Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
Thank you for the tickets, which we received on Monday. I have no idea how you found out when James' leave began, as he swears that he didn't tell you. We are very happy to accept the invitation, I repeat, just in case our letter is, I don't know, eaten by the Purple People Eater whilst winging its way across the Atlantic. I feel as though I should be updating you with our plans, but I obviously don't have to tell you our schedule for a trip you paid for and arranged! I would tell you how much luggage we are bringing, but I haven't even begun to sort that out!
As this completely upends Christmas shopping, I would be happy to have an updated list of suggestions from Vancouver, if you could find the time to forward one. You'll also have to give some thought to gifts that will satisfy the little ones and still be small enough to pack back with us. Don't worry about space in the apartment, unless for some reason you decide to give them a pot!
So here is, I think, a pretty basic question suited for a footnote as I gallop through the way that the politics of Sixteenth Century Europe led to the Pilgrims' exit from Leiden and the world of Lawrence Stone's Family, Sex and Marriage, which, to my shame, I still know from the cod summaries of others and not from a direct reading in spite of it being on my list since I first encountered Fenimore Cooper's Nineteenth-Century-novelist-style sly hints about the role of marriage, church and deception in American ethnogenesis. Ahem, digressive sentence over, direct question: What was it like to sail from Devon and Newfoundland. I mean, people did it, by the millions! Canada's most important contribution to the world's inventory of dirty drinking songs is about the "North Atlantic squadron."
I've posted this Youtube-guaranteed bowdlerised version from Stompin' Tom before, but it's not hurting anyone to do it again.
So, yeah, not finding it, although I'm pretty sure it's out there and I've just not landed on it. But what I did find is some fine scholarship posted to the web here, here, and here, and a historiographic recommendation to Jeffrey Bolster's Mortal Sea, which turns out to be a book which I've bounced off before, so now I've got two copies counting a Kindle edition. Oops. (It seems I wanted Peter Pope's Fish Into Wine, at $57 for a paperback delivered next month. Fuck!) Anyway, I am presented with a thesis which, after reading about early Scottish lawsuits and Kim Stanley Robinson's New York, 2140AD, of all things, I now have something to say.
Sometime during his Christmas, 2013 visit to his sister, just as his mental decline was getting in the way of his packrat intellectual curiosity, my father bought a copy of Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Random House, 2013). The Guardian review describes it as controversial, which must be true, since there's a Wikipedia article. However, when I actually bothered to read the review, it seems that the Guardian has Aslan's number. He is a prominent public Muslim, wrote provocavtively to rile up the rubes, got a hostile interview on Fox, and from there it was just a matter of counting my Dad's money.
And also my attention, as I read it in my motel room overnight on Wednesday. In my defence, there is only so much you can do with 92-year-olds, Grand Forks, or a body in the midst of an 800km bike trip, and because She-Hulk has so far settled into half-hour episodes, and there the book was on my Dad's shelf.
But there's a bit, just a bit, more of interest here, including a lede that Aslan buries, for some reason.
There's something a little unfair about remembering a great actor and a great guy like Ricardo Montalban for a tagline from a commercial, but, come on, "Fine Corinthian leather." It's hilarious, and it reminds us of a distant day when Mediterranean leather products had a cachet of quality that industrial leather from more northerly climates just could not match.
The product that comes immediately to mind when I think about this is chamois leather, which turns out to be a southwestern French product, but close on its heels in my free-associating mind is "Moroccan kid leather," an advertising tag rather than a specific industrial product. This turns out to be a specific product of exactly a national industry, "Morocco leather." Per Wikipedia, it was a goatskin product, usually dyed, especially associated with the port city of Safi, imported into Europe since long before the late Sixteenth Century, when it became the bindery leather of choice for expensive book editions. Not surprisingly given that it is sourced to an entrepot city, the Wikipedia article goes on to indicate that much Moroccan leather was not from Morocco at all, and singles out northern Nigeria as a source.
Which, sure, why not. But today I want to talk about the Canary Islands.
