EnclavedMicrostate在2021-12-27~2022-01-02的言论

2022-01-02 作者: EnclavedMicrostate

原文 #Reddit 的其它文章

5: How established were the Qing Authorities in Taiwan when they were ceded to Japan?, submitted on 2021-12-29 01:16:34+08:00.
IV: The Treaty Port Era
V: Summary
Bibliography and Further Reading:
6: Tanker nearly takes out rental boat anchored in shipping channel, submitted on 2021-12-29 04:25:04+08:00.
7: China was conquered by the mongols and the Manchurians. Why was it not subjected to their total influence, and instead China absorbed them?, submitted on 2021-12-29 05:12:23+08:00.
8: In the Chinese SciFi novel “The Three Body Problem” the mass violence and persecution of the Cultural Revolution are important plot points that are often revisited throughout, what is the view of the Cultural Revolution and its consequences in modern China?, submitted on 2021-12-29 06:12:57+08:00.
9: AZKi will be moving from INNK music into Hololive proper, submitted on 2021-12-29 11:05:29+08:00.
10: The Inca Empire referred to itself as the ‘Four Parts Together’, but what were the four parts, and what distinguished them? Was it just an arbitrary administrative separation, or did they represent distinct cultural groups within the empire?, submitted on 2021-12-29 13:48:53+08:00.
11: how many troops were armoured in ancient world?, submitted on 2021-12-29 17:03:55+08:00.
12: What do each of the royal titles in a historical monarchic system rule over and what is their modern equavalent?, submitted on 2021-12-29 20:40:55+08:00.
13: Why was China so weak in the 19th century?, submitted on 2021-12-30 01:11:07+08:00.
14: Beware of the bike lane, submitted on 2021-12-30 03:23:13+08:00.
15: How do historians cut through bias to find the truth of historical events?, submitted on 2021-12-30 22:23:02+08:00.
16: Which God through out history was the biggest a-hole and which God was the kindest?, submitted on 2021-12-31 02:51:36+08:00.
17: Why didn’t anyone revolt against the Macedonian kings after the Alexander died and his empire was split up?, submitted on 2021-12-31 08:43:24+08:00.
I: The Revolts That Were
II: The Revolts That Weren’t

5: How established were the Qing Authorities in Taiwan when they were ceded to Japan?, submitted on 2021-12-29 01:16:34+08:00.

—– 5.1 —–2021-12-29 18:09:40+08:00:

IV: The Treaty Port Era

In 1858, the Treaty of Tianjin (or ‘treaties’ to be pedantic, as the British, French, American and Russian versions all have subtle differences) stipulated the opening of a slew of new treaty ports across the Qing Empire. The two that particularly concerned Taiwan were Taiwan-fu, which is now the district of Anping in the city of Tainan, and Tamsui (or Danshui), which served as the main port of Taipei. The treaty ports entailed two significant changes on Taiwan that substantially altered the Qing’s relationship to the island and its people. The first was that an increase in maritime commerce in the East China Sea was starting to become a source of diplomatic headaches as a result of incidents over ship crews who were attacked by indigenous tribes after being wrecked on the Taiwanese coast. The second was that the treaty ports created a new market for certain goods that would only be accessible in the western mountainous region: tea, which was believed to grow better in humid conditions at higher altitudes; camphor, which is extracted from the camphor laurel that was still abundant on Taiwan but which had been devastatingly over-harvested in mainland China; and coal, which was mined mainly in the mountains near Taipei. These combined to lead to a considerable increase in Qing penetration into the mountains.

The economic incentive had already been drawing Han settlement westward, but the diplomatic incidents around murdered sailors finally pushed the Qing to formally expand their hold over the Taiwanese mountains. The Rover incident in 1867 saw fourteen American civilians killed on the southern coast on Taiwan, and after Qing refusal to accept responsibility, owing to the incident occurring in ‘savage land’ outside Qing control, a punitive expedition of US Marines landed but were driven off. US diplomatic staff warned the Qing that in the long run, refusal to claim authority over the indigenous interior would be interpreted as meaning that the region would be considered terra nullius, and if the Qing would not claim it then another power would. This would be stressed again in the wake of the 1871 Mudan incident, in which 54 sailors from the Ryukyu Islands, then under effective Japanese dominion, were killed on the coast of southern Taiwan. After a consistent Qing refusal to claim responsibility, in 1874 a Japanese force landed and occupied several parts of Taiwan until paid off.

Following these incidents, the Qing decided that even from a diplomatic standpoint, it had become necessary to exercise more effective control over the island, and so considerably expanded its infrastructure in several areas. In the interior, areas of woodland were cleared to build roads, Han settlements were strategically designated to break up areas of indigenous land, and a new round of school-building was established as Qing authorities tried to forcibly Confucianise the mountain indigenous peoples. Military expeditions were sent to ‘pacify’ the tribes (never mind that they had not actually launched invasions of Qing territory in living memory), and preparations began for a considerable expansion in administrative infrastructure. And, for the first time, the entire island of Taiwan was mapped and marked as Qing territory.

