The long and rich history of the contemporary genocides of the cultured, cultivated Europeans, The Americans and the Brits., to nominate yet a few.
And first, of Washington's lost Ukrainian Proxy War to weaken Russia and pillage its resources, perhaps the greatest and most feckless imperial play, something of a progress update.
I think there may be a non-useful slippage here between 'civilisation' and 'empire'.
Also "empires" may be more a nomad invention as they encounter/react/deal/trade/war(for horses & slaves) with settled civilisations, who in turn then take on nomad tech to varying degrees (and vice versa). That's Beckwith's thesis. (https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/christopher-i-beckwiths-the-scythian).
Then there is the varying types of empire (contiguous territorial expansion, trader-colonies expansion, & mixed). At which point the slippage between empire and civilisation hides the actual process.
Quigley seems ??? unaware of this slippage as you describe it. And focuses? on settled civilisations as the only source of everything, whereas it might be better to think of civs as empired together by nomad tech, and less opportunistic infections at the gate.
The Russian column in that table is hilarious. [Current Russian policy in its stupidity believes in the Brit Victorian writer Halford Mackinder's thesis, only minus the trader-colony empires consolation.]
As someone benefiting from the trader-colony empire here in Tasmania, I'll also add that expansion here was not dependent on starving Irish giving up their "surplus" for investment in Tasmania. The land was stolen and the social/worlding tech that had been here for 25K + years was replaced by nascent industrialisation funded food & energy exports (by way of lard & whales oil & seal oil). And even most of that was not done by convict labour (they did build some nice bridges easing the export of lard & wool though) Expansion is its own reward when combined with new tech. New tech on its own is expansion. At least that is the economic thesis I learned at high school and which transhuman prophets say will allows us to reach the singularity any decade now. ???Quigley seems unaware of tech in his static agrarian economics. (says he with a feudal noble last name). Or is he saying tech is flash in the pan? And we will revert to stasis and slavery at some point? Only now will I google his date of birth and shut up.
So you gave a long, interesting, and (for you) highly legible comment, and I have loads to say and less time to write. I'll give just this one remark for now, and I'll say more later. (If I don't, please remind me)
> I think there may be a non-useful slippage here between 'civilisation' and 'empire'.
I'm very aware! Glubb has a lot over Quigley in that he seems much more definite about the scope and scale of his units for analysis. "Empires last 250 years," is a very definite claim.
I've been saying to my wife that trying to interpret Quigley's model feels a little bit like literary criticism, the study of Biblical prophecy, or dream interpretation.
For example, is America in the age of conflict? Maybe, but when did it begin? Quigley says it began in the mid 20th century, but people really started noticing polarization, breakdown, anxiety, and irrationality only recently. Or maybe the age of conflict actually ended with the civil war, when a single culture was imposed on all the states? Or maybe the civilization under consideration should be the entire West, and the end of the age of conflict was World War II, when the powerful periphery (America) gradually imposed a single culture on everyone, culminating in the EU?
What I like about Quigley is that he offers an interesting perspective, not that this perspective is as scientific as he claims. He tries very hard, but ultimately he still comes across to me like any other philosopher, saying things you can believe or not.
The "Heartland Theory" is interesting insofar as it could relate to Russia's advances into Ukraine; I'd never heard of it before, but browsing around to form a cursory idea, I can see why you scorn the idea.
> As someone benefiting from the trader-colony empire here in Tasmania, I'll also add that expansion here was not dependent on starving Irish giving up their "surplus" for investment in Tasmania.
I may have overplayed the extent to which Quigley felt inequality drove surplus and expansion, and downplayed the importance he places on technology. Be aware that Quigley's model tries to generalize from thousands of years of history, and the earliest histories almost always deal with agrarian societies at the bottom of the individualism/complexity curve I like to talk about. In such circumstances, deprivation and hardship are the norm.
I'll add, related to this, that this is one of the weaknesses of *any* model for civilization proposed by Quigley or anyone else: the rules to the game are themselves evolving over time, as every collapse has, up until now, left the survivors with more technology, infrastructure, and cultural capital than before. When we consider the farming methods, roads, breeds of livestock, buildings, religious organization, and all the plunder taken from Rome after its fall, it starts to seem as though the northern barbarians of the dark ages were already starting from a point that Rome didn't achieve until some point in the Republic.
