When Did the ME Go Wrong?

[Malthus]

But is that really true? Most pre-modern professional-type armies attempted to avoid inevitable death - the Romans for example had a system worked out to rotate the front rank fighters during battle as they got tired, in medieval times protective armour & the value of ransoms made capturing & not killing your opponents the ideal (save in dire necessity as at Agincourt), etc.

While warfare is, of course, rather violent and bloody, the casualty rates of individual battles are never as horrific as people imagine them to be.

I once really pissed someone off because I told them that the USAF could never sustain 10% losses on a per mission basis during the strategic bombing campaign of WW2, which he found to be insulting and ridiculously untrue since he KNEW that they commonly lost that many planes.

I'm kinda curious. Is there any work which actually addresses the relative casualty rates of battles in different eras? I'd imagine someone must have made a study of this.

My impression is that wars such as the Civil War & WW1 had particularly horrific casualty rates (horriffic in context meaning that *both* sides suffered horribly - many a premodern battle ended with a massacre of the losers). But it's an impression only.

[Jacob]

In contrast, "modern" war is horrifically violent, but doesn't actually impact as many persons.

What do you mean by modern war?

More or less as shorthand for what Oex is talking about - Euro-style war from colonial time on, cannons & guns.

It is sometimes unbearable to read how these guys would stand to be shot at, and suffer horrible injuries and casualties stoically (Keegan writes that it is no wonder most other peoples wouldn't stand for this).

The battlefield was horrible to be sure - but most Euros never saw one. In contrast the cviolence among the !Kung San tended to be of the Hatfield vs. McCoy type feud, involving a much greater portion of the population over a much longer period of time - the worry was not of facing a war, but of waking up dead because a member of a rival family yours is fueding with happened to spot your campfire ... and of course in that society there is no such thing as police or laws, the only thing restraining people is fear of reciprocal violence, and every person is trained in the use of hunting weapons.

Ah... just a reading comprehension thing on my part then.  I thought you said that "modern" wars didn't impact as many people as your !Kung example, which I think is wrong.  But that's not what you're saying, so nevermind

[Oexmelin]

This seems dangerously close to ignoring how fantastically violent many of the Native civilizations were.  The Aztecs were one of the few people on earth who could make the Spanish appear like liberators.  Without some kind of statistical evidence I find it hard to believe that pre-modern society (or rather "uncivilized" society) is less violent; all the evidence I have seen argues against this.

I know very well how «violent» Native societies are. I believe this sort of violence is incommensurable with that of early-modern Europe. My point, once again, is to show that if you want to compare these and trace a measure of «progress you *have* to make a judgement call. That tools should be valued for their productive uses (rather than, say,  their magical uses), that the aesthetics of the Renaissance are superior to those of the Ancients, that the idea of the equality of men is better than castes, that limited but brutal warfare is superior to limited casualty, endemic warfare of hunter-gatherers.

Once you have defined the goals, then things that contribute to said goals are seen as progress and those that do not are seen as setbacks. You can then argue for linear, general trends or dark ages but in the end, this is what PDH mentionned: it is teleological. It is the inevitable march towards Reason, or whatever other goal you have in mind. Things will happen regardless. The problem is then to try to make all the aberrant data fit the model or, indeed, to explain change.

If, philosophically, you are happy with the unexplainable nature of change, or the inevitable nature of change, that mankind «gets» universal Things once in a while (more often than not, technical things which are curiously unrelated to any sort of society), and that these things hint at the direction of things to come, then, indeed, progress can be equated with domination, and progress can be equated from less to more. That is, I believe, the common ground of the Enlightenment.

My point, and, I believe, Keynes' own, is that such a view is, in and of itself, historically situated. If you *do* believe that, then you organize a whole system of society based around producing more, imposing such and such idea, such and such conception of man. You create, in a way, a self-fulfilling prophecy, hinting at things that should be crushed, things that should be banished, things that should be fostered. You create systems who hint at the inherent superiority of man over Nature, of the White man over the Other, of the removal of God or Powers from the world, of all-governing self-interest, of a State separate from the personna of the governed and of the governors, of a rationale for which to use the weapons, of the private property of land, of ideas, etc. *That* to me, is the ensemble which made for the fact that Europe fostered technological discoveries, transformed the relationship of man to agregate, abstract processes, churned out cannons, tried to spread its own ideas about the equality of mankind, undermined other systems of values and beliefs, enslaved millions,  etc. Trying to pin it down to simple technological advances is, IMO, seeing the tree but neither the forest, nor the seed and care it took to nurture its growth.

