[owlmirror]

When you pay them you have safe passage through their territory, not only from them but from other tribes who usually want to avoid robbing people in another tribes territory.

With the taxation you not only pay them to not rob you but their presence also protects you from other robbers, who may not be willing to negotiate and just shoot you.

I really don't see a principled difference to taxation by states, the only difference is the size and a more formalized institution surround the racket.

You can decide for yourself on the morality of it, I will avoid to offer an opinion on it.

[amitport]

You don't pay them to have safe passage through their territory.

It's not their territory, similarly to how guerrilla groups in Columbia/Nepal do not own the Jungle/Himalaya/etc, and you don't get a choice whether you want their protection. If you brought your own armed man with you, you will get fired upon.

There where/are rubbers in Europe and in the USA, and we call them "rubbers"/"criminals". Why all of a sudden when we're discussing an "exotic" tribe we can't call it what it is? and again I'm emphasizing that not all Bedouin tribes practic(ed) violent rubbery, but some really did(do), and it was/is really nothing like taxation.

If we want to discuss a general claim that rubbery is the same as taxation, that's fine (and I disagree), but there is no reason to drag a specific type of rubbers into focus.

[hutzlibu]

"It's not their territory"

Who decides that?

They lived there since generations. They had weapons. They controlled who goes in their land.

I think that mattered more in reality, than some arbitary lines drawn on some map far away, by people never been close to the land in the first place.

And taxation in its oldest shape was indeed just protection money.

You had to pay your lord/king for safety. Otherwise the noble knights came to your farm and took what they wanted and might have burned it down, if they felt like it. And if you passed through foreign land, you had to pay hundreds of local lords for safe passage.

Same here. You pay the nomads for safety - they keep other tribes/rubbers away from their territory, providing you safety.

So you can claim, they did provide a "service".

But sure, you cannot really compare it to the taxation and services of the modern national states.

And sure, for the caravans it would be better, if just no one was around they needed to pay for protection of someone else.

It is parasitism. But this is how most states started. By preying on the weak for the benefit of a ruling class.

[throwaway0a5e]

These people were the government. If it's robbery when they do it it's robbery when the government does it.

Until the governments in question were able and willing to project the power necessary to take the Bedouin controlled territory by force it was their state. Regardless of what the .gov claimed on paper. The Bedouins were the government there in practice.

[jazzyjackson]

Honestly it just kind of sounds like a toll road to me.