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.
Today's theme, again, is the bold rejection of a past without painfully shallow but still real curve of population increase, and thus also of technological progress, or, I guess I should say, GDP per person. (The hypothesis being that we can throw out claims about culture and take these as necessarily related.) This vision is only possible if we understand human demography to be so radically constrained that it is not useful to think about our ancestors as pressing the carrying capacity of the landscape, because such "Malthusian" pressure would be indistinguishable from technological change. That is to say, that the history of technology (hence population growth) can be inferred at any point in human history. Even the invention of agriculture --in any case not to be seen as a binary on/off switch, but a transition embracing the whole of the Upper Paleolithic-- is not a decisive moment of transition.
The fall of the Roman Empire, however, is, because it is the last example of the collapse of an archaic state in our inventory of historical examples; the best historical candidate for understanding our current troubles, as social commentators have grasped for generations. Which is to say, the fact that I'm doing what people have been doing for centuries is a feature, not a bug!
The argument here is that it is not particularly plausible that the Roman Empire in the west fell through either largescale invasion or endogenous economic or demographic decline. I expect military success to attend the armies of rich and populous nations, and such evidence as there is for Roman economic decline locates it in the second and third centuries, well before the state itself fell. As with so many proposed caused of the fall of the Roman Empire, cause comes far too early for effect.
On the contrary, trends cited as evidence of both feature prominently in James Scott's account of the "art of not being governed." Supposed barbarian invasions are better understood as ethnogenesis, an overall trend that nicely accounts for the loss of Roman family names within family descents, the rise of heresy, and the end of literacy in the secular Latin West. Deurbanisation and apparent site abandonment are similarly common symptoms of archaic (and more recent) state collapse. I'd even point to tax evasion, if I were not coming to that. According to James Scott, these indicate resistance to extractive state institutions.
The problem is that Scott puts his model forward with some ideological naivete. For Scott, the story is of an underpopulated region, where there are always empty, or near-empty ecological niches into which to flee. It is not obvious that any such thing existed in Europe. In a Boserupian narrative, we salvage these state-free geographies with new technologies consequent to the very success of the Roman Empire in fostering economic growth. That is, we assume that the growth was unequally distributed, and that increasingly many western Romans saw an advantage in escaping the Roman social order. Better feudalism, they said, than Romanitas.
It's not exactly a new argument. If I want to tell the story of the fall of Roman Empire in terms of disruptive technologies, I could just point to the stirrup and we'd be comfortably back in the 1950s, or the iron plougshare and take us back to the 1930s or earlier. These won't hold, but that doesn't mean that it is impossible to tell the story of pre-medieval Europe as a chapter in the history of technology.
So, yeah, I think that I have a skeleton of an account that I'm going to lay down, right after I expose some B.C. homeboys to my semi-worldwide audience of tens and tens of people. It's even vaguely relevant, although I mostly picked it for sentimental reasons that are pointless to explain.
First, some housekeeping. Interest in the subject of the First Nations and Black DNA share of White Americans is great, the research effort is not so impressive. Per Wikipedia, this 2007 paper is still state of the art, but nowadays even dumb people like me can gin up a citation search and find later work in the same vein.
Next, we used the Native Americans, East Asians, Eurasians, and Sub-Sahara Africans from HGDP-CEPH as parental groups of the U.S. Americans (the genotype data of the 24 autosomal SNPs can be found in the Supp. Table S5) in a STRUCTURE analysis. Self-declared U.S. Europeans showed on average 93.2% of European ancestry (95% CI from 73.23% to 98.09%), self-declared U.S. Asians carried on average 89.5% of East Asian ancestry (95% CI from 37.43% to 97.46%), and self-declared U.S. Africans revealed on average 86.2 % Sub-Sahara African ancestry (95% CI from 47.82% to 98.5%)
It's interesting that by a naive reading of the data, which is not the only one possible, self-declared US East Asians would be more "Indian" than self-declared European Americans. I speculated about this possibility, obliquely, here. The virtual disappearance of the West Coast's Hawaiian minority is an interesting parallel.
So there was a black-haired girl who belted them. She was the partner of the Governor of California, so I thought of her as a personification of the golden state of the west, and here's a song with gold and silver in it. Also, quite dispensably, the Eagles.
Then something happened. I tell a story to myself about that, about how she's older now and doesn't like to sing so hard. It's obviously wrong, but blaming time and age works for me. It works for all of us; that's why we tell our little story about empires aging, albeit vaster and more slow. Rome: it's a story about how we all get older. Or, more likely, it's a compelling historical event that keeps getting turned into A Hugely Relevant Story About How Right Now Is Just Like The Fall of Rome, And We Better Quit It, Or We'll All Be Sorry. That's a summary of this post, if you hadn't guessed.
