I tended to think Western history had been progressing toward the modern rule of law since the Dark Ages
History always tells you as much about its author as it does about its subject. That narration is, a sort of british (and american) propoganda from the British colonial era.
The way they thought of history (of "Western Civilization") was (1) The "spark" starts in ancient greece. (2) It is handed Rome, who build inherit the empire (3) Rome falls (ignore the eastern empire) (4) Civilization rekindles in Italy (5) to torch passes to the British who spread it to the world.
Everything culminates in the American-British civilization, and whatever British intellectuals thought was important about Britishness. It also plays down Europe's (especially western Europe) relatively small part in the history of "civilization" until relatively recently.
The narration would be totally different depending on who wrote it.
For example, think of it from a Middle Eastern perspective. Alexander's conquests would be seen as something akin to Gengis Khan's conquest of China. An outsider barbarian that invaded and ruled the Persian empire.
That is, Cyrus created a great persian empire. Greeks captured it, and it continued. Rome captured it, and it continued. Then, western rome fell. But, these were mostly barbarian territories with roman outposts. You can't compare Roman Brtain to Roman Syria, for example. Syria was urban, literate and civilized. Britain was a barbarian island with some roman roads and forts. High status cultural influence (eg christianity) was imported from east to west, not the reverse.
I grew up in Texas. As we all know, Texans are really proud of Texas. Part of this is because the schools spend 3x as much time teaching “Texas history” as they do teaching US history or world history (lol).
Almost all of what is called “Texas history” is simply propaganda from the early to mid 1800s. Truth is, Texas was essentially American Mexico (nearly 100% Spanish-speaking) until we found oil there in the late 1800s. It was only ever it’s own independent country because the US was not militarily strong at the time and couldn’t afford a war with Mexico — which would have been the result of the annexation of Texas.
But as a result of this state-mandated focus on “local history”, kids who come out of Texas schools are often woefully uneducated as to even Western European history. You just learn this concentrated version of American Exceptionalism that’s mandated by the board of education and has only a tenuous relationship to the truth.
As a side note, it’s really weird to learn history in the context of a place that’s only had meaningful levels of population for the last 50 years.
I grew up in the panhandle and what you're saying is true in general. Parts of my family have been in Texas since the early 1800s.
"As a side note, it’s really weird to learn history in the context of a place that’s only had meaningful levels of population for the last 50 years."
That's an interesting side note.
I've seen clovis points that folks have dug up here that are 5K ro 10K years old... the anglos in Texas tend to think that there was literally no one here when this area has had folks living in it for millennia.
One of the thoughts I keep returning to is how little we know about the history of the peoples who were living more than 400 or so years ago.
I think about how transient even our own technology is.
Considering what traces of our own culture would be available to people 10,000 years from now, I occasionally wonder if we'd be able to detect our own culture at that time scale if we didn't know what we were looking at.
"One of the thoughts I keep returning to is how little we know about the history of the peoples who were living more than 400 or so years ago."
I'm assuming you're talking about in America pre European colonisation. In the rest of the world (especially China, Europe, India and the Middle East) we know about as much as we do about the history of people currently alive. We can read their diaries, what happened in their governments, poetry, stories etc (at least for the literate classes, but this is again true in the modern world).
"Considering what traces of our own culture would be available to people 10,000 years from now, I occasionally wonder if we'd be able to detect our own culture at that time scale if we didn't know what we were looking at."
We would be able to detect really quite a bit, though less than we would like. Anything electronic would be gone, but the fact that we had electronics would be obvious. As would the vast majority of print. Some writing (especially carving) would remain, as would some pictures in lucky circumstances. Most tellingly our cities and buildings would still be around, and you can tell a lot about a culture by the way they order their buildings, and by what stuff they had. This is all assuming we some how up and leave for 10,000 years like in Göbekli Tepe[0]
"I'm assuming you're talking about in America pre European colonisation."
Yes, and specifically the area where I am living. That "400 years" has more to do with the specific people I live around and their view that basically anyone before them lacked What-a-Burger restaurants and Shiner beer and are have more in common with deer and possums than humans.
Thanks for the thoughts and the links.
"Most tellingly our cities and buildings would still be around"
I'm sure that my fantasies about how little we actually leave behind and the reality of how obvious it would be are probably different.
Like, I feel like humans have been around for quite a while longer than we have any sort of history about, but I am probably just motivated by fantasies that there were large-scale civilizations on earth that predate our own by millennia but which are wholly lost because we don't have the material archeological record or the linguistic tools to trace the existence of specific cultures (or whatever kinds of tooling that would be necessary to demonstrate such a history).
While I don't think there is evidence for that fantasy, I also think humans are creative, interesting folks and I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that folks have been just chilling with oral histories for 20K+ years until they suddenly got motivated 600 years ago or so (or 2000 or wherever we might place those histories).
So thanks for tempering that fantasy with a specific counter factual example.
I’m sure there are many lost human historical cities, outposts, et al. But based on all the excavation and discovery, it doesn’t seem likely that we are missing out on some huge timeline gap of advanced human societies.
We still aren’t even sure if some written language of some of the first civilizations like the Indus Valley were languages or not since we haven’t been able to decipher them. We also have a few areas around the world where we can look for things like evidence of stable civilization and writing that were probably isolated from the rest of the world - America’s, China, and Europe, as examples. Yet all three locations so far only show writing as recent discoveries 2-4K years ago.
To me, humans not having advanced quicker doesn’t seem so far fetched. Humanoids were on two feet and making basic tools over a million years ago. Fire was controlled hundreds of thousands of years ago at the latest. Yet even with all that, we don’t have any evidence of humanoids being advanced like setting up in one location or writing text (not just drawings) down more than a couple thousand years. The modern human species I think is only a few hundred thousand years too.
Of course we could just somehow be missing tons of data. But that also wouldn’t line up with how we do see a progression of advancement from the earliest civilizations and then empires.
I will add that to my list of stuff to read (I've heard of it, but your post specifically has caused me to add it).
I'm interested in the folks who were living here before the largish empires that we know about (aztecs and myans and olmecs). But my history is super shoddy... I will have to rethink about how by my understandings are in that area.
Sounds like you're complaining that countries teach the history of their country. I would fully expect eg Britain to primarily teach the history that led up to current Britain, with side dishes of elsewhere's history. I would similarly expect eg China to do the same, and every other country to do likewise.