By the time of the French attack on Taiwan in 1884, the Qing were already preparing to designate Taiwan as a province in its own right, rather than a department of Fujian Province across the strait. It had upped its military presence considerably, with the establishment of a bastioned fort in Anping (the Eternal Golden Castle) in the wake of the Japanese landings, and was eventually able to bottle up the French in their beachhead at Keelung and prevent a full takeover of the island. After the peace settlement, Taiwan was elevated to a province in 1887 under Liu Mingchuan, who had been appointed special commissioner for the island’s defence in 1884, in which capacity he established a series of fortifications around Taipei in preparation for a future attack. Said attack never came, of course, as Taiwan was handed over to Japan as part of the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895.

At the time of the annexation, Qing control over the island was not ‘complete’ as such, but it was far more comprehensive than it had been in 1860. During Liu Mingchuan’s governorship, Taiwan consisted of four prefectures: North Taiwan (Taibei), based at Taipei; Taiwan, based at what is now Taichung; South Taiwan (Tainan), based at Anping; and East Taiwan (Taidong), based at Pinan (now part of Taitung); the former three prefectures covered areas of older Han settlement, while East Taiwan covered most of what had been indigenous land as of 1874. In designating this area as a prefecture, the Qing asserted an equivalent level of political authority as in other parts of the island, even if the colonial project was still very much incomplete and ongoing.

V: Summary

In short, at the time of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the Qing had maintained a presence in the coastal plains region since the 1680s and had been pretty firmly entrenched since about 1790, but their presence in the mountain interior was barely two decades old, and relatively patchy – strong in areas where they had planted Han colonists, but weak where they still faced considerable resistance from indigenous peoples attempting to protect their sovereignty and way of life. Any suggestion that Qing control was loose would not be true of the coastal plains, but claiming that the Qing had firm control of the mountain interior would be overstating the case. The main thing is that both Qing and Japanese sovereignty over the island came, invariably, at the expense of that of indigenous peoples, whose displacement and erasure was an ongoing process throughout the island’s early modern and modern history.

Bibliography and Further Reading:

The book to read on colonialism on Qing Taiwan is Emma Teng’s Taiwan’s Imagined Geography (2004). John Robert Shepherd’s Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600-1800 (1993) is a dense but valuable read on Dutch, Zheng and Qing approaches to the island and its indigenous inhabitants.
On Qing ideology and ethnic policy, see Pamela Crossley’s The Translucent Mirror (1999), Mark Elliott’s The Manchu Way (2001), Edward Rhoads’ Manchus and Han (2000), James Millward’s Beyond the Pass (1997), and Pamela Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton (eds.)’s Empire at the Margins (2006).
As points of comparison with Qing Taiwan, see Laura Hostetler’s Qing Colonial Enterprise (2001) on Qing policy towards indigenous people in eighteenth-century Guizhou, and Seonmin Kim’s Ginseng and Borderland (2018) on diplomacy, colonialism, and ecology on the border between Qing Manchuria and Choson Korea.

6: Tanker nearly takes out rental boat anchored in shipping channel, submitted on 2021-12-29 04:25:04+08:00.

—– 6.1 —–2022-01-14 11:03:32+08:00:

It does look weird, but it seems like old, inactive subs are auto-renamed, perhaps to prevent their coming up on searches and/or to allow them to be reused. Take for instance https://www.reddit.com/r/a:t5_38oj6/, which used to be /r/badtactics.

7: China was conquered by the mongols and the Manchurians. Why was it not subjected to their total influence, and instead China absorbed them?, submitted on 2021-12-29 05:12:23+08:00.

—– 7.1 —–2022-01-04 19:40:01+08:00:

This is one of those ‘yes and no’ scenarios: the answer changed over time for different people. The Qing were perceived as foreign conquerors by a portion of the Han Chinese population, or at least the elite, for most of their existence; yet only in the late 19th century do we see any particularly large-scale political action resulting from that perceived foreignness. There are kind of two ways of going about viewing it: either a) until the mid-nineteenth century, the Qing were successful at projecting an image of acculturation that made their rule palatable to the Han Chinese writ large, on the basis that being seen as foreign was problematic and therefore the Qing avoided creating that impression, or b) the Han were broadly convinced of the Qing’s essential foreignness, but did not see this as problematic until, in the mid-nineteenth century, they came to adopt a much more ethnocentric form of politics.

8: In the Chinese SciFi novel “The Three Body Problem” the mass violence and persecution of the Cultural Revolution are important plot points that are often revisited throughout, what is the view of the Cultural Revolution and its consequences in modern China?, submitted on 2021-12-29 06:12:57+08:00.

—– 8.1 —–2021-12-29 16:49:53+08:00:

Thanks!

9: AZKi will be moving from INNK music into Hololive proper, submitted on 2021-12-29 11:05:29+08:00.

—– 9.1 —–2021-12-29 16:15:28+08:00:

Nah, Project: HOPE is part of HoloEN.

—– 9.2 —–2021-12-29 19:00:55+08:00:

I mean upd8 no longer even exists as of the end of 2020, so I don’t know who if anyone would have those.

—– 9.3 —–2021-12-29 19:20:01+08:00:

composition inc.

I believe Composition Inc. may just be a contractor handling video production matters rather than having any kind of ownership/management stake.

