Meanwhile, on Twitter, the Everything App...racism, mostly? But also bad, obviously wrong history - lots of multi-ethnic pre-modern states: Romans, Persians, Mongols, etc. Or just note the numbers of Welsh, Irishmen and Scots in key posts in the British Empire.
I mean, I am not a historian, but doesn't any imperial entity almost have to be multi-ethnic by definition? Who are you doing all this empiring on if not some other ethnic group?
The big difference is whether you actually include those different people in your empire (aka the Goku Model of Imperialism: "I beat you, therefore we are friends") or if you do a stupid and exclude them from all the good stuff.
I dunno. We can disaggregate racially homogeneous nation-states from ethnonatioalist ones, MAGA won’t. The uncomfortable truth is also that diversity in a state, modern or otherwise, strongly correlates with that state being imperialist, but that’s not a line of thinking MAGA will follow either!
I always laugh when I see the "British Empire" in these lists - the British monarchs were ethnic Germans, the first of whom didn't speak english.
Not only the first! Queen Mary’s English was quite basic
Also, their French monarchs, and Scottish monarchs, and even once a Dutch monarch.
and before that i'm going through these replies looking to see if someone more knowledgeable than me is willing to get into that whole deal with the hyphenated "anglo-saxon" identity
Egypt even turned their conquerors Egyptian! Motivated reasoning is one hell of a drug.
He could, like, read and book on the history of the Muslim religion
Wow, that's stupid. Rome, obviously, but how about Judaea in the time of Christ? 19th-century Vienna? New York right now? My own semi-rural Texas county right now??
The arch-Imperialist British Prime Minister at the height of the Empires growth - the one who ensured Victoria was crowned Empress of India - would not have been considered ethnically English (at the time, or by these clowns)
Gladstone wasn’t “ethnically” English either. He was born in Liverpool, but his parents were Scots as far back as you care to look. Lord Aberdeen was Scots. Wellington was Irish. None of them got the same racist suspicion Disraeli had to put up with, but they still weren’t “English”.
No disagreement - just felt that they were adequately covered by OP
Ethnonationalism was basically invented in the Nineteenth Century, and it's been a disaster. It's why great numbers of people in Anatolia & the Balkans got arbitrarily relocated a century ago. But at least it's better than 🤬 Russian imperialism.
See also, the Ottoman Empire, the Roman Empire etc
The Mughals are a fun counterexample to their claim: the empire's golden years (ex Akbar's reign) were based around the intentional turn towards multiculturalism, while Aurangzeb and his successors' move towards fundamentalism and away from that legacy did lay the groundwork for the end.
I am left with the conclusion that too many modern racists are SHIT at racism, and don't know how to finely gradate levels of personhood. I blame the invention of "white people" as a concept.
Russian Empire incorporated a lot of foreigners and conquered people into its elites.
The elites of Imperial Russia spoke largely French, and an awful lot of them were ethnic Germans. Including Catherine the Great!
Austria-Hungary, hello
Hell, even Russian Empire, an extremely bigot state, stratified their people by estate & religion, not ethnicity, and thus had ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Georgians, Swedes, Armenians, even an Ethiopian, among its elites.
Spot on! Russian nobility and civil service in imperial times was full of assimilated Georgian, Armenian, Baltic Germans and so on!
Pushkin!
Semi-related, the most hilarious conspiracy theory I know is that Pushkin was in fact an agent of the imperial intelligence service, his fatal duel was fake and in reality he moved to France where he became known as Alexandre Dumas père. =) This is so crazy, I love it!
Maybe Pushkin developed a time machine went back in time to Elizabethan England and became Shakespeare!!! 😂
Crazy things happen in history. Reilly, Ace of Spies, had a life full of coincidences, which apparently began in Odessa.
Well, Pushkin himself never quite made it to the elites (ending up a low-rank courtier) despite being the top author of the period. But his great-grandfather, Abram Gannibal grew to being the chief military engineer and a general-in-chief (second military rank in the army after marshal)
Didn't he have an African ancestor?
I believe so…
yes, Abram Gannibal I talk above was the one (he is traditionally thought to be from Ethiopia, but these days other regions like Kameroon and Chad are also proposed)
The Belgians fought a war for their own multi-ethnic state. Now, admittedly, it was because they were unhappy about the religious settlement in their previous state, but still.
📌
One thing that white nationalists all seem to share is an absolutely astoundingly terrible grasp of history, unable to imagine the - again, quite obvious - fact that people in the past defined racial & ethnic boundaries differently than we do and that those boundaries were fluid.
