[lmm]

> Settled cultivators basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to nomadic pastoralists because your grazing lands were settled (often completely unsustainably) until they ceased to exist.

Sure - it was a Hobbesian war of all against all, until the settled cultivators made a better world.

> countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors.

If the nomads make war on you unless you "trade" with them then that's blackmail, not voluntary trade.

[corsac]

And if A and B voluntarily engage in mutually beneficial trade, and C who rules over B (and holds trade and aliens both in contempt for ideological reasons) obstructs B and A from trading in order to weaken A, what is that?

[lmm]

Well, is C's rulership over B legitimate or not? We generally recognise that legitimate governments have the authority to block their subjects from trading, even today (e.g. try buying something from Cuba).

[corsac]

Were anything like modern notions of political legitimacy and just war current across Silk Road era Eurasia, or not? And didn't you just say it was a Hobbesian war of all against all anyway?

More to the point, supposing C has a robust pattern of responding to a trade overtures from nomadic A by violence towards A's representatives, and of justifying the response using an intransigently chauvinist characterization of A (the ahistorical "good peasants vs. bad nomads" construct alive and well in certain comments in this thread) – without imposing anachronistic comparisons or standards, is there a better way to understand A's retaliation than essentializing them as "parasites"?

[lmm]

> Were anything like modern notions of political legitimacy and just war current across Silk Road era Eurasia, or not?

Was the content of what's considered politically legitimate or just war similar to what it is today? No. Did they have notions of legitimate-or-not based on the standards of the time (and that evolved dramatically as times changed)? Yes, absolutely.

> And didn't you just say it was a Hobbesian war of all against all anyway?

In the early days yes. If A and C are both imposing their will on B and each other by violence and neither has established more legitimatcy than that, there's not much more to say in moral judgement; all's fair in love and war, and to the victor go the spoils.

Like, I'm fully on board with saying that the first kings and tax collectors were of a piece with, and no better than, the bandits of that era. But that doesn't mean they were worse either (on the whole; no doubt you can find examples of spectacularly nasty agrarian rulers, but there were spectacularly nasty nomadic pastoralists too), and the difference is that eventually the kings and tax collectors did evolve into systems of governance with accountability that could support labour saving technologies and medical care and all the other things we enjoy.

> More to the point, supposing C has a robust pattern of responding to a trade overtures from nomadic A by violence towards A's representatives, and of justifying the response using an intransigently chauvinist characterization of A (the ahistorical "good peasants vs. bad nomads" construct alive and well in certain comments in this thread) – without imposing anachronistic comparisons or non-relevant standards, is there a better way to understand A's retaliation than essentializing them as "parasites"?

Hmmm... I'm gonna go with no. "Retaliation" is a huge stretch: if your trade and your trade representatives are consistently unwelcome in someone else's territory, that entitles you to stop going there, not to kill and plunder. If whose territory it is is disputed, by all means fight it out, but that doesn't make you some noble free trade advocate.

[corsac]

> notions of legitimate-or-not based on the standards of the time

> "Retaliation" is a huge stretch: if your trade and your trade representatives are consistently unwelcome in someone else's territory

To clarify, trade missions conducted according to established protocols of the time and in the context of precedents of mutual trade, and retaliation in keeping with loosely-shared notions of legitimate-or-not, so much so that chroniclers of sedentary urban peoples could invoke their own concepts of legitimacy in recording them. These details are well attested in the historical record.

> eventually the kings and tax collectors did evolve into systems of governance with accountability that could support ... all the ... things we enjoy.

Sedentary agrarian societies evolved. Nomadic societies evolved. (Seafaring societies evolved. Urban mercantile societies evolved.) They all interacted with each other and some branches of each adopted some ways of the others. Our modern world with its particular triumphs and failures, freedoms and limitations, emerged from that interaction and is radically different from all of these pre-modern societies. Certain enduring elements of governance with accountability (or at least the conditions for them) were, by many accounts, a major contribution of nomadic states. It's incredibly complex and there is room to disagree -- as we do -- ideally without dehumanizing human beings as diseases or insects.