—– 9.4 —–2021-12-29 20:01:58+08:00:

Well, the main thing – which I neglected to bring up – is that INNK was always a subdivision of Cover. AZKi was, if I understand correctly, represented under upd8 while being ‘owned’ (IP-wise) and managed by Cover; but Suisei was under Cover as part of INNK but not affiliated directly with upd8. So I assume whatever upd8 may have had might have been some kind of contractual terms over AZKi’s affiliation with them which might have required her to terminate activity in mid-2022, but with upd8 folding that’s become obsolete and AZKi and Cover are now free to keep going past what would have been an agreed cutoff.

10: The Inca Empire referred to itself as the ‘Four Parts Together’, but what were the four parts, and what distinguished them? Was it just an arbitrary administrative separation, or did they represent distinct cultural groups within the empire?, submitted on 2021-12-29 13:48:53+08:00.

—– 10.1 —–2022-03-05 02:26:24+08:00:

Thank you!

11: how many troops were armoured in ancient world?, submitted on 2021-12-29 17:03:55+08:00.

—– 11.1 —–2021-12-29 18:10:37+08:00:

Please repost this question to the weekly “Short Answers” thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

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12: What do each of the royal titles in a historical monarchic system rule over and what is their modern equavalent?, submitted on 2021-12-29 20:40:55+08:00.

—– 12.1 —–2021-12-29 22:18:37+08:00:

13: Why was China so weak in the 19th century?, submitted on 2021-12-30 01:11:07+08:00.

—– 13.1 —–2021-12-30 13:27:15+08:00:

I did contemplate writing a fuller answer to this last night, but I feel like the various elements that would have made it up would have ended up recycled from older answers, so I’ll link said answers here and save myself the trouble. I will note, if there’s anything you’d like covered that I didn’t, do feel free to ask a follow-up or two or three about them.

14: Beware of the bike lane, submitted on 2021-12-30 03:23:13+08:00.

—– 14.1 —–2021-12-30 20:49:32+08:00:

Bless the maker and his water!

15: How do historians cut through bias to find the truth of historical events?, submitted on 2021-12-30 22:23:02+08:00.

—– 15.1 —–2021-12-31 11:44:08+08:00:

/u/LegalAction has given one example of how ‘bias’ – or just subjectivity in general – is worked with in trying to work out the original reality behind historical narratives, but I want to add my own point, largely reiterating what /u/zaffiro_in_giro has said, but I’m doing it anyway because I started this comment earlier and got distracted and I may as well finish.

To narrate from experience, a set of sources I’ve worked with concern the visions experienced by Hong Xiuquan, a 19th century Chinese religious leader, in 1837. The sources themselves, however, are not from that year: the absolute earliest reference is in 1846. These representations vary wildly in terms of level of detail, in the means by which they interpret these visions, in the basic chronology of the events surrounding them, and in the extent to which they are presented as relevant to contemporary Taiping policy. To describe a broad set of trends, the later the account is, the more detailed it is likely to be, the more likely that it interprets the visions through Biblical imagery, the more likely it is to elide inconvenient details and play up the miraculousness of the visionary experience, and the more likely it is to claim the visions as a source of legitimation for Taiping policy decisions.

Now, if you were trying to work out what Hong actually saw in 1837, good luck, but with the awareness that later accounts have those features you can reasonably infer that you ought to rely more heavily on the older accounts than the later ones. But that’s not what I was ding. My interest was in the narratives in and of themselves, how they changed, and why. It ceases to be my job to care whether the sources are accurate to the thing they’re explicitly narrating. What that ultimately entails is that the ‘biases’ of my sources aren’t my problem, they’re my subject in themselves.

In the event, what I’ve come to conclude is that the trend I described earlier was the product of an increasing emphasis on the visions’ centrality in the Taiping’s self-narrative. In other words, I detected an increasing ‘bias’ towards presenting the visions in a particular way. I then looked at the chronology, and this centring of the visions came about after 1856, when Hong Xiuquan purged a number of key subordinates, most prominently Yang Xiuqing, who claimed to be able to serve as a vessel for God whenever he went into a trance. I suggested that by killing Yang, divine revelation ceased to be an ongoing process in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and so there came to be a shift in emphasis towards historic examples of revelation, and, amid the personality cult of Hong Xiuquan, an emphasis on his visions in 1837 as the primary revelation, and on the channellings of Yang Xiuqing as auxiliary to it.

In the end, none of this was about what actually happened in 1837; instead it was about how people wrote about what happened in 1837, and why, and what that tells us about the situation in 1853, or 1856, or 1862, or what have you.

16: Which God through out history was the biggest a-hole and which God was the kindest?, submitted on 2021-12-31 02:51:36+08:00.

—– 16.1 —–2021-12-31 03:23:21+08:00:

This submission has been removed because it violates the rule on poll-type questions. These questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focused discussion. Questions about the “most”, the “worst”, “unknown”, or other value judgments usually lead to vague, subjective, and speculative answers. For further information, please consult this Roundtable discussion.

For questions of this type, we ask that you redirect them to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.

17: Why didn’t anyone revolt against the Macedonian kings after the Alexander died and his empire was split up?, submitted on 2021-12-31 08:43:24+08:00.

—– 17.1 —–2022-01-01 15:56:23+08:00:

It is, it must be said, a gross exaggeration to suggest that nobody revolted against Macedonian rule after the death of Alexander. It is however also true that the sudden rise and then just as sudden collapse of the Argead empire across the Middle East broadly saw the establishment of Greco-Macedonian-ruled states in the region rather than the reemergence of indigenous state formations that had previously fallen under Persian dominion. This answer is thus structured into two parts: one concerning the revolts that we know did happen, and one concerning why there were not more.

