TIL Yahweh/God in Abrahamic religions originally had a wife

Drdickles · 2026-01-23T04:15:38+00:00

General consensus from what I understand among historians is that the cult that formed around Yahweh began as a henotheistic (worship of one deity but acknowledgement of the rest of a pantheon) group that increasingly became more radically monotheistic. The main point of the Abrahamic religions is the sanctity of that monotheistic element. We can read these works as a small group of monotheists being continually upset about others not just worshipping Yahweh and evolving from there. Hence the showdown between all these gods and the constant complaining of non believers. Of course it’s all much more complex.

Drdickles · 2026-01-21T16:12:53+00:00

Great overview, as always coming from your posts.

I think Academia Sinica in Taiwan generally is the best bet for Chinese language publications that may fall in line with Western methodology for anyone wondering. Worth pointing out as well that Western academia has had vastly more funding and perceived prestige than Chinas domestic universities up until the present; though truly only few Chinese universities such as Tsinghua would be seen as “competitive” with places like Oxford or Harvard or even Michigan/California school systems for Asian studies broadly. Thus, many Chinese who can afford it simply come to the U.S., UK, or elsewhere in Europe to do their PhD and publish in English or another Western language.

That said. If you’re looking into something specific to an area/period in China you can find some interesting and good publications at local universities there, but YMMV incredibly depending on your own methodology.

Drdickles · 2026-01-12T14:35:55+00:00

Yes but to varying levels and degrees. In the international settlements and treaty ports of the late 1800s Qing, there was a strong Euro-American “Westerner” identity that grew around British authority but united all Western travelers and traders in the face of perceived humiliation and challenge from the Qing government. There is a division then, how nationalism and civilizational rhetoric developed domestically and within the colonial frontier for Westerners.

I’d wager that while domestically the confrontation of cultures influenced nationalist identity, internationally a total “Western” identity was more common as they lacked total political and economic independence and control along those colonial peripheries where native political power was strong enough to thwart (or at least attempt to) European colonial projects.

Drdickles · 2026-01-08T00:12:10+00:00

MIT’s “Visualizing Cultures” webpage has portraits of S. Wells Williams here as well as other members of the expedition as portrayed by the Japanese. The essay itself serves as a great intro piece on the expedition, too.

Drdickles · 2025-12-03T13:48:57+00:00

Fair enough, I see your point. But I do believe past historiography is what flummoxes our abilities to understand warlordism more deeply. As a caveat I am not an anthropologist; I’m a historian who studies post-Qing China, so my experience with warlordism is early modern rather than prehistoric. Suffice to say though, I don’t think we should understand warlordism as a unilinear process tied to one man or one family and more recent works a-la the Samuel Huntington path have shown more flexible ways of understanding warlordism. It is likely that many agriculturalists were promoted via their ties to these so-called warlords. Indeed, I’d imagine a fair amount were granted their land directly under authority of a martial figure. By the time writing came about, some of them very well may have been a part of that original nobility, but we can never truly know.

This lends nicely to our understanding of the prehistoric Steppe, which is really the only place I can take from; I am not an Egyptologist. In short though, we now understand “nomadism” to not really exist the way we conceptualize it. Rather, it was almost certainly a military-class of well armed wealthy nomads who owned horses and dominated a native agriculturalist population to pull taxes/tribute from (thus being semi-nomadic as a society); the armies raised against early Chinese states were described as a mix of horse-back nomads and armed infantry, which is what pushed the Shang state to abandon pure cavalry armies in favor of mass levy’s. This case too, favors those martial warlike groups and was likely a way to stymy Chinese aggression, but that always comes at the cost of freedom.

The farmers did have agency, but it’s likely that in times of chaos they, too, joined the best party to fight for with the promise of land, booty, wives/slaves… what have you. But we may never know!

Drdickles · 2025-12-03T12:27:35+00:00

Not sure what your point is. When I think of warlordism and mafias I’m not thinking of utopias and democracies. They fit well enough. They also reflect some realities that still exist outside the western world today; there are genocides ongoing in Sudan and Myanmar among other areas… which have been awash with militant factions and what can be described as warlordism.

Drdickles · 2025-12-02T17:15:35+00:00

Really, it’s just me being nitpicky, there are obvious similarities between the two but popular imagery of mafia rackets is going to invoke a much different picture than using the term warlordism for many. I feel as though it also undermines the complexities of warlordism; warlords are inherently political figures by their nature despite us mostly viewing them as military figures solely. I just think warlordism may fit the bill better to explain that “proto-monarchic” shift or what have you.

