Why did rome never reunify the same way china always did?

Because Qin developed a well thought out meritocratic centralized government and laws, while in Rome and The Ottoman Empire, they had different regional governments, often with their own laws, to not forget no European Empire/Kingdom developed a common identity before the concept of nationalism from the French Revolution. While the Qin pushed hard to standardize everything, from customs and rites to writing and measurement. When a Chinese Dynasty subjugated you, you automatically become part of the system, and all you had to do to become a full fledged citizen was to build a family grave in the Dynasty. This helped further create a common identity, Huaxia which in turn made the common people believe that a Heavenly State over Earth(Tianxia) ruled by the Son of Heaven(Tianzi) was a natural part of the world order.

Another important aspect is that reunification become easier, with the fact the First Emperor commended huge projects of infrastructure that connected all the Empire, pic related.

>no European Empire/Kingdom developed a common identity before the concept of nationalism from the French Revolution

That can't be completely true. The Greeks even thought themselves as Roman. Romanization is also a large topic in Classical Studies.

There's always been some cunt claiming to be Rome

>Holy Roman Empire
>Byzantium/Eastern Roman Empire
>Ottomans
>Russia

Only China cared about assimilating its populations to such a degree that even thought crime become a thing. (Not literally but Li Si the first imperial prime minister did purge every literally work that did go against the Empire in some ways)
I don't know the procedure to become a full pledged roman citizen, but most Empires and Kingdoms was just concerned with its people paying taxes.

Tho a huge part in why Chinese Dynasties could blob as they did was because their administration allowed to mobilize huge armies that wouldn't be seen in Europe before the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

It was reunified once by Aurelian and Diocletian after dividing into three pieces during the the Third Century Crisis (which coincidentally took place roughly concurrently with the Three Kingdoms Period in China).

(Then, coincidentally, the Sima Jin Dynasty which reunited China after the Three Kingdoms Period and the Western Roman Empire later collapsed only 56 years apart from each other)

>coincidentally
>coincidentally
Surely it couldn't all be a coincidence that the rise of Rome and the Han Dynasty and their collapse happened almost concurrently.

One theory I read was that the mandate of heaven gave an ideological incentive that emphasized reuinifying everything rather than being content with your own piece of a fractured empire. Every time China splintered, the splinter kingdoms just assumed everyone's end game was to put it back together.

Well, yeah, it could.

>North Africa is almost exclusively muslim
"no"

They are though?
Only Egypt has a sizable population of them which is 9%. Chances are that'll change in the next decade though.

A single ethnic group didn't culturally wipe out all of the others.

Unlikely

>hurr ethnicity and ideology

there was nothing about rome that lent itself to staying unified geographically

holding it together meant keeping influence over the pyrenees, across the mediterranean, through the mountains of asia minor, over the alps, and keeping those goddamn fucking persians out of the levant

holding china together meant controlling the yangtze (and possibly keeping the nomads out, but even if those did break in, they'd just make a new chinese dynasty).

that the roman empire lasted as long as it did is nothing short of miraculous, and there was plenty of ideological encouragement to try and reunify it - everyone fussed over who or what was the successor to the empire, byzantium made some pretty dope efforts to reunify it under justinian, and all of europe ended up looking back on the memory of a united empire nostalgically.

>because their administration allowed to mobilize huge armies that wouldn't be seen in Europe before the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

China always has had fuck huge population. China and India combined counted for half the world economy as late as the 1700s.

Funny, I'm just reading about just that. Although it doesn't go in depth at all.

1/2

2/2 On phone so can't rotate. Sry.

>the territory that was culturally and economically relevant changed constantly
I wonder what Romans would have thought if you tried to explain that miserable little island up north would ever be more powerful than the entirety of North Africa.

The people most geographically capable of unifying Europe were the Germans. Still true today desu.

Not for lack of trying.

fpbp

>not controlling even half the Mediterranean
>"roman empire reunified"

hahahahahahaha

[Error 476: Virtus not found]

>That can't be completely true
It isn't entirely. Portugal is often said to have the oldest national identity in Europe as they very early on decided that they "weren't Spanish".

