There is a great deal to think about here. For starters, the painting at the top of the post looks a heckuva lot like the Golden Hind, known to history as the ship Francis Drake - not then a knight - commanded on his Famous Voyage. But I digress.
It seems to me that there is fuzzy boundary between "diasporas" and "empires," and sometimes diasporas become empires. For example, the Puritan Great Migration of the 1630s (more or less) had the hallmarks of a diaspora - an oppressed people, fleeing their homeland one step ahead of the law (or Archbishop Laud's inquisitors). And yet, at the same time, the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay and the Caribbean (and to a lesser degree on the Chesapeake) were also the vanguard of empire. At what point do such people shed their victim status - is diasporean as word? - and become the oppressors? Or is there no clear line of demarcation?
By some measure, there have been other diasporas in the history of the Americans that raise the same question. I am sure you know much more than I do about the German settlement of Central Texas, and the origins thereof. Weren't such people disproportionately political troublemakers, and often pushed abroad rather than pulled from here?
I can imagine much more on this topic, but if you have read this far it will not surprise you I am a couple of bourbons along. I may be all wrong.
What is the difference between a diaspora and being chased out. The Comanches were not in Texas until they were and they didn't come by choice. Is that a diaspora? (I'm a Knob Creek Fan, you?)
Perhaps a diaspora requires widespread dispersion and a subsequent cultural impact. Maybe mass displacement to a basically adjacent territory is not a "diaspora," it is just a defeat.
There is a great deal to think about here. For starters, the painting at the top of the post looks a heckuva lot like the Golden Hind, known to history as the ship Francis Drake - not then a knight - commanded on his Famous Voyage. But I digress.
It seems to me that there is fuzzy boundary between "diasporas" and "empires," and sometimes diasporas become empires. For example, the Puritan Great Migration of the 1630s (more or less) had the hallmarks of a diaspora - an oppressed people, fleeing their homeland one step ahead of the law (or Archbishop Laud's inquisitors). And yet, at the same time, the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay and the Caribbean (and to a lesser degree on the Chesapeake) were also the vanguard of empire. At what point do such people shed their victim status - is diasporean as word? - and become the oppressors? Or is there no clear line of demarcation?
By some measure, there have been other diasporas in the history of the Americans that raise the same question. I am sure you know much more than I do about the German settlement of Central Texas, and the origins thereof. Weren't such people disproportionately political troublemakers, and often pushed abroad rather than pulled from here?
I can imagine much more on this topic, but if you have read this far it will not surprise you I am a couple of bourbons along. I may be all wrong.
What is the difference between a diaspora and being chased out. The Comanches were not in Texas until they were and they didn't come by choice. Is that a diaspora? (I'm a Knob Creek Fan, you?)
Perhaps a diaspora requires widespread dispersion and a subsequent cultural impact. Maybe mass displacement to a basically adjacent territory is not a "diaspora," it is just a defeat.