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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23318 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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Is there even a single instance of an indigenous (by which I mean tribal when Europeans showed up, not organized states like Japan) people actually advancing to the technological/military frontier without getting colonized? I find it unbelievable that the Iroquois could become a major power, just because of all the catching up they'd have to do in statecraft. They were behind the Aztecs, who themselves were far behind the Europeans or Asians at this point. There's zero chance they can control international trade because 'native peoples' were vastly inferior at sea to Europeans or settled peoples, for obvious reasons. They'd need to develop a seafaring culture first and that takes time.

Ironically, this is also orthodox Marxist thought (I am not a Marxist). Marx was dead against the idea of revolution in Russia. No revolutionary conditions he said, not enough industrial workers, improperly developed, not enough capitalism. You can only move onto socialism after completing capitalism, he said.

Tribal horse nomads were comparable technologically to settled people until gunpowder without being colonized.

Hmm, that's a good point. They sort of were but on the other hand, they were always bad at boats, textiles and siege warfare, (until the Mongols got quite good at siege warfare). But that technological inferiority obviously didn't cause them to be militarily inferior, even pre-Mongol.

Brittania and Gaul?

Also the North American Indians were already on the technological frontier so far as "living in North America" was concerned when the Euros showed up, and remained so for about a few hundred years -- they were behind in the "conquering and killing people" department though, which turned out to be pretty important.

Adding to @Jiro's comment below, there are some arguable cases predating the level of statecraft needed for full colonisation: the Magyars turned up on Europe's borders as a tribal confederation and took plenty of scalps until getting their asses handed to them by the Germanics, whereupon they seemingly settled down and advanced to whatever they technical frontier of 12th century Europe was. The various states of the Korean peninsula were still in tribal stage when first encountered by the Chinese blob but had seemingly more or less caught up before the Mongols/Yuan riding the soft power tiger that was the Middle Kingdom finally rolled over them.

Is there even a single instance of an indigenous (by which I mean tribal when Europeans showed up, not organized states like Japan) people actually advancing to the technological/military frontier without getting colonized?

There are almost no cases of indigenous people not getting colonized, period. So the fact that there are no cases of indigenous people not getting colonized and also X doesn't really tell you much.

Your definition here feels tautological: we only apply "indigenous" as a label to people whose lands have been colonized. Hardly anyone applies that label to Anglo-Saxons, or Jews in Israel. And there are a few: Thailand and Ethiopian were never fully controlled by Western powers.

For fun, consider that Vikings settled Greenland before "Native Americans" got there.

I thought the same, but to be fair, it makes sense in the framing of the post it's a reply to. People who were tribal when the Europeans showed up were colonized by them, period. It's also true that tribals generally tend to get conquered/enslaved by anyone who shows up with a sufficiently high tech level compared to them, so this has little to do with Europeans in particular, though.

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