Open Thread – 02/27/2021 – Brown Pundits
On Substack, Made in China – Does it matter who writes history if no one reads it?
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On the historicity of the Vedas
BPer Mukunda and I were having a discussion on Twitter, which I want to elevate and push to the blog, because it’s somewhat important. When I was young (20th century) I read stuff about how the Indo-Aryans described the natives of the subcontinent as dark and “snub-nosed.” That their arrival in some ways was a …
Classics must fall!
A very long piece in New York Times Magazine, He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? – Dan-el Padilla Peralta thinks classicists should knock ancient Greece […]
2,500 years later Master Kong is more relevant than ever
Victor Lieberman in Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830 that one reason the “Indian model” of statecraft and culture was more favored […]
The Sindhi homeland of the “Dravidians”
Peter Bellwood in First Farmers presents a hypothesis for the expansion of the Dravidian languages into southern India in the late Neolithic through the spread of an agro-pastoralist lifestyle through the western Deccan, pushing southward along the Arabian sea fringe. At the time I was skeptical, but now I am modestly confident that this is …
The scions of the priest kings
I was talking to a person of South Indian Brahmin origin today about their genetics. Over the course of the conversation, he showed me Y and mtDNA haplogroup types amongst his jati. The vast majority of the Y haplogroups were not R1a. Brahmin groups in India seem to be about 15% to 30% steppe in …
Sharing a continent
25% of humans live in the Indian subcontinent. 18.5% live in China. Together that’s 43.5% of the world’s population in the two great Asian civilizations. Not a trivial number in the 21st century, especially in a nascent multipolar world. And yet the two societies often lack a deep awareness of each other, as opposed to …
You will be assimilated!
Michael Lind has a piece in Tablet, The Revenge of the Yankees: How Social Gospel became Social Justice. As a trained American historian, Lind is always a good read and […]
Not all societies are identical
There is some discussion on “Hindu Twitter” and elsewhere about the French response to the murder of Samuel Paty. In short, France is going “medieval” on the asses of a lot of Muslims, even nonviolent but very conservative organizations. To use a German phrase, the French state is entering into a Kulturkampf against militant Islam. …
Meta-ethnic identities to world-swallowing memes
One of Peter Turchin’s ideas which have had a major impact on me is that of a “meta-ethnic” identity, and how that fits perfectly with what we might term “world religions.” Meta-ethnic identity isn’t a fancy construct, but the name itself gives essential information. In the world of the Bronze Age human societies were scaling […]
History beyond the screaming
Last night I realized I’m not going to weigh in on history discussions on Twitter if they pertain to the Indian subcontinent. Even people who I know are not 13-year old incels behave totally emotionally and engage in shitposting posturing constantly. It’s really impossible to get a signal out of the discussion. Indians and Pakistanis …
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 …
Who do the English think they are?
For centuries, debate has raged about whether England’s population is largely descended from German immigrants. Now, we have answers
Who do the English think they are?
In the early 5th century the Roman legions abandoned Britain, and the sceptered isle fell off the pages of history. When it reemerges two centuries later Celtic Britain had become the seedbed for the nation-state of England. The Christian religion, newly-established on the island at the time, had given way once again to paganism. Brythonic […]
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Who do the English think they are?
For centuries, debate has raged about whether England’s population is largely descended from German immigrants. Now, we have answers
The Aryan Integration Theory (AIT)
I’ve been thinking a bit recently about loaded terms like the “Aryan Invasion Theory.” Since I’m not Indian I don’t get super worked up about the ideological valence of the term. But, after thinking about it for a while, a few weeks ago I decided that the term “Aryan Invasion Theory” (AIT) is not useful, …
How the Roman Empire led to the Great Divergence
Joe Henrich argued in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous that the post-Roman order is what you have to look to to understand the nature of Western exceptionalism, and how it led to modernity as we understand it. Walter Schiedel in Escape from Rome: The Failure […]
The greatest killer of all time?
Recently there was a somewhat stupid “controversy” on Twitter where someone tried to get “Genghis Khan canceled.” It was mostly a joke but illustrated an important fact: it is hard to deny the reality of the brutality of Genghis Khan’s conquests. Part of the reason is that the Mongols themselves are not shy about what […]
Martin Luther opened pandora’s box
In the Second Foundation Trilogy, written by Greg Bear, David Brin, and Gregory Benford, we are told that Hari Seldon was one of the few individuals who was never infected with a particular virus endemic on his home planet. R. Daneel Olivaw had designed this virus to produce a fever. A major consequence of getting […]
What is indigenous about Indian civilization?
The curry to the right contains potatoes, tomatoes, and chili pepper. All of these are features of Indian cuisine from the last 500 years, as they are New World crops. Unsurprisingly, they were often brought by the Portuguese and spread out from Goa. But, at this point, it’s hard to deny these have been thoroughly …
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