History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VIII

[caketastydelish]

Fair enough

 

[Imaus]

Why didn't the Mongols travel east to Alaska and then south to America (presumably to conquer it)?

Was there something stopping them? It's certainly no farther away than it was to North America. They didn't have success against Japan but the Native Americans didn't have those kinds of fortified defenses.

...The Pacific Ocean?

The Bering Strait ?

Not even that, just Siberia proper. While Koreans, Tanguts, and Manchus did extend into Manchuria, civilization did not go further much north than the Stanovoy Range.

To the Mongols, to their north was a huge, never ending forest full of Bandits and Primitives, with deadlier and dealier winters. I doubt Mongolia had a presence in Yakut or Kamchatka lands, even by merchants.

The Mongolians, like any other steppe culture, are based on existing alongside a sedentary culture to either plunder, take tribute from, or replace. No such thing existed in the hundreds of KM of forest and tundra to their north and north-east. There would be no local base to draw any meaningful support from and going through even Siberia would be seen as fruitless. Even Japan at this time had barely touched Hokkadio, for example.

This is just Asia. America would be worse: the Inuit of Alaska, the Sub-Arctic peoples, the Mountain and Coastal tribes would be little to no value to the Mongols, and even past that there's barely anything until the Pueblo and Mexico, thousands of miles south.

All the good stuff was to their South (China, Korea) or West (Silk Road, Forest Road, etc). The Mongolians weren't the type to expand into every space and saw nothing worthy in the North.

 

[r16]

ı would say Hokkaido was still underdeveloped in the 20th Century , ı used to read Time or Newsweek articles about the island being pristine and isolated - in the 1980s . Guess construction booms have "corrected" that by already . Russian expansion into Siberia was due furs that could make a tidy money in Europe that was floating on speculation and the like about spices and could afford it , while the Mongols were already fitted for cold , as a further flippant point . Same for Canada . People do not like much snow and ice even if they are like Civ III AI , expanding everywhere .

 

[Traitorfish]

How far were people in Medieval Europe aware of the relationships between different languages? I know that they were vaguely aware that French, Castilian, etc. all derived from Latin, while at the same time they were not aware that the Brythonic and Gaelic languages were related, but what about things in between that, such as, for example, the relationship between the different Germanic languages or Slavic languages? Or the non-relationship between Basque and everything else?

 

[Lexicus]

I meant, the the forms of racism associated with European-descended societies of the late and early modern era. That is what this conversation was about.

I think there is a strong argument that antisemitism is the earliest form of proto-racism. This developed in Spain in the context of the Reconquista, and manifested in the notion of "blood purity" and the idea that Jewish people who had converted to Christianity were still a problem. This ideology morphed into racism during the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the New World, and the management (and attempts to make sense of) the indigenous people there, and then fully modern racism emerged with the importation of African slaves.

In this view racial antisemitism would indeed be the longest-lived form of racism.

 

[innonimatu]

That anti-semitism did not start out as racism, and arguably was never such. It was a religious conflict, between hegemonic region and a minor one. Made worse by the fact that members of that sometimes happened to be wealthy and visible.

"blood purity" was a thing only for the nobility. Ennoblement of, even say knighting, a black person would cause scandal because he could not obviously be a descendant of the old nobility (it could still happen, but only against the opposition of the nobility!). And accusations of having jewish ancestors were about the same: failure to have a pure lineage... this was a late medieval/early modern phenomenon, the usual thing that happens when stable elites try to fasten their grip on power and exclude all outside possible competitors. Down below, among the masses who were excluded from political power by those elites, people did not care to trace "blood purity". The ideology was not pervasive, need not be, and in that it was not what is now conventionally called racism. It did have elements of it, but was more complex.

I'm not familiar enough with the social stratification of spanish america to feel able to comment on how these ideas developed there. Only know that they did develop into stratified societies but there was some mobility between strata. Birth (and ethnicity) were only in practice a barrier to certain top offices?

 

[Lexicus]

That anti-semitism did not start out as racism, and arguably was never such. It was a religious conflict, between hegemonic region and a minor one. Made worse by the fact that members of that sometimes happened to be wealthy and visible.

