In Lineages of Modernity, Emanual Todd argues that England was the first modern liberal democratic country, because the kind of hierarchical agragrian society that took over the entire world only developed late there, so people had still more of a hunter-gatherer egalitarian spirit.
By what measure was England the first liberal democratic country? There are earlier republics than England and earlier countries with election process than England?
While the country was not a republic right away these revolutionary events lead to a de facto rule by parliament and earlier I think than any other country I can think of (though how that parliament was voted for and who got to vote is another story)
There are many examples of countries run by a republic of the elites that predate modern England. Venice, Greece, various Indian city states. You can always draw distinctions between them, but they don't seem fundamental.
> But I think they were the first to kill their king „in the name of the people“ (1649)
I suppose Tarquinius Superbus was exiled instead of executed, but 509 BC (in the traditional chronology, anyway) for the overthrow of the Roman kingdom sounds a little earlier than 1649.
Maybe my hunter-gatherer egalitarianism is clouding my views, but this sounds tendentious to me. The English descended from waves of European conquerors and settlers (and even the Celts are generally considered to be migrant agriculturalists), and with habits like city-dwelling and being fearsome warriors instead of serfs dying out in mere generations at various points in our history, it's hard to imagine that we've somehow absorbed more cues from a little-known Early Neolithic culture we might not even share much genetic material with. Not to mention a whole bunch of more directly relevant quirks like assembling a mighty navy, colonising half the rest of the world, dispensing with Catholicism early and inventing modern capitalism came precisely because our society was so hierarchical.
Modern capitalism was not invented by the British. It was invented by Italian people and Catholic religious orders. The British adopted the system and amplified it, just like the Industrialisation that came from the Netherlands.
The British made most of their capital(that financed industrialisation) from slavery trade and piracy in the Atlantic. It made huge profits and industrialisation paid off giving multiples of the inputs for the first time in History.
That also financed the "colonising of half of the world". But this colonisation came very late.
>dispensing with Catholicism early and inventing modern capitalism came precisely because our society was so hierarchical.
I am reading a book that argues that Europe's success comes from all the competence of different powers fighting each other and none of them taking over the others.
The Muslims and later the Ottoman empire tried to take over Europe.
The Spanish or Napoleon tried to take over Europe and UK, but they could not, because the others joined against them. Napoleon tried to conquer Russia. Then the British tried to take over as well. Austria, Bismarck and Hitler tried to conquer Europe. Then the Soviet Union.
Even the Roman Empire could not take over the British islands and Germany.
This is different from China, where different groups take over of everything. Centralisation and stagnation happens as a consequence.
> Modern capitalism was not invented by the British. It was invented by Italian people and Catholic religious orders. The British adopted the system and amplified it, just like the Industrialisation that came from the Netherlands.
I nearly qualified the original sentence with a reference to Dutch trading companies who built stock exchanges to fund colonies alongside us and apparently used the word "capitalist" to describe the sort of person that invested in them before us, and obviously the basic concept of markets and trade goes back long before the Venetian republic. But the Industrial Revolution and economic growth going exponential - the modern bit of capitalism - was definitely a British quirk
The Mongol Khanates were indiscriminate murderers who burned the library of Baghdad and ended the Islamic Golden Age.
They also destroyed proto-democratic cities like Novgorod in the proto-Russian territory, creating a culture of 'might is right' strongmen with absolute power.
Why are we trying to rehabilitate their image, exactly?
I don’t know if anyone is trying to rehabilitate them, more like understand their significance. The Mongols weren’t bloodthirsty lunatics; they were pretty advanced in terms of warfare tactics, religious tolerance, and a bunch of other things. They also had a direct historical influence on a million other things (the Black Death, the Mughals in India, etc.)
Is that rehabilitating their image? Is your assumption that modern humans are inherently better? World War II was caused by (what I would argue are) modern humans. I believe we could see wars of similar horror in the future.
Pedantically, modern humans have been around for a few hundred thousand years, so all recorded (ie within the last five thousand years) wars have been caused by us.
I don’t think it makes sense to use any more expansive definitions of modern (even if they are more common) than the one used in the context of the article.
If by modern humans you mean modern human society, then definitely. I'm not saying that every modern society is better than every ancient society or that there's no aspect where a given ancient society is better than a given modern society, but taken as a whole modern liberal democracy is dramatically better than previous types of society. Even capitalism, one of the worst parts of modern society, is a lot better than the feudalism that it replaced.