Sao Tome and Principe is an island state off the equatorial coast of Africa with an area of 1000 square kilometers, a population of 211,000, a GDP per capita of $1668USD and not much else to say about themselves. They were allegedly uninhabited when the Portuguese arrived around 1470, and in 1499, Felipe Fernandez Arnesto reports, the captain, Pedro Alvarez, wrote to complain about a shipment of new arrivals, Jewish orphans deported from Lisbon during the expulsion. There were, the Captain reported, only 50 colonists on the islands, mostly exiled criminals themselves, working a marginal sugar plantation, without a mill to support exports. They had no truck to trade for ivory and pepper on the mainland, little food, and had great difficulties securing wives. The rest of the islands' five century history isn't that much more interesting, although the implied mixed-race community (thoroughly dominated by first-generation Portuguese) did emerge during the next century.
As a Canadian and a UofT man, I associate the "development of underdevelopment" with Harold Innis' "staples theory," phrased in these parts as asking why British Columbia has forests, logs and mills, but not IKEA. The question of how the long-term development of "the West and the rest" became, of course, ever more pressing in the decades after Innis' death. By the time that Joan Robinson addressed the question in 1978, the state of Africa was frequently presented in apocalyptic terms --that was certainly my high school experience-- and although the worst has not happened there, we have the current state of Haiti to remind us that the Third World is still with us.
You know the pattern by now. We have two weeks of drilling into the peak of the last, decaying maxima of the past-present wave as it moves through human chronology (seventy years ago plus three months, I have decided), two weeks to play around with what we've got. Alas, I can't quite discover another technological appendix in the story of the last two weeks. Everything is consolidation and amplification of things already explored. Project Typhoon is yet another analog computer; We had a bit of radio astronomy; the Savannah "H-bomb plant" again, with just a hint of the toxic politics of race in the American South under a thin veil of technocracy; Yet more on the automation of the cockpit, almost as interesting as the recently increased frequency of business machine ads that remind us of the central importance of Campbell-Kelly's insight that the computing revolution had precious little to do with computing; and titanium, always good for some exotic thrills.
(Disney+ is being sticky about uploading scenes from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but I thought it was kind of cool that Isaiah Bradley dismantled the Winter Soldier's original, titanium arm "on the peninsula" in 1951.)
In the meantime, something else has come up.Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia has decided to bump up mentions of his 2016 edited collection for Oxbow, Dynamics of Production in the Ancient Near East, by releasing his chapter on Academia.edu, and it's a bit of a revelation that sends my own exploration of this period down a new path. If spiritualism is a disappointing avenue for understanding the explosive growth of human population(!), wealth and states during the Axial Age, how about diving way down deep into the quotidian and looking at produce markets?
I am writing in late January about October of 1950, well after North America's Christmastime "chestnuts roasting over an open fire" season, and even longer after continental Europe's fall chestnut cornucopia, when chestnut roasting stands are everywhere, and a bag of hot, roasted chestnuts, liberally doused in salted garlic butter, used to be cheaper than a subway ticket -and probably still are, although the vendors were mostly Roma, and that's quite the mess I just stepped into.
The Roma were, in their day, horse traders. People of the open road, which gives them a certain affinity with the chestnut, and maybe helps set the stage for their more recent turn as Europe's least favourite minority. (Not that the competition for that honour isn't fierce.)
If you have ever been to the Schönbrunn Palace as a tourist, chances are that you rode the U4 line to the Schönbrunn station and walked some distance down the Schönbrunner Schlossstrasse to the front entrance under the towering chestnut trees that line the allee, and were perhaps told that Maria Theresia had them planted as a boon for the poor of Vienna. This is not, as it turns out, quite the case. Ideally, this is how all roads are suppposed to look, at least in the 1740s and through at least the 1890s.
From January through October of this year, and most especially through the Canadian lockdown, I helped operate a "corner store" concept for my company --4000 sq feet of grocery attached to a pharmacy in the Oakridge shopping mall. An unwelcome legacy of the old Oakridge store was a queue of items that had gone out of stock just before the old store shut off automatic replenishment. Unless we manually removed them from outgoing orders, we got a very eclectic set of items, again and again.
