Between Marx and the mullah

There is a lot of talk on this weblog about deaths in premodern conflicts. I want to clarify a few points, at least from my perspective.

Both ancient DNA and conventional history and archaeology indicate that massive population turnovers occurred in the past. If you read a book like Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy, you note that there is plenty of record of massacres and killings in targeted fashion during the Mongol expansion. The chaos and demographic collapse induced by the Mongols have been implicated in reforestation across vast swaths of Central Eurasia (which may then have produced climate change!).

We can also look to the deep past, and the more recent past. Latin America is characterized by incredible admixture between people of disparate ancestries. This is due in large part to 1) demographic collapse on the part of native peoples 2) migration of settlers from Iberia 3) transportation of slaves from Africa.

The evidence from Europe and South Asia is also strongly suggestive of massive population replacements. Depending on your model parameters about 50-75% of the ancestors of modern Northern Europeans who were alive 5,000 years ago had descendants who were intrusive to Northern Europe. Another way to say this is that 50-75% of the ancestors of modern Danes did not live in Denmark or nearby regions 5,000 years ago. A similar number for South Asia seems to be in the 10-30% range (again, depends on your model parameters).

This elicits the question: was there genocide?

The evidence from Latin America is clear. Though there was targeted genocide on the part of the Iberian conquerors, on the whole, the deaths were mostly due to the introduction of Eurasian diseases that resulted in a cascade of consequences which resulted in famine (the Black Legend is propaganda which has influenced our modern perceptions). When a human population lives on the Malthusian margin, small perturbations can result in death due to starvation. In the case of Latin America, it is known that incapacitation of a large enough proportion of prime-age adults due to illness resulted in famine, as crops were not planted or harvested in quantities necessary to sustain villages.

In other words, population collapse was a function of reduction in labor inputs into agriculture.

And, the reality is that the Iberian conquerors, who were often younger sons of aristocratic lineages, were not inclined to engage in mass-slaughter due to the reality of their aspiration of becoming rentiers. The importation of African slaves was to a great extent a direct consequence of shortages of exploitable labor (along with the humanitarian concerns of enslaving natives). Contrast this to the situation in the Phillippines or India, where Asian peoples provided resources to support leisure-seeking European elites.

A second fact is that premodern states were not capable of the sort of coordinated genocide that has been seen in the 20th-century. They lacked the weaponry, information technology, and organizational capacity to be particularly efficient. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the coordinated genocides against Christian groups in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman realm occurred in the modern period (Armenians and Assyrians). The older Ottoman state was neither efficient enough nor did it have the means, to engage in total exterminationism (I also believe that 19th-century European-style nationalism probably made exterminationist feelings more ‘justified’ as well).

Probably the best premodern instance of ethnic cleansing we have on record is the Spanish expulsion of the Moriscos, which occurred on the basis of presumed blood lineage, not belief (e.g., many sincere Christian Moriscos were expelled as well!). But, that effort was incomplete and patchy, effective in some areas, totally ineffective in others, and haphazard in the criteria utilized (e.g., many people with Morisco ancestry were not expelled, while families which had been sincere Christians for generations were expelled).

Which brings me back to the earlier cases. What happened in Europe and India to induce population change?

There are several things going on in my opinion. First, not all late Neolithic/early Bronze Age societies had developed an ideology of elite exploitation to the level that we’d take for granted in the modern world. By this, I mean that the leaders of these agro-pastoralist societies may not have viewed farmers of different ethnicities as potential subjects, and so wealth. In conflicts between hunter-gatherer populations often warfare results in very high mortality rates, with young children and young women of the losers assimilated into the winners. There was no ideology of group assimilation for young men into an alien population, and in societies without specialized professions and economic systems, these men might not be seen as valuable in any sense except as consumption slaves (servants for powerful people, not economic producers).

