As a Lebanese, I find what you're saying both slightly offensive and slightly true. Lebanon, as a culture distinct from other middle easterners has existed for a very long time. Lebanon as an independent state has been invented in 1920, however there were multiple previous attempts historically to get independance.
Some historical figures have reached levels of influence that would qualify as "independent lebanon" (if people were so good at administrative bookkeeping back in the 1600s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakhr_al-Din_II
The modern state of Lebanon fails in part because it's a "contrieved post colonial state", you're right. But claiming it has no historical foundations is misguided. It's wrong. Colonials hijacked a very legit idea, and turned it into a failed state. It's different.
The resource curse is probably part of it. But another part is that the Ottoman Empire conquered all of these middle eastern societies at varying levels of development, and the european powers that inherited those colonies were faced with complex sectarian conflict that didn't exist in asia. With the separation of British India into Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, you've solved 90% of the sectarian conflict that exists in the region. In Lebanon, by contrast, history has left you with Christians, Shia, and Sunni all living in the same place, such that you have a constitutional structure where christians and muslims are each guaranteed half the seats in the legislature, and other roles such as president and prime minister are divided by religion.
They had centralized fully functional states that maintained economy that could supply cities as large or larger than Europe.
Japan was not made by Meiji, it was transformed but foundation of the "miracle" was there. During sengoku it created and armed with locally built firearms armies that dwarfed that of any European state of the time in one generation.. from bows to hundred thousands of muskets
Culture >> everything. In 1945 Beirut was a paradise compared to burned to the ground Tokyo and every other major city. In few decades it had built dams like Kurobe, challenged and beat American car manufacturers.. resources, colonialism.. right. Whoever was running the place knew how to do it, they do not know now and very unlikely to learn in the next 100 years.
This point is often made for the middle east but a lot of the borders and ideals put in place that caused these disasters were put in place before oil really even mattered.
Sovereignty is different if you have U.S. bases on your soil. Any country with a U.S. base is a vassal state, independent and therefore sovereign in name only.
Those prosperous states in South Asia, outside mainland China, do seem to have lots of American troops stationed in them.
One could make the same argument for a country like India. There is no "India" in the sense of an ethno-linguisic grouping. India is more akin to the European Union but even more diverse. The Indian state has survived for seventy five years now.
Just as the French and British dismembered the Ottoman empire to create modern Lebanon, so too did the British dismember the Indian empire to create India and Pakistan.
I don't think that is especially accurate. India has a lot of ethno-linguistic diversity, but has hundreds of years of centralized administrative rule even before the British: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_Empire. That's longer than Germany or Italy have had centralized governance.
Funnily enough, the Mughals were initially foreign conquerors, just like the British with their Raj. But then ancient Germania was also somewhat unified by the foreign Romans, so perhaps it's same as it ever was.
I always wonder why the Maurya Empire doesn't get brought up as a pan-Indian empire, it was local to the area and conquered almost the entirety of the subcontinent.
Human history is a story of repeated conquest, population admixture and/or replacement. Almost all “indigenous people” in present or past are just descendants of the most recent conquerors. Hardly any peoples have legitimate claim to land on the virtue of being there first, it’s almost universally on the basis of conquest instead. It always has been thus.
Yes, but it's interesting to note the difference between when a large region is united through conquest by locals, or an outside power further away. Italy, in comparison to the above two examples, was united by the local Romans. (Though of course, "local" is incredibly relative. The difference between northern and southern Italy has been vast even unto modernity, never mind during antiquity.)
Now, I'm not sure what the difference of living under Maurya vs. Mughal vs. British rule was for its inhabitants, these are widely different polities from completely different time periods, but it's still a distinction. Though I suppose more of a retroactive one imposed by our modern bias, when we can point at India, Italy, and Germany and say, "ah, that patch of land is naturally meant to be united by someone."
But there is a difference between conquerors that intermarried (European colonists to Latin america) and ones that didn’t (Mughals and British). Modern Indians have very little Mughal ancestry.
It’s the other way around - Mughals gained Indian ancestry. Canonical example is Babur to Akbar losing epicanthic folds. I guess “Ganga-jamni tahzeeb” and culture of Awadh don’t count here according to you.
- Signed, one of your mythical people with “very little Mughal ancestry” whose family founded Shahjahanpur.
India and Pakistan didn't split up because of the British, they split up because Jinnah and the Muslim League wanted it. Pakistan was born out of a sustained bottom-up movement.
The reason the British get blamed for a lot of the Indo-Pak issues is that, absent an indigenous Indian/Pakistani civil service bureaucracy, the British were tasked with executing the plan originally conceived by the Two-Nation Theorists, and they totally botched that execution.
This argument can be made for any country on earth.
Pick up a globe, close your eyes and randomly put your finger anywhere and you will see the point under question was under different (political)boundaries every 300 years or so.
Boundaries of any country are just limits to which a certain political administration extends its powers to. They keep changing for various reasons, every few decades.
Sadly it is pretty much the story of the world with a few rare exceptions.
Far right movements ethnic/religion/political have engulfed almost every place , amplified by social media and re-amplified by media.
Note that Hindus get shot in their homes in Indian state of Kashmir too , the latest being 1 day ago.This eye for an eye will take anyone anywhere.
'Dismembered the carcass of the Ottoman Empire' surely? Maybe my sense of history in this regard is flawed, but the Ottoman Empire was much to blame for its own demise.
We had high levels of autonomy under the Ottoman rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Lebanon_Mutasarrifate
Some historical figures have reached levels of influence that would qualify as "independent lebanon" (if people were so good at administrative bookkeeping back in the 1600s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakhr_al-Din_II
The modern state of Lebanon fails in part because it's a "contrieved post colonial state", you're right. But claiming it has no historical foundations is misguided. It's wrong. Colonials hijacked a very legit idea, and turned it into a failed state. It's different.