← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining the Gunpowder Empires
02:02:14
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- [00:01]
Rudyard Lynch
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- [00:33]
Podcast Narrator
Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Redyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.
- [00:47]
Rudyard Lynch
Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of History 102 with our continuous co host, Austin Pad. Hello, I am Rudyard Lynch. As I hope you would know by this point is if you're, if you watch these and today's episode is the gunpowder empires. And this is one of those eras of history that's actually very important and it affected a lot of people, but it doesn't fit into most of our current narratives of history. So it's been totally written out. And the way out, there's multiple ways I'm going to explain it. First, I'm going to start with the framing. Then I'm going to go through three examples of the gunpowder empires and then seeing the spread of gunpowder across Eurasia with the cultural effects and many historians, including McNeil and David Hackett Fisher, they describe how frontiers have a natural pressure towards freedom or towards slavery. And you can see this with democracy in America and African slavery. You can see it with the gaucho cowboys and the oppressive, corrupt states of South America as examples, or the Cossacks and the czars of Eastern Europe, Poland, Lithuania's democracy and the czars. And for there's a lot of technologists in this audience, people who develop technology. And for them, I would say it's also true for technological developments. So if you're building new technologies, be very careful about with this technology, does it incentivize slavery or does it incentivize freedom? Because when you first develop the frontier, whichever one of those groups wins in the beginning would probably determine that nation's trajectory. Democracy went out in America and America has been a democracy for centuries. Totalitarianism went out in Russia, and that was the trajectory as well. And the general narrative in military history goes that gunpowder is a democratizing force. Where gunpowder destroyed the old knight feudalism in Europe, where these guys took Years to train as nobility for their entire childhood because the horses and the weapons were so expensive. So you were incentivized to train a man with the skill. And in Europe, gunpowder, It allowed the peasantry to gain more power against the knights. Because you can just train a man with a musket. And crossbows were actually better than muskets into the early modern period. It's just guns required vastly less training than crossbows. So you could just get armies, Train them in a few weeks, Rather than over the course of years, like most medieval weapons, and then line them up. And they can slaughter knights, they can slaughter the best trained troops, the zweihanders of the enormous swords. They were some of the first people to get wiped out by gunpowder. And this was a complex process. Where initially in Europe, Gunpowder enabled the growth of centralized governments. However, at the same time, gunpowder, in the long term, Caused democracy and capitalism and meritocracy because it leveled the military playing field between the normal people and the nobility. It's funny that the exact opposite trend Occurred in most of the world, Especially Asia, where this is the gunpowder empires. And the gunpowder empires is a period of history Stretching roughly from the black death Until European colonialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when most of the world in Asia. When I talk about the gunpowder empires, I'm mostly talking about Asia. There's a handful in Africa, too, so I'll say asian for mostly, and then we'll mention the Africans In a few other places. That caused these enormous empires Built around autocratic rulers who had total power over their people. And so in Europe, the rise of gunpowder Caused these nation states, which ended up being democratic and meritocratic. In Asia, you saw the rise of the centralized government, Just like Europe, but enabled the power of the emperor, who crushed the local nobilities, Crushed the merchant classes. And these were profoundly socially conservative states. Where in Europe, the early modern period, or the after effects of the black death, Caused radical social change. Between the reformation, the renaissance, the rise of science, the age of discovery, all those things. That's not even half of it. In Asia, it caused radical social conservatism, where medieval Asia Was more socially loose Than early modern Asia was. And so you saw the just social conservatism across the board Becomes significantly stronger in Asia, where it caused a social fossilization of these originally dynamic societies, which allowed Europe to totally conquer or obliterate Asia during the colonial era.
- [05:47]
Austin Padgett
I'm sure there's civilizational reasons also, but just from a materialist lens, do you think part of it was because Tech was less accessible for non Europeans. The tech of gunpowder or guns themselves. Like in Asia when the guns were traded maybe and they didn't have the local industry and yeah, that, that basically developed in them. It made it easier for them to keep the technology segmented within the nobility.
- [06:20]
Rudyard Lynch
That's actually a really great idea. I hadn't thought of that take, but that makes a lot of sense. The development of gunpowder is weird. Where it started in China around the 11th century due to Daoist mystics trying to find the elixir of immortality. China used it a little bit against the Mongols where they didn't really have guns, they had flamethrowers and rockets. Then through the Silk Road, it went a little bit through the Muslim world, but the Muslims didn't like using it that much. Then it jumped across Eurasia and the English and the French were starting to do the next stage of gun development. So it went through the Silk Road, then the Europeans found it, then immediately started innovating upon it. And Europe became the center of gun manufacturing, which then the Europeans exported to the rest of the world. And once you get to China and Japan, they were incorporating European style guns in the 16th century. My explanation for why I think it happened is that Europe is just a more pluralist society. Culturally, militarily, economically, politically. And so inside Europe, with the democratization of gun warfare, the public could get the guns because European societies are warrior societies, unlike Asia, where most Asian civilized societies are farmer cultures where there's the emperor and then the emperor has total domination of everyone beneath him. In Europe it's generally been expected that all free men should fight. So in Europe you had this economic democratization where private enterprise could make the guns. You had the political democratization of 500 different states in early modern Europe. Then you had the military democratization that you could hand a man a gun and expect him to fight competently. And that wasn't true in a lot of Asia.
- [08:06]
Austin Padgett
When did people in Europe start regularly carrying firearms like pistols?
- [08:11]
Rudyard Lynch
I guess so by the late Hundred Years War was when you started seeing muskets and pistols used regularly. So the Europeans used cannons earlier than they used pistols and muskets by about a lifetime. So by the time, I believe the mid to late 14th century, England and France were using cannons against each other. And this was a huge shift in European history because Europe had thousands of castles. It was nigh impossible to conquer large areas of Europe because every small town had a castle that was often really well built. And so the king of France, although he had a Large territory the size of California, he had to use cannons to wipe out the nobility inside his own territory. Where even when France was unified, the regional nobility has had enough power to tell the king no. So the castles negated. So the Canada's negated the castles and needed a new breakthrough in fort construction called the star forts to offset that. And only national governments were wealthy enough to make star forts. So in Europe you saw the consolidation of local powers into national powers because the star forts and the cannons were so expensive that the Duke of Barri could not afford to make them. The King of France could though.
- [09:33]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. Viewing it through the lens of the state as purely the biggest gang or the monopolization of force, it makes a ton of sense because you simultaneously take out the castles, which from the Normans on are the foundation of the social control and the training advantage, as you said before. It's just like every advantage that they base their whole operation around just dissipated instantly. Which is pretty insane.
- [09:59]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, it is. I was reading a really brilliant book by the French World War II era author, Bertrand de Juvenal, who's a well known libertarian. He's Oren McIntyre's favorite writer and I got him from his record, I got the book from his recommendation. And he talks about this whole process where the nobility, the church and the merchant classes are the natural forces against the state. And in both Europe and in Asia, the state worked with the common people against their local elites because the common people hated the local noblemen in the church more than they hated the king. What then happened is that in Europe the bureaucracy knocked out the king, installed them in charge, and the bureaucracy was significantly more rapacious than the king ever was, where the common people got rid of their local masters to replace it for a natural master. And. And then when the state got powerful enough, it just said psych. And it used liberal democracy and socialism as a rationalization to say the government serves the will of the people. Thus we can demand infinite amounts from you, because when the king was in charge, there was this honest relationship where when the king demands stuff from you, you know it's going to this guy. And then there's the king is honest at his self interest, but once the socialist state shows up, the socialist state says, we are the will of the people and so we can ask for anything. But really the socialist state is the desires of the ruling cabal. It's not a democracy, it's an oligarchy, if you want to use Aristotle's terms. And the issue with oligarchy is that the Ruling cabal exploits the public until it. So according to Aristotle's tripartite governmental system, the issue of democracy is that the. The public gets what it wants too much. The public grows spoiled and weak. You de. Inflate the currency. You inflate the currency. The government makes immature decisions until you see the rise of Caesarism because the public has grown so weak that they look for a man to guide them. Then the issue of oligarchy or a cabal of rulers is they exploit the public for their own gain until the entire society has been broken. The issue with monarchy is that the king grows weak and disconnected from the society.
- [12:27]
Austin Padgett
And how does this fit in with bureaucracy caged inside the concept of monarchy?
- [12:33]
Rudyard Lynch
So the kings worked, and this was a unified threat across Europe and Asia, where the kings work with the common people, using the bureaucracy against the local elite, like the nobility or the church or the merchants. And the king creates bureaucracies as a way to get around the inability to wield force through society. Where society is an organic organism that sort of leadership naturally percolates through the society. And the society is built off social customs and independent relationships. The government is power ordering you to do something. So the way the king gets stuff done is he hires bureaucrats and the common people and then build his own power from that.
- [13:23]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [13:27]
Rudyard Lynch
So I'm going to. I've got three examples for the gunpowder states that'll help us. I'm going to start with Hawaii, one of the strangest gunpowder states. In an example of how far this got where Hawaii, the 50th US state or the 49th, Alaska was the last. It was populated by Polynesian peoples who sailed thousands of miles to get there. Or I think they arrived around 300 AD. And so Hawaii was as split off from the rest of the world as anywhere else in history. So it's a sort of. It's like a perfect scientific experiment. The Polynesians had some connections across the Pacific. It's actually really impressive that, for example, the Pacific's friggin huge. It's hard to overstate how huge. You can fit all the land masses on earth inside the Pacific easily. And so the Polynesians would have these thousands of miles connections between like Vanuatu and Polynesia and Micronesia, where they did keep in touch with each other. I think for Hawaii, it was so far off, it was a sporadic connection over the course of centuries where I think the Samoans launched an invasion of Hawaii centuries after the first settlement. And they genocided a lot of the local population because the Hawaiians had grown sort of complacent in their own territory. But Hawaii had. It's an interesting society. I haven't read that much about it. I've read a few books on Polynesia. But they had these distinct island cultures with dozens of tribes on an area that's not that large. Each of the islands of the archipelago had different cultures. And it was a highly taboo based culture which, with a caste system and it was also highly violent. Where they practiced cannibalism, they ate the British explorer James cook in the 18th century when he arrived, they had various taboos like you could never eat with a woman who was menstruating. Women weren't allowed to eat pork. Leaders would have mana or like aura. And then you, you would never do something that disrespected your leader's aura or mana. And you do various things like eat a man to take his mana. So it's a highly stratified, highly controlled. It exists as an almost perfect example of the archaic state of civilizational development before the masculine revolution. And so you have this society utterly cut off. And the Europeans discovered Hawaii in the 18th century with James Cook around the time of the American Revolution. Maybe the Spanish reached Hawaii beforehand, but I didn't hear about that. And so Hawaii experienced the 90% deaths from European diseases in the same way the New World or Australia did. And that made it massively underpopulated. But at the same time, Hawaiian people started having guns. And they once this within a century of getting guns from the Europeans, the great leader Kamehameha showed up and. And then bloodily unified the entirety of Hawaii and killing off all the local kingdoms, having these horrible massacres where he pushes his enemies off cliffs. And Hawaii was a unified monarchy, I believe from the early 19th through the late 19th century. And there's a lot of weird fun facts here I'll throw in. For example, they were. They were basically a New England puppet state because New England Yankees would sail around the bottom of South America. They trade in the Pacific, they'd sell furs from the west coast of Canada to China. They would hunt for whales or at Kamchatka off the coast of Siberia. And they would. Hawaii was a huge place for sugar, agriculture and I believe a few other crops. So the New England Yankees would put in these Filipinos and Japanese. Hawaii is the only plurality Asian state in America or Portuguese and some white Americans to work the sugar fields. And so it's this weird society with an ever shrinking Hawaiian native population. It's a New England puppet state by American merchants And then by the end of the century, due to concerns that either the British or the Japanese would annex the island, the Americans did before the Spanish American War, where the last queen was named Lilial Kuana, something like that. It's Lilly and then Lilian Kiwanis, whatever. But I'm using Hawaii as an example because this is an ecosystem utterly separated from the rest of the world. But then once you introduce gunpowder, it's the same effect as what occurred around the rest of the world.
