"Lebanese" is a modern invention. Lebanon is a contrived post colonial state with no historical foundations. Those most usually fail horribly.
We had high levels of autonomy under the Ottoman rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Lebanon_Mutasarrifate
Some historical figures have reached levels of influence that would qualify as "independent lebanon" (if people were so good at administrative bookkeeping back in the 1600s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakhr_al-Din_II
The modern state of Lebanon fails in part because it's a "contrieved post colonial state", you're right. But claiming it has no historical foundations is misguided. It's wrong. Colonials hijacked a very legit idea, and turned it into a failed state. It's different.
Regarding the article, before and after pictures of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria to name a few places are the same.
Prosperous sovereign nations outside Western Europe and North America are bad for business.
Maybe because they don't have the oil.
Japan was not made by Meiji, it was transformed but foundation of the "miracle" was there. During sengoku it created and armed with locally built firearms armies that dwarfed that of any European state of the time in one generation.. from bows to hundred thousands of muskets
Culture >> everything. In 1945 Beirut was a paradise compared to burned to the ground Tokyo and every other major city. In few decades it had built dams like Kurobe, challenged and beat American car manufacturers.. resources, colonialism.. right. Whoever was running the place knew how to do it, they do not know now and very unlikely to learn in the next 100 years.
Those prosperous states in South Asia, outside mainland China, do seem to have lots of American troops stationed in them.
Poland has been around over a thousand years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_Poland
Show me where Poland was on the map before the Western powers drew it on the map after WW1.
Much like Lebanon which has cultural heritage going back, so does Poland. But maps might not reflect that.
Sure parts of what is now Russia have been part of Poland before, but the center is surprising stable.
Just as the French and British dismembered the Ottoman empire to create modern Lebanon, so too did the British dismember the Indian empire to create India and Pakistan.
Pick up a globe, close your eyes and randomly put your finger anywhere and you will see the point under question was under different (political)boundaries every 300 years or so.
Boundaries of any country are just limits to which a certain political administration extends its powers to. They keep changing for various reasons, every few decades.
I always wonder why the Maurya Empire doesn't get brought up as a pan-Indian empire, it was local to the area and conquered almost the entirety of the subcontinent.
Now, I'm not sure what the difference of living under Maurya vs. Mughal vs. British rule was for its inhabitants, these are widely different polities from completely different time periods, but it's still a distinction. Though I suppose more of a retroactive one imposed by our modern bias, when we can point at India, Italy, and Germany and say, "ah, that patch of land is naturally meant to be united by someone."
- Signed, one of your mythical people with “very little Mughal ancestry” whose family founded Shahjahanpur.
The reason the British get blamed for a lot of the Indo-Pak issues is that, absent an indigenous Indian/Pakistani civil service bureaucracy, the British were tasked with executing the plan originally conceived by the Two-Nation Theorists, and they totally botched that execution.