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It's stretching the definition of monarchy a bit, but Edo Period Japan is a potential example. There was nothing approaching even a veneer of popular representation, and in fact the population was rigidly controlled in terms of both social and actual physical mobility. At the same time it was a ~250 year period of stability, peace, economic growth, and flourishing of the arts and culture. Quality of life was also pretty good relative to most other nations of the time, even for peasants. Generally you only saw isolated popular uprisings caused by local magistrates deciding to hike up taxes.
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Aug 4, 2021 02:06
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I think what makes a surviving monarchy remarkable is surviving into modernity, since that seems to be where you get the cocktail of social forces that made a lot of the old monarchies fall, either to more modern dictatorships* and autocracies or to modern democracies. Or even greatly compromising on monarchic authority to introduce modern democracy into the ancient framework. A lot of states lasted for long periods before modern democracy was developed, which isn't much of an accomplishment in an era where it's seemingly the default aside from a few weird exceptions that also aren't great. And then happiness is pretty subjective, so I'm not sure how you'd measure it. A lot of people can be generally satisfied with existing in a world they have little to no say in so long as various needs are met. It seems like one of the big reason monarchies fall is just from the relative lack of versatility so that when things start going bad, the monarchs have no idea until way too late, whereas more modern democracies will have huge nation-wide discourses that highlight issues for responses. *The line between monarchy and dictatorship being fairly blurry and probably very subjective
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Aug 4, 2021 03:00
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Grand Fromage posted:The Romans come to mind. There really weren't very many popular revolts, most strife was from the ruling class or invasion. The Romans weren't a centralized monarchy though, even a thousand years after Augustus there were still some democratic institutions. I guess it depends on whether you consider slaves part of the population because getting worked to death in a mine in Iberia wasn't a fun time. Going back to Nicholas, another thing to keep on the scoreboard is that he was as responsible for world war 1 as anyone. Russia's stubbornness in how it mobilized and dragged its feet negotiating with Germany was one of the big dominoes that fell.
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Aug 4, 2021 03:59
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I don't think "were ancient societies happy" is a realistic question we'll ever be able to answer, because so much of the historical record is just a series of "great man did this, great man did that" events. 99.9% of the world's historic population basically doesn't exist in the records we have. Personally I feel the biggest driver behind most of the revolutions we've seen has been the rise of middle classes - the doctors, lawyers, teachers, businessmen and so on, who aren't part of the upper crust or nobility. It's when these guys start realising they're getting totally screwed by incompetence/malevolance/disinterest from above, they start agitating for changes. And since they've got some wealth and means, they've also got the ability to make themselves heard in small groups, whereas with peasants it takes a huge critical mass to get things accomplished.
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Aug 4, 2021 04:37
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buglord posted:Were there any monarchies in history that survived with a generally happy population? Or does a happy and efficient monarchy just switch into a democracy?  The Lichtensteiners are still going right? Though I'm not sure how much power they weild, but I think it's a fair amount.
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Aug 4, 2021 04:55
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:
Monaco too. It's easier when you're running a rich statelet. I assume part of the reason it's easier is because it's relatively simple for anyone who doesn't like the status quo to leave.
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Aug 4, 2021 05:04
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Oh and I guess the Saudis are still going full tilt, that's probably the best example. I have no idea whether ordinary Saudis are "happy" but they seem non-riotous at least.
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Aug 4, 2021 05:10
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Brunei is still a monarchy iirc? Jordan and Oman as well I think
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Aug 4, 2021 06:07
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To the extent that the Saudis are happy, it's because they're exploiting what is near slave labor at best, and which does at times veer into outright slavery at worst. On top of being a petrostate, obviously.
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Aug 4, 2021 16:29
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webmeister posted:I don't think "were ancient societies happy" is a realistic question we'll ever be able to answer, because so much of the historical record is just a series of "great man did this, great man did that" events. 99.9% of the world's historic population basically doesn't exist in the records we have. That's more or less classic marxist theory on first stage revolutions (the one you need to set up the preconditions for a communist revolution). You have people with large groups of money but without access to power (merchants, factory owners, professionals) and an aristocracy with power but with less and less wealth. Especially once those aristocracies start to lose their military role, the rich people go "why are we keeping these nobles around". Peasant uprisings kill a lot of people and historically weren't uncommon, but they very rarely coalesced into a new government in the way bourgeoisie revolutions do. SerCypher fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Aug 4, 2021 |
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Aug 4, 2021 23:25
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Apparently Mike Duncan's stuff on Haiti is getting misrepresented somewhere? https://twitter.com/mikeduncan/status/1423319770154340352 Does anyone know the fuller context for this?
