I tend to rankle when people compare the colonialism of the last few centuries with the pre-capitalist expansion and settlement of ancient societies. It seems like there's a lot of daylight between the English founding Jamestown and ancient Ionians founding Massalia or w/e.
But what do Hexbear's historians think? Is it fundamentally the same social phenomenon across time or is capitalist settler-colonialism its own unique thing?
I had to deal with someone in my life who said something to effect of "if you're condemning modern colonization, why don't also condemn the Viking conquest/colonization of England?".
What I said to him was that while I don't know the specifics of that era, let me ask you... can you identify the continuing legacies of that colonization? Ongoing material problems? Can you point to how that still harms English people or helps Norwegians to this day? Pretty obviously, the answer is no. The viking conquest of the English coast doesn't really impact us today in a meaningful way. However, there are a whole host of very real issues that impact colonized people to this very day. So many problems that modern colonialism + capitalism have caused, and basically none have been made right.
The point about bringing up modern colonialism isn't to wag our fingers at the evil mayos (though that is fun). It's to highlight how the people there still are haunted by the effects. Kinda similar to how while as Marxists we may find the bourgeoisie to be immoral, ultimately our critique of capitalism lies in the system itself and not on the morals of individual actors.
In everyday life, people either use it to either justify actually existing colonialism (Assyrians conquering the Levant justifies Israel stealing land from Palestinians because that's what people in that region of the world has always done) or to diminish victims of actually existing colonization (the Qing dynasty commited genocide against the Dzungar Khanate so we shouldn't feel bad when the Japanese empire commited genocide against Chinese people). Occasionally, both would be used at the same time (the Aztecs had a brutal empire, so they shouldn't bitch about getting owned by the Spanish).
i wrote a big comment about it some time ago but it got swallowed up by the fact that anything older than a month won't show up in your post history in order to not have the site crashing down, will reply later with an actual answer, i'm super tired rn, but to give you a short answer, colony-founding was a specific activity that was engaged in only by the largely disunited city-state societies that could only thrived interstitially in the areas of the world where the big empires didn't care enough to extend, it's why the Greeks, Phoenicians, and later the Carthaginians started colonies, but conversely the Persians, Egyptians, or Romans did not engage in colony-building. you could argue that none of them had naval capacity which is true: the Persians largely conquered the Phoenician city-states and used them as a client navy with them focusing on land forces, Egypt was largely Nile-oriented and didn't need to expand, really, Rome eventually built a navy but didn't use it for colony-building; you could argue they had soldier-colonies, but i digress
here's a novel way to look at colony-building in the classical antiquity mediteranean: land travel is limited to a radius of about 150km, if you have beasts of burden packed up with the maximum amount of fodder they are able to carry, they would eat that fodder in about 150km, and that's even before you actually carry anything of value, so resupplying posts need to be placed at 80km intervals, what's more you can't just resupply on fodder indefinitely, you're trying to turn a profit here; the army more or less doesn't care, even in ancient times, most settlements had some sort of commissary that made sure there were excess supplies for armies coming and going (the 150km rules applies to humans just as well as it does to ancient-breed oxen or donkeys)
so you need something more efficient, river transport is almost free, at least the one way the river flows, but the rivers are not open for navigation all year round, during heavy rainfall they flood and become unnavigable, they might freeze in winter and so on
ultimately, sea transport was that era's rail tracks, and building ports was akin to building more train stations, sure, you need to stock up on food and water for the crew in excess of your cargo, but you benefit from economies of scale: a ship then times larger does not need ten times as much crew, generally with bigger ships you can get away with less crew relative to the amount of goods you're carrying
we even have some kind of written record of this, from Diocletian's Maximum Prices Edict set the relative cost for transport we can deduce that if sea transport costs you 1 unit (the base ratio) then the cost of river transport is 5 times more, and the cost of wagon transport by land is 28 / 56 times more (there's 2 numbers here because of the posibility of translating this bit in two different ways, but don't worry, they're both huge numbers so it doesn't matter) all, in all while not absolute ratios, they can be seen as orders of magnitude, exact costs depend on distance, terrain, conditions of rivers and seas, weight of goods, precise animals used, and technology