Yes, they included an item identified as kippered herring, although as far as I can tell it's not quite the same preparation as the kippered herring that comes in cans. These particular kippered herrings had to be stored frozen and cooked before eating. I bought a couple and they were . . okay. Products of the Scottish herring fishery, they are Relevant to events of today, as fishing rights come up under Brexit. Foreigners fish some fishing grounds in British waters, and it is perhaps a matter of urgency that they be made to stop. Because of conservation. Or jobs. The fact that the British are great fishers but terrible seafood enthusiasts is a very interesting subtext to the discussion, and perhaps a historical question of some significance.
Getting back to the fish I ate (not a normal part of my diet, either), Alison Mary Locker explains that these short-life preservation techniques came into vogue in Nineteenth Century London because the fish would last long enough to be distributed by costermonger, but didn't ask too much in the way of cooking equipment and time. She's probably not the only historian to explain such things, but, in comparison with agrarian history, there's a bit of shortage of fishing/salt industry historians. In spite of that, there's been some movement in the field in the last few decades, perhaps not entirely synthesised yet. (I keep finding references to Kurlansky's Salt in academic monographs. Surely if there was something less popular, it would be cited instead?)
(By some kind of miracle I actually found one of the songs that CBC Radio wakes me up with)
A boat launching in the Banc d'Arguin National Park
At the risk of repeating myself, it's worth restating where this investigation has been going. First of all, I have Lameen's challenge to think of a West African Age of the Reconnaissance, which turns out to be exactly right. And, second, we have the challenge of taking Morocco as a key actor in the European Reconnaissance seriously.
It is an old truism of the earliest "Reconnaissance of the Atlantic" that the Portuguese effort that eventually led to Vasco da Gama rounding the Cape and reaching India, began as an attempt to bypass Moroccan control of the northwestern terminus of the trans-Saharan trade in sub-Saharan gold, slaves and naturalia. Going a little further, Peter Russell suggested in 1994 that this effort was, on the one hand, an extension of an attempted Portuguese continuation of the Reconquista into the southernmost portions of the old Roman Diocese of Hispania, which is to say, Morocco; and on the other, a defensive measure against Castilian efforts to secure the defection of Hispano-Lusitanian grandees with opportunities to crusade.
All of this is interesting, but would be less so if, in fact, the Portuguese had just arrived on the African shore in 1405. In reality, the city of Ceuta has traded hands between Hispanic and Moroccan regimes so often that I doubt anyone can keep track, and, by extension, Hispanic and Moroccan regimes have their hands deep in each others' pockets since at least sub-Roman times. Therefore, Prince Henry's involvement in Morocco has as its mirror image, Moroccan interest in Portugal. Or, to put it another way, that it is all one political realm, and Moroccan politics have to be considered alongside Hispanic.
It is probably also worth noting that the core period of Henry's African adventure coincided with the period in which Henry's brother was being held hostage in Fez for a Marinid restoration in Ceuta. Ferdinand surrendered himself in 1438 and died in 1443, a period spanning the first half of Afonso V's difficult minority. During this short period, a series of expeditions along the coast reached the Bay D'Arguin and as far beyond it as the mouths of the Gambia and the Senegal. Henry, withdrawn from politics to his villa at Sagres, remained an entrenched opponent to any scheme for the redemption of the Infante Ferdinand, while patronising the geographical, and, perhaps, naval architectural sciences.
Note all the little Portuguese enclaves down the coast.
So any understanding of this adventure needs to focus on the political axis between Fez and Sagres. This much, should, indeed, be obvious. There is, however, that traditional blindness, or to be more charitable, professional unwillingness to overextend, that puts Morocco in a different category from Europe, drawing the line of political history at water's edge. There is also the foreshortening effect that makes far off countries seem smaller and more homogeneous than they would seem if we took their politics more seriously. Morocco, in particular, is a very big country. The Almoravid/Almohad imperial city of Marrakesh is 500km south of the Marinid/Wattid capital of Fez, and even a Martian would, when it was put that way, expect a north-south rivalry. It is, moreover, a rivalry that one can easily visualise as producing a kaleidoscopic variety of potential alliances. From the perspective of Ferdinand's uneasy custodian, the vizier Abu Abd Allah al-Sheikh Muhammad ibn Yahya, not only Portugal, but also Castile, Aragon, Tlemcen, Marrakesh and the sub-Sahelian states all had to be taken into account.