[crazy canuck]

seeing the tree but neither the forest, nor the seed and care it took to nurture its growth.

Thats a nice turn of phrase. 

[Queequeg]

I know very well how «violent» Native societies are.

For the record I didn't doubt that you did; iirc you've done some work on First Nation peoples in Canada and Quebec.  javascript:void(0);

*That* to me, is the ensemble which made for the fact that Europe fostered technological discoveries, transformed the relationship of man to agregate, abstract processes, churned out cannons, tried to spread its own ideas about the equality of mankind, undermined other systems of values and beliefs, enslaved millions,  etc. Trying to pin it down to simple technological advances is, IMO, seeing the tree but neither the forest, nor the seed and care it took to nurture its growth.

I'd agree that civilian economic growth and technological advancement are symptoms of success rather than the cause of it (or rather the two re-enforce each other).  That's the reason I started this thread, after all; I wanted to know why fantastic economic and scientific progress, combined with an innovative and scientific mindset, didn't result in 'modernity' in the Islamic World, and why this specific kind of near-constant progress didn't take hold in Europe.

This is not, however, the question I was addressing.  There is a clear distinction between what constitutes progress and the circumstances in which progress (or, in this case, regress) happen. While my initial post inquired into the latter, my last few posts have been about diagnosing progress.

(more often than not, technical things which are curiously unrelated to any sort of society)

Don't agree.  I think the most technically innovative societies are, as a rule, among the most culturally innovative and militarily superior. 

[Oexmelin]

Don't agree.  I think the most technically innovative societies are, as a rule, among the most culturally innovative and militarily superior.

Indeed (apart from «culturally innovative»). I was describing how technological analysis is often (wrongly, in my view) examined as disconected from its context.

[Queequeg]

Don't agree.  I think the most technically innovative societies are, as a rule, among the most culturally innovative and militarily superior.

Indeed (apart from «culturally innovative»).

Hmm.  I suppose there is a correlation, but on second thought I don't think the relationship is as strong.  I wouldn't describe the early Caliphate or the Dutch Republic as particularly innovative in a strictly cultural sense (at least when compared to the Greeks, Renaissance Italy or Enlightenment France).  Oddly enough, I'd argue Islamic culture becomes a lot more interesting as it declines, particularly with the Samanids, Ghaznavids and Seljuks. 

[The Minsky Moment]

While I am unwilling to pigeonhole 'progress' I think it is safe to say that continued technological improvement and gradual increase in economic activity are two key parts of it, and it is very safe to say that those two things showed (on the whole) steady improvement over the last 5,000 years and at some specific points in history this would be apparent (specifically the early Caliphate, which, upon further reflection, is as good a proxy for the 19th Century European Imperial state as I can think of in terms of innovation and mindset).

The Umayyad Caliphate is entirely unlike 19th century Britain or France in nearly any respect that matters - political ideology, concepts of legitimation, the very basis of nationhood and "subjecthood".  In terms of organization of economic life, there is no comparison.

EDIT - oh crap, I lost the entire rest of answer.

Short summary - I dont agree that Rome was anything like the modern concept of a nation, I don't agree that a Roman or Venetian merchant could slot in to being a modern conglomerate CEO or a managing director at Goldman Sachs without massive culture shock and wholesale re-education.

[crazy canuck]

Short summary - I dont agree that Rome was anything like the modern concept of a nation, I don't agree that a Roman or Venetian merchant could slot in to being a modern conglomerate CEO or a managing director at Goldman Sachs without massive culture shock and wholesale re-education.

Come on JR, surely trading derivatives is the same as trading cloth on the pier.

[Queequeg]

The Umayyad Caliphate is entirely unlike 19th century Britain or France in nearly any respect that matters - political ideology, concepts of legitimation, the very basis of nationhood and "subjecthood".  In terms of organization of economic life, there is no comparison.

