and/or when the group has considerable time to dedicate to getting it right, it is possible to do whole-genome sequencing, and its price went down precipitously over the 21st century. With a whole genome, the bias you are speaking about goes away.
“With a whole genome, the bias you are speaking about goes away.”
ONE of the biases I was talking about goes away IF we limit ourselves to only living organisms AND well-funded studies–a condition which is not the case in many archeological studies.
Once you add dead people to the list (or dead anything, but archeology focuses on people) you have all the issues of taphonomy to deal with, which limits which genes you can actually study. Organic compounds in phoso-aragonite leach out of the inorganic matrix due to pedogenic processes; teeth can help, but aren’t proof against loss. If you have a broad enough sample size that may not matter (assuming that you don’t have any weirdness in the sample unaccounted for in your understanding of the site), but that’s often cost-prohibitive. Studies of extant people can give you a reasonable working hypothesis, but due to the other issues with genetic studies any such conclusion must be treated as tentative, pending support from the rock record. You can’t make assessments of changes through time without factoring in time; history has shown again and again that reality is weirder than we suppose.
As for cost, even cheap stuff can be cost prohibitive. The reality is that most sciences are under-funded. You get a few super-expensive projects, like the space telescopes and supercolliders, but for most studies the budget is somewhere between shoestring and “What do you mean you need to eat?” Even with the reduced costs whole genome testing is often a pipe dream. If you can run genetic analysis at all you may be limited to selecting genes.
And even if you do whole-genome studies it doesn’t negate the biases involved with information not amenable to genetic studies. In other words: If there’s no genes available to study the population is invisible. It presents extreme limitations on genetic studies in paleontology, where whole phyla may be absent from the study. Archeology, being more recent, has less problems with this, but it’s still a problem. This is compounded by known problems of sampling in archeology, which means that we don’t always know exactly what all we have (see discussions of how to count bodies if you’re curious about one such issue).
It’s also worth pointing out that whole-genome analysis will add a bunch of spurious data and noise to the study. Looking at specific genetic markers isn’t bad–IF those markers are selected to bear on the problem at hand. The issue is that populations don’t just get invaded by one group; there’s genetic exchange with many groups, as well as mutations and drift and all the rest. (What do you do with mitochondria?) Often looking at specific genetic markers is the right call because it limits the amount of noise you have to wade through in order to get to the answer you’re after. Requires a bit of setup, sure, but that’s every study; someone who says “Let’s just analyze the whole genome and see what happens” is someone who probably shouldn’t be allowed to run loose in an archeology department without adult supervision.
I’m not saying that genetic studies are bad. I’m certainly not saying they’re worthless. They are an extremely powerful tool. However, like all powerful tools, people tend to think it’s more powerful than it actually is.
I don’t disagree with you at all! There are many, many sources of bias in genetic studies, as in all studies.
Wrt money, my involvement with genetics was in Pääbo’s lab, which was super funded, to put it mildly, which allowed them do whole genomes of Neandertals and Denisovan(s). And still, while with humans you don’t really have the problem of missing individual genes, you continue to have the problem of missing samples when the conditions weren’t perfectly right (everywhere that wasn’t arctic…).
I think it’s odd to focus upon genetic replacement as being something invariably appealing to right-wing reactionaries. In fact, in many cases I’ve encountered the strongest right-wingers among those who gesture at “population continuity.”
Particularly among North Macedonian and Turkish nationalists who will reject the notion their population is foreign to Anatolia/ the Balkans; as in having arrived within the last millennium or so when they (the Slavs and Turks respectively) invaded and displaced the Greek population. This is largely true actually, the genetic admixture between “Slavic” North Macadonians and “Turkic” Turks with Greeks is quite remarkable, especially considering the hatred between the respective sides.
For every nationalist that wants to reject connections with foreign cultures there’s another nationalist who wants to argue their culture and people’s long-standing presence within the region.
AIUI, though, American racists and antiracists alike regard Greeks as white and Turks as not, because the Turks are pretty exclusively Muslim. And clearly they way Americans view them is far more important than they way they view themselves. At least to Americans.
