← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining Colonialism in Asia
02:10:33
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- [00:00]
Austin Padgett
Packages by Expedia. You were made to occasionally take the hard route to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
- [00:08]
Rudyard Lynch
We were made to easily bundle your.
- [00:09]
Austin Padgett
Trip Expedia Made to travel flight inclusive.
- [00:13]
Rudyard Lynch
Packages are atoll protected.
- [00:18]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Welcome to History 102 where YouTube creator what Ifalth Hists Rudyard lynch and I dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.
- [00:31]
Rudyard Lynch
Hi everybody, I'm Rudyard lynch with our co host Austin Padgett. And today's video is on the era of colonialism in Asia. And before we get started, a recent tragedy has occurred that I think we should just take a minute to talk about because there are certain historic events that I think require just a minute of reflection. And that tragedy is the death of Charlie Kirk.
- [01:00]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, it was terrible event. Feel it deeply and clearly had a huge impact and is revealing the degree to which Charlie had an impact himself.
- [01:17]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, it normally takes me like 48 hours to fully emotionally process something. So it hits me. I don't feel it for the first few hours, then it hits in like a day later. And so when it first happened, I just sort of. And it's comparable to the death of Irena that occurred at the same time. I didn't really feel it. And then it hit me in the gut. And it's crazy because for a variety of reasons. Firstly is it shows how important Charlie was in his absence. And I don't think we were really grateful for people until we see them go. That happens a lot with celebrities. A celebrity will die and they'll say like, oh my God, they provided such a good service. And then when they were. Because people were constantly shitting on Charlie Kirk when he was alive, but in his absence you sort of see how very important he was. So let that be a lesson to be grateful for when you have nice things. And it's really, it's really sad because he was one of the very few moderate conservatives and you saw across the left general support for his death. People either signaling or indirectly signaling that the like destiny or Hasan said that it's okay to kill him or that it is nearly or basically signaling that it's not the worst thing in the world. Which if you know how the left talks, they always talk implausible deniability statements. It's really, it's really horrifying that one of our moderates died. And it's going to make the right. This is a new age. The right is going to go absolutely crazy because there's no Incentive for cooperation. And then the left, they've already shown that they're bloodthirsty. And I think this is going to open up a new era of American politics, but not in a good way.
- [03:05]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, so the way the left characterizes violence is very mainstream on the left. Like Hasan and Destiny are huge figures. And Destiny specifically, a few weeks before, identified Charlie as the biggest threat because. Specifically because he's strategic. And there's a lot of this sentiment that like, oh, does the left even know what they're doing? Do they know, like, the threat they've awoken? And they know exactly what they're doing because that backlash either gives them a slim chance of characterizing the right accurately according to their strawman, and winning more, more likely gets them punished while validating their worldview, which is also an acceptable option to them. So they would rather take the shot and create chaos because they're facing their cultural version of a Thucydides trap, where we're at the end of 100 years of progressive dominance and the more generative force is outpacing them. So when they're on relative parity, that's their last chance to strike, and they're clearly completely bankrupt and lashing out. And the thing that Destiny understood about Charlie, which is why some of the right doesn't. And it's correct to identify Charlie as a moderate in terms of he wasn't a revolutionary, but he was a revolutionary in the sense that he wanted to preserve the American Revolution. And he wasn't totally radical, but he was extremely radical relative to the standard. And he was actually really effective at strategically advancing mainstream politics towards being a more regenerative force, which is necessary for reversing the conditions that are leading to a potential blow up. So. And he was really, really brilliant at, I mean, he probably made more people Christians than anybody else. And he also was keyly focused on the issues of the economy and immigration. So he wanted to build coalitions around the issues that are going to like, save and protect America. And we, we basically need to take seriously and consider, like, the value and the strategy that he had to make sure we're accurately, you know, taking it forward. Yeah, serv him as best we can.
- [05:32]
Rudyard Lynch
It's horrible. And I think we can all see that. And it's sad as well, because so many of the players among younger conservatives are basically just virtue signaling idiots where what they do is they play these internal status games online. And I didn't realize until he died how close Charlie was to the Trump family or the gop. Or those people where he. What he was basically one of the very few digital conservatives who. Who would actually deal with the sort of ruling regime. And the thing I'm trying to avoid here is I went to a progressive school in high school, and every single time anything related to Trump showed up, they would make it part of the curriculum. So we were constantly hearing this stuff about, like, trump bad man. This is how it relates to history. This is how it relates to politics. Trump bad man. This is how it relates to political theory. And so we lost our education because we were so focused on short term political goals. And I try to avoid that here, where I try this to. We do talk a lot about politics, but that's partly because it's something me and Austin know about. And it's also because the only way to understand history is to look through the biases of our era of history first, because the left politicized everything. So to understand any given topic, you have to punch through the left's politicization and then the actual topic. So that's why most of our longer videos are sort of philosophic ones, where you have to explain this is what the modern paradigm did wrong, and then this is what the new one did right. Or would do right. This is the correct answer. But I think this is a genuinely important moment. And I'm unclear if people will remember the death of Charlie Kirk a century from now. It could go either way, but it definitely could be true. Especially so if this is the start of a trend. And what I'd say is that one of the most important lessons is you need to separate the things that are under your control with the things that are not under your control, where when these sort of macro political events happen, it's a hard act because you both have to, like, relate to the world and have empathy for a tragic event. But also a lot more bad things like this are going to happen. And so view this as a warning shot. And I know that's the ugliest thing to say, but I also see it as my duty to tell you the truth.
- [08:17]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. And I think he will be remembered no matter what. But is it going to be as like a flashpoint in a larger social conflict, or is it going to be at the beginning of the success of his ideas and his legacy? And just to reiterate how people kind of underestimate Charlie Kirk, one of the things that inspired him to get into politics was listening to Tom woods in 2012 around the Ron Paul campaigns, which was a, you know, very libertarian vision. And he had the wisdom and temerity to have a like long term strategic vision that he carried out. And it's not great to see people dismissing that before. So hopefully they don't dismiss it now. And one kind of terrible example of that is when people focus on like Charlie being killed by Israel or some theories like that because he was on his red pill journey and they were not gonna allow like American politics, blah, blah, to go that way. When very clearly what character Charlie was doing was trying to honestly tackle these subjects in a way that some people don't so that we can avoid having an unnecessary fracture over it, so that we can protect all the things that we care about. So to twist that into another motive is sad and kind of also emblematic of the way that the vision of the movement has gone off track before Charlie.
- [10:03]
Rudyard Lynch
The public has lost any responsiveness to reality. And so the second he was assassinated, I knew they'd blame it on Israel because they blame everything on Israel. It's like a pre written code. They have a worldview. They just filter information through and then if it's not in the filter, they're not going to pay attention to it. And it's, it's a horrible situation. Take care of yourself and try to get a handle of things going forward. Because it's funny, Merrick and I compared it to the death of Balder before Ragnarok.
- [10:46]
Austin Padgett
I saw someone compare it to the Grouchy brother Grockey Brothers, which is kind of tangential to your Trump comparison. And with unfortunate. Let's like to end that conversation on a positive note is that Charlie has an entire homeschool curriculum that he's released. He has tons of video footage. More people went to church last weekend than, you know, ever. It was like double attendance across the country. So he'll. I'm confident he'll continue to have a positive impact.
- [11:18]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, I agree with that. So to get back to the topic itself, this video is Asian colonialism. And this is an interesting topic for a handful of reasons. I see this video as the sequel to the Gunpowder Empire's video where the Gunpowder Empires were the Asian civilizations itself which ruled from the late Middle ages until the period of European colonialism. And by the time we got to around World War I, almost all of Asia was some variety of a European colony between the British and Indies, India, the French in Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Russians that spanned Eurasia, and even the Americans had a colony in the Philippines. And the Ottoman Turks in the west were also a European empire that controlled Parts of Asia. So by the time of World War I, you saw Europe conquer the vast majority of Asia. With a handful of exceptions like China or Iran or Afghanistan, A few others which were under sort of in Japan, which were under. Except for one or two, they were still under heavy European influence. And this is really remarkable because if you set the clock back a few hundred years, when the Portuguese first entered the Indian Ocean region, they idolized the Orient because they wanted to reach it and they wanted to take its wealth because they saw the Orient as more advanced than them. So the irony was that, yes, in some metrics, the Orient was wealthier than Europe. In other metrics, Europe was wealthier. But the Portuguese could take over the entire Indian Ocean region in a generation. And that heavy European dominance was something that didn't exist a few centuries before. But you start this era with the Europeans idolizing the Asians. And you end it with the Europeans utter domination of Asia. And a huge difference between colonialism in Asia versus the rest of the world was I split the world into Eurasia or the Old World. And then the New worlds, which I made a plural. Where the Old World Eurasian system is Ireland to Japan. It's. If world history was a board game, it would be the central rectangle of the board game. And that's where the Big Four civilizations, which comprise over 90% of humans in the pre industrial world were of Europe, India, Middle East, China. Then you have the New Worlds. Where the New worlds normally uses a term for the Americas. But I throw in most of sub Saharan Africa and Oceania into that as well. Because these were places that were brought into the world game by European colonialism. Where the Eurasian system was a unified whole. Where people, Italians went to China. They knew about Japan in the medieval period, although only faintly. But then South Africa, the Americas and Australia. They were only brought into the global system through colonization. And what sets Asia apart from the other colonies was that in Asia you had these pre established civilizations with cities and religions and philosophies and market systems that the Europeans went on top of. But then in the New World or Africa or Oceania, the Europeans had to build these systems. So in Asia, the Europeans were more like the Mongols or the Vikings, sort of barbarian peoples which conquered the land and then built on top of the earlier structures, rather than building structures themselves.
- [15:20]
Austin Padgett
And with the locations that didn't have structures, how much did they have to interface with the tribal people? Or was it more about building settlements?
- [15:31]
Rudyard Lynch
So I think of the British Empire video where I split the British Empire into four different colonies. As symbols for the different eras of British colonialism. And I stand by that. Where first was Ireland, which was a multi century conquest of this tribal people who had been next to England, who were finally unsurfed. You had America, which was the settlement of a ethnically Anglo Saxon population in a place destroyed by disease. You had India, which was the conquest of a decadent multi thousand year old civilization, much like the Mongols conquering China. And then you have Kenya, which was the Europeans entering into a place that had earlier been inhospitable to them due to diseases. And then from that they built out a governing political structure and railroads and stuff. But then they weren't ethnically replacing the original population. So it's this combination of European institutions with local populations. And I would split European colonialism into those four. I also throw in the Latin America model which was conquering and then introducing half of the population's genetics through a caste system. So those are, those are like the five archetypes of European colonialism.