And for anyone from the marginalised North, South, East or West of any given polity, attention will be on the marginalised, the political interest denied its legitimacy by the simple expedient of grouping it into the larger state. Morocco had just been through an extended period of government from the south, by the Almoravids and the Almohads. I'm going to link to that classically bloated Hollywood epic, El Cid, again, just so that the reader can appreciate the way that even the comparatively heedless visual politics of the 1960s biopic could read the Almohads as a threat to northern Christians and Muslims alike. (And a reminder that mask politics is not new.) It's unfortunate that it was the Almoravids who sometimes trace their origins to a ribat on the island of Tidra in the Bay d'Arguin, but given that the Portuguese did not just happen to arrive in 1405, full of wide-eyed innocence, on the North African shore in 1405, the arrival there in 1443 of Nuno Tristao, and his subsequent attack on a village on the adjacent island of Arguin, has, or ought to have, resonance. As much as Christian slavers were an ominous novelty in African affairs, small communities on islands in the Bay of Arguin were an established threat to northern regimes.
In a spirit of pure academic inquiry, I am going to note here that I rode up Anarchist Summit Thursday morning with my bike badly out of whack for various reasons. It was in much the same condition on Monday when I summitted the Alison Pass on the Hope-Princeton less the last hill before Sunshine Valley. All of this is important research, and in no way humble bragging.
In the same spirit of data collection, a shout out to the Alpine Motel of Keremeos for having good internet and pretty much good everything considering that it is a family-run small motel, your only option in the other Windy City. Ramada Inns are also nice, although you'd expect that. At the price, any complaints I have about the Boundary Creek in Greenwood have to be set aside considering the effort the new owners are putting into it. It must be something to show up to do a painting contract and end up owning a motel, instead. On the other hand, one thumb down to the Adriatic in Osoyoos, which could have viable Internet at the price, but which is in a late stage of dissolution due to the decrepitude of the owners, and two down for the Manning Park Lodge, which hasn't a shadow of an excuse.
So Alex turns us up an Independentarticle on ongoing excavations at the islet of Dhaskalio in the Cyclades, which turns out to be a semi-retirement project for the indomitable Colin Renfrew. The Independent makes the point, not brought out in at least the extract of the World Archaeologyarticle, that a monumental building phase at Dhaskalio, a so-called Greek pyramid, in fact rising tiers of marble buildings on a pyramid-shaped islet, occurred within a century of the Pyramids, Stonehenge, "first Mesopotamian kingdoms," and the cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation. I have reservations about the Mesopotamian angle and can't even begin with the IVC, but they do seem to buttress a case that checks out for Stonehenge, the Pyramids and Dhaskalio.
Since Renfrew has a monopoly on explanation/interpretation of the site, I'll start with Dhaskalio, whttps://www.world-archaeology.com/features/dhaskalio/here he adduces a two-stage history. In the first, about 2700BC, people began travelling to Dhaskalio's parent islet of Keros and depositing broken statuary and other durable artefacts at what was probably then an isthmus between Keros and Dhaskalio. Renfrew's account rests heavily on the presumed lack of everyday reason to travel to these barren islets, at which I bristle slightly. I assume that archaeozoology has ruled out a nesting area or a seal rookery, but would like that confirmed somewhere. Beginning slightly later, copper ore was brought to a windblasted beach on Dhaskalio for smelting, and about 2500 the political landscape of tiered marble buildings had emerged, while deposit activity at the isthmus tailed off and came to an end.
There are obvious parallels to the Stonehenge 3, II stage besides the Independent calling our attention to it. (If you'r wondering, I am absolutely begging off any attempt to delve into the Giza site. That's way too much work for the ninety minutes I have to kill before it is time to start getting ready for the road again.) Deposit activity doesn't come to an end, nor does building begin in 3, II; but the scale of the latter is immensely increased.
