I would say Genghis Khan falls into this category. After a conquest he might kill off the top guys but generally left the citizens to go about their business if they agreed to follow him. He also practiced religious tolerance allowing the concurred to worship the god(s) of their choice.
Ah, the Mongols, and the debate over how nasty or otherwise they were. Sure, they were a nice, lenient and tolerant bunch, expect for the parts where they were psychopathically murdering, stealing and raping like it was going out of fashion. So, it depends on how you look at it. And maybe that’s an answer that can be applied to a lot of conquerors.
What is the story with Alexander? Hard to tell, really. For a lot of the ancients, he was a cultural hero (which says a lot about ancient culture). At times, he has been described as some kind of cuddly philosopher king. These days, I see a lot people comparing him to Hitler.
It seems that he mostly wanted to conquer stuff until there was no more stuff to conquer, for the sheer glory of it all. He was a charismatic leader who had read too much Homer for his own good. I guess that describes a lot of rulers in his day, but since Alexander also happened to have inherited the most bad-ass army in the neighborhood, and a plan for how to point it in the direction of Persia, he had the opportunity to go to town with that in a way that most of them didn’t.
What “conquer” actually meant in practice is debatable. His “empire” was never any such thing, really. He blitzed through all the Persian armies he could find, but didn’t get around to consolidating his gains or put a proper administration in place. Which is probably good for him, because he would have run into all sorts of trouble with that. Instead, he had the good sense to die before he outlived his cool, and left it to his generals and family members to sort out the mess. That is, to carve up the conquered territories between themselves, which they did by way of a whole lot of war and murder. And that, kids, is how the Hellenistic world came about.
BTW, if you look at a map, the result of all that is actually surprisingly much like what the situation had been before, except with Macedonians now in charge. Macedon is still Macedon, the bulk of the Persian Empire is now the Seleucid Empire, Egypt is run by Ptolemies, and in Greece and Asia Minor a lot of places actually go “screw this empire stuff”, and you’ll find a bunch of smaller kingdoms and city states. Well, until the Romans show up.
Anyway, it’s true that Alexander mostly didn’t massacre the local populations, or even attempt to turn them into Greeks by force. His idea, if he had one (which is questionable) seems to have been to create some sort of Greek-Persian cultural synthesis. He and his generals married local nobility, and picked up local customs. Of course, this could just be a matter of pragmatics. The Macedonian army was way too small (like, 50,000 dudes) for Alex to get anything done if he didn’t get the locals on board to some extent. So he certainly wasn’t going to be killing everyone for lebensraum, even if he’d wanted to, which, in fairness, he didn’t. A lot of the time, it would be more “agree that I’m the king of y’all now, and pay your taxes to me instead of to the previous guy”.
In a general sense, I’m wondering a bit what it means to live in an ancient empire, especially around the time of Alexander. For a lot of people, you have to think that it hardly makes a difference what empire you’re nominally part of. New boss, same as the old boss. If you’re a farmer in the boonies, maybe you don’t even know or care who that boss is. Just pay your taxes, and you’re fine.
Now for the bad news: Yeah, tons of people did die, or otherwise had their day comprehensively ruined. I don’t think anyone doubts that. As for how many: The actual casualty figures for Alexander’s campaigns are hard to calculate. I’m certainly no expert on this stuff, I only read about it on the internet. 
I have seen estimates of about a couple of hundred thousand military casualties. Which is pretty low when you think about it, considering the scope of the campaigns, but not exactly negligible.
As for civilians: No idea, and if someone wants to try a body count, it would be appreciated. It seems pretty clear, though, that Alexander’s wars were no picnic for those in army’s path. We can start the body count with the siege of Tyre. Of 40,000 civilians, 8,000 were massacred, and 30,000 were sold into slavery. So, not pretty. And that’s just one siege.
If you want to go beyond Alexander and add in the figures for the aforementioned wars and murdering that his successors got into, it could start adding up fast.
You, too, would benefit from reading the book I linked to. You repeat the common narrative about the Roman Empire, which is wildly incorrect in many respects.
Wanna help us out with some highlights, for those of us who don’t have this book handy?