- [17:02]
Austin Padgett
It's a lot of different kind of vibes. It is, but there were also some overlapping patterns. Right. Where, and maybe this applies more to the less civilizationally settled regions, but I remember a lot of accounts of them basically saying something to the effect of once you've seen one, you've seen them all, like they had a similar process that they refined that they would use sort of interacting with many. And that's not very maybe nice thing to say, but at a certain level of abstraction.
- [17:35]
Rudyard Lynch
You got that from John Smith and Pocahontas.
- [17:39]
Austin Padgett
I, I, I think I got it from more than John said. I do remember watching that and actually thinking of that as a corroborating point of evidence.
- [17:49]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, I mean the other thing as well is that the ideas about these colonies changed over the course of centuries. So North America was seen very similarly to India in the first stage of European colonialism because they were far off lands inhabited by non Europeans. And Mexico and Peru were seen as better colonies than North America because they produced gold and slaves, which the Europeans wanted. But to explain your point, to fit these archetypes onto European colonialism in Asia, the Russians were North American style colonialism where the Russians over the course of a century populated an entire continent from the Black Sea to Siberia with ethnic Slavs. India fit the Indian model of colonialism, of course, as did Vietnam and Southeast Asia. I would say the Kenya model of Europeans show up, build institutions on top of previous population. Actually I think most of Indonesia fits in the Kenya model. The Philippines, which is a Spanish colony, fits into the Kenya model. And there's very little of the other categories I see the Turks were more like the Romans or they had a central sort of ethnic identity which they conquered neighboring peoples and tried to fold them in to their broader religious ethnic identity. But Asia is also the most diverse continent on earth culturally. Keep in mind a majority of people on earth live in Asia. It's like 55%. And it was even more before a century ago. Because the biggest demographic shift of the last century is Africa going from a continent where there were three Europeans for every African to one where there's going to be. There's over a billion Africans now, which is more than Europe. And there's supposed to be 4 billion Africans by the end of this century. I don't believe that. But Asia had an even larger percent of the population in this time period. And Asia is radically diverse. Between the great three civilizations of Islam, India, India, China, Asia's got more sub civilizations than anywhere else Between Southeast Asia, Tibet, Japan, all those other civilizations. And then it also has lots of sort of tribal lands between the Eurasian steppe, the forest tribes of Siberia who herded reindeer, the jungles of Southeast Asia that couldn't support large civilizations, the mountains of Afghanistan. And so Asia is such a diverse continent that culturally speaking, it's not really useful to treat Asia as a single thing except for a handful of metrics.
- [20:35]
Austin Padgett
The only way that the only thing they all have is oriental despotism.
- [20:39]
Rudyard Lynch
I was going to say that because.
- [20:42]
Austin Padgett
That starts with like it's referencing the Middle East a lot. And yeah, along that track. Yeah.
- [20:48]
Rudyard Lynch
The only unifier that all of Asia has is in comparison to Europe and its oriental despotism and the things associated with it. Where Asian societies have these highly stark traditions, they have absolutist structures about democracy, they have rigid class structures, reverence of family line, where the oriental despotism or the highly rigid traditional shame based structures, those are the things that unify all of Asia. So if you're a European perceiving Asians, they have those similarities, but those only exist in the mind of Asians when they're compared to Europeans.
- [21:33]
Austin Padgett
Well, yeah, it kind of centers on like Greece versus Persia can be extended to all these.
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Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [21:40]
Austin Padgett
Overlapping patterns.
- [21:41]
Rudyard Lynch
That's been a point that military historians have been making since at least the 18th century. It's the whole. And this is one of those things where in history you have a sort of nasty trend of someone making an argument for something, then making another, Someone making the argument against that, then someone makes the argument against that. So if you're a normal person just trying to read history, you see these centuries of academics in this constant war over fighting against what previous academics said. It's just disheartening.
- [22:10]
Austin Padgett
And.
- [22:13]
Rudyard Lynch
So the only sort of shared sense of Asian ness that ever developed, and it's never been strong, was a side effect of European colonialism. And one of the nasty things history books have a tendency to do is hyper focus on all history after 1800 and then ignoring things before 18 and then. So if you have a history book that's 600 pages, if it's poorly written, even for like the history of the Jews, the history of Armenia, China, these thousands of year old countries, is you'll have half the history book after the year 1800. What these history books always do is they over prioritize sort of unimportant intellectuals who hung out in cafes as nationalists or socialists, where if you looked at any of these colonized countries, the people who later became their new ruling class, and much of ideological history or history written for the group, not for people actually trying to understand the truth is written about how do we justify the current ruling classes ideas. And so what they'll do is they'll go back to these sort of intellectuals who were educated by Westerners. And one of my favorite new historians, Chris Dawson, he said it's a really remarkable point that post colonial Asian nationalism was based around people studying in the west, taking the West's ideas and then using Western ideas against the west which were in opposition to their own culture. So if you want to look at the revolution movements in Vietnam or Indonesia or India, there were people who had studied nationalism and socialism and science in the West. They were a small upper class elite, went back to their home countries, led revolutionary movements. With this small elite pulling on much larger basically peasant populations who had medieval worldviews. And they were pushing this against the European colonial powers. And so the biases these histories always have is they over prioritize these intellectuals because kinds of people where they are the current ruling class of those societies. The issue is that they did not actually get independence. Europe gave these countries independence. It wasn't a lengthy drawn out process where India or Indonesia fought wars like the American Revolution. What happened is that after World War II, Europe lost the will to fight. And I have an additional point there, but is there anything you want to throw in there?
- [24:56]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, it's kind of funny, like the only way that the former colonies have ever competed is by adopting either socialism or capitalism. Socialism mainly expressed in like revolutionary movements that are said to shake off colonialism. But like you said, it's it was more like a reaction to colonialism in the same way that the Irish adopted ideas that were against the side of their colonial invaders. And then the other way they've competed is capitalism like China expanding property rights and stuff as the main generative force they've used to compete with us. So there's it's like operating still on that paradigm.
- [25:40]
Podcast Host/Announcer
We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.
- [25:45]
Austin Padgett
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- [25:48]
Rudyard Lynch
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- [27:40]
Rudyard Lynch
Opportunities.
- [27:41]
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- [27:59]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, you're right. And it's funny that the vast majority of them went for socialism where, because they were educated in the early 20th century where European colonialism lasted for centuries, but it only really hit its high. So when you have a fever, the fever keeps getting worse and worse till the fever breaks and the issue solved. I find life is often like that where the fever of European colonialism, Yellow fever, argh. That fever crested around World War I and then it crashed precipitously.
- [28:34]
Austin Padgett
Where.
- [28:34]
Rudyard Lynch
If you went back to the early 19th century where European colonialism had already been going on for 300 years, the Europeans had a lot of forts along the coastline. And then the New World, the breakthrough from coastal forts to continent spanning empires was mostly a late 19th century thing. It was a singular generation before World War I. And European universities went from highly conservative biased to progressive biased from the shift from the 19th to the 20th centuries. So by the time you get to World War I, when these students are studying at places like Cambridge or the Sorbonne or whatever, they're dominated by socialists, but if they were a generation or two earlier, they'd be dominated by nationalists and classical liberals. And so the ideological bias of European academia at that moment colored an entire lifetime of Third Worldist politics.
- [29:30]
Austin Padgett
Right, because like you said, they got educated in Europe and also they wanted to copy the views of the people who were rebuking the colonial order, which was more associated with capitalism, just in terms of the views. And then. So it's really more about. It's less about their shift to socialism and more about our shift to socialism.
- [29:50]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, agreed. Socialism also fit with their cognitive biases more easily where capitalism we should. Actually, I'm considering making the next video, the Rise of Capitalism. I either want the Eurasian step or the rise of capitalism the next video. But capitalism has sort of flowered in a variety of cultures, but it only took off in Western civilization with the Industrial Revolution because the west had a social code which already prioritized individualism. And so in an individualist society, the individual is reliant on the market to support themselves rather than their family. So individualist societies need to be market based to survive, while in Asian societies that are all collectivist clan societies, socialism fits with their sort of cultural biases more easily because it's the clan father doling out income. And it also Allows cover for elite corruption. There's a great book called the Dictator. There's two good books. These are like, this is like good neoliberal writing. Why Nations Fail and the Dictator's Handbook. I'm not a neoliberal. I don't normally like neoliberals. I also think the term has been so watered down that when you say neoliberal, I don't know what you mean. But why Nations Fail is a good book because it's about how property rights and the market, how once you establish them, your country is going to be wealthy. And the Dictator's Handbook is sort of the inverse of that of how in dictatorships the incentive in democracies the incentive should be that the government provides for a ruling coalition as large as possible to please the public. In dictatorships they're providing incentives to cooperate for the coalition of the dictator and his buddies. So the incentive structures of dictatorships are how do we make sure the dictators buddies get paid off enough that they shoot anyone who fights against him? And so socialism plays into those cognitive biases incredibly easily. So I partly it's our fault for teaching the third world things that were not actually what resulted in us getting wealthy teaching. I think it must be a form of mate suppression on some level. But on top of it, socialism very handily fed into their cognitive biases. Because in the previous monarchies that had lived in Asia, there were these established controls on what the government could do. But with the rise of socialism, the pre established ruling elites could just remove all those barriers on their untrammeled power.
- [32:37]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, because basically there was already a very well established hierarchy to transition into an oligarchy. So they would want to maintain those kind of levers of control and work the system around that. And then on the lower level, like tribal level, you have customs and traditions where you're expected to give everything to your group. So there's no opportunity to build capital, so to speak. Of course there's also the opposite traditions to call on in terms of trade. And the family values thing is interesting because I always say that like conservatives would be much better libertarians than libertarians if they only did it. And part of that is like, part of that is a way that this might work to Asia's advantage because we could consider it a limitation to adopting individual rights. But also the Japanese social discipline, for example, could work very well with it because you maintain the importance of discipline and a larger cultural layer.
- [33:43]
Rudyard Lynch
Once you think you understand things, the world throws you new things to fuck with your data set where if Japan didn't exist and if Asia didn't experience radical industrialization, you would just say that modernity is correlated with Western civilization. But then Japan proved that wrong in the 19th century. And there's been three industrialization events around the world. The first was in relation to Britain from the 19th century onward. And your cultural closeness to Britain determined your degree of industrialization. The second wave occurred with Japan a century later in the 20th century. And your cultural closeness to Japan determined how industrialized you were. So Korea was more industrialized than China, that was more industrialized than Bangladesh. And I suspect a third wave might happen with Turkey. Where Turkey industrialized, the neighboring Middle Eastern countries have. And it would not surprise me if by the end of this century, the third industrial wave will be our cultural distance from Turkey or Iran.
