How do the dominant cultural narratives in art and mass media affect our politics?

Actually, you would be surprised. Due to being an island, the UK got clusters of "guests" fairly frequently. And naturally once they became a seafaring nation, the ports brought in even more diversity.

As a general rule for Europe, the level of immigration has little to do with how far away a place was from everything else, and more with ports and trade. That's still true. The farther away you are from the big cities, the "whiter" it gets.

Edited by Swanpride on Sep 19th 2018 at 6:55:57 AM

And South! There's plenty of evidence of Southern African origins for at least some part of Homo erectus' convoluted tree of messed-up relations!

Australopithecus and Paranthropus: getting to all parts of Africa and messing up any easy ideas of family trees!

Larry Niven said it best in the Motie books: it's not distance as the crow flies we need to measure, but ease of travel, the security of routes and the shortness of time taken to get to places. <nods> After all, a fast clipper ship using the trade winds with naval frigate back-up within summoning distance is a far cry from going overland by camel through several tribes' territories, none of whom like you very much and have every reason not to cooperate even with their own supposed central authorities. Yeah: the latter is going to put you off travel or trade.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Sep 19th 2018 at 2:49:48 PM

A clipper ship with naval backup is definitely not medieval. That's Victorian.

Basically all the diversity in medieval England winds up in London, huh?

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 19th 2018 at 2:49:05 PM

A clinker caravel with Venetian or Milanese banker names behind it who can beggar anybody who messes with the ships on that shipping lane vs camels and asses in places where nobody cares because its harder for bankers to find bodies in sand dunes. Happier? Same. Bleeding. Difference.

Oh, and apparently, Bristol, Chester, York, Lincoln and Edinburgh with their histories of colour apparently, don't count. Nope. Only London.

PS — Also, of all places, Beverly and Hull. Yes... Beverly used to be huge as an administrative centre of the Church. Had all kinds of interesting people settle nearby.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Sep 19th 2018 at 3:00:42 PM

Because as everybody know, London is the only thing worth mention in england

Edinburgh is not in England.

And I'm not an export on medieval trade routes—I was going to mention York because of the Viking trade, but can't say I know if Bristol was a trading hub at that point. Chester and Lincoln are less trading and more "old Roman settlements". Which was what was just mentioned: the importance to immigration is the distance via trade.

At points, it actually was. No kidding.

Just as what is now Newcastle-upon-Tyne has occasionally been Scottish. And, then there's poor Berwick. Berwick is mainly Berwick.

Reasons why the past was another place: the map didn't look like you think it looked. And, people on the ground didn't always think in nations we're familiar with.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Sep 19th 2018 at 3:41:33 PM

Are we talking about the points where Scotland was nominally a vassal to England?

Look, the border shuffled about for centuries. Going right back to the Roman settlement of the Firth, forget the Anglo-Saxon invasions of North/South... whatever-you-want-to-call-the-Borders.

Parts of England were vassals to the Scottish throne and visa versa. Parts of what are now England were actually 100% in Scotland... and visa versa. We played swapsies even in the Civil War. :|

Heck, Durham was Scottish for a while. Which riled up York and Canterbury who put pressure on Westminster to put pressure on the Crown.

And, that's not counting the parts of Scotland's mainland which were... Norwegian/Danish holdings for centuries.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Sep 19th 2018 at 3:59:44 PM

Hey, I can't think of many other times where: A) there was an Edinburgh and B) the border went as far north as that. Sure, the Antonine Wall is this far north, but there wasn't really a city at that point...

Though the Kingdom of Northumbria got pretty far up, that's again before there was a Kingdom of England to worry about, so I don't think that would count for "Edinburgh as part of England".

Leith, its docks and its surroundings was definitely claimed by England, once. I can't remember the dates, but I actually saw that in Edinburgh museum.

Last I checked, Leith is currently in Edinburgh (whether most of Edinburgh wants to admit that or not).

Edited by Euodiachloris on Sep 19th 2018 at 4:13:02 PM

I'm talking exactly about cases like that. There always was some diversity but some periods are so isolationist that finding someone from a different race is really, really hard. Likely less than the 1%

That is in race only. LGTB and woman surely can be found even in such a isolated place.

Oh yes.

That is also pretty bad issue.

How true is that idea BTW?

Thanks everyone for talking about this. Especially the Europeans.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Sep 19th 2018 at 10:48:58 AM

If you have an isolated place with no women, it's going to be deserted before long.

"Frankly, I am a little bit more concerned with actually seeing a roman army which looks like an actual roman army would have looked like, with soldiers from all areas which belonged to the roman empire than, for example, having a dark skinned noble randomly popping up with no explanation whatsoever at the court of Charlemagne as his closest advisor."

It depends what era of the Roman army we're talking about. A Roman army of Augustus would have been all Italian at the professional soldiery level, with militia and auxiliaries raised from local populations. Even after Caracalla, when all subjects became citizens and eligible for the professional army, because soldiers had to be replaced and typically were discharged around age 45 if they lived, legions would still look like the local population. The Roman military was unquestionably diverse at a macro level, but at a micro one, based on province or garrison, the logistics of getting a British legion being composed mostly of Syrians, Africans, Hispanians, etc. for more than a single campaign would have been unworkable — that legion would have looked entirely Celtic after a couple battles, and would have looked that way eventually simply to replace losses of any kind.

