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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
debaser, I think you're confusing military with cultural domination. With the possible exception of the Chinese, the Mongols left the cultures alone when they invaded.
The all-time masters of domination, in my opinion, were the Romans who basically assimilated (or tried to) every culture that they defeated on the battlefield. They basically just expanded their pantheon of gods to include whatever local ones were around and accepted the newly-defeated into the fold. Then they made them economically dependent and wore away at the cultural edifices that way.
The Mongols were a bunch of highly mobile archers that basically swept back and forth across Asia. The fact that Russia isn't significantly Mongol-influenced despite being ruled by the Mongols for 300 or so years basically disproves your entire point.
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You bring up an interesting point. Was colonialism cultural or military domination? I would say that it was a bit of both. As I noted above, colonization was driven by greed, not racism. I would put to you that it took varying guises (both cultural and military) dependant upon location and situation, but most of all dependent on profitt. The French, British, and Dutch did not colonize America to assimilate its population, they did it for the enourmous amount of wealth they could aquire.
That being said, you can point to many Mongol influences in Russia, from the prominance of Moscow (perhaps just coincidence) to the superb Cossak cavalry, to the Russians continued blame of the Mongols for their "second class" status in Europe. I would say that they influenced the areas they were in as much as any "bunch of highly mobile archers that basically swept back and forth across Asia" could have.
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Originally Posted by willravel
Are you sure you didn't just misunderstand? I mean it's been a few years...
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Very sure, it's one of those things that is burned into the mind...
PS And hey, I'm not
that old...