Internet in no way is eliminating cultural nationalism. While it makes us english more widespread, it also helps small cultures stay alive.
While XIXth century public education wiped out local languages, now the Net connect the communities.
In Canada, national newspapers were supposed to exterminate french. On July 1st 1867, the Globe (now Globe & Mail, the"national paper of record") the front page proudly boasted "Confederation enacted.French Canadianism extinguished!"
Didn't happened. So on to the 1930's. A national radio (then in the '50's tv) network was established, soon splitting in two entities who never collaborate so far as not even having a common newsroom and staff and essentially hate and despise each other (just follow the last two years fight about the title of a book describing the solidarity between francophones and blacks, a book banned on the english side...A prominent newsreader was fired just for saying the title).
The most nationalistic french-canadians are the bilinguals who can read and listen to the anglo media as they know what the other side think...
Immediate reaction: the identity remains different, in a big part because the French identity is defined in opposition to the English one (and hence the American). But that sounds unique? Eg in Catalonia or the Basque Country, nationalists don’t have this hatred of English or American culture.
Francophones Canadians don't hate Americans. The ones we encoounter are no more (or less) ignorant about us than other foreigners but don't have the mixture of contempt and condescension our "compatriots" display. We do not hate english Canadians but have no illusion about their sentiments. A very near relative is a scientist at an anglo university. Nobel number of 1...). His staff is mostly Chinese, as the resentment of Anglos being bossed by a french makes the work very difficult.
In his "From colony to nation" the great Anglo-Canadian historian A. R. M. Lower wrote about his compatriots: "They might have made at least a Switzerland out of Canada and they have created an Austria-Hungary."
I think my point is still valid, no? The hesitance against English sounds quite unique to French Canada for historic reasons, which means we shouldn’t take Canada as an example of the hesitance against worldwide English hegemony
Between a Dane and a Korean, english can be a rather neutral lingua franca, as english is not a dominant economic, social or political factor in either country (though the resulting conversation is rather interesting, as anyone who attend international events can testify...). But in Canada, english is the language of the colonial overlord and is not benevolent nor even just neutral.
And you don't have to wait long for any conversation between even supposedly polite and well-meaning canadians from both side to degenerate. I remember a thread on Paul Krugman NYT blog about interest rates a dozen years ago, where about the 30th comment it had gone down as a serie of diatribes against the economic inferiority and malfeasance of Québécois, all to the dismay of Krugman and the international audiences.
Take up identity and other cultural factors into account in the spread of a group. Compare to growth of bacteria or other forms on agar
The agar is the geographic limitation the nature of the organism and its characteristics determine the spread and location of spread
Cultural prohibitions and laws do likewise
Determinants like limits on cousin marriage may require a wider area and larger population to allow finding mates. Property rights and laws determine ability to build wealth.
A man who defines himself as the son of John in a kinship based society versus “I am an engineer or scientist “ may define or delimit a society. Same with the allowable jobs or marital partners of a Dalit or a woman in a given society Religion plays another role in cohesive behavior and allows crusades and wars to be sustained Many factors are worthy of attention in addition to geography physical ability and transport. The printing press. Literacy. Radio tv industry computer internet are also factors. Men define themselves by the technology. The body as a machine with efficiency experts Next the body as interconnected neuronal mass mimicking the computer circuits the mind and body as separate verses connected. Many issues to consider uncharted
I need to do a 2022 summary, but that's what I'm saying, right?
I explore how much geography impacted history in the past. But in this series, I explore how it's the interaction between geography *and transportation technology* that influenced some aspects of history. In the series of articles about the end of nation states, I covered how much communication technologies influenced history. I will cover in the future energy tech, violence tech, and hopefully also things like religions indeed.
The point about geography is not that it matters so much. It's that it *used to matter so much*. But as technology has evolved, it has taken over. You can see this in some of these articles. For example, what this article is saying really is that tech limitations shaped empires geographically, but now these tech limitations don't exist anymore, so empires are unshackled by geography.