- [18:04]
Podcast Narrator
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- [20:49]
Austin Padgett
And now we get into. When did the gunpowder get into Hawaii?
- [20:54]
Rudyard Lynch
Late 18th and early 19th century. Wait, so it wasn't less than a century. It was almost immediate because Kamehameha was, I think, early 19th century.
- [21:04]
Austin Padgett
Okay.
- [21:05]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. James Cook discovered them around the time of the American Revolution.
- [21:09]
Austin Padgett
Oh, I didn't know. Kame went on his island murder spree after gunpowder. That was the factor that kicked that off.
- [21:16]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, he was enabled by gunpowder. That's what. Because he was the guy who figured out gunpowder first.
- [21:22]
Austin Padgett
Right. So then you just get what, like a more a mob can consolidate a state, erasing any previous barriers. Like, for the European nobility, it would have been castles. For the Hawaiians, it would have been the separation of the islands, giving them some sort of defense. And then. Yeah, interest.
- [21:41]
Rudyard Lynch
Interestingly, on top of it, you see the same effect of the breakdown of traditional societies and cultures where it was the Hawaiian monarchy, not the Americans, who were the ones that destroyed the taboos and the religious structure and converted the islands to Christianity. Because once they conquered it, they saw the local customs and taboos and caste system as barriers to the. To the dominance of the state. And I don't blame them. I don't think they should have kept all those taboos in the modern world either. But they literally, they built. The Hawaiians were pretty good at incorporating Western culture. They had Western schooling. They converted to, I believe, Baptist Christianity from American missionaries. They were using guns. And it's interesting, you look at a society like India or China, which was significantly more advanced than Hawaii on almost any metric. But people like the Hawaiians or the Cherokee, who are significantly less advanced because they had less cultural baggage and ego, they were able to adapt to European customs more easily.
- [22:46]
Austin Padgett
And I think around the time when the islands were consolidated, there was also some drought issues, and their customs were getting to a place where they were kind of like Aztec levels of punish, punishing and absurd.
- [23:01]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [23:01]
Austin Padgett
So you could see after. After the guns swept it all away, there wasn't much sense in putting it back together.
- [23:10]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. For the second example, I'm going to use for the gunpowder empires, we're going to compare the Spanish and the Turkish empires, where Carol Quigley, one of My favorite historians was writing in the 1960s, he has a term called the Peru Pakistan axis, which is Latin America, the Middle East. And it's what it sounds like, it's Peru to Pakistan and it includes parts of Spain, parts of Italy, Mediterranean, Europe. And the traits of the Peru Pakistan axis are actually, it's easier just to compare the Turks and the Spanish and the Spanish are going to hate me for doing this, but it's still true. Where the Spanish Empire existed as a midpoint between the French and the Muslim Turkish Empire, where if you want to look at them, both the Turks and the Spanish had these large multi ethnic empires where they domesticated the conquered peoples with giving them no agency to self govern. So after both empires fell, you saw these sort of shattered states that weren't able to really recover. In the Balkans, the areas that were under Austrian governments did vastly better than the areas that were under Turkish governance. Because once the Turks seized power in a lot of the regions they were originally pretty nice. And a lot of the Balkans people welcomed the Turks over their local rulers. But because the Turks had lower taxes, they let the locals nobles maintain their structures. They weren't religiously oppressive. But by the end the Turks had these ruthless tax farmers. They'd sell certain regions to tax farmers who were told to take as much money as they could, so there was no incentive to work because it would just get stolen. Both Spanish and the Turkish empires banned the printing press in their empires both to finish the other point, Latin America is utterly dysfunctional and that's true even in societies that are more white than America. So it's not a racial thing. And what you see in Latin America is it's ethnically the same people as the Romans or the Renaissance or the people who built this empire or for the Spanish themselves. They conquered the entire New World in like a 40 year spread grant. And then it immediately stultified because inside the Spanish government, like the Turks, if you were born in the New World, even if you were purely ethnically Spanish, you were a second class citizen. The Peninsulares appointed from the king by Spain, in Spain, by the king totally ruled governance in the New World in the local whites, the creoles, they could get involved in economics, but they weren't allowed any authority. So when Latin America gained independence, they, they, they, they were not capable of self governance where they never developed the skills and the responsibility for self governance. And you can, so that's true in Latin America. You can see it in the Middle east too where people have were said when we invaded Iraq that Iraq had none of the tools of state building. But Iraq is also where civilization started. For thousands of years Iraq was the center of the world before the Mamelukes who were not the Turks, but they were related to them. Egypt was one of the wealthiest and best developed places in the world by the time you're through the Ottoman Empire. Egypt had half the population in the early 19th century as it did in the 12th century. So you're seeing a lot of commonalities and do you have any questions before I get to more commonalities between the Spanish and the. Between the Spanish and the Turks.
- [26:53]
Austin Padgett
I guess the Turks were cruising off the civilizational capital of the Middle east even though they were not really as Middle Eastern.
- [27:02]
Rudyard Lynch
Right.
- [27:02]
Austin Padgett
The Turkish groups that came in. And then it's interesting to think of the Dutch exception because when they got rid of the Spanish monarchy, that's when they did really well because they basically federalized and got rid of their king which enabled them to get rid of their bureaucracy because their their king was working with it in that case. Interesting.
- [27:27]
Rudyard Lynch
The Spanish Netherlands were self governing enough the Spanish didn't ultimately rape them. Where. So the Spanish needed the Netherlands or Belgium because it was one of the wealthiest places in Europe. So for some reason Belgium wasn't utterly destroyed by Spanish colonialism in the same way Italy or the New World or the Philippines were. So you have societies that don't promote self governance. There's a centralized monarchy which controls everything through a bureaucracy which forces the nobility in the church to cooperate. And both the Spanish and the Turks had crusading religions which they used to conquer other people, where they enforced religious orthodoxy, where the Muslim world nearly went through its equivalent of the Protestant Reformation with Shia messianism in the 16th century, but the Ottoman Turks totally crushed it with Sunni orthodoxy in the manner that the Spanish crushed the Protestant Reformation through the Inquisition and the Catholic Counter Reformation.
- [28:25]
Austin Padgett
Wow. So it would be like if the Spanish crushed the Reformation but they controlled all of Europe and you never had the Protestant.
- [28:32]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. Both of them. Both the Turks and the Spanish ultimately crushed capitalism in the Mediterranean world where capitalism had flourished beforehand with the Reformation being a really easy example. Both of them operate under state monopoly economics. Where in the Spanish. In the Ottoman Empire you had these hyper complex guild structures that controlled everything. So you had to operate through these hereditary guilds to get anything done. And in the Spanish Empire you had these state sanctioned monopolies that controlled absolutely everything. Where with the trade in the New World the Spanish had several anointed fleets a week which had to sail to the exact same ports. They went from Seville in Spain to Veracruz in Mexico to Acapulco, down the coast to Lima and then from Lima if you want to get to Argentina over the mountains. And this really screwed over young Argentina because if you look at it's just an utterly ridiculous trajectory. So Argentina and Uruguay were completely dependent on smuggling because the normal Spanish economics were just retarded in their context. And Uruguay's entire existence was as a smuggling port to get stuff to Argentina, that Uruguay stuff.
- [29:49]
Austin Padgett
Were they making the New World compete with the guild standards of like Spain?
- [29:54]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [29:55]
Austin Padgett
So they basically couldn't make anything over there.
- [29:57]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. You. Yeah. You were not allowed to make industrial processing in a lot of Mexico because the monopolistic buddies of the Spanish king wanted to sell their goods to the New World.
- [30:08]
Austin Padgett
Right. Well it's smart because if they let their colonies did that then their colonies would have been way more competitive than them. The same reason they didn't want to give citizenship because they didn't want the colonial populations to like have an outsized say on the homeland. And it's interesting you mentioned the hereditary nature because I saw this talking to this Japanese guy recently because he was doing a study on medical licensing and he really focused on the hereditary nature of it in Japan and how that's like really locks. Locks in the dynamic.
- [30:44]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. Japan's an interesting society where Americans have a very positive image of Japan from anime because in shame based cultures you're not supposed to say your country's bad. It's the same way a lot of Americans don't know about China's very deep seated issues. And that's normal for world cultures. It's weird that the west constantly self flagellates but Japan has got a sizable amount of corruption and inefficiency and all those problems that we don't hear about in the West. A few more similarities across the Peru Pakistan axis is there's always an aristocracy which controls almost all of everything. In Latin America or the Middle east that shuts down competition. The peasant classes are treated like utter garbage where you have this huge population in poverty that's been subjugated, that's lost the will to power. And they are ruled by the monarchy in the centralized government controlling the church, where the church serves the interests of power and then a domesticated nobility. And the nobility spends their free time in aesthetic or sex or luxuries. And so the entire society exists in the sort of low pressure equilibrium where it's a form of tyranny, but it's not tyranny in the same way as you'd see with Stalin or China or those places. It's a low pressure, corrupt form of tyranny where everyone in power has every incentive to cooperate inside the system. But there's not an ins. But it doesn't. It doesn't produce enough critical tension that the government is actually powerful enough to really oppress the people.
- [32:36]
Austin Padgett
Interesting. That's the Spanish and Turkish system.