"blood purity" was a thing only for the nobility. Ennoblement of, even say knighting, a black person would cause scandal because he could not obviously be a descendant of the old nobility (it could still happen, but only against the opposition of the nobility!). And accusations of having jewish ancestors were about the same: failure to have a pure lineage... this was a late medieval/early modern phenomenon, the usual thing that happens when stable elites try to fasten their grip on power and exclude all outside possible competitors. Down below, among the masses who were excluded from political power by those elites, people did not care to trace "blood purity". The ideology was not pervasive, need not be, and in that it was not what is now conventionally called racism. It did have elements of it, but was more complex.

I'm not familiar enough with the social stratification of spanish america to feel able to comment on how these ideas developed there. Only know that they did develop into stratified societies but there was some mobility between strata. Birth (and ethnicity) were only in practice a barrier to certain top offices?

I agree that it is not fully-fledged racism at that point, which is why I used the term proto-racism. But nonetheless that is clearly the origin point of positing inherent biological differences between people, as opposed to the purely cultural chauvinism (our culture is the best, but others can join it by acting like us) which is more-or-less universal in history.

 

[innonimatu]

But it wasn't about inherent biological differences between people at that point. The descendants of a peasant living by the castle of the first king would be biologically similar to the descendants of the first king. The jews were biologically similar, to the point where a particularly insane (the disease being religion...) king was opening his grandmother's tomb to check whether she had a tail and must have been jewish. This was a few decades after the expulsion of the jews in the early 16th century. Jews would be recognized only because they had hidden tails and the king might have "unclean blood"! It was religious madness, not something due to biological differences.

As the nobility closed ranks to monopolize power and privilege for their own descendants, this "blood purity" test just happened to be easier to do when there were obvious giveaways such as skin color: no descendant of the old nobles could possibly be black. Kings might make a commoner noble despite this closing of ranks by alleging that some ancestor was noble, or even that obviously valor proved such-and-such was of unacknowledged noble birth (illegitimacy was common...). But no such finessing could be done of the person was black! It was the nobility against parvenus... a phenomenon common even among the upper castes or any country today.

 

[Traitorfish]

Reconquista Spain was heaving with newly-minted nobility, though, so it doesn't make a lot of sense for the old nobility to target Jews and Moors who were not the people getting rich from Christian conquests, and therefore not the people challenging their status. I would tend to think that the racial hostility towards Jews and Moors represented precisely the opposite dynamic, a way for nobles of dubious lineage to assert their legitimacy by drawing the line elsewhere than ancient Visigothic forebears.

 

[innonimatu]

The old nobility claims were back to the beginning so the several kingdoms, not to the visighotic times. By the time this started to become a thing, roughly the late 14th century, it was old. But not that old. And it really only became a thing in the 16th century. Then there was an old nobility that interbred, and a office nobility often made up of commoners promoted by the king but that was not regarded as being on the same level and would not have lands and hereditary privileges. I guess it was much like in other places in Europe? War allowed for social mobility, stability closed it...

 

[Josu]

How far were people in Medieval Europe aware of the relationships between different languages? I know that they were vaguely aware that French, Castilian, etc. all derived from Latin, while at the same time they were not aware that the Brythonic and Gaelic languages were related, but what about things in between that, such as, for example, the relationship between the different Germanic languages or Slavic languages? Or the non-relationship between Basque and everything else?

As far as I know, in the particular case of the basque, it was not until XVI century when some intellectuals started to write about the origin of the basque language and its relationships

 

[Ajidica]

Why did the British give Hong Kong back to China? I looked into it a bit, and everything seemed to say something along the lines of "Britain's 99 year lease was expiring", that was a treaty signed with Imperial China, and they weren't around anymore (and I swear I read something about the PRC repudiating all the treaties signed with Imperial China). Unlike the Falklands, China couldn't just show up on the beaches of Hong Kong with some marines and say "it's ours now". Further, I was under the impression most residents of Hong Kong were perfectly happy with British rule. Plus, Britain signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984 which laid out the framework for putting Hong Kong under Chinese authority. It seems odd to me that Thatcher and the Tories would give away several million people in a British territory to China, right after going to war to protect some miserable islands in the South Atlantic with a couple thousand people.

 

[Cutlass]

Unlike the Falklands, China couldn't just show up on the beaches of Hong Kong with some marines and say "it's ours now".
.

Ummm, why in the hell not? Hong Kong is immediately adjacent to China, and China's army is 10s of millions of men larger than Britain could field these days. And if Britain's power projection capabilities were maxed out in the Falklands, where Argentina's weren't much better, then what could they possibly do 10,000 miles further away?

Short version being that nuclear or folding were the only options, should China decide to push the issue. They didn't have a credible threat.