The Abbasid was more what I had in mind due to the Ummayad's Arab supremacist inclinations.  I think a comparison could be made with Napoleonic France, but with that said I think I said "closest" rather than "exact".  I see parallels rather than exact correspondences (Napoleonic view of France encompassing Europe-Abbasid's expansion of Islam to include non-Arabs, creativity, universalism, land-based, scientific mindset, fanaticism).  That said, France's secularity and the importance of the slave trade to the Abbasids are glaring, fundamental differences that I can't wish away through parallel.

Short summary - I dont agree that Rome was anything like the modern concept of a nation, I don't agree that a Roman or Venetian merchant could slot in to being a modern conglomerate CEO or a managing director at Goldman Sachs without massive culture shock and wholesale re-education.

1) Venetian trade goods merchant isn't comparable to a banker in a lot of ways.  This isn't a totally fair comparison; the Medicis and the Rothschilds would have been doing vaguely similar things well into modernity, the same can be said of people in the shipping/transport business (and with the increasing importance of the Orient we seem to be witnessing a return of sorts to history).
2) A lot of the most fundamental change I think has happened not in the last 200 years of European Industrialization but rather in the last, say, eighty.   I remember reading about people, when watching The Great Train robbery for the first time, running out of the theater to avoid the train.  Moderns won't do that unless they are Graduate Students in East Asian Philosophy at Boulder.  Forty years ago your average hotel desk manager would have used a ledger similar to one the Romans used to keep track of clients, rooms and payment due.  Now we have computers, blackberries, cellphones, etc...

[Malthus]

This seems dangerously close to ignoring how fantastically violent many of the Native civilizations were.  The Aztecs were one of the few people on earth who could make the Spanish appear like liberators.  Without some kind of statistical evidence I find it hard to believe that pre-modern society (or rather "uncivilized" society) is less violent; all the evidence I have seen argues against this.

I know very well how «violent» Native societies are. I believe this sort of violence is incommensurable with that of early-modern Europe. My point, once again, is to show that if you want to compare these and trace a measure of «progress you *have* to make a judgement call. That tools should be valued for their productive uses (rather than, say,  their magical uses), that the aesthetics of the Renaissance are superior to those of the Ancients, that the idea of the equality of men is better than castes, that limited but brutal warfare is superior to limited casualty, endemic warfare of hunter-gatherers.

Once you have defined the goals, then things that contribute to said goals are seen as progress and those that do not are seen as setbacks. You can then argue for linear, general trends or dark ages but in the end, this is what PDH mentionned: it is teleological. It is the inevitable march towards Reason, or whatever other goal you have in mind. Things will happen regardless. The problem is then to try to make all the aberrant data fit the model or, indeed, to explain change.

If, philosophically, you are happy with the unexplainable nature of change, or the inevitable nature of change, that mankind «gets» universal Things once in a while (more often than not, technical things which are curiously unrelated to any sort of society), and that these things hint at the direction of things to come, then, indeed, progress can be equated with domination, and progress can be equated from less to more. That is, I believe, the common ground of the Enlightenment.

My point, and, I believe, Keynes' own, is that such a view is, in and of itself, historically situated. If you *do* believe that, then you organize a whole system of society based around producing more, imposing such and such idea, such and such conception of man. You create, in a way, a self-fulfilling prophecy, hinting at things that should be crushed, things that should be banished, things that should be fostered. You create systems who hint at the inherent superiority of man over Nature, of the White man over the Other, of the removal of God or Powers from the world, of all-governing self-interest, of a State separate from the personna of the governed and of the governors, of a rationale for which to use the weapons, of the private property of land, of ideas, etc. *That* to me, is the ensemble which made for the fact that Europe fostered technological discoveries, transformed the relationship of man to agregate, abstract processes, churned out cannons, tried to spread its own ideas about the equality of mankind, undermined other systems of values and beliefs, enslaved millions,  etc. Trying to pin it down to simple technological advances is, IMO, seeing the tree but neither the forest, nor the seed and care it took to nurture its growth.

See, this is exactly the nature of the debate - you are comming at it from a totally different angle, that of value - judgments. I'm not talking about value-judgments at all, and I disagree that they are inevitably necessary to understand why some cultures are expansionist and others are not.