George Nader, Lebanese-American from a Christian family and person generally understood as someone you’d be embarrassed to be associated with even if you agree with him, is not normally considered White by Americans. Ralph Nader, Lebanese-American from a Christian family and person generally understood as someone you’d be proud to be associated with even if you disagree with him, is normally considered White by Americans. American racism is incoherent along with it’s other features.
You’re not wrong about the incoherence. In this case it should be noted that:
1) George Nader was born in Lebanon; Ralph Nader was born in Connecticut.
2) George Nader has an extended history of working with and on behalf of foreign agents; Ralph Nader’s career focused mainly on domestic political affairs.
3) George Nader has an extended history of, shall we say, involvement in the ghastly mistreatment of children; Ralph Nader has so far as I know given no such reasons to ‘disown’ him.
@Simon,
I have no idea who George Nader is (i guess I’m lucky), but like on the thread the previous week, I’ll not that “how to classify Middle Eastern / North African people on the US Census” is currently a hot topic of controversy in the United States. They’re currently officially considered a subgroup of ‘White’, but the Census Bureau seriously considered changing that and giving them their own racial category before the 2020 Census. It didn’t happen then, for reasons that are unclear to me, but will probably happen evenetually.
For every nationalist that wants to reject connections with foreign cultures there’s another nationalist who wants to argue their culture and people’s long-standing presence within the region.
I think this is exactly right. Without getting into the “right wing” terminology (not all of these political tendencies are right-wing, and especially outside “the West”, political allegiances often don’t follow the same left vs. right lines that they do in America), I think it’s very true that *some* nationalists have national myths of conquest and replacement, while others emphasize continuity of ancestry, indigeneity, and continuous lines of descent and ancestry from the first inhabitants. This *might* line up with the difference between “nations who have in recent centuries/decades been ruling over other peoples” and “nations which have in recent centuries been ruled over by others”, I can certainly think of examples like that, but maybe it doesn’t hold as a general rule.
This is not my area of expertise or an area with which I have personal experience, for example, but I do talk about this stuff often with a Eastern European guy who has done some historical research and published a book on the topic (not in English), and he argues that while Hungarian nationalists often stress their descent from the Magyar steppe conquerors, Slovak nationalism right next door takes the opposite point of view and stresses their autochthonous ancestry and indigeneity to the region. If this is true (again, i’m certainly not an expert or for that matter even any sort of European, eastern or western), it would sort of make sense to me that they would have conflicting national myths, considering that Slovak nationalism in the 19th c developed largely *in opposition* to Hungarian domination.
Bret is an American intellectual of course and writing in a US context, so I would bet that the “nationalists” he has in mind . A right-wing (white) US superpatriot, of course, doesn’t have even the arguable claim that a Peruvian indigenous nationalist or a Slovak nationalist or a Tamil nationalist might have to “my ancestors were here for over 1000 years” or “I’m descended from the first people to live here”. All US citizens, unless you actually have a significant amount of Native American descent (and not that many of us do) have to come to terms with the fact that America is founded on displacing native peoples. So I can easily see why someone who wants to persuade themselves that America never did anything wrong might also want to believe that that kind of wholesale displacement and elimination of native peoples is just a normal, acceptable, “usual” kind of historical process.
If I understand it correctly Hungarians and Slovaks are genetically very similar. The Hungarians only have more admixture from those Medieval “steppe conquerors”.
If I understand it correctly Hungarians and Slovaks are genetically very similar.
Yes, I know, my point is that in spite of the overlap in the genetics, (as I understand it) their national myths tend to stress different elements of heritage. Foreign steppe ancestry for Hungarians, indigenous ancestry for Slovaks.
“For every nationalist that wants to reject connections with foreign cultures there’s another nationalist who wants to argue their culture and people’s long-standing presence within the region.”
I don’t particularly think this is a logical flaw in the argument of nationalism (not that you were necessarily suggesting it was).
The principle tenet of Nationalism is ‘We should have rights and privileges that They do not’, because we are ‘We’ and they are ‘They’.