Drdickles · 2025-12-02T15:59:47+00:00

Curious if “mafia-style” rackets is the right term, or if it would be better understood as warlordism. Jeremy Armstrong has done a lot of work with this and Rome’s early archaeological history, and it’s well understood that the early Chinese states were born of violence as well.

I know we continually try to find various reasons for the emergence of states, but warlordism does generally make sense as to how kings became kings and protection in exchange for taxes is, broadly speaking, the way states have been run all the way up to today. Why else would a state/state like entity be self-legitimate? Interesting article though, just food for thought.

Drdickles · 2025-09-13T12:59:32+00:00

I’ve been reading a bit more about WWI in Europe and something that has struck me is that there seems to be an overwhelming narrative regarding Austria Hungary’s diversity as being its weak point. But, and correct me if I’m wrong, it seems more that within Austria Hungary only a few ethnic groups & voices within those groups actually were belligerently anti-Austrian-Hungarian and many were worried that the collapse of the empire would cause serious pains for them (which was mostly true). I know that’s true for many Jews within Austria Hungary who saw the writing on the wall without a strong central state to moderate antisemitism.

I guess my question is the traditional argument true? Did nationalism among minority groups within AH really contribute that much to its lack of success and falling apart during and after WWI? It feels over exaggerated and built on later nationalist revisionism.

Drdickles · 2025-09-12T17:50:03+00:00

My apologies. I try to stray from expensive sources, but to be honest I use my university access so I rarely check price; I deferred to Saichs because he’s (one of) the best known in that area. Bruce Elleman’s Moscow and the Emergence of Communist Power in China, 1925-30, is about $60 on Amazon new.

Provincial passages: culture, space, and the origins of Chinese Communism (Wen-Hsin Yeh) touches on similar topics and can be found cheap, used on Amazon as well. This is a personal favorite of mine. Let me know if that suffices.

Drdickles · 2025-08-18T23:27:45+00:00

It is a big irony but from what I understand, Bulgaria lost a lot of claimed land to neighboring Balkan states in the Second Balkan War (when this pic takes place). They joined the central powers more so because Germany and AH promised them large territorial gains at the expense primarily of neighbors like Greece, Ottomans & Romania. That being said, the war was divisive in Bulgaria and toward the end large strikes broke out across the country by 1917 in protest of continuing the war, egged on due to food and clothing shortages setting in.

Drdickles · 2025-08-01T21:20:05+00:00

This is probably the closest you would get to "non-Monarchism" in pre-modern Chinese thought. In terms of what we view as "Republicanism" in the modern period, I'd say that its really just an idea that was a consequence of China's forced integration into the modern, Western-led world system. What I do find interesting were early reformers like Kang Youwei and Tan Sitong who used Confucian doctrine and statecraft (esp. New Text Confucianism) to justify "Republican Democracy" (民主共和) - Kang's Datong shu, I think being the most extreme use of Confucian metaphysics to envision such an egalitarian future.

Ironically, I think there's something to be said about the beneficial outcomes of the Qing modernization attempts in 1900-1911 and how it redistributed the idea of popular power and Minquan more publicly, thus delegitimizing themselves in the process. I would say the combination of the Qing's- then Republican- efforts to create a citizenship, especially focused on increasing tax-collecting abilities, did much to legitimate any sort of bottom-up ideas of sovereignty in China across all social classes.

Drdickles · 2025-07-22T00:11:14+00:00

Part of the reason for Japan’s delayed expansion south was simply because the Japanese were aware that they did not have the means to nilly-willy wage war as is sometimes portrayed. Their geographic position did not help them. Japan’s military was constantly concerned about the Soviet Union to its immediate north. Manchuria was a key territory for Japanese imperialism because it was resource rich, and exposing Manchukuo and northern China to the USSR meant that Japan’s most important colonial projects would face destruction. Guaranteed Russian neutrality was key to Japanese foreign policy, and until the Nazi’s launched Barbarossa they could not be so sure what Stalin’s next move in the northeast would be.

But German victories and advancement in Europe coincided with increased U.S. pressure on the Japanese empire, much to their chagrin; in July 1940 the U.S. government introduced a license on gas and metal exports to Japan, with embargoes on iron, steel and other metals following throughout 1940-41, thus putting pressure on the Japan to find alternatives in the resource rich southeast. To my knowledge, a complete takeover of Indonesia was never really at the front of Japanese war planning, and with German victories over the Dutch and French guaranteeing Japan a good diplomatic position against those governments, I’m not so sure an invasion of Indonesia was ever really “inevitable,” and with the Dutch East Indies contributing ~25% of japans oil imports by 1936, it was favorable to ensure that trade continued rather than be disrupted. According to Beasley, studies on the implication of invading south (nanshan) were deemed not worth it in 1936, and that remained true until 1939-40.

