What made the US successful in inheriting their Colonial Borders and whats preventing Africa?

[Thabo]

I'm agreeing that the OP be off in his comparison because settler states are different. But have issues with some of the counterarguments too...




And 80% of the Middle East is inhabited by Arab brown Muslims, but they still at each other. This isn't an explanation.

The people who inhabited America were EXTREMELY different from each other. The Puritans who inhabited the Northeast and the Quakers who went to Pennsylvania were both fringe religious groups (not the Anglicans which dominated English religion), while the Cavaliers who went to Virginia were the very people who had persecuted those groups. The Scots-Irish who went to Appalachia were from the war borders between the British and the Scots and were seen as different and rejected by everyone.

Basically, the Quakers were social justice warriors, the Puritans were hard-core religious right, the Cavaliers were conservative royalty who didn't give a shyt about religion, and the Scots-Irish were violent rednecks.

The different groups who settled America had at least as many cultural and religious differences as the various cultural/religious groups within any particular African nation.





Except that the Quakers that settled Pennsylvania practiced nonviolence, rejected slavery, and made peace treaties with their local Native American tribes.

Nearly all of the battles with Native Americans were extremely local in origin anyway.





That's probably a piece of it...I'm thinking there's other pieces but not certain what they are.

Sorry to say this but you are an idiot. The middle east is not 80% Arab. Those groups may speak the language but they are not Arabs but are instead arabized poenecians, assyrians etc. No the people were not that different too each other they all spoke the same language and were from the same country.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Sorry to say this but you are an idiot. The middle east is not 80% Arab. Those groups may speak the language but they are not Arabs but are instead arabized poenecians, assyrians etc. No the people were not that different too each other they all spoke the same language and were from the same country.

Goddamm man, you gonna come hard at someone like that, at least come with facts. Yes, the Middle East is 80% Arab by a broad definition of Arab.

If you really want to split hairs and claim that a lot of them are just "arabized", then by the exact same token most American colonists weren't ancestral English but were "anglicized".


Examples:

A bunch of Quakers we were talking about weren't English, they were Welch. The Welch people were descended from Celtic people of central Europe who didn't reach England until around 400 B.C. They might have learned English (just like most of the Middle East learned Arabic), but their mother tongue was Welch. William Penn had Welsh ancestry, and Thomas Jefferson not only had a Welsh background, but both read and spoke Welsh in addition to English and French.

The Scots-Irish were a weird mix. Many originated with Central European Celtic peoples who had ended up in Scotland instead of Wales, then later fled to Ireland and finally America. So they had originally spoken Scottish Gaelic but by the time they settled in America they spoke Irish Gaelic and referred to themselves as Irish. However, a lot of those Scot-Irish weren't even Scottish originally but were Calvinist religious refugees who had fled from Europe - the French Huguenots, the German Palatines, and the Dutch. Davy Crockett is a good example of a Scots-Irish whose actual background was French.

The Puritans and the Cavaliers were both descended from northern European (basically German) tribes who had invaded England in the 6th century - the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. That's where the name "England", "AngleLand", comes from. But they were from completely different strata of society. The Puritans originated in the lower classes of British society and were seen as heretics, while the Cavaliers were from the nobility and were "good" Anglicans. So while they both spoke English, they had different accents, different religion, and different culture. The descendants of these Anglo-Saxon nobles in Virginia ended up being early presidents like Washington and Madison, while John Adams and especially John Quincy show more of their Puritan background.

But then you get into the issue that the Cavaliers, being royalty, didn't have huge numbers. So they imported slaves and indentured servants, mostly White at first but mostly Black in the end. The White indentured servants were mostly British from the lowest classes, but there were also large numbers of Germans and Irish among them.

And then, of course, you had the Germans and the Swedes who migrated in independently, mostly settling in Quaker lands around Pennsylvania and such. So many that there was debate about including German as an official language in early America. And all sorts of mixes of course - like Alexander Hamilton coming in from Nevis with a Scottish daddy and a French mama.



So you got people whose ancestors were from central Europe, northern Europe, and western Europe, whose ethic groups were Anglo-Saxon Brits, Welsh Celtic, Scots-Irish Celtic, French Huguenot, Dutch, German, or Swedish, who spoken English, Welsh, Irish, French, Dutch, German, and Swedish, who followed Anglicanism, Puritanism, Calvinism, or Quaker. And within a couple generations, they had incorporated French and Spanish Catholics too.

Yeah, you could say that they were "White" or that 80% of them "spoke English", but it wouldn't be any more descriptive than pointing out that Middle Easterners are Brown and 80% of them can indeed speak Arabic.