It's expected but not appreciated. I grew up learning fairy stories about the magical rainbows George Washington shat at his enemies, the evil evil British. Learning that the people entrusted to teach you something were incurious ignoramuses reading from little more than a propaganda sheet is upsetting.
Also, the delivery and form was so simplified. I feel like what we were taught in school had one of 2 forms:
1) Bite size good/bad characterizations of involved nuanced processes.
2) Objectifying factoids on the material day-to-day of shallow characterizations, like the practice of associating Native American tribes primarily by the shape of their houses.
By jumping back and forth between the two, it did accomplish a surface appearance of depth, but ignored the spectrum as a whole that makes up humanity. (1) usually skipped over relational values and (2) failed to deliver on meaning.
The few times this done a little bit less had enormous impact, like black history month, trail of tears, stories like Huck Finn. But comparatively, these leaped over massively critical nuances. Of course, we were just all-out denied anything about the French Revolution. There is no question this is why America is contending with such a problematic political arena. We are learning everything the hard way.
The things that stir the pot are what make us human and understanding them are what allow us to progress. Being denied that is uncivilized.
>> History always tells you as much about its author as it does about its subject.
I know it has been popular, but that is a dangerous line of thinking these days. It is totally fair to say that an analysis of a complex historical event will be tainted by the views of the author(s). But such pieces aren't all history. It is possible to generate bias-free history pieces. For instance, we shouldn't say that every analysis of tree rings or ice cores is bias. That makes it too easy to dismiss a valid representation historical data.
People who see bias everywhere aren't satisfied until they personally test the ice cores. They feel free to deny climate science because everyone with eyes on the cores is biased and untrustworthy. They also see bias in every record of a historical event, again proclaiming them untrustworthy. Since they didn't witness the event and all records are biased, the event either didn't happen or is permanently beyond any accurate understanding. As with ice cores, such people feel free to substitute their own version of history.
It is dangerous to see bias everywhere. Doing so allows us to selectively dismiss anything and everything. We have to agree that there is such a thing as historical truth. To do otherwise is to deny history and all the lessons it has to teach.
The difference between science and history is that science seeks to reduce the scope of its observations to remove bias particularly biases which are subconscious. The ability to do this depends a great deal on the complexity of the system. A tree trunk and pair of calipers is a pretty simple system. Once a couple people have measured the same tree and produced simillar measurements, we can be fairly confident in those measurements.
But the actions of say a parliament are a system with orders of magnitude more complexity and thus we should trust almost no one's intepretation to be unbiased. This is the cursed paradox of history. We so badly want to understand people and societies and it is almost impossible to know we have come to that understanding with any kind of certainty.
Side Rant: This is actually why I see psychology and sociology as dangerous. They often have the rigor of history and cloak themselves in the airs of science.
>> Once a couple people have measured the same tree and produced simillar measurements, we can be fairly confident in those measurements.
Really? I remember a fight about a year ago over whether or not it was hot on a particular day in DC. Half the US decided that they couldn't trust the biased weather reporting system. The perception of constant bias in all things meant we couldn't agree on a simple temperature record. A subset of these people cannot trust doctors enough to take vaccines or antibiotics. A further subset cannot even trust that the earth is round.
Bias is everywhere, but the amount of it varies. In physics, the standard for saying something is "true" is usually a 5(1 in 2 million) or 6(one in 500 million) sigma chance that the fact is not true. In the social sciences, people publish results with a 1 in 20 chance the paper's results are false (and other problems with most social science papers makes the real chance of truth even lower). It is quite useful to have a mindset that is less binary when searching for the truth. I try and calibrate my thinking to "How likely is this to be true" and be constantly updating my view of things with new evidence. Most successful truth seekers I know do the same.
I think it's better to see history as a series of cycles playing out over and over again.
From no existing government, to aristocratic, military government, to trade gaining power, to some sort of consensus government, eventually leading to democracy, to trade decline, to oppressive government, to self-destructing government.
Likewise and somewhat independent, society evolves from extreme liberal (like in some Greek city states, or the Roman empire, where you could rent a room in temple with a big bath where you could have sex. In the room above, a bull would be slaughtered so a stream of blood would drip down on your bodies. Note: this was marketed to women, not men, and came with an optional male partner, I think even the Kardashians would consider that going more than a bit too far), to absurdly conservative (pretty much all of Europe after the fall of the Roman empire, for example), back to liberal, back to extreme conservatism.
And the amazing thing is that everyone, all these movements, from the puritans to today's women empowerment warriors, from the Roman Empire to Washington to Lichtenstein's government, see themselves as the first ones ever to do X, constantly, all the time, when in reality it seems to be a cycle that rotates around in about 1.5 to 2 centuries or so. And one the one hand that's true : there's something unique about almost everything, every movement. But 99% of what such movements stand for are duplicates of their former selves. It's just that the people in them are not at all aware of any of it.
Say, society moving away from the Church was of course, according to those who did it, the first time ever this happened (not what had happened ~80 times before, almost always in times of large economic expansion). They were smarter than everyone and "reason" was going to save the world (mostly because it had a few successes). If you go back to the time of the French revolution, of course, you'd see that the same happened, and then ... the great economy faltered ... and despite all the reason in the world (note: governments "based on reason" can easily match governments based on faith in cruelty and pettiness. In fact I would say that despite the general feeling the reason "based" governments are the worse ones. And yes, by that I mean that in times of economic desperation they're worse, far worse in fact, than things like the inquisition).
But no, the generations of the 1990s and 2000s are utterly convinced they are the first ones to ever see "the church for what it is", and that they'll just make the economy perfect and everyone happy and all will be well, because science and reason will save us all.
And when listening to grandpa you realize that the 1920s were just like that ... and the 1960s. And the 1930s and 1970s-80s ? Oh well. But those were smaller cycles, sooner or later a big shift will hit us again. It's been a while.
Coming up next: nope ... science and reason do not in fact guarantee a nice economy, do not in fact save us all. There was a nice economy, for reasons independent of religion, tolerance and this period will end, just like all other periods before it and people will flee back to faith, extreme conservatism, just like they've done so many times before.
It is hard to apply terms like "liberal" and "conservative" to ancient societies, and I don't get at all how the Roman Empire cold be considered "extremely liberal". It was thoroughly militarized dictatorship and patriarchal slave society. The ritual you describe sounds like something from a TV-show, but anyway religious rituals are not "liberal". The emperor was also the high priest and religious rituals was considered necessary to preserve the state.
