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Xiahou Dun posted:Now I want to write an alt history book about Europe getting its poo poo rocked in the 14th century by... how about the last Iberian Muslims turning the tide and having continent-sweeping Reverse-conquista. Or maybe the Songhai Empire. Or hell, maybe the Inca figure it out, somehow. Lizards from space who decide to arrive 500 years sooner.
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Sep 25, 2022 03:57
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Xiahou Dun posted:Now I want to write an alt history book about Europe getting its poo poo rocked in the 14th century by... how about the last Iberian Muslims turning the tide and having continent-sweeping Reverse-conquista. Or maybe the Songhai Empire. Or hell, maybe the Inca figure it out, somehow. This is pretty much Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, and it's a great book.
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Sep 25, 2022 04:19
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mllaneza posted:How much of the difference between the Old and New Worlds levels of development can be attributed to the New World people having had to emigrate vast distances over millennia to get established ? The only form of development there's a really strong case for is on the political side. Both the Aztecs and Inca were a bit... naive? Maybe the Spanish were just absurdly psycho, but both these empires' experienced ambushes from within their own court receptions, leading to the leadership getting kidnapped/murdered in their first contact with the conquistadors. It's not really something you would imagine happening in say, China, where the rulers had pulling that kind of poo poo since 500 BC and most everybody was wise to those stunts
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Sep 25, 2022 04:54
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Xiahou Dun posted:Now I want to write an alt history book about Europe getting its poo poo rocked in the 14th century by... how about the last Iberian Muslims turning the tide and having continent-sweeping Reverse-conquista. Or maybe the Songhai Empire. Or hell, maybe the Inca figure it out, somehow. Warning: May remove your ability to feel human.
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Sep 25, 2022 04:57
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Prolonged Panorama posted:This is pretty much Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, and it's a great book. poo poo I actually read that book now that I mention it. Nessus posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusader_Kings_II:_Sunset_Invasion Pls don't tempt me to get back into Paradox games. I have so much to live for. 
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Sep 25, 2022 05:03
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Xiahou Dun posted:Pls don't tempt me to get back into Paradox games. I have so much to live for. May I interest you in Victoria 3, coming out next month, where the game is all about balancing interest groups while trying to manage your economy and attempting to survive and thrive in the age of global imperialism? I note they have a dev diary specifically dedicated to talking about how the Opium Wars are modeled,, and I'm kinda curious what the thread makes of it.
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Sep 25, 2022 05:19
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Prolonged Panorama posted:This is pretty much Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, and it's a great book. So long as you like big ideas and are relaxed about things like characters, dialogue and plot, but then again it’s KSR so you know what you’re getting.
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Sep 25, 2022 05:40
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Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah it can’t be stated enough that the Americas in, say, 1650 were basically a post apocalyptic wasteland with a few European colonies on the fringes. Are there any good explanations of why old world diseases annihilated new world populations but the opposite did not happen?
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Sep 25, 2022 06:06
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The main reasons I've seen given:
Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah it can’t be stated enough that the Americas in, say, 1650 were basically a post apocalyptic wasteland with a few European colonies on the fringes. I can barely imagine what medieval Europe would look like with the amount of death that the Americas had from transoceanic diseases. The Black Death at its height killed a whole lot of people, but it was only like 45%, the Americas had a death doll of 90%. How much of Germany just gets swallowed up by forest to the point that people centuries later aren't even really sure people ever lived there. Maybe more isolated groups in sparsely populated areas like in the Balkans or Switzerland or even Russia would have better odds of survival, but whatever's left after the apocalyptic waves of diseases would probably just pick up and redistribute themselves across the continent as tons of more ideal spots are left open and vacant. Most of the big governments would just dissolve as they lose the manpower to keep any semblance of order. People en masse just give up on cities and towns and sometimes even agriculture to wander through the overgrown wilderness and feed off what they can gather and hunt. There's plenty of wild boar; cows do their best to redevelop into aurochs, and remains of old farms would probably still have some amount of the crop left growing wild. In fact, in just a century or so, all the abandoned fertile land will have massively overproduced relative to the amount of people left. Plenty of groups would be able to resettle vacant lands, but usually only in smaller groups, and entire theories of governance and society have to be reinvented to build bigger again. The biggest difference might be that Europeans would have so much livestock to haul around with them while on the move, and better enable mobility early on. No dog-hauled sleds for them. Presumably whatever disease hits Europe would spread across the mediterranean to the Middle East, down the Nile and Red Sea to Ethiopia and other big African states, and across India and the rest of Asia. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Sep 25, 2022 |
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Sep 25, 2022 06:24
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VostokProgram posted:Are there any good explanations of why old world diseases annihilated new world populations but the opposite did not happen? Funnily enough, the whole thesis of Guns, Germs, and Steel which we were just talking about for the past few pages is one attempt to answer that question.
