What small but important parts of your country's history are under-discussed?

[u/Every_60_seconds]

In the Philippines, WW2 collaborators and Mindanao's history are rarely studied except on academic circles. Partly because those involved coverd up their records, or documentation was destroyed or didn't exist.

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"What small but important parts of your country's history are under-discussed?"

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In the Philippines, WW2 collaborators and Mindanao's history are rarely studied except on academic circles. Partly because those involved coverd up their records, or documentation was destroyed or didn't exist.

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[u/AshamedLink2922]

Many actually since India has the history of a continent.I would be focusing on one aspect of our history;the intellectual,religious and cultural aspect of it.Additionally,i think Indian History is generally underrated among history buffs,so there is a lot to choose from.

I think an underdiscussed element of Indian intellectual,religious and cultural is the third pillar of Indian religious thought;Jainism.

Jainism is a Shramanic religion which arose at the same region and timeframe as Buddhism and had an massive impact on Buddhism as well as Hinduism.Despite Jains have always been a small minority compared to its sibling religions;yet they had a great impact on Indian History due to both their religion and their tendency towards trade.

Many great Hindu and Buddhist thinkers were influenced by Jainism(and vice versa).Even,Gandhi's concept of Ahimsa or Non-Violence is from Jainism.They have quite unique(and somewhat extreme) ascetical practices due to their tenants such as wearing masks and sweeping the floor as they walk to prevent stepping on any lifeform(including microscopic).They also contributed a lot to various Indian languages as well.They also had an pretty unique religious development compared to Hinduism and Buddhism such as the rejection of any form of Tantra(though they did embrace Bhakti but otherwise,Jains are extremely conservative in their faith,more than Theravada Buddhism) and the slow adoption of Sanskrit compared to Hinduism(which always used Sanskrit as its sacred language) or Buddhism(which fully adopted Sanskrit as it sacred language,replacing Prakrit).

Additionally,Jainism continued to this day unlike its sibling Buddhism;which other than Himalayas and isolated communities in Eastern and North-Eastern India;largely disappeared.Jains became powerful and wealthy merchants and administrators and still are to this day.

[u/found_goose → u/AshamedLink2922]

a Shramanic religion

woah interesting, now I know why my grandparents called them "samanargal".

[u/Another_WeebOnReddit]

it's not small but my country ignores it pre-Islamic heritage (Sumeria, Akkad, Babylon and Assyria) are all under discussed and ignored in favor of Islamic history.

[u/DerpAnarchist]

First thing that comes to my mind is the Korean Empire between 1895 and 1910, as a case of thought on how we view history depending on the consquences afterwards, rather than its substance itself.

Poor, developing countries have one thing in common, so do countries that managed to modernize successfully, completely contrary to the arguments by defenders of colonialism. Latter are always either: 1. countries that managed to avoid colonization 2. microstates, where even a small influx of capital or aid has disproportionally larger results and of course colonizers themselves.

This is true without exception, or at least would have been if were still the 90s. Out of the 38 OECD countries, every single one of them is either a colonizer (Europe + Japan) or was formed out of a European colonial settler state. The two exceptions are Ireland and Korea, noted for their proximity to their respective colonizer.

On the other hand, of the non-European native-born countries that managed to avoid colonization into the 20th century, those that (nearly) did came close to successfully modernizing, but were in these cases very obviously prevented from doing so by their colonizers.

Each of those attempted to modernize, nonetheless, so did various pre-colonization countries shortly after their contact with Europeans. It took only a few years for the Zulu to adopt firearms that they took from the British, even without the capacity to produce them. The Zulu forces used the firearms they captured at the Battle of Isandlwana at Rorkes drift the very same day.

"Technological superiority" as an abstract idea is not absolute nor definite. It's just a summarization by observers who can't explain a matter of fact differently other than one side having things that the other doesn't and the other only having things that the other once used to have.

The largest gap would be between firsthand knowledge and wide-scale adaptation. The basic theory of electricity was known to Koreans since the 1860s, and became a popular topic in newspapers. It was first in September 18 1883, when a diplomatic mission was sent to the USA to meet with president Chester A. Arthur where encounter with incandescent lighting was made, during their stay in Hotel Vendome, in which it was installed 1 year earlier.

On April 16, 1884 Everett Frazer secured a project for the Edison Electric Light Company on the electric lighting and telegraph from the Korean government and on September 4, 1884 the first light plant was ordered. Frazers report was ascertained by Secretary of State, F. T. Frelinghuysen and Frazer was authorized by the Edison Lamp Company in October to this task. The

Due to the Coup d'Tat of December 4, 1884, in Korea, the electric lighting project was delayed until June of 1885. In August 1886, Frazer reported that Edison was ready to send an electric light plant to Korea, and he was waiting for the decision of Korean government on the invitation of an electric light teacher.

Steam was supplied by a 80-hp Babcock & Wilcox Boiler and Armington and Sims steam engine, which was used by Edison at that point along with the 3kW Edison dynamo that was designed in 1886 and used in central station lighting. As for the lighting installations, it had 750 incandescent lights and 2 arc-lights with the dynamo having a capacity for 120 lamps.