The Roman way of thinking was also fundamentally conservative in that they though everything had been better in the olden times.
"The olden times" makes me think you read Cicero. "The olden times" Cicero was talking about were the later days of the Roman republic perhaps 50BC or so.
Those times were extremely progressive. And many of the social accomplishments, like the right to ignore your parents religion, equality between men and women ... were fought over and achieved in those times (well, before those times, really, but that wasn't how Cicero saw things).
I would also like to point out that Roman slavery was not at all the same as Islamic slavery (which is what we think of when saying "slavery", and even then you could rightly argue that "most" islamic slavery was different. Islamic slavery after economic collapse is the model we think of as slavery. Not pleasant). Slaves, in the Roman republic, or the Roman empire, mostly went home in the evening (and all -save slaves of the justice system- had the choice to go home). They enjoyed health care. They lived in apartment blocks (yes, really), which may or may not have had plumbing (granted, plumbing was for the very rich slaves).
Incidentally there were very rich slaves, a fact even true in Islamic times. You see, most jobs aside from market trader/"CEO" were slave jobs. Doctor ? Most likely a slave. Architect ? Slave. Factory "manager" ? Slave. Very high government administrators, like the director of the Colliseum ? Slave.
Slavery did not mean you were poor, or that you were imprisoned. Not at all. With the exception of "justice" slaves (ie. convicted -rightly or otherwise- criminals). Those were the people working in the mines and on the galleys.
And in ancient Rome, as I pointed out, you could pay for more services than you can today. I don't even necessarily mean that in a bad way. Sure, you could pay for sex acts, but equally you could pay to have fine metalwork done (in fact, doctors did that quite often). Women slaves were married, and generally not to their "owners", and had high functions themselves (negotiations for building things, for instance, were often carried out by women).
Roman slaves were still slaves in that they could be raped freely by their masters (regardless of age, gender and martial status) and ones spouse and kids could be sold at will by the owner. If this made you angry and you tried to kill your master, then all slaves in the household would be killed as retaliation. Slaves did not have any kind of legal rights. Sure some of them could have high ranking jobs (and some was able to save up to buy their freedom if the owner allowed it), but the vast majority performed hard manual work on farms. I don't know what you mean by "imprisoned", but if slaves tried to run away they would be tortured and probably killed in gruesome ways like with crucifixion. There were multiple slave rebellions because it was not generally pleasant to be a slave.
> Roman slaves were still slaves in that they could be raped freely by their masters
Nope. Only if so specified in the contract (of course, some slaves were explicitly hired for sexual services, just like today some people are hired for sexual services, from porn production to "hospitality services"). Also I do believe that rape was never covered, although sexual services might indeed be the expected "work" that the slave was contracted for, certainly.
Again, this is not really different for today. Would you say a porn actor/actress is "raped" ? Because in some ways you could say that their boss has them raped. How about people hired into brothels (and paid), who don't even know who they agree to have sex with when hired ?
> kids could be sold at will by the owner
Nope. Although there is some confusion. Kids were generally expected to help with their parents until a certain age, at which age they were free men/women. At that point, they could enter into a slavery contract (paid, was one of the conditions).
Generally there were various protections in slave contracts, against, for instance, large differences in job function. If an owner violated those, a slave could have the contract reviewed and gain his/her freedom.
It's not that different from the position of employee today. You can be "sold" in the sense that anyone can buy their way into becoming your boss (assuming your current boss agrees on the price, just like back then), and you cannot just immediately leave for just that.
> Slaves did not have any kind of legal rights.
Yes they did. The fundamental right any slave had was to ask for a review of their status, and whether the contract was upheld. Any and all slaves, even convicted slaves, had that right. There were various other rights that most slaves had, and generally the contracts specified extra rights. And, as I said, most slaves, especially in Rome, were not "fulltime" slaves. On remote farms, it was of customary for slaves to stay on the owner's property, for obvious reasons.
> some was able to save up buy their freedom if the owner allowed it
Roman slaves were always freed after a given amount of time. Granted, the state kept extending that time, but it was limited even at the very end (I believe to 10y for private owners, 20y for the state).
Even state slaves had "side jobs". For instance, most gladiators had a funny side income, and the state actually allowed and helped them with that. They would perform sexual services for any woman willing to pay for those (and apparently they commanded a very high price) on their off days. (note there were female gladiators too, even though not many, and yes they did the same. I believe one of the texts even points out that most of their customers were also female, and yes, any gladiator could refuse to do this, even though that was not a good way to make yourself popular).
Gladiator contracts are some of the known contracts, for instance. There were provisions that if you were killed (few non-convicted gladiators were, incidentally) the state would provide for your family or parents. You were allowed to have the above-mentioned side job, and you agreed to allow the Praetorian guard and 2 other military organizations to hire you if they wanted to, but you were allowed to limit your work there to, I believe 2 years or so (again, it is written that this is how they recruited officers, so essentially no-one ever left, though quite a few were killed along with the person they were protecting. BTW quite a few means a few dozen over 3 centuries).
> killed in gruesome ways like with crucifixion
Nope, although the state famously did that en masse to slaves (and some free men and women) in Spartacus' slave revolt, and on a smaller scale after that. I'm not saying that was OK, but I do hope you see that those were the state exercising punitive legal action on criminals, and not owners just doing that to their slaves for fun (like actually happened in the Ottoman empire, for example, killing/hunting slaves for fun)
> I wouldn't call this "extremely progressive".
Extremely progressive relates to what personal (non-criminal even) actions would get you banned out of polite society, or worse. In that regard, Rome was extremely progressive.
Senators in Rome were famous for just how far they went with this. Apparently in the Senate throwing a birthday party for someone else, and inviting 250+ prostitutes was, aside from the shear number of prostitutes, not a rare occurrence in the last years of the republic. Likewise having male-male, or female-female relationships, even with prostitutes was likely to improve rather than detract from your social status.
I understand that that doesn't mean doing this was free.
Let's say Trump, or Obama, or Clinton if you like, did the same. Let's say they all get together (spouses and children included), hire every prostitute on the west coast, and make a night of it, including gay and lesbian relations with prostitutes and guests, then brag about it in congress. Do you think society would understand ? Even the French, who seem to tolerate the president having a mistress, would kick out any politician, or anyone else, for that.
Honestly I think you are just making shit up at this point. Can you point to any legitimate historical source which can corroborate your claims?