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Sep 25, 2022 06:35
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Europe might have some advantages due to literacy allowing for information of the old ways to not be completely lost. But that sounds more like "it is likely Christianity would not disappear, although the Catholic Church's succession might have some interesting times."
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Sep 25, 2022 06:36
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VostokProgram posted:Are there any good explanations of why old world diseases annihilated new world populations but the opposite did not happen? I recall some articles about a genetic component to it but I can't find them anymore. Something to do with the bottleneck from when the Bering Strait was first crossed.
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Sep 25, 2022 06:43
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Nessus posted:Europe might have some advantages due to literacy allowing for information of the old ways to not be completely lost. But that sounds more like "it is likely Christianity would not disappear, although the Catholic Church's succession might have some interesting times." At one point there were three men all claiming to be Pope, all of whom had cardinals supporting them, and all with national military forces backing them.
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Sep 25, 2022 06:46
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Having a month-long ocean crossing by boat seems like it'd be a naturally enforced quarantine. Old World diseases travel on hosts to New World, but New World diseases either kill visitors as they come in or don't, with it being all over one way or the other no matter what by the time the ship's back in Lisbon or wherever. Diseases are much more easily carried by livestock, which were also going pretty much one way. Keeping in mind that diseases travel better as part of an actual population. One person or like a pet llama someone stole isn't as dangerous as 20 people or cows who can pass the same sickness around indefinitely.
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Sep 25, 2022 06:59
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I dunno, I think there's pretty good odds of the catholic church ceasing to exist as a meaningful institution, since it's not just the population getting scourged across the continent, it's the most widely interconnected areas and institutions getting hit harder by the disease. Even if Rome isn't obliterated, there'd be a long while of little to no meaningful contact between areas to maintain any sort of transcontinental organization. A lot of areas may just lose the entirety of their officially licensed priesthood, and the ones that survive would be pretty prone to going their own direction due to the amount of duress and lack of contact with any superiors. I think a diocese might be too large for the remaining societies, and if a bishop is attached to a group that goes mobile, there goes any semblance of structure.
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Sep 25, 2022 07:07
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Xiahou Dun posted:Now I want to write an alt history book about Europe getting its poo poo rocked in the 14th century by... how about the last Iberian Muslims turning the tide and having continent-sweeping Reverse-conquista. Or maybe the Songhai Empire. Or hell, maybe the Inca figure it out, somehow. May I interest you in these people called the Mongols, sir.
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Sep 25, 2022 09:44
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SlothfulCobra posted:I dunno, I think there's pretty good odds of the catholic church ceasing to exist as a meaningful institution, since it's not just the population getting scourged across the continent, it's the most widely interconnected areas and institutions getting hit harder by the disease. Even if Rome isn't obliterated, there'd be a long while of little to no meaningful contact between areas to maintain any sort of transcontinental organization. A lot of areas may just lose the entirety of their officially licensed priesthood, and the ones that survive would be pretty prone to going their own direction due to the amount of duress and lack of contact with any superiors. I think a diocese might be too large for the remaining societies, and if a bishop is attached to a group that goes mobile, there goes any semblance of structure.
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Sep 25, 2022 09:54
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VostokProgram posted:Are there any good explanations of why old world diseases annihilated new world populations but the opposite did not happen? It's just luck. Europe got turbofucked by the black death coming from somewhere to the East, so there's no reason why that couldn't have happened again and worse at some random inconvenient time. Even if you accept all the arguments, you end up with, say, "30% chance of Europeans loving over the Native Americans with their disease, 15% chance of the other way round". Making one more likely than the other doesn't mean the most likely thing has to happen. Pandemics are a crapshoot. And that's before you factor in the chance of someone figuring out how to vaccinate for smallpox, which they did in China around the 1500s and possibly even much earlier. Fangz fucked around with this message at 14:13 on Sep 25, 2022 |
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Sep 25, 2022 14:07
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Fangz posted:And that's before you factor in the chance of someone figuring out how to vaccinate for smallpox, which they did in China around the 1500s and possibly even much earlier. I don't think I've heard of this before. Was it some form of variolation?