Mongols never reached Novgorod, and it survived as a republic that paid tribute to them. After the decline of the Golden Horde, they were involved in power struggles with other regional powers, such as Muscovy, Tver, and (Poland-)Lithuania. After a century of shifting alliances, Muscovy became dominant and took over both Novgorod and Tver.
Parent here, thank you for responsing. Based on the history books I’ve read, your answer contradicts some of my pre-supposed views - I am very open to having been misled and misinformed. Would you mind sharing some foundational sources/books that specifically talk about the history of Novgorod, and in the aftermath of the Golden Hordes, information about the regional power struggles you alluded to? If you even have a single book to reccomend as a starting point, I would greatly appreciate it!
Perhaps you are confusing Nizhny Novgorod (on the Volga, east of Muscovy) and Veliky Novgorod (with the historic Republic, south of Saint Petersburg, west of Muscovy).
They aren't "destructive to" human history, merely a part of it. In an ideological view of history, constructed to position our place in it as correct or at least inevitable, yes they would be bad, representing a challenge or setback on the way to us.
Historians don't (consciously, openly) reproduce this view of history though. We didn't earn our place in this story, nor did our ancestors earn it for us. We are simply here, and may attempt to explain how using the tools available to us. As new information is uncovered or understood, we need to update the artifact "History" to reflect our understanding.
I am not clear where you got "destructive to," but I would guess that meant more that they are a large part of why we don't know the history of some places. They didn't leave survivors and were more than willing to destroy cultural artifacts that we would find valuable today.
I honestly suspect more in the current world would be willing to destroy cultural artifacts than many modern perspectives would believe. Not just outside of "the west," either. Though, I can't but feel that it is heightened there.
Ah, I wasn't expecting to read down then up. :D This thread would have made more sense under that clarifying response.
Reading that, I suspect my guess was fairly accurate? They were somewhat more effective than a lot of others we discuss on not just killing people, but effectively erasing their existence in the process.
I see what you mean, and maybe that's what they were getting at after all.
Still I think it gets into a history vs historiography thing. If something makes it hard to reconstruct what happened around it in history, was that thing necessarily bad? It certainly makes life harder for historians.
My understanding of history as a professional discipline is that historians mostly try to excise value judgements like this from their practice. Individuals are free to feel how they feel about past events, but historians trying to understand and accurately place those events into context are not. To a historian the question of rehabilitating the mongol khanates should have no meaning, because they were never "dehabilitated" in the first place. They were simply a thing that we used to know slightly less about (partly because of their own actions!), and now can see a little more clearly.
I think there is a subtlety there. Historians would not necessarily hold ancient people to modern standards. That said, they do not have to ignore their impact on others and can take aim at not holding some practices in good terms. Consider, do we look neutrally on infanticide?
Now, granted, this does seem to largely be a "western" thing? We are more than willing to criticize our roots and ancestors. It does seem that this is getting silly where our willingness to discuss "bad" things in our history has blinded a lot of people into thinking that other cultures do not have similar items they needed to grow from. As an easy example, it is baffling to me how slavery and minority oppression is largely viewed as a US thing.
Edit: Consider, we would accurately call the practices described as genocidal. You can say that neutrally, sure, but I don't think any modern person should aspire for a genocidal society?
That's only the case if an ideological view of history is wrong; which is certainly one way to approach history. However, there's nothing to say that approach is inherently correct.
Yes I am assuming an ideological view of history is "wrong," as do almost all working historians.
Nothing is "inherently correct" in this domain, historians subscribe to this model because it is most generally useful for their purposes. Ideological history is most useful for purposes other than strict historiography. Notably and notoriously propaganda lol. What are you getting at here?
Given that ideology can be quite corrosive to truth (selection effects on transmission of information will distort things and that's just one of the effects), an approach that tries to avoid ideology is likely to get a more accurate view of the past.
For all that, they were arguably more tolerant than other social groups/societies of their time period and ran their empire, short lived as it was, like a sort of shared commercial enterprise, which tends to appear weirdly modern. And arguably, many of their conquests, as violent as they were, descend from said conquests' previous leadership acting like utter morons, regardless of our modern perspective of distaste on demands for tribute. That said, most of their societal potential for "modernity" started devolving the moment Genghis died.
But it's not like conquest was missing from the behavior of most other pre-modern societies.
It's the next candidate of charitable nuanced study of how imperialism created paradigm shifts toward modernity, now that the charitable nuanced study of later empires immediately preceding global modernity has been categorically discarded and demonized.