Just see Wikipedia for a start: Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (prostitutes were often slaves), torture, and summary execution.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome
Slaves did not usually have contracts. It was possible to sell yourself or your kids into slavery, but slaves were usually taken from conquered peoples and sold on the market. They had no say in what they would be used for. They were not automatically freed, and children of slaves became slaves. I don't know if owners would kill their slaves for fun - they were expensive property after all - but under Antonius Pius it became illegal to kill slaves without "just cause". Which means until then it was fully legal to kill your slaves for fun.
There were many ways to become slaves, and this section basically talks about what would happen if you were caught by the Roman military. In the provinces this was supposed to be very common, but not in the inner core of the empire.
As the wikipedia page explains in the early republic and before the last days of the republic most slaves were conquered slaves. However that supply dried up quite a while before the first emperor.
After that, most slaves in Rome were people that had sold themselves into slavery (or were sold by their parents) and by the time Rome was a real republic this had term limits, as well as rights, starting with the basic right to challenge their status in court. Over time, more rights were granted. Read on in the wikipedia article, it does talk about this.
> Over time, however, slaves gained increased legal protection, including the right to file complaints against their masters. Attitudes changed in part because of the influence among the educated elite of the Stoics, whose egalitarian views of humanity extended to slaves.
(this is not talking about the right to challenge their status, this is about filing complaints, eventually even against "cruel treatment" and so on)
From that same page, the "conclusion" if you will, the standing slaves had by the end of the empire.
> Several emperors began to grant more rights to slaves as the empire grew. Claudius announced that if a slave was abandoned by his master, he became free. Nero granted slaves the right to complain against their masters in a court. And under Antoninus Pius, a master who killed a slave without just cause could be tried for homicide.[71] Legal protection of slaves continued to grow as the empire expanded. It became common throughout the mid to late 2nd century CE to allow slaves to complain of cruel or unfair treatment by their owners.[72]
I am not saying Roman society was just by modern standards, it was not. I would mention though, especially in the east, but also in the west, it was far better than what was to follow. And, as the wikipedia article mentions, in Rome at least (and presumably in most large Roman cities) it was a better fate to be a slave than to be a free urban poor. To be a (voluntary - not a convicted) "public" slave came with pretty good social standing.
The section about Asclepius mentions a few of the horrible things Rome did to slaves, especially earlier in the republic.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m getting sick of your walls of text that skirt the truth or outright lie, and never pay off with citations. You’re replying to someone who pretty much said the same and asked for citations, and you offered nothing. The time of put up or shut up has arrived. Life was brutal and fatal for many slaves, and you just ignored that. You compared peostitutes to slaves who were sold for sex, while ignoring that torture and summary execution were their alternatives.
I think this is why it's so hard to transit our concepts of "liberal" and "conservative" to other places and times. Particularly in pagan societies sex wasn't on the same taboo to libertine spectrum we see it on. It had a different social dimension.
It's interesting, you guys having this discussion because it's one of the perennial topics in world history. Has humanity been on a trend towards more individual liberty and compassion over time? Does "the moral arch of the universe bend towards justice"? Or do these ideas come and go, at different times in different places with an occasional combined trend? Is it all just a boisterous sea tide, rising and falling with eddies with eddies, spirals of change atop larger spirals?
Unskilled slaves, or those sentenced to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in mines, and at mills. Their living conditions were brutal, and their lives short.
Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (prostitutes were often slaves), torture, and summary execution. The testimony of a slave could not be accepted in a court of law[2] unless the slave was tortured—a practice based on the belief that slaves in a position to be privy to their masters' affairs would be too virtuously loyal to reveal damaging evidence unless coerced.
Sometimes slaves stood on revolving stands, and around each slave for sale hung a type of plaque describing his or her origin, health, character, intelligence, education, and other information pertinent to purchasers. Prices varied with age and quality, with the most valuable slaves fetching high prices. Because the Romans wanted to know exactly what they were buying, slaves were presented naked.
Slaves numbering in the tens of thousands were condemned to work in the mines or quarries, where conditions were notoriously brutal.[57] Damnati in metallum ("those condemned to the mine") were convicts who lost their freedom as citizens (libertas), forfeited their property (bona) to the state, and became servi poenae, slaves as a legal penalty. Their status under the law was different from that of other slaves; they could not buy their freedom, be sold, or be set free. They were expected to live and die in the mines.[60] Imperial slaves and freedmen (the familia Caesaris) worked in mine administration and management.
Of course it’s not just slaves who could have it rough.
The laws of the Twelve Tables required the pater familias to ensure that "obviously deformed" infants were put to death.
The pater familias had the power to sell his children into slavery; Roman law provided, however, that if a child had been sold as a slave three times, he was no longer subject to patria potestas. The pater familias had the power to approve or reject marriages of his sons and daughters; however, an edict of Emperor Augustus provided that the pater familias could not withhold that permission lightly.
Adult filii remained under the authority of their pater and could not themselves acquire the rights of a pater familias while he lived. Legally, any property acquired by individual family members (sons, daughters or slaves) was acquired for the family estate: the pater familias held sole rights to its disposal and sole responsibility for the consequences, including personal forfeiture of rights and property through debt.
Children "emancipated" by a pater familias were effectively disinherited.
Very good point. To this, I would add that the internet and the wide-spread use of English are reinforcing, instead of confronting, the anglo-american cultural bubble...
I agree that Poland - and the east of Europe - seldomly appears in the western history lesson narrative.
Poland was liberal for it's time, yes, albeit only for the szlachta, a large part of the population that belonged to the privileged class of nobility. Peasants had not so much to gain access these times, especially in the former parts of Poland that are now Ukraine.
People of Jewish faith had strong privileges in Poland in the middle ages, which lead to the biggest diaspora in the world, a large fragmented community that was integrated into polish society in various degrees - as can be beautifully seen in the Jewish Museum in Warsaw.
> Poland was liberal for it's time, yes, albeit only for the szlachta, a large part of the population that belonged to the privileged class of nobility. Peasants had not so much to gain access these times, especially in the former parts of Poland that are now Ukraine.
Just a note on the szlachta numbers - it was about 10% of the population.
"...mainly followed in the tolerant policy of his father and also granted autonomy to the Jews in the matter of communal administration and laid the foundation for the power of the Qahal, or autonomous Jewish community."
It depends on how you define liberal. For example, Afganistan, Somalia, the Ukraine are very liberal nowadays: weak central government, weak central censorship, weak currency. Instead, warlords and gangs having the same functions – but it can be treated as liberal and democratic construction - you can always do the same and everybody has equal rights (kind of early US).