Before I get to the meat of it, though, another one, just like that:
Neo-cons have been getting English-speaking powers into stupid wars for so long that I think there was a Kagan who didn't get his job through nepotism pushing for an Afghan war in early 1878. As always, things got sticky. A British force and accompanying journalists got to enjoy winter in Kabul
in 1879—80 under semi-siege by self-appointed "warriors of the faith" (ghazi). Taking time out from the little war, journalist Howard
Hensman went to the Kabul Arsenal to find out how the Afghans had been spending their large British subsidy. It turned out that the arsenal was making perfectly satisfactory steel breech-loading rifled Armstrong pattern guns. Extra Oriental colour was provided by the information that the guns were bored out, rifled and polished at the
water mills Deh-i-Afghan, run by a “Hindustani” named Muah Khan,
who learned his art from a “Negro named Belal,” who was in turn
the apprentice of an Iranian who came to Kabul early in the century. The arsenal had to put in a major research and development effort to produce modern fuzes, but had much less trouble setting up a percussion cap factory, and I do mean factory. (Here, 322--24.)
As often in Afghan interventions, controlling Kabul just meant more trouble with Kandahar and Herat. When the occupation settled for backing Kandahar, it basically invited a Herati invasion of the Helmand Valley by Herati General Hafizullah Naib at the head of 11 battalions of infantry and 32 guns. No Kandahar government, no matter where its masters kept their palace,could tolerate Heratis in the Helmand, so a British column of three infantry battalions, two cavalry squadrons, 2 half batteries and a pioneer field squadron set out to meet him, with
Hafizullah Naib managed to outmaneouvre the British, taking the granaries of
the village of Maiwand. This would have allowed him to take winter quarters in the upper valley, so the British advanced to expel him, thinking themselves outnumbered by as much as 2476 men to 6000. (Hensman, 462ff.). Those were not, however, outlandish odds for Oriental warfare, so when the survivors of the battle returned to report over 50% British/Indian casualties, all were duly appalled. It came out right in the end, but people were left wondering how it happened, although the answer is in the general's account of the battle, describing an artillery duel of a battle won, not surprisingly given the disparity of force, by the Afghans.
It's just that this is not the answer that we have. The London papers didn't like this version, so they added a vast, vague hordes of 10,000 ghazi to the Herati army, and Lord Roberts later upped the ante to 25,000. It's not that I'm saying that the ghazis weren't there, although I strongly suspect that they weren't. It's that we know what won the battle: superior Afghan firepower produced by a not-far-behind-cutting-edge military industrial complex. The fact that fabulists turn it into a victory for a general with half the East at heel just shows how much the average pretentious commentator likes to quote Houseman.
People keep talking about when the "Great Divergence" happened, when the West gained that crucial tech level on the Rest and officially became H. Sap.'s vanguard of progress. (Mood music.) One person likes the French Revolution, another the Scientific Revolution, yet another the Reformation. My scholarly grandfather spent his career pushing the crucial date back to the Middle Ages, if not Constantine the Great. Jared Diamond wants to blame continental drift, near as I can make out.
Me? I'm saying that it can't have happened until after Maiwand. So, you know, all those attempts to explain the West's advantage "culturally"? Blah blah essentialism racism Sokal Hoax naturalistic epistemology blah.
Okay? Glad I got that out of my system. What if we do this another way? By this I mean that instead of arguing endlessly about culture and technology, let's get the hell into the tank with Ester Boserup and Nathan Rosenberg. I'm not going to argue, I'm going to propose. Let's treat technology as purely endogenous to the economy. Technological progress is nothing but capitalised learning by doing. Basically, the technological level of a given society is a function of its population, nuanced by the fact that while any work of the hand will come to be done more efficiently as people do more of it, capital has to be invested in the process to realise productivity improvements. This isn't even a claim about human nature; but rather about microeconomics, a field I'm so poorly equipped to argue in that it's not even funny. That's why I say, let's take it as a hypothesis. Let's drive our tank around the ruin of the Roman Empire today, and, if I don't get distracted in the mean time, around the longrun history of Europe next week.
