When did strong states being territorially satiated become more normal than strong states being expansionist?
Here's what I mean, for a lot of history, it seems like it wasn't a problem getting strong states to expand by conquering their neighbors. They would be easily motivated to do so. What would stop expansion would only be inability to expand further through meeting stronger resistance, grossly excessive expense compared to expected value, or weakening of the state.
What you did not see much of was states with a comfortable margin of superiority over neighbors, voluntarily saying 'I'm good' and restraining themselves to their own borders. Almost like that idea hadn't even been invented yet.
To bring it from abstract to concrete examples I've encountered, when I've been in discussions where it is proposed that the Ottomans do not expand into Jagiellonian Hungary or the Mameluke empire, just because they didn't feel like it, as a matter of state policy, most respondents find the idea deeply unsatisfying that the Ottomans would ever voluntarily limit themselves like that. They argue it would be out of character, and focus on solutions making the Ottomans too weak to expand in those directions or the areas we're trying to keep out of their hands too hard to conquer.
Likewise, when there are discussions about the Romans not investing in the conquest of Britain, many respondents argue that it is simply not in Roman character for them not to try, and not to persist, and their period of ascendance is long enough that at least partial success is going to be inevitable. So again, it's like the late Roman Republic and Roman Empire 'doesn't know' how *not* to expand.
There is some medieval jurisprudence, on the Islamic side, that is explicit on the obligation to expand. In the jurisprudential arguments its necessary for the Islamic state/community to call on its neighbors to submit politically, and conquer if they refuse. The obligation is somewhat tempered by pragmatism but expected to apply whenever the Islamic state is strong enough to carry it out. The pragmatic tempering is that truces or suspension of holy war is allowed without harming the soul if the quantitative or material odds of the Islamic side's victory are too poor. Fits perfectly with the expand whenever you can, when you can't don't model.
China at some point seems to have become a significant exception to this. It obviously made all of the Han Chinese core Han Chinese by major conquest, expansion, and assimilation moving southward for centuries from the North China Plain. It did make Korea and Vietnam tributaries, and arguably a couple times tried for direct incorporation of Vietnam. However, after filling out the core of "China proper" China doesn't seem to have made an effort to continue its expansion of its heartland southward deep into southeast Asia to the outlets of the various rivers like the Mekong and Irrawaddy and the Mekong peninsula. China also spent over a millenium and a half deeply uninterested in nearby Taiwan. It only became interested when self-proclaimed Ming supporters took it over and used it as a base to harass the dynasty, and even after conquering it in 1683, some ministers recommending evacuating the Han Chinese population and leaving the island a wilderness.
China had episodes of expanding past its wall networks or the Great Wall to the north and west, but it had even longer periods of not bothering to try territorial expansion or buffers and trying defense at the frontier and only raids or bribes beyond.
Yamato Japan had a pretty consistent eastward and northward expansion within the island of Honshu and then Hokkaido, and three, very widely separated episodes of invading the mainland at Korea (circa 600s AD, then a 900 year gap with just some piracy, 1590s, then a nearly 300 year gap and then the 1890s). Trying getting any European country in those centuries to not be grabby against a neighbor that distance for that long! However, the pretty cohesive Tokugawa state didn't expand along any of its maritime frontiers beyond the Ryukyus. (hitting the Ryukyus only in early 1600s rather than under earlier Shogunates, not messing with Taiwan before or during Dutch or Spanish or Tungning arrival in Shogunate times, not messing with the Philippines in Shogunate times).
By the 19th and 20th century though you seemed to have more cases of "lion" and "lamb" obviously bigger, stronger states living next to smaller, weaker states without trying to gobble them up. In Europe, while boundaries continued to shift into modern times, outright state extinctions, fairly unremarkable when the Ottomans for instances wiped out Serbia and Bulgaria in the fifteenth century, became rare enough to make it fairly remarkable when Poland was partitioned into oblivion in the late 18th century.
As you get into the 19th century and 20th century, while some areas like Africa, Oceania, and parts of Asia are being opened up to conquest by overseas nations for the first time, in other places wars of conquest are becoming rarer or less thinkable.
You have some gradually building colonial portfolios, but you also have from the time of Louis XIV onward, the successive failure of 'fast conquerors' like Louis XIV, Louis XV, the French Republic, Napoleon, Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany, Showa Japan.
To me this looks like an evolution in what is normal (as in what happens routinely) in international affairs, what is normative (wars of conquest getting more frowned up lately and less frowned up the further you look back), and in what works internationally, vast territorial expansion and liquidation of preexisting states being something easier to accomplish several centuries ago compared with the last century.
On the other hand, it may be possible to make the cynic's argument and say nothing's really changed, that states still are driven to expand as much as they can, and it has just gotten that much more difficult or less cost effective to try to do it over the last century or so.
So has history had an inflection point on this? If so, where and when?
