Tag: Global
Open Thread, 1/27/2023, Brown Pundits
Some stuff from my Substack: Genetic history with Chinese characteristics – How two Bronze-Age tribes became the world’s 1.3 billion Han (without even changing much genetically) and Venerable Ancestors: untangling the Chinese people’s hybrid Pleistocene origins origins – More than 40,000 years of human evolution in East Asia. I’ve written more about India because it’s super genetically variable, unlike China. But China has more written history.
Also, if anyone wants to know what I’ve been doing with most of my time the last few years, I founded a tech startup, GenRAIT.
Open Thread, 1/6/2022, Brown Pundits
Happy New Year!
Open Thread, 12/9/2022, Brown Pundits
What’s going on?
USA, China, Taiwan. A Fateful Triangle.
Following was part of conversations with few well-informed folks about the subject.
Hamid
Fateful Triangle – China-United States & Taiwan
November 10, 2022
“Let China sleep; when she wakes, she will shake the world”. Napoleon 1817
In the last two decades, United States and China have emerged as competitors for political and economic influence especially in the Indo-Pacific region. This has invariably influenced the military posture of both countries to secure economic gains. Most strategists are of the view that Taiwan will be the most likely cause of military conflict between China and United States. Continue reading USA, China, Taiwan. A Fateful Triangle.
Open Thread – 11/15/2022 – Brown Pundits
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A confused post-Empire
Truss learns the hard way that Britain isn’t America:
If anti-Americanism was bad, look what its opposite has done. Britain is in trouble because its elite is so engrossed with the US as to confuse it for their own nation. The UK does not issue the world’s reserve currency. It does not have near-limitless demand for its sovereign debt. It can’t, as US Republicans sometimes do, cut taxes on the hunch that lawmakers of the future will trim public spending. Reaganism was a good idea. Reaganism without the dollar isn’t. If UK premier Liz Truss has a programme, though, that is its four-word expression.
So much of what Britain has done and thought in recent years makes sense if you assume it is a country of 330mn people with $20tn annual output. The idea that it could ever look the EU in the eye as an adversarial negotiator, for instance. Or the decision to grow picky about Chinese inward investment at the same time as forfeiting the European market. Or the bet that Washington was going to entertain a meaningful bilateral trade deal. Superpowers get to behave with such presumption.
(if you go to google news, look up the piece, and use incognito mode, you should be able to read it for free)
This is basically what Ed West told me in our podcast. Britain has been culturally swallowed by America and American affairs, and that’s not good for the UK’s social and economic development because the natives don’t pay enough attention to their real station and situation in the world.
For the Right: they need to get over Empire and Britain’s role in the world. Contra James bond they’re a medium-sized nation living off a history of geopolitical relevance. For the Left: get over colonialism. The ghosts of Ninevah haunt the old ruins.
Open Thread – 09/09/2022 – Brown Pundits
The flip side of globalization
It’s Bangladesh after Sri Lanka: Protests erupt over 52% fuel price hike:
Following the tragic situation in Sri Lanka, thousands of demonstrators flocked to the streets in many Bangladeshi cities when the Sheikh Hasina administration raised fuel prices to their highest level since the neighbouring nation’s independence by about 52%.
Global supply shocks due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The US and other developed nations will do fine, but small developing nations, not so much.
The Indian migration to Southeast Asia
Indian cultural influence is remarkable in present-day Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA), and it may have stimulated early state formation in the region. Various present-day populations in MSEA harbor a low level of South Asian ancestry, but previous studies failed to detect such ancestry in any ancient individual from MSEA. In this study, we discovered a substantial level of South Asian admixture (ca. 40% – 50%) in a Protohistoric individual from the Vat Komnou cemetery at the Angkor Borei site in Cambodia. The location and direct radiocarbon dating result on the human bone (95% confidence interval is 78 – 234 calCE) indicate that this individual lived during the early period of Funan, one of the earliest states in MSEA, which shows that the South Asian gene flow to Cambodia started about a millennium earlier than indicated by previous published results of genetic dating relying on present-day populations. Plausible proxies for the South Asian ancestry source in this individual are present-day populations in Southern India, and the individual shares more genetic drift with present-day Cambodians than with most present-day East and Southeast Asian populations.
No surprise to readers of this weblog. South Asians obsess about possible admixture/contact with West Asia and Europe for obvious reasons, but it’s been pretty clear for a while that the “Indian cultural influence” on Southeast Asia was also demographic. Mainland Southeast Asia and the western part of Maritime Southeast Asia have minor but consistent levels of Indian ancestry. It showed up decades ago in Cambodian males who carried R1a Y haplogroup. And it showed up in a 2012 methods paper that detected gene flow from Pakistanis to Cambodians (no Indian samples in the dataset):
Genetics is basically done now. You can observe, for example, that lowland Thai populations have Indian ancestry, while highland tribes don’t have it.
We now know that the influence of Indian culture of a southern flavor to Southeast Asia was mediated by large numbers of humans. Indian genetic imprint on Burma can be chalked up to being Bengal’s neighbor, but you can’t say the same about Cambodia or Bali. Who were these people? Well, in a way, you could say that they were the “Brown Rajahs” for ancient Sarawak…