A Carthaginian world: Better, or worse?
- Thread starter Kinna
- Start date
That would depend on a lot. I'd imagine Cathage would allow native cultures to develop individually more than Rome with a carthaginian dominated coast. So for example, Spain and North Africa would liguistically be much more interesting. Also, the Celts would be much more dominant and probably not as "advanced" as historically during the German migration. There'd also be no Christianity (and by extension Islam) which could be either a better or worse thing depending. Greek would be the languae of choice in the Eastern Med. Historically, these Greek states would have fascinating relationships with each other and other powers. It could be better, could be worse.
Kinna
Banned
Yes, I suppose it was an oversimplified question. Would Carthage likely achieve the same level of conquests as Rome?
I think we'd see much more enfecis (sp?) on individual cities and coastal trade. So no. Islands would be important (they harbour pirates) but a few miles inland would (I think) significantly lower their influence. That's why I think liguistically and culturally it should be much more interesting.
Typo
Banned
Carthage is a trading empire.
Rome are the conquer/subjugating ones.
I personally can't see Carthage emerging dominant even if it destroys Rome, one of the Hellenistic states probably would have done it. Possibly the Seleucids.
I can't see Carthage forming the same type of Empire as Rome either.
Rome are the conquer/subjugating ones.
I personally can't see Carthage emerging dominant even if it destroys Rome, one of the Hellenistic states probably would have done it. Possibly the Seleucids.
I can't see Carthage forming the same type of Empire as Rome either.
ninebucks
Banned
I agree that Carthage wouldn't be as conquest-minded as Rome, in TTL, a philosophy of universal governance will probably never arise in the West, (in OTL, one could argue that every major conflict between the Fall of Rome and the Peace of Westphalia were competitions for the sole legitimate right of universal governance, so this is a big change).
Carthaginian Imperium will probably be quite hands-off, although not in Iberia. Iberia had been considered part of Carthage for as long as there was a Carthage to be part of. Iberia to Carthage could be compared to Italy for Rome: core territory. Although a diverse, non-interfered Iberia would be interesting, under Carthaginian rule, I think if anything it would be more homogenised.
The other thing about the Carthaginian Empire, is that it will be much more navally based. Carthaginian maps will plot everything from the Baltic Sea to the Gulf of Guinea, yet the area immediately north of the Alps will simply be marked "Here Be Dragons".
Linguistically, Europe won't be as different as one might imagine. The claim that all European languages stemmed from Latin is misleading, rather, all European languages share a common, much older ancestor. The Gauls were speaking a Romance language before the Romans arrived, and I dare say they'll continue speaking a Romance language even if they don't arrive. The real difference will be in technical terms, surrounding science and academia, business and politics, philosophy and religion. The overall sound of languages will be quite similar, but two millenia of alternate loan words will make them quite incomprehensible to us.
Carthaginian Imperium will probably be quite hands-off, although not in Iberia. Iberia had been considered part of Carthage for as long as there was a Carthage to be part of. Iberia to Carthage could be compared to Italy for Rome: core territory. Although a diverse, non-interfered Iberia would be interesting, under Carthaginian rule, I think if anything it would be more homogenised.
The other thing about the Carthaginian Empire, is that it will be much more navally based. Carthaginian maps will plot everything from the Baltic Sea to the Gulf of Guinea, yet the area immediately north of the Alps will simply be marked "Here Be Dragons".
Linguistically, Europe won't be as different as one might imagine. The claim that all European languages stemmed from Latin is misleading, rather, all European languages share a common, much older ancestor. The Gauls were speaking a Romance language before the Romans arrived, and I dare say they'll continue speaking a Romance language even if they don't arrive. The real difference will be in technical terms, surrounding science and academia, business and politics, philosophy and religion. The overall sound of languages will be quite similar, but two millenia of alternate loan words will make them quite incomprehensible to us.
I thought the Gauls spoke a Celtic language? Italy didn't speak Romance languages until after Roman conquest, they spoke a broader group known as italic languages (including Latins).
Not convinced such easy cliches as the one that Carthage was a trading empire meanwhile Rome was a military empire really wash. Nominally all the European empires apart from in the Americas were about trade and look what happened there. Iberia wasn't integral to Carthage at the dawn of that city, it became so as the city judged those resources vital to its continued prosperity.
A strong naval tradition shall allow Carthaginian traders to easilly penetrate into Greece, Syria and Egypt. Traders can just as easilly be soldiers whether native or mercanary. If the powers to the east of Italy continue on fighting bloody, expensive and inconclusive wars between themselves its quite possible they find themselves paying tribute to Carthage or find themselves subjugated. Its bad for trade if your client base insist only in killing each other and threatening the sea lanes.