Your thoughts?
Here's what I mean, for a lot of history, it seems like it wasn't a problem getting strong states to expand by conquering their neighbors. They would be easily motivated to do so. What would stop expansion would only be inability to expand further through meeting stronger resistance, grossly excessive expense compared to expected value, or weakening of the state.
What you did not see much of was states with a comfortable margin of superiority over neighbors, voluntarily saying 'I'm good' and restraining themselves to their own borders. Almost like that idea hadn't even been invented yet.
To bring it from abstract to concrete examples I've encountered, when I've been in discussions where it is proposed that the Ottomans do not expand into Jagiellonian Hungary or the Mameluke empire, just because they didn't feel like it, as a matter of state policy, most respondents find the idea deeply unsatisfying that the Ottomans would ever voluntarily limit themselves like that. They argue it would be out of character, and focus on solutions making the Ottomans too weak to expand in those directions or the areas we're trying to keep out of their hands too hard to conquer.
Likewise, when there are discussions about the Romans not investing in the conquest of Britain, many respondents argue that it is simply not in Roman character for them not to try, and not to persist, and their period of ascendance is long enough that at least partial success is going to be inevitable. So again, it's like the late Roman Republic and Roman Empire 'doesn't know' how *not* to expand.
There is some medieval jurisprudence, on the Islamic side, that is explicit on the obligation to expand. In the jurisprudential arguments its necessary for the Islamic state/community to call on its neighbors to submit politically, and conquer if they refuse. The obligation is somewhat tempered by pragmatism but expected to apply whenever the Islamic state is strong enough to carry it out. The pragmatic tempering is that truces or suspension of holy war is allowed without harming the soul if the quantitative or material odds of the Islamic side's victory are too poor. Fits perfectly with the expand whenever you can, when you can't don't model.
China at some point seems to have become a significant exception to this. It obviously made all of the Han Chinese core Han Chinese by major conquest, expansion, and assimilation moving southward for centuries from the North China Plain. It did make Korea and Vietnam tributaries, and arguably a couple times tried for direct incorporation of Vietnam. However, after filling out the core of "China proper" China doesn't seem to have made an effort to continue its expansion of its heartland southward deep into southeast Asia to the outlets of the various rivers like the Mekong and Irrawaddy and the Mekong peninsula. China also spent over a millenium and a half deeply uninterested in nearby Taiwan. It only became interested when self-proclaimed Ming supporters took it over and used it as a base to harass the dynasty, and even after conquering it in 1683, some ministers recommending evacuating the Han Chinese population and leaving the island a wilderness.
China had episodes of expanding past its wall networks or the Great Wall to the north and west, but it had even longer periods of not bothering to try territorial expansion or buffers and trying defense at the frontier and only raids or bribes beyond.
Yamato Japan had a pretty consistent eastward and northward expansion within the island of Honshu and then Hokkaido, and three, very widely separated episodes of invading the mainland at Korea (circa 600s AD, then a 900 year gap with just some piracy, 1590s, then a nearly 300 year gap and then the 1890s). Trying getting any European country in those centuries to not be grabby against a neighbor that distance for that long! However, the pretty cohesive Tokugawa state didn't expand along any of its maritime frontiers beyond the Ryukyus. (hitting the Ryukyus only in early 1600s rather than under earlier Shogunates, not messing with Taiwan before or during Dutch or Spanish or Tungning arrival in Shogunate times, not messing with the Philippines in Shogunate times).
By the 19th and 20th century though you seemed to have more cases of "lion" and "lamb" obviously bigger, stronger states living next to smaller, weaker states without trying to gobble them up. In Europe, while boundaries continued to shift into modern times, outright state extinctions, fairly unremarkable when the Ottomans for instances wiped out Serbia and Bulgaria in the fifteenth century, became rare enough to make it fairly remarkable when Poland was partitioned into oblivion in the late 18th century.
As you get into the 19th century and 20th century, while some areas like Africa, Oceania, and parts of Asia are being opened up to conquest by overseas nations for the first time, in other places wars of conquest are becoming rarer or less thinkable.
You have some gradually building colonial portfolios, but you also have from the time of Louis XIV onward, the successive failure of 'fast conquerors' like Louis XIV, Louis XV, the French Republic, Napoleon, Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany, Showa Japan.
To me this looks like an evolution in what is normal (as in what happens routinely) in international affairs, what is normative (wars of conquest getting more frowned up lately and less frowned up the further you look back), and in what works internationally, vast territorial expansion and liquidation of preexisting states being something easier to accomplish several centuries ago compared with the last century.
On the other hand, it may be possible to make the cynic's argument and say nothing's really changed, that states still are driven to expand as much as they can, and it has just gotten that much more difficult or less cost effective to try to do it over the last century or so.
So has history had an inflection point on this? If so, where and when?
Your thoughts?