The most definitions include "the rule of law" (and you seem to be mistaken "limited" for "weak"):
> "Classical liberalism" is the term used to designate the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade.
>
> – https://mises.org/library/what-classical-liberalism
The parent comment, however, argues that all the liberties were only available to the nobility, not that it was liberal in a different sense of the word that we use nowadays.
Comparing renaissance-age Poland to any of the modern-day countries you've mentioned doesn't make sense to me (also, it's Ukraine, not "the Ukraine").
In ancient Greece, a great deal (or even most) of the population were slaves. Yet, it does not prevent us from treating their system as democracy and compare it with the modern democracies and "democracies".
> Poland had the szlachta, a broad citizen-warrior class that can be thought of as an upper middle class. This amounted to 10% of the population. That might sound like a very limited form of democracy, but it is the same percentage of the population as voted in the famous democracy of ancient Athens
I'd suggest reading the article if you haven't already. It doesn't argue or force a definition of 'liberal' or 'democratic' but describes the period of Polish history apparently poorly highlighted in the curriculum of US schools.
'Liberal' has many and varying definitions, but the notion that a polity is liberal if some of the bodies imposing repressive values and restraining trade aren't nation states doesn't have much currency outside the more perverse end of US anarchocapitalism. I don't think anybody whose reason hasn't been consumed with fanatical hatred of the IRS considers civil war between brutal local warlords to be a 'liberal and democratic construction'.
Polish society is still liberal. Please do not think our current government and their actions are representative of what Poles think and support. Majority is at the moment fighting our own government ...
For the record, my submission of the article above doesn't mean that I think Poland is not liberal in any way (I'm Polish by the way). I just found the article pretty in-depth and interesting thus worthy of posting here.
Thanks a lot for posting this, I had never encountered Poland in history classes (French edu system) except for the 20th century history parts, and had no idea about either the Union in itself or its political system. We heard a lot about the Italian quattrocento, as it lead up to the French Renaissance, but of what was happening in Poland, not a peep. In the same fashion, we didn't hear that much about even the holy German empire, as history in France is taught in a very French-centric way from the fall of the Roman Empire up to the 1st world war. I think it would do us a world of good to approach history in a more global fashion, paying less attention to rote learning of chronologies, and hearing more about the stories of ideas and peoples throughout the ages.
It's interesting for me (as a Pole), but for the opposite reason to the author - I'm interested in the parables to Polish history he found looking from angolsaxon protestant POV. I was aware of some of them (Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus), but not all.
The main problem is, even though the government is fairly bad, the opposition is just as bad.
Mainly, the PR and political agenda of the opposition just doesn't exist. The recent political ideas of the opposition are just the government's ideas with a small twist.
So yea, we are fighting them, we're protesting, but we don't have seriously viable well organized alternatives, which is why they'll probably win again.
Fortunately, they're becoming less anti-EU as time passes, which gives me hope, that at least we'll be heading in the overall EU-wide direction.
Very far from majority. The right-wing party got 37.58% with the turnout of 50.92%. Their main argument, repeated and nauseam, was "We will gave 125€ a month per child to everyone". It turned out partially false afterwards, but a new tradition of buying votes for money has been born.
That's how democracy works everywhere. Majority within voting part of society decides who will rule, and it's ok because non-voting part doesn't care. Also, every election is a fair of promises. This gov't at least partially fulfilled theirs, no wonder their voting base is the largest.
Literally same promise was made by Indian Prime Minister in 2014 elections, to give Rs 15,00,000 to each citizen from all the unaccounted black money stored in foreign countries by Indians. After he got elected, his party said it was just a saying, not an actual promise.
37% of people who bothered to vote. With about 50% not bothering to do so. After 8 years of "liberal" party ruling and some scandals. It's like calling USA conservative because they voted Trump.
I spent a week in Poland and saw homosexual girls passionately kissing in the public and more burkas than I have expected. Overall more liberal than I have expected from the public image we see here in Lithuania.
I was last in Warsaw about twelve years ago, bought a T-shirt from an activist that translated as "I don't like the pope". Was advised to consider not wearing it if I visited any small towns.
Surprisingly I was in Paris this year as well and... OK, jokes asides :-)
France is liberal place. No discussion here. Burqas ban is not changing that. In my opinion, context is important. Poland being Islamophobic, while France is not.
The point is the unusual tolerance found in the offbeat combination it is unusual for those strongly religiously traditionalist as those who wear burkas willingly to /not be bothered/ by something like same sex public displays of affection. Not being offended or leaving immediately at the sight or anything. The combination is fairly high entropy in an information theory sense.
It is certainly a sign of being liberal that one is allowed to wear whatever they like for any reason, and the state does not say, "Your religion is bad and you are oppressing yourself, and we are here to rescue you."
There have of course been illiberal but left-wing states that are willing to say exactly that. Most Communist governments have banned religion of any form on the grounds that the state knows better, but I don't think those governments are usually called "liberal."
I am german and have some polish friends. They are among the most liberal people I know, sometimes a bit crazy, but always open for new developments and people. This is why I find it so strange, that all the Poles I know seem like a direct contradiction to the current government of Poland.
I always supposed, that the liberals ind Poland are more open towards migration to Germany or the UK, so that the ones that are staying tend to be a bit more conservative. Do you think that has something to do with it, or are other factors more important (despite all the criticism, the PIS does seem to care more about families and general social security)?
Selection bias. Learn Polish and go talk to someone in small village in Podkarpacie to understand PIS.
As for political explanation: basically, PIS is the only economically socialist party in Poland right now. They introduced social programs on unprecedented scale. The part of Poland that was mostly ignored by the transformation is voting them because of that. Think Trump and Rust Belt, but if Trump actually did something.
There are some fringe leftist parties but they have like 1-3% support and aren't in the parliament.
Also, because of forced communism in 1945-1989, and right-wing propaganda everywhere for the last 29 years - "left" is very bad political brand to associate with in Poland. People seriously criticize politicians and want to jail them for "propagating a totalitarian regime" (which is a crime in Poland) when they wear Karl Marx on a t-shirt, to give you an idea how bad it is :)
So, PIS managed to persuade Poles that socialist economical policy is actually right-wing, because they associate with church and call everybody else leftists and communists.