- [34:47]
Austin Padgett
Oh, as in they will actually take the lead in terms of industrialization.
- [34:52]
Rudyard Lynch
I think the Middle east might go through a wave of industrial in the 21st century to what East Asia did.
- [34:59]
Austin Padgett
So the countries around Turkey, etc. And yeah, Israel and Saudi Arabia. And so there's that kind of like developmental stabilizing force going on. And you see the potential for that in the region because they were much more developed 30 years ago. Syria had advanced electronics industry, automotive, etc. So I could absolutely see that region developing also in a similar way to Asia post Vietnam War.
- [35:25]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. The reason I say that is Asia has a more lengthy history with large scale governance and trade and technology than the new worlds do. And so if you look at immigrants in America, Asian immigrants are some of the wealthiest. They're frequently wealthier than whites, and that includes Middle Easterners because we're importing Middle Eastern upper class. In Silicon Valley, there's a bunch of Middle Easterners. And with that, you've seen the precedent. The Middle east can have advanced societies in the ancient and the medieval world. And once a population has a precedent, you know they've already done it and they can do it again because social growths are organic. You can't force a society to develop. They have to do it out of their own will, out of their own context. So when you see a society that's already been developed in the past, radically higher chance of innovating in the future than a society which didn't. And it's interesting, I read a lot of books from the 20th century and it was a really common opinion back then that the Chinese character was innately primitive and superstitious and backwards. That China could not industrialize because they were too socially conservative. China proved them Wrong. At the time of the British leaving India in the 1940s, it was widely known by the British ruling class in the Indian upper class that the Muslims in India were more advanced than the Hindus and the Muslims had a higher civilization. And then after independence, that dynamic flipped, where India has done vastly better than, by almost any metric, than Pakistan. And so when you're looking at Asia, you're seeing these very old, deep societies that have the ability to change under certain contexts. And one of the infuriating bits of this was that none of the Asian societies handled the effects of European colonialism well for centuries into the process, except for Japan.
- [37:34]
Austin Padgett
And why do you think that is?
- [37:36]
Rudyard Lynch
So you have the Portuguese enter the reason in the 16th century. And this is our start where the Portuguese were trying to reach the Orient. And the Europeans heard it, the great wealth of the Orient. And they had stories from people like Marco Polo or the Carpini brothers who had gone out to Asia during the Mongol golden age. And so the Europeans knew how wealthy Asia was. They were blocked off by the Muslims. So they found all of these different methods to reach the Orient, whether sailing west over the Atlantic or around the bottom of Africa. And so a few years after Columbus watched the Age of Exploration video, the Portuguese circled the bottom of Africa and entered the Indian Ocean ecosystem. And they radically took it over. Very quickly, the Portuguese gained the control of the Asian oceans. That was very rapid with very little competition, because the Indian Ocean system, it's relatively easy to sail in because for half the year it blows one direction, for half the year it blows the other direction. So they would have these reed boats, these giant canoes. And so when Marco Polos was in Iran on a voyage to sail at the China, he was shown this reed boat that we're going to take him to China. And he said, I'm not comfortable sailing in that. We're walking to China, because as a European, he looked at the boat, he thought, we're all going to friggin die.
- [39:08]
Austin Padgett
He didn't know the Indian Ocean was so still.
- [39:11]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, exactly. And so the big military advantage the Portuguese had was that they had rolling cannons. So they were the only people who could put cannons on boats. Portuguese were also better fighters because Europe was a much more dynamic military ecosystem and Asia didn't have wide scale civilizational conflict in the same way the Indian Ocean did have pirates. It did have issues, but it was like Sinbad, where Sinbad sails around, he fights a monster, he sees some bandits. In Europe, you had these designated pirates, pirate strongholds and governments that Hated each other. So the Portuguese took over the entire region and they had a string of forts that included Oman, Kenya, Tanzania, India, Singapore, Indonesia, China, and then finally Japan. So the Portuguese had this string of pearls around the bottom of the Indian Ocean system which stretched from Portugal out to Japan. And they had this sort of peripheral contact with the Asian civilizations. And it took a while for the Europeans to penetrate beyond that. But the issue that. The issue that the Asians had was that the European influence was too slow until it was too fast. And what I mean by that is that both the Indians, the Muslims and the Chinese, the three great Asian civilizations, they did not see the Europeans as a threat, where they all used their version of barbari again to talk about the Europeans. The Muslims until the 18th century said the Europeans were savages, like wild animals. Even though the Europeans had surpassed them in civilization centuries beforehand. The Muslim historians like to say that the only things the Europeans had done was the Romans. After Rome, Europe had stopped doing anything then. The Indians thought the Europeans had nothing of value to teach them. Same thing as the Chinese, the only countries that had any sort of ability to integrate with the West. The Turks did a certain amount because they had to fight the Europeans to survive, but they didn't do it very well. The Thai incorporated cannons and guns, but their society wasn't advanced enough to do it in a large scale. And the Japanese did so briefly in the 17th century very effectively before closing their borders. So the thing is that for the Chinese or the Indians, their only contact with the Europeans were a few of these trading forts and they didn't respect the merchants or they saw the Europeans as pirate barbarians. So the Europeans built up this cultural influence and then it took centuries for the Asians to realize the Europeans had an advantage over them. And then by that point, the European advantage was so large they could just steamroll and humiliate these Asian civilizations with practically no effort.
- [42:10]
Austin Padgett
So Japan's unique thing was that they accepted reality. And.
- [42:15]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [42:16]
Austin Padgett
So they still shifted between fight or flight, which is like close off or build out. But the fundamental difference is they like read the temperature in the room.
- [42:26]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [42:26]
Austin Padgett
And it's really amazing the degree to which like your delusion, and this can extend from like yourself, your ego, your family, your in group, your country, your civilization, the delusion, levels of delusion you can engage in to maintain your sense of superiority, which is tied up and maybe things you think is not to be underestimated.
- [42:50]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. And that was really bad for Asia, where keep in mind that the idea that your society should Change over time for new inputs is a European concept. It doesn't exist in Asia. And so the Europeans had built out these social structures, starting with the Greeks, towards constant improvement. And with that, Europe, over the course of millennia, gained staggering advantages over Asia for a variety of reasons. I explained in other videos. And the shifts that seemed small in the beginning became quite important. There's this point that historians like to make about the gunpowder empires, where this is one of the sort of like millennial generation of historians. They like to make, you know, the actually meme actually is a nerd saying, you know, actually blank, blank, blank. And so the actually meme for this era of history is, did you actually know China had a larger economy than any other nation until the 19th century? The Asian empires in the early modern period had more people in larger territories than the European empires did. So this has been a point historians really popularized in the last few decades. I think it's a valid point that if you were to look around the world in the year 1700, you only have one big western empire. That's the Spanish. You have the Russians, but they're barely Western in 1700. And then the English and the French didn't have big empires yet, or at least one that weren't populated. And then the huge Asian civilizations which we cover in the gunpowder empire's video between Manchu, China, which spanned an area larger than America, India, the Turkish empire, et cetera. And so you have this string of enormous Asian states that were highly developed. A lot of them, Europe was still wealthier per capita, but it wasn't like an enormous difference where until the mid 19th century, China still had the largest economy on earth. And so the point that historians are making is that yes, China, the Asia did have these enormous developed civilizations, where in a lot of the early modern period, you could argue that Asia, by some metrics, was more civilizationally advanced than the west, although I wouldn't believe that the west was more advanced in science, military economics, social structure, political structure. But the Asians have bigger scale. And the point that belies, though, is ultimately the Europeans did make the correct choice, and their structure of civilization was the one that won. Where in the grand scheme of things, Asia had a lot going for it. But the Europeans won the game.
- [45:46]
Austin Padgett
We also redefined the game to the degree to which the landscape is significantly more volatile now, depending on whether you make mistakes or not, because the or do correct things or not, because the correct thing we did led to this exponential kind of growth. So you're not like stacking population or slightly More rice versus wheat or. Yeah, it's small improvement here. And it's like a longer competition. Like this competition can swing in ways that are much larger relative to each other in shorter periods of time than was the case before the Industrial Revolution.
- [46:28]
Rudyard Lynch
That's one of the very good points. Gustave Le Bon, another one of my favorite authors, made that in the pre modern world, each society was competing in the local ecosystem and the only variables that mattered were those competing against their neighbors. Now we're in a globalized ecosystem where if Europe isn't competitive, then Japan can. Japan, the other side of the earth, can produce goods more cheaply. And one of the points Le Bon makes, and it's crazy. This guy was writing in the 19th century. He said the nature of the future is to build societies that are as flexible as possible and as innovative as possible, because you can either compete through doing lots of grunt work and difficult hard tasks. And the Asians will always beat the Europeans at that because they have larger populations, more compliant social structures, cultures that value that sort of thing more. And the only way Europeans can compete in this world is by being more technologically savvy and more creative. But he said the great paradox is that in a world where macroeconomic global shifts determine everything, that the main endeavors of industrialized countries are weakening those things where the main push of socialism is. He also hates the school system. He said he wrote again in the 19th century, said the main role of the school system is to produce people dissatisfied with. With society who then become socialists. They don't have useful skills. They've wasted their youth on boring stuff. And it gives them a huge ego. That from like learning all this information and being educated, that is no utility.
- [48:09]
Austin Padgett
It's so much harder to start later. It's easier to give up. It's like if you lose an arm or you become blind and then you're like, well, should I still try? Yeah, it's like the same thing.
- [48:19]
Rudyard Lynch
And. Exactly. And it's true of government regulation of socialism. And that's a really stark point Le Ball made again in the 1800s. And in the 1800s, he said America is going to outcompete Europe in the next century because America's social structure is more fluid and dynamic. And he said Europe's going to get crushed by socialism and Asia is going to industrialize. But when you look at each of the three great Asian civilizations, the way Islam responded is. Is Islam was probably the one that at the beginning had the easiest chance to switch to the Europeans because they had had a pre established contact with the Europeans, where the Muslims and the Europeans have fought consistently for as long as both civilizations existed. And the Turks were pretty good at keeping up on things with the Europeans, with the Turks the Turks until the 17th century, nearly the 18th century, the Turks were militarily competitive with Europeans. What then occurred over the course of the 18th century was that the Turks were taken in by their Janissary by their janissary military formations who were Christian slave soldiers who were captured as children, and the janissaries stopped the Turkish military from modernizing. The Turkish state was also controlled by the Ulemas, or the religious councils that stopped social growth, as well as a complex guild structure that stopped economic growth.
