Why Turks ruled India for so long
After finishing Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity I continue to believe that geography and economics explain the basic reason for the very long ascendance of Turkic people in the Indian subcontinent, and, their eventual eclipse. The context for this is the fact that many Indian and Indian American …
Why there will never be an “India Lobby”
Back in the 2000s on the Sepia Mutiny blog I would get frustrated with commenters who would talk about India as if it was analogous to Cuba or Israel, in that a group of American nationals with family ties could influence the shape of American policy. This was always a crazy proposition. The reason that …
Browncast Episode 93: Camilo Gomez, Peruvian Left-libertarian
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above! You can also support the podcast as a patron. The primary benefit now is that you get the …
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The Afro-Asian world
It’s 2020. 2050 is close enough that population projections out to 2050 are going to be feasible and you can trust the projections.
In 1950 Europe & its offshoots, North and South America and Oceania, were 35% of the world’s population…
Xinjiang and Kashmir, China and India
This post isn’t really to state something unequivocal…it’s just to observe that Kashmir and Xinjiang are not that far apart geographically. The great translator of Buddhist works into Chinese, Kumārajīva, may have been the son of a princess from Kucha (on the southern fringe of the Tarim basin) and a Kashmiri. What is happening to …
Taking sides when good and evil is unclear
One of the things that I admitted when reflecting on where I’ve been wrong, is that my default stance is to be somewhat isolationist because international entanglements are so complex. Some critics always wonder why I use such a simple heuristic, why not evaluate on a case by case basis? At the extreme, this is …
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The end the European age
I made the above chart for a presentation I’m working on. You notice that in 1913 Europe is 28% of the world’s population. In 2000 it is 13% of the world’s population. In 2019 Europe is almost certainly closer to ~10% of the world’s population (the above estimates for Europe include Russia). To the right, …
The airstrikes
Indian Jets Strike on Pakistani Side of Kashmir Line: Indian warplanes conducted airstrikes in the Pakistan-controlled side of Kashmir on Tuesday, Pakistani officials said, in an escalation of tensions between the nuclear-armed nations after a suicide bombing against Indian troops in the disputed region this month. If confirmed, it would be the first time that …
Ummah, take care of your own shit!
There’s a lot of nasty stuff going down in Syria. Toddlers are being killed in front of their parents. This is prompting liberal internationalists like Shadi Hamid to demand that the USA intervene in Syria. This is the same Shadi Hamid, liberal internationalist, who admits that democracy in the Muslim world is going to manifest […]