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Sep 25, 2022 14:58
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Xiahou Dun posted:Seconding this. doesn't have time so well but d-place is incredible https://d-place.org/parameters/EA029#1/30/153
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Sep 25, 2022 15:13
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Nessus posted:Assuming it was ninety percent and pretty randomly distributed, I would imagine a meaningful number of clergy would survive; and many of them would have the relevant literature and such as well. It might well demolish the hierarchy but not necessarily the faith, or at least, the existence of the faith. Like that would probably be the biggest shift; they would have writing and a tradition of using it, and that would be unlikely to disappear completely - while in the Americas (to my understanding) the writing systems were limited and local, if doubtless well on their way. It’s not like Christianity didn’t exist outside of Europe.
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Sep 25, 2022 15:52
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Nessus posted:Assuming it was ninety percent and pretty randomly distributed, I would imagine a meaningful number of clergy would survive; and many of them would have the relevant literature and such as well. It might well demolish the hierarchy but not necessarily the faith, or at least, the existence of the faith. Like that would probably be the biggest shift; they would have writing and a tradition of using it, and that would be unlikely to disappear completely - while in the Americas (to my understanding) the writing systems were limited and local, if doubtless well on their way. The big issue in the Americas - at least as far as the Incas and Mexica go - is that their writing systems were actively suppressed and destroyed by the new colonial governments which soon emerged. IIRC there are only something like 3 or 4 surviving Aztec codices - basically books made of tree bark - left precisely because Spanish priests piled up all the ones they could find and burned them. They're beautiful too, and look a lot like medieval European illuminated manuscripts. So really it would be more like if all this went down in the early middle ages, the Vikings got spared the plague for some reason, invaded southern Europe, and actively suppressed Christianity and burned all written materials they could find in favor of a runic writing system. But, to further support your point about Christianity surviving in some form, there is a LOT of syncretism in the forms of Christianity that develop among native populations in the Americas, and you really don't have to look too far to find modern day local saints etc. that are venerated and trace directly back to pre-Colombian religious observances.
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Sep 25, 2022 16:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:But, to further support your point about Christianity surviving in some form, there is a LOT of syncretism in the forms of Christianity that develop among native populations in the Americas, and you really don't have to look too far to find modern day local saints etc. that are venerated and trace directly back to pre-Colombian religious observances. This is odd given how rich original culture Christianity had from the beginning. Like Christmas, nativity of John the Baptist, Easter...
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Sep 25, 2022 17:03
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VostokProgram posted:Are there any good explanations of why old world diseases annihilated new world populations but the opposite did not happen? It's not clear to me that it was so much "old world diseases" as it was one or two specific old world diseases - smallpox and measles in particular. Both are relatively new diseases as far as viral evolution goes, and while the old world had had some time to build up some resistance to the disease and their less-serious progenitor variants, the new world hadn't. In that respect it might have been just bad luck for them that the most recent airborne plagues happened to have occurred elsewhere first. I've seen other explanations involving a more vicious Red Queen's race in European human and viral populations due to higher density and closer proximity to livestock. Density favors rapid transmission, rapid transmission selects for hardier human immune systems, hardier immune systems in turn select for meaner viruses. I don't know how supportable that is given that there were in fact quite dense and agriculturally sophisticated Mesoamerican empires, but it's a thought. Any explanation has to account for the fact that African and European diseases didn't wreck any side in particular during colonialism. To me that tends to point toward to the bad luck hypothesis. Africa and Europe happened to have enough exchange throughout the centuries that respiratory diseases and resistance were somewhat shared. Not an expert, not even a dilettante, just what I've read people speculate about.
