Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2013 December 10

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December 10

history

Empires have been built throughout history. Apart from those that are built on the basis of religion, what would be the real reasons for their expansion?
1.Would it more of material greed or more of noble visions of the leaders? For example to achieve unity amongst nations, to provide prosperity for humanity, etc?
2.To enhance the expansion, the conquerers have to enlist the conquered people as part of their army. How would they be sure of the loyalty of the soldiers?
3.In the particular case of the ransack of Baghdad, the Mongols basically destroyed the city and its people. What much benefits would be a destroyed city to the Mongols? Also the actions would bring much hatred and enmity amongst the survivors. Would it not be much better to only attack the vital parts of the city? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 161.139.102.6 (talk) 03:10, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Please ask one question at a time, and do so without forcing respondents to agree with questionable premises of yours, such as the notion that unity amongst nations (Ba'ath party, Soviet Socialist Republic) is an inherently "noble" thing. μηδείς (talk) 06:07, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

On 161.139.102.6's last point, the first generation or two of Mongol conquerors were more interested in having wide pasturelands to support large herds of their horses than they were in having extensive agricultural peasant populations, or large cities which depended for their existence on extensive agricultural peasant populations. They wanted to preserve enough "civilization" to make certain items which the nomads couldn't make for themselves, but beyond that they didn't necessarily care too much about the city-dwellers and peasants (or how they were to be fed when irrigation works were disrupted and former crop-growing land became pasture). AnonMoos (talk) 07:10, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I'd suggest that you should answer these questions thus:

Firstly, define the differing types of empire: spiritual, temporal, and cultural. Clearly, you are asking about temporal (or territorial) empires, but there are also religious empires, such as, for example, the Roman Catholic church ('the kingdom of heaven on Earth'), you can bring in Stalin's question about how many divisions the Pope has, and cultural empires, usually based on a common language, such as a lingua franca or English, or common ideology, such as democracy and human rights. For example, most English people feel that they have more in common with North Americans than they do with Europeans. Macaulay has some useful quotations.

The cultural side should not be underestimated; Poland, for example, emerged again after 2 centuries of obliteration and a German kulturkampf.

The establishment of a territorial empire seems to me to require two things; firstly, a technological, political, organisational, or other strategic advantage over the inhabitants of the country to be conquered. Examples: (1) the line: 'Whatever happens we have got, the Maxim gun, and they have not'; (2) compare Bismark's establishment of the German Empire; (3) Gustavus Adolphus and the military revolution, Shaka Zulu; (4) as an example of another strategic advantage, we could say smallpox, in the case of the British versus American Indians, or the horse in relation to the Aztecs: see Guns, Germs, and Steel. Secondly, a reason for actually bothering to undertake the expensive business of conquering your neighbour: usually greed and opportunity: eg. Caesar's conquest of Gaul, which yielded huge numbers of slaves and advanced his own political ambitions; Gibbon (chapter 1 of Decline and Fall) states that the reason for invading Britain was: The proximity of its situation to the coast of Gaul seemed to invite their arms; the pleasing though doubtful intelligence of a pearl fishery, attracted their avarice. General Napier referred to the conquest of the Sindh as 'If this was a piece of rascality, it was a noble piece of rascality!'; the need to protect the borders of your own empire by constantly pushing forward: the First Afghan War, the Zulu War, the Fashoda Incident, which ultimately leads to Imperial overreach.

Tacitus puts a famously sympathetic quotation into the mouths of the Britons about Rome: Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant (To rape, kill, and steal, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.)

Occasionally two expanding empires meet: the Romans and the Carthaginians, Carthago delenda est, the British and the Dutch, in the Anglo-Dutch wars. Neither will give way.

Having said that, because an empire requires administration, there is often [sic. compare and contrast the Roman and British African Empires with those of Belgium or Germany] some degree of internal peace, the establishment and legal protection of property rights, standardisation of law (Roman Law, Common Law, Code Napoleon - Saint Paul's appeal to Caesar) and religion, and the gradual development of the economy, usually by roads (especially the Romans) and railways (especially the British): see Kipling's description of the Great Trunk Road in Kim. The more enlightened empires believe, or at least pay lip service to, the civilising mission, 'taking up the white man's burden'. The less enlightened empires simply exterminate the opposition: compare the treatment of the plains Indians in Canada and America, for example, and see also Holodomor and the Holocaust.

