Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2013 December 17

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December 17

Milestone as First Lady

Is Graca Machel the only woman in the world to serve First Lady of two nations: South Africa and Mozambique? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.53.228.43 (talk) 00:45, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

According to the article on Graça Machel, she is. There is also a note stating that "other women have been the consort in two separate monarchies. For example, Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122?–1204) was queen consort of France and later of England." ---Sluzzelin talk 01:02, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Queen Victoria was also Empress of India. Queen Anne was queen both of England and Scotland and, subsequently, the kingdom of Great Britain. 86.183.79.28 (talk) 04:33, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

And George III was King of Great Britain and later King of the United Kingdom. George VI was the first monarch of the Statute of Westminster 1931 era, meaning he was separately monarch of 6 countries, and his wife Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) was consort of all 6. Their daughter Queen Elizabeth II, however, is queen of 16 separate monarchies, and her husband Prince Phillip is consort of all 16. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 06:32, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

I guess a case could be made for Olga Havlová, First Lady of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic and later, after the dissolution, First Lady of the Czech Republic, but that's not a particularly interesting case. ---Sluzzelin talk 14:01, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Why has no person or country succeeded at conquering the world?

Lots of people, organizations, or countries have attempted regional or even world domination, yet at the global level none ever succeeded. This is not for want of trying nor want of candidates. List of largest empires#All empires at their greatest extent suggests it is very difficult to control more than 10% of the world's land area, and nobody has managed to control 23% or above. It seems historically easier to control contiguous population centers (for instance in the Middle East or China), so although no ruler seems to have dominated more than half the world's population, several have controlled rather more than one third. Many other successful empires, including geographically dispersed trans-oceanic empires, have contained more than 20% of the world's population at their peak. So why were none of them able to use this position of strength to attain complete global domination?

On the face of it, such large and powerful empires would have had the ability to coordinate military and economic resources that would have overwhelmed their rivals - at least individually, if not collectively. Rivals in alliance would have faced organizational and trust problems with cooperation and coordination; those that stood alone could have been picked off. But in practice great empires seem to reach a zenith, which they may struggle to maintain, before declining again - a cycle familiar from art and in literature.

I know there are many theories for the rise and fall of empires - imperial overstretch, cultural, social, environmental and economic factors and so on. I understand that the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun contained such ideas, including considerations of the scale of military resources that can be marshalled by states of varying size. Theodor Mommsen laid out a "rise and fall" cycle in his History of Rome, and this was generalized to empires across the world by Arnold J. Toynbee in A Study of History. Joseph Tainter posits that decreasing returns to social complexity prevent large, organizationally complicated states from achieving the economic gains one might naively expect them to attain by their increased scale. Peter Turchin and Andrey Korotayev used mathematical modelling to show cycles can arise from a state's population growth and its (fiscal) ability to appropriate a portion of their production.

While I am aware of this theoretical backdrop, I don't claim any great familiarity with the cited works. Nevertheless, I don't think any of the above settles the problem of why the world has never been united by a single empire. For instance, why should whatever limiting factor is under consideration (complexity, fiscal situation, etc) inevitably bite before an empire has achieved world-dominant status? How does this relate to the (empirically fairly strict) limits of half the world's population, or quarter of its land-mass? On the other hand, the Great Divergence shows that one geo-political unit can massively out-accelerate others, in scientific, economic and military terms, and maintain this lead for multi-century timescales. If such a sustained flowering had occurred in a resource-rich region with a politically centralized system (e.g. during a stage in which Europe, China, India or the Middle East were unified, as all four largely were for at least some of their history) then would those "25% land, 50% population" limits been overcome? Looking at the combined extent of the European colonial empires on a map is suggestive, but I suspect some would argue rival, smaller-scale polities were a prerequisite for the Divergence in the first place. Is there any theoretical work on the maximal extent of empires that investigates these limits? Aside from the historical approaches I noted above, perhaps in the field of geostrategy, or more quantitatively world-systems theory? ManyQuestionsFewAnswers (talk) 01:47, 17 December 2013 (UTC) (Edit: Or related fields such as international relations studies, cliodynamics, military science...)