 

[Imaus]

Britain in 1997, post-Cold War and post-Conservative, was a wholly different beast from Falklands-War era Britain of 1982. It had drastically cut its military - from 5% GDP in 1982 to around 2.5 by 2000 - it had no geopolitical advantage from stuffing up the Chinese - compared to showing off a quick war against a third-rate power to spook the Soviets, a feat basically replicated with Grenada and the Gulf War for the US and UK with the US for the latter - and basically, not much changed on the ground immediately. A million people already left before the handover, the PRC was changing to their State Capitalist reforms that impressed Thatcher enough, and the PRC was not going to drop the issue.

In '82, Deng and Thatcher met. Thatcher tried to be sly. Deng had none of it. It was a matter of extreme cultural and political symbolism to China; the UK, however, had been gutted of its empire nearly fifty years before and Hong Kong, while impressive, was not crucial for the UK. Hong Kong suffered a hit in '83 via Typhoon Ellen as well, making it a small drain for a while that imprinted itself on the common mind. Then the UK and PRC basically made a new treaty: PRC gets control of HK but keeps it special up to 2047, then it can do what it wants. And so it went from there.

 

[Traitorfish]

Also: racism. Falklanders are mostly white. Hong Kongese are mostly Asian. Tory voters can be reliably expected to value a few thousand of the former more than they value a few million of the latter.

I mean, we didn't even give the Hong Kongese citizenship. They were just "overseas nationals": literally, second-class citizens. We weren't subtle.

 

[caketastydelish]

If Dachs makes a long, well written and thought out, informative post that takes a considerable amount of time to read (and obviously far longer for him write) what do you call it?

Spoiler :

A Dachumentary

 

[Zack]

How did Hannibal get his elephants across the Mediterranean? I'm struggling to imagine the logistics of it. How do you feed them, what do you do with the massive amounts of stool and urine, where do you put them?

 

[Cutlass]

How did Hannibal get his elephants across the Mediterranean? I'm struggling to imagine the logistics of it. How do you feed them, what do you do with the massive amounts of stool and urine, where do you put them?

Ships. It's only a few days across the Med.

 

[Ajidica]

If the elephants were already present in Carthaginian Spain, they could very easily have been shipped across the Straits of Gibraltar which would only be a few hours.

 

[Dachs]

How did Hannibal get his elephants across the Mediterranean? I'm struggling to imagine the logistics of it. How do you feed them, what do you do with the massive amounts of stool and urine, where do you put them?

@Cutlass and @Ajidica have basically already answered this question. We don't know exactly how the Carthaginians transported elephants from Africa to Spain and Sicily, but the distances over which they were transported were relatively short and could be covered rapidly. Hannibal in particular definitely marched his elephants around by land where he could rather than attempting to transport them by sea the whole way.

The few textual references we have for classical transport of elephants by water in the Western Mediterranean strongly imply that moving the animals over water was usually an ad hoc affair and got messy, often with casualties among elephants, humans, or both. There were ships large enough to transport multiple elephants and their food for a few days. The ancient Mediterranean was plied by large merchantmen that could load three to four hundred tons. The issue would be keeping the animals calm for the duration of the journey. Elephants were uncomfortable with walking up gangplanks onto classical ships and usually had to be coaxed up by ruses. They were also attended by several men with ropes just in case something happened, as can be seen on one of the Piazza Armerina mosaics from Sicily. Clearly moving the animals was a harrowing business for all involved and not undertaken lightly.

Some purpose-built vessels did exist. The late Lionel Casson published extensively on the elephant hunts of Ptolemaic Egypt, which were facilitated by the construction of large ships capable of sailing the Red Sea with elephants on board, the elephantegoi. These vessels, however, would also put in on the coast during their journey north from Aithiopia to Berenike, partly for exercising the animals and partly for the sanity of the humans. Some authors have hypothesized that each elephantegos was also attended by a grain ship to ensure that its captives were well fed, but there isn't much evidence for this. Unlike the armies of Carthage, Rome, and Pyrrhos, Ptolemaic Egypt clearly invested a great deal of resources into the logistics of elephant transportation and it showed.

The Seleukid kings may also have employed specialized elephant transports from India to avoid transiting the Gedrosian deserts or the Hindu Kush, but unfortunately there is no evidence for or against such methods. Alexander brought his elephants overland, pace Arrian, and Seleukos might have done, but we know very little about subsequent additions to the Syrian elephant herd.