I’m wondering, first, what are some examples throughout history of “open” societies. What I mean by open is any society which is made up of or welcoming too people/ideas of various other cultures and backgrounds.
For instance, when I took Chinese history, I remember the teacher mentioning that the Mongolians were actually very open to people from other cultures* (except the Chinese themselves).
Then, there were Arab empires that were very open and welcoming to foreign(ers’) ideas.
I don’t know how else to explain it better, so I hope this is enough to get the conversation started, and maybe we can clarify the definition of “open” as we go. **One of the major points is that I want to know about civilizations that were exceptionally open to outside ideas, what were the characteristics of these civilizations, and why did these civilizations fall/change.
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- Someone, as I’m sure you will, please correct me if something is grossely misrepresented. I’m doing this from memory of a class that was a one semester survey of thousands of years of Chinese and Japonese history.
Well, it’s not a “gross” misrepresentation, but to put it into context, the nomadic pastoral Mongols under Chingis in the 12th Century didn’t have too many institutions of goverment to begin with, nor did they have writing, so that kind of made assimilating ideas(like writing) from advanced sedentary cultures a little easier.
As far as Chinese ideas in particular, Chingis himself wasn’t particularly enamoured of Chinese culture, having just conquered the Northern Chinese Jin/Jurchen empire rather quickly, and tended to draw most of his ideas from sedentary civilizations to the west, that is, Tibetan Buddhism, the Uygur Turk written script, and administrators from Muslim central Asia. The empire is generally refered to as the Mongol-Turkic empire for that reason. One must remember that Chingis himself wasn’t responsible for conquering China proper, only the northern part, and actually at this point he was allied with the Chinese Song empire in the south, who are more legitemately Chinese than the Jurchens, after which he turned west, and the nature of the Mongol administration during his time was decidedly non-Chinese.
After Chingis, the empire split up. Kublai Khan, the most well known one in the west, completed the conquest of China and established the Sinicized Yuan dynasty, which, obviously, is based on Chinese institutions, but even then, the Mongols were reluctant to use Chinese administrators because of the fear of rebellion and treachery. They established a racially based caste system which put Mongols at the top, followed by Central Asians (Coloured Eyes), followed by Northern Chinese who were conquered in the time of Chingis, and Southern Chinese south of the Yangtze who were conqured later by Kublai. This was more of a practical military expediency than any aversion to Chinese culture or institutions, because the Yuan institutions themselves were definitely Chinese. The other Mongol empires went west and adopted Islam and the civilization of the Middle East and Central Asia as their administrative basis.