There are many reasons to read Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. One of them is to know, understand, and express wonderment, at what the Tutsis of Central Africa achieved in the five years before and after the year 2000. What they did was awesome, and horrific.
The Congo is the size of Western Europe, and for a period 3 million Tutsi controlled the whole region. These were no two-bit warriors. They hijacked a plane from eastern Congo and landed it far to the west to launch a second front in the war.
It may seem strange, but I thought of this while reading Imperial China. The Jurchen, who became the Jin Dynasty, conquered northern China in a decade, in a furious frenzy, about 900 years ago. These people are ethnically related to the Manchus and emerged out of a coalition of hunting, fishing, and farming tribes only in the decades before 1000 AD. Taking up nomadism, they quick overwhelmed first the Khitan people, and then swept over the Yellow River plain, toppling the Northern Song Dynasty.
And yet this is not an isolated occurrence. Consider the rapid expansion of Arabs in the 7th century. Within 20 years Persia had fallen, and much of the Roman East was under their rule. The Mongols of the 13th century are an even more striking example, swallowing state after state.
Contrast with these instances the expansion of Rome or Russia. These polities grew in a piecemeal fashion, step by step. There was no explosion, just a long fuse.
My thoughts are inchoate. But it is a very strange reality that the Tutsis are traditionally pastoralists, and have been characterized by a great deal of mobility. Perhaps there is something on a psycho-cultural level which makes them more comfortable with the high-risk daring operations that they attempted and often completed during the years of the Great War of Africa. Farmers, that is peasants, are famously and justifiably characterized as extremely conservative (do some reading about how long it took potatoes to be adopted as a crop in Eastern Europe!). But nomads? I don’t think there is a similar stereotype.
And, to be entirely frank, the peculiar explosiveness of mobile pastoralist peoples that emerge out of obscurity may shed some light on the process whereby prehistoric pastoralists in Eurasia seem to have left such a strong cultural and genetic legacy….
Might I recommend “A History of Warfare” by John Keegan? Unlike many other military history books that examine strategy, technology, personalities or movements of armies and see war as rational expressions of politico-economic motivations, Keegan takes an anthropological approach to warfare and discusses the rise of the “horse peoples” at some length.
razib: Contrast with these instances the expansion of Rome or Russia. These polities grew in a piecemeal fashion, step by step. There was no explosion, just a long fuse.
I guess counterexamples among the sedentary societies are Alexander, Cyrus and perhaps Qin Shi Huang. I’m not so sure about ideas and culture, still, but agree that sheer differences in mobility are probably a constraint on frequency of very broad expansions.
This sort of narrative of the mighty pastorals always strikes me as odd. Logic goes that farmers would always kick pastoral or HG ass.
The level of glycogen in farmers was huge compared to the others, so, after the first 3-5 seconds of pure ATP as form of energy the pastoral/HG would balk or have a decline in stamina, and the farmers would have up to 2 minutes of pure max energy in their muscle at top performance.
Don’t really get it.
Alexander, Cyrus and perhaps Qin Shi Huang.
The first two are mobile. Qin better. But Qin victory built up from decades of gradual advantage of Qin.
Alexander and Cyrus were from pastoralist societies? More so than Romans or Russians?
I don’t believe pastoralists have the -ability- to frequently conquer farmers, only that they frequently have the need to try, and sometimes they succeed. The cycle of life on the plains is one of good decades and many sons, and bad decades and many hungry bellies. But history rarely takes care to record it when they attack farmers and the farmers, or their warrior class, handily beat them with little effort.
I once thought of the Indo-Europeans as merely “the Mongols 5000 years before the Mongols”. They too came out of the steppes and took over large parts of the world. But I don’t know enough about the Indo-European expansion to know if this comparison is justified.
Surprised you didn’t mention the Comanches here, since they seem like another good example.
Possible reasons:
1) Being used to insecurity and rapid changes in fortune due to animal theft/rapid die-offs
2) Enormous male competition due to patriarchal inheritance patterns etc.
@Jim.
I frequently move from a Ketogenic state to a glycogenic state. And truth is the ME glycogenic (carbs/farmer) will kick the Sh*t out of ME Ketogenic. (low carbs/pastoral) 🙂
“This sort of narrative of the mighty pastorals always strikes me as odd. Logic goes that farmers would always kick pastoral or HG ass.”
Farmers have an opportunity cost in fighting (or even training for war) – when they are fighting or training, they are not working in the fields; pastoralists can do the two things at the same time – fighting/training and at the same time travel with their cattle. In some ways, HG are even better, because when they hunt, they are also training for war (war is simply a variant of hunt, with a more intelligent prey), but have the handicap of a very small population.
Alexander and Cyrus were from pastoralist societies? More so than Romans or Russians?
yes! the macedonians were only semi-greek and their military distinctiveness was in the widespread utilization of cavalry against the greeks. and the persians in the years around 500 BC certainly included mobile elements (more properly perhaps “iranians”, since some of the tribes were probably pastoralist and some sedentary).
basically, the macedonians and persians can be thought as part of the ‘pastoralist periphery’ of their broader cultural world (at least at the time).
This sort of narrative of the mighty pastorals always strikes me as odd. Logic goes that farmers would always kick pastoral or HG ass.
Is this some sort of a joke?
basically, the macedonians and persians can be thought as part of the ‘pastoralist periphery’ of their broader cultural world (at least at the time).
This is consistent with the paradigm that such a periphery enjoyed the best of both worlds in terms of military capacity – technology, cereals, higher population density, and political ideology from agriculturalists and mobility, better fitness, and fighting ability from pastoralists.
you might be interested in the “Nomadology” by Deleuze and Guattari, it has a similar hunch.
Might I recommend “A History of Warfare” by John Keegan?
listening to it now on audible.
Love to read your impression when you are finished.
ibn khaldun has a thing or two to say about this subject:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asabiyyah