In other words, conflicts between primitive societies can be thought of as “animal conflicts,” where two groups fight over resources and don’t view the losers of the other group as resources. In contrast, societies over the past few thousand years have tended to see the defeat of the enemy as a potential for elites to accrue new subjects from which they can extract rents. This was one of the arguments made to Genghis Khan by one of his Khitai advisors as to why he should not clear the land of northern China of people so as to create pastures for horses and sheep. People were more valuable than horses and sheep. He would be richer with more people.

Of course, these are people with spears (and later swords). I don’t think that most of the demographic collapse was due to direct killing. Rather, people living on the Malthusian margin, especially the sort of late Neolithic farming that was likely marginal in Northern Europe, were likely subject to the same famine dynamics as occurred in the New World. The IVC zone in South Asia was clearly more advanced, but it too many have been relatively fragile in comparison to the agricultural regimes of later South Asian societies.

The final issue is looping back to Muslims. Did they commit genocide? Did they exterminate the local populations? Probably. But, 95-99% of the ancestry of South Asian Muslims is the same as that of South Asian Hindus of the same region. Unlike the incursion of Indo-Aryans, the arrival of Muslims, mostly Turks, Afghans, and Persians did not have a major demographic perturbation in a direct sense (indirectly, technology and organizational skills introduced by Muslim elites may have resulted in disparate demographic growth of different regions in South Asia; e.g., Eaton’s argument for the expansion into eastern Bengal).

Additionally, Islam as a dominant ideology developed during the high-tide of rent-seeking elites. Though Muhammad’s status as a merchant meant that the religion was never constitutively anti-mercantile, conquest elites invariably aimed to extract wealth out of conquered populations. Arguably, the development of Islam is a direct consequence of how lightly Christianized Arab conquest elites developing an ideology which justified their extraction of rents (“protection taxes”) from conquered populations,  as well as maintaining their separateness and distinctness.

In the Indian context, many will point out that Islamic chroniclers note the despoilation and slaughter upon the local population. I would suggest that one be cautious about the propagandistic nature of ancient conflict and war (this begins with the Battle of Kadesh). Ancient chroniclers seem to have exaggerated numbers and effectiveness routinely. At least in the early modern period, most casualties due to battlefield injuries were the consequence of infection, not immediate trauma. Similarly, I suspect that the depopulation of an invaded region was more likely a consequence of the disruption of local social fabrics more than direct killing with arrows, swords, and spears (killing people expends a lot of energy and is risky).

Because of the nature of this blog, of course, this post ends with the arrival of Muslims to India. The stupid and the disingenuous (or a mix of both) seem to fix on two extreme positions:

  1. Muslims arrived and ushered in an orgy of slaughter driven primarily by the motive of oppressing the kuffar
  2.  Turks arrived in India, and like earlier invaders aimed to extract resources and dominate the location population

These caricatures serve ideologies but don’t describe reality. Both materialist and non-materialist motives need to be considered. The chroniclers of the arrival of self-conscious Muslim military forces to South Asia clearly wished to present it as an ideological and religious act. These were ghazis, just as far to the west, the Ottomans began as ghazis. But it is also impossible not to notice the family resemblance of Muslim Turks moving into South Asia in the centuries after 1000 A.D. with the invasions and conquest of China by Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic peoples in the centuries after 1000 A.D.

Not surprisingly, the Khitai, Jurchen, and Mongols, all made some ideological claims for their acts of aggression of conquest, often post facto and tenuously. The Khitai and Jurchen integrated themselves into the Han Chinese worldview and presented themselves more worthy stewards of the Mandate of Heaven than the Song rulers of China. The Mongols also did this, though perhaps even more foregrounded was their own peculiar ideology than their sky god had given the whole world to them to subjugate (the Mongol Yuan dynasty also gave special consideration to Tibetan Buddhism, which alienated their Han subjects).

But of course, we would notice that the major consequence of the Mongol Yuan dynasty was the transfer of resources from Han Chinese elites to arriviste Mongol elites. The overthrow of the Yuan resulted in the expulsion of the killing of many of these hated Mongol landlords. Ideological rationales were given, but the memories of Han elite dispossession were fresh.