I: The Revolts That Were

Now, note that in this section I don’t get into resistance to Alexander during the period of his campaigns, which /u/Iphikrates discusses here. These are in themselves relevant background to what I’ll cover here, which exclusively deals with events after Alexander.

IA: The Greeks

The first thing Diodoros of Sicily, our main surviving source for the period 323-301, tells us about after the division of Alexander’s empire between the Macedonian officers, is a Greek rebellion. The second thing he tells us about… is another Greek rebellion. Needless to say, the king’s death occasioned a considerable reaction from some of Alexander’s less-than-willing allies.

The first group of rebels were the Greeks of the ‘upper satrapies’ (eastern highland regions such as Bactria and Sogdiana), many of whom were mercenaries who had been defeated in battle at Issos or Megalopolis, pressed into service with the Macedonian army, and finally forcibly resettled by Alexander. This I discuss in more detail here. The eventual revolt was most certainly a substantial event, with some 20,000 infantry and 3000 cavalry being assembled by the Greeks. This would be put down by Peithon, satrap of Greater Media, who seems to have planned to win the Greeks over, perhaps as part of a plot to increase his own power against the regent Perdikkas, but his subordinate officers had been secretly briefed by Perdikkas to slaughter any Greek prisoners, and so this was, in the event, foiled, and the revolt brutally suppressed.

The second was perhaps not necessarily a ‘rebellion’ as such, but still an overt rejection of Macedonian hegemony, and that was the Lamian War, in which Athens and the Aitolian League attempted to throw off Macedonian domination of southern Greece by capturing Macedonian strongholds and attempting to force Antipatros, Alexander’s governor in Macedonia, to battle. In the event, the Lamian War concluded with a decisive defeat of the Athenian-Aitolian alliance by the combined forces of Antipatros, Krateros, and Leonnatos (although the lattermost was actually plotting to depose Antipatros, but he was killed in battle against the Greeks and his troops simply defected to Antipatros). The Lamian War was a similarly large affair, with the Greek alliance assembling, at their peak, 25,000 infantry and 3500 cavalry.

The exact chronology of the war’s origins is a little hard to pinpoint, but Christopher Blackwell convincingly argues that the outbreak of war in 323 cannot have been a spur of the moment decision brought about by a short-term outburst of opposition to Alexander’s policies or a direct reaction to his death, but must have been at least partly premeditated. The evidence for this is a bit scattered, but the most notable is their repeated refusal to accede to demands by several prominent Macedonians to transfer custody of Harpalos, a fugitive treasurer who had escaped to Athens shortly before Alexander’s death. So there must have been at least some kind of anti-Macedonian preparation well in advance of 323, in which the cities waited for an opportune moment.

IB: Atropates

Now, as noted, the only overt armed revolts we know of were by Greeks, but that’s not to say there were no attempts at assertions of local sovereignty. One of the most significant and lasting of these was brought about by the somewhat enigmatic Atropates. Atropates had commanded the Median, Cadusian, Albanian, and Sacesinian contingents of the Persian army at Gaugamela, but it is somewhat ambiguous whether he was satrap of Media when acting in this capacity. What is clear is that after the assassination of Darius by Bessos, the satrap of Bactria, Atropates pledged his service to Alexander, and over time established himself as a trusted subordinate, being (re?)appointed satrap of Media in 328/7 and having his daughter married to Perdikkas. Latterly, he would be one of only two non-Macedonians, along with Alexander’s Bactrian father-in-law Oxyartes, satrap of Paropanisadae in what is now northern Afghanistan, to be listed as holding a satrapy after the division of the empire between Alexander’s generals.

As part of this division, the satrapy of Media was formally divided into two parts, with Lesser Media remaining under Atropates and Greater Media being given to Peithon. Atropates does not appear to have attempted to oppose Peithon’s control of Greater Media, but he does seem to have asserted his independence from Macedonian authority, if not immediately then almost certainly after Perdikkas’ death – coincidentally at Peithon’ hands – in 321/20. Per Strabo 9.13.1:

The other part is Atropatian Media, which got its name from the commander Atropates, who prevented also this country, which was a part of greater Media, from becoming subject to the Macedonians. Furthermore, after he was proclaimed king, he organised this country into a separate state by itself, and his succession of descendants is preserved to this day, and his successors have contracted marriages with the kings of the Armenians and Syrians and, in later times, with the kings of the Parthians.

Strabo oversimplifies a little here as Atropates was quite unambiguously a vassal of Alexander, but even if Strabo’s account is a bit jumbled it does get across the fundamental point that Atropatene Media very much did crop up as a polity that, although under Macedonian rule during Alexander’s life, subsequently refused to accept Hellenistic suzerainty.

IC: Holes in the Patchwork

It is important also to consider that Alexander never actually conquered all of the Achaemenid empire. In particular, parts of western Anatolia and most of Ciscaucasia had been left alone during his campaigns, leaving a number of polities that were not subject to Macedonian rule. Two such regions stand out: Armenia, and Cappadocia.

