The Barbarian Hordes

To the extent to which such matters were discussed at all, my history lessons portrayed European colonization of much of the rest of the world as a triumph of civilization over the primitive, and it’s true that many of the colonial victims were relatively primitive technologically, especially in the Americas, Australia, and much of Africa. That was not the case in Asia, so how, I asked, did Europe conquer India and China despite the logistical difficulties of operating across an ocean? Arun has now provided several posts by way of answer, and I now suspect that I might have been asking the wrong question.

Maybe the central premise – Civilization advancing against the barbarian hordes – has it backwards. Maybe it’s usually the barbarians who are the aggressors, invading and looting the higher civilization. Certainly that is the way we understand the fall of the Roman Empire, and it would seem to apply equally to the Roman conquest of the Greeks. Nor can we doubt the application of the paradigm to Genghis Khan and other conquerors from the plains of Asia. Having gone that far, how about Alexander’s conquest of “the World”?

Now it’s true that these conquerors often did have some technological advantage in this or that aspect of warfare, but I think that Arun has put his finger on the crucial point – the outsiders triumph by throwing sand in the gears of the complex economic interactions that make up a civilization. The invaders lacked this vulnerability either because of their primitive social organization, or because they were far from home, or both. Now we have a paradigm that applies to Alexander and Cortez, to Pizarro and Clive.

It should also have a few sobering lessons for us today. We feel secure in our military power today and our powerful economies, but a tiny band of Muslim terrorists have managed to throw quite a bit of sand in our economic gears. Most effectively, they have induced us to squander trillions in absurdly unprofitable wars.