How Do Tribes Become Nations?

[Laurence]

I've had a good root around history of ancient European countries in their tribal stages and their kingdom stages but all of my sources seem to gloss over how the former became the latter.

I can't imagine how a series of tribes would turn in to one large kingdom/empire the size of a modern day country. Can anyone explain this clearly?

It'd be great to know how the tribes of say, England, interacted with each other before, during, and after the Roman occupation. It'd also be handy to know how/why any nearby groups of tribes merged to create a 'country' without any outside interference from a large empire like Rome's.

 

[Shreddies]

One way to form a nation is to have a larger, pre-established nation come in and conquer them, set up infrastructure for government, then leave somehow.

But barring external influences, I think it usually boils down to someone (a chief, probably) being very ambitious. After you get an ambitious enough leader, there's alliances formed, conquests conquered, and so on. The chief expands his territory and 'unifies' the surrounding tribes under his rule. Usually such a rule would have perks for it subjects, such as trade within the territory, increased safety from external threats due to a larger, or more organized, military.

I think after it gets big enough they are considered a country/kingdom/whathaveyou, regardless of the ruler's title.

Overly simplistic, I know. But it's a start.

 

[Saigonnus]

Sometimes all it takes is a single event to unify them as it were; be it foreign or domestic. A single man/woman with the vision of creating an empire might be such a catalyst, or one seeking to form them into an army to repel an enemy foe; whether a rival clan or foreign military force. A truth of the world is that generally speaking, there is safety in numbers. The more you have in one place, the less likely it is that you will have issues.

A single ideology or goal is another catalyst that might bring stability and unity to assorted groups of peoples. Imagine if the most powerful clan has connections and trades with neighbors all over, giving them the goods to trade with the lesser clans; they'd want to be like them too, so mold themselves in the same way to establish trade... imagine if all of the clans sought this goal. Then imagine if these foreign governments wanted to take advantage of their self-inflicted segregation by trading more favorably with one over the other. Resentment might bring the clans together, so they all get the same terms when trading with the neighboring realms.

I had a short story I was working on revolving around life in a post-apocalyptic city; where the people had broken down into clans living in the ruins of the city, or using the rubble to build structures... one of the clans was larger by a good margin and sought dominance over the rest of the clan's resources; chiefly by controlling the migration route of the antelope in the area, either driving them away from the smaller clans' territory or by capturing large numbers of the beasts themselves. The idea was that most of the other clans wuld be forced to unite to remove the clan's stranglehold over the ruins they called home.

 

[Jabrosky]

You might want to look at the so-called "predynastic" Nile Valley, especially Upper Egypt (i.e. southern Egypt, the more upriver area) and Nubia. To provide a brief and highly simplified summary, you had these tribes of cattle-herding nomads converge towards the river after the Saharan savannas dried up into desert, and then they started fighting and conquering each other until larger chiefdoms developed. Ultimately these competing chiefdoms merged into the historical kingdoms of Kemet and Kush that everyone knows. The whole process seems to have taken at least a few generations, though the Upper Egyptian Narmer is credited with founding the "First Dynasty" of Egypt after conquering the Delta.

 

[Laurence]

Thanks a lot, guys. So, this ambitious chieftain-they're giving away all their technological discoveries and infrastructure strategies in exchange for what? The extra tax and an ego boost?

 

[Terry Greer]

There's a lot of discoveries and technology that is unlikely to happen until you expand beyond tribes.

Tribes tend to mean self contained - ok there may be trade - but its normally only for luxuries (with some few exceptions such as salt production). You can't get excellence and specialization without some structure that allows artisans/scientists and artists to perfect their craft and not have to do the myriad other things that a tribe member normally has to do.

As Saigonnus said - an external event (such as an invasion) might trigger the beginnings of statehood - as might someone returning to a tribal environment having been away or just experienced a different way of living. Without that change in perspective it's hard to see how they could plan for something that they haven't experienced themselves.

But any individual starting out on nationhood would have to be exceptional, focused and ruthless to withstand the naysayers that would prefer the status quo to continue. examples (such as the Mongol empire) would also suggest that a large and close-knit family group (albeit with a powerful head) might be more successful than single individuals would be in catalyzing change.

 

[X Equestris]

It is typically a magnetic and ambitious leader, often at the helm of a military and/or economic powerhouse of a tribe or city-state, that unifies these groups into a whole. Alexander the Great and his father unified Greece through a combination of diplomatic ties and military conquest. It crumbled a bit after his death, but much of Greece was still controlled by Macedonia when Rome finally swept in. Otto Von Bismarck is another good example, using politics, diplomacy, and war to unify the German states under Prussia.

The reasons why this individual decides to unify the tribes/city-states varies, of course. They might desire a unified front for their culture, like with Alexander carrying out his father's dream for a pan-Hellenic crusade against Persia. They might want to spread a religion to their fellows. They might just want the power and glory.

 

[skip.knox]

Well, "nation" is a word that applies to tribes. Think, for example of the Iriquois Nation. The Latin word meant more or less a "people". They might have multiple chiefs or one chief, but they were united at least in the eyes of the Romans. Thus, for example, the Gauls or the Belgae.

"King" is a similarly slippery word. The Romans tended to call "king" whatever two-bit chieftain was negotiating across the table from them, without regard for the niceties of internal political organization.

So, when you ask how does a tribe become a nation, there are a bunch of assumptions in back of that question. I'm going to pick a few out. They may be yours or they may not.

In a real sense, kings were always in tribes. That is, tribes have chieftains pretty much wherever we look. Tribal societies are almost universally pre-literate, so we simply do not know how their political systems evolved. We guess, from later or from external evidence, but it's guesswork.

Somewhere along the line, though, the kings we encounter in the historical record all claim some kind of divine or semi-divine descent, from a god or from some ancient hero. The reasonable interpretation is that most chiefs strove to bequeath their power to their son, and that they developed a mythology to help justify that inheritance. It was probably helpful to get the local shaman to buy in. But we ought not think of this as the act of a single generation; at the same time, it probably was not a smooth development either.

The scenario I favor is of the unusually successful war chief. Victory in battle was so chancy a thing, if a man won battle after battle, nothing was more natural than to think he was favored by the gods. And nothing more natural, too, than for him to start thinking this about himself. Maybe his predecessors had made some claims along these lines, but his string of victories would seal the deal. Think of how Alexander got himself declared a god by the Egyptians, to take a late example. He sure wouldn't have won that accolade before Issus and Tyre, and after Gaugamela even his hard-eyed Macedonians started to believe.

But, Alexander aside, we're still talking a tribal society. It's just now a tribal society with kings. FWIW, a good many ones we know about still elected their kings. Hereditary kingship came later. But even then, erase all images of medieval (in truth, early modern) kingship. That was a different animal. There is no straight line between tribe and king there.

I hope I have not muddled things too terribly!

 

[K.S. Crooks]

Sometimes it is an invasion by an outside force that unites tribes or communities that usually fight. It is a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". The different communities/tribes may even get along very well, they simply like to have their own leader and laws; but when a group of people they have never seen before try to take over, the tribes unite. whoever is seen as the greatest leader, could remain such for all the tribes.