Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2023 April 5

= April 5 =

Slavery and colonial rule
Normally we beleived all European countries were involved. But I think some East European countries never had slavery in Africa and colonial rule in America.

Is there any European country which never had any history of violent campaigns against natives of Africa, Americas, Australia, New Zealand.

English, French, Spanish were worst with Belgium.

Why Spanish ruled countries are third world like Cuba, Mexico unlike British areas like USA, Australia, Canada? Grace Ilunga (talk) 07:15, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
 * You forgot the Germans who were rather beastly to the natives. Alansplodge (talk) 15:52, 4 April 2023 (UTC)


 * During the Spanish colonial period the natural resources of Cuba, Mexico, and other Spanish colonies were exploited for profit, through the cheap labour of enslaved or indigenous people. No surplus wealth was locally invested and these countries missed out entirely on the Industrial Revolution, which had run its course by the time they succeeded in gaining their independence, often after long wars. When independence arrived, the vast majorities of their populations were uneducated and illiterate. After that, the United States took over the role of Spain of extracting wealth from its sphere of influence; see . --Lambiam 10:19, 3 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Regarding Eastern Europe: Russia at first was not involved in the Americas because it was busy establishing a colonial empire across Siberia; though it did eventually run out of Asia and establish its own North American Colony. The Duchy of Courland (modern Latvia) established a colony in Tobago, see Curonian colonization of the Americas.  I don't know that Poland-Lithuania ever directly got involved in colonizing the Americas.  The Austrian Habsburgs had only a small colony in the Indian Ocean, see Austrian colonization of the Nicobar Islands.  -- Jayron 32 13:24, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

I asked this in wrong place. I should have asked here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Humanities — Preceding unsigned comment added by Grace Ilunga (talk • contribs) 15:09, 3 April 2023 (UTC)


 * The Scandinavian countries and Baltic states? Plus I'm pretty sure Andorra and Liechtenstein kept their mitts clean. Clarityfiend (talk) 23:33, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Erm, Swedish overseas colonies and Danish overseas colonies (Norway was not independent until 1905, unless you count their colonisation of England). Alansplodge (talk) 15:46, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Don't forget San Marino and the Vatican City State. --Lambiam 07:42, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * And the Balkan states, except perhaps for the Ottoman conquest of Egypt and subsequent control of the Mediterranean shore of Northern Africa. --Lambiam 07:37, 4 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Also Malta and Switzerland. --Lambiam 07:44, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Malta was a British colony until 1974, by which time acquiring colonies was not really a thing. Switzerland famously lacks a navy. Alansplodge (talk) 15:46, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

If you are talking about slavery in general then I doubt that there is a country in the world that is not guilty of buying, selling and trading slaves in its past. Likewise few countries have not at some point in their history attempted to subjugate their neighbours, except where an insurmountable barrier has prevented it. If you are ignoring non-African slaves and only concentrating on the Atlantic slave trade, then of necessity the maritime shippers must be coastal states with a significant merchant marine. Even in this restricted sense you need to consider the whole business of enslaving and the subsequent travel to the coast which again relied on those with the capability to perform these deeds. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 07:45, 4 April 2023 (UTC)


 * If you go back to the Middle Ages and beyond, most present-day countries did not exist as political entities. I don't think Iceland engaged in slavery in modern history, except as a victim of slave raids. --Lambiam 16:53, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I'd have to research it to be certain, but IIRC Viking culture included slaves, so I would guess that they had slaves there at least at the time of settlement. If anyone can confirm of deny, please jump in. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 17:07, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, of course; see Chapter 20: "Slavery in Northern Europe (Scandinavia and Iceland) and the British Isles, 500–1420" in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, volume 2. The Norse settlers were predominantly men, while some 60 percent of the female population was Celtic, coming from Ireland or Scotland (see ). It is widely accepted that not all came to Iceland of their own free will; undoubtedly many were sex slaves. But by the end of the 12th century, slavery on Iceland had ended, centuries before the modern era. --Lambiam 17:56, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * We're only disagreeing with "in the past" != "modern era". Iceland though is a poor example for another reason: it is one of the few old countries that has managed to maintain it's national identity, even with a period of foreign rule.  The Althing claims to be one of (if not the) oldest parliaments in the world, though clearly from 1262–1800 it came under varying measures of Norwegian then Danish control. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 21:30, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Would you say that Malta has been guilty of buying, selling and trading slaves in its past? Ancient Carthage traded in slaves, and the Punic settlers of Malta used slaves as a matter of course, many of which undoubtedly were bought or sold. But is the Republic of Malta in a meaningful sense a descendant of the Malta from before the Second Punic War? To make statements about the past behaviour of countries meaningful, there needs to be some continuity of the countries as political entities, which is why I suggested limiting the period of consideration to modern history, the period following the Middle Ages. With that limitation, Iceland is a most excellent example. --Lambiam 07:13, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