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Aug 5, 2021 17:47
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CommonShore posted:Does anyone know the fuller context for this? This article, I think: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...0942_story.html
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Aug 5, 2021 18:06
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The article basically says it wasn't genocide because some white people weren't killed (which is an absurd standard since genocide can obviously be more specific than just skin color, and doesn't require 100% of the target population to be eradicated) and also because it was justified because they were colonizers so how dare you call it genocide. I think it's totally reasonable to understand why it happened, and failing to contextualize it in a way that makes Haitians the villains of the story would obviously be unfair/racist (and isn't what Duncan did, obviously) but just handwaving civilian massacres away as anti-colonialism (which obviously carries a positive connotation) isn't really an accurate telling of history so much as speaking euphemistically about an inconvenient truth.
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Aug 5, 2021 18:46
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 The passage in question. Maybe I'm misremembering but I don't remember Duncan saying anything of the kind.
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Aug 5, 2021 19:16
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Yeah, systematically murdering all the specifically French whites on the island still counts as a bit of a genocide. Not a very big genocide so far as genocides go (wikipedia says like 3,000 to 5,000 people were killed, and at least ten times that amount were killed in the aftermath of the war in the Vendee), but still. At least an ethnic cleansing. Killing people because of their ethnic background as opposed to like political affiliation. It would also be remiss to not mention that before the war ended, things got real nasty and the French forces were doing massacres (apparently Rochambeau even invented gas chambers in the process) as well as the Haitian forces, which doesn't make any of the civilian massacres right, but it puts them in greater context. I do wonder how much the massacre of French whites specifically played into how Haiti was politically isolated for a while after independence, since usually people blame it on the nations with slaves being nervous about slave revolts instead. I guess also if Haiti had more native-born whites, that could've been a diplomatic asset when dealing with racist cultures, but that's getting pretty abstract. Terrible Opinions posted:
He did in the podcast say that soldiers would rape the women, which I'm inclined to believe just because soldiers are generally known for such things, but there was also something about systematically goading their victims into digging up and paying out bribes for their survival and then killing them anyways. It really sounded like pretty brutal stuff, but it's also, y'know, a systematic mass-murder, so I'm not sure the specifics of what they did with their victims before killing them really matters that much compared to the main crime. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Aug 5, 2021 |
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Aug 5, 2021 19:18
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Colonizers are the real victims here great job guys
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Aug 5, 2021 20:03
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evilpicard posted:Colonizers are the real victims here great job guys That definitely looks like a good faith reading of what was said here, great job.
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Aug 5, 2021 20:12
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Remember when Rokossovsky genocided all the Germans living in Stalingrad
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Aug 5, 2021 20:44
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Didn't know the Germans had a bunch of women and children born into living there, weird! Also the Soviets did accept Nazi surrenders, even if the treatment was obviously not always up to Geneva Convention standards.
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Aug 5, 2021 20:55
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evilpicard posted:Remember when Rokossovsky genocided all the Germans living in Stalingrad that would certainly be news to the thousands of German prisoners taken during the battle
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Aug 5, 2021 23:05
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Terrible Opinions posted:
Duncan did make it very clear that the target was the French and not whites in general. There was for instance a large polish population that stayed in Haiti. And Dessalines was keen not to antagonize the US or UK people he'd planned to trade with. That kinda still makes it a genocide of the French though.
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Aug 6, 2021 06:05
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I mean I feel like this is quibbling because the actually thing is I don’t remember anything other than killing being mentioned outside the slave structure
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Aug 6, 2021 12:48
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SlothfulCobra posted:I do wonder how much the massacre of French whites specifically played into how Haiti was politically isolated for a while after independence, since usually people blame it on the nations with slaves being nervous about slave revolts instead. I guess also if Haiti had more native-born whites, that could've been a diplomatic asset when dealing with racist cultures, but that's getting pretty abstract. The fact that all the international merchants were allowed to leave having witnessed/heard the cries of french men, women, and children get forcefully rounded up and killed is a titanic diplomatic blunder. And the atrocity is only going to play into the racist stereotypes of the time as well. A blatant, organized rounding up of white women and children followd by their summary execution is something that every newspaper of the day would happily print on the front page as soon as the merchants in Haiti arrived at their home port. Dessalines never thought about what letting all the merchants and non-french witness what he was doing would mean.