- [32:40]
Rudyard Lynch
And the thing with the Peru Pakistan axis is it's one of those things where I think you should see it as one layer of analysis, but you always have to add another layer of analysis on top of it. Where just saying Argentina equals Iraq is stupid. Saying Peru equals Pakistan is stupid. Where there are very sizable differences. But I think there is this broader Mediterranean culture. And Mediterranean culture really declined with the medieval to early modern transfer, where Italy was the center of the world. Spain conquered every territory on every major continent. The Turks dominated the world. There was times when Syria and Iraq were some of the wealthiest places on Earth. And now the Mediterranean is total deadbeat. And it's sad because more history has occurred around the Mediterranean than any comparable area around the world. But any given Mediterranean country, you go to even France, where Marseille is one of the most disgusting cities I've ever seen. Marseille is like seeing the fall of Rome. And that's France, the nicest Mediterranean country. And so the reason I'm pointing this out is Spain is the only Western nation which really fits the Gunpowder empire thesis. I don't want to say France or Britain or those places they unified and gained power through gunpowder. But the other Western nations, they ruled. There's two ways to rule. You can rule through money, or you can rule with hierarchy. What Leland DeWitt Baldwin, one of my favorite historians from the World War II era, said is the British Empire won because they thought you made money by producing goods. And. And the Spanish Empire lost because they thought you made money by having gold. Where what the gunpowder empires do is they establish hierarchical structures which destroyed the capitalism in the pluralism which was the marker of the Eurasian system in the high medieval period. But by the time the Europeans had reached the orient in the 16th century, this system had already stagnated. This was something the Asians had brought on themselves. And it's not an outcome of sort of innate racial or civilizational differences between the west and the Orient, at least not in total, because the Spanish are also Europeans. And the exact same trend happened there, where Latin America is the outgrowth of a Western civilization, but it has income ranges highly Comparable to the Middle east, which suggests that incorrect choices were made at a certain point by the Spanish while the other West Europeans picked a different route.
- [35:23]
Austin Padgett
Right. It's the same thing today because the, the hierarchical control versus, like the gold versus the goods. That only works if someone else isn't doing the same thing elsewhere. Like if England, if England went hierarchy also, then Spain could get away with it. Yeah, that's, that's why it's the same thing now with the global economic cartels, where the question is if the, if the US breaks away, then China will be forced to do something else. But if the US copies China, then China will be able to stay comfortably within more hierarchy lens. If not, they'll have to shift to money.
- [36:02]
Rudyard Lynch
If so, in the Hermetica, in, if you establish a good competitive system, it forces everyone else to do it too. And what I mean by good competitive system is that in alchemy or the Hermetica, when you have competing forces push against each other with an incentive towards cooperation, it radically creates innovation greater than whatever you can imagine. This is how democracy works. This is how capitalism works. It's how, it's how the, our military structures work. It's science. Where northwest Europe established these systems of mutual competition for benefit. And then it forced everyone else to go along with it because I would say four or five countries made the modern world, and then you couldn't put the genie back in the bottle and they forced everyone else to do better. Because there was a period when Europe could have potentially become the gunpowder empires, and that was the lcien regime, which, which we'll make a video soon about. From the end of the Thirty Years War until the French Revolution, you saw Europe unified under these highly aristocratic absolute monarchies that had drill and class hierarchies. And there was this tension between absolutist mercantilism and France and capitalist parliamentarianism in Britain. And the British won that war which created the modern world. But if there were a handful of countries such as Britain, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and then the countries bordering the North Sea, those were the countries that got these sort of hermetic pressure forces going. And then they dragged the rest of the world along. If this innovation in early modern northwest Europe hadn't happened, Europe in the entire world would have looked like the gunpowder civilizations of Asia. And so it's very important that we as Americans keep these forces going, because if we don't, the world will slide into another dark age. Because if America stops having these forces going, Asia is not going to keep doing it. Because the Japanese and the Koreans and the Indians are capable of innovation. They're only going to innovate, or they're capable of capitalism and science and these things. If America keeps the funnel going. But we have a sacred duty as Americans to sort of keep our pressure cooker going because it lights up the rest of the world.
- [38:36]
Austin Padgett
And if we don't, then you might have some South American countries, but the likelihood is that they'll get choked out by the cartel if we're not defending it. And I mean, if those European, northern European countries hadn't made that movement, we probably wouldn't even have electricity right now.
- [38:52]
Rudyard Lynch
Agree.
- [38:52]
Austin Padgett
And socialists call this race to the bottom. And it's why you had universal communism develop, because they realized that they needed everybody in the cartel for it to work. And that transitions into globalism, which is why people call it like globalism communist. And then this lens of the competition over international economic cartels and is the deepest layer of geopolitics, it's often ignored. But basically every major incentive can be tracked through this lens.
- [39:29]
Rudyard Lynch
The reason the herd or conformists try to destroy outliers or the successful is they know that if they succeed, they're going to have to work harder. And most people don't want that. It's one of my favorite schizos georgiani. He says that there are certain eras of history where he says there. There are times in history where a sort of singular genius finds something. He goes into the ether and he uses spiritual terminology. He grabs fire from the gods, bring it, brings it back to the earth and he destroys the old earth. Columbus did that, Martin Luther did it, Jesus did it. Where singular individuals can sort of find things in the ether. And then what Giorgiani says is this is a titanic shift. It's a sort of titanic. It brings a titan on the earth that destroys the old order. And for the Peru. Do you have a thought about that?
- [40:29]
Austin Padgett
It just fits with the light, like light on the hill. And it is like we're at the beginning of this process because we can very easily understand how this is a huge change to the world order. And if you track its development, it's just those parts of Europe and some other parts. And now we're on a tipping point where the globe could go one way or another. So it's like we're in the middle of a really potentially huge shift in history.
- [40:57]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, I very much agree with that. And we have to be careful about it. So the reason the Spanish are ended up in the Peru Pakistan access is Spain's really two countries. That's true for most Mediterranean nations. Where I took the train from Naples to Florence in Italy is not a single country. It's such a stark difference.
- [41:21]
Podcast Narrator
We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.
- [41:25]
Rudyard Lynch
Mama Papa.
- [41:40]
Austin Padgett
Packages by Expedia. You were made to occasionally take the hard route to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
- [41:48]
Rudyard Lynch
We were made to easily bundle your trip Expedia made to travel flight inclusive packages are atoll protected what does the.
- [41:56]
Podcast Narrator
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Rudyard Lynch
A pile of money.
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- [44:08]
Rudyard Lynch
There was the unified Spain. The Muslims took it. The Muslims took all the populous areas. And the modern Spanish government were basically barbarians and bandits in the northern mountains who banded together, reconquered the south in the manner of a barbarian invasion where the Christians were less advanced than the Muslims. They didn't really understand Muslim institutions like capitalism or science or whatever. So the North Spanish used the regulatory system to keep down the Muslims and the Jews who they didn't trust. But in the process they were heavily dependent on Muslim institutions especially. So the area that was most important demographically and economically for the Spanish empire in the New World was Andalusia, the former center of Muslim power. And in the process of fighting the Muslims, the Christians took up all these Muslim like attributes such as distrust of science or rational thought, moral puritanism, crusading, centralized governments. And so in Spain to make money or to work was considered low class. No Spanish gentleman would do that. Those were things the Muslims and the Jews did. And it's funny that in the process of fighting them, the Spanish took on all these Muslim like attributes. But there's also the underlying layer that both the Muslims and Mediterranean Europe share a very strong trajectory with Greco Roman civilization where a lot of these traits were describing like slave economies, aristocratic culture, distrust of capitalism or work. These came from Greco Roman civilization to both the Muslims and the Mediterranean Europeans. And we view the Greco Romans with highly rose tinted glasses. I think that's totally fair because the Greco Romans, they're so incredible that they deserve it. At the same time, not all elements of their culture are positive and we.
- [46:08]
Austin Padgett
Took probably more of the positive ones. So it's easier to see it through a rose tinted light when those are the relevant elements to us.
- [46:15]
Rudyard Lynch
The west took up Greco Roman philosophy and science. Eastern Orthodox took up their government structure from the Byzantines, and then the Muslims took up their economic and family structure.
- [46:28]
Austin Padgett
It's another example also how someone can take up an element of your own culture and take it forward better than you can. So, so it's a, it's a good indication to like be humble and keep your eye on the ball.
- [46:39]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. My sister and I are opposite people. She's a Maoist bureaucrat and we're descended from the same parents. So we're both taking trajectories from our parents, but it's the opposite trajectories.
- [46:52]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [46:53]
Rudyard Lynch
And so now let's start with China. Where gunpowder was invented. And so I talked before about how gunpowder was invented in the Song dynasty, in the 11th century in China, it was used a little bit against the Mongols. There's this theory by military historians that the reason the Asian civilizations didn't take the gunpowder in the same way that Europeans did is because they were fighting nomadic horse archers. Gunpowder is not effective against horse archers and that is insane. Cope where gunpowder is incredibly effective against horse archers. Where the Russians used gunpowder to steamroll the entire Eurasian steppe. Where before gunpowder, the Russians were on a horrifying defensive war against the nomads. But with it, the Russians could totally take the entire step. So the Chinese didn't use gunpowder effectively because of the nomads. They didn't bring it in effectively because after the Neo Confucian Renaissance of 1000 AD, the Chinese forbade all technological advancement. And they also had they purposely underfunded the military because the bureaucrats knew that if they gave the military power that the military would unseat the bureaucracy. And the reason the bureaucracy normally doesn't win in most cultures is for that very reason. If you have a sword or a gun, the guy with the pencil doesn't matter or he can't fight back. But the point where the gunpowder the Chinese started using gunpowder in a more wide scale way was with the fall of the Mongol Empire in the mid 14th century. And the Mongols had brutally ruled China for over a century, but they had grown weak and decadent. Where Kublai Khan had his pleasure pleasures, domes at Xanadu, which is not technically true, but it's directionally true. And also the Black Death affected the Mongols disproportionately negatively against populations. And so the Black Death was the event which killed, which destroyed the Mongol governance of China. And some historians have said that the Black Death killed more people in Asia than it did in Europe. I don't know if that's true because that was a claim from a century ago when you had more like European authors who look down on Asia. But the fall of the Mongols in China, most of it's not actually about the Mongols because the Mongols didn't have the men or the will to fight. They held China down because the Chinese were cowed. But once the Mongol, because the Chinese also saw the Black Death as heaven's displeasure at the Mongols. So the Mongols got kicked out of power. Then China fell into civil wars where I believe the faction by you, Zhu Yuan Zhang, it's something like that. He was a homeless vagrant who built out a bandit army and he installed himself as Ming emperor. And gunpowder was used on a wide scale basis in this conflict by the Chinese against the Mongols, which also shows how gunpowder levels the field against. Against nomadic horses.
- [50:05]
Austin Padgett
Nomadic, yeah.
- [50:06]
Rudyard Lynch
And this war was started by a Buddhist messianic cult. And keep in mind Buddhists aren't peaceful. There's lots of Buddhist words of genocid against other religions called the yellow turbans. When China's had multiple yellow or red turban revolts because the Chinese like repeating their names across their history. And I believe Zhu Yuanjiang, he was part of the Yellow Turban revolt, but he eventually turned on the yellow turbans and installed himself as emperor. And he fought another warlord who I believe he was allies with earlier Chinese history's got these repeating patterns. Same thing as the rise of the Han Dynasty. And they had this enormous. The biggest naval battle in Chinese history at Lake Poyang on the Yangtze river where the Chinese would build these enormous barges and smash against each other. And you had tens of thousands of men fighting over Lake Poyang. But eventually he installed himself as emperor in the Ming dynasty is sort of archetypal in gunpowder empires. And they actually started using gunpowder less once they won power. By the time you get to the 17th century with the rise of the Qing dynasty and even as late as the Taiping Rebellion in the mid 19th century, most Chinese were not using guns. So the Chinese invented guns, but they didn't use them on a wide scale basis. Where over Chinese history, most of their militaries have been pike armies. Because China's got a huge population and they've been able to maintain conscription for their entire history since the ancient world.