If they didn't have that then they'd learn and might not be racist
additional reading on the US iteration of Bret's incredible points here for those interested aninjusticemag.com/the-devils-b...
I agree fully with the history here, but white nationalists are not ignorant to that history, they're lying to create a false history. Maybe some of them truly believe it, but actual evidence is in no way going to convince them. They are being disingenuous, not uneducated, and it's on purpose.
I'd say it's both - they're both ignorant 𝘢𝘯𝘥 disingenuous. In fact, the latter boosts the former - they've already invented their own fictional "truth"; there's no reason to research actual history. They'll often be blindsided by true historical claims, because they're not clever in their lies.
There were, of course, ethnically exclusive polities in antiquity - the Greek polis is a good example. They tended to be small, weak and tend to be overrun by more diverse polities (as the Greeks were by the Macedonians and then the Romans).
What disguises this fact for the 'heritage Americans' thumbless grasp of history is those new composite states last so long that they create new identities which white nationalists then and now mistake for original, pristine identities.
'thumbless grasp of history' gets a chef's kiss. I'll be having that.
Today’s ethnic-nationalists are repeating the arguments of the “little Englanders” of the 18th century—whose views (not coincidentally) influenced the American colonists
How much do you think Hollywood’s propensity to cast white people for just about everything contributes to and/or reinforces this?
Everything except the hordes of bloodthirsty invaders, of course, which definitely doesn't help.
E.g. the state of France does not exist on its current boundaries because all those places were already filled with 'the French.' Rather the French state already existed and made everyone in its borders *learn French.* The state created the nation, not the other way around.
L’etat, c’est moi, not l’etat c’est nous
In short, most modern 'nation states' began as small empires which lasted long enough to homogenize - the late unifiers (Germany, Italy) that did so in the age of nationalism are the strange exception - a product of nation-envy, as it were - not the rule.
Were even they really that uniform? In addition to some variety even among the Germans I believe there were quite some slavs involved too? Witness the multitude of German surnames that have obvious slavic roots.
As i understand it, Slavic surnames mostly come from linguistically polish Prussian subjects. While the quip "a Pole could easily be a Prussian, but unfortunately never a German" was largely true during the 19th century, quite a lot assimilated or intermarried in some way. Source: live in Berlin...
...and basically all my locally born friends have a bit of polish ancestry.
There was no German or Italian language but a bunch of dialects and regional languages
My wife has family from opposite ends of Germany who have to use Hochdeutch to communicate with each other.
I've lived in Northern Germany for 10 years and still struggle to understand certain dialects from South/East.
like, ask Firenze how it historically feels about, say, Siena
Better ask Garibaldi about it 😉
it always strikes me as pretty funny that people expect, say, Ohio, to get over border grievances with Michigan when there's stuff that is 700 years old that people in Italy are still mad about
All of which is to say, ethno-nationalist enclaves were the exception, not the rule, for most historical polities and when they existed, they tended to be small, weak and vulnerable precisely because of their exclusionary nature. The big tribe is the safe tribe.
Definitely remember seeing some observations that the collapse of the Dual Monarchy didn’t exactly lead to a positive outcome with regards to the collective security of Central Europe against its neighbors.
Yeah, wouldn't we all want to live in ... 18th-century Montenegro?
Meanwhile, your extremely successful expansionist polities - Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Mongols etc. - became successful because they incorporate outsiders. The biggest winners (Rome, Mongols) do so the most intensely. Diversity *is* strength, it turns out.
I find it very significant that one of the first things Livy has the Romans do is build an asylum/sanctuary for all the rabble, exiles and unwanted from the neighbourhood and then after a few kings he turns to the reader and says “that’s right, almost all Roman kings weren’t born here btw!“
Turns out if you put significant restrictions on who gets to be part of your group you won't have the numbers to really be strong. The best way to increase population is immigration/taking in outsiders, and population is kind of important.
So did the Inca.
A theory I heard for why Rome ultimately failed was a turn toward more exclusive conceptions of "Roman" in later antiquity. The "barbarians" wanted to BE Roman, not conquer it.
Yes exactly, they started excluding people born in Germania or Gaul from promotion, which caused them to switch sides.
Would be curious to see a comparison between Rome and the Mongol empire (and their component parts) in general.
The main difference that comes to mind is how quickly the Mongol Empire decentralised into separate, very distinct entities, creating whole new 'ethnicities' (for lack of a better word) in the process
Hm...pastoral nomadic steppe empires are...really different. Different subsistence systems results in different systems in a lot of places. But both were genius at the incorporation of foreign peoples and technologies.