If you wanted to, you could say the North was very generous to the South in 1865. Only one man, Henry Wirz of the Andersonville POW camp, was executed. Jefferson Davis was locked up for two years but became a cause celebre for abolitionists like Horace Greeley and spent the last 25 years of his life writing long, tedious memoirs. With blacks legally free and now counted as full citizens, the South ended up with more members in the House of Representatives. It did suffer from poverty for a century but it wasn’t real rich before. Much of the wealth was tied up in slaves and from what I’ve read about Frederick Law Olmstead travelling the South before the war, even the aristocrats weren’t very well off. Olmstead talks about one host who only had one candle to his name.
Of course this is if you buy the description of the Civil War as "The War of Northern Aggression".
I don’t, but for a bloody war, the peace was relatively bloodless.
The South even got to put up lots of statues of their leaders, and the US named military installations after them. What other victorious military has ever named bases after the guys that tried to kill them?
I’m sure they have statues of Louis XVI in France, too. It can’t count as “conquest” when both sides are from the same country.
Of course things didn’t work out nearly as well for old Louie as they did for Jeff Davis.
So the primary source - Julius Caesars, The Gallic Wars, is incorrect? He freely admits to a number of atrocities in there.
The Treaty of Waitangi is the foundation document that established New Zealand as a part of the British Empire. Maori ceeded sovereignty and gained the rights of British subjects.
There was conflict, but much of that was inter-tribal conflict exacerbated by the availability of muskets. There were later conflicts over land but on the whole, things were not as bad as in many other colonial territory’s.
Now, the battles over what the Treaty really meant are fought in the courts.
ALL wars by ALL nations involve atrocities. What you (and most people) are missing is that the Romans committed significantly fewer atrocities than most countries. Again, I strongly encourage you to read that book. You will learn a very great many things about the Romans that you didn’t know before.
Almost everybody who compares American to Ancient Rome compares us to the corrupt, tottering end of the empire, and argues that we are in approximately the same position–losing power and prestige. Thomas Madden argues the opposite–that America is on the ascendancy phase, and is actually akin to the republican days of 300-200 BC.
He goes on to argue that – counter intuitively – the real reason the Romans got their empire was because they did not want one.
Furthermore, Ancient Rome, rather than being feared by its neighbors, was actually held in such high regard, that – hard as it is to believe – the neighboring cities banded together and fought a full-fledged war against Rome in order to force Rome to grant them Roman citizenship!
I think your love of your pet theory is distorting your judgement. Go read more than one book on the roman empire and then tell me how benign they were. For one thing mass enslavement of captured woman and children of cities that resisted was the norm.
Prestige and such?
Colonies in sub-saharian Africa seem to have been a money hole rather than a source of income unless pressured to an extreme degree (like in Belgian Congo). In fact, it was, at least in France, the main argument used against such colonial ventures in the late 19th century (by the right wing, the left being in general onboard with the civilizing mission). Even though some individuals and companies certainly made fortunes out of them, I think that in agregate, it never was profitable for the nation in general, let alone for the state’s public funds. I guess it provided some geo-strategical advantages (guaranteed access to some ressources, ports, draftable population) but I doubt those advantages were worth the cost.
As far as I can tell, it still was prestige rather than expectations of a financial return that motivated Italy, for instance, to try to get her share of the pie under Mussolini, very late in the colonial era.
Given the reference to the Shire, not sure if you’re serious, but Pitcairn was uninhabited when the crew of The Bounty arrived.
(Warning: Long, because I get to talk about Rome, which is the main thing I rant about now, ever since Breaking Bad ended. But… stay with me.)
Right. This is the idea that the Romans “conquered the world in self defense”. Or maybe, as someone put it, in a fit of absence of mind. This sounds a bit like a joke, but it actually isn’t. The idea goes back at least to Polybius, and he certainly wasn’t trying to be funny.
Rome didn’t want an empire, or so the story goes. It simply wanted to be surrounded by friends and allies, to ensure that it was safe from enemies over the horizon.