How ‘We’ and ‘They’ are defined differs in each particular context, depending on which groups have got the upper hand in terms of who ‘We’ is, and what arguments they’ve used to define it. And because ‘We’ is a social construct, it can be built on pretty much any foundation you want to. The foundation doesn’t even need to be logically coherent. It just needs to persuade enough people that we are ‘We’ and they are ‘They’, and that those two groups should be treated differently.
It depends very, very heavily on which nationalist groups one has the most contact with. Naturally, an English-speaking American historian will have the most contact with the kind of far-right nationalists and racial supremacists who themselves speak English and live in America.
When my daily newspaper called Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “the World’s most easily offended White man” I considered it a sign of progress that ethnic Turks are now considered White.
My dear author, I have enough knowledge of the King-Emperor Charles’ legacy and European history to find the fact that a German regiment was recruited to fight for the Spanish crown in a war intended to kick what we’d now call the Kingdom of the Netherlands into line by sitting on a certain number of Italians (and/or kicking THEM into line too) far less shocking than being go made aware that there was an Actual Historic Person called ‘Wolfgang Von Mansfield’.
So help me God, that name sounds like the sort of appellation a 1980s/1990s comedy would use to indicate that a Rock and Roll star was overcompensating for having been born ‘Joe Smith’.
The Mansfeld family was longstanding Saxonian nobility whose members made it all the way to governor of Luxembourg under the Habsburgs and, later, mercenary warlords (like the infamous Ernst von Mansfeld) in service to the Protestant side of the 30 Years War.
Wait your blog suffered because of your workload and we still ended up with a ’15 minute’-long, according to WordPress, post?
How do you succeed in writing this much?
Outside of your the writing you need to do for school you are also writing books; so how fast do you need to write to produce this much output?
And then to think you also find the time to play those computer games you have reviewed here so isn’t as if you use all your free time for writing…
Ok, I suppose that for this blog not much time is needed for research, as being a historian you likely already know most of what you are writing here; you likely also have the advantage of being an experienced writer; and maybe also spent less time than me paranoidly (re)going over your writing looking for missed spelling and grammar errors.
However, even so your writing output is still surprisingly high.
” Indeed, their racially exclusive imperial regimes almost require such an (inaccurate) vision of humanity”
Joseph Conrad fans might recall that Marlow in Heart of Darkness draws a direct analogy between the Roman conquest of his homeland in ages past, and the contemporary European conquest of Africa.
Except that Marlowe thinks the conquest of his ancestors was a good thing. If he follows the Golden Rule, what should he conclude about the conquest of Africa?
So I don’t see why Marlowe, or anyone else in Western Europe, needed this vision to justify imperialism at all. The Romans had already given them their justification, if they need only to justify things to themselves.
The suppression of slavery was also a justification, as I recall, and if we don’t think that a credible justification for conquest, that raises some very awkward questions about the Union cause during the American Civil War, not to mention the activities of the British West Africa squadron.
And it was a fact of life that contemporary population movements were driven by the balance of superior and inferior organisation, subsistence’s regimes, technology and disease resistance. Why would they not expect things to be similar in the past?
Now I find myself wondering how that such 19th century colonialists would have reacted to technologically advanced extraterrestrials showing up and declaring that they are ‘more civilised’ than all those ‘barbaric’ Earthling countries…
Though, for the analogy to fit well it need to be ‘human aliens’; like in, for example, those stories in which Atlantians had escaped the destruction of their island in spaceships and have now returned to Earth…
“The War of the Worlds” makes a similar analogy and is very much not shy about it. “I know authors who use subtext and they’re ALL COWARDS”. Though the Martians are just here to exterminate and colonise rather than to civilise. Inspired by the Australians committing genocide in Tasmania.
I admit I am having trouble thinking of SF novels that fit that exact pattern. Arthur C Clarke’s “Childhood’s End” has a very positive view of a ‘civilising mission’ to Earth but it isn’t an invasion by force. Contact Section in Iain M Banks’ “The State of the Art” considers intervening on Earth but in the end decides not to. The Marvel Comics films have something similar but it’s by the super-advanced dictatorship of Wakanda (basically Comics North Korea) rather than by actual aliens. All those in any case are 20th century rather than 19th.