Synchronicity across vast distances speaks to something more than coincidence, and, of course, the Stone Age/Bronze Age has been an important transition between eras for as long as we've had eras. I know that it is fashionable to denounce it as an artefact, but it is such an enduring explanatory mechanism that I am inclined to promote it to the status of Something That Actually Happened. Maybe that's just the prejudice of the historian of technology, but I think I have more than insulated myself from accusations of androcentric focus by singling out the role of jewelry, detergents, textiles,. You know. Girl stuff.
So let's specific some kind of techno-cultural transformation that's sweeping the planet. (Wool textiles, I say.) Where do we go from here? Well, to the eve-of-Brexit anxiety that is sweeping the new field of genetic archaeology, with a "population replacement" model of social and cultural change taking hold of efforts to explain the British scene.
The dominant picture of Europe's genetic history (Y-group) is that everyone looks more-or-less like their neighbours, and the Scandinavians look a bit inbred.
More detail only refines that. However, if you look at the scanty remains of ancient Britons (and, to be fair, we have a lot of them. It's not like basing the "Ancient North Eurasian" ancestry that can be traced from Ireland to South America, and, so far as I know, Chad as well, on a single boy who died near Lake Baikal 24,000 years ago.) it turns out that some kind of population replacement, to include genocide perpetuated by trans-Channel foreigners, occurred in Britain at both the beginning of the Neolithic and of the Bronze Age.
For the purposes of this post, that means that incoming "Beaker" people arrived, exterminated (not really; the share of Neolithic ancestry rises over time, indicating that a population survived and intermixed gradually, but don't tell Nigel! [pdf]), took over Stonehenge, and promptly dressed the place up a bit --in a way that seems pretty respectful of existing henge and cursus traditions. From tumuli to roundabouts, the Brits seem to love their circles. If that's not weird enough, the cattle barbecued at the adjacent work/party site of Durrington Wells includes a significant number of animals --pigs as well as cattle-- from the Scottish Highlands.
Skepticism about long distance trade and transhumant pastoralism aside, this is pretty striking evidence of the power of cult to unite the island of Britain, and of the ability of incomers to assimilate into and improve upon existing cultural practices.
Ain't no politics round here any more than there's tourism promotion. Try the steak next time you're in the Thyme And Plate in Grand Forks, B.C.
For reasons having to do with layout and marketing, customers have difficulty finding the "breakfast aisle" at the store at which I usually work. The particular arrangement means that this aisle, adjacent to the bakery at one end of an irregular lozenge, actually contains pancake mix, pancake syrup, diabetic candy (no, I don't know, either), and pretty much every kind of spread. But as far as it goes, when I am working in the high traffic central aisles, I might as well wear a t-shirt that reads, "The peanut butter is in Aisle 13." No other item is so often sought for, and so hard to discover. I have no idea what that says, but I do know that the 3 August, 1948 Engineering covered the same talk on the theme of "How We Are Overcoming the Unexpected Difficulties of the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme" as did The Engineer, along with several other subjects that, it seems to me, deepen and enrich our understanding of the absolutely bonkers issue of Fortune that I cannot talk about this week for the usual reasons of schedules-altered-on-the-fly. (And, to be fair, my failure to think through the implications of a day-to-night swing that has essentially cost me a weekend day this week, and given me an extra one next week.)
I hope I'm building up anticipation for the August, 1940 issue of Fortune. Bonkers. I promise you. In the mean time, this is pretty much a peanut-butter-and-jelly technological appendix, except it comes before the subject.
It's also a little timely, given that I am talking about the Tanganyika Groundnuts Scheme, which we're going to need in the next few years as the Tanzania Biofuels Scheme, if we're serious about long term survival as a species.
By Steve Swayne - File:O Partenon de Atenas.jpg, originally posted to Flickr as The Parthenon Athens, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17065839
The comparison I am aiming for is with that most famous of ancient urban sanctuaries, the Parthenon, a temple to the goddess Athena, likely in her role as patron of virgins and maidens. The inevitable comparison with the Vestal Virgins in Rome would then link it to the city's symbolic hearth, while Joan Breton Connolly proposes an association with a mythic virgin sacrifice that links Athens' patron goddess and democratic ideology to a narrative of female empowerment. There's also plenty of room for it to be about the women's work of textile production.