To an extent, it’s true. It’s certainly important for understanding, for instance, the Roman takeover of Greece, which involves tons of back and forth, lots of diplomacy, and lots of Roman armies showing up, rejiggering the political situation, and then leaving again. That part of history makes little sense it you think of Rome as simply setting out to conquer Greece. If that was the goal, why faff about so much? It makes more sense if you see them as “backing into” the conquest, reluctantly, sometimes accidentally, and not originally setting out to be imperialists. It’s part of what makes the whole Roman story so damned complicated. The idea of even having provinces, and what that means, is something that the Romans need to do a lot of soul-searching to come around to. It’s not how they start out.
BTW, generally, Rome doesn’t actually have problems making friends and allies. Sometimes wannabe friends show up on their own accord, and refuse to go home until Rome helps them out. When Rome is the biggest kid on the block, it only makes sense that it’s the kid you want on your team. And Rome is serious about holding up its end of alliances. When Rome goes to war, you’ll often find that it’s in response to request for aid from an ally. Sometimes this leads to conflicts spinning out of control and ending up as wars of conquest, but it’s true that the conquest part of that sometimes looks almost accidental. In many cases, it takes a long time indeed for any given conquered area to become a Roman province, with Rome initially preferring to leave it ruled by a client monarch. Sometimes the transition goes from ally to incorporation into the empire, no conquest involved at all.
However, one should also not lose sight of the fact that eventually, Rome does end up taking over Greece (and a great many other places), mostly violently, however long and convoluted the road to that point is. And even before it gets to that, an alliance with Rome is never any kind of equal partnership. Rome will boss you around. When the Greeks want to go off and do their own thing, Rome simply won’t let them. Instead, the situation sours, until the end result is that Greece has the living bejeezus trashed out of it, and doesn’t see independence again until… well, actually, modern times. The Romans accept their role as imperialists and conquerors at *some *point. I think we can agree on that.
The Social War. Yes, this is (well, arguably, or at least I see some people argue over exactly what the Social War was) something as weird as the opposite of a war of independence. And, yeah, you don’t see that very often.
Basically, Rome’s Italian allies, by the time of the late Republic, felt that they were getting shafted when it came to spoils and political influence. They wanted citizenship and equal rights. Fair enough, I say, as they were providing half the manpower for the legions. Risking your balls without representation hardly seems fair. Anyway, when the Romans refused to grant them citizenship, the allies gave Rome the finger and declared themselves independent. How do you like that, Rome? The answer: This means war.
(BTW, the Romans will tell you that they won the Social War. Many historians say the same thing. I don’t see how it makes sense to say that. Sure, the Romans didn’t lose on the battlefield, really, but the war only ended because Rome granted the Italians citizenship, which was what the rebellion was about in the first place. I call that conceding. But, hey, if you can manage to spin it as a win, then go for it, I guess.)
I think the Social War illustrates a couple of things: On one hand, yes, being Roman clearly didn’t seem like a bad thing to the Italians, as long as they were treated fairly. They wanted in, not out. Historically, the relationship between Rome and the Italian allies was pretty solid. Hannibal’s whole strategy was to break the alliance system apart, and he couldn’t really do it. So, there’s real loyalty there.
On the other hand: Getting in, getting treated fairly, took fighting a war. Again, being a Roman ally isn’t an equal partnership, if Rome can help it.
Another thing entirely I want to mention: If you want to paint the Romans of the early-to-mid Republic as isolationist pillars of moral virtue, you also have to sort of ignore the entire takeover of Cisalpine Gaul (Northern Italy). Unless you want to argue that expansionism doesn’t really count when it’s at the expense of Gauls, sort of like the way it doesn’t count when it’s at the expense of Native Americans. I’m pretty sure that view isn’t very fashionable, though.