I love your ideas (even though I may not fully agree with everything) but I think you have two minor factual mistakes that would be worth correcting:
1. You say: “ The empire couldn’t expand further and lost to the Greeks (in the famous Battle of Thermopylae, where the Greeks were led by the Spartans)“, I do not think it is correct, the Persians won in Thermopylae, they lost later on in Marathon (to the Athenians) and in Plataea (where Sparta led a Greek coalition of city states), among others; your point about overextending remains the same.
2. You say: “That’s why the Chinese started the Grand Canal System in the 5th century BC, before Rome was even born.”, I do not think that is correct, while you could always argue that the traditional foundation year of Rome may not be exact (753 BC), by the 5th century Rome was already a Republic (even though it would not become an empire until much latter, arguably until August time ).
Another factor that influenced the speed and extent of empire growth is disease. China douth of the Yellow River remained undeveloped and largely unoccupied for centuries because if endemic diseases. This idea is exlored well in Plagues and People by William McNeill.
I wonder if similar things happen at corporations with project management. If a delay, snag, or other problem takes more than a couple days to permiate to the correct people with the authority to handle the issue, the project may fail. Time scales are obviously condensed with modern technology, but I bet the underlaying issues are the same. If you can't react quickly enough to information you are not going to succeed.
In fact there's a phenomenon that I didn't cover in this article but I will cover in the one later this week that touches on this.
The 2 factors that determine this 1 month thing are probably linked to army logistics vs neighboring pressure. So internal execution speed vs competition. Seen this way, it might well apply to businesses too...
No, space exploration is a theme I have in mind. It's more to underline how a massive amount of our past was determined by rules that we don't understand. And so when these rules stop mattering, history changes, but we don't realize it, and we feel lost.
Understanding the drivers of yesterday helps us understand the drivers of today, and hence the arrow of history
Thank you Thomas for making these topics so much fun to read. I gave a subscription to Uncharted Territories to my brother and our conversations are broader and deeper because of it.
I am reminded of “The Chalice and the Blade” by Eisler who explores the “dominator model” of expansion and implosion from the beginning of civilization. Her center for partnership studies encourages sustainable growth through partnership focusing on common interests.
Your Uncharted Territories subscription and the incipient feedback conversations such as this an example of a
living partnership with your readers. Perhaps
the virtual water cooler concept could be used here to expand and provide traction for our evolving “community of thinkers and doers”.
Exploration and collaboration on areas of common interest is so much more fun and fruitful than domination and tribalism.
Thank you! I really appreciate your comment about your brother. What an honor!
I hadn't heard about The Chalice and the Blade. Thanks for sharing. Interesting parallel.
I am thinking A LOT about what you're saying in the watercooler comment. I have a very precise and ambitious idea on that topic. I might get on it in 2023!
Great article as usual. Another reason the Europeans colonized Africa in the 19th century and not before, is that they developed medicine back then to help them fight the many diseases of the continent. It explains also why the Muslims didn’t go all the way to South Africa but where stopped around the middle of the continent.
Wish you a joyful and stimulating 2023. This year, I want to make more time for long form reading like yours. Often it conflicts with other items in inbox plus varied internet distractions. I would like to use an aggregator where I can consolidate some links (blogs, articles, editorial pieces) and read them offline over dedicated chunks of time. Any recommendations ?
I am playing with a free app called Pocket which seems to integrate well across interfaces - mobile/desktop/tablet. It embeds itself as a plug in into your browser and makes it easy to feed articles with a simple click. It is "downloading articles" though am yet to try it offline. If it works offline, it will be the solution I need.
Have you read Joseph Heinrich's book. The WEIRDest people in the World?
The effect of cultural forces, identity, literacy, religion, technology etc adds to the the geographic and transportation technologies in shaping societies. The internet effect on culture and self perception in relation to others will be interesting to hear in your next report.
Happy to go further. This was out of scope, but is very interesting.
There are 2 very different things: conquest and rule.
CONQUEST
The amount of area you can conquer depends on your military and logistics power.