Armenia is odd in that Alexander did appoint a nominal governor in the form of Mithrenes, a rather enigmatic noble who had been the military governor of Sardis under the Achaemenids, and is basically the only known Persian defector to Alexander before the Battle of Gaugamela. However, Mithrenes is never heard from again after 330, and Diodoros does not list Armenia among the satrapies distributed after Alexander’s death in 323. The next time a ruler of Armenia is mentioned is in 318/17, when one Orontes is identified as satrap.

There is an unsettled controversy over the status of Armenia under Alexander and the early successors, namely a question of whether Mithrenes actually ever exercised rule over the region, and who Orontes was. Was this the same Orontes who commanded of Darius III’s Armenian troops at Gaugamela? If so, had he successfully repulsed Mithrenes’ attack or otherwise still held territories beyond Mithrenes’ control? Or was this a different Orontes who had succeeded or deposed Mithrenes by 318? Whatever the case, Armenia seems to have more or less cut ties from any sort of Macedonian authority until the reign of the Seleukid king Antiochos I. If we do interpret the the appearance of Orontes in 318 as being a sign of Mithrenes being deposed after some time actually ruling Armenia, then that region might very much be said to have revolted against Macedonian rule. Alternatively, even if Mithrenes did still hold Armenia at the time of Alexander’s death, that he does not appear in the division of the satraps would still imply that Armenia had basically fallen out of the Macedonian orbit.

Cappadocia, on the other hand, was less ambiguous in its status. At the time of the division of Alexander’s empire, Cappadocia was openly acknowledged as an unconquered territory, and was given to Eumenes of Kardia, Alexander’s secretary. Eumenes was supposed to have been assisted in taking control of Cappadocia by Neoptolemos, but Neoptolemos had been plotting against Perdikkas and betrayed Eumenes; in the event Perdikkas himself would lead the conquest of Cappadocia. Now, Cappadocia did not revolt against Macedonian rule as such, but it shows that the Achaemenid Empire didn’t just flip over to Alexander’s control wholesale after a few battlefield victories, and some formerly Achaemenid-ruled polities retained considerable independence or even autonomy.

—– 17.2 —–2022-01-01 15:56:28+08:00:

II: The Revolts That Weren’t

But with all that said, why didn’t more regions revolt?

The example of Babylon, given by /u/Trevor_Culley here, is illustrative of one scenario. In this case, Alexander had concentrated much of his power in Babylon, and it then became a battlefield between the Successor generals that sapped at its wealth and caused significant depopulation, and particularly of urban centres. The fighting itself would likely have made it relatively difficult to use the regions being fought over as stable power bases, especially by a local movement attempting to overthrow a Macedonian (or occasionally Greek) general who had established himself there with a large, experienced army.

It had also been a hell of a long time since most of these regions were meaningfully independent from the Achaemenids. While satrapal revolts were certainly a thing, satraps were often not natives of their own satrapies, and typically fought not for local independence in solidarity with their subjects, but in a bid for either personal independence, or, in the case of Cyrus the Younger, the possession of the wider empire. Egypt stands out as about the one place where there was an overthrow of a Persian-appointed satrap in favour of a local line of rulers. Simply put, while individual cities like Sardis or Babylon might still have a decently coherent set of urban institutions, it had been a while since there had been broader regional linkages that were not tied to the Achaemenid system that Alexander had absorbed.

But crucially, I think we ought not to overstate the extent to which people in the ancient world considered rule by foreigners to be inherently untenable. That Alexander was of foreign birth was not something that disqualified him from holding power in a given region, so long as he demonstrated that he could adopt the stylings of a local ruler when prevailed upon. We know he mobilised pharaonic imagery in Egypt, and the presence of a substantial Persian following in Alexander’s camp, as well as the formation of Persian units in the army, attest to Alexander’s success at achieving legitimacy among his Persian subjects. While we don’t see the same level of appeal uniformly in the Diadochi period, there were certainly those who took a similar approach to Alexander. Peukestas, one of his officers and who was made satrap of Persis, is remarked upon as a particularly prominent ‘Mediser’ in the sources, adopting Persian dress more eagerly than the other Macedonians; he appears relatively briefly in the accounts of the Diadochi wars but seems to have established himself as effective controller of the upper satrapies by the time he was subordinated to Eumenes of Kardia in 317. Ptolemy, like Alexander before him, made use of pharaonic stylings in his rule over Egypt. For most, legitimacy was decided by actions, not birth.

In other words, there was on the one hand a serious question of how to revolt: there were some big Macedonian armies around, with troops hardened from literal decades of campaigning, and few remnants of earlier independent states around which to cohere a resistance. And then there was also a big question of why you would revolt: the former subjects of the Achaemenid Empire were not, broadly speaking, so ethnocentric as to regard birth as the only qualifying characteristic of a ruler.

Conclusions

To tie the above parts together, it is very much worth noting the cases of the two satrapies under non-Macedonian rulers which did end up breaking away, those being Atropatene and Armenia. What they show is that when things lined up, there very much were cases of polities that simply fell out of the Hellenistic orbit in the absence of Greco-Macedonian rulers. But for the rest of Alexander’s empire, a combination of the wars themselves making it rather hard to stage a significant uprising, and the ultimately effective mobilisation, where necessary, of local stylings of rule, made revolt not only impractical, but also not hugely necessary either.