Anyway, this is turning into a wall of text. I think I’ll just shut up for now. Or, actually, I’ll make one more point (one that occurred to me just now):
I think there is an important shift at around the time of the First Triumvirate. Up until then, I suppose Rome (mostly) can be said to get into wars for justifiable, or at least understandable, reasons. They do so in response to real or perceived threats, or to fulfill obligations to allies, and so forth (although completely destroying Carthage and Corinth was a wee bit over the top, no matter how you shake it). Maybe they conquered the world in the process, but hey, as we’ve said, unintended side effect. Let’s at least say so, for the sake of argument. Anyway, an important force in Roman politics was always the competition between powerful men to be the ones to lead the armies and win the wars. As far along as Marius and Sulla, though, these are still wars that Rome get into as a state, and for reasons that can at least be argued to be just. Marius fights the Cimbri and the Teutons, and Sulla fights Mithridates. The generals use the wars for their own political benefit, sure, but these are also real threats to Roman security that can’t be ignored.
With Pompey, Crassus and Caesar, you see powerful generals *purposely getting themselves into conflicts that don’t really need to be fought, *in order to gain money and power. That’s a whole different ball game.
Not that these guys don’t still have diplomatic excuses to get into wars, it’s just that those now increasingly look like nothing more than that: Excuses. And not just to us, but to Romans at the time. When Pompey rearranges the political map in the eastern Mediterranean, getting himself tons of clients and a huge fortune in the process, the Senate doesn’t like it much at all, and he has to bully them into ratifying his… well, let’s call them conquests, for lack of a better word. When Crassus goes off to fight Parthia, it’s hugely unpopular, and one senator goes as far as to call down a curse on him. It’s the same with Caesar’s wars in Gaul, which are considered unjust and illegal by Caesar’s enemies. Cato proposed that Caesar should be handed over to the Gauls for punishment. (Although, I don’t recall anyone suggesting giving Gaul back after the Ides of March, so there is that.)
So, I guess you could say that when the Republic goes down in flames, the idea of just war goes down with it. It’s a thought, anyway.
I don’t mean to pick on Flyer here, BTW. His point is a valid one. I had a look at his recommended book, and I’ll heartily second the recommendation. Even so: The story of Rome is a long and weird one, and the self-defense model of conquest can only ever explain part of it. As always, it’s kind of hard to generalize about more than a thousand years of history. Which is, I suppose, why these posts always turn out essay-length, even before I get around to even saying much.
TL;DR: Yes and no.
BTW, concerning this part:
Why the apologist tone? It’s not really called for. Rome fought tons of wars, and killed and enslaved shitloads of people. It got rough sometimes. Reading about the siege of Carthage will blow your hair back. Sorry about that, I guess.
Sure, it’s ancient history, which is basically wall-to-wall atrocities anyway by our standards. Even so, I haven’t ever seen anyone try to give the Romans a pass on that front, until now, and I’m not sure what the point would be. We don’t like the Romans because they’re pacifist hippies. We like them, partly, because they’re ultraviolent psychopaths with swords. It’s part of what makes them interesting, and human, and complex, and such a great subject for action movies. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
(Warning: Long, because I get to talk about Rome, which is the main thing I rant about now, ever since Breaking Bad ended. But… stay with me.)
Right. This is the idea that the Romans “conquered the world in self defense”. Or maybe, as someone put it, in a fit of absence of mind. This sounds a bit like a joke, but it actually isn’t. The idea goes back at least to Polybius, and he certainly wasn’t trying to be funny.
Rome didn’t want an empire, or so the story goes. It simply wanted to be surrounded by friends and allies, to ensure that it was safe from enemies over the horizon.
To an extent, it’s true. It’s certainly important for understanding, for instance, the Roman takeover of Greece, which involves tons of back and forth, lots of diplomacy, and lots of Roman armies showing up, rejiggering the political situation, and then leaving again. That part of history makes little sense it you think of Rome as simply setting out to conquer Greece. If that was the goal, why faff about so much? It makes more sense if you see them as “backing into” the conquest, reluctantly, sometimes accidentally, and not originally setting out to be imperialists. It’s part of what makes the whole Roman story so damned complicated. The idea of even having provinces, and what that means, is something that the Romans need to do a lot of soul-searching to come around to. It’s not how they start out.