For the Mongols, the military power came from their horse-mounted archers (which could attack and gallop away with few losses, exhausting opponents) and siege weaponry.
The logistics power came from the fact that they didn't need a logistics train. Most armies were limited by the food and water they had to carry. This meant an army couldn't be bigger than ±60k ppl, and couldn't go farther than a few months of travel in great circumstances (eg, water and some food available along the way). The result is that an army by foot can move a few miles per day, for only a few months.
Mongols meanwhile could travel up to 100 km per day, day in, day out, for years, because didn't need a logistics train. Their horses and goats ate the grass from the steppes, and they in turn ate as protein the dairy and meat from their animals. They also frequently had more than one horse to mount (besides the mares for milk). This means they could travel from Mongolia to Ukraine in about a month and a half give or take at maximum speed.
Now this is in extreme circumstances, so it's more likely that it would take a few months to go from one to the other, which is still more than our 1-month limit.
This is where the rule part comes in place.
CONQUEST VS RULE
You can actually conquer a lot of ground that you then can't hold. The Romans reached the Persian Gulf, but couldn't hold it. It was too far away. Alexander the Great reached India, but couldn't hold all that terrain.
That's because one thing is to go from one place to the other beating the locals, and another very different thing is to rule them for decades or centuries.
If you ride for 2 months to conquer a place, once you arrive, you can conquer the people indeed.
But then you go back home and what happens? 2 months pass before you get news. Distant places grow apart culturally, economically, politically. It's very hard to keep them united.
And so that's why at the death of the Khan, the Mongol Horde splits. They could conquer all this area like Alexander could conquer his, but they couldn't hold it for long.
Internet in no way is eliminating cultural nationalism. While it makes us english more widespread, it also helps small cultures stay alive.
While XIXth century public education wiped out local languages, now the Net connect the communities.
In Canada, national newspapers were supposed to exterminate french. On July 1st 1867, the Globe (now Globe & Mail, the"national paper of record") the front page proudly boasted "Confederation enacted.French Canadianism extinguished!"
Didn't happened. So on to the 1930's. A national radio (then in the '50's tv) network was established, soon splitting in two entities who never collaborate so far as not even having a common newsroom and staff and essentially hate and despise each other (just follow the last two years fight about the title of a book describing the solidarity between francophones and blacks, a book banned on the english side...A prominent newsreader was fired just for saying the title).
The most nationalistic french-canadians are the bilinguals who can read and listen to the anglo media as they know what the other side think...
This is a great point. I’ll think about it.
Immediate reaction: the identity remains different, in a big part because the French identity is defined in opposition to the English one (and hence the American). But that sounds unique? Eg in Catalonia or the Basque Country, nationalists don’t have this hatred of English or American culture.
Francophones Canadians don't hate Americans. The ones we encoounter are no more (or less) ignorant about us than other foreigners but don't have the mixture of contempt and condescension our "compatriots" display. We do not hate english Canadians but have no illusion about their sentiments. A very near relative is a scientist at an anglo university. Nobel number of 1...). His staff is mostly Chinese, as the resentment of Anglos being bossed by a french makes the work very difficult.
In his "From colony to nation" the great Anglo-Canadian historian A. R. M. Lower wrote about his compatriots: "They might have made at least a Switzerland out of Canada and they have created an Austria-Hungary."
Interesting.
I think my point is still valid, no? The hesitance against English sounds quite unique to French Canada for historic reasons, which means we shouldn’t take Canada as an example of the hesitance against worldwide English hegemony
Between a Dane and a Korean, english can be a rather neutral lingua franca, as english is not a dominant economic, social or political factor in either country (though the resulting conversation is rather interesting, as anyone who attend international events can testify...). But in Canada, english is the language of the colonial overlord and is not benevolent nor even just neutral.
And you don't have to wait long for any conversation between even supposedly polite and well-meaning canadians from both side to degenerate. I remember a thread on Paul Krugman NYT blog about interest rates a dozen years ago, where about the 30th comment it had gone down as a serie of diatribes against the economic inferiority and malfeasance of Québécois, all to the dismay of Krugman and the international audiences.
