Reading up on the history of great empires and civilizations there is a trend I have noticed...

Reading up on the history of great empires and civilizations there is a trend I have noticed. Almost every great empire in History fell due to invasions by semi-nomadic/pastoral people. I mean think about it.


The Indus valley civilization fell due to the Aryan invasion

The Hittite empire fell thanks to raids undertaken by the sea peoples

Rome fell due to invasions by Germanic Tribes/Huns

Song dynasty China fell due to the Mongol invasions

The Byzantine and Sassanid fell due to Turkic/Arab invasions


Why do you think this is Veeky Forums?

Other urls found in this thread:

economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21592635-revisiting-old-argument-about-impact-capitalism-all-men-are-created
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_dynasty
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Kingdoms
books.google.com/books?id=eYWcAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA339#v=onepage&q&f=false
books.google.com/books/about/For_Business_Ethics.html?id=7CSKX2HdnikC
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

You are only looking at ancient empires right there.

Also, who else would stop them?

And then the barbarians turn into effeminate weakling after settling into civilized life

Fall is a strong word and implies being finished.

When some people like the likes of Egypt or China ousted their Nomadshit invaders out.

Since when was Egypt invaded by nomnoms?

Hyksos? Cunts who brought Chariots to them?

Those are only ancient empires what about the fall a bit more modern empires like the ones in the early 20th century.

Usually it was the internal problems of a country that fucked them over before the barbarians. For example, had Rome had been more stable and not faced all the problems it had then it would not matter how many germanics would come.

Modern empires are pussies.

They fight "proxy wars" or "police actions" via their """"""""""""allies"""""""""""""".

Do the "Sea Peoples" count?

Because the act of building large mercantile urban empires brings its people great wealth, but due to R > G more and more of the society's capital coagulates into the hands of fewer and fewer aristocrats, driving income inequality up past sustainable levels, which leads to population decline and deflationary death spiral until the central bureaucracy can no longer financially support a military large enough to keep out the neighbors, who smell weakness and stage a hostile take-over.

Places like the Roman empire were able to stave off deflation through economic stimulus in the form of war booty from foreign conquests, but as soon as they ran out of other peoples' money they turned upon one another and squandered the remainder of their vast wealth fighting succession wars, until the central state was so broke and badly in need of funds that they began leasing fallow land to Germanic tribes in exchange for quotas of fighting men, which lasted for as long as it took the Germanic tribes to realize that they could get on just fine without its landlord state that taxed them without representing them for virtually no gain of their own.

It has less to do with the character of semi-nomadic/pastoral people and more to do with the wealth of urban centers concentrating into fewer and fewer hands where it is inevitably squandered on political speculation until tax revenues grow too weak to provide needed military funding.

It's a cumulative effect.

An empire is a highly organized state controlling and directing the economy of several tribes and nations to maintain itself. Part of this maintenance comes in the form of border control. In the case of a disorganized, barbarous neighbor like nomads and mountain/forest tribes who have no way of being controlled by an army holding land, the more advanced society will attempt to court powerful families and individuals as their proxies who use their interpersonal connections to pacify the border.

Over time, as the power of the state diminishes, this strongman becomes too powerful in relation to the state and so the state, if unable to find a military solution due to their own weakness, will again direct their resources to creating a balance of power in the tribal lands, supporting rivals who will keep the strongman in check.

Eventually the state deteriorates in both military and economic power, and this is where the invasion comes. The tribes, having spent generations organizing themselves into private armies and rudimentary bureaucracies due to the influence of the neighboring civilization, suddenly find their source of wealth flowing from the neighboring empire has dried up. So the balance of power between powerful tribes deteriorates as now the tribes are unified under uncontested leadership once more, and to maintain this new confederation the tribes now descend upon the civilized neighbor.

Many times the state manages to pay off the tribes, or the tribes are satisfied with the loot from their raiding to return to their lands and disintegrate after their strongman dies. This leaves the state in a position to revitalize its finances and military power and so return to the old status quo. But sometimes the tribes are so well led, and the state so decadent, that the tribes overwhelm and conquer the entire empire.

That's some shitty Marxist interpretation going on right there.

that's some shitty neoliberal denialism going on right there

Thanks for your contribution. Care to put on a trip so we know who to block?

>Triggered Marxists.
Daily reminder Marxist positivism and stupid historic models do not apply in a global scale outside its Eurocentric bounds.