- [51:33]
Austin Padgett
So it seems like they don't let their armies have any tools that not every soldier in the army can have.
- [51:39]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [51:40]
Austin Padgett
Like everybody gets a spear or nobody gets a spear.
- [51:42]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [51:43]
Austin Padgett
I love how they use yellow red turbines because it feels just like how you split up in gym class or something.
- [51:49]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [51:49]
Austin Padgett
And they don't actually have that different of uniforms.
- [51:52]
Rudyard Lynch
That's funny. Yeah, you're right. The Chinese should have been able to build more elite formations with soldiers, but they didn't. And the Chinese really needed to train more elite troops, but they just have armies of cannon fodder. And you can see this in Chinese militaries where there's a great history. I don't know. It's great, but it's pretty good. History of Asian warfare by Rice, who is a white guy. It's funny. Asian historian called Rice and it talks about the history of Asian warfare from 1200 until the Taiping Rebellion in the mid 19th century. And he covers all of these Chinese wars against their neighbors where China kept on trying to conquer its neighbors and it kept failing. Where you have, you have the Chinese war against the Mongols in this early 16th century where China had gone through a political crisis. This might have been late 15th century. China went through a political crisis for the stupidest possible reasons. A Confucian ceremonial protocol. The eunuchs and the bureaucrats. And the Mongols had used this as a sort of reason to attack China. So the Chinese massed armies of hundreds of thousands of men to fight off the Mongol attackers against the Great Wall. And then they marched out into Mongolia. They didn't feed or supply them. And then the Mongol army, a quarter of their size, just slaughtered them all. And this is a consistent pattern. The exact same thing happened when the Chinese attacked burma in the 18th century where they marched over the jungle, didn't. Did the same issues. They all died. It's why China's invaded Vietnam 27 times, failed each time. It's why there are two invasions of Japan failed. It's why they're like three invasions of Korea failed. Where the Chinese were not able to use gunpowder correctly.
- [53:38]
Austin Padgett
Well, it makes sense. If they couldn't do the supply line in terms of food, then how are you going to maintain gunpowder?
- [53:44]
Rudyard Lynch
Logistics. Bureaucracy is where China has been run by the bureaucracy. They have very serious issues with quality control because there's no incentive for quality. So China can have these huge projects, but the quality control is terrible. Where even today the Chinese. The Chinese government is trying to stockpile food and oil in case there's a war with the rest of the world. And people looking into this have found that most of the grain is rotting or it's inedible or when China's build up its navy, their men aren't trained and the ships don't work. Where China has this very serious issue with quality control and it's based upon the quality of leaders where certain things the Chinese Communist Party does, they do so very well and in a very impressive way, however, because it's dependent on the leadership structure due to Confucianism, where leaders have a lot of power and if the moral character of the leader isn't there, there's not quality control.
- [54:44]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. And then just the distributed decision making. So like when you don't have that, you can do big things. But the. A lot of errors fall through the cracks.
- [54:54]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [54:54]
Austin Padgett
That no one can address.
- [54:56]
Rudyard Lynch
And the Ming Dynasty, which ruled China from the mid 14th through the 17th centuries, they're a very prime example of gunpowder empires where they were absolutely brutal. It was the most authoritarian state in Chinese history for nearly 2000 years up to its point where. But it also really shows that pre industrial societies are nowhere near as bad as post industrial totalitarian dictatorships. Where in the Ming Dynasty they had a brief period where they explore the rest of the world out to Kenya, but then they shut off all foreign trade after that. You had to have paperwork from the government to leave your hometown. They had a secret police which spied on your every action. They totally shut down dissent, they shut down all creative thinking and intellectualism. They shut, they made the gaokao services for the government, the gaokao testings to become a government official. They made it hyper structured and bureaucratized. So that totally removed creativity. In the earlier systems were based on critical thinking or imagination or your ability to write. This was just, are you a bureaucrat? And so this was a turning point in China where they started to lose their creativity and their sort of dynamic spirit under this autocratic tyranny, which I think was partly informed by the oppression under the Mongols. But the good thing about the Ming dynasty is that it was a period of rapid population growth. It was a period of technological growth of a unified Han China where this was the first time in a very long period in the last 400 years where China was a single unified country under the Ming, under the Han ethnic group. So the Chinese still respect the Ming dynasty for that reason. And they actually reintroduced gold coinage into China where they used fiat currency before, but then they fell apart due to the collapse of the Spanish economy in the Thirty Years War because they had grown dependent on Spain's economic system.
- [56:58]
Austin Padgett
And. Right. And then Spain crashed. And it's funny how you say the gun, the Gun empire was the most brutal in Chinese history and they had a lot of good examples before that to compete with. And, and then you said it's partly maybe connected to the like the Mongols role in setting part of it up. And I was thinking that basically what guns do is they give everyone the power of the Mongols.
- [57:21]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, that's a great way of phrasing it.
- [57:24]
Austin Padgett
Because if people had guns in pre industrial whatever society, you could see if you threw guns into 500 B.C. greece, you could see them killing a bunch of people.
- [57:37]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, yeah. Then you have the rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty, which is another example of gunpowder empires where the Qing were barbarians from northeastern China and they used guns to conquer the rest of China, where by this point the Europeans had imported their new better guns into East Asia, which we'll talk about Japan soon. But the European guns could just defeat the Chinese guns easily because they had iterated it so many times. And they, the Manchus were also using European style cannons where the Chinese no longer were. And so the Manchus used their advantage with gun warfare to conquer all of China, which was a brutal process that killed like 3, 30 million people. It's one of the bloodiest wars ever in human history. And you saw the continuous thread where the Manchus had internal colonialism of China, where the Chinese were forced into this brutal authoritarian state, but at the same time they used gunpowder against their nomad brethren. Where modern China's borders are smaller than the Qing dynasty. But the Qing dynasty sort of established the framework for modern China where the Manchu Ching, they could combine the advantages of the sedentary civilized Chinese with the barbarian nomadic ethic that the Manchus had. So before they conquered China, the Qing had taken the Qing had taken Mongolia, brought the Mongols into their coalition. But then the Qing conquered out west where Chinese nationalists still obsess over getting China to have its borders it had 200 years ago under the Qing, when they even weren't run by the Chinese, they were separate castes. The Chinese were not allowed in the highest positions of power where they fought a genocidal war against the Dzungars. Where Uyghurstan, our western China is one of those genocided areas on earth where they just killed off the entire native Zungar. There's no natives, it's everyone genocided, someone else and someone else moves in. They killed like 800,000 people or nearly the entire population of Uyghurstan. And then the ancestors of the modern Uyghurs moved in. They conquered Tibet, which had already been pacified by the Mongols, killing off the nobility. And then they pushed out west to modern Kyrgyzstan. In these places in Korea, where it was Korea and a few other places were these client states of China. But the reason modern China controls the frontier regions of western China is not because of the Han Chinese, at least in the last few centuries. It's because the internal Manchu barbarians worked with other barbarians to conquer out the frontiers of China. But it established China as this highly socially conservative centralized state that dominated this huge empire. And most ethnic Han were not allowed to migrate in most of China. The ethnic Han legally had to stay inside China proper. And the Manchus ruled to these warlord captains who would go out and conquer for themselves. And periodically the Manchu government had to conquer, reconquer their own warlords who could carve out their own principalities in China, especially in the south, in the southwest. So it's this very strange situation, if you know what I mean.
- [60:58]
Austin Padgett
One of those situations where there's just a bunch of switching allegiances and battles over a period that's kind of pointless to examine because it's.
- [61:07]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [61:07]
Austin Padgett
Switches back and forth. And the gunpowder contributed to this.
- [61:10]
Rudyard Lynch
So the Manchus used gunpowder initially and then they suppressed gunpowder, same thing as the Japanese. So when the Europeans showed up in the 19th century, the Chinese had some guns, but they were mostly fighting with pikes. And you saw this. That we'll talk about Japan next. But you saw this period of cultural conservatism in China with Taoism and Buddhism lost out to Confucianism. And Confucianism was super big over this entire time period. And it got more socially restrictive where there were growing expectations. I mean, it was Beforehand, in the 12th century, if a woman was raped, she was expected to kill herself. But widows were hated because, like, if another guy's got dibs on a girl first and he dies, she should live in shame for the rest of her life. And if she's especially virtuous, she should kill herself. Women were kept in the house. They had zero rights. They had foot binding, which wasn't popular in the high medieval period. And then it got really big. And foot binding is a disgusting practice where you break a woman's feet. And it started with the upper classes. Their feet were smallest for the upper classes. You shatter them in half. They wore these tiny shoes where they can't walk. And the lower classes imitated it even though the women had to walk. And I see foot binding as an example of sexual competition getting utterly disgusting. And also, Chinese mothers would try desperately to have their daughter's feet broken as a status symbol.
- [62:35]
Austin Padgett
It's so insane because just they're breaking these poor kids feet literally in half. Like, you take the foot and you break it in half. It's not just they're breaking the toes, they're breaking like serious structure.
- [62:47]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [62:48]
Austin Padgett
And it's a little bit relatable not, not in a real sense to high heels today, where women wear high heels and not to like ruin a fashion trend or something, but the women who wear high ones and wear them a lot, their leg actually gets stuck. They lose elasticity in their tendon. It can be painful. You actually can lose the ability to stand with your foot flat on the ground. And it causes like a lot of serious physical problems.
- [63:18]
Rudyard Lynch
I think it's one of men's responsibilities to hold women back from how insane their sexual competition can get. Because fettered women will do absolutely insane things to themselves and others for competing. And especially so with beautiful women. Lots of beautiful women have profoundly low self esteem because they were relentlessly bullied for their entire youth. And they get stuck in these weird things. Like, do you notice this dimple I have? Or is my nose too large? No, like, just. No, like you.
- [63:46]
Austin Padgett
Or wearing a dress in the middle of winter. In college, like, the girls would go to the bars with just dresses on. And then you see them crawling in the snow barefoot, because they're not. They're holding their heels and they're walking through like a foot of snow. And guys like, holy crap. Like, the only reason we'd be doing something like this is if we had caught like a deer and had to drag it back, you know?
- [64:09]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And men don't care. Like, would. Men do not care about most of this stuff. It's just to please other women or because they think men care. And so with you also saw a treatment of women getting worse across Asia in general, where in the high medieval period in Islam and China and India, women had significantly higher status. But due to the gunpowder empires, women's status got markedly worse. So in the year 1000 AD, Islam had legal, near legal equality of the middle men and women. By the early modern period, upper class women were not expected to leave the house. Where I was visiting Cairo with Marek, and we were hanging out in this beautiful nobleman's palace from the Turkish period, and he had a separate floor for the women and a separate floor just for the men. So they were secluded even inside the house.