BTW, generally, Rome doesn’t actually have problems making friends and allies. Sometimes wannabe friends show up on their own accord, and refuse to go home until Rome helps them out. When Rome is the biggest kid on the block, it only makes sense that it’s the kid you want on your team. And Rome is serious about holding up its end of alliances. When Rome goes to war, you’ll often find that it’s in response to request for aid from an ally. Sometimes this leads to conflicts spinning out of control and ending up as wars of conquest, but it’s true that the conquest part of that sometimes looks almost accidental. In many cases, it takes a long time indeed for any given conquered area to become a Roman province, with Rome initially preferring to leave it ruled by a client monarch. Sometimes the transition goes from ally to incorporation into the empire, no conquest involved at all.
However, one should also not lose sight of the fact that eventually, Rome does end up taking over Greece (and a great many other places), mostly violently, however long and convoluted the road to that point is. And even before it gets to that, an alliance with Rome is never any kind of equal partnership. Rome will boss you around. When the Greeks want to go off and do their own thing, Rome simply won’t let them. Instead, the situation sours, until the end result is that Greece has the living bejeezus trashed out of it, and doesn’t see independence again until… well, actually, modern times. The Romans accept their role as imperialists and conquerors at *some *point. I think we can agree on that.
The Social War. Yes, this is (well, arguably, or at least I see some people argue over exactly what the Social War was) something as weird as the opposite of a war of independence. And, yeah, you don’t see that very often.
Basically, Rome’s Italian allies, by the time of the late Republic, felt that they were getting shafted when it came to spoils and political influence. They wanted citizenship and equal rights. Fair enough, I say, as they were providing half the manpower for the legions. Risking your balls without representation hardly seems fair. Anyway, when the Romans refused to grant them citizenship, the allies gave Rome the finger and declared themselves independent. How do you like that, Rome? The answer: This means war.
(BTW, the Romans will tell you that they won the Social War. Many historians say the same thing. I don’t see how it makes sense to say that. Sure, the Romans didn’t lose on the battlefield, really, but the war only ended because Rome granted the Italians citizenship, which was what the rebellion was about in the first place. I call that conceding. But, hey, if you can manage to spin it as a win, then go for it, I guess.)
I think the Social War illustrates a couple of things: On one hand, yes, being Roman clearly didn’t seem like a bad thing to the Italians, as long as they were treated fairly. They wanted in, not out. Historically, the relationship between Rome and the Italian allies was pretty solid. Hannibal’s whole strategy was to break the alliance system apart, and he couldn’t really do it. So, there’s real loyalty there.
On the other hand: Getting in, getting treated fairly, took fighting a war. Again, being a Roman ally isn’t an equal partnership, if Rome can help it.
Another thing entirely I want to mention: If you want to paint the Romans of the early-to-mid Republic as isolationist pillars of moral virtue, you also have to sort of ignore the entire takeover of Cisalpine Gaul (Northern Italy). Unless you want to argue that expansionism doesn’t really count when it’s at the expense of Gauls, sort of like the way it doesn’t count when it’s at the expense of Native Americans. I’m pretty sure that view isn’t very fashionable, though.
Anyway, this is turning into a wall of text. I think I’ll just shut up for now. Or, actually, I’ll make one more point (one that occurred to me just now):
I think there is an important shift at around the time of the First Triumvirate. Up until then, I suppose Rome (mostly) can be said to get into wars for justifiable, or at least understandable, reasons. They do so in response to real or perceived threats, or to fulfill obligations to allies, and so forth (although completely destroying Carthage and Corinth was a wee bit over the top, no matter how you shake it). Maybe they conquered the world in the process, but hey, as we’ve said, unintended side effect. Let’s at least say so, for the sake of argument. Anyway, an important force in Roman politics was always the competition between powerful men to be the ones to lead the armies and win the wars. As far along as Marius and Sulla, though, these are still wars that Rome get into as a state, and for reasons that can at least be argued to be just. Marius fights the Cimbri and the Teutons, and Sulla fights Mithridates. The generals use the wars for their own political benefit, sure, but these are also real threats to Roman security that can’t be ignored.
With Pompey, Crassus and Caesar, you see powerful generals *purposely getting themselves into conflicts that don’t really need to be fought, *in order to gain money and power. That’s a whole different ball game.
