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The American elites don't have to deal with the problems of a black underclass. On the other side in the ledger, empires as far back as the Babylonians realized that ethnically divided provinces were easier to rule.
I'd imagine that only applied to remote parts of the empire that are ethnically distinct from the heartland. Close to home, I'm pretty sure you'd rather your territory be ethnically unified to lower chances of rebellions/separatism.
Ethnic rebellion and separatism are rare. The Ottomans successfully played divide and rule for centuries.
The more members of the ruling ethnicity are around, the more credible competitors there are.
This is the problem a lot of ethnonationalist philosophy suffers from, it starts from the assumption that ethnos is primary. If I'm the Ottoman emperor, am I making moves to maximize the odds the empire stays together, the odds a Turk is on the throne, the odds a member of the dynasty is on the throne, or the odds that I and my immediate descendants remain on the throne? All can be in conflict on the margins.
Perhaps outright rebellion or separatism is unlikely, but at the very least stability is far more likely under conditions of ethnic homogeneity? With highly diverse populations, you've got a higher chance of different factions fighting each other, and even if they're not fighting you, that's still pretty detrimental to overall security, the economy etc. As you said, this might take a back seat to certain other priorities, but I'd imagine it's generally pretty high up there. Ethnically divided regions might be easier to rule, but they're also easier for enemies to conquer.
To take the Ottoman example (and I could be completely wrong on this, I'm not a subject-matter expert), I doubt there'd be many Sultans who'd would want core provinces like Anatolia to look like modern-day Lebanon.
Core Ottoman provinces like Anatolia always looked like modern day Lebanon. To my recollection, core modern Turkey didn't become majority Muslim until the refugee inflows of Muslims fleeing Eastern European nationalists in Greece and the Balkans combined with Christian migrant outflows to those new countries in the 19th century. And it didn't start to look as Muslim as it does today until the destruction of Greek and Armenian communities during and after WWI.
Also, Once again, you're talking from the perspective of the state. The ruler does not necessarily care about maximizing outcomes for the state. He might care more about maximizing outcomes for himself, and his sons. Which starts and largely ends with hanging onto personal power.
Minorities have advantages for rulers. Because they depend on the ruler for protection from the majority, they are in the special power of the ruler, and can be used more readily. It's a trick seen over and over throughout history.
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People are still thinking on 1789-1945 terms. Ethnonationalism (really, it should just be 'nationalism') thrived then because the military meta made loyal mass armies the backbone of a good army. The only other period in history quite like it, as far as I know, was the infantry meta of the Warring States period 475 – 221 BC, and if you look at the institutions of Qin, the winner of that conflict, they sound exactly like something out of 19th century Prussia.
Absent this, empires frequently bring in outsiders to help them rule even their core provinces. The Mamluks had their Circassian slaves, the Turks their Balkan janissaries, the Roman emperors their freemen and barbarian-staffed administrations.
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Clearly elites are protected from the worst results of their bad decisions, but I don't think it's some conspiracy to divide the working class.
A better explanation is that it comes from social signalling, where high status people can signal their abundance by not being concerned with petty things like crime and taxes.
As societal wealth gets higher and higher, the signalling required to separate oneself from the commoners gets more expensive. A high end watch is not going to cut it. You need luxury beliefs, the more extreme the better. Among these luxury beliefs, one of the most common is a hatred for white people and the belief that countries need to be reformed by importing large numbers of non-whites. If they are criminals and layabouts, it's actually better because it destroys the existing society more effectively. The signal is clear: "You worry about crime and your community all you want. Your worries are low status. I have so many resources I'll be fine whatever happens."
I've been meaning to write a post about the irony of dirt-poor post-grad white men being the most motivated regime propagandists on Twitter; compensating for lack of real status by signalling luxury beliefs as hard as possible.
The guys who were sneering hardest at every concern about inflation, crime, and woke discrimination were the ones getting mugged on their way to teach a graduate seminar in European history for $14.50/hr, because they'd watched all the tenured positions go to Queer Black History profs.
Yeah, I've noticed that too. I always wonder what kind of man puts himself in that situation.
But it does give me hope that maybe we've reached peak woke. Woke beliefs have filtered down to some very low status people now, and so its time for another turn of the barber pole.
It's quite common now for women to express contempt for sniveling "male feminists". They'll often couch this in terms of these men not being true allies, but I think more accurately it's a disgust reaction to low status men.
Having heterodox beliefs is a luxury afforded to the strong and high status.
I’ve long had a theory that outspoken male feminist Allies are mostly the men you don’t particularly want around your daughter, because of selection effects- men with bad behavior choose that stuff to compensate for red flags.
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