One with Nineveh and Tyre
Train of thought triggered by death of Alec Salmond - champion of independence, or wanting 'to break up the United Kingdom'. Actually the United Kingdom had a bite taken out of it in 1920, and that story's not finished yet.
The general point is that no polity or dominion is guaranteed to endure, no matter how monumental it seems. Who would have foreseen Britain bunking out of Europe after nearly 50 years? Or the wheels coming off the USSR after 90? Is 248 years (with a not altogether resolved conflict in the middle) enough to ensure the USA continues as is?
By and large, most of us have shorter lifespans than the average country or empire, so assume what is has always been will always be. Is this a useful assumption?
The general point is that no polity or dominion is guaranteed to endure, no matter how monumental it seems. Who would have foreseen Britain bunking out of Europe after nearly 50 years? Or the wheels coming off the USSR after 90? Is 248 years (with a not altogether resolved conflict in the middle) enough to ensure the USA continues as is?
By and large, most of us have shorter lifespans than the average country or empire, so assume what is has always been will always be. Is this a useful assumption?
Comments
The USA incorporated the vast majority of its acquired territory as politically equal parts of the metropolitan(aka the 50 states). Plus, ever since that "conflict in the middle", the government has not permitted any region to develop a qualitatively different economic system from the rest. So it's not really in the same position as the British Isles in the 1920s.
Maybe closer to the USSR at the time if the break-up, but even then, the existence of multiple ethnicities within the Union probably made things a little more unstable.
And in fact there is a decent chance that things may change dramatically within a human lifetime. That has in fact been the case for most of us here.
No, probably not. I'm just saying that, in predicting the longevity of the American state and its political system, I wouldn't necessarily take old-school empires as a model, since there are significant differences in the their general structures and that of the American hegemon.
The American state has gone through about four political systems so far: the short-lived Articles of Confederation (1777-1789), Madison and Hamilton's slaver republic (1789-1865), Lincoln and Sumner's new birth of freedom (1865-1935), and FDR's New Deal (1935-present). I guess that shows states are more durable than political systems.
Would any of those shifts represent a rupture as dramatic as that between, say, the Bourbon Dynasty and the First Republic?
Arguably the shift between Madison's slaver republic and Lincoln's free republic was similarly dramatic. It involved the requisite number of deaths to be a drama, and it radically re-defined who was an American and who was property.
Yeah, I'll agree. The reversal of constitutional protection for a separate economic system, plus federal enforcement of political rights via the 14th and 15th Amendments, represented a qualitative difference from the existing status quo, and, adjusting for brevity, one wrought by probably more blood than the French Revolution and its attendant wars.
Don't think I'd say the same thing about the New Deal, though, which was basically just the federal government expanding its list of offered services, but with no changes to political rights or in the basic structure of US governance.
What latent inheritors are present now? What rough beasts slouching?
If we’re not careful, a particular orange monster with a liking for dictators and their ways.
I think ancient Egypt is super-impressive to moderns because very few of us have any idea of the history involved. We just lump two dozen or so different dynasties and three different interregnums (each lasting more than a century where "Egypt" as a unified political entity simply did not exist) and call it "ancient Egypt", implying it was all one continuous thing from about 3000 BCE until the Persian conquest in 525 BCE. That would indeed be impressive if it were true.
Blood, toil, sweat, and tears also accompanied the beginning of the break-up of the UK, about a century ago with the partition of Ireland. I doubt if an independent Scotland (which may be some years away) will be born amongst similar events - at least, I hope not.
Various people have speculated about balkanizing the US. We could have Dixie and Deseret, Hawaii as its own little nation, Alaska eaten up by one of its neighbors, New England as a small nation, a United West Coast, etc., leaving a great deal of the country unorganized. Again: it's a dumb idea.
One of the things which matters a great deal during the break-up (or potential break-up) of a polity is how much "buy in" the various people living in it have to its continued existence. Do they think of themselves as "belonging" to that polity, or is it more of a grudging acceptance of current status quo? At one end of the scale there's the Neo-Assyrian Empire (the Nineveh of the thread title). At its height it was the largest empire in the world, and the largest that had existed at any time in history up until then. Succession wars starting in 627 BCE led to revolts by various conquered people, and eventually the neighbors (the Medes and Persians) smelled blood and dealt a killing blow. It took about fifteen years for Assyria to go from the dominant power in the Middle East to complete disintegration. Mostly this seems to have been because the various peoples conquered by the Assyrians considered themselves as occupied people rather than willing Assyrian subjects with a vested interest in the empire's continued existence. As soon as an opportunity presented itself they all headed for the exits.
At the other end of the scale is the Roman Empire, which did such a good job of extending citizenship and its benefits to various conquered peoples that by the time the Western Empire fell almost everyone inside it considered themselves to be Roman. (Like a lot of new cultural identities this was usually layered on top of some other, older identity rather than replacing it.) This was so well established that the remaining half of the empire still considered themselves "Roman" for nearly a thousand years after the collapse of West Rome, despite not having actual possession of the city of Rome.
So my guess is that a typical non-elite Irish subject of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth or early twentieth century had a lot less buy in to that identity than similar non-elite English, Scottish, or Welsh subjects and would be more likely to think of themselves as living under occupation rather than being a subject of the realm. Hence the difference in attitudes towards the break-up of the polity.
Though reflecting on my own background, Unionists would consider themselves Irish but not the same kind of Irish as the South. The difference was defined as religious. We were Protestant, sober, moral, hard-working sabbatarians. They were poor, feckless, untrustworthy, priest-ridden and probably none too clean. If a secular identity emerges that sees Irishness in shared norms and values, then game on - but not until.
Did Ireland have a qualitatively different economic system than the rest of the UK in the 1920s?
Not sure, and I wasn't really meaning to imply it did. I was more focused on the "non-incorporated aspect" with my comparison, but also wanted to point out that the USA post-1865 had a generally homogenized economic system, regardless of how that compares to Ireland.
FWIW, I would assume that, being a colony, Ireland had a different economic system from the metropolitan, and that might've still been a collective memory by the 1920s.
Just to be clear, I was refering to possibly different economic systems between Ireland and England/UK, not between northern and southern Ireland.
Could you explain why you think this?
What is it though that makes us say Egyptian and Chinese civilization survived when others didn’t?
Are Greco-Roman, Medieval Western, and Early Modern to Modern Western Civilizations distinct or they all one continuous “Western Civilization”?
Does India have the same continuity of civilization as China? What about the pre- European-contact indigenous civilizations of the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Australia? Do they still exist today in the same way Chinese civilization does? If outsiders like us say no, what right have we to say so?
China was first officially united under Qin Shi Huang in 220BC, less than two and a half millennia ago. Periods in which the mainland was not more or less united under indigenous Chinese rule - the Three Kingdoms period, the Five Dynasties period, the Yuan Dynasty, and the Qing Dynasty, amount to a bit over a thousand years of that in total.
Of course, China is a lot larger than Egypt.
Sure, I got that and should have made myself clearer.
What I should have said that whilst there were regional differences within the island of Ireland itself, as indeed there were on the island of Great Britain, there was not a different economic system within the island of Ireland during British rule.