Extra Credits
Published on 7 Jul 2018Between 3 and 6 percent of the world’s population died in 18 months when the flu first tried to take over the world. In today’s episode we explore the flu outbreak’s origins from military camps across the United States and Canada.
The flu was the first modern plague — turning our interconnected world against us by spreading through shipping lanes, rail lines and the arteries of industrialized war. Yet it was also the first pandemic of the scientific age, where doctors could to some extent understand what was happening and stand against the infection, though they lacked the tools to stop it. Also, say hello to the voice of “professor” Matt!
July 9, 2018
1918 Flu Pandemic – Emergence – Extra History – #1
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July 2, 2018
Drowsy Maggie – Scottish Indian Punjabi Mix (The Snake Charmer)
TheSnakeCharmer
Published on 4 Jun 2018When a 200 year old Traditional Scottish Folk song gets a Punjabi Dubstep revival by The Snake Charmer. A multi cultural music video with Britain’s Castles, highland dancers, Bagpipes, Graffiti walls from India, punjabi folk, bhangra dancers, Russian violinist and a crazy dhol player get together to showcase the amazing diversity in the world and how we all have something in common and can contribute to each other despite the distance and differences. Enjoy this brand new Celtic punjabi mix with Bagpipes.
Patreon (Support me for as less as $1) – https://www.patreon.com/thesnakecharmer
GET MP3
iTunes – https://goo.gl/eoszgf
Google Play – https://goo.gl/3sGBgbBagpipes – Archy Jay
Violin – MadinaHighland Dancers – Northumberland Church of England Academy combined cadet Force, Laura Greyson, Whistle School of Highland Dance.
Bhangra Group – https://www.facebook.com/bhangrainspire/
Dhol Player – Sarthak Pahwa
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July 1, 2018
Mapping medieval trade routes
Open Culture linked to a fascinating new map by a Swedish grad student, showing trade routes during the Medieval period:
A small portion of Martin Jan Månsson’s trade map of the Middle Ages.
“I think trade routes and topography explains world history in the most concise way,” Månsson explains in the very small print at the map’s lower right corner. “By simply studying the map, one can understand why some areas were especially important–and remained successful even up to modern times.”
The map covers 200 years, spanning both the 11th and 12th centuries, and “depicts the main trading arteries of the high Middle Ages, just after the decline of the Vikings and before the rise of the Mongols, the Hansa and well before the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope.”
It also shows the complex routes already available to Africa and Asia, and the areas where Muslim and Christian traders would meet. The open-to-trade Song Dynasty ruled China, and the competitive kingdoms in the Indonesia region provided both Muslims and Europeans with spice.
Looking like a railway map, Månsson’s work shows how interconnected we really were back in the Middle Ages, from Greenland in the west to Kikai and Kagoshima in the East, from Arkhangelsk in the frozen north to Sofala in modern-day Mozambique.
The full-sized, high-resolution map can be downloaded here.
Update: Tim Worstall was kind enough to link to this post and uses Månsson’s map to help explain the gravity model of trade:
A standard observation is that places which are closer together trade with each other more than places which are further apart. Add to that the thought that larger economies will trade more with other larger economies – well, you know, more economic activity means more economic activity – and you get the gravity model of trade. So, therefore Britain’s trade future lies with those places nearby, in the EU, than with places further away like the Commonwealth or the US.
This is, sadly, actually the level of debate over Brexit at times. We should trade with France because it’s 26 miles away, so there. The point being that while the gravity model is true – among the best empirically supported of all economic observations – that’s not actually what it says. Rather, that those places which are closer by trade distance trade more with each other. Trade distance being a more complex point than mere geographical location.
[…]
The point here being that by showing the trade routes it is showing us this trade, or perhaps economic, distance which is what the gravity model is about. Valencia and Palma were very much closer – and trade very much more – than Valencia and Toledo, despite roughly equal distances crowfly wise.
June 27, 2018
Calico prohibition
In the current issue of Reason, Virginia Postrel outlines an eighteenth-century French government attempt to prohibit calico cloth:
Calico printing, an image from Wellcome Images, via Wikimedia Commons
On a shopping trip to the butcher’s, young Miss la Genne wore her new, form-fitting jacket, a stylish cotton print with large brown flowers and red stripes on a white background. It got her arrested.
Another young woman stood in the door of her boss’ wine shop sporting a similar jacket with red flowers. She too was arrested. So were Madame de Ville, the lady Coulange, and Madame Boite. Through the windows of their homes, law enforcement authorities spotted these unlucky women in clothing with red flowers printed on white. They were busted for possession.
It was Paris in 1730, and the printed cotton fabrics known as toiles peintes or indiennes — in English, calicoes, chintzes, or muslins — had been illegal since 1686. It was an extreme version of trade protectionism, designed to shelter French textile producers from Indian cottons. Every few years the authorities would tweak the law, but the fashion refused to die.
Frustrated by rampant smuggling and ubiquitous scofflaws, in 1726 the government increased penalties for traffickers and anyone helping them. Offenders could be sentenced to years in galleys, with violent smugglers put to death. Local authorities were given the power to detain without trial anyone who merely wore the forbidden fabrics or upholstered furniture with them.