Hell, it even fails in defining European history.
>HURRR GUYS. FEUDALISM => CAPITALISM => COMMUNISM EVENTUALLY

Nomads were hard to defeat since they had no country to capture, and were usually united through some sort of tactical innovation.

>Daily reminder Marxist positivism and stupid historic models do not apply in a global scale outside its Eurocentric bounds.
You're going to have to list some examples how yours can either, or how you're not burdened in argument by the "Eurocentric".

>Nomads were hard to defeat since they had no country to capture
True.

They brought their families with them instead for you to kill once you quashed the main army.

No thank you. You're delusional enough to be a Marxist and arguing with you is futile.

That's a hell of a reason fight to the bitter death and not retreat then.

No wonder they were so powerful.

>R > G
What do you mean by this?
>Leasing land to Germanic tribes for quotas of fighting men
Why could they not use some poor unemployed plebs, weren't there already a lot of people with no occupation within the empire?

It's also a liability in terms of logistics and strategy.
the Russian Expansion, the Defeat of the Xiongnu, Xianbei, and the Dzungars, and the hostaging of Mongols by the Qing is proof of this.

>>Triggered Marxists.
The only person here who's triggered is you, and that's why multiple people are calling you out on it.

>Daily reminder Marxist positivism and stupid historic models do not apply in a global scale outside its Eurocentric bounds.
It's not positivism, it's mathematics backed up by a huge volume of data compiled by super-computers
economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21592635-revisiting-old-argument-about-impact-capitalism-all-men-are-created

This is why /pol/tards are the new furfaggots: as soon as you get even the smallest push back against your way of seeing things you just can't handle the rejection and go full sperglord. At least the libertarians who were there before you had the common decency to state their case in a calm, objective manner.

They don't need to worry about hordes of steppenigs because the nature of warfare, geopolitics, and technology in general has drastically changed

>it's mathematics backed up by a huge volume of data compiled by super-computers
>Bringing STEMshit positivism to say it isn't positivism.
How to destroy Marxist historical models: read Asian history.

There goes your Marxist Eurocentric Feudalism->Capitalism->Communism bullshit.

Coming to think of it: read history in general and try not to see conspiracy theories everywhere.

>MFW in Poland, it used to be taught that Rome fell due to lower class uprising compounded by barbarian troubles
Marxist Revisionism at its finest.

Those empires are states, who rely on control by a government and the institutions to function. Those semi-nomadic/pastoral normally overcame the empires when the state was weak and, for whatever reason, unable to exercise this control properly. Other sedentary states suffer from the same weaknesses, and if they're neighbours it's not strange that they're suffering the same problems for similar or even identic causes. Semi-nomadic/pastoral, since they have no state and institutions (or have them, but very undeveloped) work better comparatively when the state can't control the land, and they can easily usurp the place of the government with some opportunistic victories that in every other situation would not have destroyed or harmed the empire on the long term.

You might be onto something OP.

>How to destroy Marxist historical models: read Asian history.
One of my favorite subjects, Mengde

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

I would encourage you to read up on the horrors that the British inflicted upon the Chinese in the name of "free trade"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_dynasty

Now you can read up on the rural, isolationist dynasty who had been in power for centuries and who were directly responsible for China falling behind the west technologically, even though the preceding Ming dynasty was itself an emerging colonial power on the verge of industrialization.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Kingdoms
And while you're at it, you can read up on the three kingdoms period immediately preceding the Han dynasty, as it was a society which in one era surpassed the Roman Empire in grandeur and wealth but towards the end became dominated by private land owners independent of the central state and creating states within themselves when the central state lost all legitimacy in the aftermath of the Yellow Turban rebellion.

>preceding
Of course I meant succeeding

>Focusing on the 19th Century with severe European intrusion into Asia.
Typical Marxist.
>Whole of Imperial China is Feudal to the Marxist
KEEEEEEK.

Daily Reminder those """"""""""""peasants""""""""""""" rarely worked for a landlord and instead worked for a clan village, where not working = not eating.

The Chinese word for peasant, "nongfu" literally means "person who works in agriculture." and is devoid of any European-style peasant-retainer links the European word "peasant" has.

But of course, we can talk of landlords in the Han Dynasty because it was the last hurrah of Feudalism in China, given how Liu Bang made deals with the royal and feudal families who survived the Qin Dynasty. By the time of the T'ang & Sui, nobility and feudalism is dead, ended so by close to 300 or 400 years of violence from the Three Kingdoms Period to the Nanbeichao Period.