In respect of your second question, the usual way is to separate the levies raised from the subject people from their own country; thus, the Romans garrisoned Hadrian's Wall with Syrians, and the British sent sepoys to Africa. Over the longer term, an empire would probably hope that cultural assimilation and integration would ensure loyalty to the imperial ideal rather than nationalist stirrings, per Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education. See also Tacitus: Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis asset (Step by step they [the ancient Britons] were led to things which dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance they called civilisation, when it was but a part of their servitude.) An interesting example is the British use of Highland regiments: less than 15 years after the '45, Simon Fraser's highlanders won the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

However, the loyalty of the subject peoples is always to weak spot of an empire: vide. the Auld Alliance, the aid given to Cortes and Pissaro, and various nationalists forming 'legions' or 'free armies' during the world wars.

In respect of your third question, many empires are based on extermination; even the British managed to exterminate the Tasmanian aborigines. It was, in any case, a standard term of ancient and medieval warfare to offer your opponent terms of either surrender or extermination: Siege of Harfleur. Other empires have offered expulsion: see Psalm 137/ Babylonian exile; and the expulsion of the Acadians. It isn't that long ago that the British were carpet-bombing German cities and the the Americans were atom-bombing Nagasaki and Hiroshima; the basic rationale, of destroying the enemy's manufacturing assets, and thus reducing his continuing ability to wage war; creating a deliberate civilian catastrophe to force your enemy to divert military and economic assets in order to protect his civilian population and assets; and to weaken the will to resist, remain as valid then as now. 86.183.79.28 (talk) 14:55, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I agree that you will get better answers if you pose each question separately. I personally don't have time or energy to take on all of your questions, at least not at once. Marco polo (talk) 19:26, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Division of freedom

Does anyone know who spawned the theoretical split between "person freedom" and "economic freedom"? Farthest back I got is Roger Nash Baldwin. — Melab±1 ☎ 05:35, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I linkified his name, and would think Rousseau's "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" would be the obvious candidate. μηδείς (talk) 06:03, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

This is a really interesting history of ideas question. I too am interested in a more definitive answer. Fifelfoo (talk) 02:25, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Were they always unified? →Σσς. (Sigma) 05:18, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

I think the distinction is present at least implicitly in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, but I don't remember whether he discusses it explicitly. Looie496 (talk) 16:23, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

I want a critical analysis of different poems of English literature

I want a critical analysis of different poems of English literature. Is there any help for me? first of all, I want a critical analysis of "The Hollow Men" by T.S.Eliot. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 39.55.93.181 (talk) 05:46, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I have added a header for the request. μηδείς (talk) 05:58, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Have you read The Hollow Men and T. S. Eliot? μηδείς See our guidelines above: "The reference desk is not a service that will do homework for others" (talk) 06:00, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

There are lots of critical analyses out there. Here are some. 184.147.136.249 (talk) 02:16, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Any good recent UFO encyclopedia?

Good day, I'm doing some background research on UFOs and aliens, before analysing alien literature.

The last good (thoroughly researched and unbias) UFO encyclopedia I "encountered" was Fifty years of UFOs : from distant sightings to close encounters by John and Anne Spencer. And that was from 1947 to 1997: from the mere dots in the sky in the post-war era to the more scientific paranoia and alternative spirituality in the 1990s. It was mostly written from an American (military, technology) and British (sacred, mystical, historic) perspective, but it also covered Soviet, French, Spanish and some Brazilian encounters.

And here's the problem.

What happened the past 16 years? It seems to me since the dawn of the millennium interest slowly faded and then came to an end.

Two questions:

1. Is there any new "good" recent UFO encyclopedia? Preferably from the 2010s?

2. Did the mass media consumers' interest merely swap the "clinical", "New Age", "sterile", "unexplained" and more "futuristic" (something will happen) to something much more of a "present", "Gothic", "decaying" and "urban" hype, such as vampires and zombies (especially the latter)? Does it concern postmodernism (e.g. reviving or emphasising the different myth(s) in the modern world) or has it to do with the ever more new shifting conspiracy theories? Suidpunt (talk) 07:37, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I agree that interest in, and mention of, UFOs seems to have declined. As far as why, perhaps it has to do with movies about UFOs. I considered 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to be good UFO movies, which peaked everyone's interest. On the other hand, more recent UFO movies, like Signs, just seem silly (those aliens were water soluble, like the Wicked Witch of the West, and seemed to lack any powerful weapons). So, fewer people would take UFOs seriously after bad UFO movies like that.

