The problem with Evil races is not what you think

[Aldarc]

Again you are talking about post-colonial Africa while I talk about pre-colonial sub-saharan Africa, specifically the 15th to 18th century and especially when you go further inland. As I have mentioned before already....

So was he:

If we are talking about the pre-modern period, I invite you to compare the design of housing in (say) Fez with that in (say) Stonetown, Zanzibar. The diffusion (via the cultural influence of Islam) of housing technologies is obvious to even a non-expert.

Although Islamic traders had trade routes through the desert, the Sahara was nevertheless a HUGE barrier for trade and cultural diffusion. This was true even in the times of the Roman Empire or the window of time when the entire Mediterranean was mostly Christian. Europe was mostly uninterested in sea trade with Subsaharan Africa (apart from goods like ivory and gold) until basically the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople put the nail in the coffin for old trade routes and Europeans sought to bypass Muslim nations.

Also, keep in mind that East Africa was not so much focused on trade with Europe, but, rather, with routes along the Indian Ocean, obviously including Arabia, India, and China. And these sea trade relations between East Africa and China were occurring well before Europe began the "Age of Discovery," with East and Central Africa primarily interested in rare Asian trade goods like cotton, silk, and porcelain.

Zanzibar, which Pemerton mentions, was vital hub for trade for East and Central Africa, and it attests to an infusion of East African, Arabic, Persian, and Indian traditions. And Zanzibar was essentially the "middle man" for trade between Central/East Coastal Africa and the Arab, Indian, and Persian merchants. This cultural infusion also included religion, writing, and architecture. Some of the people in this area are descendants of even Chinese and Indian merchants from before the time of European colonizers.

And you remember that I also brought up other examples like pre- and post-contact North America?

Part of the problem is that our knowledge of pre-Columbian indigenous peoples and their trade is incredibly limited. There is a lot of guesswork we have to deduce from the diffusion of Maize and other crops from Mesoamerica to the rest of the Americas or even trade goods like turquoise. Or even the lack of pack animals or limited amount of sea trade.

 

[Ixal]

So was he:

Although Islamic traders had trade routes through the desert, the Sahara was nevertheless a HUGE barrier for trade and cultural diffusion. This was true even in the times of the Roman Empire or the window of time when the entire Mediterranean was mostly Christian. Europe was mostly uninterested in sea trade with Subsaharan Africa (apart from goods like ivory and gold) until basically the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople put the nail in the coffin for old trade routes and Europeans sought to bypass Muslim nations.

Also, keep in mind that East Africa was not so much focused on trade with Europe, but, rather, with routes along the Indian Ocean, obviously including Arabia, India, and China. And these sea trade relations between East Africa and China were occurring well before Europe began the "Age of Discovery," with East and Central Africa primarily interested in rare Asian trade goods like cotton, silk, and porcelain.

Zanzibar, which Pemerton mentions, was vital hub for trade for East and Central Africa, and it attests to an infusion of East African, Arabic, Persian, and Indian traditions. And Zanzibar was essentially the "middle man" for trade between Central/East Coastal Africa and the Arab, Indian, and Persian merchants. This cultural infusion also included religion, writing, and architecture. Some of the people in this area are descendants of even Chinese and Indian merchants from before the time of European colonizers.


Part of the problem is that our knowledge of pre-Columbian indigenous peoples and their trade is incredibly limited. There is a lot of guesswork we have to deduce from the diffusion of Maize and other crops from Mesoamerica to the rest of the Americas or even trade goods like turquoise. Or even the lack of pack animals or limited amount of sea trade.

Zanzibar was basically colonized by Muslims and many parts of Africa had trade deals with the Muslim world, especially among the east cost but also Mali (even though a lot of trade was slaves). Mali was also a big site of learning.
But how much of the technology did spread from the Islamic world to the rest of Africa which were not colonized? Not much. Here you have the same situation like in post-Columbian North America. Settlers with a higher technology base and natives with a lower technology base living next to each other for centuries, yet the technological transfer was rather limited for various reasons.
The same applies to the European contact in the west. There was some transfer between Europe and the slave trading kingdoms on the coast, but must exchanges were luxury goods which did not really transfer much technology. But from the coastal kingdoms not much spread to the interior of Africa.