Speaking of Iain M. Banks, he coined “Outside Context Problem” for “the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.”
A concept he developed, he said, after spending far too long playing Civilisation – the moment when your Bronze Age empire with its Chariots and Phalanxes and City Walls suddenly notices a couple of Ironclads off its coast.
See also the fictional game DESPOT, which one of the characters in Complicity is obsessed with… in the early 90s it sounded far too advanced to be real, but it’s basically a Paradox game!
Err, if I recall the Wikipedia article of that book correctly the Overlords very much had ulterior motives they had not told humanity about; to the point that they stood by and watched as Earth was destroyed.
So, I doubt that would count as an example of what TVTropes would call a ‘Benevolent Alien Invasion’
The Overlords have a kind of ulterior motive: To shepherd humanity towards its next stage of evolution. In doing so “current” humanity ends up extinct, but our children ends up ascending into a psionic god-mind.
Well, it’s the exact opposite of what we’re talking about; it’s not a benevolent invasion, it’s a non-benevolent non-invasion (inasmuch as an invasion has to be forceful).
I’ve had a look at the TVTropes page – hadn’t thought of that – and it’s interesting how few straight examples there are. Many, many subverted examples, of course.
“They stood by and watched as the Earth was destroyed”
There’s a way to frame this as to imply that the destruction of the Earth was a thing harmful to humanity, and an accurate way to convey that it takes place within a context of an ascended humanity departing the Earth and requiring a power source.
Whoops, I just remembered that I had yesterday forgotten to also reply to this part of your comment.
Em, I don’t think the American Civil War makes a good comparison to those parts of colonialism where ‘the suppression of slavery’ was used as one of the justifications (or excuses in some other cases).
Among others, the ACW was a, well, Civil War against secessionists instead of an attempt to impose control on previously independent territories.
Also the rebel states were reintegrated into the Union as legally equal with their inhabitants (re)gaining citizenship, to the point that the former elites, poorly enough for the freed slaves, managed to regain control of local governments. Which was very different from how the British Empire ruled, say, Malaysia.
I vaguely recall reading that the British in their blockade of Africa also targeting the slave trades of other countries, from Brazil to Spain, had during that time period been a violation of international law.
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Hmm, on another note, this made me wonder whether it would have been possible to suppress slavery without colonialism. IIRC, international pressure was enough for the Ottoman Empire to abolish its own slave trade and later also internal slavery; though, I am only a layman, maybe that was exceptional and unlikely to work in other circumstances.
Then there is also indirect rule/vassalage, which I suppose could also be used to suppress slavery. Though, that is more like ‘less intense colonialism’ than ‘no colonialism’.
“Among others, the ACW was a, well, Civil War against secessionists ”
So was every War of Independence ever waged, from the viewpoint of the evil moustache-twirling imperialists.
And “international pressure” on the Ottoman Empire included support for heroic noble freedom fighters/ evil traitor secessionists, and the conquest of quite large portions of the Empire by other Empires.
In any event, my point was not that Marlowe was right, just that he needed no particular theory of racial superiority to justify an African conquest. He can do it perfectly well if he assumes the Africans are exactly the same as his own ancestors.
Most secessionist movements aren’t sparked by forms of ‘oppression’ along the lines of “we just lost an election and we’re worried that the new government might make it less economical to own slaves by blocking expansion of slavery to new territories.” The Confederate States of America were rather unusual in this regard, and arguments that airbrush out this unusual feature of their rebellion as compared to other historical rebellions are at best poor history and at worst a means of whitewashing the actions of a willfully malicious regime.
It’s a bit like painting Mao Zedong as an “agrarian reformer” who only meant well for the people of China.
At least in peacetime there is nothing more dangerous then misdirected benevolence. Do I have to tell more?
“Also the rebel states were reintegrated into the Union as legally equal with their inhabitants (re)gaining citizenship, to the point that the former elites, poorly enough for the freed slaves, managed to regain control of local governments. Which was very different from how the British Empire ruled, say, Malaysia.”