of course a lot of this trade already happened in the levant between egypt, mesopotamians, hitties, minoan greeks, so on, so you should ask yourself, why would they ever want to trade with largely nomadic european dirt farmers? well, the short answer is, the proliferation of iron tools after the bronze age collapse made the rain-watered fields and hills of europe much more productive agriculturally speaking, meaning the european continent, which as far as ancient history is concerned is completely irrelevant, now has a healthy surplus to start trading for other goods
FINALLY, a short aside / rant on agriculture: it's not like in civ where people just "discover" agriculture, like yeah, you put the seed in the ground and it makes food, genious, the big problem is soil eventually depletes, and it does so very very quickly, in fact, especially if you have no conception of fertiliser, no way to dig up soil (with a plow) so that it can replace the now depleted top soil (or even conception that that would help), no consistent way to get water on your crops, and so on, on most european soil that means you get one decent harvest (if at all), and the next one on the same plot is basically dogshit
we're pretty sure most gatherer-hunters were aware of rainwater agriculture, they just didn't think it was worth it
the first literate agriculturalist communities formed around river valleys where 2 of those problems, water and fertilisation (the silt of the river replenishes your fields through the flood season via the irrigation you built), but honestly, there are not many places where this happens, except for the nile, mesopotamia, the indus valley and the yellow river
with bronze tools, european nomads could now cut down / debark trees, slash bushes and other smaller plants, let them dry for a couple months and then set fire to the now dried cutland fertilising the soil and meaning they could get reliable harvests for about 5 years max out of that plot of land (this is a upper estimate and does suppose you use some kind of tool to plow the field (as much as you can, you don't have the tools to remove the tree stumps yet)
this 5 year upper bound means that yes, in 5 years the settlement would eventually be deserted, although realistically, your second harvest is smaller than your first so people would be enticed to leave for the next slash and burn plot of forest as subsequent harvests yielded less food
iron tools made it so tree stumps could be removed and plows could dig deeper into the soil, overturning deeper soiled that was not depleted meaning that rainwater agriculturalism (contrasting with alluvial agriculturalism) was actually viable and that people engaging in it could have a sedentary lifestyle and didn't have to be semi-nomadic
conveniently enough this is what the greeks and most of europe came out of the rainwater agricultural "revolution"
PS
most boat trade was tramp trade
it's not that iron tools were better than bronze tools, in a lot of respects bronze was quality-wise, better, it's just that bronze was made by smelting copper with tin, with tin being pretty rare and hard to come by, making bronze scarce, check out bronze age nomad axes used to cut down trees, their blades are like an inch wide, no way you're getting enough of that to make a plow; iron on the other hand is fucking everywhere and once you have the high-heat kilns required to smelt it, it is plentiful and cheap, meaning iron tools get to spread far and wide equally
anyway yeah, shit's complex, if i had more time i would have written a shorter, less rambly, more to the point reply
edit: oh yeah i forgot to actually link it to your OP, if someone says ancient era and modern age colonies are the same they have no idea what they're talking about and you should tell them they have a discoloured patch on their face that looks like the start of BOFA
soldier-colonies, but i digress
actually i think this is probably a necessary discussion if slightly outside the purview of the question. roman colonia look an awful lot more like settler-colonialism, and were not limited to soldiers.
but without writing a book it probably suffices to say kinds of ancient colony (with particular emphasis on those sponsored by imperial states) have parrallels to more modern forms. recognizing in those modern forms the possibility of assimilation existed alongside extermination and that assimilation & synthesization were dominant under hellenistic states.
you make a good point, i should probably think about writing an actual effortpost comparing historical colony-like forms with modern colonies, including not only greek city-state colonies, roman coloneia, but also, for example, the andean "archipelago model", historic migration (like the bulgars, the Magyars, every goth ever), viking shit like the danelaw and probably some other stuff i'm missing, surface level, of course, i don't have the time to write a damn book about it
I'd love to read it personally, thought this was post was really interesting
this is the best post I've read on here in a hot minute, thank you for taking the time to write it
Death to America
We go all the way back to stuff like Massalia, Kyrenaika, etc. we don't really have enough information to really compare. Like we know people recorded the relationship to mother cities, sometimes military alliances between them... but economically? did Sybaris export natural resources back to the 'metropole' in a client relationship? did colonies conquer their land, lease it/buy it by treaty? Did the Greeks bring slaves or enslave a bunch of locals on arrival?
and on top of that, all the poleis had separate laws & customs we can only loosely affiliate with each other. so there remains possibility for any or all the possibilities to be true for any specific colony over a specific period---but we don't really know.