That said, Imperial China isn't the meme capitalism either that supposedly follows Marxist historical pokemon-style evolution. It was a weird blend of government protectionalism, free trade, small-scale communism even, hacienda-style feudalism, and mercantilism. It defies Marxist classification.

For the Ottoman/Russian Empire you had an outdated, horribly inefficient system which could not compete in the new world economically or technologically
Being large, multiethnic empires meant that they were open to nationalist uprisings on their periphery which chipped away at their territory and created socio-political instability
Both empires tried to reform in the second half of the 1800s, but it was in a sense too late. For Russia, their attempt at democracy to contemplate the monarch was laughable and only further frustrated the liberal/republican business class. For the vast working class/peasants, living conditions sucked and land reforms got stalled after Stolypin was assassinated. Not to mention the tsar did not want rule.
For the Ottomans, I like to think the social reforms were going in a good direction. Problem is you had elements like Abdul Hamid II who was more concerned with territorial prestige and keeping power. Call it a remnant of Byzantine power games. Economically, their drive to modernize put them into enormous debt, ending with foreign control of their finances not unlike Greece today. The strain of the war accelerated their decline, distracting from the possibility of reform. They failed to adapt, and a lot of it was too-little-too-late or not enough to build strong/functional institutions

I don't know much about Austria-Hungary, but their issue of having a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual state was even bigger bc of the demographic mosaic they had. Hence Franz Ferdinand's support for federalism. Shame such reformers kept getting shot...
Economically I remember hearing they were late to the party, but A-H was growing really fast. Biggest issues were political. Too many competing interests. The whole union was a mistake imo. Austria would be an awesome state if they kept and industrialized what they had. And again, the element of war.

because civilization generally makes people more docile and less agressive, they have less of a thirst or contentness for war. People who are generally peaceful are going to lose out to warmongers

Also Germany - this was actually a functional, powerful state. The war settlement alone ended that empire, inspiring immense butthurt.

Moving down the timeline, and trying to move away from the assposting above, I'm interested in what led to the collapse of colonial empires like Britain and France in the mid-20th century. It's clear the core survived relatively unscathed (if not embarrassed), with random islands still in possession.
Was this "collapse" simply concentrated to colonial holdings or was there a domestic backfire?
Did the enthusiasm for colonialism just go away + too expensive to keep? Idk, those are my assumptions.

I'm tempted to include Portugal/Spain too though I understand their conditions were much different

>Typical Marxist.
And typically the Neoliberal ignores the Opium Wars

>But of course, we can talk of landlords in the Han Dynasty because it was the last hurrah of Feudalism in China, given how Liu Bang made deals with the royal and feudal families who survived the Qin Dynasty. By the time of the T'ang & Sui, nobility and feudalism is dead, ended so by close to 300 or 400 years of violence from the Three Kingdoms Period to the Nanbeichao Period.

And the T'ang dynasty which replaced it was a vibrant market economy dominated by a powerful central bureaucracy vastly eclipsing Europe in grandeur and scale. The same progression of labor arrangement takes place in two disparate economies yet at different scales and time frames owing to different environmental pressures, in particular China's vast economy with a breathlessly exposed northern border. The Song dynasty continued this trend but suffered a major setback when taken over by the Yaun dynasty, who brutalized the population and subjected them to Debt-serfdom. The Ming Dynasty was a glorious recovery era but again were taken over by backwards northern isolationists, the Manchu, permanently crippling them in the race for global supremacy.

> It was a weird blend of government protectionalism, free trade, small-scale communism even, hacienda-style feudalism, and mercantilism. It defies Marxist classification.
But by extension it defies neoliberal classification as well.

He's actually pretty well on the money. Too much focus on the economic side of things and less on Roman attitudes towards power and the ease of becoming emperor though.

>t. someone who did a dissertation on the fall of the western Roman Empire

>Too much focus on the economic side of things
Yes, lots of people reject models based on mathematics and observational data and prefer ones based on feelings and self-aggrandizing moralization.

Roman attitudes towards power changed with their economic circumstances.

Liberty and democracy were important concepts when their society was dominated by a land-owning gentry, but by the time of the late Republic most of that gentry had been run off their farms and into the blight of suburban poverty (unable to compete with the latifundia estates which could supplement their businesses with slave labor) and had long since stopped caring about the previous system to line up in droves to support Julius Caesar's populist, unscrupulously antidemocratic platform.

