Augustus: I am leaving an Empire.
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Fables and Reflections (New York, 1993), p. 111, panel 5.
"'And you yourself, I suppose, will be the first emperor?'
"[Argos'] eyes were expressionless. 'Yes,' he said. 'Unless I find a better man, which I doubt.'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Star Plunderer" IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 325-362 AT p. 357.
"'We'll have to get the racist complex out of mankind. We can't conquer anyone, even the Gorzuni, and keep them as inferiors and hope to have a stable empire. All races must be equal.' [Argos] rubbed his strong square chin. 'I think I'll borrow a leaf from the old Romans. All worthy individuals, of any race, can become terrestrial citizens. It'll be a stabilizing factor.'"
-Anderson, op. cit., p. 360.
Pragmatic anti-racism but anti-racism, nevertheless. People kept as inferiors revolt, practising the violence taught to them by their oppressors. Slaves killed slave-owners and raped their wives but that kind of violence ended when slavery had been ended.
Gaiman shows us Augustus (literally "shows" in the graphic medium); Anderson shows us Augustus' remote successor, Argos.
We posted before that Anderson imagines a Roman sf writer projecting two futures for Rome, a long empire or a short one, and Gaiman shows us Augustus choosing between those same futures.
9 comments:
Actually, not so.
The Indian caste system, for example, is over 3,000 years old -- and it's still there, despite all the upheavals that India has gone through.
DNA research has shown that many Indian -jati- (castes or sub-castes) have been endogamous breeding isolates for that long, and the -varna- (the broader caste categories) still correspond to shares of the DNA introduced by the Indo-Aryan migrants in the 2nd millenium BCE.
I should, of course, have said that sometimes there is violent resistance.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree. Unfortunately, some abominations, like the Hindu caste system, can be very, very long lasting indeed. And I don't see the grip of that caste system ever being broken until the vast majority of Indians convert to a religion, like Christianity, disapproving of caste.
Ad astra! Sean
Some lower caste people converted to Buddhism.
Paul: and some became Christians. A -lot- of them became Muslims.
Note that there was only one successful slave revolt (in the sense of actually smashing the slave system irreparably) in the whole history of humanity.
That was in Santo Domingo, and required a concentration of really bizarrely unlikely events.
Eg., the population was over 90% slaves, there was a sharp racial distinction between free and slave, the ruling power (France) was undergoing revolutionary upheaval and was cut off from the colony, the free population was engaging in a 5-sided civil war in which all factions armed slaves to fight for them, and then the place was invaded by foreigners.
Slavery was until recently a virtually universal institution(*), on a greater or lesser scale, so that shows you that successful slave revolts are vanishingly rare.
"Success" on a smaller scale -- successful escape, for example -- is more common of course.
And mass slave revolts are confined to times/places in which recently captured and enslaved people are a substantial share of the population -- itself a rare phenomenon.
(*) even hunter-gatherers had what were effectively slaves, mostly abducted women and children. They usually assimilated over the course of a generation or two, but this leaves genetic traces which can be studied and recently have been.
From Sean:
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: And Buddhism has never really shaken the grip of the barbaric Hindu caste system. Only conversion to Christianity or Islam enabled some Indians to escape caste.
Mr. Stirling: Unfortunately slavery still exists, either de facto (think sex slavery and prostitutes in Western countries) or de jure (some Muslim countries have revived it).
And Haiti/Santo Domingo is one of the most miserable and badly governed places in the world. Fat lot of good that successful slave revolt has done it!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
And some Indians have recently escaped from caste by converting to Buddhism.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Thanks for "resurrecting" my mysteriously disappeared comment!
And, that was good, Buddhism enabling some ex-Hindus to escape the caste regime.
Ad astra! Sean
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