- [50:02]
Podcast Host/Announcer
We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.
- [50:07]
Rudyard Lynch
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- [51:25]
Rudyard Lynch
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Podcast Host/Announcer
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- [51:43]
Rudyard Lynch
The Turkish empire, which spanned a huge region from Algeria out to Iran and from Ukraine and Moldova down to Somalia. It was this huge empire that had closed itself off to trade and innovation, and so the Turks started losing more and more to the Europeans. And over the course of time The Turks were artificially held on as a lifeline due to the power of European colonial. Due to European colonial powers protecting the Turks between the British and the French propped up the Turkish Empire to stop the Russians from conquering them. And so the Turkish Empire should have probably fallen earlier than it did. It's remarkable. It lasted from the 14th until the early 20th century. Warner Brothers film studio existed at the same time as the Ottoman Empire. So the Turks finally innovated in the early 20th century with the Young Turks movement, which Ataturk, the man who unified modern Turkey after the fall of the Ottomans, he was pulling from that trajectory. But the Islamic world's reaction to European colonialism multiple times was to become more conservative. Ibn Wahhab, the founder of the Wahhabi school, who are the big people for radical Islam between ISIS or Saudi Arabia, were these people. The Wahhabis were founded the same time as the American Revolution. So they were partly a reaction to the social effects of European colonialism. And then there was another several conservative reactions in the Ottoman Empire and then again in the 20th century with first the Muslim Brotherhood and then the Muslim Brotherhood's early 20th century, that was in British Egypt as a reaction to the cultural control of the Muslim world by Christian colonialism. And later on with the wave of Islamism between the Iranian revolutionary government, the Taliban is the Muslim world's number one reaction against European colonialism was to become more conservative and more sclerotic because they were trying to reach back to the days of the Prophet Muhammad to say, if we follow Prophet Muhammad's codes correctly, we can beat the Europeans.
- [54:09]
Austin Padgett
Right. Which was. Yeah, the opposite of yes, saying that would have worked also. Sorry, I forgot. What is the topic of this video?
- [54:18]
Rudyard Lynch
It's Asian colonialism.
- [54:20]
Austin Padgett
Okay. Asia. Right. And Asia is the continent. Right? Yeah. My mind was wiped in the beginning.
- [54:26]
Rudyard Lynch
The Muslims didn't adjust very well. And it speaks to a very constant theme in human nature that when a society is collapsing, it will normally do its worst trait. More between the Muslim world, all three of the Asian civilizations became more conservative as they faced European colonialism until they finally snapped in the 20th century and tried to innovate, which worked to differing degrees because in their societies there was no feedback loop to innovation. You just reverted to tradition. So the pressure they faced, the more traditional they became, until they ultimately lost to European colonialism and short circuited.
- [55:07]
Austin Padgett
Right. And insinuating that you maybe needed to evolve, change, reinterpret even, or pull something out rather than go back to what the in group has established is correct, is A very difficult thing to do. And it just shows like how powerful that force is. Where, yeah, like there's obviously clear things going on with them getting outmatched by Europe. But if you're the guy that says like, hey, maybe we should do this, copy them or adopt a little of this, you get thrown out the window. You know, it's.
- [55:49]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. I've thought of the pain of being one of those few sort of enlightened people in those Asian empires that knew what was going wrong and trying to tell people and you only face crap. That must have been such a hard life being like the one Chinese minister who understood it.
- [56:07]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, it's the story of my life. Understanding things and not being able to explain them and watching them unfold.
- [56:13]
Rudyard Lynch
Don't kill myself now. But yeah, culture of face is really important in Asia because Asia is shame based societies where your status is based on social approval. And in shame based cultures, maintaining the status of your group is a moral good and it can have pretty bad results. Where some of the worst examples of shame based cultures, this culture does have some positives. It's made the most stable societies in history. Out of all the moral pillars of my seven emotions, it's the one that most people in history are most reliant on. But in Afghanistan or Pakistan, honor killings are normalized, where if a daughter is raped by someone outside the family, her brothers will kill her even if it's not her fault, in order to wash out the disgrace of her family. And Asia across this entire era had horrible treatment of women. And one of the positive things the Europeans did was was radically increase the status of women across Asia. And besides that, the province of Aceh in northeast Indonesia, I believe that's the name. When they had the horrifying tsunami in the early 2000s that killed hundreds of thousands of people, they refused aid from the U.S. navy because that would make the province's government look incompetent, even though it would have saved so many lives. Or in China recently with cutting off cities in the COVID lockdowns, the economic issues that ensued from that, the Chinese government cannot admit fault because that would be showing the weakness of their face. And this is a huge issue. If you follow China, where the Chinese government will have various allies and you're not allowed to point out when even people who are indirectly part of the Chinese Communist Party's network do something wrong. So you have these sort of networks of coalitions and people will cover for their buddies when they do something wrong because you don't have the Western Concepts like Greek rationality or honor culture or Christianity that would allow you to arbitrate these group based differences.
- [58:23]
Austin Padgett
It's funny because we also have the dynamic where we try to limit accountability. Like you look at all the mainstream media, which is where they will constantly avoid accountability. But they can't just say this is the way it is or that's the way it is like China. So they have to lie through facts or present like skewed narratives. So they just have to do a lot more work, jump through a lot more hoops to get a similar result. Which I guess is good because you at least make them work for it. Right.
- [58:54]
Rudyard Lynch
In my emotion based system, the modern west, especially cities, is anxiety based. Where the moral code is based around anxiety and Asian civilizations are shame based. Both of them are groupish. Groupish. So they have similarities there where unlike basing your moral code around God or honor, which would be honor, that would be guilt and pride as moral axes or sort of racism is discussed. Anxiety is based around approving of the things the groups approving of popularity inside your social group and then shame is approving of your society's social traditions. So they're both using your sort of sense of self from the group. But it's either does the mob around me like me or does this long standing community with pre established values like me. And so it's the same mechanism. It's just shame based cultures are more honest about it.
- [59:54]
Austin Padgett
And then you have the other big one within the US which is guilt, which is fear of God instead of like your social circles.
- [60:02]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, guilt based morality is still dominant in the West. It's you being right with God. And so you've seen the west lose a lot of the guilt space morality over the last century with the shift from sort of actually having a moral code to just vibes and not even good vibes or chilva. So when you look at the other Asian civilizations around 1700 you saw the crystallization of Asia with the Turks, the Persians, the Indians and the Chinese as the great empires. We talked to the Turks. The thing with the Persians is they didn't really have a lot of contact with the West. They had like I think 2 million people in all of Persia against 20 million in the Turkish empire, 100 million India or China each. So Persia was kind of off in its own dimension. Persia also was an agrarian, traditional feudal society. Then you have India, which was this huge mix of a wide variety of cultures. It was mostly Hindu. When the Europeans talked about India's wealth, they were talking about a Small elite who were staggeringly wealthy on top of a general population that was very poor. And so when European travelers would go to India in the 17th century, before the Europeans had wide scale colonies besides a few forts along the coast is they were shocked about how the Indians had these gilded palaces and temples with enormous luxury. And then the average person lived at a level of just utter squalor, where it wasn't even sort of advanced farming like you would see back in Europe, where the farmers have rotating crops or lots of livestock or a market economy. Most Indians lived in subsistence agriculture. And then the state was really oppressive. And another element on top of it was most of India was governed by a small Muslim elite who were perfectly fine oppressing the majority Hindu population. And the Hindus had already become sort of inured to this. They had lost a lot of their national consciousness because they had been part of this trend earlier where their thinking was we will avoid the horrors of being conquered by slipping into our souls because Indian society is built around religion. And so you had already seen the same traits which made India resistant to European colonialism had already made, had made them resistant to the shifts of the European worldview. Because they were the same techniques they had used to avoid dealing with the Muslim colonizers.
- [62:58]
Austin Padgett
When you could actually see how that could be part of what Gandhi was pulling on in terms of a past threat which was resistance through spiritual withdrawal. With the added point of creating an international strategic response.
- [63:14]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [63:14]
Austin Padgett
So it's like a hot, interesting hybrid. And then it's also funny that they were shocked at all the inequality because it wouldn't be the first time Europeans were shocked at inequality that was possible in a non market economy.
- [63:30]
Rudyard Lynch
You're right, because the market is the biggest thing against inequality. Because without it, it's just hierarchy. And everyone thinks that in the hierarchy based system they'd be the ones on top of.
- [63:44]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Right.
- [63:44]
Austin Padgett
And then what we point to now is inequality is usually a form of cartel, like guild, like regulatory cartel in.
- [63:50]
Rudyard Lynch
India had one of the worst economic guild structures. It was the caste system where a single social class dominated everything and you had to pass it to their family only mate inside your caste. And the caste system was the worst for European colonialism in a lot of India. I mean, I've told the story many times, the 40s, it's a great story. When the Portuguese first reached South India, they saw a king who was not allowed to make eye contact or sit at the table with the priests in his kingdom because in his kingdom the priests had higher status than the kings. Or the priests in south India they did not let low castes step within 30ft of them or make eye contact where the castes they would bathe differently, they would eat differently, they would wash differently, they would have all these hyper specific rituals that covered every single element of their life. And so India had attained sort of like maximum cultural regulation through the religion. And Gandhi was a highly predictable figure where if you were to guess who would the liberator of India be you would say he is some yogi ascetic. Because that's what India's always, that's what India always pulled their cultural leadership from.
- [65:04]
Austin Padgett
It's pretty, it's kind of impressive levels of riz as the Gen Z would say to have a priest class that is so dominant over the military and like the King. Because it's based off of a test basically.
- [65:21]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [65:22]
Austin Padgett
Where they don't, they could like the, the king could kill him in an instant. But they're, they're creating dominance purely off of this like psychological shit test which is kind of makes me think of like a female dominated bureaucracy.