And yet despite the fig-leaf that ideology provides, differences may result from such distinctions. The Khitai and the Mongols were more punctilious is differentiating themselves from their Han subjects than the Jurchen. They maintained their separateness due to their reduced respect and veneration of Confucian norms. And, notably, the philo-Sinic Jurchen were assimilated into the Han to a far greater extent than the Khitai and the Mongols.

Similarly, in South Asia, the ideological distinctions between the rentier class of Turks and West Asian Muslims, and native Indians was sufficient for the absorptive process to halt. Synthesis occurred. But amalgamation did not proceed to completion. In David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism the author argues that the religious difference was also the key reason that the Indian elite, Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu, did not intermarry with the British gentry.

The various arcs of history cannot be easily defined by grade-school level Marxism, or internet Hindu level psychoanalysis. In all regions that self-conscious Muslim conquest elites established themselves, their sense of distinctness, superiority, and God-given right to rule are clear. But, all these groups, whether it be the slaving regimes of Arabs in East Africa, the Ottomans in the Balkans, and yes, Muslims in South Asia, exhibited a strong orientation toward pragmatic exploitation of the riches of the regions which they conquered.

Addendum: I’m going to delete stupid comments. This means if you leave a 2,000-word comment that’s stupid, it will be for naught.

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INDTHINGS
INDTHINGS
4 years ago

“Indian elite, Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu, did not intermarry with the British gentry.”

In Dalrymple’s “White Mughals”, its actually argued that during the early period of British rule in India, the British were intermarrying with the Muslim Elites in UP, and slowly becoming “Mughalized”. This caused so much consternation back in Britain that they began to restrict those sent to the region to already married, older/established personnel.

They also began to interact more harshly and hierarchically with their subjects in India, to further increase the distance between the two peoples (which contributed to the eventual Indian Rebellion).

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago
Reply to  INDTHINGS

They also began to interact more harshly and hierarchically with their subjects in India, to further increase the distance between the two peoples (which contributed to the eventual Indian Rebellion).

Common understanding is that the process was reverse. Pre-rebellion British attitudes towards mixing and intermarrying with Indians were pretty lax. It was this lax attitude that caused rebellion because Indians started taking British lightly.

Post-rebellion there was of course a complete break in the social interaction between Indians and British. British locked themselves up in their ivory towers and used the intermediary class of Indians (Macaulay’s children!) to rule their subjects.

Ikram
Ikram
4 years ago
Reply to  Scorpion Eater

Scorpion, you are not living up to your self described IQ (always a natural upward bias in self description).

The change began in the early 1800s, and has been attributed to causes as diverse as the entry of missionaries (1813) or the the end Persian language primacy (1835). Either way, it was just about dead by 1857.

This is an easy and accessible topic to learn about — Brits love writing about the raj. Here is Dalrymple —

“The wills written by dying East India Company servants show that the practice of marrying or cohabiting with Indian bibis quickly began to decline: from turning up in one-in-three wills between 1780 and 1785, they are present in only one-in-four between 1805 and 1810. By 1830, it is one-in-six; by the middle of the century, they have all but disappeared.”

AtheistMallu
AtheistMallu
4 years ago

Clearly almost all muslims in India are converts. How much of the conversion was –
1) Threat. Die or convert.
2) Coercion. Convert or pay taxes.
3) Proselytisation

VijayVan
4 years ago

\ Khitai advisors ……….People were more valuable than horses and sheep. He would be richer with more people.

Of course, these are people with spears (and later swords). I don’t think that most of the demographic collapse was due to direct killing. Rather, people living on the Malthusian margin, especially the sort of late Neolithic farming that was likely marginal in Northern Europe, were likely subject to the same famine dynamics as occurred in the New World.\

One does not have to go to New World. Even in Britain of 18/19th centuries, there was large scale ‘clearances’ i.e. people were replaced with sheep. Even earlier in England also there was large scale enclosures where people were displaced. Perhaps bourgeois industrialization or State industrialization of communism creates these displacements. The Scots who were removed from their land went to the new industrial towns as workers or emigrated to America and Canada.

