The Eighteenth Century: Building a Better Future Through Higher Energy Density?

No "series" post here, but I missed a moment in the blogosphere a few weeks ago when people were talking about how the transition to high intensity energy use (burning coal, that is), created modernity. So this whole global warming thing has us back on the road to the caves, or something. It's nice to see John Landers' closely argued thesis finally get some traction.

On the other hand, I was disappointed by The Field and the Forge. It's not that I disagreed with it or anything. I just thought that Landers was offering the wrong global explanatory framework, one that has already gone sideways in Chinese history. So now that the moment has passed me by, my unfashionably late thoughts.

Also, links to myself: this isn't one of my little series, but it is a sequel to this, this, and above all, to this. Above all, it's bout taking Daniel Szechi seriously.
So let's get  in the mood!

So what does coal have to do with romanticising the Celts this time? Here's the meditation: sure, "The Skye Boat Song" is another sporran-full of schmaltz. ( I was going to post the Real McKenzies' version, but that particular selection challenged my heteronormative assumptions, and how often does an old-fashioned historian get to say "heteronormative?" Besides,  it's not a particularly impressive reinterpretation.) Old Kenneth McKellar, on the other hand, is pretty powerfully affecting. At least, to me, but then I've probably been exposed to more of his over-orchestrated prime than most. The Skye Boat Song is about the whole "lost cause" thing, and having an old man sing it seems to catch what the song is about (now) very well. "Seems," he said. There those Hanoverian spin doctors go again. People get old. Countries and political options don't. Find a way to buy enough people (and, admittedly, it would have to be a very large "lots"), and the Jacobite restoration could happen tomorrow.

What's really going on is simple enough. If you can't put a solid, rational argument for preferring the Hanoverian dynasty to the Stuarts, you use illegitimate rhetorical devices instead. If that makes the practice of history harder two centuries down the road, well that's a problem for the historians of two centuries in the future.
That is, if you care enough to be seen making bad arguments in public, something that good people don't do unless they think there's something important at stake. So it's time to talk about what's important, and where it leads.

Sigh. It's money, of course. And the conjunction of money and politics and guilty, weak arguments leads to foreign military misadventures, and corrupt people getting rich. But before I mutter about how the more things change and retire to cultivate my garden, I am going to stop and propose that it also led to the industrial revolution, in a much clearer way than the notional proposition that people suddenly discovered that coal burned real good.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse, IV: Why Pylos?

Another month's end, another set of disappointing economic results. Endless arguments about how public policy should respond to what seems to be a slide towards deflation. Maybe it is because it is election time in the United States that things seem both to be at their worst. (But when isn't it?) Is this going to be the new normal? Take it from this sometime Germanist: deflation can be normal. And that's not a good thing. Clearly, deflationary cycles can be broken by public policy. There's the Great Depression for an example, and also the way in which, in the early modern and above all the Nineteenth Century, deflationary cycles were broken by gold rushes and silver booms.It might seem apparent that the more valuable money becomes, the more there is to be made in winning it from the ground, but in reality, this was public policy at work.

How so? Money is not bullion. Money is a social artifact. We know that. We can define it as bullion,but an act of policy (specifically, the act of policy of saying that we don't understand these things and don't care to) is an act of policy. And we have a counter-example. For, whatever the causes of the end of the Roman Empire(it is, after all, far more common to read this as an episode of inflation than my counter-intuitive speculation abut deflation), there was evident currency disorder that didn't lead to the opening of the Saxon mines. If the end of the Roman Empire were a deflation, it was one in which increases in circulating money was not enough. There was a lack of demand that needed slating, but by, I suggested, by the restoration of  credit. I don't know. Does that make sense?

Anyway, if we're going to talk about policy lessons from past catastrophic, state-system-ending deflations, perhaps one accompanied by the appearance of a major new technology is more relevant to modern times. (Also, plant lipids, if anyone's wondering.) That would be the Late Bronze Age Collapse, perhaps the clearest case of a state system collapse accompanied by the rise of a really fundamental new technology, ironworking. In 1300BC, iron was a precious guest-present for kings, a metal given value by rarity and a connection with the Stormgod of Heaven.  In the c. 1050BC Lekandi "heroön" burial, iron tools and weapons have largely displaced bronze. That's our framework: state collapse and the appearance of a socially-disruptive but transformative technology. It only remains to find a deep causal link and really get this gloom-fest on the road.

Or not. All this modern talk is really just a framing device. What I really think is that the LBA collapse and following "Dark Age" is just too fascinating not to explore. The Middle Bronze Age collapse was "normal." These things happened all the time back then. The fall of the Roman Empire was earth-shattering. So the LBA collapse is a transitional moment --more reason to ask whether this particular technological change was somehow irreversible.