There was no "ease" to what Julius Caesar did, utterly crushing the Gallic Celts with only a handful of legions and making himself astronomically wealthy in the process, going toe to toe with Rome's finest general and winning, pacifying Greece, conquering Egypt, and making himself even more popular (because Romans loved a good conqueror) through a series of political proposals which for the time would have been considered progressive.

It's no coincidence that one of the reigning members of the first triumvirate was Crassus, one of the wealthiest men ever to live when judged by percentage of ownership of their society's wealth. It's also no coincidence that Marcus Brutus was able to reverse his family's slide into obscurity by engaging in business practices which we in the modern era would consider predatory loan sharking, but they had no concept of this being a bad thing.

The fact remains that the Roman model had no system of checks and balances to prevent too much power, economic or political, from amassing into the hands of fewer and fewer individuals, and that's precisely what happened.

2/2

When conservative reactionaries assassinated Julius Caesar they assumed that by removing the tyrant liberty would flourish again and life would go back to being flowers and sunshine for the republic, but all it did was create a massive power vacuum (removing Julius Caesar from the equation didn't do anything to change the circumstances which lead to his rise in the first place) filled by a strongman, Augustus Caesar, who consolidated the lion's share of economic power by way of private ownership of the province of Egypt, the Empire's breadbasket and most important province.

He called himself first citizen and made sure to position himself as the great preserver of traditional Roman values and democracy when in practice he had become a government within a government, providing services that the public government refused to provide while keeping them around solely to maintain the facade of democratic representation.

He also reinvigorated the economy through a series of investments in the public infrastructure, and for that reason had the longest and most peaceful reign in the Empire's history.

But this was a great hypocrisy as the Emperor became so important that he basically controlled all the political and economic activity of the Empire, nothing could get done without his direct supervision, and by the time of Emperors like Diocletian and Constantine, they had abandoned all pretenses of being a democratic society and ruled as absolute monarchs, and most of the accumulated wealth that the Romans had pillaged fair and square was squandered on petty succession wars by the small handful of people within reach of the throne, falling into the hands of the mercenaries that took over when the office of the Roman Emperor had become essentially bankrupt.

I mean like... In some ways that isn't wrong.. Julius Caesar certainly came to power due to an angry lower class, or at least in part. And the empire itself in the later years was plagued with problems, one of those being a dirt poor and angry lower class.

I think that Western Europe is going to fall due to Muslim invasions

No

Almost every empire fell due to succession issues resulting in civil war and thus constantly internal turmoil.

Oh and the Germans ruining everything, Germans ruin all empires out of their mad jealousy

>The Indus valley civilization fell due to the Aryan invasion

...

THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION WAS ARYAN.

YOU ARE IGNORANT REGARDING THE ARYANS, AND THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION, SO WHY DO YOU EVEN COMMENT REGARDING THEM?

Disagree.

It seems that way, but the reality is that empires hold strong against such invaders for centuries, it is only when the empire is already crumbling that an invader will come and finish them off, making it seem like the invader, who the empire had fought off many times before, killed the empire.

And they seem to be nomads because people who invade are either empires or nomads and giant empires who havent killed each other by a certain point basically never will so its down to the nomadic people to finish them

2/10 made me reply

ecks dee dude if u dont literally colonize countries and invade your neighbours you're a pussy it's not like the modern world is different from the world 200 years ago dude

I think this is the best explanation ever on the rise and fall of the WRE. I mean, I already knew it, but you word it sensationally.

Can you provide one for the ERE?

Yes, OP included them with the Hittites

British empire fell due to the German invasion.

>What do you mean by this?
that the rate of return on capital is greater than economic growth.

In layman's terms it is a data-driven mathematical proof that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer

>What do you mean by this?
He wants everyone to know that he's read a summary of Piketty's book.

>Implying I'm a Neoliberal.
I'm more of a "leave history the fuck alone and quit making shitty, often uni-directional- predictive models as to point out where society goes."

Which is what something marxists, conservatards, and religions with apocalyptic visions do. It's not history, its blatant revisionism.

Thanks. I've considered every explanation for why the Roman Empire fell, from environmental decay to moral decay, but the one that I found to be the most compelling (explained above) is the one that incorporates contemporary understandings of material sciences like economics and archaeology and human sciences like sociology and psychiatry. It's elegant and simple enough to also explain the dynastic cycle of China, the Bronze age collapse, and puts the seemingly cyclical nature of history in a perspective that doesn't invoke teleological models.