And note that vampires and werewolves are "sexier" than little green men, and sex sells, so that's why we get such an overdose of those lately, and a dearth of aliens.

There also seems to be a larger trend in movies away from true science fiction (things which may actually be possible, like UFOs) and more towards fantasy (magic, etc.). StuRat (talk) 09:59, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Search google for 'signs demons' (without the quotes), for a theory that turns the movie from having a terrible plot to merely being badly executed. There are also theories that monster movies reflect the fears of society as a whole, so when the western world feared a foreign power about which not much was known, we had aliens (and as they started to open up, we had nicer aliens). When the western world starts fearing home grown terrorists who could look like any of us, we get vampires and zombies, who are normal people changed into monsters (for zombies in particular, the popularity also depends on who is president of the US [1]). MChesterMC (talk) 10:36, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

It could also connect with the fact that news coverage of UFOs seems to have dropped to zero. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:38, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

2001: A Space Odyssey is a UFO movie?? There isn't a single UFO in the entire movie. --Bowlhover (talk) 16:02, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

The Star Child's bubble could be considered a UFO. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:04, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps it's an Unidentified Standing Object movie. StuRat (talk) 03:08, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

While there were long notions of aliens travelling space, the UFO craze started as a nutty cover story for the Roswell UFO incident. It was the aura of government authority behind the idea that got it going, and having citizens report unknown aircraft obviously had some appeal during the Cold War going forward (Project Blue Book). Eventually though, people became more canny (or perhaps they lost a habit of silence learned during the war) and started to discuss these things more openly as secret aircraft. Alien abductions became more plausible when viewed as humans abducting and drugging people.

I don't think that realistic science fiction has really gone away - though it was never really that large a segment of literature - it's just that there are other ways for aliens to arrive. Wnt (talk) 17:45, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

• StuRat's hit the stake on the head; the rise of vampires and werewolves (!) has distracted the public, and, weakened, the last of the aliens have been taken out by zombies. μηδείς (talk) 21:59, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

• • As with dinosaurs, those things have the pop-culture advantage of not actually existing; hence, entertaining but harmless in the real world. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:31, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

".. entertaining but harmless .."? Are you suggesting the normal attribute of "entertaining" is "harmful"? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:01, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Well, there are entertaining but harmful movies, like The Birth of a Nation, where the "monsters" are black men. And, one could argue that movies which teach that everyone is invulnerable to bullets so long as they do somersaults are also harmful, at least if anyone ever takes them seriously. (On the other hand, a lot of would-be murders were probably thwarted from people thinking they could kill somebody by holding a pillow over their face for 10 seconds.) StuRat (talk) 03:15, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

He has a point. Imagine if somebody made a series like "Vampire Diaries", only instead of using vampires they had someone else who preys on the weak, like serial killers or child predators. It would be such a welcome realism, but not to many! Wnt (talk) 20:14, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Around the time Jurassic Park and its various knockoffs were in the theaters, someone asked, "Why do kids love dinosaurs?" and the answer was "Because they're big, scary... and dead." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:13, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm interested in the OP's concept of an "unbias" (sic) UFO encyclopedia. I suspect it means "has the same bias as the OP". HiLo48 (talk) 22:10, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

There is also the issue of far less compelling evidence being out there than might be expected since the advent of the internet, camera phones, more widespread video surveillance, etc. “Look at all the people who now have personal cameras. If there was something flying around that was a structured object from somewhere else, you would have thought that someone would have come up with some convincing footage by now – but they haven’t" quoting a "Ufo adviser to the National Archives. A lot of groups have closed during the past 10 to 20 years. The Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena has held conferences on the decline of Ufology. See for example this Telegraph article, also referenced in our article UFO, subsection "Decline". ---Sluzzelin talk 23:39, 12 December 2013 (UTC)