The same happened in North America. The natives adopted horses and guns, for example. But metallurgy? Writing? The North American tribes actually lost the ability of metallurgy at some point before the contact with Europe as they switched back from copper to stone for various reasons. It was only in the 19th century that some tribes relearned how to smelt and work copper from Mexican settlers.
So over centuries of contact there was hardly much technological transfer. Some specific items, but the Native Americans did not simply adopt European technology over time, meaning that even after a long tome of contact the technological disparity remained.

As for Pre-Columbian times, Central and South American goods goods like maccaw feathers and cocoa were found among the, I think, Pueblo so there defiantly was trade between them and the Mexican powers. There are also some very similar stories between those peoples. So there must at least have been indirect contact and trade between them similar to the Silk Road. The coastal trade certainly was not all that limited.

So with all those historical examples of slow to nonexistant technological diffusion and the general slow development in RPG worlds, why exactly would it be implausible and a "colonial trope" for the Grippli the have a much lower technology base than other countries, even though they had contact with them?

 

[Aldarc]

So with all those historical examples of slow to nonexistant technological diffusion and the general slow development in RPG worlds, why exactly would it be implausible and a "colonial trope" for the Grippli the have a much lower technology base than other countries, even though they had contact with them?

Primarily because it fits in with bigger picture patterns and language of colonialism in the game and its history in perpetuating these colonial tropes. That's the bottom-line of your gish gallop. This is less an argument about plausibility and more about the presence and propogation of negative colonial tropes.

 

[Ixal]

Primarily because it fits in with bigger picture patterns and language of colonialism in the game and its history in perpetuating these colonial tropes. That's the bottom-line of your gish gallop. This is less an argument about plausibility and more about the presence and propogation of negative colonial tropes.

If something is true, or in this case historic and plausible, it is not a trope.

 

[Aldarc]

If something is true, or in this case historic and plausible, it is not a trope.

Is it historic or plausible for African Americans to like fried chicken or watermelon? Can that not still be harmful stereotypes and tropes perpetuated by white supremacism and racist ideology? Sorry, but historical plausibility does not negate harmful stereotypes or tropes.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Living in small societies that do not use metallurgy is a pretty typical way for humans to live, and in that sense is not out of place in a FRPG.

However, if you are imagining some societies that are agrarian, use metal, etc it seems - to me, at least - worth thinking about why, in your fiction, there is not diffusion of some of that. For instance, your non-agrarian peoples may prefer living as hunter-gatherers or pastoralists; but is there a reason they don't trade for metal tools?

They do trade for metal tools, or at least the ones who live near cultures with metallurgy do. But that still makes that sort of stuff kind of expensive luxury items for them. Also the world is rather 'points of light' in a sense that there is (probably unreasonably) a lot of uninhabited land where freaky prehistoric megafauna and fantasy monsters roam and societies are somewhat isolated. But it is pretty pulpy and probably not particularly realistic.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Do you even know what kind of knowledge and resources are required to make a blast furnance? Yes, making a stone tool, even a really well made one, is primitive compared to that.

Why, yes I do actually! Do you want to discuss Bessemer Process furnaces, or Open Hearth? Or maybe even modern thermoelectric ones? LOL. Don't assume the people you are discussing with are ignorant or simpletons. I do hold a degree in the physical sciences, and I've worked as an aerospace engineer. No big expert on blast furnaces, but I can explain to you the equations of state, change in free energy, enthalpy, and electrochemistry involved in reducing ore to metal. I've some experience in the quality, management, and information and logistics areas of running a factory.