And yet China had to be unified somehow, the State of Qin unified China with an army of 500 000 conscripted peasants

Most of that territory did as America said until Drumpf got elected

Geography
China is one big blob while the Roman Empire is a bunch of disparate regions around a large sea with many peninsulas and islands.

Well there's the idea that China must always exist and be unified.

Nice trips

Is this why we have this retarded "which China is the real China" involving the PRC and ROC?

Yes, so we can have two Koreas but just one China.

...

Yes. That's why the PRC actually prefers that the ROC keep pretending to be the true government of all of China and call the CCP illegitimate rebels, than for the ROC to declare independence from China. There can only be one China, they just have to agree to disagree on what the definition of that China is.

people overestimate emperor justinian.
He had low popularity throughout most of his career, and though he was credited with the hagia sophia, he still took dead soldiers money and land, and everyone knew it. This was such a long running disgrace that he was almost exiled from constantinople. Regardless of this money skimming, he still probably could have arranged the funds to take back crucial parts of the west, were it not for the plague of justinian occurring the moment he decided to do this. Millions died, destroyed trade, and though he survived having contracted the plague, he is believed to have suffered minor brain damage, after which he had not the energy nor the wish to retake the west.

It was two things, circumstance and money. The east would have needed to be in better economic standing, social stability and a common national cause, which it had neither.

And now Amerifats.

What sort of phone doesn't let you rotate and crop pictures you take

China is a pretty level land that is surrounded by mountains that pack their people like a pack of sardines so it's easy to take over the area and keep it safe from outside invaders

Europe on the other hand is a mountainous mess full of natural and Rome-built defenses that makes things easy to defend but shit-ass difficult to take

That and the question of "what is Rome?" that never really gotten answered (is the city Rome? the Byzantine empire? the >H>R>E? is it controlled by the pope or the emperor? which emperor? etc.)

>the First Emperor commended huge projects of infrastructure that connected all the Empire

Does the expression "All roads lead to Rome" not tell you anything?

Both Roman Empire and non-modern China werent single states.
/thread

Geography and ethnic homogeneity.

China collapsed into rebel states several times, yet it reformed each time because it has natural borders which lend themselves to unification (wasteland in the north, ocean in the east, jungle in the south, mountains in the west). The second is the dominance of the Han Chinese ethnic group, which leads to any would-be conqueror being assimilated into a Han instead of the other way around.

Yuan and Qing dynasty were situations like the HRE where the empire was ruled by barbarians, yet we still call them China

Rome kinda suffers an identity crisis that China never did

it's kinda weird that Romans never really spread out themselves beyond their city.

I mean they called their provincial subjects "Romans" but they still seemed distinctly African, Gaulish, Germanic, Greek, etc.

Because of foreigners really.

China's foreigners were successfully memed into thinking their own culture inferior and thus tried to be as Chink as possible.

On the other hand, because the Western Roman Empire was occupied by G*rnanics who, despite meming themselves as Romans, were absolutely big on MUH SOVEREIGNITY, MUH NOBLE RIGHTS, MUH EQUALITY BEFORE PEERS, that unity is hard to achieve. Thrown in tribalism to boot.

G*rmanics basically split the Empire because they couldn't stand unifying it and being under someone else's King.

>ethnic homogeneity.
Not really. The "Han Identity" itself is fairly recent (Modern China is working on Ming/Qing Definitions). In addition it contained a lot of other races as well, like Southern Tribals for one.

If you said "Cultural Imperialism" you'll be far more right.

>The "Han Identity" itself is fairly recent (Modern China is working on Ming/Qing Definitions).
Correct,though regional identities took precedence.

>In addition it contained a lot of other races as well, like Southern Tribals for one.
"Han" didn't even apply to anyone south of the Huai until the Ming.

The irony being that the term had to be repeatedly reintroduced by steppe conquerors while the northern Chinese either identified with the ruling dynasty or regional toponyms(Yan,Zhao etc.)

Prior to the Xianbei's usage of the term as a ethnonym for northern Sinitic speakers,Han was a hydronym,toponym and a dynastonym.

doesn't matter when your new administration and government can't maintain them.

Barbarians invading the central plain at least adopted Chinese Goverment and Beurocrats.