You could make a long list of people who wanted to conquer the world and tried but the world made fools of them all when they found out how big the world is and how little they were. Like when they got to Switzerland, or Russia. 71.246.153.121 (talk) 01:55, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Heed the words of Will Cuppy, who said this about would-be conqueror Erik the Red: "He had learned that there is no use murdering people; there are always so many left, and if you tried to murder them all you would never get anything else done." No matter how many enemy you kill, you'll never get them all. That's a significant roadblock to world domination. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:08, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Indeed, from a military point of view we may heed the words of General Montgomery: Rule 1, on page 1 of the book of war, is: "Do not march on Moscow". Various people have tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good. That is the first rule. I do not know whether your Lordships will know Rule 2 of war. It is: "Do not go fighting with your land armies in China". It is a vast country, with no clearly defined objectives. Hansard, Col. 227 I do wonder whether military constraints, perhaps in combination with the accompanying logistical and economic issues, are actually the most problematic. It certainly seems consistent with landmass being a tighter constraint than population and is why I specifically asked if anybody could contribute any geostrategic insight. The imperial overstretch explanation of Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) goes into more detail on the financial problem of funding an imperial military. ManyQuestionsFewAnswers (talk) 02:25, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Doesn't your own quote from Montgomery answer the question perfectly? I'm not quite sure if you mean to ask something else, or what it all means. 71.246.157.200 (talk) 04:56, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Montgomery's comments are best described as stylized facts about one of the problems of world conquest - the sheer extent of the Eurasian landmass. This is a kind of consideration that I know is examined in more theoretical detail in the field of geostrategy. It would be helpful to know how seriously geostrategic thinkers rate the difficulty of dominating Eurasia, and how they compare it to other geographical impediments such as the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Further, "don't march on Moscow/fight in Asia" can't serve as a complete answer because it actually indicates a strategic strength of any civilization that does dominate large tracts of Eurasia. Several civilizations (Mongols, Russians, Soviets, various Turkic and Chinese peoples) have held such a near-impregnable space. Why were they not in a prime position to dominate the (known) world? Does this relate to the historical difficulty of controlling more than a quarter of the world's landmass? I'd be surprised if there have been no serious academic studies of these issues, in geostrategy, world systems theory or cliodynamics (which has certainly been used to examine the geographic spread of civilizations). ManyQuestionsFewAnswers (talk) 16:53, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

The American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrate very well the problems with managing an empire. The US, by far the world richest and most powerful country, could not keep order in a poverty-stricken Iraq years after Iraq's army had been defeated. It couldn't defeat North Vietnam, a small and largely agricultural country with outdated weapons and no way to even reach America. The biggest problem with conquering the world isn't militarily defeating the strongest opponent; it's administering conquered territories and ensuring the loyalty of their inhabitants. ---Bowlhover (talk) 08:08, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

The US could have won in Vietnam if it was less moral. Dropping multiple nuclear weapons would have gotten the job done, for example. As far as one nation conquering all, the Roman model seems to come closest to having worked, where they offer to incorporate conquered territories and give those nations sufficient rights so they don't rebel, combined with absolutely vicious reprisals on those which do rebel. The Roman empire seemed to lack some technology needed to conquer the entire world, though, like ships capable of crossing oceans safely.

Back to the case of the US, it probably could have conquered the whole world, back when it was the only one with nuclear weapons, if it was willing to use them on anyone who resisted. One problem is that the Soviet Union was able to use spies to steal the secret in short order, but, if that could have been prevented, it might have been possible. Then, to maintain control, enough people would need to be stationed in each nation to ensure that they couldn't develop any WMD capable of hitting the US. Of course, the US would be absolutely hated as a result of all this, as would any world conquerer.

But, here we are where everyone and their brother has a nuke, making world conquest impossible, unless some new technology is developed to render those obsolete. StuRat (talk) 08:52, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

You seem to think that making Vietnam an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland amounts to "conquering" it. If that's the case, I claim to have conquered the Moon. Also, remember that China and the Soviet Union both had nuclear weapons during the Vietnam War, so it's not clear that the US would win even if it did use nuclear weapons. --Bowlhover (talk) 18:35, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

They seemed about as resistant to surrender as the Japanese in WW2, and a couple nukes convinced them to surrender. I doubt if China or the Soviet Union would risk nuclear war over a nation as unimportant in geopolitical terms as Vietnam (despite the domino theory). Of course, it's lack of importance is also part of why the US gave up on it. StuRat (talk) 18:47, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

