Addressed at all participants: how did central cities reflect the diversity that was present in your respective region? Were capital cities home to representatives of various ethnicities, religions, and languages? Or were urban spaces the domain of particular groups?

We popularly think of empires exerting total hegemonic control over their lands, but power ebbs and flows over time. For any of the panelists, what are some of your favorite examples of negotiating and accommodating imperial control in your area?

To what extent was there a Jewish diaspora in the Graeco-Roman world before the year 70? How were Jewish communities treated, and how connected were these communities to each other and to Hasmonean Israel?

Rogers Brubaker has a very influential article called “The Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples”. The abstract is this:

This article provides a historical and comparative analysis of post‐imperial migrations of ethnic unmixing. It examines the post‐Soviet migration of ethnic Russians to Russia in the light of the migrations of other once‐dominant ‘new minorities’ engendered by transitions from multinational empire to incipient nation‐states: Balkan Muslims during and after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, Hungarians after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, and Germans after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the German Kaiserreich.

One thing that strongly characterized the “end of empire” and their transformation from multiethnic realms to nation-states is this “unmixing of people”. It’s astonishing that Vienna today is smaller than it was in 1910 (whereas similar cities like Paris, Berlin, Rome, London, Budapest, Prague have all grown). Why? Because so many Czechs, Hungarians, Slovenians, etc went “home” after the dissolution of the Empire.

Two separate questions: now, we are seeing a “remixing” of people through global immigrations flows, notably to Europe and the Americas. What lessons does empire have for these multiethnic non-imperial states?

Second, what happens in places where empire ends without such an “unmixing”? There are political science articles arguing statistically that violence is not related to ethnic mixture (Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War”) but instead to things like ethnic exclusion from government and power (Cederman, Wimmer, Min, “Why Do Ethnic Groups Rebel? New Data and Analysis“). Are there other lessons to be had about what “do” with post-imperial states?

To /u/Bentresh, what is the present consensus (or lack thereof) surrounding the late bronze age collapse in the near east circa 1200 BC? I've read several popular history books but would like to know what academics think on the subject. Also, why do you think Egypt survived while the rest of the states in the region did not?

A question for u/EnclavedMicrostate

How did the environment and especially natural catastrophes influence Chinese imperial policies leading up the Taiping rebellion? Charles C. Mann discusses in "1493" how American foods like sweet potatoes and maize were planted in China from the 16th c. onwards, leading to massive forced migrations and floodings in later centuries under the Qing (he sums up recent research on this). This is clearly a huge topic, so anything on how e.g. floodings or food shortages might have shaped the period directly before the Taiping rebellion would be great.

For /u/rakony:

How cosmopolitan was colonial Malaysia, and what did this cosmopolitanism look like?

For anyone: What were some of the social and cultural values that ended up being shared between the West and the East before 1,000 A.D. through the Silk Road?

Edit: Not just between Europe and China, but everywhere in-between as well.

Does the Achaemenid Persian Empire deserve the credit it has been given for ruling with tolerance and respect for the cultures of the people living in their empire, or is it possible that this was exaggerated by the Persians for PR purposes?

A question for /u/LordHussyPants:

You hear a lot about the racist and oppressive mentality of European colonials in Australia, how did the imperial rhetoric of the government of New Zealand compare?

Also:

In what ways did Maori culture influence the mainstream culture of the country of New Zealand?

A few things for /u/cleopatra_philopater:

The Ptolemy royals often seem to be depicted as a Hellenistic dynasty that 'went native' in adopting Egyptian customs and culture. Some depictions suggest a more enthusiastic exoticism in comparison to the other Hellenistic rulers of the Near East.

Do we know how the Ptolemys viewed themselves? Was a Greek ancestry an important pillar of their identity? Did any members of the family look to shed a Hellenistic background and more fully embrace the identities of their Egyptian subjects?

Additionally, do we know how the Egyptian noble classes (in other words, the ones who would have been in contact and interaction with the Ptolemy house) reacted to the dynastys adoptation of their customs?

To all participants, as experts of any region or period:

I've often heard that the core/periphery lens through which Empire is viewed has been subject to great changes in historiography. What do these changes look like? What are the alternatives?

/u/CommodoreCoCo, how were smaller kingdoms integrated/absorbed into the Inca Empire? Turning back the clock, how did pre-Inca Andean states incorporate new cultures as they expanded?

"What land is so distant, that from it no spectator is present in thy city?"

So what's the quote from, please?

For /u/LordHussyPants - was there ever an equivalent of a formal/informal 'White New Zealand' policy in place? If so, how did it work?

For /u/Bentresh: Egypt controlled the Levantine coast from 1550 to 1100, according to Wikipedia. What did this 400 year period of Egyptian rule actually look like for the people there? Was it simply that the Kings of the local countries paid them tribute and supported them against the Hittites, or did Egyptians live there and affect the local culture?