- [65:01]
Austin Padgett
They put their man caves above. Unlike us, where we crawl into the basement.
- [65:06]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. And there are stories of there's even a fire inside the house, and the women would rather burn inside the house than leave to show their dishonor. And I think this is just culturally cruel. A lot of right wingers like to say that women have never been oppressed over history, but these Asian stories are horrible. Or female genital mutilation, where they cut up a woman's vagina so she can't feel sexual pleasure, so she won't cheat on her man, but she can't leave the house anyway. That's common in northeast Africa. In India, widow burning was common, where if your husband died, the most noble thing a woman could do is burn herself so she could spend her afterlife with her husband. I mean, it's one of those things where, like, if you marry A girl. If you get with a girl who already had a guy, I understand it's somewhat demeaning, but like this is taking it way too far. And also in, across all of Asia, you saw this growing expectation that upper class women should have, should not be allowed to leave the house. They should not be public members of society. And even in some of these societies, women were not allowed to see their relatives because they were lived in their husband's compound and they're not allowed to leave the compound. And I just think this is profoundly cruel.
- [66:19]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. The after death thing illustrates how much it's about putting the woman just as something that revolves around the man because once the man is dead, you can't conceive of any single role or utility for her or meaning or whatever, which shows that. How extreme it was towards.
- [66:42]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, I mean also it's just like you should not fear your women in this manner. Like, it's just not like a masculine thing to do.
- [66:50]
Austin Padgett
Oh yeah, true.
- [66:51]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, yeah. It's not masculine to be constantly petrified about, like, oh my God, will my woman approve of me?
- [66:57]
Austin Padgett
Well, it's like a sustainable dynamic versus an unsustainable dynamic that requires tons of inputs. Like a low trust dynamic. Right. Requires all these structures. But then a high trust dynamic, you don't need to keep everybody locked down and cut up their genitals. So it's just a sexual example of high trust works in the sexual marketplace as well.
- [67:19]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. So the thing with the tyranny of the state is it's ultimately hard to maintain. The tyranny of culture can last forever, which is really ugly because culture is easier to enforce and it's more ingrained than state control. And so certain tyrannies of the culture can last for centuries in society and be followed obsessively, but they're unnecessary. Francis Fukuyama talks of the tyranny of family culture and government. Or sorry, the tyranny of cousins, family and culture and I think. Or something else I forget. Exactly. But he's an ethnic Japanese author because he, he'd know that's Japan's got a lot of issues with that. And speaking of Japan, Japan did not import guns from China. They imported them from the Europeans who sailed the long way around. And by that point the Portuguese had significantly better guns. And again, watch the Japanese history video. Nobunaga followed by his successors Hideyoshi and Tokugawa. They were the first people to use guns on a mass scale. And they were the ones who unified Japan. And Japan was a series of hundreds of squabbling independent states. And they were able to wipe out the samurai, cavalry and noblemen who had gained an advantage. And they were to knock down the castles with the port, with the cannons as well. So you saw a similar trajectory to China, where in China, centralized government uses guns to take power. And Hideyoshi and Tokugawa were commoners and peasants like Zhu Yuanzhang. So gunpowder allowed this sort of Caesarism, where commoners seize power with guns, establish an authoritarian state, where Japan did the same things under Tokugawa as what Ming China did, with centralized bureaucracy, secret police, very tight social controls, cutting themselves off in the rest of the world. And then they got rid of guns afterwards. But also, like China, it was still a period of growth and wealth and those things, even though they were highly closed societies for some reason. Asians can have highly closed societies and still be wealthy. And Western European Westerners don't do that. I can't think of a single instance in Western history where you have that highly closed society and it works.
- [69:43]
Austin Padgett
We can't keep the same motivation without. Without meaning or something.
- [69:47]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And it's interesting as well, where the Japanese are the people who used guns the best in Asia, where they had volley firing, which was like Western Europe, and they invented that independently. And they invaded Korea and they wanted to invade China. So there was this brief period when the Japanese had potentially the best military in the world, between their muskets, their pikemen, the samurai knights, great commanders. Then their failure in Korea, which we talk about in the Japanese video, there's a cool war with really cool ironclads. The Koreans had ironclads, and they had one of the best naval commanders in history who shoved the Japanese into a whirlpool that destroyed their ships in a strait that made the Japanese turn, and then they went back to getting rid of guns. So the Japanese are an all of all or nothing people. Either we're going to conquer all of East Asia, or we're going to be totally isolated.
- [70:43]
Austin Padgett
Right. And they realized after that point that it would be a little bit harder than they thought. And I guess they weren't as good as art at artillery or different things like that. I'm sure some people would dispute that there were stronger armies at that point, especially when you factor in navy. But they beat the rush. They did well against the Russians, et cetera.
- [70:59]
Rudyard Lynch
So I love the term arguable, where, like, you could arguably say the Jews or the Anglo Saxons or the Greeks, the Chinese, where the ethnicity was done the most in history in the year 1600. You could arguably say the Japanese or The Spanish or the French or the Turks are the best military. And now we're going to jump across Eurasia because the Muslims used gunpowder somewhat and one of the Muslim commanders who used it is Tamerlane. And we're going to cover Tamerlane in the next video on inner Asian history. Tamerlane was this Uzbek warlord who rose from nothing to become military dictator of this huge empire. And he conquered from Moscow to India and from Turkey. He was going to conquer China before he died. He used gunpowder sparingly, but like the other Muslim states, it was a side tactic where they were still dependent on counter cavalry in normal melee weapons and horse archers rather than gunpowder. Because the Muslim highly mobile armies, they fought more like the nomads of Central Asia. So they were the ones who lost to gunpowder rather than being able to incorporate it. Except the Turks who were a Muslim empire who were as European. I said European, I didn't say Western as they were Asian. So the Turks were able to incorporate gunpowder really well, the rest of the Muslims weren't. And it's what gave the Turks the military advantage they did over the other Muslim peoples.
- [72:31]
Austin Padgett
And did they have more horses than the other Muslim people, the Turks, more cavalry.
- [72:37]
Rudyard Lynch
The rise of gunpowder caused the ossification of the Muslim world into three great states. That being the Turkish empire that stretched from Algeria to Iraq, from Hungary to Somalia. Then you had the Safavid Persians who ruled modern Persia in Azerbaijan. Then you had the Mughals. And the Mughals had most of India at a certain point. They were immigrants from Afghanistan. The Turks had really good cavalry where the way the Turkish Empire worked was they had colonies in. They had the Turkish farmers in Anatolia as free farmers who in exchange for military service were yeoman who owned their own land. They then used this to conquer all the neighboring peoples. And so the Turks had a very well balanced military. They had the Sifahin noble cavalry, like knights. They had the horse archer is what they kept from their nomadic history. Because the Turks are descendants of the Central Asian nomads. They had the Janissaries who were the Balkan slave soldiers. They were recruited from Christians, forcibly converted them to Islam and they served the king directly and they had the best artillery. So the Turks had really good cavalry. But they were really. They were also better than other people and their other. They had a great combined armed military when they were fighting the Persians. As an example where there was a really important campaign in the, I believe late 15th century between the new Shia messianist Safavid empire versus the Turks where the Safavids had comparably good cavalry to the Turks. Both had good cavalry. But then the Turkish advantage in guns and organization, artillery is what slaughtered them. Where the reason the Turks took the mid most of the Middle east rather than the Persians was because of their gunpowder advantage.
- [74:33]
Austin Padgett
It's a little bit like a Wild west dynamic because you have some Turks with cavalry and guns, like using long guns on horses or maybe they had more of the infantry and then they're conquering people who are more on horses. Right. Like the western Indian tribes who also then pick up some guns and like ride around on their horses with guns. I'm not sure I can picture that dynamic of calvary rifle fighting and including the balance of some with fewer rifles, some incorporating infantry with rifles. As I can with the Middle east and the American West.
- [75:12]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, yeah, that's a great way of phrasing it. And it was a sort of cultural Wild west period where keep in mind this was the end of what I call the Muslim Dark Ages. And I'm reading a book by Ibn Khaldun, the Muqaddimah. When I'm done, we're going to make a video on medieval Islamic with this time period. Keep in mind for both sides, a lot of the fighters were descendants of the Mongols. Where the Safavid Persians, their founder had no Persian ancestry. He was part Mongol ancestry, part Turkish, part Greek, Armenian. And he built up a coalition of buddies who were Shia. Keep in mind, in lots of periods in history it's just a group of buddies who win. So it's greatness is attainable if you try.
- [75:58]
Austin Padgett
And a little help with your. From your friends.
- [76:01]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. And they made. They had a mass conversion of Iran from Sunni to Shia. Iran's gone through multiple phases of being Sunni or Shia. It's now the great Shia power due to the Safavids. But the Safavids were a Turkic nobility who ruled on top of the native Persians who had grown decadent and become sort of domesticated. Where for almost all of the last thousand years Persia has been under Turkic governance. This was even more true of the Qahar Empire which ruled after the fall of the Safavids. But they were in that the Turks also had lots of descendants of the Mongols fighting for them as well. Tamerlan was a descendant of Genghis Khan, same thing as Babur. So in this period after the fall of the Mongol Empire, the Muslim world was this complete kaleidoscope and mess in the great Turkic Muslim states came from this kaleidoscope where it's interesting. You'll see really funny things in the map. Like this is the black sheep Turks who had this area of northern Iraq and Armenia and those places. You'll see these random warlords just carve up territory. The Timurids were this they're called. If you look at maps of this time period, this huge region is just Tamerlane's dominion. And it shows. This was this era where singular men built empires out of this raw chaos. And the Turks came from this wild west frontier in northwestern Turkey against the Christians. The Osmanlis were unimportant. Osmanly they were very manly. They were this unimportant frontier people, unimportant frontier counts. Who unified the frontier against the Byzantines next to Constantinople. And because they were on this fault line, they grew strong enough and they could incorporate both, both Asiatic horse cavalry with European guns. Because keep in mind, although the Christians learned of gunpowder through the Muslim world, the Muslims were started incorporating gunpowder warfare from the Europeans in turn. Keep in mind it's jumping from China to Italy, France, England, who then improve the technology. Then it ripples back to Islam where the gun manufacturers that the Ottomans were using, they were Christian Europeans. The guy who made the cannonballs to take down Constantinople. Where Constantinople was this thousand year old fort that had fought off dozens of invasions. It was the unbeatable walls. The Turks finally conquered it in 1453 with using enormous guns. It was made by a Hungarian guy who first offered his services to the Byzantines to help fellow Christians. The Byzantines refused to pay him, so he just fought for the Turks instead.
- [78:40]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, that's part of the reason why I was slightly hesitant on the Japan best army thing because one of the reasons I would tend to give it to the Europeans is they're the center of the manufacturing.