So just to refine our temporal parameters, I'm going to lay out what looks like a timeframe to me. Sometime after it occurred (obviously) Suppiluliuma II recorded a 1210 BC naval victory over Alasiya. Some people take that as foreshadowing, but I don't. Admirality is expensive, something for powerful rulers to indulge in, and the fact that it is commemorated in an impressive and expensive new monument at Hattusa tells us more.  Yet our only account of Suppiluliuma's later years is a king list that closes his reign in 1187, done by a pretender to his throne at Carchemish. And, nice as Carchemish is, it is not Hattusa. On its face, while a Hittite successor state may survive, it has lost its capital and its heartland. .

Another way to look at the time frame of the collapse is through the Assyrian annals. These sources suggest  the death of Tiglath-Pileser I in 1076 as a date for decline, and the accession of  Adad-nirari II (911BC) for a restoration. Or we can take the decision by the priests of Amun at Thebes to consolidate all of the royal mummies from the tombs at the Valley of the Kings in a single cache as an admission of defeat. State power had lost the fight against social disorder.

The long span of dates is justified by a centre-periphery mode,according to which the decline begins at the edge of the larger Middle Eastern world and moves inwards. Thus, when,in the very same annals we use to reconstruct the rhythms of the Assyrian state, we find consistent mention royal campaigns against "the Hittites," we find a change in the expected geographical perspective. For us, the story of the end of the Hittites is the fall of one centre (Hattusa), because we understand it as the Hittite heartland. That the Assyrians take this heartland to lie elsewhere perhaps signifies a contraction of highly organised state action towards its heartland. not of a claim to political continuity and ethnic identity. At the same time, we may reasonably ask why it was Cappadocia, specifically, that was abandoned. Because it was further away from Assyria is not much of an answer!

As for the priests of Amun, they are certainly preserving the ideologically vital mummies of dead royalty, but you don't have to be a dialectical materialist to notice that they didn't they re-inter most of the precious treasures  originally consigned to the royal graves. I can make up a story about deflation here, and others have, according to which all of this buried money must be recirculated, but the when of that recirculation matters.

Another way to tell this story is the way that Ángelos Chaniótis does here,quoting Curtis Runnels' fascinating observation (presumably from here; Google Books doesn't seem to want to let me look at bibliographies) that metals, which embed investment, experience and exchange, make an excellent medium for the storage of (social) capital. On the face of it, bronze, although less expensive than bullion, makes a better store of value. For while both gold and silver could be mined with the Middle East, tin entered the region from outside. From a strictly practical analysis, it would make little sense for a Middle Eastern state to turn bronze into a currency standard without knowing the rate at which tin was entering the region, but it is likely that no prince of that era would have even realised that such a statistic could potentially be known, much less what a currency standard might be. An exogenous collapse in the "price" of bronze due to a steady acceleration in the inflow of tin is surely a part of this story, but only a part of it, or we would find an effort to sterilise this inflow, something on the order of the explosion of tripod dedications at Olympia in the 700s.  


This is because, as I understand or recall some half-remembered articles encountered while browsing that lately deceased institution, the periodical stacks, the Late Bronze Age already had the rudiments of an international bullion standard, with standardised weights in lieu of coinage.* It clearly lacked a theoretical apparatus that would have allowed it to understand the workings of its own financial sector, but if bronze hoards weren't sustaining the state, silver and gold hoards would seem able to serve. But it didn't. The near-simultaneous collapse of Pylos and the other Mycenaean palace-principalities is still difficult to understand or conceptualise in this framework. The  financial instrument upon which they relied to store labour and speculative gains and reputation was suddenly, inexplicably losing its value, and the world was unwinding. Sure. Sort of like this, I think. Deflation breeds a hunger for money, but we're still left to explain the collapse in demand. Can iron do that, ahead of its introduction as a tool metal? Yes, I think that it can. (Or, rather, it can if we get away from too much specificity about the actual material.)

Or, it's a theory, anyway. Pulled out of my nether regions, of course, but remember: the project is a world history. That's like a license for ass-pulling!

And, thanks to the Web, I can also circle back on things that I can at least claim to know, specifically, the Battle of Navarino. Poor old Richard Helmstadter** would probably shake his head at hearing me claim to understand the Nineteenth Century context of the Greek Wars of Liberation way back there in London, but I do have a PhD field to my credit, enough to see that the Wikipedia article on the Battle of Navarino is a pretty good summary, and well linked. Here's an aerial, apparently a 1943 RAF surveillance photo. of the Bay of Navarino. Pylos seems to be just north of the crop, but you can see the flat and fertile land below it on the way to the Bay.