This question is for /u/snapshot52.

Would you, please, recommend some introductory and advanced readings for the Penobscot Nation?

For all: For each of your respective empires which, if any, public goods did the state deem most important to provide. Modern day American examples being Medicare and Medicaid, free public education, and disability benefits.

To /u/cleopatra_philopater, to what extent did the Greek and Egyptian populations in Ptolemaic Egypt merge? Did the new Greek nobility marry members of the old Egyptian nobility to gain legitimacy? Was it more that the Egyptian population become Hellenised, or that the Greek nobility become Egyptianised?

Also, I have heard that there was an attempt to merge the Greek and Egyptian pantheons, how successful were these attempts?

To all panel participants, how useful do you think are transhistorical categories like Bonacich and Blalock’s “middleman minorities” (i.e. “market dominant minorities”, like the Jews in much of European, Greeks and Jews in much of the Ottoman Empire, Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia), Hayden and Nemeth’s “service nomads” (most famously the Rromani in Europe and the Middle East, but also groups like the so-called “Sea Gypsies” [Moken] in Southeast Asia and Jewish peddlers in Eastern Europe among others), and Spivak’s “subaltern” (groups with “limited or no access to the cultural imperialism”, people “outside the hegemonic discourse”, who barely even appear in colonial records)?

Is categorizing groups in multiethnic empires across time and space a useful activity? If so, what other categories exist that you find useful for undertstanding the contexts you look at? If not, what is useful about thinking about “empire” and “imperialism” rather than just “an empire” or “a period of imperialism”?

Hey guys thanks for doing this. Always love a bit of question prodding.

Adressed to all

What would you say quantifies an Empire? How would you define it?

In ancient multiethnic empires, did the ruling classes expect the lower classes to take on the former's cultural identity in order to be considered citizens?

For example, Saul of Tarsus famously changed his name to a Roman name when he became a citizen of Rome. Was this required?

I ask because nowadays a common sentiment among some American whites is that black people are treated badly because they didn't assimilate. Does this view have any historical basis?

" Imperialism does not have to be all about conquest either! "

I don't understand this statement. Unless a country loses its sovereignty, the imperium(power to command) is still theirs.

Question for /u/cleopatra_philopater

Was Egypt Hellenized at all by the time that the Ptolemies became the rulers of Egypt? And if not, what factors made the Ptolemaic Dynasty successful in Hellenizing Egypt, a nation/society that had such a long standing history and culture of its own?

After all, Egypt was sort of the China of the Ancient World. A long continuous civilization with history, culture, politics, and religion which even to the people of the Ptolemaic Kingdom was old.

/u/Snapshot52, in A Misplaced Massacre, Kelman contextualized the U.S. Civil War by looking east from Indian Country as war of imperialism, fought to decide the slave-holding status of the West, with the assumption of to the victor goes the God-given spoils, naturally without regard for the original inhabitants. Growing up in the east, I never thought of the Civil War in such a manner.

Do you think this perspective is helpful in understanding US Indian Policy during and immediately after the war? Does it mesh with the lived experience of nations in the West, as well as the rhetoric of justification used to cover horrendous atrocities?

Can you sum up what the beginning of what we call "the Bronze Age" looked like?

Where did the innovations begin, how did they spread? Conquest, collaboration, deliberate empire building?

I'm sorry if this is vague and feel free to interpret or re-interpret my question but I think I'm driving at the incredible rate of innovation must have been mind-blowing at the time and its spread equally so.

u/cleopatra_philopter would probably be best: how did the Parthian and Sassanian states treat the Hellenic and Hellenized former ruling classes in Iran and Mesopotamia? Is it more complex than the Parthians incorporated Greek culture while the Sassanians stamped it out?

A few questions about the relationship between liberalism, multiculturalism, and empire to all the panelists.

1. Do you think that framing this in terms of multiculturalism and empire can distort how the multiculturalism of empires is viewed or do you think that there are underlying similarities between liberal multiculturalism and imperial multiculturalism?
2. Would you think that the ways in which your respective empires organized their politics towards different religious, national, ethnic, and linguistic groups can serve as an inspiration for modern liberal democracies? (Not sure if this violates the 20 year rule, if it does, I can rephrase or edit out). I ask partially because I've seen some Hayekian-inspired philosophers hold up the millet system as an ideal of multiculturalism.
3. Do you think these multicultural empires were stable, or do you think that these regimes lead to underlying tensions that can fragment the empire? Similarly and comparatively, do you think that there is a stronger tension in liberal democracy and multiculturalism than in empire and multiculturalism?
4. Honestly any good readings about viewing each empire as multicultural? I ask because when I think of multicultural empires I think Habsburgs, the Soviet Union, and the Ottoman Empire.