Chapter 7: The Dialectic, History, and Climate Change: Part III

Commerce in these desert empires often went by land; they were Silk Road states with the exception of the Mexica, who nonetheless traded their feathers and cacao with porter caravans walking on land. So caravanserais were a common feature of these empires, which often were elaborated into a postal network of Pony Express-like couriers, such as the Mongol yam. Furthermore, commerce was the lifeblood of these empires: presumably, control of a lucrative trade route was much of the reason for living in the desert with a lot of military capacity in the first place.

One final thing uniting most of these dry, desert religious empires, especially the early ones: the lack of concern for unbelievers and other institutional outgroups. They often enslaved entire defeated enemy populations, selling them in their own markets or to foreign lands. As with their solidarity, their intolerance of slavery grew over time. Jews and Christians accepted and regulated the practice in ancient times, while Muslims regulated it more strictly and occasionally allowed them to rise to great power anyway, and Sikhs forbade it.

It was slavery and imperialism in particular that drove history forward. The concentration of labor power in private hands begat the first crude mines, foundries, and factories in the Bronze Age, as at Jebel Barkar in Jordan. The vast structural inequalities worldwide that began as one city-state plundering and enslaving another have yet to be healed, and are why there are communists.

And that points us to a class analysis of these dry desert religious empires: they were originally conservative, but military victory brought slavery and changed their societies to nazbol ones, with a clear race- or faith-based lower class.

The religious empires, once arisen in the dry desert wastes, did not stay there, but conquered the wet settled lands around them. They often transferred their centers of power there. The caliphs moved from Mecca to Baghdad, the Mongols from Qaraqorum to Beijing, the Mexica from Aztlan to Lake Texcoco. Defeated enemy cities rebuilt as capitals of proud empires, where once their defeated ancestors ruled kingdoms.

With the military power of the desert dries behind the economic might of the settled wet, the next era would be driven by the interests of societies living in settled wet regions. At some point, either by revolution and restoration of the defeated ruling families or by a new heir deciding to be tolerant to the defeated settled peoples instead, the settled wet areas inevitably shrugged off the nazbol politics that conquered them, and the nazbol bourgeoisie in charge tried to openly assert their interests as liberals. Sooner or later, because of the accumulation of vast fortunes in productive lands, this worked. Depending on how it worked, the military of the conquering power might go over, or might try to resist the change, or splinter off areas they directly controlled into a rival kingdom maintaining the old dry desert coalition.

But regardless, the rise of population and the rise of gunpowder doomed the military power of the desert dries against them in the long term. Qubilai Khan moved his capital to Beijing and provoked a civil war with other Mongols simply because China was too populous to be fully conquered the Mongol way, too many people to simply butcher, and so it had to be conquered the Chinese way, through a mastery of the literally liberal arts. This was before every last farmer could shoot a gun well enough to drive off nomadic raiders, but even so, it's somewhat impressive the Mongols held on as long as they did. It's also instructive that they held onto their empires much longer away from population centers like China and Iran.

The settled wet era is truly the bourgeois era, derived from the financial power of the great trading houses and/or corporations shipping vast quantities of goods produced in favorable terrain with cheap labor. The main competition for bourgeois liberal ideology in this era is conservativism, but this is the conservativism of religion and peasantry. The nazbol military is kept well in check by the liberal bourgeoisie with better pay than the commoners, who whether free, enslaved or in some semi-free feudal status live lives of wretched toil for the benefit of the rich and their tools. This happened in ancient Rome, to the point that there came to be a Latin word for a free laborer who lives in a city: proletarius. You may have heard of this class of people before.

Continue reading Part IV