Re: Why did China unite and Europe fail to?
Posted: 2013-05-28 07:42pm
No, it is not. For there is nothing really ethnic about being a subject of "ruler A" during that time. That people try to claim past glories is also not something that is borne out of nationalism. For example, one can easily be a member of public grouping A without being born a member of public grouping A.Iracundus wrote:When the rebellion is aimed at the creation or re-creation of their own ethnic state, then yes it is a form of nationalism. It is acknowledgement of their ethnic identity with their nation. If you recall, the original point under contention was the supposed "similarity" of the Warring States and therefore why unity wasn't that big a deal. The cultural divisions among the Warring States were not as superficial as the other poster had claimed if the post-Qin revolts were aimed at re-creation of the old nationalities and states.
Yes. Why should that be a problem unless you have some kind of agenda like "ZOMG BIGGEST BATTLE EVER?" History should try to deal with facts and concepts, not ancient or modern dick-measuring.And as with any sufficiently ancient battle, you will not find purely physical evidence that would yield the body count or the participant count as much will have been lost to time. At some point reference to textual documents will be necessary. If you question all the texts as being unreliable, then nothing can be ascertained about the battle size at all.
That number is less than impressive, really, considering the low tech base, even if you accept all those numbers at face value (which I do not).The general number of soldiers mobilized by Qin in its final state destroying campaigns was 1 million if you tally up the counts in the individual campaigns. Granted some of these might have been emergency short term levies that were then demobilized after the war as there is textual evidence of an emergency levy of all able bodied men over the age of 15 as reinforcements for Changping.
I shall await hard evidence of such a population reduction then.Gutting an agrarian state that measured its population in the low millions is an idea of the scale. Whether the total casualty count was 450,000 or 440,000 is a bit immaterial to the final effect, which is what is relevant for practical considerations of the level of devastation suffered by Zhao. Even so it did put up some fight in the end and managed to scrape together an army of levies. No resort to any (possibly non-existent) mercenaries.
No, I do not underestimate anything. Peasant levies might very well have been worth it for Qin. That does not mean they were ever a good idea in Europe.I think you are still persistently underestimating the effectiveness of peasant levies, especially in the Warring States given the existence of the Qin crossbow which archeological evidence has shown was mass produced. In mass numbers the killing power of such a weapon outstripped armor technology of the period and could make the armed peasant more dangerous than one might think.
Yes, it does. Maintaining chariots was easier than maintaining good cavalry for a myriad of reasons, one being that chariots are easier to produce and train for than good heavy cavalry.Not when you are talking a Bronze Age civilization.
Again, just because chariots might be effective in a low-tech environment it does not mean that the use of them is "a good idea" or would have been a good idea in Europe.A correction to my earlier point, chariots would have fit the role in the Spring & Autumn period preceding the Warring States, when the costs of war chariots meant they were raised and maintained only by nobles by the resources of their fief in a role analogous to the knight. When it was still the realm of nobles and their retainers doing the fighting on a small scale, a chariot force of 500 could constitute an "army" (as in the use of what is now the modern Chinese character for it). The role of the chariot fills the same niche sociologically, with the costs of war raised so that only a few could afford to fight in such a manner.