Take up identity and other cultural factors into account in the spread of a group. Compare to growth of bacteria or other forms on agar
The agar is the geographic limitation the nature of the organism and its characteristics determine the spread and location of spread
Cultural prohibitions and laws do likewise
Determinants like limits on cousin marriage may require a wider area and larger population to allow finding mates. Property rights and laws determine ability to build wealth.
A man who defines himself as the son of John in a kinship based society versus “I am an engineer or scientist “ may define or delimit a society. Same with the allowable jobs or marital partners of a Dalit or a woman in a given society Religion plays another role in cohesive behavior and allows crusades and wars to be sustained Many factors are worthy of attention in addition to geography physical ability and transport. The printing press. Literacy. Radio tv industry computer internet are also factors. Men define themselves by the technology. The body as a machine with efficiency experts Next the body as interconnected neuronal mass mimicking the computer circuits the mind and body as separate verses connected. Many issues to consider uncharted
Ah now I get it.
For sure!
I need to do a 2022 summary, but that's what I'm saying, right?
I explore how much geography impacted history in the past. But in this series, I explore how it's the interaction between geography *and transportation technology* that influenced some aspects of history. In the series of articles about the end of nation states, I covered how much communication technologies influenced history. I will cover in the future energy tech, violence tech, and hopefully also things like religions indeed.
The point about geography is not that it matters so much. It's that it *used to matter so much*. But as technology has evolved, it has taken over. You can see this in some of these articles. For example, what this article is saying really is that tech limitations shaped empires geographically, but now these tech limitations don't exist anymore, so empires are unshackled by geography.
Hi Tomas,
I love your ideas (even though I may not fully agree with everything) but I think you have two minor factual mistakes that would be worth correcting:
1. You say: “ The empire couldn’t expand further and lost to the Greeks (in the famous Battle of Thermopylae, where the Greeks were led by the Spartans)“, I do not think it is correct, the Persians won in Thermopylae, they lost later on in Marathon (to the Athenians) and in Plataea (where Sparta led a Greek coalition of city states), among others; your point about overextending remains the same.
2. You say: “That’s why the Chinese started the Grand Canal System in the 5th century BC, before Rome was even born.”, I do not think that is correct, while you could always argue that the traditional foundation year of Rome may not be exact (753 BC), by the 5th century Rome was already a Republic (even though it would not become an empire until much latter, arguably until August time ).
Regards,
Gerardo
Ah thank you! I really appreciate. Corrected!
Another factor that influenced the speed and extent of empire growth is disease. China douth of the Yellow River remained undeveloped and largely unoccupied for centuries because if endemic diseases. This idea is exlored well in Plagues and People by William McNeill.
Indeed! And Africa unconquered due to malaria
I wonder if similar things happen at corporations with project management. If a delay, snag, or other problem takes more than a couple days to permiate to the correct people with the authority to handle the issue, the project may fail. Time scales are obviously condensed with modern technology, but I bet the underlaying issues are the same. If you can't react quickly enough to information you are not going to succeed.
Very interesting idea.
In fact there's a phenomenon that I didn't cover in this article but I will cover in the one later this week that touches on this.
The 2 factors that determine this 1 month thing are probably linked to army logistics vs neighboring pressure. So internal execution speed vs competition. Seen this way, it might well apply to businesses too...
Is all this to say that Mars cant be a colony of the empire of earth?
That's it!
No, space exploration is a theme I have in mind. It's more to underline how a massive amount of our past was determined by rules that we don't understand. And so when these rules stop mattering, history changes, but we don't realize it, and we feel lost.
Understanding the drivers of yesterday helps us understand the drivers of today, and hence the arrow of history
Thank you Thomas for making these topics so much fun to read. I gave a subscription to Uncharted Territories to my brother and our conversations are broader and deeper because of it.
I am reminded of “The Chalice and the Blade” by Eisler who explores the “dominator model” of expansion and implosion from the beginning of civilization. Her center for partnership studies encourages sustainable growth through partnership focusing on common interests.
