Standalone Essays · Triad of Stewardship

Forced Assimilation

Why Empires Erase Cultures — and Why It Never Pays

There is a pattern I find distressing — one I have met both in my reading of history and in my own life in Africa. The Australians disrespected the Aboriginal peoples, forbade their customs, and forced their children into schools where many were abused. The Americans did the same to the Indian nations. The Russians did the same to the Chukchi. And I remember American missionaries insisting that Africans wear shirts, ties, and trousers if they wanted to be Christians — as if the Gospel came stitched into a Western wardrobe. They were missionaries for American culture more than for Christ, and I doubt most of them ever noticed the difference.

Strip away the local details and the machinery is nearly identical everywhere it appears: forced assimilation, cultural erasure, the imposition of external norms. It is one of the most consistent features of imperial and colonial expansion in the human record. Whether you look at the Stolen Generations in Australia, the Indian boarding schools of North America, Tsarist and Soviet policy toward the peoples of Siberia, or missions across Africa and Asia, the same drive appears: make the conquered dress, speak, worship, and live like the conqueror.

To an ethical person this looks insane. The stated reason is always a kind one — we are civilizing them, saving them, bringing them to God, lifting them out of the dark. The real reason is never the stated one. It becomes clear only when you stop asking what the conqueror said he was doing and start asking what the arrangement was actually built to produce.

Why It Looks Insane

Let me use the trade I know. If everyone on the site is a carpenter, who wires the place? If you force the plumbers to forget their training and hang shingles instead, what have you gained? You have taken skilled people and made them redundant.

If I lead a tribe or a nation, my best path forward is obvious: build alliances with the peoples around me. They can do what we cannot. Their land holds what ours lacks. Their different way of seeing produces solutions that would never occur to us. Many smaller, diverse systems that cooperate will out-build one giant monolith every time — the way a real crew of specialists out-builds a crowd of interchangeable laborers.

You respect the electrician because if you run the conduit wrong, the building burns. You respect the plumber because bad drainage rots the foundation. Difference is not friction. Difference is competence you don’t have to grow yourself.

So the destruction of that difference makes no sense — as long as you assume the goal is to build a durable house together.

That is exactly the assumption an empire does not make.

The Goal Was Never a House

For an expanding power, the job site was never collaborative. The goal was a hostile takeover of the land, the materials, and the deed. Once you see that, every piece of the machinery clicks into place.

Autonomy is leverage, and leverage is intolerable. An allied people who keep their own language, knowledge, and culture hold real power. They can renegotiate. They can refuse to trade. They can walk off the site. An empire does not see that as an asset; it sees a supplier who might one day say no. So it eliminates the leverage at the root. It does not want independent master tradesmen who set their own terms. It wants a standardized, replaceable labor pool with no support system to fall back on — people who cannot say no because they have nowhere else to stand.

A living culture is a competing deed. A people with their own language, lineage, and ancestral claim to the land hold a moral and legal title to it — a permanent, generational grievance that outlives any one uprising. Imperial logic asks a blunt question: why trade for the timber every year when you can seize the forest once and pay nothing? But to take the forest for good without endless guerrilla resistance, you have to dissolve the title. Break the language, sever the lineage, take the children — and within a generation the claim evaporates into history. The forest stops being theirs and becomes “state property.” Cultural erasure is not cruelty for its own sake. It is how you launder a theft into an inheritance.

Monoculture is easier to command. A network of diverse, sovereign allies is antifragile — it adapts, it invents, it survives local failure. But it cannot be run by decree. It demands constant diplomacy, compromise, and cultural literacy; you cannot issue an edict from a distant throne and expect instant obedience. A monoculture is brittle, but it is legible. A central bureaucracy will nearly always choose an inefficient system that obeys immediately over a resilient one that demands negotiation. Control is worth more to it than strength.

Legibility is not an abstraction; it has specific parts. An empire struggles to govern a population it cannot read, and a centralized state cannot read what it has not first standardized — beginning with language. A single imperial tongue lets courts, tax collectors, military recruiters, and administrators monitor and govern their subjects without depending on local interpreters. The institutions finish the job: schools, military conscription, and the church parish function as central processing plants, converting autonomous, self-reliant traditional communities into an integrated, legible working class. This is why the schoolhouse and the tax roll always arrive together — they are two ends of the same instrument for turning a people the state cannot see into one it can.