They are also anti-business, and anti-EU. And there is also a healthy dose of xenophoby (Muslim refuges will come if you vote PO and rape you or do terrorism), and conservatism (LGBT is relatively unpopular in Poland, even among young people, compared to the west).
I try to avoid this label, because it stops all discussion, but they are basically national socialists (without the death camps).
> PIS is the only economically socialist party in Poland right now
Not exactly, you have SLD, you have Partia Razem, both of them are a lot more socialist than PIS. What makes PIS different is that they add patriotism/nationalism and church into the mix. So they are so called leftist when it comes to economy but conservative when it comes to world view.
> Also, because of forced communism in 1945-1989, and right-wing propaganda everywhere for the last 29 years - "left" is very bad political brand to associate with in Poland. People seriously criticize politicians and want to jail them for "propagating a totalitarian regime" (which is a crime in Poland) when they wear Karl Marx on a t-shirt, to give you an idea how bad it is :)
Well, SLD - leftist party, ruled Poland from 2001 to 2005.
> I try to avoid this label, because it stops all discussion, but they are basically national socialists (without the death camps)
PIS is objectively more economically socialist than SLD. And not by a small margin.
1. SLD introduced no social programs when it ruled (PIS introduced 3 already and promises more)
2. SLD continued privatisation (PIS is doing the opposite - buying private companies - banks, coal mines, telecommunication companies, bus and train factories, and joining them into big national holdings)
3. SLD continued free-market reforms (except for the NFZ - national health foundation), PIS reforms the law the other way - introducing targeted anti-big-business taxes, regulating who can buy farming land (only a farmer who lives in nearby province or a church), where a new drugstores can be built, and what the prices for buying raw fruits and vegetables should be (that one is only a promise for now).
4. SLD did nothing regarding housing, PIS introduces a program where the state will build cheap houses and assign them to young families (previously PO introduced similar program but state wasn't building anything, just helped with financing the mortgage the young marriage took, PIS is changing that so that state will do everything - build the house, take the mortgage, manage it, and people are only going to live there and pay part of the rent)
5. PIS is trying to force the big national companies to build an electric car that will be the solution to all Polish problems. Despite the companies having nothing to do with electric cars, there's little Polish-owned manufacturing to speak of, never mind electric cars. To reiterate - the state is telling insurance providers and petrol rafineries to build an electric car :) How is that not socialist?
SLD (despite the name) when it was in power was more free-market and liberal oriented than even PO when it comes to economy :) PIS is far more socialist on that count.
Razem is the fringe party I mentioned. Less than 3% of support.
> I think you went a little too far here.
That's the problem. But how do you call a right-wing nationalist party that is economically socialist?
> 1. SLD introduced no social programs when it ruled (PIS introduced 3 already and promises more)
What about miners pensions? Of course you can't compare both of those parties because budgets and economy was a lot different then and Poland just entered to EU when they were ending their cadence.
Anyway, you now wrote what SLD did when they ruled but in original post you wrote:
PIS is the only economically socialist party in Poland right now, emphasis on right now. You should check current political programs of SLD and Partia Razem. They are more economically socialist than PIS.
> Less than 3% of support.
That doesn't make what I wrote any less true. It's like saying that gay people do not exists because there is only couple of percentage of them in society.
> But how do you call a right-wing nationalist party that is economically socialist?
I'm not sure I understand which miner pensions you mean, there were lots of miners' privileges, mostly relics from before 1989. But even giving you that - it's still one small program in 2 terms compared to 3 big programs in less than 1 term combined (PIS ruled for about 4 years as of now).
And you haven't answered all the deregulation and privatization SLD did compared to the central planning PIS does now :)
> You should check current political programs of SLD and Partia Razem. They are more economically socialist than PIS.
There's no indication SLD is going to be any more socialist this time around. They were promising similar things before and never delivered (thankfully). I'm labeling them basing on what they did, not what they promise (similarly - PO promised to be a liberal right-wing party, but is actually conservative center-right, they lost many voters over that).
> It's like saying that gay people do not exists because there is only couple of percentage of them in society.
I specified I mean mainstream parties in my original post. Razem is a typical protest-party, people don't vote them because they believe they will be in parliament and do what they promised, people vote them as a "fuck you" to the mainstream parties.
They are as relevant to Polish politics as the tee party is in USA :) We also have a pro-Russian party Zmiana in Poland, but they will also never get to the parliament, so who cares.
> conservative-socialist
I guess. But there are a few ways to be conservative (for example, in any normal country PO would be called conservative center-right, and PIS is much more conservative than them, to the point of being extremists. See how they rename every institution from "public" to "national" for one example, or how they focus their propaganda on nationalist interpretation of history, and nationalist conspiracy theories about leftists, Soros, refuges, Jews, cultural marxism, gender, etc.
You are in touch with extreme part of their society, i.e. people adventurous enough to move abroad taking much higher risks; the comfortable ones likely stay at home and vote as their low-risk strategy leads them to. You probably also aren't interfacing with people that were literally pushed out of the country for survival reasons, forced to take menial jobs abroad and experience "2nd class citizen" at full scale either; those might vote against liberal values as well and would prefer stronger state to take care of them.
I've got the same impression, but a Pole I'm currently working with told me that election results only represent about 30% of the electorate, and that things are complicated as far as societal groups go - more liberal groups would be associated with former-socialist parties, the church being seen as representing the (economic interest of the) "establishment"; things like that. Maybe a a Pole could explain it better.
This is weird statement. Majority doesn't care too much about political ideologies in Poland as in any other country. Meanwhile the ruling party still gets more voters than any other.
"I feel like my teachers lied to me. The version of Western history that I was taught in school mostly focused on Spain and Portugal during the 1400s and 1500s, France and Germany in the 1700s and 1800s, Russia and Germany in the 1900s, and Britain during the whole era from the Dark Ages onwards"
This beginning.. points to that our history lessons are focused on resnisance / reformation times. the 'dark ages' is all a bunch of nonsense. if you look at islamic / african continent, asia and other places you can find actually a lot of history that supports the fact that also in Europe people were not in some dark evil times... that a lot of cultures were sharing (ofc there was also conflict all over the place..) a lot of knowlege and culture with eachother.
our dark ages for a lot of other cultures is in the middle of their golden ages...
like some cheesy soap series: "the rewrting of history after war by it's victors, is a war in itself."
just imagine how often that happened. just look at all the modern activities by governments and how they try to turn and twist things like 'their country is best, and others are shit' (that's the general idea they will try to put on their poplation in any case).
if you ask me they just try to hide the fact (by reforming history) to make everyone feel seperated, and opposed. instead of remembering we can share and grow all together.