The question is how one society got to the place where it was capable of spamming the world with cannons and McDonalds. Merely wishing to do so is not an adequate explaination. To that end, it is obvious to me at least that the culture or ideology of dominion develops hand in hand with the technology that enables that dominion to happen: no amount of colonialism and will-to-dominance on the part of the Aztecs (and they had plenty) would have enabled the Aztecs to colonize Spain - rather than the other way around. Your position (and that of Minsly) seems to posit some type of spirit or ideology a la "the Protestant Work Ethic" to explain western domination - my own position does not rely on such; in my opinion, the question is better explained, not through some innate cultural "conception of man" that differs from Europe and say China (such differences have traditionally been highly overstated by people who know a lot about Europe and less about China), but through historical contingencies -  China suffered from Mongol & Manchu invasions and Europe by and large did not.

In short, you are seeing the beauty of the forest when the question at hand is why *some* people are capable of making chain-saws to cut that forest down and make it into Ikea furniture, and others are not. To state that those who are not simply didn't want to is IMHO to put the ideological cart before the historical horse.

[The Minsky Moment]

1) Venetian trade goods merchant isn't comparable to a banker in a lot of ways.

The fair comparison is either with the CEO of a conglomerate trading company or someone running a commodities trading desk.  Either way the Venetian would be baffled.

the Medicis and the Rothschilds would have been doing vaguely similar things well into modernity

Historically, the Rothschilds were the link between the pre-modern court bankers and modern banking.  What made the Rothschilds so successful is that they were truly revolutionary in the way they handled information - to the degree that the old-style court bankers they competed were left in the dustbin of history.  But the Rothschilds themselves, despite their business savvy and innovation, were themselves soin passed by the new-style bankers based on the financing of the new limited liability corporations.  It is a testament to the speed of change during this time that within a few decades the Rothschilds transformed the business of finance, and yet within a few decades after that, receded from the front rank of finance as a result of new developments they failed to keep pace with.

To put it more pithily, while it is possible that the Medicis might have been able to catch on to high finance as practiced by the Rothschilds in the 1830s, they would have been baffled by the world of finance as practiced by the House of Morgan in the 1890s.

the same can be said of people in the shipping/transport business (and with the increasing importance of the Orient we seem to be witnessing a return of sorts to history).

I think this a poor example for you.  It may seem like shippers are doing the same thing - ie sending cargo in boats.  But the 19th century revolutionized the *business* of shipping in radical ways -- the way in which capital is raised and deployed, how risks are managed, the role of communications, labor practices, leasing markets, and so forth.  16th century English or Italian ship owners would have no clue what to do if placed in charge of even a relatively small modern shipping company.

The present day "Oriental" shippers you refer to are really in the business of asset management (ownership vs. leasing of fleets), derivatives trading (freight forward contracts), raising and deploying capital in creative ways, and regulatory arbitrage.

A lot of the most fundamental change I think has happened not in the last 200 years of European Industrialization but rather in the last, say, eighty.

I do agree with that point.  The 19th century (at least in Europe) saw more fundamental change in human society than the previous 2000 years combined.  But the 20th century was even more revolutionary than the 19th.  That is the consequence of organizing an entire society on the animating principle of material and technical progress.  "Growth" can have the effect of compounding interest, acting upon the stock of capital of technological know-how, thus causing a geometric acceleration in the pace of change.  (how long that pace can be sustained I can't say).

Thus, your argument looks stronger when you pick a date not far into the period and somewhat removed from the core geographic areas of advancement (say Istanbul in 1850    ).  My argument looks stronger if the comparative is say New York in the 1920s or Singapore in the 1990s. 

[PDH]

EDIT - oh crap, I lost the entire rest of answer.

See, my students use this ploy as well.

[The Minsky Moment]

The question is how one society got to the place where it was capable of spamming the world with cannons and McDonalds. Merely wishing to do so is not an adequate explaination.

But you have argued quite persuasively that several societies were capable of doing so.  So wishing to do so takes on great significance.

Your position (and that of Minsly) seems to posit some type of spirit or ideology a la "the Protestant Work Ethic" to explain western domination - my own position does not rely on such; in my opinion, the question is better explained, not through some innate cultural "conception of man" that differs from Europe and say China (such differences have traditionally been highly overstated by people who know a lot about Europe and less about China), but through historical contingencies -  China suffered from Mongol & Manchu invasions and Europe by and large did not.