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Sep 25, 2022 19:29
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Magnetic North posted:I don't think I've heard of this before. Was it some form of variolation? Yes, variolation using dried scabs. Not exactly obvious, and also somewhat unsafe, but does work. Multiple groups seem to have independently discovered the technique, and it would not have been technologically out of reach for indigenous Americans. Captain von Trapp posted:I've seen other explanations involving a more vicious Red Queen's race in European human and viral populations due to higher density and closer proximity to livestock. Density favors rapid transmission, rapid transmission selects for hardier human immune systems, hardier immune systems in turn select for meaner viruses. I don't know how supportable that is given that there were in fact quite dense and agriculturally sophisticated Mesoamerican empires, but it's a thought. Frankly this makes very little sense. Being exposed to one disease does not help you with unrelated diseases. If anything, suffering a serious illness can compromise your immune system and make you *more* vulnerable to other diseases. Trying to argue that Europeans are generically more immune to disease in any significant way seems extremely dubious. Further, the "red queen's race" works *against* smallpox in this case. Virulence is not a positive trait in an endemic illness! The tendency is for pathogens to become more transmissable but *less* lethal over time. This is why in the modern day the most serious and dangerous diseases do not first appear in dense modern urban areas, but rather isolated rural places in developing and third world countries, and then make it *into* major cities. Fangz fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Sep 25, 2022 |
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Sep 25, 2022 20:13
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We’ve had a few discussions in the ancient history thread lately-ish about plagues, and one of the more prominent points that keeps coming up is that there isn’t actually any record of large scale widespread pandemics until within the past couple of thousand years, after both widespread urbanization and established trade links that link Eurasia.
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Sep 25, 2022 20:22
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I dont know if this is exact right thread for it , but what happened to the various kingdoms of Africa to make it so that by the time of european colonization it seemingly goes uncontested for the most part by local kingdoms and you end up with africa effectively sliced by brit, france, belgium, et, al?
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Sep 25, 2022 20:40
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The slave trade (and reorientation of local economies around it) was immensely disruptive to the kingdoms and left them much weaker than they otherwise would have been, but it’s the discovery in Europe of an inoculation against malaria (so allowing European armies to venture into the region when they hadn’t been able to sustain operations there before) that caused the sudden shift from no conquest to total in such a short time.
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Sep 25, 2022 20:50
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Koramei posted:the discovery in Europe of an inoculation against malaria A what now?
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Sep 25, 2022 23:18
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Fangz posted:Frankly this makes very little sense. Being exposed to one disease does not help you with unrelated diseases. If anything, suffering a serious illness can compromise your immune system and make you *more* vulnerable to other diseases. Trying to argue that Europeans are generically more immune to disease in any significant way seems extremely dubious. The theory isn't that exposure helps you, it's that exposure helps your population when you die and your subpar immune system (w/r/t that type of disease) isn't passed on. I think that possibly also overcomes the more-transmissible less-lethal objection, because if a disease that's more transmissible hits an immune-naive population it might not be less lethal to them. In that sense disease would not be so dissimilar from any other invasive species. It seems pretty clear that Europeans are not somehow "more immune" in general, but in 1492 they have been more immune to those two diseases specifically. I would still lean toward "bad luck" to explain why smallpox and malaria popped up in the eastern hemisphere first, rather than density or shape-of-continent explanations.
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Sep 25, 2022 23:56
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Captain von Trapp posted:Any explanation has to account for the fact that African and European diseases didn't wreck any side in particular during colonialism. European colonization of Africa was actually slowed down considerably by malaria, I'm pretty sure.
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Sep 26, 2022 00:25
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Xakura posted:A what now? It's in the culture tech tree, you get a chance to discover it once you develop medicine. That + Gatling gun lets you colonize africa, new guinea and Wyoming.