Urban sanctuaries are the social context of the title, while the four key innovations are iron, alphabetic writing, equestrianship and money. All these innovations of the Iron Age are clearly significant, just on the basis of what ancient writers said, and sometimes did, with them. The modern approach that takes archaeology before text seems to undermine and complicate the received, literary narrative. And since no historical effort can avoid its contemporary context, one may wonder about the ideological motivation that might have led elite literary practitioners to constructively misunderstand the foundations of the world they lived in --to invert transcendental and substructural concerns and reverse causality, as some mad-eyed ideologue would put it.
Here I am back in California, and you're off to the East again! I understand, though. A Celanese contract would be very sweet. Speaking of the industry, there is also some movement on newsprint pulp in Newfoundland. It is buried deep in my letter, but Labour is backing away from the stringent early limits on newsprint next year. Whether that means the syndicate can salvage the new Newfoundland pulp mill is another question. I'm just a simple flyboy, but it seems to me that a mainland site would be a better idea, anyway.
Speaking of flying, I've been billeted at Arcanta, but I have a plane, so it is easy to get down to San Francisco. Ronnie and Miss K.'s apartment is nice, if cramped. I don't think Miss K. likes me very much. Well, I don't like her boyfriend, so it's sort-of mutual.
I'm also a little surprised that she has a boyfriend, but what do I know of the ways of the human heart? I would tell you a bit more about the Arcanta flying, but so far I'm less than impressed with the Navy's approach to things. Better runway lights are all very well, but I am aching to try out those British automatic-landing gadgets I read about. And the less said about Fido, the better.
It has been a wearing week, and not just because I am a working girl, now. I've been invited to give a talk about my senior thesis, I think mainly because I am the only Junior who knows what her senior thesis is going to be! I've had to do some fast footwork over the fact that it is Californian history, and not French literature, but Stanford tends to be easy with these things if you're eager and smart. (And rich, Reggie would say.) And I'm told, with a heavy hint that it's my fault, that my Mother is drinking again, and that Dad is acting as though his ulcer is flaring up. He, of course, won't say anything, in case it makes me feel guilty. He'll just rant on about how Indians, Mexicans, Coloureds, Jews and Communists make him sick to his stomach. I can't say I find that much better.
So that's me, so obviously the most important bit; but, you might have heard that Gandhi is dead. I feel a little like I'm supposed to be sad about it. What hits a lot closer is that President Tressider is dead. He was only 53! The rumour around campus is that he was in New York to "manage" President Hoover --One more thing to blame the Wonder Boy for.
So that's it for me, except to mention that Mrs. Delano called back about my application for a summer job at Magnin's to offer me an interview. It's quite exciting, and makes me wish that I'd thought to apply to Magnin's!
You'll pardon me if I'm not my usual, chatty self, as I've just had the news that Mr. Rank's problems (which I notice are not in today's press, but will turn up next time) are somehow our problems. Or, my problems! And I am to fly across the Atlantic as soon as class is out to go up to Marleybone and rescue the money that we only spent in the first place because of the silver opportunity? It's just so silly. I'm not even sure it's the money so much as the legal rights to your grandfather's "story" (As interpreted by S.R.)
I had so wanted to spend Christmas in Santa Clara with everyone, and now I get to spend it. . . Well, I can't fight my parents, so another holiday season down, another horrid flight across the Atlantic. I hve only one request from you, and it's a small thing. I don't want to fly British this time. Please, please, take an interest with whoever is arranging this, and see that I have a Pan Am booking, preferably a Constellation. I would talk to Uncle George, but then it would . . . Well, anyway, I'm looking to you to be my white knight in this, just as Mr. R. ended up being last year.
Sweetbreads poaching for Fried Sweetbreads with Peas and Broad Beans, a recommended recipe for beginners. Google Ads also put Comixology in the sponsored box, which seems to be an authorial decision of which I heartily approve. (From Britishfoodhistory.com. I'm going to assume that the author's quasi-anonymity is a personal decision.)
