World History With Les

Let’s talk camels! So, I had just come back from Southwest Asia, and one of my colleagues asked how it was. I told a story of watching a compound that was surrounded by bails of sugarcane and SO MANY CAMELS! For the location I was in, it was odd to see camels. The colleague I was telling this story to was from Eastern Afghanistan directly on the border of Pakistan in Nangarhar, or as we liked to call it the Nangahood. It was a rough spot. Either way, she had grown up in a very traditional way before she had to escape the country with her family. I’m talking normal family, growing some crops for food and a little cash, and always with the poppy field as the cash crop. Anyway, back to the camels. So I tell her this story, and she says “OHH! Camels are SUCH  a luxury.” I laughed and laughed. This woman was highly educated and worldly. What that told me was how important animals were in that area.  Camels are a big deal. Any pack animal really. Guess what, Afri...

Slavery was much more prominent in Greco-Roman civilization that it was in either India or China. During second wave civilization, slavery was often a result of war and conquest. I think that is the most obvious reason as to why there were so many more slaves in the Greco-Roman empires. After the destruction of Carthage, Rome took 55,000 slaves. We’re just talking about the fall of Carthage. People from modest means all the way to the top had slaves. Beyond that, there is also the matter of the economy. The economies of India and China were not reliant on slave labor. Greco-Roman economies on the other hand were heavily reliant upon it. A part of this was the highly structured caste system of India. The lower castes were already carrying out the majority of hard labor. India also had laws to protect the rights of slaves. Owners could not abandon slaves in their old age as was common-place in Greece. Laws to protect the rights of slaves disincentivized their use in India (Strayer, 2016...

Religion is most definitely a double-edged sword. It can support political authority and the social elites, or it can undermine them. Look at China and Daoisim. First I need to say something about Ban Zhou. Do you think five generations later there was a Ban Zhou VI (Bahn Jo VI)…Do you think he was a vocalist? He sang “It’s my life, it’s Dao or ever…” You guys know that song? Just me? Okay.  Daoism was taken into the popular religion in China. It promoted a oneness with the Dao, and a return to nature. At first glance, this sounds great for the government and the social elite. If you really think about it, this was bad for them. If everyone is living a simple life, painting landscapes and meditating, then riding their water buffalo off into Western China, then they are not spending, competing with each other, or producing excess for the ruling class to take.  Beyond the promotion of a less materialistic life, this pulled people from the government in other ways. Lar...

If there is anything to be learned from the second-wave civilizations (and there is), it is about over-extension and the benefits of equality to the empire. Of course every civilization is different. If there were not lessons to be learned from history, all the military strategists in the world would not be wasting their time. I don’t think they’re just nostalgic or curious about their roots.  So, let’s talk empire building. China, Rome, Greece, Persia, Macedonia, they all did it. Until recently, a lot of places kept doing it. If you want some good examples look at Africa. Germany stole Tanzania, Italy had Somalia, France did a number or Rwanda. I don’t think we even need to talk about England and South Africa (I’m making a cringing face, but you can’t see it).  Side note: Everywhere France colonized had just a terrible time. If there was a Yelp for colonizers, France would only have the nastiest reviews. Imagine what Vietnam said about them… First, let’s...

I was surprised to learn of the spread of Bantu languages from Cameroon, moving South and East. I knew that there were a lot of Bantu languages, but I didn’t know there were more than 400 (Strayer, 2016, p.37). This really made me think about how I perceive things. I speak Kiswahili and learned from a couple of men from Tanzania. I think because everything I learned about Bantu languages was really focused on East Africa, this made me think that it must be where they originated. I must have so many other preconceived notions about things.  I also think that parts of my ideas are as a result of whom I learned from. My first instructor was a very old sociologist. We called him Mzee, which literally means old man but is the common term of reference. He grew up in Tanzania under the rule of colonial Germans. Subsequently, he learned to speak fluent German, in addition to English, Swahili and his native tribal Bantu language. A lot of class time was dedicated to learning the ins...

I find it infuriating that as human innovation increased, equality began to disappear. The very problem we have today with hoarding of wealth and resources started with the rise of the first civilizations. Strayer and Nelson (2016) speak of the relative equality of the sexes within the first human societies on page 21 of the text. It is absolutely maddening that gathering and hunting societies enjoyed more equality than women do now.  This is not just about gender inequality. Let’s talk about the rise of the first civilizations. So we have all these farmers, pastoralists, and trades people working. For the first time, humans should have had a wealth of food, supplies, and free time all while staying in one place. The arts, religion, philosophy all should have flourished. Instead, what we ended up with was a class hierarchy. They stockpiled the resources, developed militaries and plotted ways to stay on top. The working people were creating more and more productive economie...

I found it interesting to read that some societies trace their lineage through the female line, and particularly that these societies were in the area of Europe and Anatolia. What I found interesting was not the existence of matriarchal societies, but the location. I thought that the locations of these societies would have coincided with the existing matriarchal societies, for example some spots in Nepal.  On page 43 of the text, the critical role of women in agriculture as well as their production of textiles is cited as a possible reason for tracing lineage through the female line. When I made my foray into anthropology for my first two years of college, this was a main topic of a course I took Sex, Gender, and Kinship. In this course, a prevailing theory about why lineage might be traced through a female line regarded division of land. In instances where the lineage of a society is traced through the female line, land is less often divided. This is of particular i...