I tend to rankle when people compare the colonialism of the last few centuries with the pre-capitalist expansion and settlement of ancient societies. It seems like there’s a lot of daylight between the English founding Jamestown and ancient Ionians founding Massalia or w/e.
But what do Hexbear’s historians think? Is it fundamentally the same social phenomenon across time or is capitalist settler-colonialism its own unique thing?
We go all the way back to stuff like Massalia, Kyrenaika, etc. we don’t really have enough information to really compare. Like we know people recorded the relationship to mother cities, sometimes military alliances between them… but economically? did Sybaris export natural resources back to the ‘metropole’ in a client relationship? did colonies conquer their land, lease it/buy it by treaty? Did the Greeks bring slaves or enslave a bunch of locals on arrival?
and on top of that, all the poleis had separate laws & customs we can only loosely affiliate with each other. so there remains possibility for any or all the possibilities to be true for any specific colony over a specific period—but we don’t really know.
my own very lukewarm opinion is that medieval italian (very complicated subject in its own right) colonies are probably what ancient efforts most resembled. and we can say those are pretty different from modern colonialism.
my even weirder addendum is that i think cultural differences between medditerrean peoples in greece-italy-anatolia (i.e. where 90% of greek ‘colonization’ happened) are very much exaggerated & scholarship overemphasizes a ‘hellenic’ influence on surrounding peoples who might’ve just ‘originally’ been much more culturally similar & amenable to living with & around greeks than greek authors’ chauvinism lets on
Didn’t Hellenistic era Greeks have their own internal ethnic chauvanism going on though? Like Ionians didn’t like Dorians who didn’t like Magnetes or whatever?
i don’t think they were very discrete groups with hard political affiliations, but there were regional dialects & religious groupings. the hellenistic era is actually when intra-greek differences in dialect are going away because of Koine & regionalism becomes less important under the big diadochi empires (Macedonians, Cretans, Rhodians, etc. are all just Greeks when you put them in Mesopotamia or Syria)
Very interesting. Are there any works you’d recommend that talk more about this? Besides the one @Wertheimer recommended, that is.
Peter Green’s From Alexander to Actium is my main starting point for Hellenistic history. Of particular regional interest is Richard Stoneman’s The Greek Experience of India.
The Greek version of the phrase “Don’t bullshit a bullshittter” was “Don’t try to out-Cretan a Cretan.” There’s an example of it in reference to siege-based treachery somewhere in Polybius.
Most of my other go-to examples are from the classical era. Abdera, despite multiple philosophical luminaries hailing from that town, was the place that generated the ancient Greek version of the Polish joke. Corinthians were notorious swindlers, Laconians were legendarily laconic, etc. Take a drink every time Thucydides introduces a speech (which he wrote, naturally) from a Spartan leader by saying something like “Brasidas, who was a good speaker, for a Spartan…”