If every time civilization grows it takes three steps forward, and every time it falls it only takes two steps back, then the relapse into barbarism of a civilization four iterations into the process is already at the peak of the first cycle. Surely it is hard to imagine that the rules of the game remain the same when a "gestation" stage is occurring amidst a backdrop as advanced as the height of expansion in a previous iteration.
The Turkic take-over of Istanbul-not-constantinople proabably does not count as a collapse, however it strongly relates to the complete collapse of Roman empire in the Balkans (the emporer who established rather than just promote Christianity Justinian was born in today's Serbia) And the back and forth between expanding and contracting waves of success (before and after Turkic control) basically depopulated it in a way that Western Europe did not feel to the same degree, i.e. the collapse there was nowhere near as drawn out, so the two steps back theory can sometimes be qualified to 10 steps back. This is what actually Balkanised the Balkans, Otherwise it would have been all like Romania, or All Bulgaria, or all something. The number of steps back could become a metric of collapse. And then there is the case of Ireland which did quite well never being part of Rome per se, i.e. took a step forward while Rome two-stepped, until the Germans/vikings/normans took a step forward economically (your collapse where you are compared to me)
Quigley is Quigley. He really forms part of a spectrum of modern thinkers from who looked at humans organized into societies, civilizations, empires and became interested in trying to explain their successes and failures in a broad a general way.
If you are familiar with these other names, Quigley fits cleanly and directly along a line: start with Spengler, Toynbee, Glubb, Quigley, and finally end with Peter Turchin, who was born last. Spengler is probably the weakest, and Turchin is probably the strongest, as you might expect given that Turchin had more data, and all of his predecessors' models, to work with in perfecting his own ideas.
Yet, I don't think any one of these thinkers really managed to get everything from all the others. And worse, even though I don't truly know to what extent the problems Quigley et. al identify in civilization are crucial, I do believe that cohesive groups require many things, and some of those have been badly ignored by all of the above thinkers. Thus, while their predictions may help inform my thinking, ultimately none of their writing leaves me feeling as though I can rely on any of their conclusions.
You deserve more reader comments, R.A.
On related themes . . .
The long and rich history of the contemporary genocides of the cultured, cultivated Europeans, The Americans and the Brits., to nominate yet a few.
And first, of Washington's lost Ukrainian Proxy War to weaken Russia and pillage its resources, perhaps the greatest and most feckless imperial play, something of a progress update.
https://les7eb.substack.com/p/genocide-and-economics
Free to subscribe . . . The Dead Do Not Die.
_____________
I think there may be a non-useful slippage here between 'civilisation' and 'empire'.
Also "empires" may be more a nomad invention as they encounter/react/deal/trade/war(for horses & slaves) with settled civilisations, who in turn then take on nomad tech to varying degrees (and vice versa). That's Beckwith's thesis. (https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/christopher-i-beckwiths-the-scythian).
Then there is the varying types of empire (contiguous territorial expansion, trader-colonies expansion, & mixed). At which point the slippage between empire and civilisation hides the actual process.
Quigley seems ??? unaware of this slippage as you describe it. And focuses? on settled civilisations as the only source of everything, whereas it might be better to think of civs as empired together by nomad tech, and less opportunistic infections at the gate.
The Russian column in that table is hilarious. [Current Russian policy in its stupidity believes in the Brit Victorian writer Halford Mackinder's thesis, only minus the trader-colony empires consolation.]
As someone benefiting from the trader-colony empire here in Tasmania, I'll also add that expansion here was not dependent on starving Irish giving up their "surplus" for investment in Tasmania. The land was stolen and the social/worlding tech that had been here for 25K + years was replaced by nascent industrialisation funded food & energy exports (by way of lard & whales oil & seal oil). And even most of that was not done by convict labour (they did build some nice bridges easing the export of lard & wool though) Expansion is its own reward when combined with new tech. New tech on its own is expansion. At least that is the economic thesis I learned at high school and which transhuman prophets say will allows us to reach the singularity any decade now. ???Quigley seems unaware of tech in his static agrarian economics. (says he with a feudal noble last name). Or is he saying tech is flash in the pan? And we will revert to stasis and slavery at some point? Only now will I google his date of birth and shut up.
I learnt my ecological colonial terms about neo-europes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_Imperialism_(book)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_W._Crosby
So you gave a long, interesting, and (for you) highly legible comment, and I have loads to say and less time to write. I'll give just this one remark for now, and I'll say more later. (If I don't, please remind me)
> I think there may be a non-useful slippage here between 'civilisation' and 'empire'.
