Sapiens: Chapters 9–11

Anthropologists, historians and politicians thus referred to ‘Samoan Culture’ or ‘Tasmanian Culture’ as if the same beliefs, norms and values had characterised Samoans and Tasmanians from time immemorial.

Unlike the laws of physics, which are free of inconsistencies, every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions. Cultures are constantly trying to reconcile these contradictions, and this process fuels change.

Returning home in a meek and pensive mood, the nobleman would change into his best silks and go to a banquet in his lord’s castle.

For 12,000 years, nobody else knew the Tasmanians were there, and they didn’t know that there was anyone else in the world. They had their wars, political struggles, social oscillations and cultural developments.

These square coins made by the Christian conquerors were emblazoned with flowing Arabic script that declared: ‘There is no god except Allah, and Muhammad is Allah’s messenger.’

Land gets converted into loyalty when a baron sells property to support his retainers.

Initially, when the first versions of money were created, people didn’t have this sort of trust, so it was necessary to define as ‘money’ things that had real intrinsic value. History’s first known money—Sumerian barley money—is a good example.

For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil.

Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits.

Brutal warriors, religious fanatics and concerned citizens have repeatedly managed to trounce calculating merchants, and even to reshape the economy.

Numantia later became a symbol of Spanish independence and courage. Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, wrote a tragedy called The Siege of Numantia which ends with the town’s destruction, but also with a vision of Spain’s future greatness. Poets composed paeans to its fierce defenders and painters committed majestic depictions of the siege to canvas.

The ancient Numantians are to this day Spain’s paragons of heroism and patriotism, cast as role models for the country’s young people.

Yet Spanish patriots extol the Numantians in Spanish—a romance language that is a progeny of Scipio’s Latin. The Numantians spoke a now dead and lost Celtic language.

Most past cultures have sooner or later fallen prey to the armies of some ruthless empire, which have consigned them to oblivion.

The Athenian Empire at its zenith was much smaller in size and population than today’s Greece. The Aztec Empire was smaller than today’s Mexico. Both were nevertheless empires, whereas modern Greece and modern Mexico are not, because the former gradually subdued dozens and even hundreds of different polities while the latter have not.

In our time, ‘imperialist’ ranks second only to ‘fascist’ in the lexicon of political swear words.

For example, when the Western Roman Empire finally fell to invading Germanic tribes in 476 AD, the Numantians, Arverni, Helvetians, Samnites, Lusitanians, Umbrians, Etruscans and hundreds of other forgotten peoples whom the Romans conquered centuries earlier did not emerge from the empire’s eviscerated carcass like Jonah from the belly of the great fish. None of them were left.

The profits and prosperity brought by Roman imperialism provided Cicero, Seneca and St Augustine with the leisure and wherewithal to think and write; the Taj Mahal could not have been built without the wealth accumulated by Mughal exploitation of their Indian subjects; and the Habsburg Empire’s profits from its rule over its Slavic, Hungarian and Romanian-speaking provinces paid Haydn’s salaries and Mozart’s commissions.

No Caledonian writer preserved Calgacus’ speech for posterity. We know of it thanks to the Roman historian Tacitus.

Cyrus, on the other hand, claimed not merely to rule the whole world, but to do so for the sake of all people. ‘We are conquering you for your own benefit,’ said the Persians. Cyrus wanted the peoples he subjected to love him and to count themselves lucky to be Persian vassals.

The most famous example of Cyrus’ innovative efforts to gain the approbation of a nation living under the thumb of his empire was his command that the Jewish exiles in Babylonia be allowed to return to their Judaean homeland and rebuild their temple.

Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’ and ‘they’.

Every time an empire collapsed, the dominant political theory goaded the powers that be not to settle for paltry independent principalities, but to attempt reunification.

Every time an empire collapsed, the dominant political theory goaded the powers that be not to settle for paltry independent principalities, but to attempt reunification.

Empires have played a decisive part in amalgamating many small cultures into fewer big cultures. Ideas, people, goods and technology spread more easily within the borders of an empire than in a politically fragmented region.

The benefits were sometimes salient—law enforcement, urban planning, standardisation of weights and measures—and sometimes questionable—taxes, conscription, emperor worship.

The benefits were sometimes salient—law enforcement, urban planning, standardisation of weights and measures—and sometimes questionable—taxes, conscription, emperor worship.

The wild Germans and painted Gauls had lived in squalor and ignorance until the Romans tamed them with law, cleaned them up in public bathhouses, and improved them with philosophy.

The Mauryan Empire in the third century BC took as its mission the dissemination of Buddha’s teachings to an ignorant world.

The Soviets felt duty-bound to facilitate the inexorable historical march from capitalism towards the utopian dictatorship of the proletariat.

He indulges his wife’s penchant for elaborately ornate baubles, but is a bit embarrassed that she, like other local women, retains this relic of Celtic taste—he’d rather have her adopt the clean simplicity of the jewellery worn by the Roman governor’s wife.

Equipped with his new manners, he travelled to England, studied law at University College London, and became a qualified barrister.

Emperor Septimius Severus (193–211) was the scion of a Punic family from Libya.

Many of the empire’s subjects gradually adopted the Muslim faith, the Arabic language and a hybrid imperial culture. The old Arab elite looked upon these parvenus with deep hostility, fearing to lose its unique status and identity.

For more than 2,000 years, a welter of ethnic and cultural groups first termed barbarians were successfully integrated into imperial Chinese culture and became Han Chinese (so named after the Han Empire that ruled China from 206 BC to AD 220).

During the modern era Europeans conquered much of the globe under the guise of spreading a superior Western culture.

These ideologies are at best naïve; at worst they serve as disingenuous window-dressing for crude nationalism and bigotry.

Perhaps you could make a case that some of the myriad cultures that emerged at the dawn of recorded history were pure, untouched by sin and unadulterated by other societies. But no culture since that dawn can reasonably make that claim, certainly no culture that exists now on earth.

How many Indians today would want to call a vote to divest themselves of democracy, English, the railway network, the legal system, cricket and tea on the grounds that they are imperial legacies?

States are increasingly open to the machinations of global markets, to the interference of global companies and NGOs, and to the supervision of global public opinion and the international judicial system.