Comment by enkid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by enkid | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think you can make some of the claims you are making without more evidence. State formation is often a violent process and often involves someone showing up with weapons demanding you pay them taxes. Does it matter if it is a European or a neighbor?

You often have what we would call colonialism in this process, just a more local version of it. Think about the Huns sweeping into central Europe, conquering those people's and adding them to their coalition. Or the Aztec demanding tribute from their neighboring cities. Or China conquering central Asian states and Korea. Or the Zulu building a confederation through conquest of Southern Africa. All of these were coercive relationships, built on a state or proto state dominating the "less advanced" people around them.

I'm not saying that this makes colonialism good, but the idea that there was some sort of peaceful prior existence for the people before colonization or without colonization there wouldn't be just as difficult violent struggles is not obvious from history.

There is certainly a huge difference between setting up extractive institutions designed for the benefit of people living half a world away, compared to extractive institutions set up for the benefit of people living a few hundred kilometers away. In the latter case, you have a much greater chance of seeing some of that wealth again, and of being able to influence the decisions of your rulers.

Do you have any evidence of this? I doubt the poles would agree with you.

Do you have evidence to the contrary?

Logic dictates that any wealth or resource that staysin the community is more likely to benefit that community as opposed to if it is shipped to a different continent and never seen again.

Yes, the Germans invaded Poland, Russia, and most of Europe and extracted lots of resources at a significant disadvantage to the Poles. Japan invaded Korea, China, and much of Southeast Asia and killed hundreds of thousands of people for the sake of colonialism. I don't think the locals were happy about that. The United States relationship to the Native Americans. Mongol conquest of central Asia. The Zulu conquest of their empire. The Italian and French occupation of North Africa. The Ottoman relationship with the Armenians. The relationship between South Sudan and Sudan. Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria and the Kurds. Israel and the Palestines. All of Europe and the Jews. I can name historical examples of neighbors exploiting neighbors all day.

You can't just say "logic dictates" when logic dictates no such thing. I'm not saying your wrong, or there is not correlation, but there is no clear pattern between how far off an occupier is and the treatment of the occupied from what I can see.

I'm not sure that this is a "huge" difference, especially when compared to the clear difference between extractive and inclusive institutions.

And yet we don't call what the Huns, Aztec, Chinese or Zulu did "colonialism" - why do you think that is, and does it change your point?

We don't call what the Huns, Aztec, Chinese or Zulu did "colonialism" because it doesn't help the narrative. Notice how, in particular, there are plenty of people willing to call what happened to Ireland colonialism even though it involved solely neighbours and even though every single faction arrived there via England originally.

> even though every single faction arrived there via England originally

The vikings & other nordics who bled in to early irish bloodlines didn't arrive via england.

Also a large genetic component of the Irish population is shared with people in the Iberian peninsula.

Yes, but the Iberian migration was just an earlier example of a long history of migrations and colonizations going back millennia. There was a time when the British Isles weren't populated by Homo Sapiens, and migrating people's found the lands empty (except for the occasional band of Neanderthals), but it's deep in pre-history and since then migration has almost always involved some level of population replacement and/or subjugation by new elites.

Ireland is probably better framed as (mostly) entrenched religious discrimination and subjugation on that basis (for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_Laws)

We also don't call, say, the Spanish conquest of the Netherlands "colonialism", yet we still celebrate our independence from Spain (indeed, our entire royal house is based on this).

I think it's mostly just a bit of a bikeshed over terminology to be honest; we could also call it "European conquest of Africa", or whatnot, but that's just the same as "colonialism" with a different name.

Does "bloody conquest" sound better?

Colonialism is a specific institution, it distinct and separate. It does not mean that mongoles were better, but they dealt with subjugated countries differently. They did not redraw borders of countries, or forbid people from mining their own salt.

"After his morning bhajan, Gandhi waded in to the sea shore and picked up a handful of salt, proclaiming that with the handful of salt he was proclaiming the end of the British Empire. The police arrived and arrested thousands of national leaders including Gandhi. Gandhi's bold defiance of the salt law encouraged other Indians to break the law as well"

The Mongols most certainly changed the borders of the countries they occupied. If that is the only criteria, then every conqueror is also a colonial power.

There also were plenty of examples of conquerors applying specific economic laws to the conquered. For example, Muslim conquerors would impose a tax on Christians and Jews in their empires (the Jizya). Does that make them colonial powers? So how is colonialism a specific institution?

I am not sure what are you arguing for, are you actually claiming that colonialism was no different than any other conquests throughout history?

The entire country India was ruled by a private company, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_rule_in_India

The Mongoles have not redrawn borders along a line on a map the way British and French have, creating the mess we now have in the Middle East.

I can't make a complete list of criteria that defines colonialism, but to claim that it was no different than other conquests is to betray complete historical illiteracy.

> The Mongoles have not redrawn borders along a line on a map the way British and French have, creating the mess we now have in the Middle East.

Back then there was not really the same concept of boarders. But you can be 100% sure that the Mongols picked sides in many local conflicts and simply layed down the law on things like grazing rights and many others things.

> I can't make a complete list of criteria that defines colonialism, but to claim that it was no different than other conquests is to betray complete historical illiteracy.

It really isn't. Sure colonialism from 1800 is not the same as 1200 century mongol conquest. But to draw a line between colonialism and all other types of conquest in human history is actually historically questionable.

Comparing colonialism to other conquests at the same time is very apt. Empires impose institutions and take sides in local conflicts, enforcing new laws making deals with neighbours not to the advantage of locals and so on.

Unless you can lay out a set of clear differences between colonialism and all other froms of one society taking over another, I see no reason to treat collonialism as seperate.

> The entire country India was ruled by a private company

And in other cases, for exmaple the mongol one specific branch of the family was put in command of a region and those families often engadged in trade of the resources from their part of the empire. There are lots and lots of ways empires manage their 'colonies', a quasi private 'company' is certaintly not typical but its also not ahistorical as far as I can see.

I don't see the point of this discussion if can't even accept that the East India situation is unique, something that's unanimously agreed upon amongst historians and economists.

Either you posses some unique knowledge that historians do not, or you are dead set on 'proving' colonialism was 'no different than what came before' regardless of any arguments brought forward.

> something that's unanimously agreed upon amongst historians and economists

Can you actually show this to be true?

Lots of things in history is are pretty unique. At the time East India company was clearly not special, other institutions of that type that existed. And we can find clear precedents in history.

Any attempted to really define colonialism will either be incredibly convoluted or equally aligns many other historical situations.

Lots of what we call colonization is also not threw quasi-private space sponsored monopolies.

I don't know why we don't call it colonialism considering we often call them empires and the process of empire is in some ways very linked to colonialism. All of these terms come from the Roman empire which created a multiethnic state dominated by two ethnic groups, the Romans and the Greek, with colonies of each around the Mediterranean.

Perhaps its baggage from the 18 and 19 centuries when only Europeans, Americans, and Japanese had territories spanning continents in a form we would call colonies. The only reason the Japanese had those territories was because they thought an empire would stop them from being colonized themselves. ( This does not excuse the terrible abuses of the Japanese government.)

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