I think it was the black death that effectively killed of feudalism in most of Europe. Wages went up and peasants were in high demand so it became easier to move.
The effects of the Black death (1344) were probably being felt in 1400s Europe to at least the extent that WW2 still impacts on us today.
Strangely, Poland was left largely unafected by the Black Death so the cause of this social arrngement wasn't there.
The high regard for peasants in Poland contrasted with the neighboring East Slavic countries like Russia probably because of the influence of their Mongol rulers, but in the origin Slavic cultures were quite egalitarian and benevolent.
Disagree with the high regard. As you said, it's not russian type of servitude/slavery, but at the same time, being a Polish (well, not really Polish - living in a land of a certain polish-slavic ruler) peasant was bad.
If the plague hit Poland, then... but that's a what-if ;)
I find the difference is really well explained by the description of the Refeudalization process [1].
There was a class of well-off peasants who had fairly comfortably lives, but for the most part I think you're right as that part of my argument was really hand-wavy.
It isn't strange that Poland wasn't affected by Black Death. King Casimir the Great have introduced sanitary cordon and quarantined cross-border travelers.
Arguably Scotland is an exception, the reformation is still a hot topic there. 2004 wasn't too long after Rangers signed its first Catholic player. I'm kidding btw. I think you'll always find vestiges of ancient systems if you look for them especially in countries where evolution rather than revolution has been the way change has been effected.
Feudalism is more than just concentrated property ownership. It’s primarily about people being bound by law to provide labor and resources to their feudal lord.
Concentrated ownership of property is not a specific feature of feudalism. It is something which obtains in basically any large scale society which is non-communal.
Black death didn't kill feudalism ( even if we could come to a consensus on what feudalism is ). The societal structure wasn't affected by the black death. Feudalism died as european monarchs and elites got wealthy and used that wealth to centralize power. Feudalism is a result of weak or nonexistent central power. A classic example of this is japan during the meiji period. The emperor centralized power by overthrowing the feudal lords of japan. Which he was able to because he opened trade and gained investment and weapons from the west which gave him enough power to central japan's feudal estates under his direct rule.
The black death didn't cause rises in wages. What caused wages to rises was trade. There as something called the mongol empire ( you might have heard of it ) which allowed europe to trade directly with china, india and the rest of asia. The mongol empire ( particularly the golden horde ) was central to european wealth generation. So much so that when it finally fell in 1480, wealthy merchants were desperately seeking another trade route to the east. A few years later, you have columbus ( you might have heard of him as well ).
The idea that death caused wage rises is ludicrous when you think about it for a second. If population decline causes wage increases then japan would be seeing a huge rise in income. Russia in the 90s should have seen a ridiculous rise in income.
What increases wages are increasing population and increasing trade.
You have to be insane to think that a 50% population reduction would have no significant impact on societal arrangements.
Life up until the industrial revolution was dominated by a single factor: the Malthusian limit. The Black Death obliterated that constraint. And, since it reoccurred every 10-15 years, it continued to make the Malthusian limit a non-issue for a long, long time.
The European economy at the close of the Middle Ages (c. 1500) differed fundamentally from the pre—plague economy. In the countryside, a freer peasant derived greater material benefit from his toil. Fixed rents if not outright ownership of land had largely displaced customary dues and services and, despite low grain prices, the peasant more readily fed himself and his family from his own land and produced a surplus for the market. Yields improved as reduced population permitted a greater focus on fertile lands and more frequent fallowing, a beneficial phenomenon for the peasant.
I'm well aware of the theory. I used to subscribe to it myself when I was younger. I won't go into why reduce population wouldn't affect farm yields since back then, farming was a very physical endeavor requiring many people. If yields did increase, it was most likely because of population increase in the countryside due to europeans fleeing disease ridden cities. Lets not forget that most of the attributed
population decline was due to cities being emptied because city dwellers moved to the countryside. Just like isaac newton did in the 1600s when disease struck england.
I would think that numbers, knowledge, technology and goods from the east had more to do with changing european society than a population decrease.
What do you think impacted korea more? The deaths during the korean war or trade with the west? What impacted european wages more? The deaths during WW2 or the american-led trade system?
Also, throughout history, there have been quite a few plagues ( not to mention mass killings ). Those didn't lift wages. China's wages didn't rise after tens of millions of people died during the taiping rebellion. But you are free to believe what you want.
This small republic inside the Union had economic freedom for peasants, parliament and voting right, education and medical care system - way ahead of it's time.
This is what I imagine what would happen when a modern day progressive is sent back in time and told to try out 21rst century ideas: it lasts until he dies.
I think Polish people are very liberal, I live in Podlaskie Voivodeship, we have mix here of Belarusians, Lithuanians, Jews (regions of Tykocin), Tatars (regions of Kruszyniany). Mix of religions Catholics, Orthodox, Judaism, Muslims. It is called cultural crucible.
As one of the implications of such mix, we have very tasty food here!
I don't like all comments about government - it is always easy to complain. Please just do you your job as good as you can and everything will be perfect.
Author mentions that "Szlachta" are now portrayed as the villains of Polish history without appearing to understand why this is the case.
The key to understanding the dysfunction of polish political system at the time is the concept of "Liberum Veto" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto). Essentially any legislation passed by the Parliament ("Sejm") had to be passed unanimously.
This resulted in nobility securing earmarks and privileges for themselves at every turn and led to anarchy and destabilization of the political system, which culminated in partitioning of Poland between three of its largest neighbors for 123 years.
Liberum veto abuse was a symptom, not the cause. The practice existed since forever, but before late 17th century it was only used to block a particular issue, not the whole session, and only temporarily. And it was OK.
Then in one case it was abused (technically correctly) to veto a movement to lenghten the parliament session because consensus wasn't achieved. One guy vetoed that, and sejm was finished without any decisions.
Then it started to be abused illegally to finish any sejm completely at any time (even 1 day into the session which were supposed to last weeks) when even 1 nobleman vetoed. It wasn't the problem of the law, because it was illegal to do so - it was the problem of the implementation of the law - because influential people wanted it to be abused that way.
But the real reason was - Poland lost several important international struggles (over Baltics vs Sweden and over part of Ukraine vs Russia), and international economic situation changed (agricultural revolution started, decreasing grain prices on the western markets). Additionally after series of barely survived wars Poland lost a lot of population, so the grain production decreased (and it was like 99% of Polish economy).