There might not be a united 'Carthaginian Gaul' but such would become more likely once the Carthaginians consolidate their hold on Iberia. There would likely be trading colonies up through Gaul and possibly as far as Britain. Once you have trading colonies the people there shall grow tired of having to either suffer attacks from the natives or having to constantly pay them protection fees. The obvious solution is to subdue them. This was after all what happened in Iberia.
Would the Carthaginians settle Italy? It seems they must do something if the threat from Rome is to be ended. They could raze the city and then play off the various factions in Italia forever but such has risk. It would be better to be sure by colonisation and conquest.
Its possible Carthage never makes this transition from trading empire to an empire based on conquest, but I wouldn't consider it a given. The major problem I think would be the lack of 'Carthaginian' population compared with that of Italia which provided the Romans. This could be changed over a century or so however if Iberia becomes fully implemented into Carthage as would probably occur after a victorious second Punic war.
A strong naval tradition shall allow Carthaginian traders to easilly penetrate into Greece, Syria and Egypt. Traders can just as easilly be soldiers whether native or mercanary. If the powers to the east of Italy continue on fighting bloody, expensive and inconclusive wars between themselves its quite possible they find themselves paying tribute to Carthage or find themselves subjugated. Its bad for trade if your client base insist only in killing each other and threatening the sea lanes.
There might not be a united 'Carthaginian Gaul' but such would become more likely once the Carthaginians consolidate their hold on Iberia. There would likely be trading colonies up through Gaul and possibly as far as Britain. Once you have trading colonies the people there shall grow tired of having to either suffer attacks from the natives or having to constantly pay them protection fees. The obvious solution is to subdue them. This was after all what happened in Iberia.
Would the Carthaginians settle Italy? It seems they must do something if the threat from Rome is to be ended. They could raze the city and then play off the various factions in Italia forever but such has risk. It would be better to be sure by colonisation and conquest.
Its possible Carthage never makes this transition from trading empire to an empire based on conquest, but I wouldn't consider it a given. The major problem I think would be the lack of 'Carthaginian' population compared with that of Italia which provided the Romans. This could be changed over a century or so however if Iberia becomes fully implemented into Carthage as would probably occur after a victorious second Punic war.
Would it be possible that maybe the Carthiginans would be conquered by another nation? Maybe a renewed Rome some centuries later or Persia or a new nation like a unified Gaul or renwed Greece or maybe even one of the Germanic tribes. A Carthiginian victory might not lead to a Carthiginian world but would set the stage for another Europe dominated by another empire.
Indeed, the Gauls spoke a number of closely related Celtic languages, and not Romance languages.
And you're right about the Italic languages too.
Without Rome or another state to unify the Italian Peninsula, Italy could very well remain much more diverse, with the north quite possibly being permanently overrun by Gauls.
But how civilisation et al will develop in Europe in this scenario is anybody's guess - without Christianity and Islam, the butterfly effect is tremendous, and the migration patterns during TTL's equivalent of the Great Migration (which is very likely to happen, as the invasion of nomadic hordes from the east is almost inevitable) will be very different from the OTL migration patterns due to the absence of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires.
Depending on how strong (or weak) Macedonia or its successor state is during this ATL Great Migration, Greece, Thrace, Macedon, and even Anatolia could very well end up being overrun and settled by the Eastgermanic peoples.
After all, the lionshare of Byzantium's European territories were lost to the invading Slavs at some point IOTL, and in pre-Roman times, the Galatians, (who were a Celtic people) actually crossed the Bosporus and ended up settling in central Anatolia.
Similar weird things could happen in this scenario, but there's no telling exactly what would happen, except that Europe (and the world at large) will be very different from OTL.
What I find curious is the (although a tad unlikely and offbeat) idea of Phoenician-derived languages emerging in Iberia, Italy and Gaul... after all Phoenician was a semitic language. Makes things quite interesting. 
hmmm
this is a really good "what if?" i wanted to let you know that first.
secondly, i think the world would have been stranger. quite a patchwork of little empires and cultures all over the place.
carthage never really had the manpower to go on huge conquests like rome did, they would have had to build an empire first, maybe starting in Iberia and then expanding to Gaul and the ruins of the Roman nation, if other Italian city states didn't already start to expand.
what i am thinking would be that there eventually would be increasingly larger and larger empires, just like in our history, except the players and the costumes would have been different, but the places would pretty much be the same.
it is possible that maybe the Mongols would get farther in this world and maybe they would even raze Europe to the ground, who knows?