For the question "Why Spanish ruled countries are third world like Cuba, Mexico unlike British areas like USA, Australia, Canada?", the mistake is in seeking answers in history. The reasons for a country to be successful or a failure are not things that happened centuries in the past, but about the way the country is managing things now (or perhaps "now and in the recent past"). No country has guaranteed prosperity nor is doomed to poverty because of its origins. For example, China was a country-sized slum under Mao, but since then they changed their policies and now they are a world superpower. In the other direction, Venezuela used to be the richest country in South America, and after so many years of Chavez' and Maduro's economic terraplanism they descended to be the poorest one in just a couple of decades. Cambalachero (talk) 19:53, 4 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Some things that happened did not happen "centuries in the past". The stranglehold of the US on many Latin American countries lasted till well after WWII, less than a century ago. Cuba remained a virtual colony of the US until 1959. The military coup of 1991 in Haiti, overthrowing Haiti's first democratically elected president, would not have been possible without the tacit support of the US. In general, the US is happy to support brutal dictators, not only politically but also with military aid, as long as they guarantee American corporations the freedom to exploit their countries' natural resources and keep the profits. Also today, a disproportional part of the profits from Latin America flows to American companies. --Lambiam 23:46, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * As opposed to after 1959, when Cuba became a virtual colony of the Soviet Union. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:44, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The balance of the economic value of the relationship with the Soviet Union was much more favourable to the Cuban side. It is unlikely Castro, who favoured independence, would have entered into this relationship if the US policy of isolating Cuba had not forced him to accept Soviet economic and military aid. --Lambiam 15:32, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The imprisonment of the entire population of Cuba was just fine and dandy, right? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:25, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * That's the left-wing narrative. Most coups were part of larger conflicts between factions inside the country, with both the United States and the Soviet Union using them as part of proxy wars (or proxy conflicts). Left-wingers prefer to forget the Soviet side of things and the local contexts to ease the anti-imperialist narrative. Cambalachero (talk) 16:48, 5 April 2023 (UTC)


 * There's also the concept of "being born on third base and claiming you hit a home run". Starting with better conditions makes the effort necessary to advance to the next level much easier.  Societies with an advantage have an easier time maintaining and expanding that advantage; especially when that advantage was gained and is in large part maintained at the expense of other societies.  It does all well-and-good to spend centuries exploiting the resources and manpower of a part of the world, and then when it becomes less politically expedient to keep doing so saying "You're independent now.  It's time to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and join the rest of us".  "Now and in the recent past" ignores that now not all societies are on the same footing, and in the recent past they were not either, and in the recent past to the recent past they were not either, and so on and so on.  Expecting any point in history for a society to just magically "skip ahead" in development level is silly.  -- Jayron 32 11:14, 5 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Jayon32: Colonialism did cause huge problems in some cases -- for instance, there were only a single-digit number of Congolese with college degrees when Belgium declared the Democratic Republic of the Congo (later Zaire) independent, and of course this was only a little more than 50 years after the Congo Free State mass brutalities. It's also semi-notorious that India de-industrialized under British rule (went from a cloth exporter to a cloth importer).  However, many Arab countries (except Algeria and Syria) had a comparatively somewhat brief and light experience of colonial rule, yet many of their rulers never seem to tire of incessantly blaming colonialism for every single problem in their countries, even 70 years after the colonialists left (though by now many others find this to have become rather tedious, including a few Arabs). AnonMoos (talk) 13:21, 5 April 2023 (UTC)