And yeah, I could do the same damn breakdown for the Middle East, easily (hell, I done wifed an Egyptian). If you know anything about its history, if you JUST take the Arabian peninsula, until Mohammed came along pretty much every tribe was at each other's throats, even though they were all the same color, spoke the same language, and most didn't have particularly meaningful differences in religion. Mohammad's influence was that the warring groups became fewer and bigger, but they still were at each others throats in a fight for power on the regular, and it had little to do with linguistic or religious issues. (In fact, the biggest religious split in Islam was caused BY a power struggle, not a difference of opinion on actual religious practice.)



Asking how the White Americans worked things out with each other and made a country work is a meaningful question. It wasn't because they were good people, as is abundantly clear. It wasn't because they had particularly similar backgrounds, that's a cheap answer that falls apart under the microscope. You gotta try harder.

 

[BigMan]

No offense but this is a dumb question.

 

[Camile.Bidan]

This thread was in part inspired by @MansaMusa 's comments in the Biafra thread and my general curiosity.


Back in 1776, the original 13 colonies that would later become the United States had very litte in common with each other. In terms of ethnic makeup, those living in New England were primarily second or third generation British/Welsch immigrants. Elsewhere inland into the northeast were well established communities of Quakers and Puritans of fringe religious beliefs and customs. New York had a lot Dutch Descendants, and the South/Appalachias had people mainly of Scots-Irish heritage and a completely different economic system and culture on top of that.



This isn't to mention Louisiana and Florida that were added soon after but where still culturally French and Spanish respectively. A lot of these ethnic groups had heavy beef with each other from the old world and the concept of US nationalism wouldn't really be embraced by the public until much later.



Despite all that, there was relative cohesion between them and no movements of ethnic nationalist secession movements or civil wars occurred. What circumstances have made it hard for some African countries to do the same?

Have you actually read history?

There were all kinds of conflicts between the colonies that's why the colonies did a re-fresh and federalized later on.


If you want to unite African countries, which are vastly more different to each other than the American Colonies, then you will need a ultra powerful federal entity. An African federal entity that has enough military power to wipe out any African country with ease.

 

[Misreeya]

Goddamm man, you gonna come hard at someone like that, at least come with facts. Yes, the Middle East is 80% Arab by a broad definition of Arab.

If you really want to split hairs and claim that a lot of them are just "arabized", then by the exact same token most American colonists weren't ancestral English but were "anglicized".


Examples:

A bunch of Quakers we were talking about weren't English, they were Welch. The Welch people were descended from Celtic people of central Europe who didn't reach England until around 400 B.C. They might have learned English (just like most of the Middle East learned Arabic), but their mother tongue was Welch. William Penn had Welsh ancestry, and Thomas Jefferson not only had a Welsh background, but both read and spoke Welsh in addition to English and French.

The Scots-Irish were a weird mix. Many originated with Central European Celtic peoples who had ended up in Scotland instead of Wales, then later fled to Ireland and finally America. So they had originally spoken Scottish Gaelic but by the time they settled in America they spoke Irish Gaelic and referred to themselves as Irish. However, a lot of those Scot-Irish weren't even Scottish originally but were Calvinist religious refugees who had fled from Europe - the French Huguenots, the German Palatines, and the Dutch. Davy Crockett is a good example of a Scots-Irish whose actual background was French.

The Puritans and the Cavaliers were both descended from northern European (basically German) tribes who had invaded England in the 6th century - the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. That's where the name "England", "AngleLand", comes from. But they were from completely different strata of society. The Puritans originated in the lower classes of British society and were seen as heretics, while the Cavaliers were from the nobility and were "good" Anglicans. So while they both spoke English, they had different accents, different religion, and different culture. The descendants of these Anglo-Saxon nobles in Virginia ended up being early presidents like Washington and Madison, while John Adams and especially John Quincy show more of their Puritan background.

But then you get into the issue that the Cavaliers, being royalty, didn't have huge numbers. So they imported slaves and indentured servants, mostly White at first but mostly Black in the end. The White indentured servants were mostly British from the lowest classes, but there were also large numbers of Germans and Irish among them.

And then, of course, you had the Germans and the Swedes who migrated in independently, mostly settling in Quaker lands around Pennsylvania and such. So many that there was debate about including German as an official language in early America. And all sorts of mixes of course - like Alexander Hamilton coming in from Nevis with a Scottish daddy and a French mama.



So you got people whose ancestors were from central Europe, northern Europe, and western Europe, whose ethic groups were Anglo-Saxon Brits, Welsh Celtic, Scots-Irish Celtic, French Huguenot, Dutch, German, or Swedish, who spoken English, Welsh, Irish, French, Dutch, German, and Swedish, who followed Anglicanism, Puritanism, Calvinism, or Quaker. And within a couple generations, they had incorporated French and Spanish Catholics too.