I'm very aware! Glubb has a lot over Quigley in that he seems much more definite about the scope and scale of his units for analysis. "Empires last 250 years," is a very definite claim.
I've been saying to my wife that trying to interpret Quigley's model feels a little bit like literary criticism, the study of Biblical prophecy, or dream interpretation.
For example, is America in the age of conflict? Maybe, but when did it begin? Quigley says it began in the mid 20th century, but people really started noticing polarization, breakdown, anxiety, and irrationality only recently. Or maybe the age of conflict actually ended with the civil war, when a single culture was imposed on all the states? Or maybe the civilization under consideration should be the entire West, and the end of the age of conflict was World War II, when the powerful periphery (America) gradually imposed a single culture on everyone, culminating in the EU?
What I like about Quigley is that he offers an interesting perspective, not that this perspective is as scientific as he claims. He tries very hard, but ultimately he still comes across to me like any other philosopher, saying things you can believe or not.
I will in future explore the differences between empire/civilisation/world.
The "Heartland Theory" is interesting insofar as it could relate to Russia's advances into Ukraine; I'd never heard of it before, but browsing around to form a cursory idea, I can see why you scorn the idea.
> As someone benefiting from the trader-colony empire here in Tasmania, I'll also add that expansion here was not dependent on starving Irish giving up their "surplus" for investment in Tasmania.
I may have overplayed the extent to which Quigley felt inequality drove surplus and expansion, and downplayed the importance he places on technology. Be aware that Quigley's model tries to generalize from thousands of years of history, and the earliest histories almost always deal with agrarian societies at the bottom of the individualism/complexity curve I like to talk about. In such circumstances, deprivation and hardship are the norm.
I'll add, related to this, that this is one of the weaknesses of *any* model for civilization proposed by Quigley or anyone else: the rules to the game are themselves evolving over time, as every collapse has, up until now, left the survivors with more technology, infrastructure, and cultural capital than before. When we consider the farming methods, roads, breeds of livestock, buildings, religious organization, and all the plunder taken from Rome after its fall, it starts to seem as though the northern barbarians of the dark ages were already starting from a point that Rome didn't achieve until some point in the Republic.
If every time civilization grows it takes three steps forward, and every time it falls it only takes two steps back, then the relapse into barbarism of a civilization four iterations into the process is already at the peak of the first cycle. Surely it is hard to imagine that the rules of the game remain the same when a "gestation" stage is occurring amidst a backdrop as advanced as the height of expansion in a previous iteration.
> New tech on its own is expansion.
This feels very much like simplified Quigley.
Quigley is then a qualified Malthus.
The Turkic take-over of Istanbul-not-constantinople proabably does not count as a collapse, however it strongly relates to the complete collapse of Roman empire in the Balkans (the emporer who established rather than just promote Christianity Justinian was born in today's Serbia) And the back and forth between expanding and contracting waves of success (before and after Turkic control) basically depopulated it in a way that Western Europe did not feel to the same degree, i.e. the collapse there was nowhere near as drawn out, so the two steps back theory can sometimes be qualified to 10 steps back. This is what actually Balkanised the Balkans, Otherwise it would have been all like Romania, or All Bulgaria, or all something. The number of steps back could become a metric of collapse. And then there is the case of Ireland which did quite well never being part of Rome per se, i.e. took a step forward while Rome two-stepped, until the Germans/vikings/normans took a step forward economically (your collapse where you are compared to me)
Quigley is Quigley. He really forms part of a spectrum of modern thinkers from who looked at humans organized into societies, civilizations, empires and became interested in trying to explain their successes and failures in a broad a general way.
If you are familiar with these other names, Quigley fits cleanly and directly along a line: start with Spengler, Toynbee, Glubb, Quigley, and finally end with Peter Turchin, who was born last. Spengler is probably the weakest, and Turchin is probably the strongest, as you might expect given that Turchin had more data, and all of his predecessors' models, to work with in perfecting his own ideas.
Yet, I don't think any one of these thinkers really managed to get everything from all the others. And worse, even though I don't truly know to what extent the problems Quigley et. al identify in civilization are crucial, I do believe that cohesive groups require many things, and some of those have been badly ignored by all of the above thinkers. Thus, while their predictions may help inform my thinking, ultimately none of their writing leaves me feeling as though I can rely on any of their conclusions.
"Pride always comes before a fall"