I feel like there’s two points causing the confusion:
(1) The assumption that natives are an undifferentiated mass. There were a variety of mutually hostile indigenous peoples, who themselves sough out allies against each other; and, in particular, who sought to balance the strongest local powers. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, page 48:
The search for native allies was one of the standard procedures or routines of Spanish conquest activity throughout the Americas. Pedro de Alvarado entered highland Guatemala in 1524 not only with thousands of Nahua allies, but also expecting to be able to take advantage of a Mexica-Tlaxcala type rivalry; the two major Maya groups of the region, the Cakchiquel and the Quiche, had both sent ambassadors to Mexico City a year of two earlier. As a result, for the rest of the decade, a brutal civil war ravaged the highlands as the Spaniards used these groups against each other and against smaller Maya groups, while periodically turning with violence upon these native “allies”. Conversely, Spaniards under the Montejos sought desperately to make sense of regional politics in Yucatan in order to exploit or establish a similar division, being forced in the end to make a series of often unreliable alliances with local dynasties such as the Pech and Xio. These Maya noble families controlled relatively small portions of Yucatan, and the Spaniards never achieved control over the whole peninsula...
Manco’s great siege of Cuzo in 1536 would probably have resulted in the elimination of Pizarro’s forces were it not for his Andean allies. There were initially less than 1,000, but grew to over 4,000 later in the siege as two of Manco’s brothers and other nobles of the same Inca faction came over to Pizarro’s side...
The taking of native allies from one zone of conquest to the next was a practice established at the very onset of Spanish activity in the Americas. Caribbean islanders were routinely carried between islands as support personnel on conquest expeditions, and then brought to the mainland in the campaigns into Panama and Mexico. For example, Cortes brought 200 native Cubans with him to Mexico in 1519.
(2) This also neglects native power structures, which conquistadors mostly left intact in the years immediately after the conquest; note also that part of the conquered region had previously been conquered by the Aztecs, so there the Spanish were simply substituting one empire for another. The Spanish initially didn’t speak the native languages, worked through local elites, and reused existing systems of tribute and corvee labor. The Spanish eventually exercised more direct control, but this took an extremely long time. (Fun fact: the last native rebellion against European control in Mexico ended in 1933).
The lesson I draw from (1) is that in fact I should not think that conquering some areas help you conquer others. Rather, when entering some area, it is possible to draw local support in the first stages of a war. This updates me back towards thinking it’s costly to control a newly conquered area.
The lesson I draw from (2) is that you can continue to make use of some of the state capacity of the native power structures. But it seems like you have fairly low fidelity control (at least in the language barrier case, and probably in all cases, because you lack a lot of connections to informal power structures). This seems like mostly a wash?
Are these the same as the lessons you draw from this data?
(1) Local support doesn’t end after the first stages of the war, or after the war ends. I mentioned having favored local elites within one society/ethnicity continue to do most of the direct work in (2); colonizers also set up some groups as favored identities who did much of the work of local governance. For example, after the Spanish conquest, the Tlaxcala had a favored status and better treatment.
(2) Not sure why you’d expect low fidelity control to imply that it ends up as a wash in terms of extracting resources, can you clarify?
(2) It seems expensive to run a state (maintain power structures, keep institutions intact for future benefit, keep everything running well enough that the stuff that depends on other things running well keeps running). Increasing the cost by a large factor seems like it would reduce the net resources extracted.
It seems even more expensive if the native population will continue intermittently fighting you for 400 years (viz your rebellion fact)
Pongo, I think you are drawing the wrong lessons. Yeah, maintaining a state costs stuff. But there’s no law that says it has to cost more than the benefits. In fact historically the “benefits” have almost always been greater than the costs. This is why empires tend to grow bigger. If ruling territory is usually a net cost, well, you’d never see any empires at all really, because no city would be wealthy enough to maintain more than a few small pieces of territory.
Edit: I think my confusion is that there’s never been a whole world empire. Shouldn’t that happen if conquering a neighbouring region tends to make you more able to conquer other regions?
Alexander’s empire didn’t last. It seems like shortly after being founded, the Roman Empire has a lot of trouble and then (from my skim of Wikipedia) Diocletian sort of split it in four?
There’s also never been someone with 100% of the money, even though getting money tends to make it easier to get more money. (For example, you can just invest it in an index fund!)
There definitely are ways in which maintaining an empire gets harder the bigger it gets. For example, communication is more difficult over longer distances and higher language barriers. Also, ingroup cohesion becomes harder to maintain when the outgroup is weaker and more distant. And there are of course special cases—e.g. England for the Roman Empire—where holding on to a piece of territory is more trouble than it’s worth. Nevertheless it’s still true that, in most cases, conquering something gives you more resources, military force, etc.
I wrote some interesting speculation on this topic a few years ago. Roughly speaking, large premodern empires seem to consistently max out around roughly the same population size (~60M, with large-but-less-than-a-factor-of-two error bars). The few which manage to get larger than that through conquest rapidly split apart.
One generation. The Mongols were the only empire to get a lot bigger than 50-70M (they capped around 110M), and they promptly split in a war of succession.
There’s also never been someone with 100% of the money, even though getting money tends to make it easier to get more money.
Oh yeah! What’s up with that?
Nevertheless it’s still true that, in most cases, conquering something gives you more resources, military force, etc.
Yeah, that seems to be true. My intuition is still having trouble with the success of converting the conquered military. Wikipedia tells me it was a big deal, and it remains surprising to me
I don’t really have a great answer to that, except that empirically in this specific case, Spain was indeed able to extract very large amounts of resources from America within a single generation. (The Spanish government directly spent very little on America; the flow of money was overwhelming towards Europe, to the point where it caused notable inflation in Spain and in Europe as a whole.) I don’t disagree that running a state is expensive, but I don’t see why the expense would necessarily be higher than the extracted resources?