- [65:39]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, it is, it's. I mean it's part of the reason the Muslims kept conquering India because the Muslims could routinely, both the Muslims and the British could beat Indian armies, they outnumbered 10 to 1. That happened at Panipat. It happened at the battle of Plasi which were the battles when the Mughals and the British took over North India. And there was this shift in India back before the birth of Christ from the warriors running society to the priests running society. And with that the priests sort of took over society. Where if you go back to medieval Europe in the Carolingian Empire, yes the Germanic warrior nobility were the ones who had political power but the church taught people literacy, they managed the bureaucratic records. They were the people who integrated your life from cradle to grave. They gave the worldview. It was impossible to think in dark age Europe and not think Christian thoughts. And that's what happened. Sorry, I just thought that'd be a great dating app. Think Christian thoughts. With India it was comparable where they had. Keep in mind the term secular only makes sense in the Western context. And in all these Asian civilizations there is no secular. It's why populism in Islam is always Islamist. Because the term secular stems from the separation of church and state in Western civilization where we had a distinct church power based structure that was apart from the political based power structure. And that's ultimately a descendant of the split between the old Roman nobility and, and the Germanic barbarians who each tried to have their own power. And it's also partly why the west has so bureaucratized its thought where Western thinking is very rigid and sort of autistic. Because it was this battle between the church regimenting thought and then trying to shove it onto the population who had also regimented it in their own way. Because Catholicism is one of the very few societies that based its power on off agreeing to dogma. Islam is also similar, but they do it in a different way. But in India, China, Islam, there was no concept of the secular, where it was just the culture and the religion was the culture. So the concept of religion entered India through the British actually, because the Indians had no concept of this is religion. This is just objectively true culture.
- [68:13]
Austin Padgett
They were just like swimming in the soup of regular behavior in a way they couldn't categorically distinguish it. And the secular separation of church and state is kind of an interesting one because by some semantic definitions you could argue that that separation didn't actually happen because you can't separate values with governance. And then also you can. The original context of that sentiment is in not trying to separate values from governance, but in attempting to prevent a type of theocracy in the mold of the Church of England or the Calvinist, etc, where there wasn't like a state. Yeah, Mandated religion.
- [68:55]
Rudyard Lynch
One of those highly definitional arguments where you can make a definition here that speaks to a variety of points tween either. Are you referring to the existence of political authority independent from a church and the church can still have authority over society, which was the medieval definition. Are you referring to a society that explicitly avoids having a state sanctioned religion? Because the reason the founding fathers set up the separation of church and state wasn't because they were really against religion interfering in politics. At least they had a series of highly subtle views on the topic. But rather because they wanted to avoid different state governments that did have sanctioned churches butting heads against each other.
- [69:46]
Austin Padgett
Exactly. Because they were competing and that was one of the big barriers to unity. It was implication they would lose some religious control or have control inserted on them. Yeah.
- [69:57]
Rudyard Lynch
And finally it's just pure secularism in the society. So you'd have a society like the French Revolution or Stalinist Russia where it's like you cannot be religious. And so that's not a separation of church and state, it's the state crushing the church. So you have a wide variety of options. And for each of those options people will say that they are doing the separation of church and state. But another thing.
- [70:23]
Austin Padgett
And they viewed their political values as Directly deriving from Christianity.
- [70:27]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [70:28]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, so, yeah, go ahead.
- [70:30]
Rudyard Lynch
So integrating the Western rational tradition was highly difficult for a lot of these Asian societies. For India as an example, or Japan, they didn't have a concept of rationality, so it was something they had to import into their worldview. Because the Western concept of rationality stemmed from the Greeks, where you add these different segments together to build a coherent argument. And Asian societies didn't believe in splitting it like it. They believed in holistically adding things together and seeing it as a whole. Where if you look at sort of eye scans of Asians, Asians always spot the context first, then the individual. Westerners spot the individual first, then the context.
- [71:14]
Austin Padgett
It sounds like it's reflected in their cooking with curry versus fries on the side.
- [71:19]
Rudyard Lynch
Because modern Western cuisine is a side effect of Louis XIV's court. And so Asian cuisines tend to be based around balance. And Western cuisine is about concentrating tastes. So appetizer, main dinner are all the concentrations of different goods, which is a French word for taste. And there was an interesting two way relationship of European thought to the Orient and vice versa. Where, for example, an entire generation of German philosophy was based off Hindu philosophy, between Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Einstein or a lot of the first physicists were out of any country on earth, most influenced by Indian philosophy. It was Germany. And the German generations of atheists and nihilist thinkers were pulling from Hindu sources because the Hindus have some pseudo nihilistic doctrines like life doesn't matter, you should just give up and accept the spiritual. Meanwhile, the most popular place for Chinese thought in philosophy was France, because in France they were trying to build out the governmental structure like China's as a secular bureaucracy. And so thinkers of the French Revolution were obsessed with China, as was Frederick the Great, who was trying to do the same thing. Frederick the Great had a China room in, in his palace at Potsdam. And so we tend to see these European societies as very racist, and a lot of them genuinely were. But at the same time they were significantly more open to foreign ideas than we are today, where they were trying to integrate Asian ideas in a way that I think we don't really do anymore.
- [73:07]
Austin Padgett
Fascinating, because I was going to say there's a sort of overlap because if you're talking about Frederick the Great and a lot of these, even Bismarck and Napoleon and like, which connects to the France thing, all these centralizing philosophies of the late 1800s, they use almost identical lingo to the advocates of the EU or the advocates of the UN and Those bureaucracies are also very tied in with people copying China in the sense that we're going to do the Chinese model to be successful and standardize that. So it's it. We kind of are copying China. Some, some factions are trying to copy China in a similar way to the. What they did 100 years ago.
- [73:55]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [73:56]
Austin Padgett
And along like similar physical philosophical lines.
- [73:59]
Rudyard Lynch
I'm going to go to the bathroom. Then I'll talk about the, their sort of views on Western and oriental culture and spirituality. Be back. The thing that got me to focus on this video was our conversation last time about Rudyard Kipling. My namesake. And he's sort of symbolic of an entire generation of European colonialism in Asia because he's, he's. He was ethnically English but he was born in India and he spent a lot of his life in India. And my parents named me after him because the day I was born they say I grew up to be a writer. And your name they would have picked is Noel. But Kipling lived at the time of the high sort of the end, the edge of the fever of European colonialism. And it's crazy to see the 20th century how rapidly things worked where by the end of that period even America, an avowedly anti colonial nation, or Belgium, which is a tiny sort of silly country, had colonial empires. Belgium had Central Africa. America got the Philippines. And they did so because colonialism was cool. Where all the cool kids were doing colonialism. And if you didn't have a colony that made you lame by the time you get to 1950s and 60s European countries were throwing away their colonial empires because it wasn't cool. This is what happens when you have an anxiety based society where you just switch from generation to generation without thinking deeply about them. But Kipling spoke to this very strong ideal when Europeans had mastered most of Asia. And so this ideal was he talks about in the White Man's Burden, which is one of the least the things he said that age the least. I've read like six books of his. And the white man's burden's hard to justify in this current society because he said Europeans were superior. So it's our duty to sort of elevate and educate these more primitive nations. And that's one of those things where yes, it was used to justify lots of terrible European colonialism but at the same time you'd rather have some element of that moral edge rather than not having it where European colonialism is comparably brutal to other empires. But the Europeans had higher highs where the Europeans Had a character for sort of ending things like slavery or introducing education or public works programs or altruism where Europeans were equivalently to slightly less brutal than other conquerors, but the ties were higher.
- [76:38]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. And the way you phrase that actually kind of matches up with this conception I have of white man's burden and how it's sometimes misinterpreted because it was used in both ways. But I think it was primarily not a mechanism to alleviate some pre existing guilt. It was a mechanism to generate guilt to get people to care about the colonies so that they would continue funding the colonial thing. Because look at all the great things we're doing here. We're building them roads and schools and they wouldn't have any of this without us. And so it is our burden to spend this much of our gdp. And that actually tracks really well with the concept of white privilege because it's the same thing. It's a mechanism to generate guilt in order to take resources to put them towards specific areas, slash to empower the people who control those resources.
- [77:31]
Rudyard Lynch
You've said that before and it's one of your better points because if you look at the elected politicians in Western Europe each get, even the unelected ones like Bismarck, each generation, if you asked them do you want colonies, they all would have said no. Very few of the ruling leadership in Europe wanted colonies. Bismarck didn't, Palmerston didn't. The entire generations of the Whig party which dominated Britain, the Tories did in a different phase. What occurred though was that these special interests of Europeans out in the colonies just conquered the land by themselves. And then the European governments got involved to bail them out. And it was also became a strategic concern against other Europeans. So you had the Portuguese first. And I do want to get back to a point about Orientalism, but let's cover this first because Kipling is sort of good entry into Orientalism. But let's talk about the real history, then we can talk about our thinking about the history. But so after the Portuguese empire which the issue they had is most of the rest of the areas they were dealing with turned back in on them. So China closed itself off to the threat of Portuguese colonialism. Japan had a brief flirtation with European colonialism and they utterly closed off their borders, cutting off even the final Portuguese because the Portuguese tried to convert the Japanese to Christianity, which nearly caused a social revolution in Japan. And then the Dutch started to replace the Portuguese across the region and the Dutch with the voc, which is Dutch for their East India Company, they took over South Africa, they took over Indonesia and the Dutch had a strategy of surgically striking Portuguese naval bases to wipe out the Portuguese monopoly. So the Dutch had this hyper aggressive strategy and it was again like the Portuguese funded off VC capital. Although over time Portugal became more big government and sort of socialist. And so that's when the Portuguese Empire declined, where by the end, the Portuguese would send out singular governors to the Orient. They had a year to govern, so almost all of their time was reaching there. Then a few months later there was another appointment. So there was no coherent leadership and there was staggering corruption. Where in Goa, the big Portuguese center in India, the governors, much like the rest of India, lived in luxury while the men weren't paid and were starving on the ships. So the Portuguese lacked social cohesion after their first generation of invaders who were quite virile. The Dutch were way more organized and they surgically striked and the Dutch took out. They made Indonesia their colony gradually, where it's really embarrassing to read a lot of the military histories because the Dutch would routinely beat Portuguese, sorry, the Portuguese had a colony first and the Dutch took that in Indonesia. But the Portuguese, the Dutch would routinely beat Indonesian armies 10 times their size with superior use of artillery or rolling fire or those different things. And the Dutch. I read, I've read several histories of Indonesia. I don't really. It's one, just one of my. One of my passive interests at a certain point. And the Dutch gradually expanded their hold. It was a process much like the burden in India, where the Volc would find a coastal base, establish support there, they'd get dragged into the local conflict and they gradually took over the entire region. The difference between the Dutch and the British, where there was a Darwinistic selection of competition, where the Dutch were more organized than the Portuguese and the British were more organized than the Dutch. And then the Japanese in their brief colonial period were more organized than the British. And so it was this Darwinistic selection mechanism where you can see the comparison of the Dutch in Indonesia versus the British in India, because both are part of the same rough region of the world. Both are roughly index civilizations because Indonesia had structures based around rajas and they had the cult of Vishnu and Shiva, which then was ultimately replaced by Islam, a little bit before European colonialism. But the Dutch didn't establish a leadership class in Indonesia. And when they developed one, it was all sort of bastard sons with local women. So the Dutch would go there, sleep with a local woman, and their entire leadership structure were the bastard sons. And they had a lot of resentment when the Dutch in the 19th century started bringing out actual full blooded Dutch people who displaced their position in the social status which was part of the independence movement, where disgruntled local elite aspirants were always the people in the independence movements. Then the Dutch ran Indonesia in a highly extractive manner where they practically genocided the entire island of Sulawesi for cloves, burning down the trees to gain a total throttle on the clove market in Sulawesi, because Sulawesi resisted the Dutch. And then the Dutch said, fuck it, we're going to kill all of you. And that's how brutal the Dutch were.