ManyQuestionsFewAnswers -- The technological infrastructure and geographical knowledge of all the earth's major regions which would be necessary to support a world empire didn't remotely come into existence until the 17th century, and since the 17th century there hasn't been one nation-state which is overwhelmingly more powerful than all others. The closest was mid-19th-century Britain, but the mid-19th-century British had mixed and conflicting attitudes about large standing armies and accelerating colonial acquisitions. They were enthusiastic about using the Royal Navy to safeguard Britain's commercial prosperity (and also food supply, since Britain was becoming less agriculturally self-sufficient at that time), but launching armies into Continental Europe for any purpose other than brief selective interventions to maintain the "balance of power" was exactly what most Britons didn't want to do... AnonMoos (talk) 08:49, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Wanting to rule the world is a form of mental illness. Any attempt is a major cause of unnecessary human suffering. Dreaming of ruling the world is a good example of "trying to get cow milk from a pigeon" like many of the questions on this page. 71.127.132.207 (talk) 13:23, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

AnonMoos: that's an interesting answer. Even without Early Modern technology and geography, there were some pretty sizeable empires, like those of the Eurasian steppes, or the Roman, Byzantine and Islamic civilizations that spanned Europe, Africa and Asia. Clearly without knowledge of America or Australasia no expansion there was possible, but was there a common factor that stalled their growth in contiguous regions? A related question is just why no one nation-state has been overwhelmingly more powerful than others (I know the headline for my question is world conquest, but it's this notion of an undisputedly "unipolar world" that prompted my question) after the 17th century. Why didn't one country, particularly one in a strong position like the UK was, simply race away from its competitors in a similar manner to how Europe outpaced the world during the Great Divergence? Britain's rivals may have struggled to match her, and some effectively "dropped out" (e.g. Spain), but several like France, Prussia/Germany and later the USA were at least able to keep up with the pace of British development. ManyQuestionsFewAnswers (talk) 03:11, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Who says the only way to "conquer the world" is through military force? What about a cultural conquest? Or is that too close to conspiracy theory to be examined. Blueboar (talk) 17:17, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

One should be free to examine it, the only drawback is it may become a waste of time as there is no end to the idle speculations. If you are not Roman Catholic and you visit Mexico on vacation, will you automatically convert to Catholicism by being surrounded and immersed in a Catholic country? Not necessarily. Too many humans seem to understand the world in terms of freedom of conscience to allow for that kind of phenomenon, because there is such a thing as freedom of conscience. 71.246.153.244 (talk) 17:28, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

When I originally drafted the question I actually included "movement" or "ideology" as well as people and countries. I had several concrete examples in mind: the Roman Catholic church, Hinduism (which, before Christianity and Islam took hold, had once expanded very seriously into SE Asia), communism, liberal democracy (will it attain global dominance, as suggested by The End of History and the Last Man?) and a more particular interest in the early Islamic empires. But I decided to reduce the scope of the question, to prevent discussion creep (clearly unsuccessfully!) and maintain more focus on the political, economic, military and strategic elements. ManyQuestionsFewAnswers (talk) 03:11, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

When you expand your empire you get more subjects but the number of loyal soldiers willing to fight for you doesn't increase at the same rate. You often have to use an increasing number of loyal soldiers from your "home people" just to control your new subjects. A large empire may have more resources to pay soldiers, but if they don't feel it's "their" empire and they have no natural loyalty to it then getting motivated hard-fighting soldiers without insurrection is difficult. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:54, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Let's extend the thought experiment on the United States and Vietnam and assume that the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Hanoi and the North Vietnamese government, what was left of it, then surrendered. The United States would still have faced the Vietcong hiding in the hills and across the border in Laos and Cambodia. The United States did try to bomb the Vietcong during the war, to little avail. Japan in World War II was kind of a special case because the people were abjectly loyal to the emperor, and the emperor and Japanese military elites realized that the best interests of their country lay in surrendering and in effect sold the Japanese public on surrender. Ultimately the only way to win a war, short of creating a radioactive wasteland, is to win over the populace. But the peoples of the world are too many and too diverse for a single nation ever to win the loyalty or even the acquiescence of all of them. Marco polo (talk) 19:49, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