my own very lukewarm opinion is that medieval italian (very complicated subject in its own right) colonies are probably what ancient efforts most resembled. and we can say those are pretty different from modern colonialism.
my even weirder addendum is that i think cultural differences between medditerrean peoples in greece-italy-anatolia (i.e. where 90% of greek 'colonization' happened) are very much exaggerated & scholarship overemphasizes a 'hellenic' influence on surrounding peoples who might've just 'originally' been much more culturally similar & amenable to living with & around greeks than greek authors' chauvinism lets on
Have you read this one? It's been on my list for a while. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/greeks-and-barbarians/CA8E4141E95FF846E3C4831FB8279DBF#fndtn-information
Didn't Hellenistic era Greeks have their own internal ethnic chauvanism going on though? Like Ionians didn't like Dorians who didn't like Magnetes or whatever?
i don't think they were very discrete groups with hard political affiliations, but there were regional dialects & religious groupings. the hellenistic era is actually when intra-greek differences in dialect are going away because of Koine & regionalism becomes less important under the big diadochi empires (Macedonians, Cretans, Rhodians, etc. are all just Greeks when you put them in Mesopotamia or Syria)
Very interesting. Are there any works you'd recommend that talk more about this? Besides the one @Wertheimer recommended, that is.
Peter Green's From Alexander to Actium is my main starting point for Hellenistic history. Of particular regional interest is Richard Stoneman's The Greek Experience of India.
The Greek version of the phrase "Don't bullshit a bullshittter" was "Don't try to out-Cretan a Cretan." There's an example of it in reference to siege-based treachery somewhere in Polybius.
Most of my other go-to examples are from the classical era. Abdera, despite multiple philosophical luminaries hailing from that town, was the place that generated the ancient Greek version of the Polish joke. Corinthians were notorious swindlers, Laconians were legendarily laconic, etc. Take a drink every time Thucydides introduces a speech (which he wrote, naturally) from a Spartan leader by saying something like "Brasidas, who was a good speaker, for a Spartan..."
https://web.archive.org/web/20190402114641/http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/quinn_jokes.shtml
Lots of :grillman: "Take my wife, please!" humor
:sadness: i got to read a ton of articles in school about the hellenistic period and poleis but since i dropped out & my school laptop killed itself i don't have them anymore.
you can hit up encyclopedia iranica though that place has tonnes on greek cities/settlement, religion, culture etc. as it interacted with west asia
Thanks, I had no idea that emcyclopedia iranica was even a thing! Condolences for your school laptop though, I'll light a candle tonight for it.
Were you the one I recommended the fiction book set in the ancient Greek period "Mediterranean Hegemon of Ancient Greece" by Chen Rui? If not I recommend it because it touches on the period of the March of the Ten Thousand and the rule of Dionysius the Elder in Sicily.
@Wertheimer and @Bluegrass_Buddhist you might like it too.
Bit of trivia about the dictator of Sicily:
Stolen from wikipedia
Like Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens, Dionysius was fond of having literary men about him, such as the historian Philistus, the poet Philoxenus, and the philosopher Plato, but treated them in a most arbitrary manner. Diodorus Siculus relates in his Bibliotheca historica that Dionysius once had Philoxenus arrested and sent to the quarries for voicing a bad opinion about his poetry. The next day, he released Philoxenus because of his friends' requests, and brought the poet before him for another poetry reading. Dionysius read his own work and the audience applauded. When he asked Philoxenus how he liked it, the poet turned to the guards and said "take me back to the quarries."
Good post like many posts in this thread, but the Romans did have economic reasons for genociding everyone, not just Germans. Ancient Rome used the slave mode of production which means you get rich by having more land and more slaves. There is a huge incentive therefore to conquer and enslave people. The empire only started running into problems when they literally couldn’t conquer anyone else. Deserts / oceans/ forests blocked them on every side, and the barbarians were also starting to figure out how to fight the legions (horse archers at the Battle of Carrhae) while Roman wealth itself was transforming the virtuous warriors of Caesar’s day into pleasure-loving hedonists before they became stoics and then finally Christians (specifically because they were running out of shit to steal and society therefore needed a way to get people to consume less and have fewer kids (thus the creation of monasteries)).
Ancient Greece and Egypt used the same mode of production, it was just less developed.
That is a fantastic explanation for the birth of stoicism! Thank you.