- [82:48]
Austin Padgett
They were there for the cloves.
- [82:49]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. And much like New York, where the reason that the Dutch had an early colony in America, but there's very few Dutch Americans is the Dutch were operating out of this very short term growth mindset of how much do we exploit now? Because they lacked the British aristocratic understanding on a generational basis. And so you can see this stark polarity where in the 1950s, you look at British India, you have a democracy, you have a unified rail system, you have a military, you have a health system, you have a sort of cohesive national identity in 10 other things. None of that existed in Indonesia. And Indonesia's post colonial leadership actually did a pretty good job at creating a cohesive, unified identity where the Dutch hadn't given them much.
- [83:41]
Austin Padgett
Interesting. I think it's easy to underestimate the breadth of the Dutch impact on Indonesia. We don't think about it in the same way, but if you look at Jakarta like the city planning of Jakarta is still based around the Dutch construction. Like the size of the streets. Yeah. Are based on the Dutch layout. There's a lot of old buildings, there's old stone sidewalks that are like falling apart where you can actually fall into the sewer that basically haven't been replaced since the Dutch colony or post Dutch colony built them.
- [84:20]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. I might be reading biased histories because the histories I'm reading are written post World War II and they're very. Or not really post World War II, last 40 years. And they will never write positively about colonialism. But I have heard horror stories of like enormous famines in 19th century Indonesia which did occur in Britain. But I know you've lived in Indonesia. Do you have any other good stories there?
- [84:46]
Austin Padgett
Well, you just said it's probably one of the most beautiful, maybe the most beautiful place I've ever seen. When you're up on the mountains, it's an island with 300 million people but a surprising amount of nature because of the mountains. This nature of it. And there's geysers going and mist and an endless kind of high elevation rolling landscape that is very ethereal. The. Yeah, the, the cities I describe kind of the main Dutch influence point. And then I guess the other thing I, I'll say about it is the Dutch going after the cloves. Right. It might. It was nutmeg where they traded New York City for nutmeg, which really highlights the difference between their vision and the English in terms of generational value or not even generational value, but settlement versus just like business opportunities. And the Dutch are still like that today. We're not, they're not involved in empire necessarily or even the highest levels of lobbying outside of their proximity to the eu. But there's a Dutch businessman and every country of the world of like starting a startup from pretty much every category at all time, there is a Dutch businessman in that country with a tomato greenhouse or whatever. So they do a ton of international business.
- [86:04]
Rudyard Lynch
The Dutch are really remarkable people where they've done 160, but they're also the same where the Dutch in the 17th century were hyper religious, hyper militaristic, hyper capitalist, super conquest oriented. Now the Dutch are probably like the most lib society in the world. They're hypersocialist, atheist, progressive, communitarian, but they're the same people. I feel sorry for Europeans because so many high. I meet so many high quality young European people who just have no opportunities to go their societies.
- [86:36]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, the Dutch are kind of in between where they have a little bit more freedoms, but they're also really corrupted by the kind of other things you mentioned. And that's partly because they're so close to the EU headquarters that that pulls them back in being part of that power structure rather than thriving in the way that they could without leaching off that.
- [87:02]
Rudyard Lynch
The other thing is that highly homogenous European countries are very naive. Like I'm from Philly. I have no illusions that the money I pay in taxes will not be be stolen or that we're not constantly a few bad events away from civilizational collapse. Because if you're in a hyper homogeneous European country, it's very easy to forget what most of the human condition is like because everyone's been trained to play into the same social games. And then growing up in Philly, I'd walk through bad neighborhoods to see if I would die. Like half of Philly is utterly uninhabitable. It's just constant emptiness and barbed wire. And it reminds you that you have to be careful but that doesn't exist in a place like the Netherlands until within living memory.
- [87:49]
Austin Padgett
Well, a great example of this tension between the Dutch and the EU is the farmer protests. Right. Because it's very, you know, cohesive culture had a blow up specifically over the loss of sovereignty, which is now getting into these structures that are not homogeneous and not connected to just the Netherlands. And I did a similar thing in Indonesia where I went to really crazy slum and just hung out with some people and I went in their house and we watched tv and I leaned against the wall and there it was, made of sheet metal. And when I leaned against it, it just kind of kicked out at the bottom.
- [88:25]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [88:26]
Austin Padgett
And the slums are all near the sewer, so there's like a constant smell everywhere. And there was like a rat running through, but we were just watching like a soccer game or something.
- [88:35]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. Austin, one of his previous jobs is you worked for an agricultural company across Asia. So you worked in Indonesia, Thailand, India. And you say that in those countries, things that we would see as Mad Max, post apocalyptic are just normalized.
- [88:49]
Austin Padgett
Oh, totally. Yeah. We could not creatively conceptualize a dystopia that has the conditions that are existing right now, which, like, with like, the cities sinking from the water being sucked out. More people alive than have ever lived in the region, and 10 water reserves on groundwater that takes like 50 years to recycle. And then insane population, obviously. But the situations where they're like, there's no doors on this bus in India, but the bus is full of people. And so they go around a corner, you think everybody's going to fall out. But the three strongest guys are making a human, human door where they. One grabs the handle and the other guy grabs their waists. And the. As the bus turns the quarter, the crowd bulges out and these guys, like, catch him and then bulges back in as they turn the corner. Cows wandering the street, like, eating garbage.
- [89:42]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, this is what the absence of an honor culture looks like. And so British India, I don't think we're going to do it justice. The British showed up because their allies, the Portuguese, had several previous bases. The East India Company was established under Queen Elizabeth, and they had a fort down in Madras in the south. They had another one in Mumbai in the east, Mumbai in the west, and Calcutta in the east. And these three British forts, which were unimportant, became three of India's greatest cities. And there's an okay book by William Dalrymple that the establishment loves called the Anarchy, which was the breakup of the Mughal Empire, which was this powerful Muslim empire founded by Babur in the 16th century. And the Mughals held this territory that stretched nearly to the bottom of India, almost all of the entire subcontinent. But they had worn themselves out so much. Conquering the south with Aurangzeb, the last Mughal emperor, he had just utterly burnt out his own organization and trying to conquer the hills of the south. Because in India it's pretty easy to unify the north Gangetic plain. But conquering the mountains and the valleys of the south is what does in most Gangetic empires. And one of the things the British did was they were the first people to unify India ever. Under the Mauryan, sort of like the Romans, India had gotten closest to unification. But the Mauryans were a hyper descent decentralized empire where the Mauryans, for example, and this is true of a lot of ancient Indian empires, none of them kept paper records of their governance system. So all of it was done orally and at the same time. The Mauryans did not have a centralized government system and it was a tributary system. And we don't have records of India before the Muslims came a thousand years ago. It's all mythological records. So there could have been a great conqueror who unified the gangetic plane, killing 10 million people in the 9th century. We wouldn't know. We've picked up certain stuff like Gurjar or Pratihara or the Mauryans, the Guptas, these great empires. But India sort of is a historic black hole. More than a thousand years ago. And the anarchy was the breakdown of the Mughal Empire due to decadence saw the Persians invade into north India towards twice sacking Delhi. The Afghans raided deep into India. They made the Afghans carved out their own kingdom by Bangladesh. So you saw the same trends which occur in India before the British kicking in, right before the British conquered the region, like barbarian invasions. The breakdown the Marathas of South India, who were sort of like hill horse tribes, but they did have an advanced society. They conquered north, becoming the new rulers of the Gangetic plain. And the Mughal emperor was stuck as the sort of spiritual authority in Delhi who was dependent on, who was dependent on, on the Marathas. And you saw the unification. The British conquest of India was one of those go, go, go tipping point, go where the British and the French had a handful of forts. The French were further south. They fought the French and Indian war where one of the comments you said in a previous video I love is there's two French and Indian wars against North American Indians and the one against Asian Indians. And the British won their French and Indian war in India partly because they had a military genius named Clive on their side and also because they had three times, they had three times the money the French Indian colony had because they had invested more so in trade while the French had invested more so in military stuff. So the British were able to wipe out the French and their allies, making themselves the only real power in India. And the seminal battle for that was the battle of Plassey where Clive fought an Indian army ten times his size. It was just an artillery duel. This is up by Bengal with the Nawab of Bengal was a French puppet where Bengal had its own power dispute, where one faction who were supported by the French, they basically killed all of the British population of Calcutta, which on the edge of Bangladesh or Bengal. Then they shoved them into the Black Cave where most indicted disease. The British took revenge. Then after they beat the Indian artillery formation, the Indian Army 10 times their size gave up. The British took Bengal. And it's hard to find other key events in the British conquest of India because it was a gradual process where the other Indian states didn't offer much resistance. Where the British conquest of India there were like a thousand Indians for every one British. And the Indians had not yet attained national consciousness. So the British were able to hold India because other Indians supported them. Where most of their armies were sepoys or locally trained Indians with white officers on top. And the Indians have a lot of cope about the British period. You can tell they have sort of like colonial daddy issues about it because they'll constantly look for Britain's approval. Does the west like us? And then they'll say they hate Britain. But it's obvious in their actions that they respect Britain. Because by the time you get to the 1850s, the British were pushing up against the borders of Afghanistan. They unified India. They provided all the institutions we said before where India was the country in the world in the mid 19th century with the most railroad out of anywhere except America. And what the British did that was bad was they tried to incorporate sort of capitalist structures into India before the Indians were ready for them. Where example in Bengal there was a mass famine where the British got rid of these pre established structures of local traditions. They assumed a high trust society. The landlords just used this to rape the tenants, to starve them. And then the society just fell apart. And that happened multiple times in British colonialism where they got rid of the traditional land holding class or the nobility, replacing them with capitalist Zamindars. The capitalist Zamindars were highly exploitive. And so a lot of the worst famines in history occurred in British India with over 30 million deaths, which is really not cool because like Ireland, the British would cause these famines due to social interventions that destabilize the society and then they wouldn't send any food to feed the local Indians. This was a wide scale issue and you don't really see comparable famines before or after. At the same time though, I don't think any integration of India into the modern world would have been easy. And if the British hadn't done that, there's no chance India would be developing today.
