History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VII

[Traitorfish]

It wasn't. At all. Why would you assume there was anything unifying in the isle of Britain?

The pre-Roman tribes seem to have spoke loosely-related languages and had similar material cultures, enough so for the Romans to feel justified in generalising them as "Britons". The Romans aren't always the most subtle anthropologists, granted- but that's surely why Lexicus' question is worth asking?

 

[Lexicus]

I actually don't know much on this topic. Celtic linguistics is not really something I've studied with any sort of intensity and the only Republican-era demographic/ethnic descriptions I've read have come from Caesar, and he doesn't tend to do a very good job of describing nuance in the cultures he visited.

My assumption would be no, though?

I hoped you'd come through for me particularly given your username

Not very - in fact, the idea that 'Britain' and 'Gaul' were united but separate ideas is basically a Roman one. Pre-Roman Gallic and British cultures were remarkably similar , if totally without political unity and regularly at more-or-less ritualised war with each other. The Druids, for example, seem to have been a fairly 'international' sort of group, and one of Caesar's main (stated) reasons for invading Britain was that the island of Anglesey was a major centre for their training, and would-be Druids from Gaul were travelling to Anglesey, learning their trade, and coming back to lead anti-Roman resistance.

So would it be fair to say that the political situation in southern Britain was more or less similar to that prevailing across the channel in northern Gaul? From my own cursory (almost entirely Wikipedia-based) reading on the subject it seems like politics and culture 'diffused' across the channel and that this process (at least as it concerns the iron age Britain rather than late antiquity, post-Roman Britain) culminated in the arrival of the Romans, who never constituted more than a tiny, tiny minority of the population of the island.

The "Roman Era" is about a 400 year stretch of history, so you might need to be more specific about what you're asking.

To be clear I'm talking about the Roman era in a broad sense, as in the era in which Rome was powerful, not the era of Roman Britain which I understand is a different thing. Basically I'm asking about late Iron Age Britain I guess. Say roughly 250 BC until the Roman conquest. And even then I'm sort of interested in what went on north of the province.

 

[Flying Pig]

So would it be fair to say that the political situation in southern Britain was more or less similar to that prevailing across the channel in northern Gaul? From my own cursory (almost entirely Wikipedia-based) reading on the subject it seems like politics and culture 'diffused' across the channel and that this process (at least as it concerns the iron age Britain rather than late antiquity, post-Roman Britain) culminated in the arrival of the Romans, who never constituted more than a tiny, tiny minority of the population of the island.

That sounds about right, though I think the question of who counted as a 'Roman' in post-conquest Britain was more complicated and up for debate than you might be making it appear. It's also worth saying that we know the square root of zero about 'political history' for pre-Roman Britain: we know that it was disunited, because taking advantage of that disunity (via the creation of client kingdoms, for example, of which the Iceni were the most famous) was a key part of how the Romans worked their way into Britain in the first place. However, not much beyond that.

 

[Lexicus]

That sounds about right, though I think the question of who counted as a 'Roman' in post-conquest Britain was more complicated and up for debate than you might be making it appear.

Fair, I had in my mind actual colonists from Rome but by the time the Romans had reached Britain there were "Romans" hailing from all over the place, so...anyway.

As a side note, does anyone else find it really easy to get completely lost reading the articles on Wiki about languages/linguistic groups? It makes me really wish I had a time machine and immortality so I could actually go and see what the hell happened in Europe from like 4000 BC onward. I want to know who the hell the Basques are, whether there's anything to the Kurgan hypothesis, how accurate is the stereotype of the Indo-Europeans with their horsed warfare and thunder gods...all this stuff is endlessly fascinating to me.

 

[Phrossack]

Fair, I had in my mind actual colonists from Rome but by the time the Romans had reached Britain there were "Romans" hailing from all over the place, so...anyway.

As a side note, does anyone else find it really easy to get completely lost reading the articles on Wiki about languages/linguistic groups? It makes me really wish I had a time machine and immortality so I could actually go and see what the hell happened in Europe from like 4000 BC onward. I want to know who the hell the Basques are, whether there's anything to the Kurgan hypothesis, how accurate is the stereotype of the Indo-Europeans with their horsed warfare and thunder gods...all this stuff is endlessly fascinating to me.

Story of my life...

 

[Agent327]

The pre-Roman tribes seem to have spoke loosely-related languages and had similar material cultures, enough so for the Romans to feel justified in generalising them as "Britons". The Romans aren't always the most subtle anthropologists, granted- but that's surely why Lexicus' question is worth asking?

The same might be said about the Gauls. And yet there was nothing 'unifying' them. We could move on to 'the Germans' and see the same. Etc.

 

[Flying Pig]

Fair, I had in my mind actual colonists from Rome but by the time the Romans had reached Britain there were "Romans" hailing from all over the place, so...anyway.

Indeed. And there were certainly plenty of men in togas knocking around London within a few decades of the conquest, but you might have got a different answer had you introduced them to one of their trouser-wearing countrymen, and then to a senator in the capital, and asked if they counted as 'Roman'. There isn't really an 'objective' definition you can fall back on apart from legal citizenship, and that doesn't really tell you much about how being 'Roman' actually worked in daily life, and then after AD 212 it becomes meaningless anyway.

 

[Lohrenswald]

Why did people settle in deserts?

 

[Cutlass]

People settled essentially everywhere that they could scrape out a living. Before the Industrial Revolution population densities were low almost everywhere people lived. Only China and neighboring areas, where intensive rice agriculture allowed higher population densities were there a lot of people together. And even then, those population densities were small compared to modern times. So as populations grew, people spread out, and spread out some more, and spread out some more. And settled anyplace they could gain the food and other necessities of life. Other than Antarctica, there's only a handful of pieces of land in the world that never had human populations.