Stalin’s massive purges of kulaks in the 1920s and 1930s where their land and all other possessions were confiscated and they themselves shipped to gulags , to make way for industrial collective farms vaguely looks like earlier Scottish experience , even though not identical.

marcel proust
marcel proust
4 years ago

Probably the best premodern instance of ethnic cleansing we have on record is the Spanish expulsion of the Moriscos, which occurred on the basis of presumed blood lineage,

Are you making a distinction here between the earlier expulsion of the Jews as being based on religion (blood lineage becoming important only later) and the blood lineage-based expulsion of the Moriscos?

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago

My take is that Christians who were expelled supposedly due to their bloodlines were in fact expelled over their beliefs. Many of these converted Christians were thought as crypto Muslims, who secretly practiced Islam and plotted for the revival of Islamic rule. So the operative factor was still faith.

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago

I have always known that demographic impact of Islamic conquest of India was minimal.

However, social impact was huge. Subcontinental population was split in one-third / two-third ratio of two hostile groups, forever at the throat of each other. That caused global importance of Indian subcontinent to diminish.

It would have actually been better for the subcontinent if the population had converted 100% to Islam. 🙂

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

(aydin in “The Idea of the Muslim World” writes at length about the huge influence of ‘indian muslims’ btwn 1800 and 1950 in the muslim world broadly)

I know that shiploads of gold went from India to the holy cities of Hejaz and Iraq. (Some of it even fell in the hands of European pirates; ref – ganj sawai).

Awadh Nawabs’ financing of Iraq’s Hindiya canal and Najaf seminary caused Iraq to turn into a Shia majority country.

The point is, how many Arabs even know the Indian contribution to their countries, let alone show any gratitude for it.

Walter Sobchak
Walter Sobchak
4 years ago
Reply to  Scorpion Eater

“It would have actually been better for the subcontinent if the population had converted 100% to Islam”

Only if there was some idea in the area that there was an underlying unity among the various peoples. India has lots of different ethnic groups speaking lots of different languages. There are many religions. It is not clear to me that what we now call Hinduism was regarded as a single entity by its followers before the arrival of the Muslims and British.

There was probably more underlying unity in Europe than there was in India.

VijayVan
4 years ago
Reply to  Walter Sobchak

\Only if there was some idea in the area that there was an underlying unity among the various peoples\

Of course, there was and is.
On an ideological plane there was unity – i.e. 4 “ends of life” Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha was common to all Dharmic religions. The pilgrimage sites were common to all the people of the subcontinent. Vast literature made in Sanskrit was common to all the subcontinent.

“Ethnic consciousness” in the western sense was absent in pre-modern India. Indians of yore could immediately see the vast chasm separating Islam/Christianity and Indian religions.

Dravidarya
Dravidarya
4 years ago

Can we call the modi wave as a kind of ‘peaceful’ re-conquest of India just like the Spaniards took back Spain and the Hans took china back? Btw, I came across this post

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/indias-right-to-cultural-self-determination/

Ikram
Ikram
4 years ago
Reply to  Dravidarya

LOL Dravidarya — pogroms and lynchings are not a reconquista!

Christian Spain fought Muslim polities, and surpressed and expelled Muslim elites.

The last significant Muslim power in India was extinguished in 1799, and the educated “forward” class of Muslims migrated voluntarily to Karachi (and Dhaka) in 47 and after. Indian muslims today are backwards and leaderless — there is nothing left to reconquer!

The ongoing kulturkampf in India more resembles Erdogan’s Turkey, a rising vernacular elite pushing out the remnants of the older cosmopolitan regime, both sides hindu. Indian Muslims are an unwilling mascot / scapegoat in this conflict, not a participant.

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago
Reply to  Ikram

a rising vernacular elite pushing out the remnants of the older cosmopolitan regime, both sides hindu.

Spot on! +1.