To the khanate's credit, there were periods of relatively exemplary tolerance towards conquered people - if and only if they were fortunate enough to have local leaders who immediately, unconditionally, and pro-actively offered surrender with tribute during those gracious moods. Otherwise, you know, skull pyramids and whatnot.
They were not indiscriminate in the murders. The leaders are always given a choice of paying tribute before hand. And they do stay true to their word if tributes were paid. It’s one of the major reasons why the mongol empire was so successful.
The idea that being forced to pay tribute or die is not murder is laughable. The idea that the Mongol empire was successful is also laughable. It could not even last 100 years before falling to infighting. And how do you even measure success? They killed 11% of the entire world population. Why would you want to remember anyone like that in a positive light?
There was that article the other day about how "no evidence" is an untenably ambiguous phrase to use in headlines. I wonder whether "scholars now argue" and similar constructions might also be an anti-pattern, as they can suggest either a universal consensus or the existence of two scholars on the fringe who hold the view. I suppose the word "argue" may go some distance toward disambiguating in this case, but that could also be interpreted in a few different ways. The article gives more context, but of course most people don't read the full article, thus—at least partly—the need for headlines and subheadlines in the first place. If they are bearing the weight of the whole article, might as well make 'em sturdy.
Dan Carlin did an excellent hardcore history podcast on the mongol conquests- it’s called “wrath of the khans” and, well, to modern sensibilities it’s a pretty shocking tale. There were details like, when a city was taken, each soldier was required to bring back something like 20 left ears from people they killed. They had big bags of them. They would round people up in pens, and kill the adults first so they wouldn’t see their children die and fight back. Sometimes they would send a single soldier into a town to demand their surrender and he would walk around killing people at random. If nobody lifted a finger to stop him, then the city was spared. If anyone intervened, the mongol army would come and sack the city. Word got around, and most cities just surrendered.
I can’t really think of any positive outcome of murdering every one of a city’s 2 million inhabitants- with knives, no less, which is a lot less impersonal than bombs. They genuinely considered non-mongols to be a form of cattle. You could make the case that the whole central Asian region never really recovered.
> The steppe restoration typifies what historians call the global turn, a larger project of shifting histories away from nation-states and colonialist defamation and toward the peoples and processes that have knotted us together. It’s a survey of shadows, a tracing of negative space. It focusses on peoples who, in Sattin’s words, “have long been confined to the anecdotes and afterthoughts of our writers and histories.” These are some of the most maligned groups in historical chronicles: the uncivilized; the barbarians at the gate; the tribes who seem to appear from some demonic portal, destroy everything in sight, and then recede back into darkness. The steppe restoration repositions them. It treats them as subjects in their own right—as peoples who have their own histories, who formed societies no less complex than the sedentary states they confronted, and who helped craft the world we inhabit.
> The emerging discipline had to overcome centuries of historiographic hubris. Writing about other peoples has long been in service of self-glorification.
I think the term "architect" is probably better phrased as "major influencer". Yes - they did have major influence. No - they certainly weren't the brutal orks that the losers (us) said they were, they just won. Do we secretly celebrate the Roman empire, Alexander the Great, etc? What must the "other guys' texts say about them?".
The mongol's resulting state must certainly have had intelligent, diligent, and benevolent leaders, so I think this is more of a "One of us!" type push.
But honestly, horses and wheels? Yeah, that's a pretty big contribution, and that's the first few paragraphs of TFA.
> More than the Greeks, the Romans, or the Chinese, it’s the nomadic Yamnaya whose legacy survives in our words and our bodies [70% of us have this DNA]
Another good quote:
> It was through the Mongol Empire, Harl writes, that papermaking, block printing, and gunpowder moved from the East to the West, hastening the spread of knowledge and catalyzing Europe’s conquest of the seas. “The global economy of the modern age was thus born thanks to the Mongol legacy,” he declares.
A relative claim of "most" assumes a survey of "damage to human knowledge" not evident in the link. Maybe some points of human history were stuck in local minima, scholastic periods where all things were considered known and new observations fit to existing theory in ever more Byzantine epicycles. Maybe not, but its hard to tell from this vantage.
> It was through the Mongol Empire, Harl writes, that papermaking, block printing, and gunpowder moved from the East to the West, hastening the spread of knowledge and catalyzing Europe’s conquest of the seas.