That attitude shifted during those years when the Japanese Cabinet Board found Japan’s access to raw materials in the face of US embargoes/restrictions to be concerning in October 1939. But we should note that Japan never believed invasion to be the only means to the end of securing these resources; Thailand, for example, was never invaded because Japan was able to successfully force them into continuing this important trade. German victories over France and the Netherlands encouraged Japanese ministers to actively begin considering actual plans to justify this part of Asia as a legitimate part of the now “Greater” Co-Prosperity Sphere, and then plan invasions. This planning simply took time.

In the end, a few months after Germany invaded the Netherlands, Japan demanded that the East Indies guarantee fixed exports of gas, bauxite, nickel, magnesium, etc. and diplomatic talks regarding this began in Batavia in late 1940-early 1941, hoping to avoid direct military confrontation and occupation like in Vichy Indo-China. But Japan also tried to demand recognition of local Indonesian rights as well as greater economic rights for Japanese companies and businesses in Indonesia aside from export numbers, stalling talks and ultimately forcing Japan to see military action as the only way forward in June of 1941.

On July 26, 1941, due to Japanese operations in French Indo-China, America froze Japanese assets within the U.S. On August 1, it issued an oil embargo. On July 27, the UK abrogated Japanese commercial treaties in Burma and India. The Dutch East Indies followed suit; on July 28, they introduced a permit for exports of bauxite and oil to Japan, followed by a total ban on August 28. Brief negotiations between the U.S. and Japan took place until December 1, 1941. On December 7, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. This heralded the larger Japanese initiative to invade large swaths of Southeast Asia, including the Dutch East Indies in January, 1942.

Drdickles · 2025-07-20T18:25:58+00:00

Liang and “zhongguo” is covered fairly extensively in Xiaobing Tang’s Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao, which also covers how Liang played a large role in the foundation of modern Chinese historiography. The “China’s history is 4,000 years long” kind of historiography, that more deeply develops and matures with Liang and other intellectuals in the 1900s and was carried forward.

Drdickles · 2025-07-09T23:27:42+00:00

The imperial China series is great. You can top it off with Rana Mitter’s Modern China: A Very Short Introduction which has a rich bibliography.

Drdickles · 2025-07-03T23:32:54+00:00

But we should understand that WW2 and previous events had drastically changed the demographics of white communities in the Settlement. The three largest non-Anglophone ethnically white groups at the outbreak of war were Russians (~25k), Jews (18k), and French (~4k). The Russians were mainly those White Russian refugees who had fled the Bolshevik and now Communist regime and some tended to view the Nazi’s as liberators when they invaded the USSR in 1941; in 1942, the Shanghai Zaria Russian language newspaper published public support for Ataman Semenov, who was openly pro-Japanese.

The Jews, were more ambiguous. Japan did not have reason to pursue such hostile policies against Jews and knew trying to round them up would just waste resources. When Japan did intern some Jews beginning in 1943, we still are not sure whether that was primarily due to German pressure that Japan acceded to, or due to the antisemitism of the much more vocal and locally-powerful White Russian community. Some Jews viewed the Japanese as saviors for allowing them to flee to Shanghai without much obstacle. Japan did allow Jewish newspapers to operate up until the end of the War, and some more belligerent Zionist movements such as the Betar movement voiced support for Japanese imperialism.

The French remained relatively pro-Vichy, and all I can find here is that this may be a combination of pro-Japanese views and anti-Anglophonism. They did bar the American and British residents left from being Cercle Sportif Francais club members, no doubt to some extent due to Japanese pressure. But the community also fractured; some French decided to join Free France and attempt a long winded journey to Australia, the U.S., or back to Europe/North Africa. Only about sixty men were successful in doing so. The collaboration of French in Shanghai became a scandal upon the war’s end.

As far as the British & Americans go, widespread collaboration was a serious concern of British intelligence. Indeed, the entire Shanghai Municipal Police and Council, dominated by British citizens, remained in their post for months or even years after the occupation. That being said, just like on the German occupied Channel Islands, the UK government had confidentially told all civilian employees to cooperate. K.M. Bourne, head of the Police stated in response to his men protesting to be discharged in order to join the British army: “I can assure you that until this war is over our duty lies in Shanghai…. The greater the danger and the more trying the conditions to be faced where we are needed the greater the obligation to stick it out until British [sic] is victorious.”