Vernacular aspirants had hoped for this process to start immediately after independence, but were thwarted in their attempt by the left-liberal establishment who outmaneuvered them and seized the reins of power. Left-liberal deftly utilized votes of Muslim/Dalits to retain their hold on power for many decades after independence.

A large part of Hindu rage is not really directed against the Muslims, but against this English educated cosmopolitan elite who has locked provincial India out of power. Muslims are largely pawns in this game. Hence the constant charges of Muslim appeasement by Hindu Right against Congress.

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago

Are we like debating the same stuff under different posts now? I vote for a post on North/South or caste just to have some change. LOL

Jason Muniz
Jason Muniz
4 years ago

Without a doubt disease played a huge role in decimating the pre-Hispanic populations. But I think you’re underestimating the patriarchal and aggressive nature of those Spanish males that conquered the Americas. As well as the role it played in propagating Spanish male lineages more than pre-Hispanic male ones. R1b-L23 and its subclades are predominant in most of Latin America. The whole Spanish conquest looks similar to the Yamnaya-Bell Beaker “conquest” of Western Europe just on a way bigger scale.

So this was not just a Spanish version of the British in India, the Dutch in Indonesia or the French in Algeria. This was more or less a population replacement, especially in regards to males.

Hoju
Hoju
4 years ago

Great post. I agree, both the materialist and non-materialist motives need to be considered for a more fulsome understanding of what happened.

Milan Todorovic
Milan Todorovic
4 years ago

I am not around anymore but I received an email to refer on this article. I will not comment but I will just say that any book/paper about ancient period without referring Lepenski Vir and Vinca is just about worthless. Let see how long this ignorance will last. This is a place of the oldest and the most developed civilisations where “Indo-European” language(s) was born, where people had at home 30 different pieces of pottery, 4 pieces of footwear, first ore melting and serial metal production, first gold melting, the oldest urbanisation plan, paved streets, luxury and all equal size homes, social equality, the oldest cheese (4000 years older than Egyptian), the oldest alphabet, the oldest calendar, yin yang, swastika, cavalry swords, double-bitted axe (labrys), first mini-skirt, the earliest Bronze Age, where Aryans started their migration to the east. How genocide conducted by R1b newcomers, which decimated R1a to 1/12 of male population after almost 2000 years of their peaceful development, influenced Aryan migration I leave someone to research.

Just to use this opportunity, to notice that Indian readers (and public) are still unprepared (maybe one exemption) to face all facts of Aryan migration (I am referring on those who accept that Aryan migration existed). Paradoxically, muslim background readers express more common sense and acceptance of Aryan migration. It is also paradoxical that they, although probably closer to Aryans (considering that their ancestors were at the SA ‘entrance’), do not care about this but we already absolved this issue.

Finally, any sightings of The_BP_Brown_Pundit_Man and his enlightening, non-erroneous facts? I hope that Dr Khan can confirm his/her good welfare.

AnAn
4 years ago

Milan, please keep sharing your wisdom. I and others greatly benefit from it.

Lepenski Vir and Vinca appear to have been very ancient advanced civilizations. Are they the ancient Yavanas?

Numinous
Numinous
4 years ago

Yep, the genocide of the R1a by the R1b is a severely understudied topic!

I’m sure the former were mass-raped by the latter too, eh, INDTHINGS?

What, I wonder, as a non-geneticist, would a hybrid of R1a and R1b look like?

Milan Todorovic
Milan Todorovic
4 years ago

Just to finish my previous comment before I retreat to my ivory tower…Maybe Vinca’s mini-skirt or cheese or the oldest golden finger ring and filigree jewellery were not civilisations turning points but the oldest wheel with axis was. There are written books and theses about all of this but why it is still not considered as a mainstream? Previous artefacts are unquestionable but why they do not reflect adequately in history books? Maybe because the history was so heavily falsified and it would be needed an Augean effort to put everything on right place. Maybe because we are for eg. still in a 200-years quest for elusive Indo-Europeans…

A side question – would be above urban, high technology, civilisation able to produce for eg. Rig Veda or it is more likely that was made by some noname, mute aliens, Scythians, steppians, nomads who were riding 24 hours on their horses? I believe that millions of SA people should consider Vinca as a part of their own history and beginnings, probably it will take for years for this to start coming to their minds.