But honestly, yes, these are complex processes. Still, an early 19th Century blast furnace was far less complex. And if we look at logistics, the difference between Aurignacian flint knappers and 19th Century steel barons has a lot more to do with scale than anything else. The flint was acquired through long-distance trade in many areas, various specialized workers apparently carried out different parts of the tool-making process, etc.

You have to be careful to consider all the different dimensions here. If you asked some manufacturing firm to turn out flint knives for you today they would laugh. Its virtually impossible. No living person even has a very good idea of how to do it, certainly not at the skill level displayed in 35k YA Europe.

And your idea of capital is a modern concept which has no use in this example as there was no market economy where "money is king". Besides, Africa was very wealthy thanks to the slave trade and gold mines so the basis of your theory is wrong to begin with.

No, you have a very limited view of capital. I suggest you should read some basic economics texts. You might want to give Marx a read as well, his definitions of value and capital are some of the most sophisticated. Suffice it to say that when I refer to capital I am referring to the means by which the productive capacity of society is directed, and the ways in which productive capacity is self-amplifying and how it can be mobilized in different directions. The factors involved are complex and not always apparent. Capital and cash are not the same thing at all.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's rather terrible how strongly stigmatised certain terms associated with... low-tech, non-city-based (?) societies are. I feel it is actually really difficult to describe such things sometimes, at least in casual narrative manner. Like yeah, I agree that 'primitive' sounds kinda iffy, and 'savage' is right out. Even 'tribal' has somewhat negative connotations. And this is of course due centuries of colonialist perspective portraying such societies as inferior or outright bad. We barely have language to describe such things in a neutral manner.

My current setting is rather low-tech and many societies are rather small and do not have terribly complicated social structures. Basically from stone age hunter-gatherers to early bronze age settled cultures, so I've been thinking about this a bit.

You know what worked? Traveller has a scale. Tech level 0 is stone tools, up to 6 being roughly mid-20th Century Europe, and 9 being the beginnings of interstellar FTL flight. I guess you could say that the numbering system is a sort of implicit 'ordering', but no place in the material do I recall an active description of one tech level being superior or inferior to another. There's tons of description of specific equipment and its characteristics at different tech levels. I cannot swear the word 'primitive' never appears, but overall it seemed like a very objective and utilitarian view of technology. Indeed, PCs would very often opt for 'lower tech' solutions to problems simply because they were available, cheap, expedient, or simply perfectly adequate to the task at hand.

Admittedly, not a ton of action happens in that game at TL5 (around 1900) and below, its a science fiction game. So maybe Marc Miller simply dodged the bullet on that one by not really addressing it much. Still, I think it might teach us a bit about technology and culture (I also don't remember any disparaging statements about forms of culture, political organization, etc. though again I haven't really read through the books in a few years) and how to view them.

 

[Cadence]

You know what worked? Traveller has a scale. Tech level 0 is stone tools, up to 6 being roughly mid-20th Century Europe, and 9 being the beginnings of interstellar FTL flight. I guess you could say that the numbering system is a sort of implicit 'ordering', but no place in the material do I recall an active description of one tech level being superior or inferior to another. There's tons of description of specific equipment and its characteristics at different tech levels. I cannot swear the word 'primitive' never appears, but overall it seemed like a very objective and utilitarian view of technology. Indeed, PCs would very often opt for 'lower tech' solutions to problems simply because they were available, cheap, expedient, or simply perfectly adequate to the task at hand.

Admittedly, not a ton of action happens in that game at TL5 (around 1900) and below, its a science fiction game. So maybe Marc Miller simply dodged the bullet on that one by not really addressing it much. Still, I think it might teach us a bit about technology and culture (I also don't remember any disparaging statements about forms of culture, political organization, etc. though again I haven't really read through the books in a few years) and how to view them.

The traveller SRD at least has
TL 0-3 = Primitive
TL 4-6 = Industrial
TL 7-9 = Pre-Stellar
TL 10-11 = Early Stellar
etc...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Again you are talking about post-colonial Africa while I talk about pre-colonial sub-saharan Africa, specifically the 15th to 18th century and especially when you go further inland. As I have mentioned before already....
And you remember that I also brought up other examples like pre- and post-contact North America?

