Does anyone have any study guides for chapter 1 of Conquests and Cultures by Thomas sowell?

Starting with the observation that modern western civilization has its origins in the Roman conquest of the surrounding peoples, Thomas Sowell examines first the British Empire, then the impact of conquest on Africa, the Slavs, and Western Hemisphere Indians in CONQUESTS AND CULTURES: AN INTERNATIONAL HISTORY. His conclusions are that, once the initial devastation and destruction have passed, there is a potential for the benefits of peace, wider economic markets, more intellectual contact, and cultural borrowing to take place.

How any cultural or racial minority responds to the opportunities afforded by being included in a larger political body determines its fate, not the attitude of the conquerors or larger economic forces. Geography plays an important role, of course, but geography is more important in creating conditions that make conquest possible than in what can or cannot be achieved afterward. Freedom is also significant, especially economic and social freedom, but not necessarily political independence or democracy.

Major themes include group stereotypes (often accurate), race (unimportant compared to cultural traditions), racism (stupid, but complex, and too easily used to justify backwardness by groups which resist cultural change), and slavery (an international phenomenon, eliminated by Europeans, especially the Britons). “Human capital” lies at the intellectual center of Sowell’s argument. This is a collection of traditions and attitudes which describe the potential for each group in a society to achieve stability, prosperity, and happiness. As societies evolve, some group characteristics aid or impede making adjustments to new circumstances. Those which embrace appropriate modifications in their culture thrive, those which resist decline. Conquest brings about the most rapid changes, and it provides the conquered with the greatest challenges and opportunities.

#1 CONQUESTS AND CULTURES

“We do not live in the past, but the past in us.”

– Ulrich Phillips, “The Slave Economy of the Old South”

Conquest is a major part of that past and a major shaper of the world today. Wars of conquest have changed the language, the economy and the moral universe of whole peoples. As a result of conquests, the Western Hemisphere is today a larger region of European civilization than Europe itself. Even those in the Western Hemisphere who hate European civilization express that hatred in a European language and denounce it as immoral by European standards of morality. The history of conquests is not just about the past, it is very much about the present and how we came to be where we are economically, intellectually and morally.

While migrations have transferred knowledge, skills, technology, and economically valuable aptitudes around the world, conquests have played a more varied and ambiguous role. Where a technologically or organizationally more advanced people have conquered a people lagging behind in these respects, then conquest – like migration – has been a way of spreading the existing human capital of mankind and promoting the development of more human capital among more peoples. But, where conquerors are clearly less economically or intellectually developed than those they conquer – a common situation for centuries, during which ancient civilizations in the Middle East were prey to mounted nomadic warriors from the steppes of Central Asia then conquest has not promoted the spread of human capital, but instead has destroyed much of it where it existed and prevented civilization from spreading to militarily vulnerable areas.

While slavery existed around the world for thousands of years, and has been abolished only within the past two centuries, it tended to decline with the rise of many powerful nation-states, whose armies and navies stood between their own people and marauders from outside who might attempt to capture and enslave them. Thus the consolidation of nation-states around the world reduced the number of peoples who remained vulnerable to enslavement. The regions of the world which continued to be subjected to mass enslavement had much more in common geographically than racially. Typically these were regions whose internal geographical barriers made it more difficult to consolidate political control over areas large enough to produce powerful nation-states, able to protect their populations from marauding outsiders.

Just as slavery became a general moral and political issue in Western civilization in the 19th century, so the ‘right of self-determination of peoples’ became a general moral and political issue in the 20th century. In both cases, the overwhelming military power of the West stood behind these moral and political imperatives. The vitorious allies of the First World War carved up the defeated Habsburg and Ottoman empires into smaller states run by formerly subjugated peoples, such as the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians, and the various southern Slavs who were then lumped together in a newly created Yugoslavia.

The ‘right of self-determination’ has had a high cost. Hitler was able to pick off – one by one – countries that would have been much more difficult to conquer when they were part of a consolidated empire, thus enabling Nazi Germany to begin shifting the military balance in its own favor. Even in the last decade of the 20th century, there were still consequences from the artificial creation of new states after the First World War. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia both came apart in the 1990s, peacefully in the first case and amid hideous atrocities in the second.

The breakup of empires seldom, if ever, restores the world that existed before conquest. The practical question is therefore not how the conquest should be viewed, either morally or politically, but what options now exist in a world irretrievably changed by the conquests of the past.

Our story opens in an island not yet part of the civilization of its time, among illiterate tribal peoples, far removed in distance and culture from the glories of Rome. It begins in Britain.