What is interesting is that this East to West movement of gunpowder is what did in the horse archers. Previously it was very hard to counter horse archers. Gunpowder based artillery and muskets were a perfect counter to the horse archer. Bullets and cannonballs can go faster than a horse, and it is fairly easy to train masses of soldiers to use them thus giving advantage to the centenary civilizations who had both the population and manufacturing ability to be able to exploit gunpowder weapons.
The whole article talks about the mongols, not "early nomadic empires".
The whole article does not mention what made the mongols the "architects of modernity" or how are "scholars now argu[ing]" that mongols were architects.
Yes, nomads did do lots of empire building. The arab empires were largely an offshot of nomadic upbringing and went to conquer. The mongols were largely an offshot of nomadic upbringing and went to conquer. The turks (aka ottomans) were largely an offshoot of nomadic upbringing and went to conquer.
And I am pretty sure in europe, there is some trace of nomdic upbringing that gave rise to early empires, especially the scandinavian vandals and vikings and saxons.
They didn't architect. They set the house structures for which empires needed to set the groundworks (conquering, pillaging, conforming). And the house structures are the preambles for modern constitutions and societies.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadBut I think they were the first to kill their king „in the name of the people“ (1649)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_Charles_I
And then not much later deposed another king in 1688.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution
While the country was not a republic right away these revolutionary events lead to a de facto rule by parliament and earlier I think than any other country I can think of (though how that parliament was voted for and who got to vote is another story)
I suppose Tarquinius Superbus was exiled instead of executed, but 509 BC (in the traditional chronology, anyway) for the overthrow of the Roman kingdom sounds a little earlier than 1649.
Don't forget about modern industry, scientific advancements, personal freedom and other privileges we enjoy today
The British made most of their capital(that financed industrialisation) from slavery trade and piracy in the Atlantic. It made huge profits and industrialisation paid off giving multiples of the inputs for the first time in History.
That also financed the "colonising of half of the world". But this colonisation came very late.
>dispensing with Catholicism early and inventing modern capitalism came precisely because our society was so hierarchical.
I am reading a book that argues that Europe's success comes from all the competence of different powers fighting each other and none of them taking over the others. The Muslims and later the Ottoman empire tried to take over Europe. The Spanish or Napoleon tried to take over Europe and UK, but they could not, because the others joined against them. Napoleon tried to conquer Russia. Then the British tried to take over as well. Austria, Bismarck and Hitler tried to conquer Europe. Then the Soviet Union.
Even the Roman Empire could not take over the British islands and Germany.
This is different from China, where different groups take over of everything. Centralisation and stagnation happens as a consequence.
I nearly qualified the original sentence with a reference to Dutch trading companies who built stock exchanges to fund colonies alongside us and apparently used the word "capitalist" to describe the sort of person that invested in them before us, and obviously the basic concept of markets and trade goes back long before the Venetian republic. But the Industrial Revolution and economic growth going exponential - the modern bit of capitalism - was definitely a British quirk
Interesting. Do you have any sources on that?
They also destroyed proto-democratic cities like Novgorod in the proto-Russian territory, creating a culture of 'might is right' strongmen with absolute power.
Why are we trying to rehabilitate their image, exactly?
Is that rehabilitating their image? Is your assumption that modern humans are inherently better? World War II was caused by (what I would argue are) modern humans. I believe we could see wars of similar horror in the future.
Historians don't (consciously, openly) reproduce this view of history though. We didn't earn our place in this story, nor did our ancestors earn it for us. We are simply here, and may attempt to explain how using the tools available to us. As new information is uncovered or understood, we need to update the artifact "History" to reflect our understanding.
I honestly suspect more in the current world would be willing to destroy cultural artifacts than many modern perspectives would believe. Not just outside of "the west," either. Though, I can't but feel that it is heightened there.
Reading that, I suspect my guess was fairly accurate? They were somewhat more effective than a lot of others we discuss on not just killing people, but effectively erasing their existence in the process.
Still I think it gets into a history vs historiography thing. If something makes it hard to reconstruct what happened around it in history, was that thing necessarily bad? It certainly makes life harder for historians.
My understanding of history as a professional discipline is that historians mostly try to excise value judgements like this from their practice. Individuals are free to feel how they feel about past events, but historians trying to understand and accurately place those events into context are not. To a historian the question of rehabilitating the mongol khanates should have no meaning, because they were never "dehabilitated" in the first place. They were simply a thing that we used to know slightly less about (partly because of their own actions!), and now can see a little more clearly.