Realistically, if a longtime British legion suddenly gained a cohort of Africans, they were probably Evocati, veterans who have served until an honorable discharge and rejoined the military at the request of a governor. The real inaccuracy, in this case, is in portraying such men as Cannon Fodder. They would be prime centurion material.

Edited by CrimsonZephyr on Sep 19th 2018 at 12:57:52 PM

Exactly what country and era are you thinking about here? Certainly not Japan, given you were talking about white heritage and Eastern Europe. And what game, movie, book, etc. inspired this train of thought in the first place?

Edited by M84 on Sep 20th 2018 at 1:01:23 AM

I mean overall, I'm wondering how inmigration had worked in the past and how diverse was the world IRL.

Then why only focus on countries and eras that had isolationist policies in place? And can you actually name one that isn't Japan? Because I can't honestly think of a country in Eastern Europe that had actual strongly enforced isolationism in place.

First you say you're only talking about specific countries with isolationist histories then you say you're talking about the overall world?

Edited by M84 on Sep 20th 2018 at 1:30:48 AM

I would like to point out that this is almost exactly the opposite of the truth. The Romans might recruit from allied local peoples during pacification, but once it came time to garrison a province, they almost always used a core of Roman troops reinforced with troops from other parts of the empire. The whole idea of that being that the garrison and the local population, lacking common customs, culture and language, would not be willing, let alone able, to conspire to throw the Romans out.

Especially since these foreign auxiliaries were well aware that if they did aid (or fail to fight to the best of their abilities) any local rebellion, the foreign bastards stationed at their own home villages would be standing ready to decimate all their friends and relatives in retaliation.
And while that means that the auxiliaries weren't exactly settling down, humans being humans you can bet your behind that quite a number of Briton girls were going to have to explain to their families why their newborn baby looked a heck of a lot more like those strapping lads over in the Campina than any of the local village boys.

During the actual campaign, the logistics of reinforcing troops from the other end of the Empire with their own countrymen in time to get them up to strength for the next battle would've been too much, but once the resistance was suitably reduced, it would be piss easy, especially since the non-Italian auxiliaries were regularly rotated around anyway.

Edited by Robrecht on Sep 19th 2018 at 10:52:25 AM

That really hold for the entirety of the empire? Once it changed from focusing on legions and auxiliaries to limitanei and comitatenses...

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 19th 2018 at 6:56:53 PM

It was quite deliberate. You didn't want to train up young lads from a region you'd relatively recently conquered (or which you strongly suspected was due a revolt in the near future) and have them all together at home to use their shiny new skills on your actually-Italian guys.

They got sent elsewhere with a trusted core of Romans and a whole load of recruits from other areas they wouldn't have any ties to, but they all would learn to have ties to each other and Rome.

It was when the deliberate displacement and mixing broke down that the legions got into trouble.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Sep 19th 2018 at 9:24:20 AM

Case in point Arminius who was both a Roman citizen and a knight - who after being sent back to Germania promptly betrayed Rome and cost them two legions.

Oh, I meant "did they keep that up even after the point where the military distinctions changed". Basically the transition to late imperial armies.

Most provinces had a pool of Romanized locals. The Empire didn't need to settle soldiers to make a province "Roman" — that was done through soft power. Ariminius was an exception that shocked Augustus because the local collaborationist class typically didn't just betray them out of the blue, and the Romans always relied on them as an extension of central authority. And this is reflected in what we know about the makeup of the legions: by Trajan, only like 5% were Italians — the exception being the Praetorian Guard, which was overwhelmingly Italian. Now, all Roman legionaries under Trajan were citizens, but they didn't necessarily have to have been imported directly from the metropole to be that. As for whether they deliberately kept foreigners at military postings — that was certainly done, but how often or how consistently were they able to maintain that? Their documented preference for local recruitment sort of underpins the idea that a legion stuck in one place would eventually look like its surrounding population. Legio II Augusta, which was one that lasted forever and was also very well traveled, stayed in Britain for two hundred years. No way they were bringing in Roman Africans by the hundreds when perfectly good Romano-British were right there. You have to look at a place like the outskirts of Germany, or Judea for a place that had a foreign occupational force there all the time, and even then they typically started adopting the character of the locals — Legio XII Fulminata was a Republican legion raised by Caesar that eventually became a predominantly Christian legion when it was still a persecuted faith because they spent so much time in the 1st Century Levant and picked up people like that.

Edited by CrimsonZephyr on Sep 19th 2018 at 9:33:16 AM

None of the part I emphasized is true.

What we know about the presence of Christians in the Legio xii. Fulminata is that in 320CE the Legion had 40 confirmed Christians, out of the 5000+ Legionaries and 5000+ Auxiliaries, who were martyred for it.

They also didn't 'pick up people like that' in the 1st Century Levant... Because they were there to assist in dealing with a revolt. They famously lost a battle against Zealot rebels which resulted in the loss of their Aquila specifically because the fighting had left them severely under-strength and the Romans, as a rule, did not recruit locally to reinforce their legions.

That’s not true. Local recruiting was not unheard of, especially for auxiliaries, and as time went on it became more common for legionaries to be locally recruited as well. It more or less depended on the discretion of the individual commander from what I understand.