I think Prime Hunter's point that "When you expand your empire you get more subjects but the number of loyal soldiers willing to fight for you doesn't increase at the same rate" is extremely important. The idea of some kind of proportional relationship between the size of an empire, the number of troops at its disposal, and hence its power, can be traced back to at least Ibn Khaldun and the Muqaddimah. A lot of the academic work on Rome suggested the unmaintainable cost of its frontiers as a reason for imperial collapse. But drawing up a very simple mathematical model, if the "strength of an empire" is proportional to its size while the "cost of empire" is proportional to the length of its boundary, then larger empires will tend to expand indefinitely and overwhelm smaller ones. This is because larger polities will tend to have a smaller ratio of perimeter to area. One problem with this model is that it doesn't penalize logistical overstretch - which perhaps should be weighted by available technology and distance from the imperial center. But a different refinement would be to note that recently acquired territory may not contribute to imperial strength. Clearly it takes time to assimilate a territory (and this may raise special problems if the territory is overseas, e.g. French "civilizing" attempts particularly in Algeria, which was administratively an integral part of the French state) and the examples of US weakness cited above might suggest that the imperial periphery comes at a cost to the core. I don't think this cost just applies for military "pacificiation" reasons. I recall reading, perhaps in a book by A. J. P. Taylor, that the Japanese expansion into Manchuria was in economic terms a strategic failure on the timescale of WWII. While Manchuria underwent rapid industrial growth, making useful contributions in steel production, the massive investment it required meant it represented a net drain on Japan. Payback time apparently lay far in the future, by which time the war would long be over. Since there is a tendency for more technologically and economically advanced states to expand at the expense of backwards ones, I doubt this example is unique. Can anybody verify the Manchukuo anecdote? Or cite any mathematical modelling of imperial expansion similar to the ones I outlined? I am sure I have seen that basic idea before. ManyQuestionsFewAnswers (talk) 03:11, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

No-one's yet mentioned The Geographical Pivot of History, in which Halford Mackinder argued in 1904 that control of Russia (and eastern Europe and central Asia) was the key to world power. He summarised the theory as "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island controls the world." The reason it hasn't happened is probably that some of the "outlying" economies, notably the US, developed faster and had more equable climates (requiring less effort in climate control and mitigation), so that they could at least match the power of the "heartland". Ghmyrtle (talk) 20:01, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Right, this is great stuff thanks. Relates to my point about MacArthur's Moscow/China comments above - an idea I was familiar with but couldn't source. I have studied global economic history before (see e.g. Power and Plenty by Findlay and O'Rourke, The Growth of the International Economy by Kenwood and Lougheed) and seem to recall the development of the "New World" (Australasia and the Americas) required vast inputs of capital which the European "core" could provide. Before the development of the New World, any empire that dominated Eurasia - particularly from Europe to southeast Asia - would have been in such an overwhelmingly powerful position that it could arguably be described as world-dominant. But several empires had very strong geostrategic positions according to this analysis, without ever attaining that higher level of power. Have theorists suggested any explanation of that before the development of the New World? ManyQuestionsFewAnswers (talk) 03:11, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Anyone with enough time, energy or interest could compile a list of big things who have "taken the world by storm". It would be a very long list, and would contain mainly names that were forgotten more quickly than they entered the world's consciousness. If they ever did. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:12, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

• The false premise here is that one conquers the world. The two exemplar empires here are Rome and Britain. Both offered a more liberal and rational rule to their "subjects" than did the original rulers of the states they subsumed. Both empires failed when they instituted socialist policies and controls that fatally weakened them economically. We'll have a stable one-world state when that state offers people across the globe better freedom and security than any alternatives. μηδείς (talk) 23:26, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

That's quite some definition of socialism you're going with there, Medeis. Roman empire. Itsmejudith (talk) 00:04, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

I didn't define socialism, but public games, the occasional direct payments of cash bribes, and the permanent grain dole to the lower classes were long established practices. The move toward the command economy in Rome began in the Republic with the government buying of wheat, which it sold with a public subsidy. By the time of Julius Caesar, one third of Romans were receiving free wheat. By the time of Diocletian there were full price and wage controls. Whatever you call it, statism, fascism, socialism, it all has the same effect. μηδείς (talk) 01:38, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

You could call it "Nixonism", as Tricky Dicky imposed wage and price controls for a while, resulting in shortages of certain commodities. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:40, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

If anyone is interested in non-crackpot scholarship on the decline of the Roman and British empires, see decline of the Roman Empire and British_Empire#Decolonisation_and_decline --Bowlhover (talk) 03:11, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Because nobody with the desire to do so has been able to accumulate the knowledge, power, and loyalty required. This question is simply an invitation for debate. There is no answer. --Onorem (talk) 23:29, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