Yeah, you could say that they were "White" or that 80% of them "spoke English", but it wouldn't be any more descriptive than pointing out that Middle Easterners are Brown and 80% of them can indeed speak Arabic.



And yeah, I could do the same damn breakdown for the Middle East, easily (hell, I done wifed an Egyptian). If you know anything about its history, if you JUST take the Arabian peninsula, until Mohammed came along pretty much every tribe was at each other's throats, even though they were all the same color, spoke the same language, and most didn't have particularly meaningful differences in religion. Mohammad's influence was that the warring groups became fewer and bigger, but they still were at each others throats in a fight for power on the regular, and it had little to do with linguistic or religious issues. (In fact, the biggest religious split in Islam was caused BY a power struggle, not a difference of opinion on actual religious practice.)



Asking how the White Americans worked things out with each other and made a country work is a meaningful question. It wasn't because they were good people, as is abundantly clear. It wasn't because they had particularly similar backgrounds, that's a cheap answer that falls apart under the microscope. You gotta try harder.

Ok, is Europe one country? or is there many countries in Europe? Then why did not the Europeans formalize one country like America? Again the same question is Asia one country? Also why did not North American expands throughout the Americas example Canada, Mexico, or all the way to Argentina since they occupy the same continent? That will include the Caribbean as well since America has possession of few of the islands within the Caribbean. (example Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico) Why not expand the Pax America, similar to the Roman Empire? Since it again occupy the same space or Continent. Most countries in the world don't consider North and South America as separate continents. People generally believe that the Americas is one continent.

Americas

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Ok, is Europe one country? or is there many countries in Europe? Then why did not the Europeans formalize one country like America? Again the same question is Asia one country? Also why did not North American expands throughout the Americas example Canada, Mexico, or all the way to Argentina since they occupy the same continent? That will include the Caribbean as well since America has possession of few of the islands within the Caribbean. (example Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico) Why not expand the Pax America, similar to the Roman Empire? Since it again occupy the same space or Continent. Most countries in the world don't consider North and South America as separate continents. People generally believe that the Americas is one continent.

Americas

Wait, huh? What are you talking about?

The post is about people in the same country successfully working together in that country. The OP is about inheriting their colonial borders, not forming something akin to one-world government.

If you want to talk about why Europe managed to come together to form the EU, and why Africa hasn't quite managed the same, that's a really, really different question from how the colonies managed to work together despite different tribal backgrounds and why man intra-national ethnic conflicts in Africa haven't gone as well.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Have you actually read history?

There were all kinds of conflicts between the colonies that's why the colonies did a re-fresh and federalized later on.

If you want to unite African countries, which are vastly more different to each other than the American Colonies, then you will need a ultra powerful federal entity. An African federal entity that has enough military power to wipe out any African country with ease.

You're completely misreading him, I believe. He's talking about intranational conflicts within certain African countries, not international conflicts between countries.

He's asking why various ethnic groups within certain African countries haven't been able to put aside their differences in order to get their own nation to work.

 

[Misreeya]

Wait, huh? What are you talking about?

The post is about people in the same country successfully working together in that country. The OP is about inheriting their colonial borders, not forming something akin to one-world government.

If you want to talk about why Europe managed to come together to form the EU, and why Africa hasn't quite managed the same, that's a really, really different question from how the colonies managed to work together despite different tribal backgrounds and why man intra-national ethnic conflicts in Africa haven't gone as well.

Ok, i misread what the OP was saying, i thought he was talking about continent wide, and not current borders which in many cases a foreign creation in some countries, you cannot put something together which is polar opposites from each other, it just does not work. My parents country is a good example of that reality unfortunately.

 

[Camile.Bidan]

You're completely misreading him, I believe. He's talking about intranational conflicts within certain African countries, not international conflicts between countries.

He's asking why various ethnic groups within certain African countries haven't been able to put aside their differences in order to get their own nation to work.

The same logic applies. I can think of two powerful collection of united tribes. The Zulus and Mongols. Both groups were united by a ruthless but smart and cunning leader.

 

[The D-List Vet]

Have you actually read history?

There were all kinds of conflicts between the colonies that's why the colonies did a re-fresh and federalized later on.


If you want to unite African countries, which are vastly more different to each other than the American Colonies, then you will need a ultra powerful federal entity. An African federal entity that has enough military power to wipe out any African country with ease.