One of the things you have to appreciate about change is that it can be non-linear. So, for 100's of millennia humans wandered around the world chipping stones, hunting, and gathering. During this ENTIRE TIME there was cultural change, undoubtedly, but the effectiveness of the instrumentalities of society didn't change much. An early modern human from 250,000 YA and one from 40,000 YA probably had fairly similar kit. It undoubtedly got somewhat refined and adapted to a wider range of environments, but progress was slow, almost non-existent.

At some point, people began to grow food. Nobody is entirely sure when this happened, certainly it became a prevalent practice some 12,000 YA in the Fertile Crescent (headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in eastern Anatolia most likely). It isn't clear exactly how long the transition period was, but at some point some people reached a critical threshold and in that region society rapidly transformed. Now, rapid might mean it took 20,000 years to go from "I planted a seed, look something grew that I can eat, this is a good idea." to Katal Huyuk. This is part of the point being made by Hodgson in @pemerton's quotation.

So, this is an uneven process. It is probably analogous to a phase transition in physics. Nothing seems to change as water gets colder and colder, but at some point one location, due to some variation in local state, begins to freeze. Once the change starts, it can proceed quite rapidly, the new ordering of molecules spreads throughout the system. This phase change may start in multiple locations too, and the resulting ice might have boundaries between crystals, each organized in a different orientation. Likewise agriculture happened in one or a few specific locations and then spread.

When you compare cultural change or diffusion during a period when the 'state' of society didn't change much, vs a situation where such rapid change did happen, you are talking about two different processes which happen at different timescales. Not only that, but if society A is in the new and more rapidly changing state, then obviously society B, which is still in the old state, hardly changes at all by comparison. So Sumer leaped to an urbanized state, but Europe remained in the old state for another several thousand years until agriculture was established there, and its own internal rate of progress was still stone age, which by comparison is basically no change at all on the timescales in question.

Likewise with sub-saharan Africa. Its technology was probably not that much different from Medieval Europe. They had iron, cities, roads, public works, etc. (at least in some areas), state structures, etc. Meanwhile Europe, by 1600 had started a rapid transformation. So we see that it changed radically from 1600 to 1800, but Africa changed maybe as much as Europe did from 1000 to 1200, which is not a heck of a lot in overall terms. There need not be much other explanation. Diffusion takes centuries, so when you say agriculture diffused to Europe, yes, over 2000 years or more. It might take 500 or 1000 more years for Africa to achieve what Europe has now by diffusion alone. But at our accelerated rate of change, we will be (perhaps, if you are optimistic) vastly more advanced still, and one would assume that the gap would only ever grow, and not shrink. This isn't an indictment of one society vs another, it is just the nature of non-linear change, aka phase changes.

Another thing to consider in terms of 'advancement' is that you only have, or are considering, one yardstick and one possible sequence by which 'progress' might happen. We don't know how many possible pathways there are which could lead to similar phase changes in society. Not all of them may be technological, or it may be possible to base them on entirely different aspects of technology. However, once one society stumbles upon a scenario in which they achieve non-linear phase changing transformation, then if that change involves an increase in means, improved instrumentality, it is likely to abort progress on all other paths. Thus it is easy to imagine that European civilization was 'superior' or 'more advanced' in some fashion, but it is equally likely that, given time, any society might have emerged into a new form of some kind and entered into a non-linear rate of change scenario. We just don't know, and will perhaps never know.

So, here's an alternate way of looking at 'progress'. Imagine it is a lot like a maze. Each society wanders through the maze, and once in a while one reaches a location where they can find a brushhog. From that point on, the maze is no obstacle to them, they go on in whatever direction circumstances dictate at a much more rapid rate, and pretty soon the whole maze is nothing but pathways leading wherever they were going. Any other solutions to the maze that might have existed are now moot.