What I see in my head is a little Balkanized Europe, dozens, maybe even hundreds of little kingdoms and fiefdoms, all of them slowly coalescing around various cultural centers, but not quite forming the large empires we saw in OTL. there would be conquerors and the conquered, and i am sure there would be large empires, but i doubt anything like Rome would ever happen until the Persians get really big, or maybe the Turks even.
ugh. after a few hundred years, it just gets too muddy! lol
this is a really good "what if?" i wanted to let you know that first.
secondly, i think the world would have been stranger. quite a patchwork of little empires and cultures all over the place.
carthage never really had the manpower to go on huge conquests like rome did, they would have had to build an empire first, maybe starting in Iberia and then expanding to Gaul and the ruins of the Roman nation, if other Italian city states didn't already start to expand.
what i am thinking would be that there eventually would be increasingly larger and larger empires, just like in our history, except the players and the costumes would have been different, but the places would pretty much be the same.
it is possible that maybe the Mongols would get farther in this world and maybe they would even raze Europe to the ground, who knows?
What I see in my head is a little Balkanized Europe, dozens, maybe even hundreds of little kingdoms and fiefdoms, all of them slowly coalescing around various cultural centers, but not quite forming the large empires we saw in OTL. there would be conquerors and the conquered, and i am sure there would be large empires, but i doubt anything like Rome would ever happen until the Persians get really big, or maybe the Turks even.
ugh. after a few hundred years, it just gets too muddy! lol
Thank you, before been a history enthusiast I was very interested in languages.
Agreed, any number of things could happen.
A Germanic Balkans would be interesting. The Slavic migration may fail if the Germans/ Celts are strong enough. That would make an interesting Pomerania and Baltic area. The Baltic languages had a huge distribution area before the Slavs arrived. Baltic Russia??? But anything could happen.
Just had a thought. Stronger naval traditions could open up the Baltic to Carthaginians seeking Amber. It had been used in Greece/ Middle East for a while. This would completely change the Baltics.
Jaded_Railman
Banned
There's actually a mediocrum of truth here. Carthage's 'empire' was really control over cities stretching both ways along the Numidian and Tripolitinian coast-lines, plus control over strategically important islands. There was very little conquest of the same sort you would see, for instance, from the Romans after the First Punic War. Until Hannibal built his personal empire in Iberia, in fact, Carthaginian empire was as much about denying possible enemies access to trade in a sort of primitive mercantilism than it was about anything else.
Similarly, Rome's expansion right up until they took Sicily after the First Punic War, was militaristic by inclusionary in nature. Rather than direct empire, the Republic ruled a sort of tribal federation (modified for urban Italy, of course), where every member was nominally independent but in truth Rome was the dominant partner in the federation. That many cities had membership forced onto them after losing a war with Rome didn't stop the whole thing from being, in some sense, voluntary association.
Sicily changed that. It came under the direct imperium of the Roman senate and the aristocrats that made up the Senate exploited this handily. At the time the Roman Republic was still mostly made up of free-holding, yeoman farmers, who owned their own land and worked it solely for their own profit. The latifunda that would dominate the Roman country-side (and indirectly lead to the downfall of the Republic) after the Second Punic War didn't exist yet.
One thing that drove Roman expansion early on was as an outlet for urban poverty. Any grouping of poor in the city itself could easily be taken care of by giving them land to work outside the city. Since the city of ancient Latium was a very different beast from the cities of elsewhere in Italy (trade and production were barely factors at all -- during the periods of the Roman Kingdom where the kings were native Romans and not imposed Etruscan monarchs, Latium was virtually sealed up. There's very little evidence at all of any trading with the outside world going on. Something similar happened in the first century and a half of the Republic, and the apathy of the Roman government to trade continued on straight through to Diocletian, in ways), this really was a good way to get rid of the troublesome mob.
The problem was that land didn't come cheap. Rome needed to win it in wars to continue to have excess to give to de-landed soldiers (there were no laws at the time protecting soldiers from having their property lapse and be bought up by another, larger land-owner while he was on campaign) and others. This nominally drove early expansion. The rate was moderately slow, however, and the terms relatively amicable to the defeated. It was only when this land allotment became the purview of the commanding general during the late Republic that things got particularly dicey (the wholesale conquering of Gaul, Iberia, and Dacia, for instance).
So, in reality, the two are very different. Rome's economy depended on agricultural production, so it needed land. Carthage's economy depended on trade, so land was significantly less important than, say, a well-placed city or fort.
Alt-Carthage TLs are among my favorites, but I've never taken them very far along because things diverge so rapidly, and one quickly gets into the realm of "just make crap up, 'cause it's all just as plausible".
One difference that I've been meaning to investigate for a while is that Carthage employed war elephants as terror and siege weapons, while Rome didn't. If Carthage remains dominant in Iberia, or if they conquer Italy, they'd likely bring some elephants along. So I wonder, would feral elephants survive in Europe? And if so, what would that do to the Celtic cultures?
One difference that I've been meaning to investigate for a while is that Carthage employed war elephants as terror and siege weapons, while Rome didn't. If Carthage remains dominant in Iberia, or if they conquer Italy, they'd likely bring some elephants along. So I wonder, would feral elephants survive in Europe? And if so, what would that do to the Celtic cultures?