I agree with this. But I don't think anyone will get powerful enough to do this

 

[Thabo]

Goddamm man, you gonna come hard at someone like that, at least come with facts. Yes, the Middle East is 80% Arab by a broad definition of Arab.

If you really want to split hairs and claim that a lot of them are just "arabized", then by the exact same token most American colonists weren't ancestral English but were "anglicized".


Examples:

A bunch of Quakers we were talking about weren't English, they were Welch. The Welch people were descended from Celtic people of central Europe who didn't reach England until around 400 B.C. They might have learned English (just like most of the Middle East learned Arabic), but their mother tongue was Welch. William Penn had Welsh ancestry, and Thomas Jefferson not only had a Welsh background, but both read and spoke Welsh in addition to English and French.

The Scots-Irish were a weird mix. Many originated with Central European Celtic peoples who had ended up in Scotland instead of Wales, then later fled to Ireland and finally America. So they had originally spoken Scottish Gaelic but by the time they settled in America they spoke Irish Gaelic and referred to themselves as Irish. However, a lot of those Scot-Irish weren't even Scottish originally but were Calvinist religious refugees who had fled from Europe - the French Huguenots, the German Palatines, and the Dutch. Davy Crockett is a good example of a Scots-Irish whose actual background was French.

The Puritans and the Cavaliers were both descended from northern European (basically German) tribes who had invaded England in the 6th century - the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. That's where the name "England", "AngleLand", comes from. But they were from completely different strata of society. The Puritans originated in the lower classes of British society and were seen as heretics, while the Cavaliers were from the nobility and were "good" Anglicans. So while they both spoke English, they had different accents, different religion, and different culture. The descendants of these Anglo-Saxon nobles in Virginia ended up being early presidents like Washington and Madison, while John Adams and especially John Quincy show more of their Puritan background.

But then you get into the issue that the Cavaliers, being royalty, didn't have huge numbers. So they imported slaves and indentured servants, mostly White at first but mostly Black in the end. The White indentured servants were mostly British from the lowest classes, but there were also large numbers of Germans and Irish among them.

And then, of course, you had the Germans and the Swedes who migrated in independently, mostly settling in Quaker lands around Pennsylvania and such. So many that there was debate about including German as an official language in early America. And all sorts of mixes of course - like Alexander Hamilton coming in from Nevis with a Scottish daddy and a French mama.



So you got people whose ancestors were from central Europe, northern Europe, and western Europe, whose ethic groups were Anglo-Saxon Brits, Welsh Celtic, Scots-Irish Celtic, French Huguenot, Dutch, German, or Swedish, who spoken English, Welsh, Irish, French, Dutch, German, and Swedish, who followed Anglicanism, Puritanism, Calvinism, or Quaker. And within a couple generations, they had incorporated French and Spanish Catholics too.

Yeah, you could say that they were "White" or that 80% of them "spoke English", but it wouldn't be any more descriptive than pointing out that Middle Easterners are Brown and 80% of them can indeed speak Arabic.



And yeah, I could do the same damn breakdown for the Middle East, easily (hell, I done wifed an Egyptian). If you know anything about its history, if you JUST take the Arabian peninsula, until Mohammed came along pretty much every tribe was at each other's throats, even though they were all the same color, spoke the same language, and most didn't have particularly meaningful differences in religion. Mohammad's influence was that the warring groups became fewer and bigger, but they still were at each others throats in a fight for power on the regular, and it had little to do with linguistic or religious issues. (In fact, the biggest religious split in Islam was caused BY a power struggle, not a difference of opinion on actual religious practice.)



Asking how the White Americans worked things out with each other and made a country work is a meaningful question. It wasn't because they were good people, as is abundantly clear. It wasn't because they had particularly similar backgrounds, that's a cheap answer that falls apart under the microscope. You gotta try harder.

You're not getting it are you. America's power structure has always been held by Anglo-Saxons. The English as an identity were formed under the Norman conquest which established a power hierarchy that has never been broken to this day. Same as America the power structure had been established and when mass migration from Europe happened, so everyone who migrated there had no choice but to assimilate if they ever hoped to advance in social and economic status. The masses don't matter its the top that determines stability.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

You're not getting it are you. America's power structure has always been held by Anglo-Saxons. The English as an identity were formed under the Norman conquest which established a power hierarchy that has never been broken to this day. Same as America the power structure had been established and when mass migration from Europe happened, so everyone who migrated there had no choice but to assimilate if they ever hoped to advance in social and economic status. The masses don't matter its the top that determines stability.

