Chapter 2 section 25 of the 14th century North African classic the “Muqaddimah” by Ibn Khaldun describes the effect of a society ruled by the Arabs – Note: to understand what this word means in the context of the book I recommend you read it. Arab is closer to the idea of a tribal society in the book than a specific ethnic group.
“Places that succumb to the Arabs are quickly ruined.
The reason for this is that (the Arabs) are a savage nation, fully accustomed to savagery and the things that cause it. Savagery has become their character and nature. They enjoy it, because it means freedom from authority and no subservience to leadership. Such a natural disposition is the negation and antithesis of civilization. All the customary activities of the Arabs lead to travel and movement. This is the antithesis and negation of stationariness, which produces civilization. For instance, the Arabs need stones to set them up as supports for their cooking pots. So, they take them from buildings which they tear down to get the stones, and use them for that purpose. Wood, too, is needed by them for props for their tents and for use as tent poles for their dwellings. So, they tear down roofs to get the wood for that purpose. The very nature of their existence is the negation of building, which is the basis of civilization. This is the case with them quite generally.
Furthermore, it is their nature to plunder whatever other people possess. Their sustenance lies wherever the shadow of their lances falls. They recognize no limit in taking the possessions of other people. Whenever their eyes fall upon some property, furnishings, or utensils, they take it. When they acquire superiority and royal authority, they have complete power to plunder (as they please). There no longer exists any political (power) to protect property, and civilization is ruined.
Furthermore, since they use force to make craftsmen and professional workers do their work, they do not see any value in it and do not pay them for it.
Now, as we shall mention, labor is the real basis of profit. When labor is not appreciated and is done for nothing, the hope for profit vanishes, and no (productive) work is done. The sedentary population disperses, and civilization decays. “
This is not the complete passage but captures the thesis of this section well. If you want to read the remainder, check out the entire book here. Many of the observations this book makes – over a century before Columbus discovered America – highlight both how liable to change the balance of global power is and how both genius and racism are far from the sole inheritance of Europeans. This passage began a thought process – pushed forward by a friend of mine, Jyotirmai Singh – about how civilization and predation interact.
In this essay, I hope to accomplish something simple. I want to generalize Ibn Khaldun’s idea of the “Arab” since the cultural dynamic from the passage above has been repeated innumerable times and represents a form of persistent social organization that has appeared at every level of social and economic development. I refer to these cultures as “land pirates” and despite the efforts of cultural relativism to emphasize the subjectivity of human morality “land pirates” have done catastrophic damage to human flourishing and we should be willing to call a spade a spade. Efforts from the last 50 years to redeem - some of - these groups are indefensible and must be resisted. Even if objective morality does not exist, something I think matters less than people believe, an effort has been undertaken to absolve them of the responsibility for their actions, something I think is bad.
Land Pirates:
What exactly is a land pirate? The simplest explanation is they are bandits with sufficient power to overwhelm a settled society. Over time they have taken many forms in different lands, but they always share one key aspect, whatever wealth they have is purely parasitic. An intuitive way to measure if a society is ruled by land pirates is to ask yourself the following question: “If the ruling class just disappeared but every other country was unaffected would the peasants be better or worse off?”. Like most characteristics a society can have it is rarely binary. Like the question of whether and to what extent a society is democratic, the question of whether a society is a land pirate isn’t easy to answer. I will articulate some examples in the following section but I want this to be clear. Additionally, often as is the theme of the “Muqaddimah” land pirates have a way of becoming less anarchic and more productive with time. Thus, the same group can be predatory at one point in Human history(Goths under Aleric) and then through the sanctity of time represent a necessary and productive force of the society centuries later.
Almost without fail land pirates emerge from one of the great open basins of the earth. Most commonly the Eurasian steppe but also in the American South West with the Commanche and as you will see in areas as diverse as Iberia. They do not have to be steppe nomads, the Spanish conquistadors represent the land pirate archetype almost perfectly, but they usually are. Land pirated need not even need to be less socially or technologically advanced than the society they are robbing. Instead, my definition requires only three things. For a society to qualify as “Land Pirates” they first, must gain wealth exclusively through plunder and look down upon the productive creation of wealth as something the weak and effeminate do. Second, they must view themselves as a special class of humans who are capable of being free. Whereas the people they rule over are little more than animals whose sole purpose is to satisfy the economic or sexual needs of the ruling class. Often this takes the shape of complicated racial hierarchies defined by blood proximity to the land pirate ethnic group. Third, they cannot be a transient group. Rather than more traditional pirates who will raid and then move on land pirates must establish themselves as the rulers of an agrarian society. Or if ruling is viewed as an impediment to raiding, they must at minimum be capable of overpowering the military of the settled society.
This is the major distinction between land pirates and regular bandits or pirates. Unlike for example the barbary pirates or Viking raids before the Great Heathen Army in 865 the key characteristic of land pirates is that they stay. Usually replacing rule for misrule and order for disorder.