Linked via Wikipedia article***

In 1827, something happened here. 10 battleships-of-the-line and 10 frigates against 3 battleships and 17 frigates, plus lots of lesser vessels of very little importance. Was it this?



Or this?





That's history for you: one event, multiple interpretations. We humans. Bubbly Dutch girls against bare-armed leather boys. Warriors of the Faith verus warriors of Progress. 


Yeah. Enough of that. Here's a utilitarian point: the Bay of Navarino is an excellent anchorage, and big enough to stage a naval battle. Yet the lord of Pylos went to the trouble of excavating an artificial port in the dunes only 10 miles north. That, I modestly argue, tells us something concrete about the Late Bronze Age collapse. Sure, it's all a complex tapestry (if you're a real Simpsons fan, you'll remember the context of the quote from a little later in the episode), but here's a telling fact.  

Fall of France, 11: Making Free On The Land: Or, the Bailey Bridge

The Kriegswissenschaftliche Mémoiren collection of the War Archives of the Austrian State Archives contain many interesting and well-produced, even beautiful manuscripts. So many, in fact, that I've argued that you need some kind of sociological explanation to account for them. Disappointingly for those who want to raise the credibility of the whole military-intellectual racket, I found little of interest in the ones that dabbled in high philosophy. 


The technical manuals, on the other hand, are awesome. They all need to be digitised somehow and put on line. We just don't get how good those old guys were at doing stuff, because we don't understand the problems they solved. It's a lesson that historians of technology need to hammer home again and again until history finally takes cognizance of  the way that doing stuff --for example, moving artillery or 30 tonne tanks across country-- was, and is hard, and calls, and called upon, a substructure of skills and experience. It strikes me as a truism that that substructure is going to look like, and must look like, the everyday economy at work. 


That, for what it's worth, is the epiphany I had when looking at Lieutenant-Colonel Ano Turpin's two-volume treatise on artillery. (I'd like to know more about this guy, but there are all sorts of real and possible transcription problems here. Turpin may have been active in the 1720s or the 1770s. I'm thinking that "Ano" is  an abbreviation of "Antonio," and that his being a Piedmontese officer explains the Italian form of the personal name and a not-uncommon French last name. But I'm not overly satisfied with my conclusions.)


So what does Turpin have to say? That the well-known distinction between field and siege artillery is actually between "meadow" artillery and static. I'm translating freely back and forth here, just the way that a guy named Obristleutnant Antonio Turpin did, and I'm getting that "meadow artillery" gets thrown across the country so easily that commanders had to be careful that they didn't end up in a position where there wasn't enough grass around the feed the gun teams (contemplate for a moment what that means about the state of the roads and of the countryside round about), while  moving siege artillery is part of that project of moving things that aren't supposed to be moved. Imagine those massive teams and specially built bridges and whatnot that were required to move despoiled Egyptian obelisks, giant church bells or purpose-cast floodgates.


People move around easily. too easily, and end up places where they don't want to be. Armies only seem to do the same, and in reality must prepare in advance and tap into the contemporary transportation industry. But what if that industry is itself in flux? What if horses are going away and the semi is just being born? Then the times are out of joint. We really need to do a better job of fixing ourselves to times and context and understanding how human intervention has changed the landscape. Because our relationship with the landscape might go a lot deeper into our cognition than we entirely understand. 






Or we can just put the Royal Experimental Bridging Establishment to work. (This is funny and creative. I thought about embedding "Bridge Over Troubled Waters," but that would just sad. And by sad, I mean "pathetic.")

The Plantation of the Atlantic, VIII: The Rule of the Admiral

Hee. I'm hilariously riffing on Jeffrey Bannister's Rule of the Admirals. Because Christopher Columbus was appointed "Admiral of the Ocean Seas," and he came to grief when he tried to rule his discoveries in the New World, so that he died old and bitter, and maybe a bit of a religious maniac.




(Because they were playing old Johnny Cash at the local Chapters when I converted birthday money into this and this.)

Well, no, actually. It seems to me that there's a more useful way of thinking about all of this. Imagine for a second that Columbus was normal. Where does that lead us? To cassava, I think.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse, III: Sandy Pylos

I went looking for the edited collection of articles coming out of the University of Minnesota expedition to Pylos, a Middle Bronze Age--Later Bronze Age site on a ridge overlooking the western shore of the southern Peloponnese yesterday, which meant that I got to spend some time in the Koerner Library stacks. Which I love doing. Even if these days the experience all too often has me cringing in embarrassment for my alma mater, which really is getting to the point of shopping in the Adult Diapers section. (There's no Wifi in the stacks! If you're going to the trouble of installing campus-wide wifi on the one hand, and study space in the stacks on the other....I'm beginning to think that our civilisation is in decline. But where, or where, are our northern barbarians going to come from?)

