Multiculturalism and Racism in the Ancient World

Thanks, I had never heard about that and just had a quick read on it. I can see where it links with the "promotion" of the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Though I also venture that the colonial projects were pragmatically self-serving, first and foremost, and only adopted those ideologies that could be used. And then in turn promoted them. In the 19th century states were not particularly wealthy and both colonial companies and "state-managed" colonies had to make do and turn a profit. That meant organizing the exploitation of the african populations, as we all know, because europeans would not migrate there in large numbers. Colonial governments would do anything that was expedient to extract the maximum of traceable wealth from those populations, with the smaller costs. Infrastructure was limited to ports in the coast or rivers, those were fixed costs for each territory. The variable costs were the military, the cost of repression. This the european colonial governments would go along with whatever structures were already in place and willing to cooperate in that extraction of valuable goods.

Did the belgians and the french actually went to the trouble of installing a group over another, with the military costs necessary for that? Or did they exploit structures that was already in place and nudged them along?

Not sure if you mean permanent re-location, yet the belgian Congo did use other africans (from outside Congo) as the Askari (lower soldiers), exactly because those other africans would have less issue with chopping hands of the congolese natives. Besides, this has been the reason why mercenary troops were so popular from ancient times: they can only be loyal to their ruler, and thus they stand or fall with the ruler and will destroy the natives if asked.
 
Surely you mean "millennium" not "century"

Thank you for correcting me, that's what I meant.

Thanks, I had never heard about that and just had a quick read on it. I can see where it links with the "promotion" of the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Though I also venture that the colonial projects were pragmatically self-serving, first and foremost, and only adopted those ideologies that could be used. And then in turn promoted them. In the 19th century states were not particularly wealthy and both colonial companies and "state-managed" colonies had to make do and turn a profit. That meant organizing the exploitation of the african populations, as we all know, because europeans would not migrate there in large numbers. Colonial governments would do anything that was expedient to extract the maximum of traceable wealth from those populations, with the smaller costs. Infrastructure was limited to ports in the coast or rivers, those were fixed costs for each territory. The variable costs were the military, the cost of repression. This the european colonial governments would go along with whatever structures were already in place and willing to cooperate in that extraction of valuable goods.

Did the belgians and the french actually went to the trouble of installing a group over another, with the military costs necessary for that? Or did they exploit structures that was already in place and nudged them along?

I agree with your assessment of the colonies. Instead of comparing them to the modern nation state it would perhaps be more fitting to compare them with the rising multinational corporations like the East India Company. This especially applies to the plantation systems in Latin America and elsewhere.

As for your last sentence, I agree partially. I would say that the colonists definitely did install this notion of Tutsi superiority inside the community, but, as you said, not with the Rwandan society in mind, but rather with their profit in mind. What is perhaps the biggest tragedy in the Rwanda conflict is the fact that in the second half of the 20th century Belgium had a very liberal government that might or might not have had the intention to actually bring the surpressed Hutu back to power. But with them turning around their policy, rapidly and unexpectedly changing the power structures in Rwanda, essentially due to their inredible shortsightedness, they partially caused the conditions that in the end led to the genocide.

Of course a million other factors play a role, too. Like the military deployment, the various Rwandan armies.. But this shortsightedness in regards to colonies/former colonies is something you see throughout the centuries. I feel the same way about a lot of foreign aid programs.. Seems like even when "we" have good intentions we still inevitably f s up.
 
Does it actually cost more to install one ethnic group over another than it does to install yourself over both? It seems to me a cost-saving measure: Europeans inevitably relied on some degree of local support to staff the lower rungs of the colonial apparatus, and that's going to be easier if a portion of the indigenous society are invested in the continuation of that apparatus. It's hardly an uncommon tactic in colonial societies, from Ireland to Indonesia; what's unusual in Rwanda is only how it emerged as a sharp distinction between two opposed ethnic groups, and eventually spilled over into genocide.

The American South is again instructive: it would have been virtually impossible for the planter aristocracy to suppress both the blacks and poor whites, so why not convince the poor whites that they had something to gain by the suppression of the blacks? If they buy it, they'll not only do the hard work of suppressing the black population, but, and this is the real beauty of it, they'll start suppressing themselves. For the cost of no more than a lie, the ruling class save themselves a fortune in the costly business of class warfare.
 
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I'm uncomfortable with saying that history happens because powerful people lied and less-powerful people just went along with it - as if that's what ordinary people do. Part of the answer has to be, surely, that the poor whites did gain something out of suppressing black people, and that they lost something (the ready chance to become rich whites) that wasn't really on the table for them anyway. How many northern factory workers ended up as factory owners? You might say that they also lost the chance of starting a class-based revolution and overthrowing the whole thing, but that sounds even less likely in a place where Marxism and similar were never meaningful social forces.
 
Well, sure. There's acres of scholarship on the topic. The much-dreaded concept of "white privilege" began as an attempt to explain Southern popular racism within a Marxist framework of class-conflict. But while it's an oversimplification to say that the rich whites played the poor whites for suckers, it's not actually untrue.
 
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