That is not to say that in the long run, peoples did not eventually assert independence from the Hellenistic kingdoms: the hybrid Greco-Bactrian Kingdom broke off from the Seleucids, and latterly the Parthians under the Arsacids emerged as a substantial force. The Odrysian kingdom in Thrace re-emerged by the end of the fourth century. Pergamon, led by an ex-lieutenant of the Successor Lysimachos, emerged as a substantial kingdom in its own right in western Anatolia. Most dramatically and perhaps best-remembered was the Maccabean Revolt of the mid 2nd century BCE, in which Judas Maccabeus’ revolt against Seleucid rule culminated in the re-establishment of an independent Jewish kingdom under the Hasmoneans. (The festival of Hanukkhah commemorates the rededication of the Second Temple during the revolt.) So reassertions of local rule were far from absent in the broader Hellenistic period, even if they were not a frequent occurrence in the immediate aftermath of Alexander’s death.

18: Warring states to take inspiration from?, submitted on 2021-12-31 21:30:35+08:00.

—– 18.1 —–2021-12-31 22:13:53+08:00:

19: How Do Secular Historians of Islam Explain the Numerous Reports of Various Miracles?, submitted on 2022-01-01 08:24:07+08:00.

—– 19.1 —–2022-01-04 00:33:53+08:00:

As long ago as 1977 Stock was able to argue that “the point is not whether the miracle “took place”, but that people whose social affiliations can be the object of empirical study explained their behaviour in terms of it”.

Just a quick question – Stock doesn’t appear in your bibliography here; what text is being referred to? A lot of what you’ve said about the methodology lines up with some work I’ve done on 19th century Chinese narratives of visionary experiences and seems worth having a look at for my purposes.

20: PainRys, submitted on 2022-01-01 21:02:13+08:00.

—– 20.1 —–2022-01-03 02:44:46+08:00:

the kinda botched first rig

I believe it was a mix of straight up not liking the design, and possibly, latterly, Cover planning on redoing it at some stage a la Nene.

21: YouTuber Dr. Ludwig, who claims to upload “German historical music”, shares Neo-Nazi music, submitted on 2022-01-01 21:30:42+08:00.

—– 21.1 —–2022-01-02 17:56:36+08:00:

Yep, Graham Linehan confirmed that he is a massive transphobe and eventually got booted off Twitter after years spewing hate.

—– 21.2 —–2022-01-02 18:05:22+08:00:

Given that Dr. Ludwig is a longtime associate of all-but-confirmed neo-Nazi Karl Sternau (see for instance this post), I’d go beyond being prepared to just taking his political stance as a given.

—– 21.3 —–2022-01-02 20:09:24+08:00:

I need to remember that as a mod here I do have a certain obligation to prevent spirals into modern political discussion, but yeah the UK has a rather prominent slice of transphobes who have been given a lot of time of day.

22: Some historians suggest that the Chinese may’ve been to the Americas between 1418-1421. Vikings also had some settlements in Nova Scotia in the Middle Ages. Prior to Columbus, did any external people establish (or tried to) any source of trading/commerce network with native American peoples?, submitted on 2022-01-01 21:58:43+08:00.

—– 22.1 —–2022-01-02 01:10:19+08:00:

I cannot speak to the Norse settlements in North America myself, for which I would direct you to answers by /u/sagathain such as this, this, and this. What I can speak to are the claims that Zheng He reached the Americas in the 1420s.

These claims are not ‘seemingly debatable’, they are bunk. Anyone who is asserting the truth of these claims is perpetuating a hoax that has been kept afloat by conspiracy theorists of various stripes since the publication of Gavin Menzies’ 1421: The Year China Discovered America in 2003. Menzies had no formal qualifications in history nor a known grasp of any Chinese languages; instead he was an officer in the Royal Navy – one who retired under rather ignominious circumstances in 1970 after ramming a US Navy minesweeper in the Philippines in 1969.

Menzies’ work is shoddy in the extreme, with its only evidence for a pre-Columbian Chinese arrival in the Americas being based on maps whose dates he can only offer poorly-grounded assertions for; superficial analysis of genetic evidence; and supposed archaeological findings that he often provides no citation for. Menzies’ book was so comprehensively bad and wrong that an entire website was created by a group of academics responding to it, 1421exposed.com. Today the domain has been bought up so don’t copy the link straight into your search bar, but most of its contents remain archived via the Wayback Machine. Menzies would later claim that a Chinese fleet sailed to Italy in 1434, in a book unsurprisingly titled 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, an even more ludicrous book which was also responded to on 1421exposed.

The specific Chinese map that supposedly proves Zheng He’s voyage was ‘discovered’ by a Chinese collector named Liu Gang in 2005 and publicised in 2006, and was purportedly a 1768 copy of a 1418 original. This too has come under considerable scrutiny and is almost certainly a fake that was produced specifically to support Menzies’ claims post-publication; while it was supposedly carbon-dated, the sample of paper supplied to the laboratory cannot be confirmed to have actually come from the map; moreover, even if the sample was authentic, and the map dates to the mid-18th century, it fails to prove the existence of an early 15th century original.

Moreover, Menzies doesn’t even stop at the claim that Zheng He simply reached the Americas. His book argues, among other things, that the Chinese fleets charted the west coast of Africa, both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the Americas, and Australia and New Zealand for good measure. Even more offensively, he (spoilers because TW: sexual assault) > asserted that the Māori are not indigenous to New Zealand but the result of the rape of Chinese women by Melanesian peoples !<. I cannot begin to stress how horrific this book is; so much as entertaining its claims means giving legitimacy to a whole host of nonsense that is overtly and deliberately offensive in many parts.