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Sep 26, 2022 01:06
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Defenestrategy posted:I dont know if this is exact right thread for it , but what happened to the various kingdoms of Africa to make it so that by the time of european colonization it seemingly goes uncontested for the most part by local kingdoms and you end up with africa effectively sliced by brit, france, belgium, et, al? Colonization of Africa gets misunderstood as a primarily military conflict, when it was less of a direct conflict and more of an exploitative economic relationship that intensified over time. For starters, the colonization of Africa begins in the 1400s, and the African states were more or less at parity with Europeans when it came to land wars until the 1800s. Sufficiently motivated African states could beat European militaries during this time, but the issue then was that the Europeans would retreat to coastal forts. The coastal land itself had little value for agrarian/pastoralist African societies, and the forts were difficult to take. So rather than assault them for little gain, African polities usually would instead accept the European presence and trade with them for their own benefit. Two inequities came out of this. One was that the Europeans were getting way more money from their end of trade because of their globalized trade networks. The other was the slave trade, which incentivized wars and violence in Africa that was objectively to the detriment of general African society. This doesn't really explain why the scramble for Africa happened so quickly. That was the culmination of the unequal relationship between Africans and Europeans in these economic relationships, because the scramble was less about asserting European political authority in Africa than it was about Europeans asserting legal authority among other Europeans. The Berlin Conference laid out a prerogative for interested European country with economic interests in Africa to stake out geographically defined areas where they were supposed to be the primary authority, not because there was so much European administration happening in the middle of the Sahara, but to avoid future conflict in Europe over trade arrangements in Africa. The opinion of actual African people was irrelevant to the conference, and functionally irrelevant to the way Europeans had actually colonised Africa. This formal ownership of African land led directly to decolonization, because the Europeans racistly assumed that their colonial governments were natural consequences of white supremacy and represented something to African people other than nominal control and rule by force. The relationship shifted from an indistinct economic relationship to direct rule from an arbitrary quasi-government. Almost immediately after the Berlin Conference and the Scramble for Africa, popular rebellions started happening everywhere in Africa. Whereas earlier military conflicts in Africa were mostly small wars between local rulers that the Europeans could pick sides in, these were explicitly anti-European rebellions. Despite the immense difference between European and African technology by this point, the Europeans were forced/elected to decolonize only around 50 years after establishing colonial governments in Africa. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Sep 26, 2022 |
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Sep 26, 2022 01:34
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:A good effort post So what I'm getting from this is largely that Europeans basically hung out in coastal trade ports and basically drew boundries on a map telling other euros to stay out and when they actually tried to do things like actually govern beyond these port areas the locals revolted pretty immediately, that about right? Thanks for the post.
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Sep 26, 2022 02:49
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Xakura posted:A what now? They mean the invention of gin and tonic.
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Sep 26, 2022 06:02
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Captain von Trapp posted:The theory isn't that exposure helps you, it's that exposure helps your population when you die and your subpar immune system (w/r/t that type of disease) isn't passed on. I think that possibly also overcomes the more-transmissible less-lethal objection, because if a disease that's more transmissible hits an immune-naive population it might not be less lethal to them. In that sense disease would not be so dissimilar from any other invasive species. It seems pretty clear that Europeans are not somehow "more immune" in general, but in 1492 they have been more immune to those two diseases specifically. For that argument to even start to make sense, you need everyone with a subpar immune system wrt smallpox in Europe to *actually die* (or at least, to be unable to have children). If Europeans start with the same proportions of more immune/less immune to smallpox as the indigenous Americans, that means you need 90% of Europeans to have died to smallpox. No, there isn't really an evolutionary explanation here. It's too fast. It's just random luck of the draw with mutations and disease spread.
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Sep 26, 2022 08:25
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Isn't it possible to pass down part of your immune system's threat database to your children via colostrum? Meaning they start with a bit of resistance to various common diseases, compared to someone who's matrilineal line has never been infected.
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Sep 26, 2022 08:29
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The Lone Badger posted:Isn't it possible to pass down part of your immune system's threat database to your children via colostrum? Meaning they start with a bit of resistance to various common diseases, compared to someone who's matrilineal line has never been infected. Yes, but that isn't an evolutionary survival of the fittest thing. It's a matter of the lethal strain being preceeded in a certain population by a less lethal one, *against* the usual evolutionary gradient.
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Sep 26, 2022 08:39
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Reading on the First and Second Italo-Ethiopian War and I found the amusing detail that Nazi Germany was one of the few countries to send aid to the Ethiopians, apparently to weaken Italy because of the Italian-German rivalry over Austria. This was before the pact between Mussolini and Hitler, after all. I never really knew that, it's funny, they certainly did have a major rivalry and animosity even after they became alliesquote:The Ethiopians were brave but poorly trained, and only a fifth of Haile Selassie’s 250,000-man army possessed modern weapons, including 16,000 rifles and 600 machine guns secretly supplied them by Adolf Hitler. Der Fiihrer wanted to confront a weakened Italy when he moved against Austria. 
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Sep 26, 2022 09:09
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Fangz posted:For that argument to even start to make sense, you need everyone with a subpar immune system wrt smallpox in Europe to *actually die* (or at least, to be unable to have children). If Europeans start with the same proportions of more immune/less immune to smallpox as the indigenous Americans, that means you need 90% of Europeans to have died to smallpox. eurasians and africans were more immune to smallpox than americans, and that's why the disease was so deadly in the americas
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