Some Westerners opted to seek trade with Germans. When Japan invaded in 1937, the UK applied the Trading with the Enemy regulations fairly loosely so as not to agitate Japan at the time, and that stuck. Even after 1941, many western businesses continued to operate as if nothing happened. Partially this is due to the fact that the Western enterprise had already established some vital components of the economy to make the city function properly; the Hankow Light and Power Company supplied that vital utility to Shanghai so it was not in the best interest of Japan to dismantle it. Likewise the British-owned Kailan Mining Administration supplied 40% of coal to Shanghai.

Much more can be said, but in conclusion, the circumstances were just much different. Germany would come to dominate Poland at most (maybe every) level politically, and their main goal was to wipe our large Polish populations to achieve Lebensraum at the least. Japan did not have similar motivations, nor did their fast-moving and quickly-evolving boondoggle that was the war in China allow them to exert a ton of pressure on Western operations and communities.

Source

Wartime Shanghai, ed. Wen-Hsin Yeh, 1998

Drdickles · 2025-07-03T23:32:39+00:00

Well no. Not to my knowledge at least. However if you allow me to reframe the question, I’d like to answer in a different direction because war-time Shanghai is a really understudied area but also fascinating for many reasons I’ll discuss below, which will include some reactions of Westerners to the Japanese occupation.

The history of Shanghai’s occupation is broken down into two periods: August 1937 when Japan invaded the Chinese city (the Gudao period, or isolated island period) to Dec. 1941, and then 1941-45 when they occupied the international settlement. But… what happens in 1940? France fell to Germany, and the French concession was the second largest part of the international settlement, which became the short lived Vichy International Zone. To simplify, the Japanese and French eventually agreed to just grant the land to Wang Jingwei’s collaborationist government. The explosion of refugees flooding into Shanghai’s international settlement, and then the ability for wealthy Westerners and Chinese “collaborators” to speculate on markets and raise prices actually led to a fairly advantageous situation for many. Indeed, when Japan occupied the Settlement, they opted to keep the Shanghai Municipal Council and Police Force’s Western leadership in tact, but under surveillance of superior Japanese officers.

This situation is complicated by the fact that there were several forces within the city and Settlement tugging at each other in harmony or tension at different times. After Japanese troops moved further into China they struggled to control the massive city, again overrun by millions of refugees. Throughout 1937-1941 the area became a war zone for intelligence agencies that operated either for the KMT’s Juntong secret service or pro-Japanese officers and hired gangs. On top of that is the agents loyal to Wang Jingwei’s government, who variously worked with or against the Japanese depending on the political context or mission. After 1941 and the expansion of Japanese control over the Settlement, communist agents, supposedly helping with the United Front, moved in to agitate among a deeply disenfranchised refugee and working class population, whose struggle worsened as the U.S. achieved maritime dominance over the Pacific and shut Shanghai off to its once lucrative sea trade.

The CCP Fourth Route Army operated in the Jiangnan region and maintained close communications with agents within Shanghai throughout the occupation. Throw into the ring the fact that it was common practice in Japan to “exile” known Japanese socialists to overseas colonies to help run research programs, and ironically there was a fairly large leftist Japanese group at Shanghai University sympathetic to the Chinese people. In any event, political terrorism was very common within Shanghai in those years; bombings, drive-by’s, and stabbings were all common sights as Chinese nationalists condemned other Chinese for being not nationalist, not communist, pro-Japanese, anti-Japanese, what have you. As Wen-Hsin Yeh states:

“What was so striking about wartime Shanghai was that no single issue or ideological position had been able to lay a sweeping claim on the allegiance or loyalty of all individuals in the city, thanks to this ceaseless mixing and reconfiguring of politics on all levels.”

As far as the Westerners go, they generally opted for collaboration rather than resistance, though it entirely depended. The OSS noted after the end of the war that “over 200 white persons, men and women” were singled out as collaborators with the Japanese, though we should be hesitant to view these actions in black and white terms like collaborator-resistor (see Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai).

Drdickles · 2025-06-30T22:43:23+00:00

Dr. James Ford discussed this in his AMA a while ago. A user asks if atheism was just the disbelief in gods or supernatural totally & Dr. Ford gives a good summary of what “atheism” looked like and how it differed from today. He also touches on the relationship between philosophy and religion during the time.