I accept that the "headline" question was intended as an attention-grabber! But the content of the question is valid, and the rise and fall of empires is a legitimate subject of academic study. The question I was asking for refdesk help (in the traditional sense of a reference desk as a place to be directed to an existing corpus of academic study rather than "a place for people to speculate") was Is there any theoretical work on the maximal extent of empires that investigates these limits? I think that question can be answered. ManyQuestionsFewAnswers (talk) 03:11, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Jehovah's Witnesses have published information about the removal of kings (http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1200002149?q=%22removing+kings%22&p=par) and about the largest empire in history (http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2012443?q=%22largest+empire%22&p=par) and about world government (http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2012807?q=%22world+government%22&p=par). Also, they have published information about conquering the world (http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2011203?q=%22conquer+the+world%22&p=par), not in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense.

—Wavelength (talk) 03:44, 18 December 2013 (UTC) and 17:04, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

While the Roman Empire might have conquered less than 5% of the Earth's surface (and 21% of its population), I do wonder how much of the world the Romans thought they had conquered. They were undoubtedly aware of the northern and western extents of Europe and were probably aware of a large and populated area for a long way to the east (ie. India & China), but how much more of Africa did they think existed to the south of the Sahara? I think it is accepted they had no knowledge of the Americas, instead assuming that if you dared sail far enough west of Spain you would probably end up in China. Astronaut (talk) 18:27, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

It's now easy enough to read what they thought about such questions in their own words, particularly for those who can translate Latin! Those who will not read them may speculate, why take part when it starts arguments? 71.246.153.241 (talk) 18:47, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

The impetus to rule the world comes from a single megalomaniacal leader; a whole national population may go along with it (especially if they've been indoctrinated since youth), but isn't that ambitious/crazy on its own. It simply isn't possible to conquer the world in one lifetime. In the past, the technology just wasn't there, even if you lucked out and ruled a powerful nation at an early age. In the modern era, that much power isn't inherited, so simply amassing enough to try it takes you into middle age. Then, you only have a few decades to do it. Plus, with modern communication, once your intentions become clear, others will band together to oppose you. Now if you had sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads, that's a different story. Clarityfiend (talk) 18:42, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

One might add Alexander the Great to the list. Aristotle gave him a map, and he tried to take everything on that map. This may have been the first real attempt to conquer the world. DanielDemaret (talk) 10:25, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

He was one of the most successful, but many others have tried to conquer as much as they could and probably hoped to conquer the World without having any idea how large it was. And there are probably isolated regions like islands where somebody actually thought they had conquered the World. By the way, the Achaemenid Empire was larger and older than Alexander's. He caused its collapse but didn't conquer all its former possessions, and he didn't even try to conquer the North or West near his home. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:44, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

When was Last Call Return (*69) introduced?

Someone asked this question on the talk page of Last Call Return several years ago, and never got an answer. I'm looking for the same answer, but it seems like posting the question there again would be useless. Anyway, Last Call Return is a code you can type into phones to see who called last. In the US, it's *69. I'm seeing a number of references to this in songs and movies from 1994 onward, but nothing before then. I was alive back in the early 90s, but too young to be making many phone calls, so I don't remember the introduction of this feature. Does anyone else? 67.142.167.23 (talk) 06:43, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

According to this article from 1995, the functionality was introduced in the US between 1989 (in Illinois) and about 1993 (nationwide). Hack (talk) 09:01, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Seems a lot older than that, to me. Maybe some companies offered it before, but it became standard then. StuRat (talk) 10:26, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

A number of features, perhaps most famously Caller ID, started to pop up in the early 1990s. It was, as I recall, kind of a regional thing until all the companies eventually had it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:50, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

• The feature became available about 1984 in my area. Caller ID was available in my exchange (in the US, the first three numbers of your 7 digit phone number are the exchange, the last four are the extension) a few years before that. Features like this were developed for and often test marketed by the state Bell companies. In order to have the feature, your phone number had to be routed through a local switch which had been upgraded to have the technology. μηδείς (talk) 19:26, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

• The equivalent service was introduced in the UK (nationally) in November 1994, for what it's worth. Interestingly, it seems that the service was turned on at the same time as "pre-answering" Caller ID display, which makes some sense. Andrew Gray (talk) 22:30, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Many of these services were linked to having a touch tone phone, which really didn't become widespread until the late 80s. More info at Push-button telephone. 184.147.136.249 (talk) 13:38, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

A rotary phone could get call return dialing 1169. μηδείς (talk) 16:57, 20 December 2013 (UTC)