It’s actually pretty similar to how the British Empire ruled Malaysia (or as it was then the Straits Settlements/Malay States) – the settlement inhabitants were legally British subjects, with exactly the same legal status (rights of residency etc) as British subjects born in Liverpool, and the former elites, the sultans, were left in charge of local governments in the States.
@ajay,
Malaysia is interesting also because they actually do have a significant “settler” population, it’s just that the settlers aren’t Europeans. (they’re Chinese and to a lesser extent South Asian). I’m not sure how much of the migration happened during the British colonial period versus before that, though, but my general understanding is the British did encourage it.
I think that almost all the migration is after the British arrival – though there were Chinese traders in Malacca under the Portuguese and the Dutch. A lot of 19th century Chinese immigrants came as traders or miners; the 19th century Indians were mostly labourers from the south of the country.
@Tus3,
Leaving aside international pressure, industrialization was also a powerful factor that made slavery less attractive, so maybe as the developing world gradually industrialized they would have gotten rid of slavery without western influence at all. I guess we’ll never know, since there is no alternative world where colonialism didn’t happen, but count me pretty skeptical of the good intentions of British and American interventionism.
Ehm, I myself am sceptical of arguments that ‘slavery and industrialization are incompatible’.*
Nonetheless, I do agree that absent any European colonialism or even direct pressure to abolish slavery it is indeed plausible that (most of?) the rest of the world ends up abolishing slavery; though, for very different reasons.
I am very much a layman when it comes to history; however, I had read of several cases of conscious anti-slavery ideology/attitudes emerging without European influence: some Indian cultures near the North-American Pacific Coast**; a Chinese Emperor who had abolished slavery, but poorly enough it had not stuck; some Jewish sect in the Roman Levant; and another example from Sub-Saharan Africa. Presumably, there are even more examples I am unaware of.
Not to mention that ideas are perfectly capable of spreading without requiring any violence or other pressure. Look at for example, the admiration some Enlightenment philosophers had for Confucianism or the spread of Indian philosophies in South-East Asia.
So, in a world in which all new colonialism was somehow halted past the date Britain had abolished slavery in its colonies in the West Indies; it’d still expect abolitionist ideas to emerge/become more powerful in the rest of the world, even absent any forceful European influence.
Possibly, local abolitionist would become influential enough to defeat slavery in most of the world; though, as a layman, I haven’t the faintest idea how (un)likely that would be. Those local abolitionists could also point at the British abolition as successful example of getting rid of slavery, even if only in the vein of ‘they got rid of slavery and are fine’; though once again I don’t know whether that would matter in practice.
However, it might not happen everywhere. For example, some parts of the Islamic world, like Saudi-Arabia had only abolished slavery in the sixties; without international pressure it might take even longer.
* At the start of the American Civil War the CSA was, whilst less industrialized than the Union, still one of the most industrialized countries in the world.
They even had factories manned by slaves; admittedly that was a rather marginal phenomenon, but I had the impression that had more to do with the sheer profitability of cotton plantations driving up slave prices and drawing slaves from industry. I had been told that whenever the Antebellum South had a ‘cotton bust’ slave manufacturing had a boom, through such mechanisms as plantation owners renting out their slaves to manufacturers.
The CSA still had, but mostly would later have had it survived, a variety of disadvantages when it came to industrialization because of its specific form of slavery; however, I doubt that those would be enough to doom slave-driving powers in a world without abolitionist powers to target them.
** Though, if I recall the ‘Dawn of Everything’*** correctly they did have an institution of debt slavery. However, they nonetheless consciously rejected the slave-raiding ways of their northern neighbours.
*** Whilst the authors had in that book spread lots of obvious nonsense about subjects outside their fields; I had been told the anthropology in it was excellent, even by people who complained about aforementioned, so I assume that part of it was accurate at least.
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I also received other replies I considered writing back too; however, I have other things to do, so I’d decided to just leave them.
I’d also note that the Saudis still have a practice of indentured servitude, which the British also experimented with in their transition from slavery.