OK, so maybe the idea is “Conquered territory has reified net production across however long a period → take all the net production and spend it on ships / horses / mercenaries”?
I expect that the administrative parts of states expand to be about as expensive as the resources they can get under their direct control. (Perhaps this is the dumb part, and ancient states regularly stored >90% of tax revenue as treasure?). Then, when you are making the state more expensive to run, you have less of a surplus. You also can’t really make the state do something different than it was before if you have low fidelity control. The state doing what it was doing before probably wasn’t helping you conquer more territory.
I feel like there’s two points causing the confusion:
(1) The assumption that natives are an undifferentiated mass. There were a variety of mutually hostile indigenous peoples, who themselves sough out allies against each other; and, in particular, who sought to balance the strongest local powers. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, page 48:
(2) This also neglects native power structures, which conquistadors mostly left intact in the years immediately after the conquest; note also that part of the conquered region had previously been conquered by the Aztecs, so there the Spanish were simply substituting one empire for another. The Spanish initially didn’t speak the native languages, worked through local elites, and reused existing systems of tribute and corvee labor. The Spanish eventually exercised more direct control, but this took an extremely long time. (Fun fact: the last native rebellion against European control in Mexico ended in 1933).
(I am less familiar with India.)
Thanks for sharing this data.
The lesson I draw from (1) is that in fact I should not think that conquering some areas help you conquer others. Rather, when entering some area, it is possible to draw local support in the first stages of a war. This updates me back towards thinking it’s costly to control a newly conquered area.
The lesson I draw from (2) is that you can continue to make use of some of the state capacity of the native power structures. But it seems like you have fairly low fidelity control (at least in the language barrier case, and probably in all cases, because you lack a lot of connections to informal power structures). This seems like mostly a wash?
Are these the same as the lessons you draw from this data?
(1) Local support doesn’t end after the first stages of the war, or after the war ends. I mentioned having favored local elites within one society/ethnicity continue to do most of the direct work in (2); colonizers also set up some groups as favored identities who did much of the work of local governance. For example, after the Spanish conquest, the Tlaxcala had a favored status and better treatment.
(2) Not sure why you’d expect low fidelity control to imply that it ends up as a wash in terms of extracting resources, can you clarify?
(2) It seems expensive to run a state (maintain power structures, keep institutions intact for future benefit, keep everything running well enough that the stuff that depends on other things running well keeps running). Increasing the cost by a large factor seems like it would reduce the net resources extracted.
It seems even more expensive if the native population will continue intermittently fighting you for 400 years (viz your rebellion fact)
Pongo, I think you are drawing the wrong lessons. Yeah, maintaining a state costs stuff. But there’s no law that says it has to cost more than the benefits. In fact historically the “benefits” have almost always been greater than the costs. This is why empires tend to grow bigger. If ruling territory is usually a net cost, well, you’d never see any empires at all really, because no city would be wealthy enough to maintain more than a few small pieces of territory.
That’s a good point!
Edit: I think my confusion is that there’s never been a whole world empire. Shouldn’t that happen if conquering a neighbouring region tends to make you more able to conquer other regions?
Alexander’s empire didn’t last. It seems like shortly after being founded, the Roman Empire has a lot of trouble and then (from my skim of Wikipedia) Diocletian sort of split it in four?
There’s also never been someone with 100% of the money, even though getting money tends to make it easier to get more money. (For example, you can just invest it in an index fund!)
There definitely are ways in which maintaining an empire gets harder the bigger it gets. For example, communication is more difficult over longer distances and higher language barriers. Also, ingroup cohesion becomes harder to maintain when the outgroup is weaker and more distant. And there are of course special cases—e.g. England for the Roman Empire—where holding on to a piece of territory is more trouble than it’s worth. Nevertheless it’s still true that, in most cases, conquering something gives you more resources, military force, etc.
I wrote some interesting speculation on this topic a few years ago. Roughly speaking, large premodern empires seem to consistently max out around roughly the same population size (~60M, with large-but-less-than-a-factor-of-two error bars). The few which manage to get larger than that through conquest rapidly split apart.
How rapidly?
One generation. The Mongols were the only empire to get a lot bigger than 50-70M (they capped around 110M), and they promptly split in a war of succession.
Oh yeah! What’s up with that?
Yeah, that seems to be true. My intuition is still having trouble with the success of converting the conquered military. Wikipedia tells me it was a big deal, and it remains surprising to me
I don’t really have a great answer to that, except that empirically in this specific case, Spain was indeed able to extract very large amounts of resources from America within a single generation. (The Spanish government directly spent very little on America; the flow of money was overwhelming towards Europe, to the point where it caused notable inflation in Spain and in Europe as a whole.) I don’t disagree that running a state is expensive, but I don’t see why the expense would necessarily be higher than the extracted resources?
OK, so maybe the idea is “Conquered territory has reified net production across however long a period → take all the net production and spend it on ships / horses / mercenaries”?
I expect that the administrative parts of states expand to be about as expensive as the resources they can get under their direct control. (Perhaps this is the dumb part, and ancient states regularly stored >90% of tax revenue as treasure?). Then, when you are making the state more expensive to run, you have less of a surplus. You also can’t really make the state do something different than it was before if you have low fidelity control. The state doing what it was doing before probably wasn’t helping you conquer more territory.
Well said. The implications for AI takeover are interesting to think about.