This is why the “civilizing mission” was preached in earnest by people who believed it. For most of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, Western thought was gripped by unilinear cultural evolution — the false conviction that every society climbs a single ladder from “savagery” through “barbarism” to Western “civilization.” Under that belief, faith and intellect could not be separated from European social habits. A convert could not simply accept the theology; his traditional dress, hair, and communal life were themselves read as heathen. So the Gospel arrived welded to Victorian etiquette, and the schoolhouse arrived welded to the tax roll. Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, put the whole logic in one sentence: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Read it closely. To Pratt, whatever was Indian was, by definition, not yet a man.

And here is the part that unmasks the whole thing. Strip the land away and the motive does not vanish — it stands out more clearly. My missionaries in Africa were seizing nothing for Washington; there was no forest to take. Yet the demand was identical: shirts, ties, trousers, or you are not truly saved. That is Pratt’s sentence again, wearing a clerical collar — you are not fully a man until you look and sound like me. The land grab hides that contempt behind a payoff; the mission shows the same contempt with the payoff stripped off. Beneath both cover stories sits a single claim: your way of being human does not count. That is the darkness the “civilizing mission” was built to disguise, and it is why forced assimilation appears wherever one people holds power over another — with or without a forest to steal.

The Structural Cycle

Stripped to its bones, the process runs in four stages:

Stage 2 is where the psychology hides. If the people you are dispossessing have rich, valid, deeply moral ways of living, then what you are doing to them is plainly criminal. To keep seeing yourself as enlightened, you must convince yourself the conquered are backward, childlike, or depraved — and that forcing them to become like you is a kindness. The contempt is not a byproduct of the theft. It is the anesthetic that lets you commit it and still sleep.

Forcing others to look, talk, and live like the dominant power was never about aesthetics. It was about control, resource capture, and the elimination of any competing model of how a human society might work.

The Paradox of the Tyrant

Now turn the ledger around and look at what the conqueror actually buys.

To me it is plainly easier to let each people govern itself, manage its own resources, and simply trade. Micromanaging a vast kingdom — surrounded by guards and food-tasters, sleeping badly — does not look like a good life. But they have so much money, someone will say. If wealth were that satisfying, why do so many of the rich, the famous, and the beautiful end in addiction? But the tyrant has his pick of women. True — and most of them despise him, and a fair number are plotting against him.

The ancient image for this is the Sword of Damocles; the deeper claim is Plato’s, in the Republic — that the tyrant, who looks the freest man alive, is in fact the least free and the least happy, a prisoner of his own power. I call it the Paradox of the Tyrant: the man who appears to hold all the power cannot leave his own palace without bodyguards, cannot eat without a taster, and sleeps worse than the poorest free man in his kingdom. From an engineering standpoint, absolute control is a terrible trade. It buys a fragile, high-friction life defined by paranoia, isolation, and diminishing returns. Rulers keep choosing that misery over the low-friction alternative of honest alliances for a few plain reasons.

The zero-trust trap. In a network of self-governing peoples trading honestly, the currency is trust and reciprocity. The tyrant cannot run on that currency, because he sees a well-armed, self-governing neighbor not as a partner but as a threat who might one day say no. He decides the only way to be safe is to strip everyone else of the capacity to say no. The result is exactly the world he feared: bitter, resentful subjects who genuinely want him dead — which is why he now needs the food-tasters and the private guards and the sleepless nights. He builds the prison, then locks himself inside it.

Dominance as a counterfeit. Dominance is a fake version of respect; possession is a fake version of intimacy. A man who cannot earn voluntary, mutual regard reaches for coercion to fill the hole, and coercion behaves like any other drug — tolerance builds. The thrill of ruling one province fades and leaves the same restlessness behind, so he takes the next three just to feel the old baseline. It never arrives, because it was never the province he was missing.

Asymmetric accountability. Building a decentralized network of trade demands humility and constant maintenance — listening to others, and paying for your own mistakes. Building a monolith lets a small elite offload the cost: the emperor sits in the palace while conscripted peasants die on the frontier to seize resources he will never touch. When the ruling class keeps all the upside — the gold, the titles, the prestige — and exports all the suffering onto the people below, pathological behavior stops being a personal flaw and becomes the design of the system.

Governing through mutual respect, and letting your neighbors run their own lives, is not only the more decent path. It is the healthier and more durable one. The monolithic conqueror trades real security, peace of mind, and honest human connection for a gilded cage — and spends his life afraid of his own dinner plate.

