@AaronMk
Which rises actually interesting question of whenever Iberian cultures such as Galicians, Leonese, Asturians, Castilians, Aragonese and Catalans were present as we know them or at least somehow close to that during Visigoths rule over most of Spain, right before the Arab invasion.
I am personally inclined to not think so, as it honestly close to saying what for Example Russians and Ukrainians at the height of the Kievan Rus or even before Rurik, or insisting what there were Austrians or Bavarians during reign of Charlemagne.
Well as I recall the narrative of Spanish development going, there wasn’t any sort of move towards a full Spanish until the Reconquista was in full swing. The first nominally Spanish-esque piece of literature being the Cantar de mio Cid in the late 11th century, where as the Moorish invasion was in the 8th century, by which point I think the only still-existing cultural population from that time would be the Basques. About the 11th century is when we can say Castillian and Leonese and so on did exist, but by the 8th they probably weren’t even trending into existence yet.
to relate this to colonialism though, with exception of the Crusades classical conquest such as this is different from the later post-15th century era of colonialism by how the act was merely a change in local leadership than total top-down reshaping of the landscape. While the Moors didn’t seek to eliminate Christians or Jews and maintained their populations, they certainly didn’t like it though when Muslims converted to either or; they didn’t seek to totally eliminate and re-write millennia of independent cultural development, enslaving a people and then enforcing their cultural supremacy on the population as in the later Spanish conquest of Central and South America where entire structures were destroyed and the native populations pushed to the fringes and made as near-slaves by the foreign master class with rolling repercussions today in which wide-scale atrocities and genocides into the modern era is the go-to to maintaining dominance of the population.
Pre-modern periods were much more dominated already by very localized cultures and it would have been excruciatingly difficult for the institutions then to try and enforce any sort of cultural hegemony, so even the migration of Romans from Italy following their conquests didn’t see the extinction of a cultural, but more the intermarrying of the two groups until they reached a synthesis. Versus, well: Americans sweeping aside the Native Americans into tiny reservations and then clear into the seventies or eighties trying to educate out of existence all evidence of being Cherokee, Shawnee, and so on.
And besides Genghis Khan of Tamerlane there hasn’t been any significant long-term and targeted effort to physically destroy a landscape until very much later into industrialized colonialism. Hawaii is still suffering from long term physical and legal impacts of plantation-system sugar operations that’s seen much of the islands desertified through abuse of the otherwise carefully managed water resources prior to the arrival of Yankee missionaries.
But much more often the impact of colonialism as talked about is the recent kind because it’s still having living and breathing impacts on entire segments of the world, a large majority of it really that’s laid the foundations for troubled internal and multi-national politics to this day. And with the emphasis of “Well X’s culture is bad therefore we need to teach them” underlines the backwards parental outlook on it, by making what’d otherwise be an internal matter no longer your own. It’s busting down the front door to teach someone otherwise simply because you don’t agree or share the same epistemic structure as you, and then staying there to live.
What even makes western cultural attitudes so “good”?