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Aug 6, 2021 23:43
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Eh as mentioned in the episode merchants were fine to go back….until they realized the massive resource of the colony just did not exist in the new state. Remember this is the era of the extermination of the Native Americans
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Aug 7, 2021 00:18
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CharlestheHammer posted:Eh as mentioned in the episode merchants were fine to go back….until they realized the massive resource of the colony just did not exist in the new state. Remember this is the era of the extermination of the Native Americans Yeah this was really the issue. Toussaint and Dessalines were very keen to make the cash crop machine keep going, and merchants were quite happy to ignore their qualms if they got some of that sugar- Adams, and Hamilton even helped Toussaint write his Constitution. But there was basically no sugar without slavery so the merchants stopped caring and political will to stand with Haiti evaporated, especially once Jefferson and more enthusiastic slaveowning interests in America came to power. https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/john-adams-supports-toussaint-louverture-horrifies-jefferson/
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Aug 7, 2021 01:08
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One interesting thing I read recently is that Haiti and the Dominican Republic actually had pretty similar per capita GDPs well into the mid 20th Century, which complicates a lot of narratives about Haiti's distant past being responsible for its present. You can still attempt to draw a line by suggesting that Haiti's institutional failures and distrust of foreign capital could be affected by the past, but then you still have to explain why they weren't really doing worse than the DR until relatively recently. The DR did have longer life expectancy, so maybe some seeds had already been planted that led to greater economic success later, but the divergence coming after Haiti had finished paying off its (still brutally unfair) indemnities suggests that cause for their current circumstances has been overblown too. And just to be clear, the Dominican Republic isn't just doing well in comparison to Haiti, but seems to be on a path to become richer (per capita) than countries like Mexico and Brazil.
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Aug 7, 2021 01:37
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SerCypher posted:Peasant uprisings kill a lot of people and historically weren't uncommon, but they very rarely coalesced into a new government in the way bourgeoisie revolutions do. On the whole, peasant uprisings tend to be more about demanding concessions from the existing power structure, rather than replacing it wholesale.
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Aug 9, 2021 03:55
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Yup. Patrick Wyman did a good episode on it: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1NUizZVVyiPmBmM55LAqdE?si=FKe0IkuEQlKXUPbvm7vwpQ&utm_source=copy-link&dl_branch=1
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Aug 9, 2021 04:22
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You have to remember, a lot of peasants believed their rulers had their best interest at heart. It obviously must be the monarch didn’t know their sorrows, or worse, a bad advisor was lying to the king. So remove him and everything will be better! It never got better and mostly ended with then dying horribly
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Aug 9, 2021 15:31
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Yeah the idea that you can make a new system of government isn’t as obvious as it might seem to us.
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Aug 9, 2021 20:36
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CharlestheHammer posted:You have to remember, a lot of peasants believed their rulers had their best interest at heart. See Father Gapon.
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Aug 10, 2021 12:39
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Has anyone here ever bought Patreon or otherwise paid episodes of podcasts? How did that go? Is it a pain in the taint to add Patreon episodes to regular podcast software? Specifically I'm thinking about buying the bonuses from History of Rome, History of Byzantium, History of English, and When Diplomacy Fails, because I'm pretty much caught up on all of my podcasts right now.
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Aug 10, 2021 20:41
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It's usually just a second password protected feed
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Aug 10, 2021 20:48
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CommonShore posted:Has anyone here ever bought Patreon or otherwise paid episodes of podcasts? How did that go? Is it a pain in the taint to add Patreon episodes to regular podcast software? I haven’t subscribed to any historical podcast Patreons but from my experience subscribing to others what usually happens is that either you are forced to listen to the bonus episodes from the Patreon app (which sucks but not as much as it used to) or if the host is more tech savvy, they will create a custom RSS feed that you can then subscribe to with your app of choice (Pocket Casts for example allows you to subscribe to RSS feed but by the unintuitive method of pasting the link in the podcast search bar).
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Aug 10, 2021 20:49
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CommonShore posted:Has anyone here ever bought Patreon or otherwise paid episodes of podcasts? How did that go? Is it a pain in the taint to add Patreon episodes to regular podcast software? If they just let you download MP3s it's rough. Most podcasts (especially Patreon stuff) will have a subscriber-only RSS feed that you plug a username and password into in your podcast app, after that it acts like a normal feed. The history of Rome supplementals were all just mp3s back during the fundraiser, don't know if they're easier to use now.
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Aug 10, 2021 20:50
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Ok well all of that sounds easy and good. Thanks!
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Aug 10, 2021 20:53
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Back when I had a less-dim view of Carlin I bought a package of all the HH's to date during a winter holiday sale he was having, it was just a link to download a bunch of .mp3's that all had unclear file names that I manually had to rejigger to be easily navigable. But that's Carlin who's a dinosaur so I assume most other podcasts have a cleaner way of handling it.
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Aug 10, 2021 21:05
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They’ve also started to incorporate that stuff into the default Apple Podcasts app, which if you’re lazy and a glutton for punishment like me you still use. It looks like this, though I’ve never used it:
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Aug 10, 2021 22:31
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I'm sure there's, like, one of you in this thread who hasn't heard yet, but apparently Mike Duncan has written a twelve song pop-punk rock opera about the French revolution.
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Aug 11, 2021 03:20
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Arrhythmia posted:I'm sure there's, like, one of you in this thread who hasn't heard yet, but apparently Mike Duncan has written a twelve song pop-punk rock opera about the French revolution. Wh-
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Aug 11, 2021 08:21
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