Better Models

None of this is theory. Across history, peoples have deliberately organized themselves around local autonomy, cultural non-interference, decentralized defense, and reciprocal trade — and built some of the most durable systems we know of.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois League). A participatory, matrilineal confederacy founded on the Great Law of Peace, uniting distinct nations — Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and later Tuscarora. Each kept its own territory, language, and internal governance; the Grand Council at Onondaga met only to settle disputes among them and manage common defense. Their guiding image was the Two-Row Wampum, Kaswentha: two vessels traveling the same river side by side, neither steering the other. Collective security, they understood, does not require cultural uniformity.

The Achaemenid Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great. Rather than force conquered peoples into Persian language and religion, Cyrus built a decentralized framework in which local peoples kept their customs, laws, and gods. He funded the rebuilding of local temples and allowed the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem. Local governors (satraps) handled administration while communities ran their own daily affairs. Because there was no cultural erasure, revolts were rarer and trade flourished across a stable, diverse network.

The Hanseatic League. A decentralized commercial and defensive confederation of merchant towns across Northern Europe, anchored at hubs like Lübeck. It had no king, no standing army, no imposed dogma. Independent city-states kept full local sovereignty while cooperating on maritime security and shared contract law. It ran exactly like a working trades crew: the Baltic supplied grain, Flanders cloth, the North timber and furs — each specialized in what it did best and traded under agreed rules, with no one needing to conquer or convert anyone else.

The Swiss Old Confederacy (Eidgenossenschaft). Alpine valley communities, later joined by towns like Bern, bound together as a mutual-defense pact against Habsburg expansion. Each canton kept its own law, dialect, economy, and eventual religion, with almost no central executive. They grasped that forcing a neighbor to change its local laws would tear the pact apart — so they kept the union strictly to common defense and free trade, and produced one of the most durable decentralized political structures in European history.

The Melaka (Malacca) Sultanate. A fifteenth-century maritime power on the Strait of Malacca that grew rich without conquering its hinterland. It ran an open port under a written maritime code, the Undang-Undang Laut Melaka. Traders from Gujarat, Java, China, Persia, and the Philippines lived in their own quarters under their own harbormasters (shahbandar). The rulers understood that fair enforcement and cultural hospitality were more profitable than pillage. They grew wealthy by providing a secure, predictable platform for others to trade — not by taking what others had built.

What these systems share is a short list:

Sovereignty at the lowest feasible level. Decisions stayed local; the center stepped in only for common defense or to mediate.

Pluralism treated as an asset. Difference was read as specialized competence and trading opportunity, not as administrative friction to be filed down.

Covenant rather than coercion. Stability came from mutual benefit and negotiated contract, which is far cheaper to maintain than an army of occupation and a machinery of repression.

Notice what actually holds each of these together. A single nation is easy to picture: a firm center and softer edges — settled in what it is, open at its borders to what it lacks. (That is the pattern the companion essay on the ecotone calls security of the core with openness at the boundary.) A confederacy looks like it has no core at all — no king, no capital, no throne to march on. But it has one. Its core is simply not a place; it is a shared idea — the Great Law of Peace, the two canoes that refuse to steer each other, the pact that no canton may impose its laws on another. The strength lives in the covenant, not the geography. That is exactly why these systems were so hard to kill: you cannot decapitate an idea by burning a city. The homogenizer builds his unity out of sameness, and sameness shatters at the first real shock. The confederacy builds its unity out of a shared principle that lets every member remain itself. The first is a wall. The second is a keel.

This is Sojournism at the scale of nations: guests in a shared world, maintaining what they use, trading for what they lack, and refusing to leave ruin behind. The monolithic extraction machine was not built by people trying to maximize human flourishing. It was built by institutions optimizing for centralized ownership, predictable extraction, and the removal of every rival from the board. It works — for a while, for the few at the top. Then the bill comes due, in the currency the Paradox of the Tyrant always demands.

See also The Ecotone Principle, which argues the same conclusion from the other direction — why the power that enforces homogeneity impoverishes itself, not only its victims.

See also: Essays · Sojournism: Full Documentation · CRES: Full Documentation

Part of the Triad of Stewardship’s Standalone Essays. Companion pieces: Forgiveness and Its Limits (forthcoming) · The Mandates of Conflict · Criminal Justice.