Would you be happier if you were ruled by China and:
>You got more money
>You were more prosperous
>You were more safe
And
>You were worked like a dog if you wanted any of that benefit, 6-9-9 style hours (otherwise you were in the hinterlands boonies and if you interacted with a Chinaman it was in a negative context like them deciding your undeveloped land is forfeit)
>Every Chinaman in your country lived much much better than 98% of your country.
>You had to bow and scrape and kowtow towards any Asian or get whupped, fired, or killed outright
>Chinamen were governed by Chinese law and Chinese courts
>Chinamen could rape and abuse your women with impunity and if you fought back you were whupped or killed.

Lawrence of Arabia said better to let an Arab do something imperfectly than to do it perfectly for him, and that isn't a sentiment limited to Arabs.

If I had to think on the cusp:
>Civic engagement was not sectarian partisan.
I lost the book (World of late antiquity by Peter Brown) but I recall a passage quoting someone who complained about how you couldn't go five feet in Constantinople without someone engaging in a theological dispute. Bartenders, porters, everyone was a wanna-be-philosopher on theology. And you can look all over to see the unending litigious at best and violent at worst sectarianism and ideological purity spiral bullshit. Think about how social media has led to everyone being an expert and everyone being hyper opinionated yet include an inclination to violence into that mix. The worst excesses of our woke vs anti-woke faggotry today and make it more disunited and more volatile. Prior to that and sectarianism might exist but it would be blues vs greens or temporary politics or ethnic tensions, but religion introduced an animus that is all of the above (entertainment for team vs team, not-temporary politics, ethnic tension).

I never thought about that but that's actually a big fucking one. The heterodoxy of philosophical camps is totally in opposite to the Semitic zero-sum tribalism of theological disputes. People go and think the "Dark ages" meant there was a near 1000 year gap between the Romans and renaissance, but you realize from 400AD it takes until the fucking 1800s to actually stop being sectarian Christian riven apart by ultimately philosophical disputes while the Muslim parts of the Romans still haven't escaped it.

Like imagine fucking pogroms and unrelenting civil wars and wars of philosophy. Rome tearing itself apart because of Epicureans vs Stoics.