>ERE
Sure. The ERE/Byzantine Empire gets a bad rap because classical western historiography paints them as the enfeebled remnant state from the glorious High Imperial era, but that's a false perspective, a consequence of adopting a eurocentric historical model.

From antiquity until the Mongolian invasion, the Middle East had always been far more cosmopolitan and wealthy than the rural, backwater west, and owing to its extensive network of international trade and powerful central state was able to keep deflation at bay and endure just fine, without having to drain its coffers defending unprofitable western provinces. It only fell a thousand years later thanks to crusaders stabbing them in the back and pillaging their society despite the threat posed by the Turks

In fact if it hadn't been for the Justinian Plague (which like the Antonine Plague before and the Black Death later were catastrophes of zombie apocalpyse-esque proportions) they probably would have gone on to reunify the Empire, but plagues are much more devastating, history altering events than we previously gave them credit for.

>He wants everyone to know that he's read a summary of Piketty's book
No, I want everyone to know how important the implications of this research are despite the protestations of neoliberals whose regressive views it discredits

>>Implying I'm a Neoliberal.
>Implying I'm a Marxist
You're the one who jumped in with the labels and finger pointing. I'm actually a Catholic who thinks that the best system is capitalism regulated against itself, and the reason you confuse me for a dialectical materialist is because reason and factual evidence are more important to me than consistent ideology which doesn't flinch in the face of facts.

>"leave history the fuck alone"
Which is a nice way of saying that you hate that contemporary research is offering new insights into old topics and wish we would cling blindly to models which we now know to be discredited or incomplete because they do a better job of validating my preconceived notions about human behavior.

> its blatant revisionism.
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?

>Implying I'm a Marxist
Difference is, Marxists actually exist. Neoliberalism is just a LatAm boogeyman that was exported to the rest of the world in the 2000s.

>muh neoliberals
see the above

>Neoliberalism is just a LatAm boogeyman
This is a common Neoliberal deflection in order to avoid going on the defense and to keep the discussion firmly rooted in their ruminations on orthodox Marxism, as if that's still a relevant theory in 2016. I fully admit that the term 'Neoliberal' is solely a critics term, owing to the intellectual cowardice of the Neoliberals to own up to their now falsified beliefs
books.google.com/books?id=eYWcAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA339#v=onepage&q&f=false

>Neoliberalism represents a set of ideas that caught on from the mid to late 1970s, and are famously associated with the economic policies introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States following their elections in 1979 and 1981. The 'neo' part of neoliberalism indicates that there is something new about it, suggesting that it is an updated version of older ideas about 'liberal economics' which has long argued that markets should be free from intervention by the state. In its simplest version, it reads: markets good, government bad."
Pulled right out of a textbook. Pg.100.
books.google.com/books/about/For_Business_Ethics.html?id=7CSKX2HdnikC

>excellent post
>totally ignored
You deserve a (you).

Nubians

neoliberal is a vapid, useless term... nobody self-identifies with it and it's spurious as an insult.

Use 'capitalist' or whatever, anything else... or people just won't take you seriously.

>nobody self-identifies
That's because nobody wants to be associated with a sinking ship.

>Use 'capitalist' or whatever, anything else... or people just won't take you seriously.
Again, you assume that because I'm not in favor of full unbridled capitalism that I surely must be a Marxist diametrically opposed to the concept of a capital owning society, when I have already stated that it's not "capitalism" that I am opposed to, just the type of capitalism that promotes and rewards predatory behavior while removing all of the obstacles for an oligarchy to form. Capitalism is what I am promoting: healthy vibrant markets backed up by a strong central state which can maintain a healthy diffusion of capital through tax and spend policies that prevent violent dynastic cycles, where societies continuously rise and fall because they are unable or unwilling to properly invest in their markets.

Oligarchy is what I am opposed to, when all of the capital is owned by an aristocracy who work together to stifle competition and prevent the market from behaving the way it should, leading to a depressed, deflating economy that enriches the few at the expense of the many. And neoliberal economic policy, this theory that government should be made as weak as possible, is their tool to implement such a system

OP the famous historian Ibn Khaldun came to your same conclusion:
"when a society becomes a great civilization (and, presumably, the dominant culture in its region), its high point is followed by a period of decay. This means that the next cohesive group that conquers the diminished civilization is, by comparison, a group of barbarians. Once the barbarians solidify their control over the conquered society, however, they become attracted to its more refined aspects, such as literacy and arts, and either assimilate into or appropriate such cultural practices. Then, eventually, the former barbarians will be conquered by a new set of barbarians, who will repeat the process.