 * A difficult past is usually just a convenient excuse for populists to justify their failures. The past may have been hard indeed (if it's not exaggerated to make a point), but if you place things in order, abandon the notions of economic terraplanism and embrace instead the methods that actually work, then you can see a dramatic improvement of things in just a few years. AmonMoos has just mentioned India, who suffered much worse during their colonial times than the Spanish south american colonies... and yet, just compare the current wealth of each one. India is one of the highest-growing economies, and Argentina has inflation above the 100% (no typo there). And what causes it? Why does Argentina have such high inflation? Is it because it used to be a Spanish colony 2 centuries ago? Is it because there was a military dictatorship half a century ago? Is it because some wrong side prevailed in some historical conflict? Is it because someone else wants to see Argentina being poor and sent a biblical plague? No: it is because the state wastes many times the money it generates, prints money to compensate, and generates inflation as a result. If Argentina sees the errors in their ways, ceases to waste money in unprofitable nonsense, and gets a reasonable balance of finances, inflation will decrease. Cambalachero (talk) 15:15, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The specific example of Argentina presents different issues; if we're talking why one country has a specific economic problem, then yes, we can cherry pick examples of, for example, why Argentina largely fucked itself in recent decades out of it's own economy. Argentina is not particularly representative of all formerly colonial countries.  Economically and historically it is more like the U.S. and Canada in terms of its colonial history than it is like, say, the Belgian Congo or Vietnam, for example.  There's really two completely different historical timelines for what we call "colonialism", but they are really two different things.  There's the "Exterminate the natives and move a bunch of Europeans" model of colonialism, and there's the "Bring a small number of well armed Europeans in, essentially enslave the natives to do the hard work of extracting raw materials from the ground, and then when it becomes inconvenient to do so any longer, abandon them to their own devices".  Argentina's colonial history is much more of the former than the latter.  People who had the economic resources and fucked themselves over is a different kind of history than people that never had them.  Argentina is especially held as a historical paradox and an outlier; figuring out where Argentina went wrong tells us nothing about what happens in other historical examples.  Until the first half of the twentieth century, they looked more like the U.S. or Canada in terms of their economy and society than did, say, the Belgian Congo at that time.  So, your example is bullshit.  Argentina is an example of a country "born on third base and decided to steal second".  It's a terrible model for understanding the economic harm that colonialism did to most of the world because Argentina was never really that kind of colonialism.  -- Jayron 32 17:26, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Tax revenue in Argentina is about 11% of GDP, compared to 21% in the US. If they could increase the effective tax rates, there would be no fiscal deficit, but this is a political non-starter. --Lambiam 17:27, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Argentina is just one example. The point was that an economic problem like inflation has only economic causes and that those causes are grounded in the world of today and the recent past. If you have a financial deficit and make up for it by printing more money, the currency will decrease in value and there will be inflation. That would happen in countries that used to have benign colonial rules, countries that used to have brutal colonial rules, countries that are colonies right now, metropolis owning colonies, countries with no history of colonialism, and even the future base on Mars. Cambalachero (talk) 18:04, 5 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Cambalachero -- India didn't become "one of the highest-growing economies" until the 1990s, and it still lags behind China in a number of aspects... AnonMoos (talk) 02:29, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Actually, Argentina's GDP per capita is still three times higher than India's, and also higher than China's: List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita The latter two only have a larger total economy due to their much higher populations... Roentgenium111 (talk) 14:21, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

I've found an article about coups in Africa in the post-colonial era. One of the interesting points the article makes is that coups have been more common in Francophone than Anglophone countries.

My own hypothesis is that British colonial systems tended to establish fairly robust administrative and legal systems in their colonies, compared to weaker governance in French colonies (rule by administration versus rule by force). These colonial systems basically formed the foundation of post independence governance systems, thus influencing their (in)stability. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 08:41, 8 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Some discussion of post-colonial politics in this recent NYT article... -- AnonMoos (talk) 20:34, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Jackrabbit drives
Hello! I can't find any article on the jackrabbit drives in the United States, especially those during the Dust Bowl (1930s). Is there any existing article in Wikipedia concerning this? Ifteebd10 (talk) 10:25, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * No, but there could be a Jackrabbit drives article; "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anybody can edit" (including you!). There seems to be sufficient sources out there. 136.56.52.157 (talk) 10:41, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * By Wikipedia policies, the article title would more likely be singular (without the final -s). AnonMoos (talk) 02:29, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Like a beetle drive or a whist drive? DuncanHill (talk) 14:11, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Yeah, no. See:
 * --136.56.52.157 (talk) 18:01, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Giant Baba and Rikidozan
Please, can you help me to translate from Japanese to English the six pages on this site about Giant Baba's childhood? Moreover, there are also more information about Rikidozan's family and early life that nobody had translate yet: 1, 2, 3. You can write all in my talk page. Thank you very much. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.239.132.101 (talk) 16:09, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Assuming this is not for immediate input into Wikipedia, have you tried putting the text into Google Translate? If so, what were the results? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.213.18.208 (talk) 17:16, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Hirohito
After the war's ending, he was forced by the Americans to repude his divine nature as monarch and to form a Constitution. However, was he continued to consider himself a descendant of Amaterasu and then a divine monarch until his death? And what though all the defeated Japaneses about that? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.207.118.15 (talk) 18:14, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The declaration in question is referred to as the Humanity Declaration, the Wikipedia article has some information on the Japanese reception of it. -- Jayron 32 19:08, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * According to Hirohito "Hirohito was however persistent in the idea that the Emperor of Japan should be considered a descendant of the gods." I have no idea what the people thought, but since it is a Shinto belief, one might assume that followers of Shinto agreed. Star Lord -   星爵 (talk) 19:15, 5 April 2023 (UTC)