The Best Way to Make an Empire More "Integrated"

What is the best way to make an empire more integrated?

  • Making the representatives of conquered people involved in the Imperial government

    Votes: 36 40.9%
  • Full-scale colonization of the conquered territories

    Votes: 22 25.0%
  • Conscription of the conquered people into the Imperial army

    Votes: 1 1.1%
  • Forcing the Imperial ruling class' culture to the conquered people

    Votes: 8 9.1%
  • Genocide

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Two (or more) of the things above are needed (explain)

    Votes: 17 19.3%
  • Other (explain)

    Votes: 4 4.5%
  • None of the above, it is always pointless to try to integrate the conquered people

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    88

Don Grey

Banned
And part of the process is to give the conquered people a stake in your own culture. This is what I mean by representation. They might think of themselves as cultural Y, but you can make it so by the time of their grand kids they just think of themselves as part of culture X. It's a way to culturally genocide theirs with less resistance. Plus there's usually a few elements that you can graft on to yours that are useful.

Yes that did wonders for the ottomans. Every one had there own millet religious cultural and linguistic freedom and were alowed to run there own regions. And now all the former countrymen of the ottoman empire are such good friends.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
It did do wonders, before Russia had the idea of destroying it, arming orthodox minorities, and watching them slaughter muslim greeks and serbs... 4 centuries of relative stability vs one century of falling apart mostly thanks to foreign pressure? Gee, that was a huge failure.

Besides, the Serbs share a bit of the blame, a lot of the bad blood comes from "Yugoslavia" to begin with. No matter how you cut it, in 1918, it was Greater Serbia.
 
I would think a few of these options would be best...

1.) Equal Representation to Non-Conquered Provinces. (I.E., Egypt would have equal representation as Italia does). Usually, a local leader would become the Senator or Governor.

2.) Partial Autonomy. Allow for the province to be largely independent, but the leader is still abiding to the conquerers.

3.) Colonization. Colonize the hell out of the conquered land so that the original inhabitants are insignificant.
 
It did do wonders, before Russia had the idea of destroying it, arming orthodox minorities, and watching them slaughter muslim greeks and serbs... 4 centuries of relative stability vs one century of falling apart mostly thanks to foreign pressure? Gee, that was a huge failure.

Besides, the Serbs share a bit of the blame, a lot of the bad blood comes from "Yugoslavia" to begin with. No matter how you cut it, in 1918, it was Greater Serbia.

It was Serb-dominated from the get go.
 
Representation, as it not only makes subjugated peoples feel like they have a stake in the government, but it also ensures eventual cultural assimilation.
 
Yes that did wonders for the ottomans. Every one had there own millet religious cultural and linguistic freedom and were alowed to run there own regions. And now all the former countrymen of the ottoman empire are such good friends.
That's not what I meant at all. Chill.
 
I believe you meant having non-Turks represented in the Ottoman government and having an actual say in how the empire operates, right?
I actually wasn't referencing the Ottoman Empire at all. I was talking in an abstract about a mixture of co-opting elites, changing some things in ways that obviously favor and disadvantage the key populace. Then, start employing people from the area in your state as a whole--the people see that the people a lot like them can get ahead in this new regime, some in ways that weren't possible before. But stuff like that also goes along with colonization in some parts and some brutal examples of dissidents.

If anything I was referencing Han China's model of bureaucracy+Mongol practices of annihilation of opponents.
 
But in OTL, representatives weren't always mean a better "integration". The best example of this is Roman Empire. The Romans (AFAIK) never use representation in their governmental system, which was highly hereditary aristocracy. Yet most areas that the Romans conquered always successfully romanized, and overtime the natives and their descendants looked upon themselves as "Romans", without the usage of any representation.


They had no representation, but I thought locals at least had the ability to climb the social ladder, and possibly score a well-off middleman position somewhere in the bureaucracy. You may not have a senator in Rome, but you might have a cousin who was a censor for the provincial government. And then there were the various client kingdoms, who were also eventually integrated.
 
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