Mongol sources are obviously varied across time and place but if you could use any from Chinese sources, would be happy to oblige.
Sorry - the Mongols? The empire that was built on massacre and lasted barely longer than the blink of an historical eye once they tried governing? By what metric were they extremely successful? Their politics in China and Korea, at least, could hardly have been called inclusive.
Largest land empire in history.
…which lasted - what -two and a half human lifetimes the minute they stopped killing and tried to govern. Not sure we see success, or inclusivity? Enforcement of Mongolian language policy in China, which failed. Forced marriage of KR aristocracy to Mongols engendered resentment
Where did you think the Chinese infantry to take on Southern Song, or the artillerists to take on Xiangyang came from ? The Empire inability to scale up rulership, and the resulting instability combined with Imperial rule led to its fall yes but well, military wise, Mongols did very well by recruiti
Finally, going lasted 2 lifetimes ignores en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norther... And the Ming inability to conquer the 16 commanderies and subsequent creation of the Great Wall....
Subjects revolt, citizens don't.
On Know Your Enemy, Mike Duncan said this exact, same thing about Rome. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...
I mean, from a moderately-educated layperson's perspective, the Romans were definitely bigots, and absolutely dicks, but not along the silly phenotypical lines that we have drawn since the early modern period.
They were absolutely cultural chauvinists, but were pretty accommodating of non-Romans who assimilated, especially if they had money/power
Yeah, the point isn't that the named examples were what we'd call progressive (because obviously not), but that even as bad as they could be, they weren't overcome by this particular ideological malfunction
One of the fun things I extrapolated from some of the EU games (I think 2?) was that France was not just simply "France" back in the day!
Ernest Gellner from the grave: HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO EXPLAIN THIS TO THEM?
And speakers of Occitan are still mad about it
amb rason ☝️
Right!? I'd joke that I am begging these idiots to go to Europe and, like, talk to people, but half of them live in Europe and I guess don't talk to people? 'We're ethnically homogeneous' says the racist in a state (the UK) which is explicitly four different nations!
Cornish and Manx might argue it's more than four, even.
habitual refusal to talk to people seems to be the leading risk factor in falling into these ideologies
Not to mention Breton, Walloon, Picard, Francoprovençal, Basque…
And the Catalans! They're here too.
Indeed!
This always confuses me about race-essentialists. Like, where did those races originate from? If you were a pre-Darwin biologist who believed humans sprung up fully formed in their local regions, then okay. But anything else you have to face that ethic groups were created by a mixing of people.
I mean, the real answer is they don't know or care, they just hate Black people with a moronic fury. I put basically the same thread on Twitter and it's doing numbers but also drawing out the racists whose arguments basically sum up with 'but they weren't Africans!' which is, of course, also wrong.
My hot take is that while Ramses II or whoever may not have been ‘black’ by modern standards North Africa is historically more African than Near Eastern. Or at least equally so. The division of the continent by the Sahara is in no small part racism.
St Augustine was African! So was Septimus Severus. Your statue PfP is African. Gah!
Fundamentally, we're all Africans, the question is just 'at what level of remove.' People are people, no matter where you go or when you are. Unalienable rights, inherent dignity, all the rest. Everywhere, all the time.
I think their idea is that while humans were at one point on even footing, the "harsh climate" of Europe induced futher evolutionary development, while the "abundant food" in tropical climes did not. And they would dispute that any significant ethnic mixing took place before the last few centuries.
Boy, they would not like to know that Neanderthal genes are more prominent in Europeans than any other “race”!
there's a whole branch of biblical "literalist" creationism that does this brucegerencser.net/2017/08/is-s...
“Thumbless grasp of history” is a beautiful turn of phrase
You’ll have to forgive a complete nobody like me for asking you this question. But I’m genuinely interested in why you say this. I’ve just read Ma’s book “Polis” and this is not the impression I gained there - that is, that they were small and weak and easily overrun. Also, I’m in the midst of…..
…Netz’s new book “Why the Ancient Greek Matter”. He takes the position that what is significant about them was the role of “diversity, debate and dispersed authority“ played. Which is why the culture not only survived for so long but why it was so influential (even on those that overran them).
Obviously bluesky is not a great medium in which to have a discussion about something like this but, anyway I thought I’d ask the question. I do enjoy following your posts very much.
What made the Macedonians more ethnically diverse? Did they have Thessalians and Epirates and such as part of their society beyond elite marriages?
Yes. Their army included soldiers from other Greek city-states and they also served in the administration of the empires, not to mention the colonies that were set up.