There is a radical ideological shift - I will say that.  Such a shift is in itself a historical contingency so I am not sure about the distinction being made here.  It seems that (like Diamond) you are wary of an explanation (like Weber's classical formulation) that implies is some way that there was some special human character that certain western people had that other (inferior??) people lacked.  It is right to resist such an implication but neither Oex or I are proffering anything like that.  Historical contingency -- not innate ethno-religious character -- is at the root of the ideological shift.  But it is a different sort of historical contigency than the Manchu invasion, which seems to be a poor explanation of why China did not initiate the transformation to the modern.

In short, you are seeing the beauty of the forest when the question at hand is why *some* people are capable of making chain-saws to cut that forest down and make it into Ikea furniture, and others are not.   

Everyone is *capable* of making a chain-saw to cut down forests to make Ikea furniture.  For it Ikea to happen though, you need an international market, cheap shipping, limitied liability corporations, complex systems of advertising, marketing and distribution, an autonomous legal system, radical new conceptions of property rights.  In short a vast and complex social infrastructure.  Such a thing does not spontaeneously spring forth like Minerva from the head of Zeus, as a natural outgrowth of inevitable social evolution in the absence of pesky steppe nomads.  Rather, it requires a rather jarring shift in ideological perspective to even conceive of doing such a thing.

[Malthus]

The question is how one society got to the place where it was capable of spamming the world with cannons and McDonalds. Merely wishing to do so is not an adequate explaination.

But you have argued quite persuasively that several societies were capable of doing so.  So wishing to do so takes on great significance.

The one does not follow from the other. Several societies had the capacity to achieve the breakthrough to modernity - but I would argue that they were prevented or retarded from doing so, by historical contingencies. Not by "not wishing to".

There is a radical ideological shift - I will say that.  Such a shift is in itself a historical contingency so I am not sure about the distinction being made here.  It seems that (like Diamond) you are wary of an explanation (like Weber's classical formulation) that implies is some way that there was some special human character that certain western people had that other (inferior??) people lacked.  It is right to resist such an implication but neither Oex or I are proffering anything like that.  Historical contingency -- not innate ethno-religious character -- is at the root of the ideological shift.  But it is a different sort of historical contigency than the Manchu invasion, which seems to be a poor explanation of why China did not initiate the transformation to the modern.

Disagree. How can the invasion of a nation by a tribe of nomadic Manchus, who then proceed to fossilize that society in its most backward and conservative form, not have a major impact on it?

I agree that the shift to modernity is a "contingency" (we all agree on that) - what we disagree is on what caused that contingency to occur. I believe it is based on other contingencies, and from what I've seen so far, it would appear that you & Oex are the ones arguing that it sprang into being Athena-like.

Everyone is *capable* of making a chain-saw to cut down forests to make Ikea furniture.  For it Ikea to happen though, you need an international market, cheap shipping, limitied liability corporations, complex systems of advertising, marketing and distribution, an autonomous legal system, radical new conceptions of property rights.  In short a vast and complex social infrastructure.  Such a thing does not spontaeneously spring forth like Minerva from the head of Zeus, as a natural outgrowth of inevitable social evolution in the absence of pesky steppe nomads.  Rather, it requires a rather jarring shift in ideological perspective to even conceive of doing such a thing.

And you are proposing that this "jarring ideological shift" came from where ... ?

No, the whole point is that everyone is not capable of doing it. The Aztecs could not have done it. Why do I say that? Because the Aztecs lived on a planet in which, compared to other civilizations they were quite comprehensively backwards. The Aztecs were never going to be the ones spamming the world with McDonalds, no matter how much their ideology changed, because when compared to Euros and Asians, they were a bunch of stone age primitives (in spite of their impressive cities etc.).

This appears to be the vital point you are missing, in holding tha things haven't "progressed' since Sumer. Progress is relative and compared with civilizations such as the Aztecs, *all* of the high civlizations of Europe, the ME and Asia were very "progressive" indeed - and the balance between then was fine. There was nothing inevitable about Euro dominance and, while that dominance was accompanied by many changes in ideology, the ideology did not *cause* the dominance - it was a *symptom* of it.