That's not the point that's being made. Regardless of who has controlled the power structure, they've made it work out between many different groups. Why didn't all the states dominated by Scots-Irish refuse to fall in line with the Anglo-Saxon leadership? Why did the Welch and Swedes and Germans who drove things in Pennsylvania collaborate with federal power? Why were they able to assimilate Germans in such large numbers without serious revolt? Why did the heavily French-influenced area around Louisiana agree to stay in the fold? Why has power transitioned peacefully even as we've had Welch, Dutch, Irish, German, Scottish, and Kenyan presidents?

And note that even the "Anglo-Saxon" Puritans were a group that WASN'T able to assimilate in that "unbroken" power hierarchy in England, but which actually fled. In England the Cavaliers, Puritans, Quakers, and Scots-Irish were at such significant odds with each other that some of them were literally expelled from the country. In America, they shared power and made it work out.

I mean come on, you don't even consider the Puritans to be a different group from the Cavaliers who oppressed them anymore, much of that "unbroken" power structure is ruling with the very ideas that the Quakers had been fighting for all that time, and the Scots-Irish are not only willing to work in the same government as their hated English rivals, but actually vote FOR them in elections!


In an Iraqi democracy for instance, the question isn't who the dominant leadership would be (most of them would be Shia Arabs), but whether they'd be able to share power with Sunnis Arabs and Kurds without fighting constant separatist movements or just ruling over the minority with an iron hand.

In Kenya, it's not about which Christian Bantus (whether they be Luo or Kikuyu or Kalenjin or whoever) hold power, it's about whether they'll be able to hold power in such a way that the other tribes still feel represented and have some sway over the direction of power such that the country remains stable despite their differences. Do you believe that your rights matter to your nation despite not holding the presidency? That's the question.

 

[EndDomination]

- Anglo whites had to unite to prevent African rebellion and to defeat native tribes

I wouldn't even give the reasons you said.
It took the states until the 1980s to even truly reconcile being a collective State.
They weren't all that successful.
An armed rebellion could have shattered nationhood for most of history.
It actually did when they went to war in the 1860s.

 

[Thabo]

That's not the point that's being made. Regardless of who has controlled the power structure, they've made it work out between many different groups. Why didn't all the states dominated by Scots-Irish refuse to fall in line with the Anglo-Saxon leadership? Why did the Welch and Swedes and Germans who drove things in Pennsylvania collaborate with federal power? Why were they able to assimilate Germans in such large numbers without serious revolt? Why did the heavily French-influenced area around Louisiana agree to stay in the fold? Why has power transitioned peacefully even as we've had Welch, Dutch, Irish, German, Scottish, and Kenyan presidents?

And note that even the "Anglo-Saxon" Puritans were a group that WASN'T able to assimilate in that "unbroken" power hierarchy in England, but which actually fled. In England the Cavaliers, Puritans, Quakers, and Scots-Irish were at such significant odds with each other that some of them were literally expelled from the country. In America, they shared power and made it work out.

I mean come on, you don't even consider the Puritans to be a different group from the Cavaliers who oppressed them anymore, much of that "unbroken" power structure is ruling with the very ideas that the Quakers had been fighting for all that time, and the Scots-Irish are not only willing to work in the same government as their hated English rivals, but actually vote FOR them in elections!


In an Iraqi democracy for instance, the question isn't who the dominant leadership would be (most of them would be Shia Arabs), but whether they'd be able to share power with Sunnis Arabs and Kurds without fighting constant separatist movements or just ruling over the minority with an iron hand.

In Kenya, it's not about which Christian Bantus (whether they be Luo or Kikuyu or Kalenjin or whoever) hold power, it's about whether they'll be able to hold power in such a way that the other tribes still feel represented and have some sway over the direction of power such that the country remains stable despite their differences. Do you believe that your rights matter to your nation despite not holding the presidency? That's the question.

Again you're missing the point. England actively encouraged the migration of puritans to populate the colonies, the puritans would have been assimilated otherwise if there were no colonies.
Presidents are just a figurehead I thought you'd know that by now. Real power lies in the people who hold majority of the wealth a deep state if you will. Obama toed the line and Trump is toeing it as well.
No they didn't share power in America, the power structure was already there and they had no choice but to assimilate to it since America is surrounded by two oceans and foreign powers couldn't meddle there.

Iraq is different because while the Shia are the majority it was the Sunni who controlled the military power and Shia don't seem to be able to forcefully dominate them into submission. Rights are a mirage any way, the only rights that matter are the ones which you have an ability to enforce. It depends n if the other tribes feel they can enforce their rights militatily if it comes to it.

 

[blackzeus]

- Anglo whites had to unite to prevent African rebellion and to defeat native tribes

Nothing breeds unity like a common enemy.