Every society is a "multi-ethnic" society. That's what makes studying history fun, that we'll never really know what the actual puzzle we're trying to put together looks like. When did Occitans become "French?" Who decided that, when did they actually believe it? Why? It's never simple.
Or, even what groups were "successful" (see, for example, how the Spartans are perceived)
All nations have in their past innumerable blendings of tribes and peoples. To be “English” is to be mixed from a wide variety of European sources. And those source peoples were themselves admixtures of earlier wandering groups. It’s fractal.
If these people looked at the elites of 19th century Europe they'd have a stroke. Napoleon had a marshal named MacDonald and another who was half-black. David Ricardo was a British parliamentarian and economist. To say nothing of Britain or Greece's German kings, or Spain's french king.
it’s not even entirely true about the united states
Right. Our our immediate neighbor Canada, who has an entire province that speaks a different language...
It's only true if you use modern definitions of "whiteness" and ignore the fact that German, Irish, English, Italian, and Swedish people were all treated as different races at the time, even if some were part of the US in-group.
Reminds me of how those chuds go "oh so we're not allowed to have pride in our ethnicity anymore???" and like dude, there are polish-american and german-american and italian-american festivals all the time have pride in that but you don't get to claim them as "white" american
Black Americans tend to have more inter-group solidarity for a very obvious reason when you think about it, which is that the furthest many of them can trace their lineage - if at all - comes down to a slave dock in South Carolina c.1790
If you, as a person of nordic or germanic or wherever heritage, are trying to take credit for the achievements of the greeks or whoever, you are *only* doing so on the basis of "idk our skin pigment is kinda the same" and that is dumb as fuck
Yup, "white" is not an ethnicity; it's a skin color that's shared by a number of ethnicities, including some which you would not expect.
and it's how we go from Polite White Society going from "ew, those swarthy Papist mediterranean types, we don't want them here" to "oh yes, the architecture of Brunelleschi and the artwork of Michaelangelo embodies the greatness of the white race"
proving it's not even a colour but a political gatekeeping narrative of convenience that just happened to originate with two groups that arguably did have some kind of average skin tone distinction
These people have a racist cartoon version of history in their heads and you can't convince them otherwise.
Better believe they’d be ready to ‘No True Scotsman’ over “civilized”.
I can’t think of a single successful empire in history that lasted that wasn’t diverse. You could argue the early Muslim Conquests, but that fragmented quickly and also became multi-ethnic just as quickly, and the empires that formed from that were mostly diverse.
Every successful city in early history was usually due to trade, which means diversity. Early cities would have been absurdly diverse as they’d be bringing in various hunter-gatherer groups. In fact, the less diversity an empire/city has, the less likely it is to survive.
i thought these people were supposed to think about rome multiple times per day
Bret, it's your responsibility as a historian to endlessly engage with endless "What-if" questions from the Rome LARPers over there.
mfrs played Civilization 7 and thought it was real life
it's why i've never seen a 4x large-scale strategy game i didn't hate the way these games handle what it means for groups to be in conflict is like the real version of what people thought first person shooters rotted our brains with [/hyperbole]
dig the hyperbole designation
the most charitable reading i can give to that bluecheck is one of blatant dishonesty of humpty dumptying the word "civilized" to pass off a tautology as an insight
I mean, ethnonationalism was a major cause of generation after generation of petty warmongering on the European continent until the postwar order gave us the quietest period maybe ever, so there's that too.
Also, this is very basic logic stuff, but I feel like someone should say, "Everyone did it this way until 60 years ago" is not an argument that "This way is good."
Conservatism is a form of “paleophilia,” a belief that what is old must be what is good, but it’s often rooted in completely misguided ideas about what truly is old in the first place.
Also, the ethnonationalist Axis powers lost to the more polyglot US, UK, USSR—all countries whose very name stresses that they are a union of diverse parts.
This is a complete inversion of history. The Austro-Hungarian empire?
Even the place that we now know as Wales was originally viewed by the Romans as being occupied by multiple distinct tribes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordovices
In the same way that transphobes insist that trans folks didn’t exist until a few years ago, some racists insist that Europe was 100% white until the mid-20th century.
The wild part is in a lot of cases, the people insisting that Europe was '100% white until the mid-20th century' are of Irish or Italian or Polish or Jewish or some other heritage that wouldn't have been considered fully white in the United States in the early 20th century.
bsky.app/profile/pogt...
