Europeans certainly don’t have a monopoly on driving critters to extinction…
This is something that always I’ve wondered about as well.
What was behind the age of enlightenment and the massive strides in scientific thinking and resultant discoveries, music and arts.
Because I’m a racist?
I’m pointing out that the language used to refer to the victims of colonialism is often heavily loaded. Nobody refers to Rome vs Carthage or Athens vs Sparta as “tribal violence”, but you’ll happily use it when referring to the Mexican inter-state wars and not think twice about it.
And when this is questioned, snark is the only response you have. Because you know it’s actually indefensible.
Indeed, the Zulu were invading South Africa from the North as the Boers were settling from the South. And.. then came the British..
The Indian subcontinent was subject to several invasions, one of those from this dude called Alex (maybe you have heard of him?), long before the British colonized it.
The area of Melbourne was home to about 20K natives before the British came in. Comparatively (to the massive wars of aggression and conquest, in the Americans and Africa) it was more or less peaceful.
The Maori wiped out many species of megafauna by hunting withing a couple of centuries after their arrival, so much for living in harmony with nature .
The NA (in what is currently USA and Canada) natives used to have “buffalo jumps” where they’d kill hundreds of bison, taking only the humps and the tongue, leaving the rest to rot. At least there the wars were more limited.
Yes, but one speculative and disputed book does not make it so. Many experts in the field are not in agreement.
While wondering whether a book that “hypothesizes confidently in the face of scant or confusing evidence, can be trusted”, historian Daniel Immerwahr described the book as “a work of dizzying ambition”… Anthropologist Chris Knight called The Dawn of Everything “incoherent and wrong” for beginning “far too late” and “systematically side-stepping the cultural flowering that began in Africa tens of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe”,… Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argued in The New York Review of Books that there is a “discordance between what the book says and what its sources say”, but also that the book, which is “chockablock with archaeological and ethnographic minutiae, is an oddly gripping read”…The Princeton historian David A. Bell, responding solely to Graeber and Wengrow’s argument about the Indigenous origins of Enlightenment social thought, accused the authors of coming "perilously close to scholarly malpractice
The major thesis in the book may be disputed, the facts about cultures it is based on are not. There were many different models of organization that were followed, including different development paths. That is not in dispute.
I wanted to deal with this separately - this is not accurate at all. The Zulu nation was an indigenous South African development, they were not “invading from the North”. This is perilously close to bullshit invented histories developed by the Apartheid government to justify themselves.
It’s true that Bantu people overall arrived in South Africa from further north, but this happened way before the Boers moved away from the Cape (like, a millennium-and-a-half before), and as to whether it was an “invasion”, that’s still very much undecided.
Yes, they came from what is now called KwaZulu-Natal, which is in South Africa now. But the Zulu empire became quite a bit larger and conquered other lands
You are not saying that the Zulu Empire didn’t do quite a bit of warfare, invasions, and conquering are you? They bumped up against the Boers coming from the South, no?
I suppose “the Zulu were invading from the Northern of South Africa” would be a better phrase.
Are you trying for a repeat of the whole Simon’s Town affair? I don’t need you explaining South African history wrongly to me, a South African with an archaeology major, based off some frantic googling.
No, I’m not. But they did it strictly in KwaZulu. Also, not an empire. The Zulu head is styled “King” and it’s called the Zulu Kingdom. Yes, Wiki will tell you it’s sometimes called that. Nobody here seriously calls it that.
Some of the people they defeated then went on to invade and conquer elsewhere (chiefly northwards), but the Zulu kingdom, themselves, stuck to KwaZulu.
Some fled south, but they assimilated into the Xhosa peoples, they didn’t conquer them.
No. They stayed in place, consolidating their conquests, and the Boers came to their territory. They didn’t do any kind of “meet in the middle” deal.
There’s a whole lot of South Africa north of KwaZulu. They were more in the middle, as far as latitude goes. So, for instance, the Boers came to KwaZulu from the north, not the south.
This illustrates your ignorance of the topic you’re choosing to lecture a native on. Again.
You asked in a snarky way so you got the snarky answer you deserved. Had you started out by pointing out that the language used to refer to the victims of colonialism was often heavily loaded I would have agreed and replied in a different manner. Anyway, I didn’t mean to refer to the Aztecs as tribal. But between reading the OP and replying it just slipped out.
Your snark-o-meter is broken. I even said “please”, and meant it.
Fair enough.
Personally, I wouldn’t use it for any people in an anthropological context anymore, as that’s the growing trend in the field.
I believe the definition colonization is the movement of people from one area to another. This is separate from the movement of goods and most importantly ideas from one area to another. With this definition of colonization, I don’t think the history of the world would be that different.
For example, look at China. Certainly there was no western colonization in China. Westerners certainly visited and some lived there, but no self-sustaining colonies of westerners ever took root. Central Asians of course repeatedly colonized China, but they were the only ones. Chinese culture and civilization was profoundly changed by ideas and goods (primarily foods) from other parts of the world. Certainly colonization from Central Asia was a major factor in the history of China, but not in countries like Japan. Ideas on the other hand, moved quickly and had a major impact everywhere.
If there had been no movement of people from Europe and Africa to the Americas, but ideas and goods did travel, the most powerful ideas would have changed the Americas almost as much as the colonization did. Again, the evidence for this is the huge impact goods and ideas from the Americas had on Europe. Mostly foods, but there are fascinating speculations that Native American governance concepts influenced the age of enlightenment in Europe.
There very much was. Have you ever heard of Hong Kong? Macau? The Opium Wars? The Boxer Rebellion?
That is not necessary for it to be considered colonialism. Settler colonialism is not the only sort of colonialism. And I don’t know what the concessions were, if not colonies.
I’m currently reading and very much enjoying The Dawn of Everything, and I’m very pleased to see it come up in this discussion.
Australia would have been populated without trans-oceanic voyages. There were most likely some trans-strait or trans-sea boat trips, depending on the sea levels when the original inhabitation occurred, which may have been lower due to an ice age. But even today, it’s possible to hopscotch from Australia to Asia without crossing more than 200 kilometres of open water at a time.
I have read The Washing of the Spears, have you?
But fair enough, I won’t comment on anything South African, if you won’t comment on anything American.
That is what came in to post.
People who were educated in the U.S. tend to think of colonization as a type of migration. That was the initial form in what would become the U.S., made possible by the indigenous depopulation. But colonization is more generally a type of imperialism (I’m not clear on their distinction anymore), where outside forces usurp or supplant existing authorities. Migration may or may not be part of colonization.
How far back are we going with “no colonization?” Do the English never go into Ireland? Do the Normans never go into England? Do the Moors conquer Spain? Was there a Roman Empire?
It went down-hill after the Akkadians usurped the Sumerians.
The Washing of the Spears is long outdated. It was published in 1965, and written by someone who had never even visited South Africa.
Historical knowledge and scholarship have moved on, and it’s better to rely on more recent and more authoritative books.