- [78:52]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [78:53]
Austin Padgett
Which kind of like if it comes down to it then it actually becomes a relevant factor. But I love examining the horses, the conditions that lead to the horses plus guns combo because it's just a really cool combination. And the Eurasian horse tribes adopting it is a natural kind of.
- [79:12]
Rudyard Lynch
It is. And it shows a lot of social history for a society that we don't know about. Where if you want to look at the Turks for example, their heavy cavalry were Sifahi noblemen. Then they had these leftover barbarian tribes from the step who provided the horse archers. The janissaries were. And again it shows that the. The if you were to ask, I say the Japanese are arguably the best in 1600 I might have said slipped up and said they were the best. The people who I would put number one are the Spanish. The Spanish had by far the best military, or they had a really good military between the terkios, heavy cavalry, musket formations, they would hire out sort of Swiss mercenaries, and the Spanish were able to beat the Turks. But both of them had this stasis in the Mediterranean where they'd butt heads in the Mediterranean and not. But the break through the other side, sort of Cold War iron curtain. And the janissaries were the big Turkish gun formations. And as I said before, they were slave soldiers from the Balkans who were appointed because in Islamic society, everyone is ultimately responsible for their family first. And Ibn Khaldun talks about how successful states are built on pure blood lineages, where people trust their bloodline, and once the bloodline of a lineage becomes broken up, they will no longer fight for each other. And that was obviously true to a medieval Islamic author, because the family and the clan is so strong in Islam, it controls every element of their life. Who you marry, who you work with, who you live with. But because of that, if you appoint another clan line as the king into your position of power, you can't trust them anymore. So Muslim governance has been dependent on hiring slave soldiers, which keep winning. And I think the Turks might have actually read Ibn Khaldun and learned from him. Which is why Ibn Khaldun, writing around the time of the Black death in the 14th century, said that dynasties only last 120 years, because it follows the cycle of after four generations, they grow weak and there's too many descendants and they fight against each other. The Turks weren't stupid. I think they read Ibn Khaldun, figured it out, and then they lasted 600 years. Because what they would do is that whenever a new caliph would arise, they would kill all of his potential competitors and shove them into cage. Shove them into cages and kill them. So the Turkish court was this horrifying thing where if you inherit power, you get total authority, and if you don't, your brothers all die. So the king has a harem of thousands of women. He picks the best descendant, all the others die and get killed. And that's to stop the elite overproduction that Khaldun talks about. Secondly, the Turks had a balance of power where their slave soldiers did not gain dominance. And they stopped the Turks, the Anatolian Turks, from becoming decadent through having a population of free farmers who had an incentive to fight. And with the Janissaries. By the time of the 18th century, they eventually dominated the Ottoman court. But it's surprising. It Took that long, to be frank, because the Janissaries were an elite formation, they could routinely defeat European armies like the Habsburgs or the Spanish, whatever. And the Turks were feared across Europe, where even the Turkish guns, the Turkish cannons, Until the late 17th century, nearly the time of Mozart, they were seen to be frequently better than Western guns, where you have authors talking about how terrifying the Turkish guns are. And so the Turks are a very primal example of a gunpowder empire, and they used it to conquer one of the largest states in history.
- [82:54]
Austin Padgett
Squid gaming the entire royal court is insane.
- [82:58]
Rudyard Lynch
It is. It's.
- [83:00]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. To me it sounds like the nobles aren't in charge in that situation. No, it sounds like they're controlled by a junta who doesn't want separate elements of the military junta to be able to make claims around, to make puppets out of those various characters.
- [83:15]
Rudyard Lynch
That's very true. The word is junta, though, Right. And these. It's Spanish. Where like Jefe, Chief Juan Don. I heard that when Byron wrote it, it was Don Juan, and that made me want to kill myself.
- [83:30]
Austin Padgett
And it's still Jesus, though. Not Jesus.
- [83:33]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. It's funny, when I was in California, I'd have doordash drivers called Jesus and then it said, Jesus is coming in 12 minutes.
- [83:40]
Austin Padgett
Right. Oh, great. I didn't know the Rapture was announced on an app.
- [83:44]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, yeah. No, but you're right. And that's a symptom of other gunpowder empires where the nobility and the church have been cowed so that it serves the state where. And in both cases, the church in these or the ulama, which is the Muslim version of church, became totally socially conservative, serving the interests of power in the Turkish Empire. The economy was under these highly controlled guilds. And then the nobility had been cowed where they were forced to have military service to the government. And they couldn't develop these entrenched power interests to push against the state's authority. So it's like Latin America, where the elites have all the power, but it's a sort of low trust equilibrium.
- [84:34]
Austin Padgett
Interesting.
- [84:36]
Rudyard Lynch
What happens due to the domination of the Janissaries and the Turkish military is that over the course of the 18th century, as Europe radically innovated with its military formations with German drill drills, really important history rifling, better guns, better tactics. The Turks didn't. So by the time you get to the mid 18th century, the Europeans had an enormous advantage over the Turks. And the Turks were called the sick men of Europe, where they had also grown weak. So the Turks were stuck fighting a defensive war. From the 18th century onwards where after they attacked Vienna and lost in the late 17th century, the Austrians took back Transylvania and everything north of the Danube from the Turks, except for Wallachia. And then the only reason the Turks survived was the European powers balanced and helped Turkey. Because if any European power conquered the Turkish possessions in the Balkans with the Russians really wanted to, it would disrupt the European balance of power. So whenever the Russians tried to conquer the Turks and seize Constantinople, the British and the French stopped the them the Austrians just lacked. The Austrians aren't really a super dynamic empire. I don't think they could have done it. But the Turks became a total mess and they. And whenever the Turkish government tried to innovate, and there were several times in the late 18th century, the Turks tried to innovate and incorporate Western technology in military. The Janissaries blocked them. Over the course of the 19th century, the Turks were routinely humiliated by Western powers. Where it was known by that point that the Europeans were better. Where Muslim authors are really embarrassing. They wouldn't admit any European superiority or that the Westerners were even people. They said the Westerners were savages, like animals, or the Africans, their words, not mine. And until the 18th century, then they realized it too late and they still weren't able to change. And by the time you get to World War I era, the situation had gotten grave enough where the Turks had lost almost their entire empire that the Young Turks, or cadres of young officers from the new military, deplaced the Janissaries and ended the Ottoman Empire. Where the Ottoman Empire had become wedded to this early gunpowder empire system because they were so dependent on it, but they couldn't change change.
- [87:00]
Austin Padgett
And in the Young Turks, that's in the 1920s, where you had the secular leader who sent Turkey on its current trajectory, which was interrupted recently with Erdogan, who I think is probably the only time since then where they had a shift back into a more Islamic traditional direction. But your Turkey's still caught in this middle ground between Europe and the Middle East. Yeah, a lot of French speaking there. The. The funny thing about incorporating them within various international conceptions of Europe. And then it's so interesting with the. They made their decision in the 18th century to try and modernize the Janissaries. Stop them. Right. They make that decision to stop them, and then they feel shame in the 19th century because they're so far behind, and this shame leads them to like, double down on their decision. So it's an extended version of like a corporation where someone makes a decision and then they have to justify it because they made that decision. It's funny how everything works the same.
- [88:09]
Rudyard Lynch
That's a consistent theme in human psychology. Oftentimes, dying societies push their worst decision and double down in their worst trait rather than win. Where the Turks, the Islamic world became significantly more socially conservative over this period. Where the modern sect, the Taliban pulls from are the Wahhabis. The founder of that, Ibn Wahhab lived at the time of the American Revolution. So modern radical Islam is not a traditional old part of Islam. It's a new movement comparable to communism or liberalism that was a revolution action, because once the Muslim world failed, their goal was to return to the era of the Prophet, to gain power to fight the Europeans. And it took a while for them to figure it out. And it's interesting, there's a great book called the Case for Islamo Christian Civilization by Bulliet. And the thesis he makes is that until the modern period, developments in Christian Europe were comparable in part of the same trajectory as the Islamic world. And he said Islam as the religion won, the west as a society won, where Islam survived as the religion. And then in the West, Christianity got weaker, but the Western civilization, which secularized, won. So in the west, the institutions won, the culture died in Islam, the culture survived, the institutions grew weak.
- [89:33]
Austin Padgett
But how does that relate to Islam being turned into sort of like a modern communists kind of.
- [89:41]
Rudyard Lynch
So jihadism is a. So the modern late 20th century jihadists that we've been dealing with from the war of terror, they're actually basing it on communism because these Muslim authors and writers studied in Western universities or in the Soviet Union, they studied under communist professors. And they thought, wait, this is actually. We hate this. This is utterly godless. Where it's funny a lot of. One of the founders of the modern Wahhabi movement, he learned it from hanging out in rural Colorado in the 50s, and he was shocked by the degeneracy there. And so he went back to Islam and reformulated it where they were literally basing it on communism as this messianic national organization where the faithful come together and establish the global unified state. So it's a combination of communism, the structure of communism, with their earlier Islamic messianic movements like the Ismailis or the. What's the sect in. In. In Oman that are like radical anarchists? I forget them.
- [90:52]
Austin Padgett
Right. Like it fits with liberation theology.
- [90:54]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. It's very much like that. And most Muslims today don't like the rad, they don't like the jihadis. The left lies about this. A lot of Muslims, most Muslims today are not jihadis. A lot of them are highly fate are highly to moderately favorable to them. And there's another chunk that aren't. But as examples of the gunpowder empires in the Middle East, Bonapartism had a huge impact on Islam. Where Napoleon founded the state in Egypt and the French put a lot of effort into modernizing Egypt as a society. And Muhammad Ali, who was an Albanian warlord, he declared independence in Egypt after the French from the Turks. And he was working with Egypt's nobility, who were Turks and Mamelukes who had brutally repressed Egypt and the local Egyptians were shoved into the ground. But he built it around Bonapartist principles. He started growing cotton and other exports for Europe. He brought in European experts to govern it. He helped the French build the Suez Canal. So this Bonapartist secular authoritarian structure became popularized in the Muslim world, pulling from the west. And so Syria, Iraq, a lot of these, the bunker regimes or the secular regimes in the Middle east, which dominated especially through the late through 20th centuries. And there's still a lot today, they're modeling themselves off European authoritarianism. Then the other polarity of Islamic politics is the Muslim Brotherhood and these radical Islamists. So when the America conquers regions in the Middle east and they immediately vote in Islamists, it's because the Islamists are the sort of like right wing populist group who are pushing against the Westernized elite.
- [92:45]
Austin Padgett
It basically they're stuck in their own version of a commie reactionary paradigm.
- [92:50]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [92:51]
Austin Padgett
And the Bonapartism, it all makes sense because they cycle back and forth into each other. Right, because the Bonapartism grew out of the communism in the French Revolution, but it also provides a smoother transition back into communism than a non Bonapartist structure.