- [97:04]
Austin Padgett
So I've, yeah, I've explored these topics and dealt with them because they come came up, you know, in like 2014 debates about capitalism versus socialism. You know, Stalin's death counts would get countered by Indian famine and Ireland famine. And the context is similar in India, I imagine, but the context of the Irish famine is England took over all the land, they took over 97% of the land and then gave that land to specific landowners who then exported the food out of Ireland and basically used it as their system. So if you like use the government to take over all the agricultural land and prevent the citizens from owning it and then they starve, it's like a stretch to call that like a market based solution. Yeah, it's more like along the lines of how colonial powers did bad things and also got their, generated their power from cultural institutions that were market based.
- [98:18]
Rudyard Lynch
I would agree that I don't think Ireland is a market based failure because the local Irish were prevented from owning property or an education and they had no industry to speak of in India is one of those things where I don't trust the context on this stuff because even authors in the 20th century, in the mid 20th, mid to early 20th century, were biased on this. A lot of the American authors from the 30s hated British India because they didn't like colonialism. So Will Durant hated British India, Amaury Duriancourt hated British India. And partly I think it's oppressive, but at the same time I also think that the British. I don't think if you had picked any other colonial empire that India would have had a better outcome than it did. I don't think there's a single other country on earth you would have picked where India is a better off country than it is now. And that's consistently the case where the British Empire did significantly better than other empires.
- [99:21]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. And people's confusion here comes from like not being able to See the nuance between like subjectivist and universal values where it's like don't enter fear slash. There are portable cultural technologies.
- [99:39]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, and I agree with that. And I mean what I'd say also is the British influence in India is, it's like they increased the breathing space of the Indian organism where they unified the country, they gave it a new intellectual trajectory which finally split it off in the issues of its old multi thousand year one. They built a unified rail system, they educated the Indian public, or they educated upper class Indians. And so modern India is a creation of the British. And you have to accept that for its negatives and its positives. It's just a statement of reality. And it's more true for India than the rest of the Asian colonies where in Islam they reverted back to Sharia law which was their pre established structure. In China they had a previous state structure. We haven't spoken a lot about Russia, but Russia is comparable. But Russia is, it's its own thing. Where Russia was, they settled it with Slavs from the late 17th through, from the 17th through 18th centuries. And so it became this extension of the broader Russian society. And it was pioneered by the Cossack fur traders. And so Russia is its own dimension involved. Russia is a trans Eurasian empire like the Mongols. And so British India is the most long lasting effect of European colonialism in Asia. And it's also one that changed the lives of billions of people where British India would have 2 billion people today, significantly more than China if you include the neighboring countries that were also part of British India. And the British changed the life of the average Indian in a fairly key way, although they were outnumbered a thousand to one. And need I remind you, India was 80% of the British Empire's population. And so for the second British Empire, it's more useful to see it centered on India than on Britain because the East India Company had their own foreign policy between going out to fighting the Opium wars in China, colonizing South Africa, Kenya, building the Suez Canal in Egypt, Australia, etc.
- [101:54]
Austin Padgett
It's, it's gets back to why did they call India the jewel of the empire? It's because the entire colonial process was kicked off based on an attempt to get to India after the Ottomans closed us off as the major trading market. So it's actually kind of interesting how long it took to actually get to India. And it's totally logical that that was the pinnacle of colonialism because that's literally how it started. And you could argue that. And the way you mentioned Russia's Distinct like political system. You could argue that Modi's government in India is kind of like Rome in the same way that Rome impacted the Norman structure and the Norman structure impacted the English structure. And we deal with that with the invasions of, of Gaul and everything and then the invasions of England. You know, we have our own kind of like the nuanced ways we have to approach, approach that in terms of the value and the tragedy. Because then that system, the normist England, that. That's the system that then implanted itself onto India. And it's basically in a like very lowly abstracted sense because it sounds like, you know, very well Rome or whatever. But I just mean basically the system that your minorly taxing your colonies and not intervening that much. So like the Indian structure survives off of federalism. And yeah, you can turn the pressure up on that and it's going to make it harder. You can turn the pressure down and it's going to work better.
- [103:28]
Rudyard Lynch
Agreed. Yeah. The other similarity is, and I was thinking of this last week, that the way we will see the European empires from the colonial period is comparable to the Greeks or the Romans or the Muslims or the Arab caliphate because they're setting the foundation for the first modern political structures these societies have. So no matter what, they're going to be looking back on the European colonizers as their model for what to do, because societies have to develop organically from their own roots. So they're going to have to pull on the European tradition whether or not they like it. And I also agree that, I mean, the second official language of India is English and there are no native speaking English populations in India, unless none you would pick out if you're highly autistic. And then on top of it, I also think India would not function if it was not a federalized state. And Britain was the only colonial power that would have federalized India. The French would have made it a centralized government based out of. The Germans would have. I can't imagine the Germans actually conquering India. The Russians would have. Oh God, Russian India would have been terrible.
- [104:42]
Austin Padgett
It barely works as a federation too.
- [104:44]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. Because the Indians don't have the centralized militaristic structure that would have allowed the French centralized system to work through. And to go to the final polarity of Asian colonialism, we have a modern China video. I love the story. I've said this so many times. The story of McCartney in 1791 visiting China as the British trade delegation and he showed The Chinese technology 500 years more advanced than anything they had between steamships, repeating rifles, high advanced machinery, clockwork. And the Chinese said, you have nothing to offer us of value. Their worldview is that myopic. And I read a really interesting comment online that the way the rest of the way the Western elite will be perceived in this era of history is comparable to how we perceive the Manchu Qing Dynasty elite in the 19th century, where China was ruled by the Manchu barbarians, who maintained this sort of artificial cultural sclerosis over the general population. And China became even more socially conservative in the vein of the other Eurasian civilizations when they faced European colonialism. And the Chinese actually had multiple contacts with the Europeans. The first nation on earth that the Chinese ever recognized as being equal to China was Russia, because they met up in the late 17th century in Siberia, where they divided up the Asian continent together. And they had another vector along the coastline where the Portuguese had a base in Macau. And the Jesuits were really influential in the Chinese emperor's life. They were the people who introduced China to the west and vice versa. They showed the Chinese emperor a world map. He liked that they had a room of clocks and they also managed the observatory for the Chinese emperor. Emperor. So this was a society with very little practicality. And the things they liked that the Europeans did were not the guns, were not the agricultural advances. It was the clockwork and the astrology.
- [107:01]
Austin Padgett
And literally a room of clocks which is even making. Not using clocks as clocks. You're using them as like a collection of decoration. You're supposed to put a clock in each room.
- [107:14]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. And so China is also comparable to India, where it was. It was building up tension until it smashed. And that. That occurred in the mid 19th century, where one of it was either an author at the time or one of the historians, because you had three Manchu emperors who each ruled for like 80 years. Years. So the Manchu empire was unified under three trustworthy, powerful guys who held power for a long enough period. And the final guy said, man, and I'm not translating this correctly, man, things are going to be super fucked when I die. And he was totally right, because he's like, he and my father and his father have been holding things together. No one can do this. And so Manchu China experienced its own crisis of overpower population and all these sorts of issues and drug addiction and social breakdown and racial conflicts between the Chinese and the Manchus. And this was resolved by. First, the puncturing event was the Opium wars, where because China, the British didn't have a lot of The Chinese wanted, the British gave the Chinese opium because life was so hard in China that 10% of the population became opium addicts. The Chinese didn't like this. They tried to close the border. Britain was super free trade and this is a total dick move. But the British, they knocked down China's barriers to sell China hard drugs because they didn't respect China's boundaries. This is like school drug dealer moves. And the Chinese still resent it. And I see it as a morally bad move on the part of the English speaking world. But there is a sort of Nietzschean charm that about a handful of British ships on the other side of the world. And I don't think Britain raised taxes at all for this. They definitely did not have conscription. This was a side project of the East India Company. They could bring China to its knees. This multi thousand year old civilization. And these ships and these men were all from Britain or most of them. So this tiny island on the other side of the world defeated China. They built up a series of forts along the coast. They took out China's entire coastline and they even sacked the Imperial Palace. And I read a book about the guy who sacked the Imperial Palace. He was an orientalist and a man of culture where he had moral conflicts. But he's like if we beat up the Chinese now, they'll learn in the future. And this is how I feel about how America treats a lot of proud Asian societies today. That the Chinese still have not forgotten the century of humiliations from the Opium wars until World War II. They're still trying to get back against us for it. And they do not see Americans and English as different. They see us as the same thing. And I see the way we treat the Middle east or Trump recently backstabbing India. As these societies have very long memories and so do not fuck with them for short term gain because they're not going to forget it for centuries.
- [110:31]
Austin Padgett
That's funny to think of that conception because obviously they see us as one group. I wonder if they ever comment on how it's funny how differently we see each other and whether that plays towards our attitude around Taiwan.
- [110:48]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, there was this book written by this Indian historical fiction writer and he said it's about the Opium Wars. Sea of Poppies. It's an okay book. I wouldn't recommend reading it. It covers the dynamics around the Opium wars of like five different characters. And in the book he says the Chinese refer to the British as red faced barbarians because our sort of. I'm Rudyard and I have a sort of rutulent. Because Rudyard is English for red Yard.
- [111:20]
Austin Padgett
Especially under that Asian sun.
- [111:22]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [111:22]
Austin Padgett
And so red yard. Okay, interesting.