Examples of Land Pirates:
All of this is still fuzzy in the way a theory without examples always is. To tighten my theory up I will list 4 examples of land pirate societies. I purposely avoid listing only various nomadic conquers but it should be kept in mind that they represent the overwhelming majority of land pirate cultures.
Mongols represent the canonical example of a land pirate civilization. Starting in the 13th century and lasting for over half a millennia - until the Qing crushed the last of their descendants in Mongolia and Russian Cossacks smashed the Crimean Khanate – Mongol steppe nomads raided and destroyed civilizations across Eurasia.
The scale of their destruction was so profound it is difficult to even communicate. Their 13th-century conquest of Iran deleted the previous society. Estimating the exact death toll is difficult but without a doubt, they murdered the majority of the population. In their multi-century war with the Chinese, they ended the Song Dynasty – one of the most beautiful and refined creations in human history – and replaced it with their own Dynasty the Yuan which oversaw a catastrophic collapse in Chinese economic output. This effect is so stark that research trying to look at long-run Chinese economic data has a huge hole starting with the Jurchen invasions of the northern Song(another separate group of land pirates) and not ending until the collapse of the Yuan. For example, “China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980-1850” by Broadberry et al. in the Journal of Economic History simply reports their charts of Chinese economic data without that period.
Where they ruled, they showed very little interest in the maintenance of a state beyond its capabilities to provide for the material and sexual needs of the Mongols. The scale of their human destruction was so vast you can still see it in the genetic and ecological record.
As academics are quick to point out they also increased trade and East-West connection by creating a single common zone. This is true, but speaks more to the ability of common people to weather any insanity than it does to the beneficent rule of the Mongols. The account of Friar John of Pian de Carpine from 1245-1247 should highlight that this was by no means a free trade zone as we would currently conceive it. Instead, the Mongol empire represented a consolidation of banditry.
What is key here is the Mongols satisfy my three criteria. 1) They did not integrate themselves into the economic or social fabric of the societies they conquered beyond being pure parasites. 2) They maintained their identity as a separate conquering group. 3) They did not perform hit-and-run attacks on the societies they subjugated instead directly seizing control of the coercive power of the state.
The Belgian Congo – starting in the late 19th century and lasting not even a generation Leopold and his henchmen robbed a staggering degree of wealth from the Congo under the pretenses of civilizing their society. I cannot find the part exactly but in an excellent book titled “King Leopold’s Ghost” by Adam Hochschild, he estimates that Leopold personally stole over a billion dollars inflation-adjusted. In the same book, he estimates over 10 million deaths to be plausible. It is difficult to estimate a relative proportion, but this probably represented the majority of the pre-colonial population. Even after 1907, the Belgian government seized control of the colony of Leopold after an unfolding public relations catastrophe the plunder never stopped just became more orderly. Again, this meets my three criteria.
Iberian New World – Conquistadors spreading out from Iberia toppled preexisting agricultural societies. In places like Mexico and Peru, the civilizations were stable enough to persist somewhat with many indigenous languages surviving today. In some places, however, their level of predation was so extreme they effectively permanently wiped out the indigenous societies. Under Iberian colonial rule, the rate of human destruction was so extreme they had to find replacement chattel and turn to the African slave trade. In the words of a German educator in 19th century Brazil “In this country, the Blacks occupy the main role. They are responsible for all the labor and produce all the wealth in this land. The White Brazilian just doesn’t work.” Source taken from here. The transition from land pirate to productive elements of Latin American society took centuries.
Early Mughals/Timurads – this one is controversial, possibly the most controversial, both because of what appears as an outsider to be a conscious effort on the part of Indian society to reject a framing of the Islamic conquests as a colonial project and also because of fear of current oppression of Muslims by India’s Hindu majority if people are intellectually honest about the origins of the Mughals. But modern Indian Muslims have as little to do with the crimes of their ancestors as a modern White Brazilian does. They form an important and integral part of South Asian culture with many of them descended from low-caste Hindus who sought refuge in the egalitarian religious structure of Islam.
But in their early stages the Mughals and the predecessors the Timurids represented clear land pirate societies. Timur Lane explicitly modeled himself off the steppe nomad empires that preceded him. Similar to the Germanic invasions of Western Europe with time the Mughals transitioned into a more normal state structure. Eventually, roving bands of warriors plundering Hindu villages and raping women were replaced by a military aristocracy which faded into a perfumed and decadent court nobility until eventually being defeated by South Indian Hindus.
Conclusion
History is complicated and we should be hesitant to impose too much of our morality on people who lived in different times and places but we should also be willing to stand by those values we believe in and call out societies that fail to live up to them. I believe in peace, property rights, and the value of meaningful and productive labor and so I cannot view the Mongols as anything but history's greatest villains. Here land pirates serve as a valuable lens through which to understand the dynamics of power, exploitation, and societal decay. It reminds us that the struggle between civilization and predation is an ongoing one. As a member of a decidedly settled post-agrarian society, I can admire the military achievements of many cultures without assigning them moral virtue.