- [93:07]
Rudyard Lynch
So the gunpowder empires is a term originally starting with Asia. I think Marshall Hodgson, who's a big. He's a Quaker actually, and he's a big historian of the Islamic world. I read part of his trilogy on Islam. It's not that well written. I read it when I was in college five years ago. I just found it boring. But I think he invented the term for the trinity of Turkey, Persia and the Mughals. You had a few other gunpowder empires in Islam, like the Moroccans or the Songhai, which I'll touch on briefly. Moroccans had a state. They were the only place west of Turkey who was independent. It was a functioning society. They fought out the Spanish and the Portuguese. They did launch a pretty cool campaign where they marched across the entire Sahara and wiped out Timbuktu raiding it, establishing a colony briefly before going back. And that killed the Songhai Empire, which was the Sahel's gunpowder empire. Were after the fall of the Mali Empire, which people know about from Mansa Musa's wealth. In the high medieval period, the Mali Empire fell apart. And this is their records because they were getting their gold supply from. How do I articulate this? What they said is that their gold supply, their economy was dependent on was based around placating an enormous serpent. Then the serpent sat on the gold. They then placated. They stopped placating the serpents. The serpent started killing them. They couldn't harvest gold anymore. Then their state fell apart. And there was the battle between the hunters, the hunter's guild and the sorcerer's guild. This is Sundiata, where the hunter's guild was evil. Sorry. The hunter's guild was evil. Sorry. The blacksmith and the hunters, the hunt. The hunter's guild was evil. The blacksmith guild was good. Both of them practiced sorcery. And seizing the throne was attacking an enormous buffalo and taking it down. Magical buffalo. Our hero, Sundiata, who I believe is blacksmith guild, he captured the buffalo, installed himself as king. I read this like five years ago, written in medieval West Africa. And so this Dark Age period, and I believe the Malinke horsemen from the Sahel region were in the Sahel, or this. The Sahel is Arabic for the shore. It's the only large region of Africa that had states and large cities before the pre industrial in the pre modern world. And the Sahel is Arabic for the shore because you have the great desert of the Sahara. The shore to it is the Sahel, and south of it is the jungles where you can't build large societies due to diseases. But the Sahel has lots of weird dynamics where there's jihads of horsemen who come down from the edge of the desert. Then they destroy the farming peoples, and you build these fortress cities that are these islands of safety in the open grassland. And then a great man uses Islam to arise. So over the early modern period, you saw the rise of jihads who unified regions of the Sahel, often with these horse tribes. The horse tribes conquer areas, then grow decadent and weak. So the Song High were one of the great gunpowder states. And people forget how they were more important and more successful than Mali, which is the big empire. These were states that are like 2 to 4 million people. But I believe there was a technological loss from Mali to Songhai, where Mali had huge libraries and culture and that things, I think Songhai was a step down culturally, but it was better organized and larger. Where songhai had. They had organized militaries. They had professional militaries. But then songhai fell apart. Because the Moroccans sent an army across the desert, burned. I need to read more books on the topic. I think they burned the capital, Timbuktu, or whatever the capital of Songhai versus Mali was. And then it fell apart into various states. Where there were several more jihads. There was this great prophet, mystic. Who formed an army. That conquered across the region in the 18th century. And he had his own private empire, like one of the step nomads. And the sokoto caliphate formed in the 19th century. That was one of those radical sect of muslims in northern nigeria. They had the huge city of kano, which had hundreds of thousands of people. And by this point, slavery had destroyed the sahelian states. Because it used to be that the sahelians would raid south into the jungle, Take slaves, Bring them across the sahara to the muslims, where the muslim slave trade Is the largest in history. It continued into the 19th century. What then happened was that due to the Europeans. Adding additional pressure on the Atlantic slave trade. And the Europeans paid the africans more. You saw the africans get guns earlier, Destroy the sahelian states. Now the sahel, which was the center of civilization beforehand, Stopped, Became poorer than the coastline. The sahel is the consistently poorest region on earth today, Barring the congo. Then society and empires, or kingdoms, Started to develop along the coast. Due to the gunpowder advantage from the europeans.
- [98:22]
Austin Padgett
It's so interesting how the desert works as an ocean functionally. And how they build forts on the edge of it. Just exactly how the normans would build forts on the beach along the coastline.
- [98:35]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [98:35]
Austin Padgett
And, yeah, it is the poorest area today. I was involved in a, like, crypto project. To try and, like, verify property rights on the sahel. So that they could connect to produce buyers. And then verify their property rights. And then develop the land to stop desertification. Because it's just like the desert is encroaching on the area. It's very poor.
- [98:57]
Rudyard Lynch
First of all, that sounds very cool, but what was the corruption level?
- [99:01]
Austin Padgett
Well, that was the whole point. It was like, maybe we can get around it. By just verifying property rights on the blockchain. Because every property claim has, like, 10 people written down on it. And the government database. And then they can just decide whoever has it.
- [99:13]
Rudyard Lynch
Crypto sounds very good for Africa for that reason. Because you can trust crypto More than you can trust the local African currencies, which are often worthless for the final gunpowder states. We spoke a little bit at Safavid Persia and this. The Safavids they had a centralized state. They, Persia had a sort of nice stable decline where Persia was one of the very few places that didn't experience the crisis of the 17th century. Where across Eurasia a lot of countries lost a third of their people. Between Germany, Spain, the Turks, China, Germany, Ireland, the New World lost more than that due to disease. But the Safavids didn't have a crisis because they pro. They practice wide scale infanticide and they had mass abortions on a sort of industrial scale because Islam actually doesn't have rules against abortion. A lot of Koranic scholars think it does, others don't. And their sect of Shia because the Shias have sort of messianistic switch where. Because the Sunnis aren't. The Sunnis are 90% of Islam and the Turks were Sunnis, the Persians were Shia. The Shias will use Messiah in their ideas of the Mahdi that the next son of the next prophet spirit, the spirit of Muhammad will emerge. And they've done this a few times. So the Safavids were radicals at first and then they chilled out over time and they nep. Persia used to be one of the great centers of learning and economics. And so the Safavids established this highly feudal agrarian society without a lot of place for that, that was highly socially conservative. And they experienced one of the worst cases of drug addiction in the world where they had mass opium issues because the Quran says do not experience drunkenness. And some Quranic scholars say opium is not drunkenness. And so Safavid Persia, it's like, you must know places like this where the elites holds the population down so that nothing happens. And it's a low pressure equilibrium. But then they use drugs and abortion to get out of it.
- [101:21]
Austin Padgett
Right? You mean like America?
- [101:23]
Rudyard Lynch
I was gonna say Pennsylvania.
- [101:25]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, exactly right. It's. It's a. It's a sadder version of bread and circuses. It's what people do to their dogs when they have a dog that's too big for the apartment. Yeah, it's the only way to manage that. I forgot I was gonna say something funny about something, but yeah, I'll think of it.
- [101:45]
Rudyard Lynch
School. When I was in high school, they showed us a map of opiate addictions around America and they just showed us the states and we had to guess what it was. And I said deaths in the US Civil war because Pennsylvania's got more numeric opiate overdoses. Than any other state in America, even with larger populations like California or Texas. Because the map of opiate overdoses is the same as. Basically the same as deaths in the civil war, because it's what places were important during the industrial revolution that have declined. You see it in parts of the south, the rust belt and Persia moved over to the Qahars, who were another group of Turks. They were barbarians from the steppe, and it was largely the same project. The Qahars had a single really interesting leader called Nadir shah in the 18th century who tried to modernize. He conquered a larger empire. He conquered Iraq from the Turks, parts of Armenia. He conquered out to Delhi where the Persians besieged and took Delhi twice. But once Nadir Shah died prematurely, the Turks stopped this innovative cycle. The last of the major gunpowder states was the Mughal empire, where the Mughals, in The mid early 16th century, I believe, at the battle of Panipat, Babur was a descendant of both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, who was an Uzbek. And oftentimes invaders of India are Uzbeks like Tamerlane or the Aryans or some of Genghis Khan's men who go to Afghanistan. They raise men among the Afghan tribes because the Afghan tribes have this innate masculinity inside them that allows them to conquer. The Afghans have attacked in India over 20 times, and they've won 95% of those wars. There is a Russian. Yeah, respect. There is. There was a Russian scholar in the 19th century who said there have been 19 invasions of India and 18 were success. There have been 19 invasions of India from the northwest, and 18 have been successful.
- [103:47]
Austin Padgett
Well, that might be more of a you problem for. For India.
- [103:51]
Rudyard Lynch
But think of the one guy who failed. He must be like, feel such shame.
- [103:55]
Austin Padgett
You mean like Italy and Ethiopia?
- [103:58]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, exactly. And Afghanistan. They have the same. They have the same horrible treatment of women with the burkas. And they have honor killings where if a woman gets raped, she should commit suicide so that she wipes out the shame on her family line. And oftenly her. Often her brothers or her father will kill her for them to clean the family line. And it's just abhorrent.
- [104:21]
Austin Padgett
Were they growing opium in Afghanistan back then?
- [104:23]
Rudyard Lynch
They were.
- [104:25]
Austin Padgett
Okay, so they were. They were along the doctrine that opium doesn't count as getting drunk. Drunk refers to alcohol. But what they misinterpreted is that the Quran is against downers. So, like, alcohol and opium don't count, but uppers should be okay, I think so, like meth and tobacco.
- [104:48]
Rudyard Lynch
I don't know, it's.
- [104:51]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, that's just my legal, theological, scholarly opinion.
- [104:55]
Rudyard Lynch
I haven't studied Koranic legalism enough. I'm going to be blunt. I think a society should have at least one substance to take the edge off from life. Where I'd rather the society uses alcohol than opium, but life is hard enough. Your society should have at least one like thing to cut the edge.
- [105:13]
Austin Padgett
It's a little utopian to expect the lack of any sort of substance like that because they're used to make up for dependencies due to like, lacking of other optimal conditions.
- [105:25]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [105:26]
Austin Padgett
So unless you can expect all conditions to be optimal, then you probably can't expect that.
- [105:31]
Rudyard Lynch
And Babur was a nobleman from Uzbekistan who got kicked out. And we have his autobiography. And it's interesting. Babur was a sensitive young man. He would write in his autobiography, would write lengthily about his emotions and his loves and his sorrows and how his like, relation to his environment and that his friends, people who talk to he would have homosexual affairs, which was normal in the Muslim world at the time. He'd write about those. So we have this great conqueror who just being a sensitive young man, writing about his, like, his passions, which I think is. I think it's sweet. But he also amassed an army in Afghanistan. He was the first guy to use guns in this time period. He invaded northern India. And at the battle of Panapat, using the classic Muslim combination of gunpowder and horse archers, he wiped out a Muslim army 10 times his size and that secured northeast northwest India for him. And from Babur's own writings, he viewed the Indians with contempt. He saw them as weak and he saw them as idolaters. Where the Muslims were nicer to the Christians and the Jews who are a part of the Abrahamic religions. The Quran tells Muslims to respect the other Abrahamics. They got along better with the Zoroastrians, who also have a comparable religious tradition. They viewed the Hindus with utter contempt as pagans and idolaters and degenerates. And Hinduism would do things the Muslims didn't like, where they'd have over. They'd have pornography in their temples. In Hindu temples. They literally have. They have people fucking tantric sex magic. They. I think at least one or two Hindu cults did human sacrifice. You had the thuggies who were religious, criminal cults who would commit crimes, take people, sacrifice them to the chaotic goddess Kali.