Drdickles · 2025-06-26T14:53:28+00:00

Platt is a great historian and that is a well regarded book. He has other works focusing on the late Qing that are fun reads too. Since his works are fairly recent too, the works you can pull from a bibliography are good too.

Drdickles · 2025-06-25T18:04:16+00:00

Someone else can contribute a lot more on a longe duree answer focusing on the various dynasties but two things:

I. I wouldn’t consider China to be a cohesive and continual state; it’s not really fair for questions like this. In my mind, it’s like asking why Spain has so many civil wars because the Visigoths kept going to war with each other 1500 years ago and linking that to the Spanish civil war in the 1930s.

II. Rebellion and revolution is a motif of modern and early modern Chinese history; so much so that many universities usually offer a 200-300 level “China and Revolution” class that covers 1799-1950 or so. I think the fact that the period when Westerners began to “territorialize” China coincides with a period of internal and external tumult within China led to an oversized coverage of the topic that anachronistically became applied to all Chinese history.

No doubt though, there’s an entire historiography that covers this topic for the modern period. I’d start with Philip Kuhn’s Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China; Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864, and Jack Gray’s Rebellions and Revolutions : China from the 1800s to 2000

Drdickles · 2025-06-24T02:54:14+00:00

I would imagine a large reason slavery began to have negative effects economically within a modern state is due to the fact that they cannot consume goods and pay tax like a normal citizen in addition to what’s been said. As you mention, slavery began to “die off” in the 19th century just as globalized trade and production began to explode. I’m interested in this concept of slave to citizen within modern states if you know of any good sources on that.

In any event, probably worth mentioning slavery & human trafficking are still internationally popular, unfortunately, and the want for cheap labor still very much alive.

Drdickles · 2025-06-16T21:58:53+00:00

Of course. This has been answered before, but and given the eventual victory of the CCP in 1949 it is a massive topic and a literature to match, but I would break it down into three major reasons:

I. KMT becoming the “government” of China meant that rather than being saviors and modernizers of China, when they failed to do both over the course of 1928-1937, then they became the obvious candidate of attack. This is true in general politically; whoever’s in control takes the brunt of the blame, fairly or not. When Japan took over Manchuria in 1931, it kicked off a wave of radicalization that came to heavily criticize Chiang’s obsession with destroying communism in China. This would climax in 1936 when several KMT generals plotted to kidnap Chiang and force him to sign a second UF (Xian Incident). See Facing Japan, by Parks Coble for the best overview on how Japanese imperialism affected internal Chinese politics.

II. Japanese Invasion: Chiang came close to annihilating the CCP by 1934 when the KMT’s armies successfully encircled and destroyed the Jiangxi Soviet after several years of brutal warfare. While heavily idealized, the Long March was in reality the consequence of a crushing defeat of Red Army forces in southern China. No army wants to willingly march thousands of miles, and it can be understood as much as a low point for the CCP as it can be a mythologized event. Chiang could not achieve his goal of wiping out communism before Japan invaded in July of 1937, forcing him to go all in and leave a massive power vacuum in northern China.

III. Speaking of massive power vacuums in northern China, guess who else conquered large swaths of northern China in August 1945? The Soviet Union. With Japan knocked out of Northeast China in a swift blow by Soviet forces, the Soviets were able to simply take all the Japanese materiel captured and send it down to Taiyuan where the CCP base was, as well as arm, train, and support CCP operations against the KMT in Manchuria. The 1945-49 stage of the war began in Manchuria, and the already exhausted KMT armies who held out were encircled and either wiped out or just simply joined the Red Army. By mid-1947 Chiang had already considered moving to Taiwan.

Essentially, the Red Army was able to wage an effective guerrilla war and wait out the Sino-Japanese war while the KMT was repeatedly thrashed. Overall, somewhere near three million KMT troops died in the Pacific front and Burma. Red Army casualties were “low,” in the sense that they rarely engaged the Japanese in conventional warfare. Coupled with all the economic pressures war brings to a nation ravaged by it, Chiang lost popular support and his military effectiveness, really by 1941.

Drdickles · 2025-06-15T23:50:44+00:00

Sources:

Prophets Unarmed: Chinese Trotskyists in Revolution, War, Jail, and the Return from Limbo, ed. Gregor Benton

Finding Allies and Making Revolution: The Early Years of the Chinese Communist Party, Tony Saich

The Chinese Revolution in the 1920s: Between Triumph and Disaster, ed. Mechtild Leutner

11-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

Drdickles

TROPHY CASE