Razib Khan

Category: History

  • A “carvaka” perspective historicity of myth and religion

    A comment thread below discussed the issues relating to the historicity of Jesus, Muhammad, and Hindu figures such as Ram and Krishna. The assertion is that while Jesus and Muhammad are historical figures, Ram and Krishna are mythological. To some extent, this is a religiously fraught topic. People from Abrahamic backgrounds are wont to dismiss…

  • The Insight show notes: episode 28, Violence & Warfare

    Scottish cavalry charging during the Battle of WaterlooThis week Razib and Spencer discussed violence and warfare on The Insight (iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play).Spencer’s book, Pandora’s Seed, was mentioned. As was John Horgan’s The End of War and S…

  • 2019 isn’t 1999: the unipolar moment is over

    I just finished reading War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots where the author argues that hegemonic Leviathans are actually good for average human well-being because they maintain order and peace. In other words, a multipolar balance-of-powers situation is dangerous. Unipolarity is less dangerous. For various personal…

  • Carthage (and others) must be read

    The first half of Richard Miles’ Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization is useful, but there’s less of a focus on the culmination you know is coming, the Punic Wars. For a history of that, I’d actually recommend Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265-146 BC (one…

  • Give me liberty or give me alternative history!

    For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga is one of the best alternative history science fiction novels written in the 20th century. It is literally encyclopedic. A fully realized alternative timeline, the novel takes the form of a narrative history!  I don’t know if one can say that the world depicted…

  • American folkways & American pedigrees

    St. Augustine Historic districtOver ten thousand years after the first Americans settled the New World, from the Arctic to Patagonia, a new people arrived on these shores. From “deep history” to colonial history. Before Plymouth, before Jamestown, even…

  • A shock is a surprise because it’s a shock

    Reading Thomas Childer’s The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany reminds me a lot of reading The Red Flag: A History of Communism. These strange and extreme ideological systems seem likely to be eternally marginalized…until they aren’t. The dream of revolution is a fantasy until it isn’t. The rot within these societies, their anomie and…

  • Most people have always thought human sacrifice was bad

    A few days ago a minor controversy about the cultural context of human sacrifice in Mesoamerica cropped. A writer at Science, wrote a piece, Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital. The article was good. But it elicited some emotional responses from readers. As one sees in…

  • Midnight’s Descendants: A History of South Asia since Partition

    I recently read John Keay’s Midnight’s Descendants: A History of South Asia since Partition. Like his earlier books on the history of India and China, this is a work written by a journalist, not an area specialist (though Keay seems to take a particular interest in South Asia judging by his oeuvre). To be frank…

  • Why the world before 1450 matters

    It is no surprise that I am not excited by the proposal to focus AP History in the United States on the period after 1450. Overall I agree with many of the comments made in T. Greer’s tweet thread. Though I have a concurrent opinion with many history teachers who oppose the change, my opposition…

  • The days of the All-Fathers

    Citation: Zerjal et al.“A man’s greatest joy is crushing his enemies.”— Genghis KhanThere are many apocryphal quotes attributed to Genghis Khan. And there’s a reason for that — in a single generation he led an obscure group of Mongolian tribes to conqu…

  • The invention of Hinduism 1,000 years ago by a Muslim

    On of the most annoying tropes in modern intellectual discourse, in particular of the postcolonial variety, is its Eurocentrism. That is, the focus on the Western colonial experience is so strong and unwavering that operationally the rest of history becomes prehistory, a formless period which we are ignorant of, when humans were different in fundamental…

  • Gene Expression 2018-06-09 00:09:44

    One of the major conclusions of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation is that Protestantism only captured societies with finality when the most powerful temporal leader pushed for the change from above or maintained the pressure. The “magisterial” Reformation succeeded in those nations where the king or the most powerful aristocrats defended Protestantism and made it their…

  • Gene Expression 2018-06-09 00:09:44

    One of the major conclusions of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation is that Protestantism only captured societies with finality when the most powerful temporal leader pushed for the change from above or maintained the pressure. The “magisterial” Reformation succeeded in those nations where the king or the most powerful aristocrats defended Protestantism and made it their…

  • The Insight, Episode 17: Patrick Wyman, Barbarian Genetics

    This week on The Insight we talk to Patrick Wyman of Tides of History. Patrick is now a professional podcaster for Wondery, but I got to know him originally through comments on this weblog. A historian of Late Antiquity, we originally encountered each other in 2010 after I had just finished a period where I…

  • The fall of Rome and the wandering of peoples

    The feat of Atilla“…The people of the Huns, but little known from ancient records, dwelling beyond the Maeotic Sea near the ice-bound ocean, exceed every degree of savagery. Since there the cheeks of the children are deeply furrowed with the steel from…

  • Books on Indian history without recency bias

    One of the problems with Indian history is that a lot of the books are strongly biased toward the Muslim and colonial periods. There are numerous reasons for this. People are interested in the Muslim and colonial periods for nationalist and anti-nationalist reasons, if that makes any sense. But some of it is simply source…

  • Our Edo period future?

    The second season of Westworld has some scenes set in Edo period Japan. To spoil things for you there is apparently a scene-by-scene re-creation of a plot arc from the first season of the show set in the American West. Watching this scene, and comparing it to the earlier version, I can’t but help feel…

  • Migration at the roof of West Asia

    The figure to the left is from The genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus. If you are a regular reader of this weblog, or Eurogenes, you can figure out what’s going on, and keep track of the terminology. But in 2018 I think we’re getting to the end of the line in making sense of…

  • India as the hydra against Islam

    In some versions of the legend of the Hydra, every time you cut off one of the heads of the monster two more grow in its place. I have been thinking about why and how India remained predominantly non-Muslim despite most of the subcontinent being under Muslim ruling for 500 years (dating from 1250 to…

Razib Khan