Invader
From Hobson's Choice
In the context of a typical campaign of imperialism, invaders are a group of people who travel from one region and conquer another by armed force. In ancient times, invasions were typically gradual affairs in which the distances traveled by the invaders might be very short, e.g., a riverine boundary or the other side of a large lake. Because of the relatively slight margin of military superiority between ancient combatants, such early invasions were slow. In some cases they were accompanied by assimilation, in which either
- the invaders gradually were absorbed or co-opted by the natives, or
- the invaders reduced the natives to subordinate status, such as slavery, or
- the invaders eradicated the natives.
In early historic times examples of all three are recorded. The Ancient Greeks have made many references to a practice of destroying cities and either murdering or enslaving their inhabitants.[1] In contrast, very rapid conquests such as that of Islam tended to be a form of social revolution that would profess solidarity with some classes of the conquered nation. Most invasions have tended to lie along this continuum.
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Context
Typically the term "invasion" is used either as an objective term of military art (e.g., the D-Day Invasion of France, which did not lead to a demographic transformation of France) or as a figure of speech (e.g., the alleged "invasion" of illegal immigrants). Other uses include metaphorical-professional usages (e.g., "invasive procedure", "invasion of privacy") or inter-species warfare, such as ants versus humans, imported plant varieties versus domestic plants, and so on.
However, over the tens of thousands of years since the development of language, human communities have migrated immense distances, typically with little confrontation. As the number of venues where humans had never penetrated declined, these movements typically became slower and accompanied by strategy. Invasions of hungry nomads in pursuit of pastures and water are widely assumed by anthropologists to have played a decisive role in the development of modern human traits.[2] It seems clear that defense from encroachment and greater effectiveness in aggression were crucial motives in the formation of the early states.
The European expansion of 1450-1911, like most mass conquests, was accompanied by a massive campaign of ecological redemption, in which territories were physically transformed for the purpose of a centralized industrial system. This required a large migration of Europeans to the Americas, accompanied by transportation of capital and military hardware. It also required, or was believed to have required, the transport of immense numbers of Africans captured as slaves. The Native Americans were suppressed through the discontinuous technical superiority of the Europeans, the onslaught of alien diseases such as smallpox, and the effects of European ecological redemption on their food sources.[3] Typically death by disease and ecological displacement are intertwined, as refugee populations are usually much more vulnerable to carrying and succumbing to disease.
Attenuation of the Invader
The invaders typically try to widen their social base as their numbers fail to keep up. New arrivals are likely to find themselves reduced to subaltern status, although rivals as to the initial subalterns. Hence, slaves are supplemented by indentured laborers or even as a marginalized group of immigrant laborers (such as the Irish in North America). At an individual level, there is every incentive to be snobbish towards any arriviste; sometimes it is bureaucratic pressures, such as the military, that undoes this and "whitens" an heretofore-out group, such as the Italians or Greeks in the United States. In other cases it is simply the arrival of new arrivistes, against whom the older Whites must unite with the less-new ones.
In cases where there is some permanent barrier to assimilating incoming elites (such as scarce professionals who don't desire to immigrate), these elites form a fifth race. Morally critical of their allies within the industrial system, they nonetheless benefit from it. Their allegiance is to the metropole, and their moral revulsion at colonialism enforces an arms-length distance from the invaders.
Notes
- ↑ See, for instance, Mogens Herman Hansen, Thomas Heine Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis Oxford University Press (2004), "Destruction and Disappearance of Poleis", p.120
- ↑ This is a fundamental concept of evolutionary psychology. Some sources on this include Jung-Kyoo Choi & Samuel Bowles, "The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War," Science (2007), inter alia.
- ↑ Usually the enormous loss of life among Native Americans (1492-1900) is attributed to either actual violence or disease. A third, perhaps larger, cause of death among Native Americans was the abrupt transformation of the landscape into one that did not support their livelihood. Detailed information on causes of death among Native Americans during much of this period is highly conflicted, but this seems consistent with cases studies in the lives of particular Native groups. See Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492, University of Oklahoma Press (January 1990), chapter 1; this describes methods of calculating the initial population of the Americas by the means of death, i.e., calculations backwards from the nadir populations of 1900 all the way back to initial contacts with Europeans. Richard White's The Roots of Dependency, U of Nebraska Press (1988) includes case studies of the Choctaw, Pawnee, and Navajo that describe comparatively mild cases of decline into dependency (my review).
See Also
Race
Slavery
Trans-European Project
External Links
- Mahmood Mamdani, [When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda], Princeton University Press (2001)
- Mogens Herman Hansen, Thomas Heine Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis Oxford University Press (2004)
