Conquest

[jsburbidge]

 The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is in the news again due to Brexit, as is the continuing state of (many of) the indigenous groups in Canada. Catalan wishes for independence occasionally reach a level of international attention, and, of course, the Middle East, where the modern State of Israel looks in many ways like the ghost of Outremer returned, continues to provide its own intractable problems.

 

These have in common a background in conquest. Occasionally this is obscured for political or rhetorical purposes - the typical discussion of the Aboriginal situation tends to turn on the polite fiction of treaties between independent powers rather than recognizing explicitly the state of subjugation by main force underlying that history.

 

The push-pull tug-of-war over Brexit can be traced back through the centuries to the profoundly ambiguous effects of the Norman Conquest, which tangled up English government with continental concerns. (Apprentice riots against the French Huguenots in late 16th Century London are eerily similar to the eruptions of anti-European sentiment associated with the Leavers.) 

 

The current structure of Europe is a direct consequence of three relatively recent waves of conquest: the Napoleonic Wars (which destroyed the Holy Roman Empire and set the stage for the later unification of Germany and Italy, both carried out in their own ways by military force); the First World War, which extracted old ethnic nations from the corpses of empires; and the Second World War, which rearranged borders yet again and incidentally resulted in a mass process of ethnic migrations / ethnic cleansing glossed over as "refugees" post-war (regarding which, Tony Judt's Postwar is illuminating). 

 

It used to be considered legitimate to derive right "de bello jure"; now it is generally rejected by the overall consensus of the international order (though it still takes place: witness the Crimea).

 

We frequently focus on the most recent examples of this and try to set up moral high grounds based on it; indeed, much of the formulation of privilege along ethnic lines, where it is not grounded in the slave trade, can be traced back to more recent instances.  However, the traces of conquest go back in a cascading chain into prehistory and no area of the world seems to be immune (a purely New World example would be the expansion of the Inca empire in the period shortly before contact with the Europeans) - small enough polities tend to generate inter-group violence in a raiding rather than conquest style, but there's a continuity even there.)  If we really want to untangle the effects of conquest, we not only have to disengage England from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, but the Norman heritage from England. The French are resented in Brittany, Languedoc, and the Basque regions of France, but the Franks  themselves were conquerors of a Romano-Celtic region which itself reflected Caesar's Gallic wars. (Or we can set an arbitrary horizon of some number of generations after which we view such impositions as normalized, but that has its own perils: where do we set it? Do we tell the Irish to stop complaining because the Anglo-Normans came over in the Twelfth Century and we've decided to ignore anything before 1492, 1815, 1870, or 1945?) 

 

If you want to have a much better sense of the earlier layer of conquest and internal colonization - not always purely military - underlying the later European emergence from their corner of the globe, Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe is almost certainly the best place to start. Bartlett sets out the process of colonization of the fringes of Europe from its Carolingian centre - Normans to England, Anglo-Normans to Ireland and Scotland, Germans to the Baltic states, Crusaders to Outremer and the Western Mediterranean, the Reconquista in Spain. In a few cases these were "by invitation"- the Scots monarchy deliberately anglicized its aristocracy as a way of countering having England intervene as a polity across the border, and the Irish situation began with Hibernian rulers inviting Norman fighters in to assist in internal wars. In many others they were straightforwardly military in nature. (The most aggressively hostile relation between intruders and "natives" having been in Ireland: the split over religion is merely a calque over much older hostility; in many other places there was a much less adversarial relation (although that tended to sour towards the end of the High Middle Ages as well)).  

 

Although Bartlett's book focusses on the period from 950 - 1350, one of the best places to get a fictional acquaintance with the world it depicts is in Dunnett's House of Niccolo series - which reflects how much that particular series is "about" the endings of earlier places and patterns - Trebizond, the Venetian and Genoan trading patterns of the earlier period (and connections with the Byzantine society) , Burgundy, Rus. (The Rus proper, let us remember, were Vikings, not Slavs, product of a process of conquest outside Bartlett's scope).