The main things to look at are as follows:

General debunk of claims in 1421 by the late Victor Prescott, professor emeritus of geography at the University of Melbourne: Focus is placed on Menzies’ claim that the ‘Mahogany Ship’ wreck spotted in early colonial Victoria was Chinese; that European maps of the very early 1500s accurately depict the Pacific coast of the Americas; claims about the supposed route of Zheng He in the Caribbean that contradict known facts about sea levels and winds in the region; and his tendentious claims about the identifiability of now-lost shipwrecks.
Bullet list of issues with Liu Gang’s alleged 1418/1768 map by Geoff Wade, independent scholar. There is a more detailed article also by Wade.
Detailed statement on issues with the 1418/1768 map by Gong Yingyan of Zhenjiang University, arguing that even if authentic to 1768, the map must have been based on European examples.

—– 22.2 —–2022-01-02 13:16:23+08:00:

EDIT: There have been certain criticisms against Kunz and Mills’ article on the bead finds in Alaska based on evidence within Europe of particular styles of bead manufacture. See this response for more detail.

Pinging in /u/ruferant and /u/DinoDude23 as well; also thanks to /u/TruePolarWanderer for jogging my memory about its existence:

The principal source for the claim that the beads are not only of pre-Columbian manufacture, but indeed pre-Columbian arrival in Alaska is a report by Michael L. Kunz and Robin O. Mills in the journal American Antiquity (behind a paywall here), summarising finds from not just one site, but three:

The Punyik Point site, excavated in 1961, where four beads were unearthed. The site believed to have gone through five phases of occupation, most predating European contact but one of which was after 1741 – the evidence cited for this last phase was the presence of Venetian beads, which were believed to have been brought over by the Russians. In 2004-5, Kunz and Mills revisited the site with radiocarbon dating equipmment and were unable to corroborate any post-Columbian habitation, while confirming the four earlier phases. Using metal detectors, the two discovered a cluster of eight artefacts in an area of 5cm diameter: three more beads, two copper bangles, two iron pendants, and a piece of twine wrapped around one of the bangles; this cluster looked to be an ornament that would have been strung together. They also found an additional half-bead at one of the houses.
The Lake Kaiyak site, excavated in 1996, where one bead was found in two halves in neighbouring houses. The houses themselves were not radiocarbon dated at the time but ‘both were thought to date to 1578–1760 based on artifact typology’.
The Kinyiksugvik site, excavated by the report’s authors in 2007, where half a bead was discovered. Radiocarbon dating and artefact typology showed that this site had both pre- and post-Columbian habitation.

All three sites, the authors note, are located on what had been a major internal Alaskan trade network connecting two main trading centres: Nigliq on the Arctic Sea, at the mouth of the Colville River; and Sheshalik on the Bering Strait, near the mouth of the Noatak. There is evidence which they cite for Sheshalik being the site of trade across the Bering Strait, suggesting that was the probable point of entry for the beads. All other dating aside, the two authors note that because the beads are not found elsewhere for thousands of kilometres, their arrival must have been as a single group at a particular point in time that was then dispersed through this particular Alaskan trade network.

There is a lot of science that I don’t understand, but the important part is that the various dating operations carried out were not just on the beads, which would, as you note, not prove a pre-Columbian arrival, just a pre-Columbian manufacture. They also dated:

The twine the authors unearthed with the bead cluster at Punyik Point. This fell into the range 1397-1488 with a 98.9% certainty.
A charcoal layer in the house with a half-bead at Punyik Point. This was either from the mid-1300s (38.7%) or around 1380-1440 (61.3%); the early date was attributed to the wood itself likely being a few decades old at the time it was burned.
Four samples of caribou bone found at Lake Kaiyak, two from ‘House 1’ and two from ‘House 2’. Both of the House 1 bones and one of the House 2 bones date to either around 1435-1525 or around 1570-1630, with the probability heavily skewed towards the former (68.7%, 80.3% and 84.2% for each of the three samples.) The fourth bone is anomalous and inconclusive, no newer than 1523 and probably from either 1630-81 or 1763-1802.
Charcoal at Kinyiksugvik from the same layer as the unearthed bead, certain to have originated between 1470 and 1648, but where a more precise dating was not possible.

It is the combination of all of this evidence – but with the dismissal of the anomalous second caribou bone at Lake Kaiyak House 2* – that the authors posit a pre-Columbian arrival date for the beads between approximately 1443 and 1488, which is the period of overlap between the principle probable age of the twine discovered at Punyik Point and the more probable, earlier dating of the caribou bones at Lake Kaiyak.

* The authors give a number of explanations for the anomalous bone: temporary reuse or dumping at a later date; contamination during museum storage (as the radiocarbon dating was not carried out until over 13 years after excavation); or simple anomaly in carbon content.

It is worth noting that there is a chance that the pre-Columbian date is wrong, as there is in fact a 0.4% chance that the twine is from 1604-1608, putting it slap bang in the middle of the later dating for the three non-anomalous caribou bones at Lake Kaiyak, and still within the timeframe of the charcoal at Kinyiksugvik, creating a bit of a probability spike ca. 1610. Nevertheless, on balance of probability, the most likely timeframe for the beads’ arrival is the latter half of the fifteenth century.