Personally I’m a little sceptical of the ability of abolitionist movements to be widely successful across the globe. The issue is not making the argument of ‘the British managed it and they were fine’, it’s that of removing the wealth and power of specific very wealthy very powerful people within society (those slaveholders). It’s not an argument of logic that is needed to persuade these people, because the continuation of their wealth and power relies on them doggedly refusing to agree that your logic makes sense. It’s a political power struggle.
Perhaps that logic can be used to leverage other powerful members/groups of society to force the issue through (even better if their interests are slightly at odd with the slaveholders), but you’re going up against the influence and power of very wealthy very powerful people. That’s not to say that it’s not achievable, or even achievable en-masse, but it’s a difficult fight with a very uncertain likelihood of success.
Incidentally, this is likely the main reason the British paid off their former slaveholders with compensation. The single most effective argument those slaveholders had against the British government was something along the lines of ‘the government’s stealing our hard-earned money…and they’ll do it to you next!‘. Leveraging the profits of empire to compensate them quite effectively knocks the wind out of that particular argument.
Note that this doesn’t justify that ‘profit of empire’ just because some of it was used for a good purpose, but it does complicate the matter.
The existence of modern sweat shops should absolutely discredit the notion that you can utilise slaves in mechanised industry.
“The existence of modern sweat shops should absolutely discredit the notion that you cannot utilise slaves in mechanised industry.”
Absolutely agree. (I assume you meant ‘cannot’ there.)
Or, to put it even more vividly; the first space rockets in history were built by slave labour. Yes, you can use slaves in industry.
Though I think that the counterargument is that industrialisation makes slavery less attractive, not that it makes it impossible. And, while slave labour will always be less efficient, I suspect that the difference grows as the work becomes more technical. An enslaved labourer might pick 90% as much cotton as a free labourer working for a salary, but I think an enslaved industrial chemist will be much less than 90% as effective as a free industrial chemist.
Though I think that the counterargument is that industrialisation makes slavery less attractive, not that it makes it impossible
Right, this was exactly my point. I don’t think industrialization and slavery are incompatible. As you and @Tus point out, both the US Confederacy and Nazi Germany were great counterexamples. I do think industrialization *militates against* slavery- it shifts the balance between “reason to abolish it” and “reason to have it”, and makes the “con” side stronger. But, of course, in any particular case, a state might still decide to have slavery.
but I think an enslaved industrial chemist will be much less than 90% as effective as a free industrial chemist.
Also even the free industrial chemists in such a society are probably going to be angry at the government and a potential source of dissent and unrest, because they don’t want to have to compete with slave labor.
@Ynneadwraith
Depends on how important slavery is.
In China slavery had always been a marginal phenomenon; so I don’t expect great opposition to abolition to be present there, should an influential abolitionist movement emerge there. I had the impression that slavery also was a marginal phenomenon in India; though, being a layman I could be wrong about that.
Moreover, even in societies where slavery had been important there nonetheless fortunately were governments who had succeeded in abolishing it; for example, Brazil.
However, IIRC, in Brazil the monarchy abolishing slavery was one of the causes of their overthrow and the subsequent creation of the oligarchical republic. I fear that many other regimes would not risk that.
@ajay
I suspect the difference could be much smaller than 90%, depending on the specific type of slavery.
The Greco-Romans had successfully used slaves in such skilled professions as scribe, doctor, gold-smith, business management, banking, and even supervising other slaves.
Note, I would not expect such a thing to work in a surviving CSA; there it was even forbidden to teach slaves literacy out of fear of them rebelling.
However, in the 19th century there were still other slave-driving states. Brazil’s system of slavery much more closely approximated the Roman one; for example, there were slaves who themselves owned sub-slaves and it was possible for former slaves to themselves become part of the slavedriving elite. I had been told Imperial Brazil even had a black baron who owned plantations manned by hundreds of slaves: ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Paulo_de_Almeida,_Baron_of_Guaraciaba )
So, if not a surviving CSA, maybe a Brazil in which slavery was not abolished could pull such things of as using slaves in high-value manufacturing.
