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corsac | 2 years ago
Settled cultivators basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to nomadic pastoralists because your grazing lands were settled (often completely unsustainably) until they ceased to exist.
"Not unlike [insert pathogen or reviled insect here]" (in quotes b/c I can't seriously compare humans to such things without revulsion; just an instructive parallel).
The "Great" Wall of China, interestingly, walls in vast areas of steppe and former Xiongnu grazing land.
Eurasian nomad wealth was overwhelmingly the "spoils" of trade, not raiding – and countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors. Eventually, Eurasian trade patterns shifted from overland (the "silk road") to maritime routes, and the interior of the continent fell into a terminal recession. Until then (e.g. the Jungars) nomads continued to play an outsized role.
Some of the smarter nomad communities are still nomads. And 99% of developed/developing world population (including those with nomad ancestors) resemble pre-modern sedentary populations just as little as they do pre-modern nomad populations in their modes of life.
lmm|2 years ago
Sure - it was a Hobbesian war of all against all, until the settled cultivators made a better world.
> countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors.
If the nomads make war on you unless you "trade" with them then that's blackmail, not voluntary trade.
corsac|2 years ago