Now, granted, this does seem to largely be a "western" thing? We are more than willing to criticize our roots and ancestors. It does seem that this is getting silly where our willingness to discuss "bad" things in our history has blinded a lot of people into thinking that other cultures do not have similar items they needed to grow from. As an easy example, it is baffling to me how slavery and minority oppression is largely viewed as a US thing.
Edit: Consider, we would accurately call the practices described as genocidal. You can say that neutrally, sure, but I don't think any modern person should aspire for a genocidal society?
Nothing is "inherently correct" in this domain, historians subscribe to this model because it is most generally useful for their purposes. Ideological history is most useful for purposes other than strict historiography. Notably and notoriously propaganda lol. What are you getting at here?
I have a hard time believing it wasn't like that when they got there.
But it's not like conquest was missing from the behavior of most other pre-modern societies.
To the khanate's credit, there were periods of relatively exemplary tolerance towards conquered people - if and only if they were fortunate enough to have local leaders who immediately, unconditionally, and pro-actively offered surrender with tribute during those gracious moods. Otherwise, you know, skull pyramids and whatnot.
Their atrocities were brutal and ruthless, but not indiscriminate because they were designed to achieve certain goals.
Many historians today dispute the hypothesis that the sacking of Baghdad was the main factor in ending the Islamic Golden Age.
https://www.livescience.com/11739-wars-plagues-carbon-climat...
I can’t really think of any positive outcome of murdering every one of a city’s 2 million inhabitants- with knives, no less, which is a lot less impersonal than bombs. They genuinely considered non-mongols to be a form of cattle. You could make the case that the whole central Asian region never really recovered.
> The steppe restoration typifies what historians call the global turn, a larger project of shifting histories away from nation-states and colonialist defamation and toward the peoples and processes that have knotted us together. It’s a survey of shadows, a tracing of negative space. It focusses on peoples who, in Sattin’s words, “have long been confined to the anecdotes and afterthoughts of our writers and histories.” These are some of the most maligned groups in historical chronicles: the uncivilized; the barbarians at the gate; the tribes who seem to appear from some demonic portal, destroy everything in sight, and then recede back into darkness. The steppe restoration repositions them. It treats them as subjects in their own right—as peoples who have their own histories, who formed societies no less complex than the sedentary states they confronted, and who helped craft the world we inhabit.
> The emerging discipline had to overcome centuries of historiographic hubris. Writing about other peoples has long been in service of self-glorification.
I think the term "architect" is probably better phrased as "major influencer". Yes - they did have major influence. No - they certainly weren't the brutal orks that the losers (us) said they were, they just won. Do we secretly celebrate the Roman empire, Alexander the Great, etc? What must the "other guys' texts say about them?".
The mongol's resulting state must certainly have had intelligent, diligent, and benevolent leaders, so I think this is more of a "One of us!" type push.
But honestly, horses and wheels? Yeah, that's a pretty big contribution, and that's the first few paragraphs of TFA.
> More than the Greeks, the Romans, or the Chinese, it’s the nomadic Yamnaya whose legacy survives in our words and our bodies [70% of us have this DNA]
Another good quote:
> It was through the Mongol Empire, Harl writes, that papermaking, block printing, and gunpowder moved from the East to the West, hastening the spread of knowledge and catalyzing Europe’s conquest of the seas. “The global economy of the modern age was thus born thanks to the Mongol legacy,” he declares.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom
What is interesting is that this East to West movement of gunpowder is what did in the horse archers. Previously it was very hard to counter horse archers. Gunpowder based artillery and muskets were a perfect counter to the horse archer. Bullets and cannonballs can go faster than a horse, and it is fairly easy to train masses of soldiers to use them thus giving advantage to the centenary civilizations who had both the population and manufacturing ability to be able to exploit gunpowder weapons.
The whole article does not mention what made the mongols the "architects of modernity" or how are "scholars now argu[ing]" that mongols were architects.
Yes, nomads did do lots of empire building. The arab empires were largely an offshot of nomadic upbringing and went to conquer. The mongols were largely an offshot of nomadic upbringing and went to conquer. The turks (aka ottomans) were largely an offshoot of nomadic upbringing and went to conquer.
And I am pretty sure in europe, there is some trace of nomdic upbringing that gave rise to early empires, especially the scandinavian vandals and vikings and saxons.
They didn't architect. They set the house structures for which empires needed to set the groundworks (conquering, pillaging, conforming). And the house structures are the preambles for modern constitutions and societies.