It's basically the same phenomenon though the specifics of colonialism vary widely so it's hard to compare such broad categories as "ancient" and "modern" colonialism. In both times you have extreme violence, slavery, and extraction and in both times you can find examples of cohabitation and assimilation.
The thing that is disturbing is when people try to justify ongoing colonialism with far past colonialism, as if the Romans settling Gaul and wiping out the native Celts somehow justifies the ongoing colonial projects in the Americas.
The thing that is disturbing is when people try to justify ongoing colonialism with far past colonialism, as if the Romans settling Gaul and wiping out the native Celts somehow justifies the ongoing colonial projects in the Americas.
I probably should have clarified, this is what rankles me.
Read Xenophon's Anabasis. It's a great window into the iron age and how all this ancient cultural diversity got crushed by passing armies casually genociding people. The author is basically an ancient greek chud who sacrifices to Zeus like a good boy, but if you read it with a keen eye for ancient military history, early monetary economies, and the extreme cultural diversity of the period it's mind-blowing. It's also fairly entertaining and not too long a read.
Now I want to reread this. I read the Anabasis when I was around 12 and I thought Xenophon was the coolest guy ever. Thankfully I grew out of that eventually, but reading his Socratic dialogues did help to get me interested in philosophy. I think I would find different things interesting about it now lol.
It's not fundamentally the same phenomenon until the early modern era imo
What differentiates them, in your view? There's obviously less of a profit motive in pre-capitalist settlement, but would some form of the indigenous / settler dichotomy as we understand it still apply in how the newcomers and native people interacted with each other?
in short, systems of colonization under different modes of production are difficult to directly compare
You have to ask yourself if that isn't the case with any human migration. Unless you are literally the first Cro-Magnon in a part of France then someone displaced someone else for you to be there. It was also not a new world that was being explored, like Greeks knew Egyptians intimately for centuries by the time Naucratis popped up. That and many of these colonies didn't belong to anything resembling an empire or coherent state back home. Syracuse had a close relationship with the Peloponnese sure, but it was not an expansion of Korinthia. Hell it occurred during the Greek Dark Ages.
I recommend "1177; The Year Civilization Ended" as a good intro to the Late Bronze Age Collapse and how thoroughly interconnected much of the Bronze Age world was. We have evidence of people from the Hellas fleeing to Anatolia and the Levant, and vice-versa. These are not clear cut distinct peoples moving into a completely foreign place and dominating it. It could be extractive for sure, and easily lead to violence over resources, but it is not exactly comprable to the kind of planned displacement and domination of our modern Colonialism.
Personally I would put these colonies in a different category from Scandinavian ones. Mostly since those started explicitly as a means of creating a base for the slave trade. The relationship to the native population also sometimes hitting close to home. The Ostmen in Ireland had special privileges even once they became localized, eventually being left in their segregated housing in Dublin by the British. There had been claims of it being expulsion but modern scholarship disagrees. Point is Scandinavian colonialism was more comprable to modern versions than Phoenicians forming Carthage
I think the key here is modes of production. The forces of production in a slave society are not as developed as in a feudal society, and feudal productive forces are not as developed as those of capitalism. Settler colonialism definitely took place in the ancient world and definitely sucked but was not on the same level of suckiness as under capitalism because the settlers were limited by the productive forces. Medieval Christians would slaughter Jews and steal their shit, for example, but were unable to exterminate them without barbed wire, poison gas, trains, IBM’s computing technology, machine guns, etc.
Bother is the wrong word. I think it's easy for people to look at capitalism and settler-colonialism and see the parrallels to earlier forms of social organization. Pointing out that much of the inequality of English fuedalism survived into capitalism, for example.
But I think it's important to point out that capitalism does have fundamental differences from feudalism, early command economies, etc. Otherwise you get things like British and French people justifying Sykes-Picot in by comparing it to the Roman conquests of Gaul, or white midwesterners making apologism for Manifest Destiny by pointing out the history of conflict among ancient plains peoples.
It sounds like what's actually bugging you is the assumption that anything the ancients did was fine.
It's perfectly plausible that the ancient Mediterranean colonies were just as brutal as age of sail European colonies, but the voices of the victims were lost to pre-history.
In my experience it's almost always to try to justify modern colonialism. I'm sure lots of academics and theorists make legitimate comparisons, but in the wild I've mostly encountered it in the context of people saying "People have always done this so we're not doing anything wrong".