Your Uncharted Territories subscription and the incipient feedback conversations such as this an example of a
living partnership with your readers. Perhaps
the virtual water cooler concept could be used here to expand and provide traction for our evolving “community of thinkers and doers”.
Exploration and collaboration on areas of common interest is so much more fun and fruitful than domination and tribalism.
Thank you! I really appreciate your comment about your brother. What an honor!
I hadn't heard about The Chalice and the Blade. Thanks for sharing. Interesting parallel.
I am thinking A LOT about what you're saying in the watercooler comment. I have a very precise and ambitious idea on that topic. I might get on it in 2023!
Great article as usual. Another reason the Europeans colonized Africa in the 19th century and not before, is that they developed medicine back then to help them fight the many diseases of the continent. It explains also why the Muslims didn’t go all the way to South Africa but where stopped around the middle of the continent.
Indeed!
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-europeans-colonized-america-before
Excellent read
Hi Tomas,
Wish you a joyful and stimulating 2023. This year, I want to make more time for long form reading like yours. Often it conflicts with other items in inbox plus varied internet distractions. I would like to use an aggregator where I can consolidate some links (blogs, articles, editorial pieces) and read them offline over dedicated chunks of time. Any recommendations ?
Happy new year! And thank you.
Good question. Let me think about it.
Would it be useful to convert all these articles to PDF? Not committing to doing it, just wanted to know if this would solve the problem.
I assume you're asking for a more generic solution though.
You assume right :)
I am playing with a free app called Pocket which seems to integrate well across interfaces - mobile/desktop/tablet. It embeds itself as a plug in into your browser and makes it easy to feed articles with a simple click. It is "downloading articles" though am yet to try it offline. If it works offline, it will be the solution I need.
Have you read Joseph Heinrich's book. The WEIRDest people in the World?
The effect of cultural forces, identity, literacy, religion, technology etc adds to the the geographic and transportation technologies in shaping societies. The internet effect on culture and self perception in relation to others will be interesting to hear in your next report.
I heard about it recently. The more suggestions I receive about some piece of content, the more I’m likely to consume it!
But you’re getting into a thorny subject. Share your thoughts!
Great article.
The Mongol exception needs a better explanation... It could take years to traverse from one end to the other.
Happy to go further. This was out of scope, but is very interesting.
There are 2 very different things: conquest and rule.
CONQUEST
The amount of area you can conquer depends on your military and logistics power.
For the Mongols, the military power came from their horse-mounted archers (which could attack and gallop away with few losses, exhausting opponents) and siege weaponry.
The logistics power came from the fact that they didn't need a logistics train. Most armies were limited by the food and water they had to carry. This meant an army couldn't be bigger than ±60k ppl, and couldn't go farther than a few months of travel in great circumstances (eg, water and some food available along the way). The result is that an army by foot can move a few miles per day, for only a few months.
Mongols meanwhile could travel up to 100 km per day, day in, day out, for years, because didn't need a logistics train. Their horses and goats ate the grass from the steppes, and they in turn ate as protein the dairy and meat from their animals. They also frequently had more than one horse to mount (besides the mares for milk). This means they could travel from Mongolia to Ukraine in about a month and a half give or take at maximum speed.
Now this is in extreme circumstances, so it's more likely that it would take a few months to go from one to the other, which is still more than our 1-month limit.
This is where the rule part comes in place.
CONQUEST VS RULE
You can actually conquer a lot of ground that you then can't hold. The Romans reached the Persian Gulf, but couldn't hold it. It was too far away. Alexander the Great reached India, but couldn't hold all that terrain.
That's because one thing is to go from one place to the other beating the locals, and another very different thing is to rule them for decades or centuries.
If you ride for 2 months to conquer a place, once you arrive, you can conquer the people indeed.
But then you go back home and what happens? 2 months pass before you get news. Distant places grow apart culturally, economically, politically. It's very hard to keep them united.
And so that's why at the death of the Khan, the Mongol Horde splits. They could conquer all this area like Alexander could conquer his, but they couldn't hold it for long.