But to come back to the stacks for a second, the virtue of shelf scanning is that it brings you in touch with the unexpected. In this case, Nino Luraghi's monograph on the history of ancient Messenia. I'm aware of Luraghi from shorter articles (as for example included here) that brilliantly apply the modern political/anthropological literature on ethnos formation to problematise ancient history. Well, here's the monograph that the shorter works promised. You know that class of historian who gets upset about how po-mo theory is all up in his narrative. Chances are that his supposed obvious interpretations of plain facts are just the constructions of old theories themselves. Historiographical progress isn't impeded by the theoretical deconstruction of these old narratives. It begins with that deconstruction!

Or something. Keynes managed to make this point more pithily, but what do I know about pithy?

On an Alternative Explanation for Human Demographic History: Or, I Don't Believe in Plague

I was so struck by the cleverness of my "unsettling of America" subtitle last time that it failed to cross my mind that it might not be read as the kind of revisionist contrarianism that I normally peddle here.

I want to argue that the emergence of European demand for furs caused a widespread cultural modification of the Eastern Woodlands in favour of fur production. So my "unsettling" is a human abandonment of the bottomlands, perhaps with very few significant human consequences. The "settling" is their resettlement. Largely between 1760 and 1776, in response to the crisis in the fur trade upon which early Americanist/military historian Walter Dunn insists so strongly, the Indians came down from the upper benches, built towns in the bottoms at places like Cooperstown, and chose to become Americans. Scalp/ceremonial poles became Liberty Trees became flagpoles, Earth Lodges became Masonic Temples, and the councillors all went to Congress in 1794.

But it's the general consensus that the Americas were "unsettled," in the sense of being depopulated, in the wake of first contact with Europeans. I cast around on Youtube briefly for a canned explanation, and found much that was dramatic and pseudo-plausible. But also this, which is fun:



Poor Gwen Stefani. It's an old story: she comes, she goes. It's unfair that someone like Gwen Stefani can't come back from a maternity break, that bringing new life into the world ends a woman's (public) life. Biology should not rule us! On the other hand, if you don't like Gwen Stefani, her sudden emergence and equally sudden disappearance is typical of a kind of artist and, well, like.... Well, it's like a plague. Biology should rule us! At least if it comes to getting rid of annoying girl singers. If anyone disliked Gwen Stafani (hard to believe), that's perhaps what they would think.

Pop culture's like that. Things come, go, get all jingle-jangled up 'till we have no idea what ever happened. Was that ship of corpses that carried death into the land the one that carried the Black Plague into Sicily, or Dracula into Whitby? I forget. Or was it both? Are the two things all mixed up? Subversive, infectious dangers from the East, come to take our wimmins?

I know this, though: I jumped into the middle of the story of the unsettling of America because the story makes no sense. Maybe I should try to, y'know, communicate why I think that.

Gather the Bones, 10: Unsettling America

I just caught a Vinyl Cafe rerun of an episode on "children's songs that are worth a listen." This was on it.



Good news. (For me.) There's still some CBC Radio listeners who are older than me, who remember wearing coonskin hats. (Cringe.) Some.

And that's today's provocation. Specifically, the apotheosis of Davy Crockett, striding off into the wilderness at the head of the western march, which "had just begun."

Really? Put it another way, with the authority of a real historian, William R. Polk, author of The Birth of America: From Before Columbus to the Revolution. Now, this is a bit unfair. Professor Polk is a Middle Eastern specialist, not an early Americanist. He is giving us a big picture review, perhaps out of some sense, well-merited but kept where it belongs, of having a personal stake in the antebellum and "the western march." In some ways, the worst that can be said of the result is that his treatment of the Indians as a little on the noble savage side.

In some ways. In 1962, the future professor worked in the restoration of a 1692-built Harvard home, an experience that he apparently found formative enough to discuss on pp. 144--45.

I get that: I worked for home restorers one summer as an undergraduate, and was deeply impressed with their faith in, and commitment to, the future, and their family's place in it. It's a very grounding perspective. Now, I don't know if that's the social context of Polk's experience. He's awfully private about some aspects of his life, and he could have been anything from summer labourer up to home owner.

So now I feel like a real heel. I'm bashing a worthy book by a good scholar, and I've chosen an episode that is clearly a happy episode from Polk's youth(ishness).

But he insists that the architectural novelties of this house, built by a shipwright in a shipbuilding town of lumber sawed for shipbuilding are due to its being a "garrison house." He cites Turner's "frontier thesis," and points to evidence from 1645, 1669, and 1675 as proof that in 1692, the "frontier" ran through Harvard Yard.