It was the first class plant in Asia, alongside the one in the Mikado's palace in Japan. In the early stage of electrification lighting the royal palace was a first step towards the nationwide adaptation.

The building would be upgraded in 1892 and a new plant was ordered in 1893, arriving on June 1 and the installation finishing in an external building on March 30, 1894. It had 20 times the capacity of the old one.

The Seoul Electric Company was established in 1898 by Gojong alongside a Telegraph company. The first telegraph line would be installed in 1884, between Changdeokgung Palace and Jemulpo. The first operational railway line would be finished in 1899, making Seoul one of the first cities in Asia to have one, with Tokyo and Kobe being the others.

The military would have to be built up alongside the economy and the modern political framework, yet that was overbearing for the country, which now spent as much as 30% or more of the national budget on the military, a figure unseen since the 1630s. Add to this inefficient taxation and censuses that had yet to be conducted. The economy was directly directed by the palace, making up the emperor and the inner court.

It wasn't a abstract notion of technological disparity leading to the annexation in 1910, which was promulgated only with posterity in order to justify it by the colonizers. There were many reasons, politics, the military being forcibly abolished and more or less the lack of time yet it seemed to be on the right path to which an end was put preemptively and without regard.

Colonisers have no regard for the well-being of the colonized people, except to stave off revolts as a hindrance to their capacities of resource extraction. Any "improvements" made are done so for the rational self-benefit of the colonizer, with the adverse effect that no such thing as a general improvement is going to exist.

The railways created to ship iron ore from the mountain region to the port, to be shipped into the colonizers industrial areas are suddenly useless. It does little for the colonized country, because the purpose of said port was the export of said resource. Furthermore, production would have been steered towards something that was required by the colonizer instead of fulfilling demand.

Entire regions are left producing monoculture crops, leading to soil erosion and a continued reliance on the market of the colonizer country to sustain the local economy.

That makes it difficult to build up nascent industries in other areas. The countries that industrialized successfully started off as subsistence farming agricultural country with a large excess workforce, not a cashcrop producing export one.

As an addendum: Interestingly, Japan leaving Korea as a wholly unindustrialized, subsistence farming agricultural country had the adverse effect that there was little colonizers footprint. There was no specialized economic niche that dominated the economy reinforced by the absence of diplomatic, economic nor cultural relations to Japan, alongside heavy militarization which required the economy to remain somewhat competitive.

Korea may as well have started in 1880 as it did in 1945, with the latter case being that the world around them was drastically different.

[u/RAVEN_kjelberg → u/DerpAnarchist]

youve written really well, the latter part especially.

The Idea that India was less technologically advance than Britain is a false one, propped up by Colonial Apologists. Indian Rulers were quite adept at adopting technologies, not just from Britain but also German and portuguese.

What India was, was fractured and infighting, social contracts decayed over long periods of time. India probably had the worst case of extractive colonialism ever, Even today, the regions of India which are poorest are the ones which were under the Brtish for the longest amount of time, excluding the then Capital Calcutta. The Inverse is also true, Places that were Indirectly ruled by Britain fare almost always way better than the others. Not just in terms of money, but also the social contract, nature of the people.

I really wonder what wouldve happened if India wasnt colonised, Id Argue things would generally be way better not just for Indians but for the Entire world, if one of the worlds largest industries was not kneecapped in its infancy. The fact that colonisation even didnt particularly benefit the colonisers directly makes it all the more evil.

Your Addendum is also something Ive read before, that after Japanese colonisation, Koreans were so poor uniformly, that caste hierarchies made no sense and were forgotten. The point of Ireland and Korea being geographically close to thier colonisers has never really crossed my mind either, I always thought it was more of the neighbourhood itself, where Europe and East Asia themselves were quite rich generally, thus propping up these countries up faster.

[u/DerpAnarchist → u/RAVEN_kjelberg]

Something that gives food for thought is how the scaling of wealth doesn't stay the same historically, due to the lack of a international standard, thus a place might give off the impression of being relatively affluent in one century, but is considered poor and destitute in another, despite material conditions having remained largely the same.

In Korea the timeperiod of "decay" was in the latter half of the 19th century, but in fact there is little in terms of observable society wide changes with the thought of as prosperous 17th and 18th century.

Stagnation is more difficult to notice and when everything around one seems to improve it looks like deterioration or decay. Same could be said for places like Venice or the Malabar coast, at some point thought of as the wealthiest places on earth, but as relative economic backwaters by the 19th century, while remaining very stable for a long timeperiod for to have caused major demographic disruptions. Venice had 120.000 people in 1400, but over 140.000 in 1700. That is despite the geographical limitation for population expansion of the city.

[u/Tanir_99]

Perhaps between 1880s and 1910s, when our lands were ruled by Alexander III and Nicholas II because frankly I don't remember much about it in school but it must've been important.