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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five
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The European navel empires were mixed on this. As far as I know the ones that made it a religious thing were less tolerant. Believe it or not the British empire was fairly tolerant. Yeah I know it sounds crazy doesn't it. (This is not a defense of the British Empire before someone says otherwise) This holds true to the Ottoman Empire too. Despite being a theocracy for most of its existence they were fairly tolerant to other religions being practiced in their borders.
It is only as they fall apart so they tend to become more oppressive as they attempt to hold power.
Coming from part of the British Empire I find that particular one surprising. Do you have any examples?
I wouldn't classify the Ottomans as being a European naval empire, myself. They were part of the preceding wave of Persian gunpowder empires IIRC.
Wealth extraction is not a nice process and can be very oppressive, but it is more effective if you let the local population keep some identity. A rebel or dead local makes no money for the empire. I guess a good example of the top of my head would be the the Great Hedge of Inda. So in India over all there was limited effort to make the Indians conform with British religion or customs. But there was great effort put into collecting taxes. Now a lot of this in the British was not because they were tolerant for the sake of tolerance, but because they genuinely thought the locals were unable to understand the "Superior Ways of the British." So definitely not a nice or inclusive point of view, but accidentally tolerant.
As for the Ottoman Empire they empire all the way to 1920ish. Yeah they weren't European and they existed long before the age of discovery. But they were still contemporary to the British, Spanish, Dutch Empires. I think it would be fair to say that the Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese Empires were well in decline long before the Ottomans.
Though honestly the nuance of all this could be argued forever. My broad point is that if you look at an empire vs a nation state, each with autocratic control. The nation states are much more likely to require conformity from their population not just wealth.
I think I'd agree with that, even if empires have a great deal of variance. The only nation states that are tolerant I can think of are very modern indeed, and there seems to be a trend back to enforcing homogeneity. For the sake of completeness we should probably mention small-scale feudal (agricultural) or band (hunter-gatherer) systems which are neither. Feudal systems can be anywhere in that range, I think, and often adapt very fast if participation with outsiders becomes important, which is basically how empires grow. Band societies are atomic by definition and will have no overall regional policy.
I know that they didn't try to completely reorganise India, which is good. Obviously, in Canada colonization didn't go well for the natives. At times it was straight up genocidal, and probably wouldn't have even been as subtle as it was if now-independent America hadn't done most of the work already. In South Africa it was kind of a weird situation because there was another legacy group of Europeans in the picture, and I know less about the rest of British Africa.
I've heard the idea that the British were nicer before IRL, but it mostly seems like an echo of old propaganda when I do. I'd take them over the earlier Spanish or Portuguese any day, but they seem pretty comparable with the French, and behind someone like the Romans who were truly apathetic towards the customs of their colonies in most cases, and even allowed colonial subjects to ascend to citizenship as a regular course of events. I don't know, maybe that wasn't your point but I felt the need to bring it up.