- [111:24]
Rudyard Lynch
So they would call the English like the Red barbarians because our faces sort of light up red when we're stressed or we're drink. We also have red hair. And so those were the details they latched onto. And I mean, interestingly, the true Native Americans. Yes, there were several, there were several squabbles between Confederate mercenaries and Northern mercenaries during the Taiping Rebellion at the same time as the US Civil war, because China went through a state collapse. They had the Taiping Rebellion. Hong Shu Kwan was a failed student who had visions from God, launched a revolt that killed 20 million people. And which is, he said he was the second son of Christ from a preacher in Kentucky who taught him Christianity. And the thing that ultimately got the empire to beat the, the Taiping rebels was using Western mercenaries as shock troops. And they could also pull on sort of rural Confucian populations, more so than the radical religious Taiping. And so the imperials ultimately won that war, but they pulled on a lot of British and American mercenaries, where for both sides in the conflict, the core guard for the Taiping Heavenly Emperor was Irish. And then for the imperial shock troops, it was British and American. And so both of them used these European shock troops. But the Imperials had more of them, which is why they ultimately won because the Christians were first sort of interested in the Taipings, and then over time they got progressively more horrified. They worked with the empire. And so you saw the solidification of China back into this centralized country with the defeat of the Taipings, which the Europeans just relentlessly raped. We humiliated China. And the reason that we didn't conquer it was that European colonialism was driven off VC capital. So the incentive was we should do whatever we have to to trade with said country as easily as possible. In Asia, conquering the country was the cheaper option rather than dealing with the locals in China, because there's a multi thousand year trajectory of stable governance the Europeans could trust the Chinese government, split up China by these different sub regions and then trade through them with the Chinese government.
- [113:51]
Austin Padgett
And I think they had the same issue, what contributes to the cost of it. Right. Like they had the same issue conquering China as Japan.
- [113:58]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [113:59]
Austin Padgett
Because it was a similar based logistical, gunpowder based armies. And so they could dominate the coasts and they could go up the rivers, but when you get so far up the river, you just get increasingly, increasingly outnumbered. Like an impossible video game with harder levels where the Mongols could dominate all the space. They didn't just dominate the water. And so they could take out. They could control that large interior without just being dependent on these narrow river systems.
- [114:34]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, that's very true. And the British prioritized the Yangtze river and the Pearl River. The Chinese were by Vietnam in the south. The Germans were Shandong Province. So they would isolate parts of the coastline. And the Europeans didn't think that much about China, but the Chinese got very resentful of it. Where they had the Boxer Rebellion, which is a sign of the civilizational disconnect, where there was this rebellion for the emperor against the rebels, against the Europeans. And then the Europeans sent an army of 11 countries to slaughter the rebels because they thought if they did the magic dance correctly, the European bullets wouldn't hurt them, which did not work. By the time we get to the fever pitch of European colonialism, almost all of Asia before World War I was a European colony. And they had gradually built up their positions on the coastline. Then in the final generation, they had slammed across the region. Where the British took India in the 18th century, they had most of it by the mid 19th century. You saw the British and the Russians butt heads in Central Asia with the Great Game, where the British were paranoid that the Russians would move into the hills of Afghanistan, build up an army there, much like previous invasions of India, and attack into India. And so the British, they invaded Afghanistan several times, which failed several brutal campaigns. They held up Persia as a puppet state against the British. So the British and the Russians, as implausible as it sounds if you look at the map, were butting heads over Afghanistan and Persia. Then you had the Russians pushing across the north, and you had Europeans trying to take out their positions in the continent where the French conquered Indochina. And you saw the British and the French butt heads over Southeast Asia, with the British launching several wars over Burma, with the Anglo Burmese War, I think, being one of the least bloody wars in history. The British conquered Burma with practically no effort. And so Thailand maintained independence because it was between French Indochina in British Burma. And I'm always disappointed I don't know more about French Indochina. I just haven't studied it. I've read Vietnamese history, but not modern Vietnamese history. And then you have European areas around the coast in the Far East. But there's three trajectories I want to close out before we end. European colonialism in the Orient, because European colonialism in the eastern east, it was like a fever goes up, crashes. And so one of them was the fall of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which occurred in World War I, where the last thing the Turks held onto was the Levant and Syria as well as Iraq down through Arabia to Mecca. The British and the French, mostly the British fought the Turks in World War I and using Lawrence of Arabia to work with the Arab Bedouins from the desert where Lawrence promised them the Levant if they won. And they were later betrayed by the Bordeaux where people have talked about the Sykes Picot Agreement where the French took Syria and Lebanon and the British took Iraq and Jordan and Palestine. And people say that these borders have been the cause of a lot of civil war and strife in the Middle east since. Because places like Syria or Iraq or whatever are not unified national identities. I think that's. And it's not true. These places have been sort of governed societies since the Middle Ages. Even the ancient world Syrian has been an identity for 4,000 years at least. It's just that due to governance by a combination of the Turkish Empire which stripped local elites of agency and Islam's regressive trajectory for the last thousand years, they had lost the ability to have self governance. And so they were more dependent on European colonialism. So when you look at the Middle east there's this critical tension between the European secular regimes that were Bonapartist and that was the sort of Sykes Picot trajectory. And then you see the radical Islamists pushing back against it. And so that's why if you look at radical Islamist propaganda, they refer to their enemies as crusaders or Western pawns or whatever.
- [119:35]
Austin Padgett
And they also identify that as capitalist quite often in terms of their opposition, which is why you have this Islamic communist kind of thing. And it's interesting you mentioned like Syria was a place before, etc, but I wonder how many of. I think there was certainly a large degree of artificial mishmashing of various tribes and ethnicities into borders. And this is what I say about the most damaging legacy of colonialism because people always argue I have the conversations we had before is actually the borders because they're specifically drawn around divide and conquer. So then you have the secular Bonapartism which could work in like a. Can also transition to like a communist Islamic radical majority. But is there any room for something outside of those two options? As long as Iraq includes Sunnis, Shias and Kurds.
- [120:37]
Rudyard Lynch
So I agree with that. I think the European boundaries are ridiculous. You'll see certain examples like Palestine where that's just so obvious the border makes no sense. And you. The British could have made an easier structure, but they didn't. And I think there's a degree of divide and conquer. But on top of it, are we sure we want modern Iraq to be 50 countries? Are we sure we want Tanzania to be 100 nations where there's a certain threshold where you can't, if you get rid of the national borders, you're delegating these countries to utter social collapse. And I think that's a choice that Europeans could have made, but it's a choice that requires a certain degree of balls. Where I was at this fantasy bookstore in Toronto and I was talking to the vendor where he said, oh, we have to go back to the Middle east to solve the issues we created through colonialism. And I said, wait, so you want us to use more colonialism to solve the issues of the earlier colonialism?
- [121:35]
Austin Padgett
Intervention leads to problems which lead to more demand for.
- [121:38]
Rudyard Lynch
You don't realize you're just circling the drain here. And that's the first trajectory. Second and third trajectories were the rise of two political powers that sort of upset the West European dominance of the region. One of which were the Russians who pushed across Central Asia. Another were the Japanese who pushed across the East. And both of them were more socially conservative, aggressive nationalistic populations. Whereas the West Europeans grew more complacent and sort of soft. And both of them saw the Western humanitarian order as an affront against them of pre established powers which were creating standards that they pushed against. And the Russians did though, did push for military regulation around weapons advancement because the advancement of military technology put the Russians at a disadvantage where the Russians are pushing across Asia and they were trying to take Manchuria, which is this hinge segment of Japan, China, Russia, and there's the Russo Japanese War where both of these were butting heads against each other. And the Japanese improvised to Western technology in a way better than any other Asian country. Watch the Japanese video if you want more context on that. And so the Russo Japanese War killed hundreds of thousands of people. And the Japanese won, which was this huge moment because finally an Asian power had beaten a European power. And through that it created this sense of Pan Asian consciousness which was a big deal for educated Asians in the beginning of the 20th century with the Japanese Co Prosperity Sphere or their colonial empire, that they were trying to unify all of Asia. But it was all propaganda for the Japanese colonial empire itself. And so with the rise of Japan leading to World War II, you saw the, you saw the sort of myth of European colonialism weaken because the idea that the Europeans were just innately vastly superior by every metric that had died with the Japanese being able to beat European militaries firstly against the Russians, the Japanese beat the Chinese. And then In World War II, the Japanese conquered an entire region, including a third of China, Southeast Asia, down to the edges of India or to New Guinea. And they had destroyed multiple European field armies, with Singapore being one of the easiest examples. Singapore being one of the hinges of the British Empire. And they attacked it through going back behind the jungle formations where the British guns were pointed towards the ocean. And after the defeat of the Japanese In World War II, the Europeans lost the heart to govern Asia because you had Gandhi who launched this enormous peaceful, anti British movement. And Gandhi was all based around playing to the psychological weaknesses of the Western public. And so because the Europeans were so worn down at the end of World War II, the British gave up India two years after the war peacefully, because they knew they couldn't hold it. India gained independence. Then it was this cascading effect where the Middle east gained independence in the late forties too, as did. As did Southeast Asia. And with the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, you saw the loss of any European illusions of maintaining these colonial empires. The French fought a little bit further into the 50s, but then the Vietnamese slaughtered one of their armies out in the mountains in the jungle. And then you saw the total collapse of European possessions in the east, where the Europeans gave up their Asian empires before anyone else to these new colonial elites, these European educated elites who still go before.
- [126:35]
Austin Padgett
And it's interesting about Vietnam because it's interesting to go into these different countries and see like what are the visual imprints of colonialism. And India is probably one of the biggest impacts, British impact on India. But it's not as visible, maybe because India is so big. But you just don't see a lot of like British buildings. You see the language is huge.
- [126:54]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [126:55]
Austin Padgett
But in cities and Manila and Cebu, you'll see a lot of Spanish stuff, Spanish architecture. In France, every single bakery, I mean, sorry, in Vietnam, every single bakery is completely revolves around French food.
- [127:09]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [127:09]
Austin Padgett
You see a lot. You see churches, you see different stone buildings, like more of a visible presence. And Jakarta, all the streets are all in Dutch. So you see the imprints of these colonial powers more in those countries than India. I don't know if it gets lost in the size of India.
- [127:27]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. So that's European colonialism in the East. Thank you. And if you don't have any final points, the next topic is going to be the Eurasian step peoples.
- [127:41]
Austin Padgett
Cool. I guess one final point would be, I don't know if I freaked anybody out by talking about water in Asia and them running out of water. But the main issue is that it's publicly controlled resources and it's publicly allocated at a very low price point under extreme political pressure, which prevents the adoption of wastewater technologies. And so desalination doesn't work to, like, supply you with the water demand that you need. But if, if they just run out of water while pricing it really low, what's going to happen is they're going to be able to recycle that through wastewater technology, and they can produce enough through desalination to get enough water circulating through their water management systems. But the, the later they wait to develop this, the more annoying it'll be. But it's. There's solutions for it, so don't worry.
- [128:38]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, that sounds good to me.
- [128:41]
Austin Padgett
All right, see you.
- [128:43]
Podcast Host/Announcer
History102 by Rudyard lynch and Eric Thornberg is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.