Re: ancient genocides – the exact replica of the above mentioned was extermination of Raseni (Etruscans), the founders of Rome, who are also recognised as the founders of the Western civilisation. All original Roman arts, architecture, aqueducts were Etruscan. Having civilised their neighbours (like R1a and R1b), they were subjected not only to physical genocide than their all texts and culture were systematically destroyed and were preserved only on few sarcophaguses and plates, still enough to reconstruct their (Vinca’s!) alphabet and language.

This maybe opens an interesting research topic for future geneticists. Maybe now it sounds unscientific but, is the coincidence that R1b for thousands of years conducted thousands of genocides, robberies, colonisations all over the world (Eu, N&S America, Australia, Asia)? If the inclination toward some diseases (e.g. some cancers, schizophrenia) is genetically based and transmitted is it possible the similar inclination toward genocidallity? Often is a question asked after some brutal crimes – is it a result of nature or nurture? A task for future researchers.

At the end, I wrote before about Sesostris’s (1391—1328 BC) invasion with 600 000 soldiers and 24 000 horsemen, his 9-years of looting in India and earlier Ramses II wins and destruction of the ancient town where some ancestors of today’s Jats in India lived. For those who intend to research, this town was in today’s Israel and its name was Kedem. On Internet can be found references in scriptures on this town and allegedly it was mentioned in Genesis (did not have time to check myself). Cheers.

Milan Todorovic
Milan Todorovic
4 years ago

PS: Exposition of Genesis: Volume 1 — Herbert Carl Leupold
17. Abraham’s Second Marriage and Death (25:1-11)

5, 6. And Abraham gave all he had to Isaac. But to the sons of Abraham’s concubines, Abraham gave gifts and sent them away from Isaac his son during his own lifetime, eastward to Kedem (East Country).

AnAn
4 years ago

Sesostris had 600 K infantry and 24 K cavalry? It is possible. But it would have required enormous logistical trails.

What other famous names in history might have been associated with Sesostris? Could he have had other names?

What are your views on the connection between Vinka and the Yavanas? Could they be the same people and the descendants (figuritively perhaps) of Yayati?

Milan Todorovic
Milan Todorovic
4 years ago
Reply to  AnAn

– Tutmos III is the sixth pharaoh of the XVIII dynasty. He ruled Egypt from 1486BC until 1425BC. At the temple of Tutmozis III and his sister Numt Amena, we find his colourful fighting with the nations: Ruthenians, unknown in N.Africa and Heti in Hanan.

– Setos (ruled from 1445-1394 BC) and his son Ramesses II – on their buildings we find again a recorded victory over the people of Ruthen, Remn and the people of Shaza, and again Heti with their city Kedem, etc. They conquered the countries of Asia and Europe to the Black Sea, and in Finland to the Lika River, conquered Scythia and Thrace in Europe, and considerable part of Asia till India. These victories against Livy, Nubian and Heti were again written on their tombstones

– Sesostris (Setos’ grandchild, ruled 1391—1328BC) led big ancient expedition of 600 thousand of warriors, 24000 horsemen, 27000 chariots from Africa and invaded Europe and India with intention to conquer the whole world. He conquered all the lands in Europe up to Don, Volga and Danube and in Asia through Gang in India, etc. After nine years of robbing, firing, killing, he returned to Egypt with many slaves.

The tribes: Heti, Ruteni were Serbian speaking tribes. The remains of these Heti or the ancient Hati in India were known as overly cruel and wild, but at the same time warlike and brave as all travellers to India describe them. They were known in today’s Serbia (and Tripoli) during Trajan’s ruling and in other places, such as Venice and Italy, etc. whom everyone recognise as Serbian and called various Slavic names. Roman poet Ovid wrote about them (Ex Ponto) during his exile in Serbian Dacia.

Brown Pundits