A long time ago, I wrote a juvenile article about the RAF
and Britain’s war effort. I called it an industrial history of strategy because
it took issue with R. J. Overy’s “production history of strategy" (the which he did not call it ) The Air War, 1939—45. As I conceived it, Corelli Barnett was
already in the business of writing industrial histories of strategy. It’s just that
his were terrible. There you have it: a neat
little thesis. As you might guess from this blog, it turned into a 72 page screed, and bless the Journal of Military History for nursing it into print.
I had my reasons for prolixity. There were just so many people saying such silly, wrong things in
print about the air war. I wanted to make an impression. Apparently, I might as well have been butting a brick wall.
Why care? Let's, by all means, ramp up the stakes. The idea of an Air Ministry was laid out in 1911, and it was created in 1918, on the basis of what British politicians, civil servants, industrialists, and trade unionists thought was the solid model of the Royal Navy. While the Ministry wasn't swimming in either money or manpower, it was the largest and best funded air force of the interwar years. (You'll have to take my word for it; the numbers are laid out in my article, but they're just collated from the British state papers on the one hand, and a life of Admiral Moffat on the other.) When I got my anorak on, I counted some sixteen thousand aircraft delivered by the British industry during the interwar. That's a lot more than anyone else ordered, even taking the German surge of the late 30s into account. If policy failed in the face of this relative generosity of resources and thought about the problems of policy, we have reason to be pessimistic about the possibilities for public policy in general.
So I promised that I'd talk about polo and bicycles. (Also fox hunting and the King's Cup Aero Race). How about this: aspirational sport fashions come and go. Looking at them might be an interesting way of doing a landscape reception study.
Now what's really crawled into my brain this week and won't let go until I've talked about it:
From Anarchyandchaos: "Longing for the end times since I hit puberty."
Let's see how long that image stays up. Thanks to taking a transfer to a new store to keep my current (very new and very nice) employment status, I've been spending a great deal of time on busses and a main transit spur line not-to-be-named in the interest of giving my employer some plausible deniability in case I'm ever inclined to rant about the grocery business here,* and that means spending a lot of time trapped with the book you see here. It's brilliant, stimulating, rambling, repetitive, annoying and frustrating. And boy, does it make you think about other things than the people you'll see so much less now that you're working at some not-to-be-named place in the inner suburbs.
So what's the story here? For better or worse, we have a set of nation-building chronicles that lead us to a complex constellation of as many as 50 Southeast Asian theater/mandala/padi states spread throughout the region in about 1600, speckled on bottom lands spread through the Indosinian orogeny. Today, we have the modern nations that these texts serve to historicise, which have filled out the map Southeast Asia in the blocks of solid colour, as the modern nation state paradigm does. Taking the approach of the maps to the recorded political geography of 1600, and you can produce the same kind of map, although you'll need more crayons.
In that sense, we have a history of the uplands. Get the right map, and we'll be able to determine if any arbitrary place in Southeast Asia is part of Pagan, Lan Xang, Annam, Ngoenyang, or choose your own exotic ASEAN name. Just look at the colour key.
Which is, of course, completely unhelpful. Whether you prefer to talk about the "raw" barbarians, forest Mleccha, or even Appalachian hillbillies, chances are you're going to gesturing in the direction of non-state spaces. Western observers entered Southeast Asia in the Nineteenth Century and promptly discovered an indigenous non-state space in the highlands. Amateur ethnography gave way to state funded political anthropology just after the middle of the last century for various reasons (mood music), part of a full-blown commitment to the stability of the Southeast Asian state that had the usual results. Burmese authorities, meanwhile, proved that it wasn't necessary to be colonised to end up in a guerilla/civil war in the highlands. With a little more detachment from external bogeymen and grand ideological commitments, area scholars proposed a new conceptual label for upland Southeast Asia. It is the Zomia, and by definition it is non-state space, at least until recently.
What we've done here is create a conceptual region by cutting it off from the history that used to constitute it. And, of course, that's a fine thing for political anthropologists to do, because there are lots of questions that, say, development agencies might want to put to the upland that don't require a commitment to what the region looked like in 1200AD. All the same, you might want to ask how these regions got the way they are, at which point you're writing the history of a region without history. Which, again, is hardly an impossible thing to do. I've read some great histories-without-history, and I have a good sense of what to look for: tour-de-force archaeology and gentle criticism of ancient (and Nineteenth Century) cosmogenic historical fantasy (1, 2,3, 4, 5)).
Well, that's not what you get here. What you get here is a rambling, repetitive case for writing such a history of Zomia, maybe, one day, when the archaeology is in. In the mean time, one can gesture in the direction of what such a history might one day look like. And if the rambling is the bad part, this is very definitely the good part.
