> Any time anywhere with a functioning administration is conquered, the local administration is mostly left alone.
Not universally true - this presupposes that maximum economic output is the only goal of a conquering power. Conquering rulers are not always rational, or they may have other rational goals.
The Mongols maintained the existing administrations wherever they submitted to them, but wherever they faced stiff resistance they wiped out the old power structures (and much of the population at large). In mesopotamia they even destroyed ancient, essential irrigation systems to an extent that the the region's productivity didn't recover for centuries.
Even the Romans weren't always so conciliatory and rational - in conquering Carthage they sold the entire surviving population into slavery and destroyed the original city entirely. It wasn't exactly rare for them to choose to be brutal to make a point.
Another example is that after the Russians have occupied the Eastern European countries at the end of WWII and after they have installed there puppet governments, they have not only replaced the old administrations, but they have also sent most of their members, including many of those from the lowest levels, into prisons where many have died.
Moreover, the children who had parents or other close relatives who had belonged to the previous administrations were frequently blacklisted and thrown out from any high-level education institution and allowed to do only menial jobs with low qualification requirements.
> Even the Romans weren't always so conciliatory and rational - in conquering Carthage they sold the entire surviving population into slavery and destroyed the original city entirely. It wasn't exactly rare for them to choose to be brutal to make a point.
This is contested. Myth says they "ransacked" the city, but some data might suggest that might not be the case. I am pretty sure they got rid of the "elites" who were running the Carthaginian show. However, without hard-evidence, I am more leaning toward them not really doing much damage.
Most historical evidence suggest that the city was mostly uninhabited for close to a century until the Roman reestablished it.
Same thing happened to Corinth (actually in the same year as Carthage was destroyed) except that supposedly unlike in Carthage the entire male population was murdered and only the women and children were sold into slavery. Corinth wasn't reestablished for a hundred as well.
> Even the Romans weren't always so conciliatory and rational - in conquering Carthage they sold the entire surviving population into slavery and destroyed the original city entirely.
But Carthage wasn't just a city, it was a region. The city was sacked for standing up to Rome -- essentially the same policy the Mongols used. What happened to the rest of the region?
Britain during and after the fall of Rome is worth considering here; it's similar and also different. Roman Britain was overrun by Germanic tribes and the system that resulted wasn't closely related to the system in place under the Romans.
But I see that as related to the invasion being decentralized. It was more "a large number of small groups of people showing up" than "Genghis Khan showing up with his horde".
We may have different ideas of what "the local administration is left in place" means. The Yongle emperor (Chinese) deposed his own nephew (also Chinese) and subsequently executed a very large share of the people who had been administrators (still Chinese) under the previous regime, along with their families.
But the system of Chinese administration was left untouched by the mass executions. A slate of administrators was wiped out and replaced by very similar people doing very similar things.
They were left alone? e.g. the elites in Utica probably didn't mind the destruction of Carthage that much. However the core of the Carthaginian territory in North Africa was a collection of 'allied' cities dominated by Carthage (just like Roman Italy before the Social War). So there wasn't really much of a centralized system to keep in place (unlike in China and some other empires)
You might think so, but that just isn't true. There are a few core tasks, like tax collection, that have to be done everywhere.
But even those core tasks are handled in very different ways from place to place. Questions like who is eligible to potentially be an administrator; how do they actually become one; what does the org chart look like; and what functions does the administration perform, all vary radically between different cultures.
Every military hierarchy in a sizeable country (> 10 million population), since WW1, has been organized almost identically except during the communist revolutions, and even then they reverted to the norm.
I'm pretty certain there are close to optimal organizational structures for certain other functions as well, given the same standard human and technological limitations.
Comparing two societies at different points in time would obviously yield much larger differences.
> The Mongols maintained the existing administrations wherever they submitted to them, but wherever they faced stiff resistance they wiped out the old power structures (and much of the population at large).
This is what broke the power of the Hashishim, or Order of Assassins. The Mongols didn’t use local talent for palace guards and so on, so they couldn’t play their usual game.
Muslim rule generally. The Ottomans had the Janissaries. The Qajars in Persia had the Ghulam. The only one of the Muslim gunpowder empires not to use slave soldiers were the Mughals who were ethnically distinct anyway. Persians and some Arabs and Turks ruling over South Asians.
Good question. I assume there was a distinction between the various foreign soldiers and the ruler’s bodyguard under the Fatimids, but I can’t say for certain.
Not universally true - this presupposes that maximum economic output is the only goal of a conquering power. Conquering rulers are not always rational, or they may have other rational goals.
The Mongols maintained the existing administrations wherever they submitted to them, but wherever they faced stiff resistance they wiped out the old power structures (and much of the population at large). In mesopotamia they even destroyed ancient, essential irrigation systems to an extent that the the region's productivity didn't recover for centuries.
Even the Romans weren't always so conciliatory and rational - in conquering Carthage they sold the entire surviving population into slavery and destroyed the original city entirely. It wasn't exactly rare for them to choose to be brutal to make a point.