When I taught English in Taiwan in the 1970s one of my students asked if I thought interracial marriages could succeed. Turned out her brother was dating a different kind of Chinese -- native Taiwanese vs mainland refugee :)
*Indigenous* Formosan or ethnic Chinese but native-born to the island? Because indigenous Taiwanese are no more ethnically Chinese than they are ethnically Japanese.
Native Taiwanese aren’t Han or any other Chinese ethnicity? Race is fake anyways but there’s absolutely an ethnic and cultural and linguistic difference there.
There’s also a history of colonial exploitation and oppression by the one group against the other, both before and after the KMT showed up after losing the civil war on the mainland.
yeah i think the best way to deal with the whole idea of "interracial relationships" is to deal exclusively with the actual sociopolitical and cultural context and not worry about phenotypical subspecies morphs or whatever
Again, race is fake anyways, but my understanding is neither group views themselves as belonging to the same ancestry or culture as the other. There are also differences in physical traits, but I agree that’s less important.
In the 70s, the population groups: "Taiwanese" descendants of Han who moved across the Taiwan straits a few hundred years ago and mostly displaced the natives. Their native language was a dialect of Chinese that was not mutually comprehensible with Mandarin... (1/3)
...but most also knew Mandarin (the official dialect, from northern China) "Mainlanders" people who came over after WW2 and the Communist takeover of the mainland. They mostly spoke Mandarin, sometimes with strong regional accents (2/3)
"Aborigines" remnants of the original inhabitants. Ethnic Asian but not ethnic Chinese. (3/3)
I’d assumed you had meant aboriginal Taiwanese, but sounds like that’s not the case?
Back then, "Aborigine" was not "Taiwanese". But I'm way out of date on current usage. FWIW, Taiwanese were maybe 80% of the population. If you wanted to see an Aborigine you mostly needed to go to a mountain scenic spot / tourist trap, which I never did.
Austria-Hungary has entered the chat, and the Austrian Empire before it, and the Holy Roman Empire before that.
Wouldn't the Mongol Empire also fit that bill? I ask you, because you know *way* more than I do.
Mentioned in the skeet I was responding to.
Apparently reading comprehension is another thing I should probably try to improve on... 😇 Thank you.
Ah yes. The famously ethnically homogenous Carolingian Empire. The Holy Roman Empire definitely had all the germans and only germans in it. The definitely ethno-nationalist Russia Empire whose court language was French. India, why such a county surely only has one ethnic group or language...
This is hilariously incorrect and if you drill into any famous empire, you'll find they were multi ethnic. Does he think Alexander the Great depopulated his entire empire to fill it with Macedonians? Italy wasn't even a single thing until 1870!
or like, the colonies of colonial powers, and the people who lived in them, were part of "society"? and this was on purpose, "progress" was understood to include, as an imperative, the spread of society in this way to eventually everywhere and everyone.
I could imagine a white nationalist retorting w/ a Pat Buchanan “a republic not an empire” rejoinder, b/c all the examples from the Mongols to Great Britain are empires vs. where republic is defined in racial herrenvolk terms
I wouldn't fetishise premodern multi-ethnicity either. Almost every empire was multi-ethnic. Examples of m-e states formed (quasi)voluntarily are rare (PLC?)
I mean were there ANY ethno-nationalist states before like...1800?
I'd say Ptolemaic Egypt. It was an apartheid state where the "Macedonians" (which included a mix of various different Greek ethnicities) were given exclusive political control over the local Egyptian and Libyan populations. A Diadochi Macedonian Phalanx could only be made from ethnic Greeks.
'nationalism' had to be invented first, and then the respective nations had to be invented, something that largely required industrial communications and technology just to get people speaking the same language.
Japan probably. Tokugawa Shogunate pretty explicitly delineated Japanese and everyone else and made conscious effort to keep ethnic purity
What these people long for, fairly obviously, is not really a pure ethno-state, but a return to a time when elites consisted of a single self-defined ethnic group (or caste more accurately) and everyone else was denied entry to that elite. Pre 1914 UK arguably was organized that way.
Also, the United States
Just...show these people a map of the Roman Empire under Trajan and ask 'do you really think all these people were one ethnicity'?
They tend to believe - because they do not understand chronology or how long a century is - that the Roman Empire began as a strong ethno-nationalist state, expanded into a multi-ethnic empire, thus becoming weak and then immediately collapsed. Of course that's not...like...true, but 🤷♂️
TBF, the Romans didn't know how big a century was supposed to be either.
can't talk shit when you've barely managed to pack any centurions in your own
Probably fail to grasp that "Roman" and "Italian" are not the same and just treat all the Latin Allies as if they were the same as Romans.
"they all look the same to me!"