If you don't have time to make the jump, here's an excellent summary by an old friend of the blog:
This post is not about Vienna, but Vienna could hardly not be central to it.For a young graduate student, too over-conscious of his own budget to travel elsewhere in Europe, it was a sole encounter with the built environment of a great European city, and one of his all-too-few chances to get to know a strange city by getting on public transit, riding the line until he was as lost as he could get, and then riding it back. (Spoiler alert: that graduate student was me! Had you going there for a minute, didn't I?)
I lived at a youth hostel near the Hutteldorf-Hietzing station of the U4 Unterbahn line, built on the hill above the valley that the Vienna River cuts as it winds south of the heights of the Kahlenberg towards the city whose wet ditch it fills. The estate proper was the grounds of a bishop's palace, with an Augustinian monastery and a parochial school still near and over an old Imperial hunting reserve, and the U4 follows the course of the river and the old Linz road on its way to town. If you've taken the subway to see the Schönbrunn Palace, you've taken the U4.
Hey, I know! Let's try not valorising the physical tells of borderline personality disorder and enable a descent into morbid substance abuse!*
Every day that the new Staatsarchiv was open, I took the U4 to its intersection with the U3 line in the Landstrasse, one of a number of multilevel subway stations somehow existing under massive inner city buildings (in this case a rail station) in some nether realm between the properly underground and the aboveground worlds.
Which I wouldn't recognise, because in the interim they've done this on the site. Wikipedia.
It was always a marvel to me the way that inner Vienna was linked and tunnelled and built. This is perhaps because the U4-U3 axis is a little eccentric by tourist standards. It was he Landestrasse that Metternich was looking down when he said that the Balkans ended a few blocks down, and the neighbourhood earns its reputation by virtue of being a bit of a backwater. The river meets the Danube Canal around here in (of course), marshy low-lying ground. There tends to be a bit of an off-taste in the air, the architecture is unexplaining, and looking down the shopping district, by guide recalled the Metternich comment, although different strokes for different folks, because the sight of all the Asian touristgirls just reminded me of home!
The regular tourist gets off the U4 at Karlsplatz, and then either takes the U2 a few blocks more, or ascends to the surface, and, ignoring Karl VI's roccoco masterpiece of a commemorative cathedral, heads out along what was once the great enceinte of the fortress on the great Ringstrasse that was built on the filled-in wet ditch once fed by the Vienna River (I presume through a sluice contained within the works?) That's the way to go to see the Hofburg and its unerwhelming Roman ruins, followed by the local and federal parliament, state
and popular operas; museums of art and science, and the new
university buildings. It's all quite ideologically numinous, and I could make some strained point about state-building knowledge literally replacing earthwork fortifications, were it not for the fact that the ring road eventually reaches the an entire campus of the University of Vienna devoted to training civil engineers, reminding us that at the same time that the Ringstrasse was built, the Danube was being tamed. Between 1870 and 1875, a new, concrete-bound main bed, 900ft wide and 10ft
deep was excavated, with a sacrificial zone 1500ft deep on the left bank for
flooding, and fully 2400 acres on the right bank won for
construction of a greater Vienna, much of it in the hip Thirteenth District. The point? Well, that would be fifteen hundred acres of flooding ground astride the main Berlin road. Not that the K (u.) K. Heer was planning to lose another battle in the lands between Prussia and Austria. But even so.
I saw a great deal of this area, thanks to setting out to find the site of Wagram without the aid of a map. I never got there, but, in the long run, I think seeing the inner suburbs and the recreational boating areas on the Danube were more inspiring. This is a tamed landscape. It's part of a change that took place in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century that the majority of people who live in heavily built landscapes don't even realise has occurred (ask a libertarian intellectual about what happens to books in floods, if you don't believe me), and that those who don't hardly even realise needed to be done. If you do live in flooding ground, you probably think that it happens in Mississippi or Port Alice because of where they're built, and that Vienna and London were built somewhere where it just doesn't flood. It ain't true. It just looks that way because of all the concrete and iron that was buried between about 1872 and 1914.
Wait. Jutland? What does a naval battle have to do with the Battle of France? Or the Somme, for that matter. And for such an anticlimactic battle on top of it? (Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan? Hopefully you won't miss the point of the reference, like these guys did.)
It gets worse, though. I've babbled about London as a fortress/electric city, about the location of RFC/RAF bases on commuter lines, about broaching and forging shells. I see a connection. Can I communicated it? Probably not. The sand bars have piled too high on the eastern shore of the North Sea, and this post will ship too much water to get across and home safe to haven.