Talking about a Legion of Super Heroes story of the 1960s with a particularly obvious homoerotic subtext, Chris Sims once commented on the point where subtext becomes so obvious that it is surtext. As we were reminded this week, what, in connection with hilariously naive comic books is a joke, had an earlier life as the Very Serious Artistic Movement known as Surrealism.
With surrealism in its death throes in the month that America's middlebrows were introduced to Existentialism as both Very Serious and Very Sexy --the month that the UFO became official, on top of that-- I am very tempted to say something incredibly insightful and pithy about the trends in French intellectual fashion that have washed over North American shores since 1947.
First off, apologies all around, because Nymphaea caerula, the blue lotus, one of the three species present in the Nile, contains " [an] aporphine having activity as a non-selective dopamine agonist," and it is a controlled substance in the Baltic states. That being said, some people get high by chewing an entire sheet of Zantac, and I kind of doubt that the Early Iron Age had a blue-lotus-related public health emergency going on.
It most certainly did have a problem with people who were tempted to take off into the marshes and get away from it all.
"A happy day, as we go down to the water-meadow As we snare birds and catch many fish in Two-Waters [Fayum] And the catcher and the harpooner come to us As we draw the nets full of fowl We moor our skiff at the thicket And put offerings on the fire
For Sobek, Lord of the Lake" . . .
I would do as my heart desires When the country was my town When the top of the water-meadow was my dwelling No one could part me from the people my desires and from my friends I would spend the day in the place of my longing In the . . and the papyrus clumps When it was dawn, I would have a snack And be far away, walking in the place of my heart
[Fragment of a New Kingdom poem; quoted in part from Blouin, trans. Parkinson, 1998, but lifted from here; reconstruction indications omitted]
These are thoughts related to last week's inadvertently meaty post, thanks to Katherine Blouin, who has given us so much to think about. So it's good that I need to get a low-effort post out of the way. (Work on the postblogging posts will coincide with a trip to 100 Mile House for my youngest niece's elementary school graduation. Go Aly!)
The collapse of complex societies used to be big! With drama! Cities left to ruin; economies transformed, technologies changed. None of this dragging-out "secular stagnation" thing for the Ancients, no sir! Lay yourself down a nice "destruction/dark earth" layer, and go off and live in the mountains or the swamp or wherever.
With some exceptions: Egypt made it through the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Fall of the Roman Empire well enough. It looks as though the country was uniquely suited to complex society (no need to spell out why, I suppose). It didn't go entirely unscathed, however. Egyptologists divide the Ancient Egyptian past into three periods of high monarchy, and three "Intermediate Periods," although, as the maths of group theory will suggest, one of those Intermediate periods can't have been Intermediate. (The trick is that we don't count the Persian-Ptolemaic-Roman interlude as an Egyptian monarchy; so the Third Intermediate can also be the last period --unless we throw in a brief phase of Egyptian revival in the Classical Period, as we can if we want, for we are licensed historians.
What made Egypt special, in comparison with, say Roman Britain? My conclusions probably aren't worth the electrons they're written on, but the evidence I rely on is building up, and really ought to be accounted for in a good theory.
Lots of caption here, because credit where credit is due. This is Abdelratif Reda's fresh goat cheese, served with apricot jam on a bagel in the medina of Rabat, Morocco.. The photograph is by Eloise Schieferdecker (imputed c. 2015), and appears in an article by Zoë Hu, running in the online lifestyles magazine Zester Daily
Did Rome have a crisis? The basic outline of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire is Decadent First Century-Golden Second Century-Third Century Crisis-Fourth Century Dominate-Fifth Century Fall-Sixth Century-
Cliche, but good point. Let's just stay the heck away from the Byzantine Empire or whatever it is.
The confusing thing here is that the crisis comes in the middle. There's an elaborate theory of politics in which governments pass through cycles of development. Domitian's government is a "Dominate," replacing an earlier "Principate." Yes, the restored empire is a different, and lesser thing, rather like the old Chinese Western and Eastern dynasties, but it is restored.
In this analysis, it is all about politics. A number of specific factors make the Empire politically infeasible: the government is badly structured; The location of the Roman capital is bad; it is overspending to buy army support; changing elites mean that new groups will have to seize control of the imperial office, whatever the short term cost of political stability. Etc. Not a single mention of cream cheese for breakfast!