- [107:22]
Austin Padgett
They ritualized a lot of schizophrenic and homeless behavior.
- [107:25]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. Hinduism doesn't have quality control. There's no degree Hinduism is An open source book on how different mystics and different people can attain God through different ways, but there's no standards. So the Mughals were brutal in northern India. They subjugated the region and it was a multi stage process where the Mughals were really good at importing new people in from the hills. And they had a leadership class that was partly Turkic, partly Persian, partly Afghan. And so they had this trans Muslim elite which they used to conquer India. And they developed this sort of beautiful culture that was Islamo Persian. And the Taj Mahal is the ultimate culmination of it where the Persians were conquered. But they had a huge cultural impact across Asia. Where Persian culture influenced Indonesia, which converted to Islam, it influenced India. And so you had this ruling Islamic culture on top, then beneath it you had Hindus. And you have Hindu authors in this time who talk about how the Muslims may have defeated us physically, but we are going to become even more conservative because we must submit to God in our souls even though the Muslims have conquered us. So the Hindus didn't really fight back that hard. They had kind of given up on that. By this point the caste system in the social conservatism and the religion had become all consuming. So the Hindus didn't have the social flexibility to fight back very hard.
- [108:56]
Austin Padgett
So they told the invading armies that like bro, our biggest battle is on the inside, so go for it.
- [109:02]
Rudyard Lynch
A few centuries earlier, because the Muslims went through multiple rounds of invading India. In one of the earlier rounds in the 11th century under Mahmoud of Ghazni, the Hindu rulers would literally build temples to fight the Muslims. The gods give them favor and then not funds the militaries. The Muslims could routinely beat Hindu armies 10 times their size, as could the British at the Battle of Plassey as an example. Because there was such little social trust and organization, the Hindus would mobilize these enormous armies that either the guns or the horses could. They'd normally surround them or they'd sometimes do interesting mechanisms. I forget which battle this was. It might be Panipat where you turn the Indian elephants back on their own men.
- [109:48]
Austin Padgett
Right. That seems to always happen.
- [109:50]
Rudyard Lynch
It does. You have to be careful with your elephants. It's why whenever there's an elephant in the room, I shoot it and sell its ivory.
- [109:57]
Austin Padgett
Smart, smart. But they don't belong in rooms.
- [110:00]
Rudyard Lynch
They don't. They belong in the jungle with their elephant friends. I love elephants. You know, they're possibly as smart as humans.
- [110:07]
Austin Padgett
I don't know about that, but I've interacted a lot with elephants. I made really close friends with a baby. And he wouldn't let me leave. And I swam in between two big ones as they were closing together and I had to get under their legs underwater to escape. Yes, crazy.
- [110:21]
Rudyard Lynch
I saw elephants in Thailand. I played with them a little. Thailand and Burma were both gunpowder states. Burma, they had a brief empire under Tangu, where in the 16th century they conquered most of the neighboring countries, which fell apart pretty quickly. Then India, the Mughals, over a multi generational period, conquered south. So in the 16th century they had the north plain. Then by the 18th century they were in the south and they controlled almost all of India for a very brief period from the term from the 17th to the 18th centuries. And that was under Aurangzeb. And Aurangzeb, he was sort of the tail end where they had gradually grown decadent. Where Babur was the first group of in the 16th century he was the first vigorous barbarian. Then by the time the 18th century they had acclimated to Hindu India. They had chilled out where one of the, one of the great Mughal rulers, Akbar, he tried to make a new religion that would fuse the shared elements of Hinduism and Islam. But that utterly failed where both the Hindus and the Muslims hated it. He was a forward thinking guy because he was part of the tolerance phase of we're an Empire that's 90 plus percent Hindu, but we have a Muslim ruling class. Let's fuse them together and under a new religion. But that didn't work. And the Mughals, they were an oppressive society. Where they were one of India was potentially the wealthiest place on earth, but it wasn't that economically advanced. They were a society where almost everyone lived in grinding poverty. The nobility was utterly oppressive and they take most of what the peasantry earned and then spend it on luxuries. So India was the sort of place most people lived in grinding poverty. A few lived in astounding wealth with, with these enormous gilded palaces and enormous wealth everywhere and all those things. And it's one of the most unequal societies ever in human history. And so with the Mughals you have this beautiful society that produced the Taj Mahal, but then also had the Thuggee cults and widow burning. It's a duality. And in the early 18th century, Aurangzeb had expended too much effort to conquer the mountains and the valleys of the south, where north India is pretty easy to unify. But then northern regimes will spend themselves on conquering the south, which is a lot harder. India had never been unified before the British. And then India fell apart To a period called the anarchy, where it all fell apart. The Afghans conquered across northern India once again, making out to Bengal. The Persians conquered out to. The Persians, sacked Delhi, which was a Mughal. The Mughals made Delhi. No, sorry, the Delhi Sultanate, who were mamluks in the 1200s made Delhi. The Mughals just made it their capital. The Persians took Delhi twice, took all the possessions. And then India fell into a period called the anarchy. And there's a sort of mid history book that the establishment loved called called the anarchy. But 18th century India, where the Maratha confederacy, the south Indian hill tribe, who fought a heroic. They actually had a black commander because India's got a small black population due to the trade with Africa and the slave trade. Their black commander heroically fought off the Mughals for many years. And then the Marathas in the south rose to become India's great power, conquering the north Indian plain. But out of this chaos came the British. And this is the end of the gunpowder empires. Where the rise of the British in India showed that the Asian gunpowder empires had finally ended. Because the European advancements in their own gunpowder in society and military had finally out competed the Asians. And so the British were able to conquer India practically outnumbered a thousands to one, Frequently winning battles ten to one, even against the more vigorous Muslim armies. And the end of the gunpowder empires was the rise of European colonialism. Because these Asian states did very well when they were competing against other Asians. But they had picked the wrong strategy for the rapidly shifting, highly advanced Europeans. So all of the gunpowder empires lost it to the Europeans. Whether the Turkish empire being divided up in the British, the French and the Russians, the in the Italians, the Mughals getting conquered by India. Iran became a British puppet state against the Russians. China was divided. China was humiliated by western powers until it became liberal. And then communist Japan was able to survive by transmuting and burning away their old form. So by the time you get to 1900, the era of the gunpowder empires was definitively over. And it was over for reasons no one involved could have understood. Because societies under pressure make their worst trait most. And the Asians had done this, which had forced the Asians, which will force the Asians to go through a period of profound cultural and civilizational change which we have not seen the end to. Which is going to be fascinating to watch. Because they can't go back.
- [115:43]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. Like we've talked about before, it's almost like the modern society is too complex to deconstruct. If you start deconstructing it you end up all the way to like a state of system failure. And we talked about technology and the impact of different technologies and in the beginning of the episode. And AI feels like a comparable one to guns in the way that it not only will potentially disrupt power dynamics, but be like a key factor in which way the world goes in the kind of contest we were talking about earlier versus cartel and anti cartel.
- [116:23]
Rudyard Lynch
Of course. I agree. That's mega facts.
- [116:26]
Austin Padgett
Mega facts.
- [116:28]
Rudyard Lynch
I want to make maga facts a popular phrase. But next episode's Inner Asia. We're going to cover Central Asia. Tibet and Central Asia. Tibet, Uyghurstan and Afghanistan.
- [116:43]
Austin Padgett
Very cool. Those are cool areas. And yeah, pretty interesting for us because I. We just did a little war there.
- [116:51]
Rudyard Lynch
I periodically just do videos like this as sharpshooting to see if like I can.
- [116:55]
Austin Padgett
Right.
- [116:56]
Rudyard Lynch
No one else is going to make this video. So we will.
- [116:58]
Austin Padgett
Right. It's not like you read a book about it recently or something. It's just where the episode spit us out.
- [117:04]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. It's also. I see the sort of duty to fill in people's information gap holes. Like if. If I make a map of where all these videos are set, there's a huge void which you should probably know about because those people have their own stories which are interesting.
- [117:19]
Austin Padgett
Right. I like the gunpowder lens too because it. It's just cuts across in a different way. I know there's a book on paper I've been meaning to read forever. I don't know if you ever read that one, but that would be other interesting lens because a lot can be explained through stuff like the history of paper. Because of all the dynamics it touches.
- [117:38]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [117:40]
Austin Padgett
Well, weird thing. And. Yeah. And then it's also fun to explore the like communist tensions between communism reactionary and like develop pro development forces in Islam. We haven't really painted that area with that brush as much. So it's fun to see like all these patterns overlap in another area.
- [118:00]
Rudyard Lynch
I think the West's intellectual treatment of Islam has been fundamentally very unfair. We see. We see Islam as an innately barbaric religion, which it isn't. Because in the high Middle Ages it was more advanced in the West. We paint the Islamic world as a monolith, which it isn't. It's as different as the rest. We paint them as stupid, which it's not. You'll meet. You can meet lots of incredibly intelligent upper class Middle Eastern people.
- [118:26]
Austin Padgett
Oh yeah.
- [118:26]
Rudyard Lynch
It's why there's so many in Silicon Valley because they make really good coders and we also paint them as, like, universally brown. But you have black Muslims, you have Muslims who are as white as us, and you have Asian Muslims. So the Middle East, I do not think, is an area that's been painted fairly. I mean, once I'm done reading Ibn Khaldun and maybe another book book, I want us to make a video on medieval Islam. I think that's a topic that we can cover, but I don't think people would get anywhere else that would be cool.
- [118:58]
Austin Padgett
And it's fun to see all the weird alliances because, like, why does the left get along with Muslims in some senses? Because there's that communist connection you're not thinking of. And then. But then also at the same time, the reactionaries are getting along with Muslims because they're like, oh, they're. They're stopping global homo or whatever. And then there's like these multiple intersecting lens of bureaucracy and culture that create all these weird combinations of alliances and confusions that would be fun to untangle.
- [119:27]
Rudyard Lynch
I'm gonna cut. I'm gonna cut the video after this. But the reason the Muslims, the reason the left likes the Muslims is because they hate white men to an irrational degree where they'll pick any enemies white men have. It's why the left flirts with China a lot.
- [119:40]
Austin Padgett
So the oppressor thing, bigger power and power.
- [119:44]
Rudyard Lynch
The reason some, some parts of the right hate Muslims, others are more fine with them. More of the right hates Muslims, it's because they're based and they're socially conservative and they've been nice to Lord Miles.
- [119:56]
Austin Padgett
Right, well, and they'll, they'll be mad at them in the context of immigration, but then, like, appreciate them in terms of usury or something.
- [120:03]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, exactly. Well, it's good to see a man, James. Listen to your heart. Inshallah.
- [120:10]
Austin Padgett
Bang bang.
- [120:12]
Podcast Narrator
History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett 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.