Yes, I agree; however, I am unsure how strong that effect is. It might be much smaller than usually assumed.
That assumes that there will be heavy competition between free and slave labour; which I don’t think can be taken for granted.
I suspect that slave labour would be drawn to jobs which are unpleasant (dirty, dangerous, having inconvenient hours, demeaning, and so on) and for which free labour would thus demand high wages relative to the required skill level. Even within a single firm I’d expect slaves to be given more unpleasant work than free workers, holding everything else constant.
This might lead to free workers defending slavery; fearing that if the slaves are freed they might be forced to either accept lower wages, from competition from freed slaves moving into less unpleasant jobs, or themselves having to such jobs as sewer cleaner. I had been told there were urban whites in the CSA which supported slavery for such reasons; they feared that if the slaves were freed they would leave the plantations for the cities and would attempt to ‘steal their jobs’.
Though, there of course also were plenty of instances of common people supporting the rights of others, even if that went against their (perceived) interests. So they might still end up opposing slavery.
However, thinking about it, I might be overestimating the wage premium of such ‘unpleasant’ jobs; if it is small, or even tiny, such positions might draw only marginally more slave labour to themselves than other jobs.
I had the impression that slavery also was a marginal phenomenon in India; though, being a layman I could be wrong about that.
Slavery certainly existed in South Asia, in both Hindu and Muslim contexts (it was abolished in Nepal only in the 1920s). Like you, though, I don’t know how quantitatively significant or economically important it was. In one instance I read about, enslavement was the penalty for sexually transgressive women (women and men in this society were allowed to have multiple partners, but only within their caste, sex with someone outside your caste was the transgression they were concerned with). That kind of slavery clearly existed for social rather than economic reasons, so it seems like it would have been immune to pressures from industrialization or other economic factors.
Slavery existed in Nazi Germany for the purpose of working certain groups (ethnic minorities, prostitutes, gay men, political opponents) literarily to death. These people were also starved resulting in them working much worse than free employees. It is estimated the V-2 killed more people through its making than through its use. So the Nazis using slave labour does not demonstrate the viability of slavery in an industrial society.
>The suppression of slavery was also a justification,
>as I recall, and if we don’t think that a credible
>justification for conquest, that raises some very
>awkward questions about the Union cause during
>the American Civil War, not to mention the activities
>of the British West Africa squadron.
I’m not sure the ‘awkward questions’ actually do materialize. Suppression of the slave trade entails different things at different points along the trade route. The British West Africa Squadron could disrupt the slave trade by simply stopping ships loaded with slaves or raiding points along the coast where inland parties of slave-takers exchanged their captives with foreign slave traders.
Likewise, in the American Civil War, the fact that the Confederate cause was “rebel against government to ensure that the institution of slavery remains intact” and the Union cause was “prevent that from happening” and eventually “abolish slavery in the process” makes things very different from the argument “conquer that city-state over there, they practice slavery!” A justification for abolishing slavery within one’s own polity and for fighting a war to prevent separatists from ignoring the outcome of an election as soon as the antislavery crowd wins may exist. It does not require similar justification for conquering and violently subjugating everyone who lives in a nation on another continent and who happen to practice slavery.
Especially since such colonial conquests can involve making the free population of the conquered region into semi-free or unfree labor; no one was “liberated” by the Belgian conquest of the Congo.
I suspect part of the trouble with “population replacement” is that typical humans have a sort of fascination about the idea. Of course, in the Bad Old Days, you needed to carefully watch out for population replacement events that you were on the losing end of. But there’s been lots of ethnic cleansing over the centuries, so it’s not that irrational.
But consider how athletic contests often get tinged with an air of utter destruction. I live in Boston, and the Boston Patriots just lost the Super Bowl, and there’s an air of mourning, like we are Carthage and the Romans have just sown the fields with salt, rather than “We ultimately got to play one of the very best teams in the NFL and regrettably weren’t quite good enough to win.”
>> Of course, in the Bad Old Days, you needed to carefully watch out for population replacement events that you were on the losing end of. But there’s been lots of ethnic cleansing over the centuries, so it’s not that irrational.
