NoFreeWill posted:

cool article crow but i am not so concerned with ecological as with sociological effects. it's cool that the stuff about malthus i learned in environmental science class is all propaganda tho

Well in conjunction with technological advance and the expansion of international markets has and continues to have caused radical social changes in settler societies, at least in the Americas. That is to say has populations expand into frontiers the state and related institutions have only a limited capacity to impose their will on subjects located within the protean boundaries of the frontier. This is an ongoing process, many places within latin America are still essentially frontier societies which will necessarily be displaced and eventually erased as populations continue to expand and state power progresses. I suspect areas of Borneo and other tropical frontiers are experiencing similar processes of frontier development.

ilmdge posted:

Joel and Shennong are arguing about theology on D&D lol

As with fighting men, Southeast Asians sometimes gave alcohol or tonic herbs to their elephant mounts, presumably to make them fearless in battle. It is unclear from the available sources just how successful this measure was in the field.

The Burmese chronicles record an attack by Shans on the town of Sagaing in the midfourteenth century in which the defenders gave an elephant a fermented drink and then sent it out of the gates to wreak havoc among their besiegers. The Shans ‘fired’ and ‘pierced’ the elephant (the weapons used are not clearly indicated) and the drunken elephant wheeled around and then laid waste to the town instead, forcing the defenders to flee the town. 89

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of the professional soldiers kept on a permanent footing by Southeast Asian courts were mercenaries. Portuguese expansion during the same period provided European professional soldiers and desperados who frequently pursued either escape from the control of officials or quick fortunes. In many cases, Europeans and Indians were pressed into royal service after they had been captured from ships or fallen ports.

In the sixteenth century, the King of Sunda had a personal bodyguard of forty Portuguese who surrounded him in the field and defended his life while on campaign, while the ruler of D mak had Acehnese, Dutch, Turkish, and Malabari mercenaries. Mons, Christian Japanese, Makassars, Bugis, and others also served as mercenaries in varied locations in the next few centuries.

The large numbers of foreigners available for hire meant that many early modern Southeast Asian courts were not desperate for new recruits. Europeans and Asians competed with each other for employment and sometimes attempted to sabotage one another’s repute. In the seventeenth century, for example, Muslim mercenaries cast doubt in the Arakanese king’s mind concerning his Portuguese mercenaries stationed at Syriam and in Ayudhya, one Englishman attempted to outdo a Frenchman by demonstrating that he could drill more Siamese troops in the same way as the French incumbent.
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Their status as professional warriors, special skills, technologies, and lack of local loyalties meant that they sometimes sought more than a meager court stipend. As they were not rooted in local society or culture, they frequently saw themselves as sojourners and adventurers who had both the freedom and, one suspects, the seeming obligation to take advantage where opportunity was offered. Unbounded by cultural constraints regarding the place of the ruler in society or even the rulers’ claims to royal legitimacy, such men viewed and sometimes treated Southeast Asian rulers as equals or less. As Dutchmen pressed into the service of D mak at the beginning of the seventeenth century claimed of indigenous perceptions of them: We are … very much feared here and there is no Javanese who would be so brave as to dare arouse our anger. They say we are not men but devils. 34

Further, mercenaries, when guarding rich ports and portages or consulting the king in the royal court, had a better idea of the state of the king’s military power and wealth than did almost anyone else. Moreover, armed with the best weapons of the day, they could easily sweep aside, at least in the short-term, the king’s other defenses.

In several well-known cases, foreign mercenaries made their own bids for the throne or for autonomous power. Filippe de Brito y Nicote and Sebastião Gonsalves y Tibao, for example, both rebelled and set up rival petty kingdoms on the Arakanese and Burmese coasts at the beginning of the seventeenth century where they defeated local rulers and bewildered more powerful ones for almost a decade-and-a-half. The seventeenth century saw many such episodes in Ayudhya. Some six hundred Japanese Samurai warriors, for example, interfered with Siamese court politics in the early part of the century and seized control of at least one important town.

In most of Southeast Asia, the population was broadly divided into free and service (sometimes referred to as slaves) populations. In no state were these divisions completely the same and were subject to considerable local variation. In early modern Ayudhya, for example, the general population was divided into royal and noble servicemen, while in Burma, there were substantial bodies of both asis (free people) and ahmú-dàn (servicemen). Other divisions complicated this picture. Monks, for example, fell outside of both categories and monastic slaves were not subject to either royal or noble service. The main population category that determined the health of royal armies, however, was the royal servicemen. Royal service populations were generally hereditary groups allotted to specified tasks, many of them non-military in nature.

Edited by Squalid (May 4, 2013 19:11:59)