Not that these guys don’t still have diplomatic excuses to get into wars, it’s just that those now increasingly look like nothing more than that: Excuses. And not just to us, but to Romans at the time. When Pompey rearranges the political map in the eastern Mediterranean, getting himself tons of clients and a huge fortune in the process, the Senate doesn’t like it much at all, and he has to bully them into ratifying his… well, let’s call them conquests, for lack of a better word. When Crassus goes off to fight Parthia, it’s hugely unpopular, and one senator goes as far as to call down a curse on him. It’s the same with Caesar’s wars in Gaul, which are considered unjust and illegal by Caesar’s enemies. Cato proposed that Caesar should be handed over to the Gauls for punishment. (Although, I don’t recall anyone suggesting giving Gaul back after the Ides of March, so there is that.)
So, I guess you could say that when the Republic goes down in flames, the idea of just war goes down with it. It’s a thought, anyway.
I don’t mean to pick on Flyer here, BTW. His point is a valid one. I had a look at his recommended book, and I’ll heartily second the recommendation. Even so: The story of Rome is a long and weird one, and the self-defense model of conquest can only ever explain part of it. As always, it’s kind of hard to generalize about more than a thousand years of history. Which is, I suppose, why these posts always turn out essay-length, even before I get around to even saying much.
TL;DR: Yes and no.
BTW, concerning this part:
Why the apologist tone? It’s not really called for. Rome fought tons of wars, and killed and enslaved shitloads of people. It got rough sometimes. Reading about the siege of Carthage will blow your hair back. Sorry about that, I guess.
Sure, it’s ancient history, which is basically wall-to-wall atrocities anyway by our standards. Even so, I haven’t ever seen anyone try to give the Romans a pass on that front, until now, and I’m not sure what the point would be. We don’t like the Romans because they’re pacifist hippies. We like them, partly, because they’re ultraviolent psychopaths with swords. It’s part of what makes them interesting, and human, and complex, and such a great subject for action movies. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Thank you for explaining things better than I could.
What I have a problem with is how coremelt keeps stubbornly repeating “But atrocities!” over and over, as if that single aspect somehow overrides and nullifies everything else that the Romans did. He seems to think that (A) the entirety of the Roman Empire can be summed up by that one aspect, and (B), the mere presence of some atrocities means that the Romans were no different from any other empire. I’ve been trying to show him that those things simply aren’t true.
For starters, this is not “my pet theory.”
Guess what? There is more than one book that agrees with Madden.
I can’t copy and paste from this, but scroll down to “A Powerful State Emerges.”
And another book.
And this author explicitly shows how the Romans deviated from common practice.
This thread is not about whether Rome is less evil than other empires. Its about if there has ever been a benign takeover of a “lesser” civilisation. I agree with you that the Roman empire did some good things, but they were brutal with how they took over so for the purposes of this thread we can’t count them as “benign conquest”.
The British Empire doesn’t really qualify. British occupation of India was originally a solely “private” affair; colonial government was almost wholly operated by the East India Company directly. It was only after the Indian Mutiny that the British government decided it should probably administer India directly.
British policy only looks enlightened or “benign” if you look at it from the perspective of British colonists (not all of whom were themselves of that view anyway, as the existence of this country demonstrates). As far as their policies towards the native population, the British* were almost invariably pretty horrible to them.
*to be fair, much of this horribleness also stemmed from the hands-off approach of the government in Westminster to colonial authorities. AIUI, it was not British policy to exterminate Aboriginals in Australia, it was just something the locals came up with.
This is not cruel or unusual as these things go, for those days, either. If you just had a huge battle, and defeated a massive tribe on the battlefield, probably killing a lot of the men in the process - what did you think would happen to the women and children? Leave them behind to be victims to marauding gangs of survivors or neighbours? Leave them to starve since the guys doing the heavy lifting in the fields, and the hunting, are dead? If you take their lands (to pay off your legionnaires) do you just push them off to starve in the surrounding forest?
Slavery was a simple and useful social tool in those days. The new owner had to house and feed his slaves. Some work especially for men may have essentially been a slow-motion death sentence, but most slaves were simply cheap domestic and agricultural labour - a way of ensuring there was not a roaming Roman rabble starving, desperate, and causing problems.