It is important not to overstate what is proved by this – as indeed the authors themselves did not, at least in their formal report. That there was trans-Bering Strait trade at Sheshalik has been known since the 1970s, so what is learned by this is not that there were trade links between Eurasia and North America, but rather that Venetian beads had made it to northeast Asia by the mid-late 1400s.

—– 22.3 —–2022-01-02 14:54:39+08:00:

Apologies if I gave off that impression; it’s simply that pre-Russian connections across the Bering strait are something that have been accepted in scholarship before, in work cited by Kunz and Mills. Their main references on this specific point are (copying their referencing style):

Grover, Margan Allyn

2016	Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric Glass Beads in Alaska. Arctic Anthropology 53(2):69–80.

Burch, Ernest S., Jr.

1975 | Inter-Regional Transportation in Traditional Northwest Alaska. Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska 17(2):1–11.
1976 | Overland Travel Routes in Northwest Alaska. Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska 18(1):1–10.
2005 Alliance and Conflict: The World System of the Inupiaq Eskimos. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

Unfortunately I’ve had a hard time accessing any of Burch’s work (especially the relevant parts of the 2005 book that Kunz and Mills highlight), but I do have access to Grover’s article, which makes a few points:

The use of beads among indigenous Alaskan people at the time of Russian contact proves that the Russians cannot have introduced them, and so some kind of trade link across the Bering Strait must have existed beforehand. The beads themselves don’t necessarily prove a pre-Columbian link, but they do show the existence of non-European maritime links predating Russian movements.
There have been a small number of pre-Columbian metal artefacts found in Alaska, including a copper bangle dated to early as ca. 600 CE; as copper is generally not thought to have been produced locally in Alaska this also suggests the existence of very early trans-Bering links that are probably pre-Columbian.
Recent Russian scholarship suggests the existence of technological influences travelling across the Bering Strait, with elements of bow design on St. Lawrence Island borrowed from developments on mainland Alaska no later than 1145, and possible though undated influence on kayak designs from the Aleutian Islands and Chukotka Peninsula. So while movement across the entire strait may not have been common, we can point to possible daisy chains of contact through the various islands dotting the strait.

At the time of writing this answer I was alerted by /u/Hergrim to the note that some specialists in European beads have argued that the actual beads themselves were probably not 14th/15th century Venetian objects – as no such beads have been found in Venice itself – but rather from Rouen in northern France, dating to the early 17th century. A summary of their criticisms can be found here. Because Kunz and Mills’ article is relatively new it will likely take time before more substantial criticism emerges in more formal publication.

The main issue seems to be that Kunz and Mills don’t really engage with known information about the chronology of different bead types developed in Europe, and so seem unaware of what European beads existed. Instead, they seem to have used the stratigraphic evidence first to establish the most probable timeframe of the beads’ arrival in Alaska, and then looked at literary and archival evidence on the development of of the techniques used to create the beads (rather than at the existence and distribution the beads themselves), then surmised that the beads found in Alaska could plausibly have been created in the early 15th century based on the limited information known about the organisation of the Venetian glass-working guilds.

In effect, the accuracy of Kunz and Mills’ proposal now rests on the veracity and provenance of the beads. That there was a trade in glass beads at some stage pre-Bering is indisputable; that there were cross-strait networks in general pre-Columbus is also reasonably established. What seems to be the main issue is whether there was a trade in glass beads pre-Columbus. As their critics note, Kunz and Mills do offer an alternative, mid-17th century date for many of the radiocarbon datings, which would fit the later dating of the beads that aligns with the evidence from Rouen.

But if so, some explanation would be required for the broadly early-skewing dating at Punyik Point, particularly the piece of twine which only has a 0.4% chance of belonging to the 17th century, and the charcoal layer whose original material definitively dates to no later than 1441 per the dating carried out under Kunz and Mills. This is not to say that the circle is unsquareable or that Kunz and Mills must definitely be right, but it is to say that if the beads are indeed established as being of 17th century French make, then that will raise questions back the other way about the Punyik Point site and how these 17th century artefacts might have ended up mixed in a site with virtually no evidence of habitation after the 15th century – except perhaps for those beads.

To briefly loop back round to the original question and to the responses to it, even if the ‘Venetian’ beads turn out to be later French ones, it is clear that there is evidence supporting the existence of trade in certain European goods to Alaska pre-Bering, and in general cross-strait connections pre-Columbus. That much can be pretty firmly established.

—– 22.4 —–2022-01-02 19:49:00+08:00:

…yes.

—– 22.5 —–2022-01-02 19:54:42+08:00:

No that was an admission of me getting it wrong; and I’ve since edited.

—– 22.6 —–2022-01-02 20:02:16+08:00:

I think we’ve both confused ourselves because I think the original was correct. Anyway, the gist is that 1523 is the earliest date, which is why it’s quite a weird one – on top of that, none of the possible periods align with the mid-17th century alternate date.

23: Could the Japanese and the Chinese communicate through written language in the year 800 (Kanji)?, submitted on 2022-01-02 09:43:38+08:00.

—– 23.1 —–2022-01-02 15:21:07+08:00:

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