 

[Agent327]

Why did people settle in deserts?

I don't think beduins are considered as having settled in the desert. In ancient Egyptian sources they were referred to as 'desert dwellers'. We should probable think of semi-pastoralists here, who lived on the edge of civilization (in Egypt the desert is often quite close to the Nile). and of course traders. Caravan routes are known from quite ancient times. Unless there is an oasis (which indeed provided occasion for settlement), we should most likely think of desert dwellers as trekkers rather than permanently settled people. (It's interesting that in Exodus the desert is mentioned as a place to travel through, not to settle in.)

In short, deserts offer very few occasion for actual settlement. As Cutlass mentioned Antarctica, that is actually a desert (albeit a cold one), as are the arctic zones. Most we find there are fishermen and hunters - and of course the occasional research encampment and military station. Which brings me back to ancient Egypt: to the Egyptians the desert was mostly used for hunting, trading and mining. (And, of course, banditry.)

 

[Traitorfish]

The distinction that Agent327 notes between how people are described and how they actually lived is an important one. Flatland agriculturalists have a long history of describing neighbouring peoples, particularly pastoralists and hunter-gatherers, as living in "the desert", "the forest", "the swamp" or "the mountains", by their association with environments that seem uninhabitable to flatlaners and thus which stresses a perception of Otherness, while in fact these people will tend to inhabit oases, clearings, islands and valleys, in environments which aren't always that different from those inhabited by the flatlanders.

 

[Mouthwash]

I tip my hat to you, Lohrenswald. That was a pretty good return on investment for "why did people settle in deserts."

 

[Phrossack]

Just how effective was the German submarine campaign in WWI? Did it ever get close to starving Britain into peace?

 

[JohannaK]

As far as I know it was fairly effective, but it was easily thwarted with the extensive use of escorts and such, not to mention that it was a political liability as it put Germany at odds with neutral nations shipping to and from Britain itself.

I have no depth of knowledge on the matter however, so take this with a pinch of salt.

 

[trader/warrior]

Why did people settle in deserts?

Interestingly, there is some evidence that the rapid expansion of Homo Sapiens out of eastern-southern Africa during 80-50k B.P (100ky after the emergence of modern humans) was caused by rapid drying of the environment and a bottleneck in the human population adapting to a more wide-ranging state where moving across more harsh environments was a necessity for survival. Whether this involves outright a desert-nomadic type of existence or just moving along the "rims" of such I'm not quite sure. In my view there might be some notable advantages of a highly intelligent goal-oriented species to adapt to such compared to the highly competetive environment of the African savannah which has never been fully populated even until today campared to other grassland-type environments.

One article from a quick google:

http://www.pnas.org/content/103/25/9381.full

Clearly, all of these possibilities will require further analysis and testing in the course of future research. But the implication seems clear that many of the behavioral innovations reflected in the southern African archaeological records between ca. 80,000 and 60,000 B.P. could have led to a substantial increase in the carrying capacity of the environment for human populations and, accordingly, to a major expansion in human population numbers and densities. Even allowing for the imprecisions in current DNA dating estimates, the apparent coincidence between these major behavioral changes and the estimated timing of the population expansions reflected strongly in both the mtDNA mismatch and lineage-analysis data seems hard to ignore. It should be emphasized that there is no necessary implication that population numbers in Africa as a whole increased dramatically at this time. Indeed, it could be that total population numbers in Africa decreased significantly at this time, owing to the onset of extremely dry conditions in many parts of Africa between ca. 60,000 and 30,000 B.P. (31, 44). The point is simply that increased levels of technological efficiency and economic productivity in one small region of Africa could have allowed a rapid expansion of these populations to other regions and an associated competitive replacement (or absorption) of the earlier, technologically less “advanced,” populations in these regions

 

[jackelgull]

Why did the Ottoman Empire lack financial institutions in the 19th century?

 

[Lexicus]

Why did the Ottoman Empire lack financial institutions in the 19th century?

It didn't?

 

[Agent327]

Why did the Ottoman Empire lack financial institutions in the 19th century?

I'm also not sure what you are referring to. What financial institutions do you think were lacking?

 

[jackelgull]

It didn't?

I'm also not sure what you are referring to. What financial institutions do you think were lacking?

The Ottoman Empire was a poorly capitalized country in the nineteenth century. It was not very populous compared to Europe, and that population was spread out in difficult-to-access areas. Much of the Empire's population was comprised of migratory pastoralists, who were difficult to assess and tax and who don't usually have a great deal of liquidity. Financial infrastructure was even worse than the transportation infrastructure, and what little of it did exist was under risk of being attacked (e.g. during the Armenian rebellions in the 1890s, when a few banks were targeted). Part of it was certainly that there were few technical specialists in advanced fields in the Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but had there been such specialists they probably would not have had the domestic financial backing to succeed.

This implies there was a lack of financial institutions

 

[Agent327]

Actually, it doesn't. It does suggest there was no room for extensive financial institutions. That's not to say they didn't exit, as they did. Also

Much of the Empire's population was comprised of migratory pastoralists

isn't quite correct. I'm not really sure what that is based on. The problem of the 19th century Ottoman empire was not a lack of tax base, but a lack of adequate financial management. It wasn't shortage of funds, but the mismanagement s of the funds available. And this at the highest level. (In short: corruption.) In the late 19th century 80 % of tax income was entirely reserved for paying off interest on debts to - indeed - foreign banks. A crippling situation, but one that couldn't possibly be solved by local financial institutions, as it was a government issue.