Literally the entire point of this article is that no, there wasn’t. A few occasionally, but not “lots”.
I think Worley was referring to 19th-20th century happenings (ranging from population swaps to downright atrocities) that did in fact result in actual durable population replacement in various parts of the world. Precisely the times in which the (wrong) belief about past replacements Bret criticizes was dominant in Europe.
?
I thought that was actually mostly an ‘Anglo’-thing?
For example, I recall having read that in the French New World colonies there were complex racial dynamics with complicated relationships between the white elite, mixed-race Creoles (often distant relatives of white planters), and poor whites.
With Creole families sometimes having good relations with white elite families, though despite that the latter were still racist against the former, just less than to full blacks; such Creoles could also achieve a higher status than poor whites, which the latter greatly resented.
However, I don’t know how much of that held in French colonies outside of the New World.
As far as I know, in the 18th century the British were not particularly opposed to the ‘race mixing’ either. For example, both sir William Johnson, 1st Baronet, and George Croghan were married (or at least had long-term relationships and children with) Iroquois women. And the East India Company initially encouraged its employees to marry local women. The discrimination against the descendants of these mixed marriages in India started only in the end of the 18th century during the Cornwallis reforms, and such marriages were completely banned in the 19th century after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
“I thought that was actually mostly an ‘Anglo’-thing?”
And a Chinese thing under the Qing, if I remember. There were fairly strict rules about intermarriage between the ruling Manchu and their Han subjects.
Probably out of fear they would be culturally absorbed by the Chinese like the Mongol conquerors before them.
Race-mixing is not incompatible with a colour bar or prejudice. It was common in the US (if coerced on the part of the slaves), there remains an Anglo-Indian community in India, most aboriginal Australians have some ‘white’ ancestry (again coerced) and so on.
Yep. Just take a look at the dizzying array of lingering colonial prejudice in former Spanish colonies in the Americas (which otherwise seemed much more willing to intermix with native and imported African populations). My impression is that it’s not quite as severe as in places like the States and Australia, but it’s not non-existent either.
It seems that racial prejudice in places with significant population intermixing often takes the form of gradients rather than hard-cutoffs. It’s less super-segregated like the USA’s racial schema (i.e. you’re either white, brown, black or ‘hispanic’…and any mix of those is a sort of weird non-category that people don’t really know what to do with). It’s more of an ‘X is whiter than Y who is whiter than Z’ situation.
You see this come out in things like employment, with higher ranking positions becoming increasingly whiter as you go up.
Even in the States, there seems to have been more nuance to it at a certain point in the past, particularly as regards things like the children of white men and (enslaved) black women (and extending into their own descendants as such children would tend to marry other white people). The specifics of American racial politics, especially after abolition of slavery, seem to be at the root of flattening that into something like a one drop rule.
Ehm, considering that Bret Devereaux had in one of his earlier blog posts complained about ‘Confederate planter elites raping their slaves’, he is well aware of that; and possibly also of the other examples you provided.
So, presumably with ‘regarding race mixing as unacceptable’ he was referring to such things as ‘anti-miscegenation laws’ and so on.
Though, that makes me wonder how good the other British colonised places fitted into that pattern.
From George Orwell’s Burmese DaysI have the impression that in the British Raj, even when marrying local women was not done it was still tolerated of colonial officials to have a native mistress. However, it was a piece of fiction, so I am not sure if it was accurate on that field.
It sounds like agricultural societies don’t tend to engage in extermination campaigns against other agricultural societies. Which makes a lot of sense to me both in terms of what they want and what they can do; Conquerors would probably rather expand their own status and resource base by slotting themselves into the top of an extractive heirarchy rather than leave room which their home country’s peasants could breed to fill a few generations down the line, and pre-modern armies just didn’t have the manpower and force multipliers to wipe out the entire population of a newly conquered region.
Heck, even the colonial powers, operating with a much larger technological advantage, still settled for conquest and extraction, just crueler, greedier, and with more separation.
Swords and spears can definitely kill people even if they resist. Not just nearly as quickly as modern automatic and semi-automatic weapons.