Britain started as a trade/naval and though that became a colonial one. I could see Carthage expanding it's control of North-Africa, Sicily and Iberia. If carthage utterly beats in the 1st/2nd Punic war Rome there is no other nation who is threat to their Heartlands. And since beating Rome would entail the conquest of Italy.
There is the seeds of empire right there.
There is the seeds of empire right there.
Jaded_Railman
Banned
Britain started as a trade/naval and though that became a colonial one. I could see Carthage expanding it's control of North-Africa, Sicily and Iberia. If carthage utterly beats in the 1st/2nd Punic war Rome there is no other nation who is threat to their Heartlands. And since beating Rome would entail the conquest of Italy.
There is the seeds of empire right there.
Carthage isn't likely to try to hold Italy. Too many other people want it to the point where it would be difficult as hell to keep. Phyrrus, at the very least, will have a bone to pick.
And do you really need to be reminded that a difference of several millennium worth of technology and social development separate Great Britain and Carthage?
They dont have to keep all of Italy just neutralize Rome. Once that is done the only potentially serious threat to Carthage itself is removed.
As for Britain I just used it as hypothetical example, as It too was trade/naval nation, Which formed a huge empire off the back of these thing. and all without a huge land army.
Of course technological and social development changes some things, but the material needs of empire dont change. I.E military-economic power.
As for Britain I just used it as hypothetical example, as It too was trade/naval nation, Which formed a huge empire off the back of these thing. and all without a huge land army.
Of course technological and social development changes some things, but the material needs of empire dont change. I.E military-economic power.
Jaded_Railman
Banned
Easy, grant the Etruscan league independence from the Roman Republic, perhaps a puppet state of some sort in Magna Graecia, maybe, and only directly annex the rest of Sicily. If the Romans try anything with the Etruscans or the Greeks, burn the city to the ground.
Britain is why the time difference does matter. Britain's empire was a result of specific social and technological conditions that didn't exist in Carthage's time. The early British colonial ventures were, actually, private ventures. Occasionally the king would have a hand in financing it and making everything legal (like the land-grant to William Penn), but the driving source of this sort of colonialism is the proto-capitalism that was evolving in western and central Europe at the time.
Basically in this time period, major overseas trading powers (the Dutch, the French, the British, the Portuguese, the Danish and Swedish for a short while) would form economic colonies. This actually bears a lot of superficial similarities to the actions of Carthage; she, too, was far more into economic colonies than downright imperialism (again, the Barcids adventures in Iberia were the work of the Barcids as people/a family, not of Carthage). Carthage, like the Phoenicians she was descended from, would drop a small colony somewhere and allow the natives to bring the goods for trade.
This highlights the differences between the two time periods. The financial structures and labor resources simply aren't there to support the same sort of exploitation missions the imperial powers of the 17th and 18th centuries could and did.
That all, of course, changed again with the industrial revolution. After that imperialism took on a whole new flavor. It's most noticeable in Britain. It's interesting to see, but the rise of the British East India Company in the Indian sub-continent closely parallels the rise of manufacturing in Britain itself. Now, I'm not suggesting some sort of cause and effect thing, but rather that the specific conditions of the rise of industry and full-on financial capitalism, combined with the sudden availability of a huge amount of resources of every sort, ready and waiting (but not willing) to be exploited for the benefit of the Metropol.
That completely changed views on how trade should be conducted. Previously you couldn't come take resources for yourself, you had to trade for it. You could come try and take things for yourself, but that only works when the technological gap is as big as like was between, say, that of the colony of Virginia in 1730 and the native Americans they faced. The Dutch also had limited success with this prior to the industrial revolution, conquering a huge area spread through the Indonesian archipelago. You can find some other examples scattered amongst the accomplishments of the first wave of economic imperialist countries (the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Danes, etc).
What really changed everything is suddenly the mild technological and organizational advantage that had allowed the British to conquer the Indian sub-continent was multiplied a million fold with the dual triggers of industrialization, leading to a much greater ability to innovate new technology and then produce it in vast quantities, and then nationalism, which suddenly made it somewhat plausible to have standing armies large enough to garrison huge tracts of land.
So, western Europe suddenly has the means to conquer their neighbors (in the loosest sense of neighbor...) with relative impunity and the example of Britain (and several other, lesser examples) in India. Britain at least seems to be doing very well with India providing both immense amounts of basic commodities which Britain herself could then turn into finished goods to be sold back to the captive market in India.
People put two and two together viola, you've go the New Imperialism of the 1880's.
Now, in contrast to Carthage, the technological, social, structural, organizational, and just entire situation is completely different. They're not 'comparable' in that way. As long as Carthage makes most of her money through trade, she'll act like a trading empire. Look up 'mercantilism' and you'll get the general gist of what her behavior should be (although adjust for the far more ancient time period).