Becausse of all of that - infulential people in Poland perceived Polish interests as unrealistic, and alligned themselves with more profitable groups - Prussia, Germany, Catholic Church. And to further their cause they were breaking the law by abusing liberum veto among others.
There were also patriots, of course, and they broke the law, too (3rd May Constitution was introduced in a coup supported by Prussia basically). But in the end Poland was already a Russian protectorate, and there was no way to fix that as long as Russia was so much stronger. Only after WW1 it became possible.
When you wonder why Hitler built the concentration camps for Jews in Poland, you can find the answer in the article. For centuries and centuries Jews chased away from Spain and other countries found a safe home in Poland. They enjoyed freedom and were thriving until the nationalists movements started to become pronounced everywhere in Europe in the early 20th century.
>>When you wonder why Hitler built the concentration camps for Jews in Poland, you can find the answer in the article.
Well, it's one of the reasons. The other one is that Oswiecim was(and still is) very well connected to the rest of Europe with train lines - prisoners could be brought there easily from pretty much any part of the occupied territory, from both West and East.
> the nationalists movements started to become pronounced everywhere in Europe (...)
After the Polish state that was home to the Jews was crushed in '39 and Europe fell to Nazi Germany and consorts, only Sweden and the UK were liberal havens - and de facto impossible to reach. They were locked, with no escape, exposed to the industrial genocide that would happen.
A true tragedy that makes someone think again when one sees refugees on the TV screen.
No, unfortunately a bit earlier than that. The mid-war Poland was a country in a terrible state. Most of the population was destitute. Malnutrition was omnipresent. People were dying of typhus, especially in poorer areas (incidentally, it was thanks to a Pole Rudolf Weigl that a vaccine for typhus was finally discovered.) Imagine the Jews in all this: keeping aside, strongly refusing integration (with some notable exceptions), and, for historical reasons, keeping to a different set of jobs than the rest of this multi-cultural Polish society. The conflict was unavoidable. Right-wing nationalists were convinced that Poland would be better without Jews [0], and the Catholic Church was supporting this vision. That's why Ghetto benches [1] appeared, and the life of Jews in the last years before the war was much more difficult than earlier.
However, many Western, and especially American scholars, don't have a deep understanding of these issues. They simplify it as "Poles hated Jews." It was not so. Probably the best example is Zosia Kossak-Szczucka, presented in the article "Anti-Semite who saved Jews" [2] As many others, she was critical of Jews in pre-war years. And as many others, she risked her life to save them. Most people discussing the issue of Anti-Semitism in pre-war Poland don't understand this issue at all.
It's certainly multi-ethnic. Lithuanians are Balkan peoples while the Polish are Slavic, two separate language and cultural groups. As for race the author was most likely referring to people of Mongolian and Persian descent who were also part of the Union.
The Polish language is interesting as it has just a few Roman/Latin influences and did not get reformed in modern times - unlike many other European languages.
Poland did not exist for a long stretch of time, 1795-1918, it was partitioned between Prussia, the Habsburg empire and Russia. Poland had provoked those powers with a radical, modern constitution.
The Polish language was forbidden, hence only got taught in underground schools, thereby preserving its old nature. Learning it now can drive you crazy due its chaotic "rules".
The partition is also the cause of famous Poles having French names - Frederic Chopin, Marie Curie.
The partition and soon to follow WW2, Holocaust and Russian occupation have beaten a fierce paranoia and national identity into modern Poles.
Are you Polish? Because what you wrote is mostly wrong.
Polish is probably the Slavic language with the most foreign influences, at least compared to other western Slavic languages or Balkan languages I've seen. Czech language is more "pure" exactly because it was reconstructed from peasant-speak when nationalism became fashionable and educated Czechs turned to their language.
Meanwhile Polish language was continuously used by all layers of society all through the partitions, so it accumulated lots of foreign influences as the fashions changed (from Latin/Italian/German/French/English). It's a significant cultural phenomena, to the point that people in 16th century already complained that everybody uses "makaronizm" (Italian or Latin words) to show-off that they know foreign languages.
Polish language wasn't forbidden for majority of the territory that was occupied, and in these parts where it was forbidden - it was only forbidden for a period of time, not the whole time.
> The partition is also the cause of famous Poles having French names - Frederic Chopin, Marie Curie.
No, it's not. Chopin's father was French, and Maria Skłodowska-Curie (as she preferred to be called, at least when she was in Poland) married a French guy named Curie.
Also - Polish language had small reforms every few decades, but I agree it's overdue another, big one.
Same reason talented Poles now go to London or New York.
> What was Russification? Germanification?
Mostly futile attempts to make people speak different language than they speak. Language was banned in some places, for some time. And they achieved nothing - if anything, Polish Romantism movement was flourishing because of the "forbidden fruit" effect.
Are you not at all aware of the depression and similar disorders and how prevalent they are in general population? Honestly, I think that majority of people around me never learned to love themselves.
Haha Trump is like global warming now. Even when the topic at hand doesn't have anything to do with him, writers must mumble through a litany of "right-thinking" mumbo-jumbo to placate the pitchfork brigade.
History always tells you as much about its author as it does about its subject. That narration is, a sort of british (and american) propoganda from the British colonial era.
The way they thought of history (of "Western Civilization") was (1) The "spark" starts in ancient greece. (2) It is handed Rome, who build inherit the empire (3) Rome falls (ignore the eastern empire) (4) Civilization rekindles in Italy (5) to torch passes to the British who spread it to the world.
Everything culminates in the American-British civilization, and whatever British intellectuals thought was important about Britishness. It also plays down Europe's (especially western Europe) relatively small part in the history of "civilization" until relatively recently.
The narration would be totally different depending on who wrote it.
For example, think of it from a Middle Eastern perspective. Alexander's conquests would be seen as something akin to Gengis Khan's conquest of China. An outsider barbarian that invaded and ruled the Persian empire.
That is, Cyrus created a great persian empire. Greeks captured it, and it continued. Rome captured it, and it continued. Then, western rome fell. But, these were mostly barbarian territories with roman outposts. You can't compare Roman Brtain to Roman Syria, for example. Syria was urban, literate and civilized. Britain was a barbarian island with some roman roads and forts. High status cultural influence (eg christianity) was imported from east to west, not the reverse.