hmm, I feel like we both completely agree and completely disagree on the main points!
Forex, I don't think that a lack of infrastructure was a stumbling point when it came to China and India. Rather, it was the lack of a certain type of infrastructure. (India pre-18th century had a better internal economic infrastructure than most places in the West.) It was just that the development was not geared towards weapons/ships, since they'd made different decisions on how to allocate resources (though almost all the initial tech for such weapons/ships came from China, right?).
In this way, I think China and India are very different from Mongolia and Afghanistan, in that the latter two lacked natural resources and infrastructure (both are much more decentralized) and placed a lot of emphasis on weapon tech. (One reason why Afghanistan was never colonized was its lack of infrastructure/centralization. British could never figure out how to hold such a place.)
I do agree that justifications such as "they're barbarians in need of civilizing" are just that, justifications, and come after the fact, to justify economic gains due to colonization (and slavery, and genocide, etcetc). It's almost never ideology that drives these things, though ideology can exacerbate & speed up certain processes. Even the Crusades, which are almost always portrayed as a straight-up ideological action, had at their roots rather pragmatic economic reasons, right?
I suppose where I disagree (or rather, think I disagree -- perhaps there's no disagreement after all) is that your cause and effect seem more like my effect and cause, if that makes any sense (or perhaps not cause and effect at all but aspects of the same phenomena). A society that does not place much value in weapon tech would of course not be very interested in the bother of conquering anyone, barbarian or not.
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-24 10:58 pm (UTC)Forex, I don't think that a lack of infrastructure was a stumbling point when it came to China and India. Rather, it was the lack of a certain type of infrastructure. (India pre-18th century had a better internal economic infrastructure than most places in the West.) It was just that the development was not geared towards weapons/ships, since they'd made different decisions on how to allocate resources (though almost all the initial tech for such weapons/ships came from China, right?).
In this way, I think China and India are very different from Mongolia and Afghanistan, in that the latter two lacked natural resources and infrastructure (both are much more decentralized) and placed a lot of emphasis on weapon tech. (One reason why Afghanistan was never colonized was its lack of infrastructure/centralization. British could never figure out how to hold such a place.)
I do agree that justifications such as "they're barbarians in need of civilizing" are just that, justifications, and come after the fact, to justify economic gains due to colonization (and slavery, and genocide, etcetc). It's almost never ideology that drives these things, though ideology can exacerbate & speed up certain processes. Even the Crusades, which are almost always portrayed as a straight-up ideological action, had at their roots rather pragmatic economic reasons, right?
I suppose where I disagree (or rather, think I disagree -- perhaps there's no disagreement after all) is that your cause and effect seem more like my effect and cause, if that makes any sense (or perhaps not cause and effect at all but aspects of the same phenomena). A society that does not place much value in weapon tech would of course not be very interested in the bother of conquering anyone, barbarian or not.