Since I am on record as arguing that the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west is due to a breakdown in long-distance trade causing a shortage of money and local deflation in the far west, it might be time to go through the long, long list of emperors and usurpers and highlight the factors that, I think, make a purely political explanation inadequate.
Those are some happy elephants, because Tirupati deluxe bran is the best bran.
iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli / uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim / imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se / continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, /panem et circenses
--Juvenal, Satire X. (Note that like any Nineteenth Century parliamentarian on his feet to deliver a zinger on the Balkan Question, I've cut and pasted out of Wikipedia.)
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."
- Elmer T. Peterson. In this week of so much going astray down south, the fact that the nominee for American Secretary of Labour has riffed on the idea that democracies are destroyed by social welfare benefits ("bread and circusses") might easily take a back seat to more pressing concerns about his boss. But! I'll start with the attribution, which is a spanking new, modern thing for which we can thank Google, even if my store of gratitude to Google is being drawn down by the gradual disintegration of Google Books, although that's a rant for another day. Traditinally, we see this quote attributed to much more famous people than Elmer T. Peterson, and he himself began this tradition by attributing it to a a minor Nineteenth Century thinker with a funny name. He did so in a 1951 letter to the editor published in a minor Oklahoman paper, which raises the question of how it entered the public record so quickly. Peterson himself was a writer, but his literary record [pdf] is pretty second rate, and it would be surprising if many people took him very seriously. "Alexander Fraser Tyttle," on the other hand, is someone to reckon with! I suppose.
Perhaps Peterson noticed the general shortage of actual examples of welfare payments destroying democracies. After all, he may have had the Juvenal "bread and circusses" line in mind, and perhaps even has some recollection of being rather brusquely informed that Juvenal came a full century after the Republic. Perhaps, although this is asking a lot of the basically optimistic mind of the early 1950s, which feared only communist roentgens, someone even pointed out that rich tax evaders have a better record of destroying regimes than poor handout beneficiaries.
This is what makes the Roman example so handy, in that rich people might evade taxes and even attend gladiatorial games, but they certainly do not stand in bread lines. Not that Peterson needed to explore things very deeply. Everyone knows that the ancient Romans gave out a corn dole to the urban poor of Rome. But!
Of course not. No-one's ever read a history of the Thirty Years War past the death of Wallenstein, and even that was a struggle. That's the part where you skip the last, thick chunk of pages. It's amazing that anyone ever even managed to write those pages, and I am not going to absolutely guarantee that they're not blank. No-one knows the end of the Thirty Years War. Or the Hundred Years War, or the Italian Wars, for that matter. The last history of that last that I've tried to tackle starts out with exactly that observation, wondering who would still be with him in 1557. (Not I, as it turns out, although I really liked the bits I read. Only $46 for the Kindle edition!)
This is why, in British economic history, it is always and will forever be 1846. Famine in Ireland! Corn Law repeal! Peel splitting the Conservative Party! Chartism! Something something Second Reform Bill, and, in the midst of it all, the disgraceful capitulation to America over the Oregion Boundary.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
The siege of St. Omer is a pretty good example of this, actually. The linked Wiki article seems to have been written out of an old Spanish account, and has mind-numbing detail of the difficulties that late Thirty-Years-War armies had in mastering the complex systems of canalisation and reclamation with which local authorities had tamed the surrounding marshlands into irrigated farmland and convertible water meadows. We can see how agricultural investment is transforming the landscape and dragging military practice along with it. Then, all this was forgotten in pieties about "Cabinet War" and the more recent "OMG they make fortresses shaped like stars, help Po-Mo Man you're our only hope." Farms and fortresses; it would make a good study.
Farming! That's what I'm talking about!
Writing about Lord Woolton's war requires pictures of Land Army girls driving tractors, so here you are. You'll notice that this is a caterpillar tractor (small "c" caterpillar), of which we haven't heard much so far in this series, since they tend to be big and expensive for modern collectors and their websites. Also, per David Perren, British agriculture just wasn't that into caterpillar tractors, on account of the soft-bottomed land being under permanent grass.