“The exasperation of the lawmakers, after forty years of successive edicts and ordinances which had been largely ignored, flouted or circumvented on a wholesale basis, can be sensed in this law,” writes the fashion historian Gillian Crosby in a 2015 dissertation on the ban. Her archival research shows a spike in arrests for simple possession. “Impotent at stopping the cross-border trade, printing or the peddling of goods,” she writes, “government officials concentrated on making an example of individual wearers, in an attempt to halt the fashion.”
They failed.
In the annals of prohibition, the French war on printed fabrics is one of the strangest, most futile, and most extreme chapters. It’s also one of the most intellectually consequential, producing many of the earliest arguments for economic liberalism. “Long before the more famous debates about the liberalisation of the grain trade, about taxation, or even about the monopoly of the French Indies Company, philosophes and Enlightenment political economists saw the calico debate as their first important battleground,” writes the historian Felicia Gottmann in Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism (Palgrave Macmillan).
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June 26, 2018
Saragarhi – The Last Stand – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 5 Aug 2017A humble signal station manned by only twenty one Sikh soldiers of the British Empire finds itself beset by 10,000 attackers. There is no hope for relief, but even knowing it will come at the cost of their lives, the Sikhs refuse to stand down.
Twenty one men in the 36th Sikh Regiment stand against thousands of attackers, prepared to make their final stand.
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June 25, 2018
QotD: Gandhi and the British army
The film, moreover, does not give the slightest hint as to Gandhi’s attitude toward blacks, and the viewers of Gandhi would naturally suppose that, since the future Great Soul opposed South African discrimination against Indians, he would also oppose South African discrimination against black people. But this is not so. While Gandhi, in South Africa, fought furiously to have Indians recognized as loyal subjects of the British empire, and to have them enjoy the full rights of Englishmen, he had no concern for blacks whatever. In fact, during one of the “Kaffir Wars” he volunteered to organize a brigade of Indians to put down a Zulu rising, and was decorated himself for valor under fire.
For, yes, Gandhi (Sergeant-Major Gandhi) was awarded Victoria’s coveted War Medal. Throughout most of his life Gandhi had the most inordinate admiration for British soldiers, their sense of duty, their discipline and stoicism in defeat (a trait he emulated himself). He marveled that they retreated with heads high, like victors. There was even a time in his life when Gandhi, hardly to be distinguished from Kipling’s Gunga Din, wanted nothing so much as to be a Soldier of the Queen. Since this is not in keeping with the “spirit” of Gandhi, as decided by Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi, it is naturally omitted from the movie.
Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.
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June 20, 2018
Korea adds a second helicopter carrier, may adapt them to carry F-35 aircraft
At Strategy Page, a look at the Korean and Japanese helicopter carrier ships, including the recently launched ROKS Marado, the second ship of the Dodko class:
The Republic of Korea Navy amphibious landing ship ROKS Dokdo (LPH 6111) and the aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN 73) transit the Sea of Japan (July 27, 2010).
U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Charles Oki via Wikimedia Commons.
During May South Korea launched its second Dokdo class large amphibious ship, the 14,500 ton Marado. The first of these ships, the 14,000 ton LPH (Landing Platform Helicopter) Dokdo entered service in 2007 and the Marado is expected to follow in 2020. In addition to being a bit larger than the first Dokdo, the Marado has a number of new features that enhance its ability to operate as an aircraft carrier. This includes more capable electronics, many of them made in South Korea as well modifications to the flight deck and the hanger deck below.
Both 199 meter long Dokdos are similar in appearance and operation to the larger American amphibious ships. The LPH flight deck can handle helicopters, as well as vertical takeoff jets like the F-35B. The Koreans deny that the ship will be used with these jets, but the capability is there. The LPH normally carries 720 combat troops, a crew of 300, ten tanks, seven amphibious assault vehicle, three towed 155mm howitzers and ten trucks. Dokdos carry fifteen aircraft (two V-22 vertical takeoff transports and 13 helicopters) and two LCAC hovercraft in the well deck for landing troops.
The Marado has a redesigned flight deck that can handle two V-22s at once instead of just one. In addition to a more powerful 3-D surveillance radar for tracking aircraft, Marado has two Phalanx anti-missile systems compared to one Goalkeeper system on Dokdo. South Korea is also going to add a locally developed and manufactured K-SAAM anti-aircraft and anti-missile system. This is similar to the existing U.S. made ESSM but with longer range and an improved guidance system.
JS Izumo DDH-183, sister-ship of the JS Kaga DDH-184, both helicopter-equipped destroyers, officially.
Meanwhile, neighbor Japan has taken the Dokdo concept a bit farther. In early 2017 Japan put into service a second 27,000 ton “destroyer” (the Kaga, DDH 184) that looks exactly like an aircraft carrier. Actually, it looks like an LPH, an amphibious ship type that first appeared in the 1950s. This was noted when Izumo, the first Japanese LPH, was launched in 2012 (and entered service in 2015). The Izumos can carry up to 28 aircraft and are armed only with two Phalanx anti-missile systems and a launcher with sixteen ESSM missiles for anti-missile and anti-aircraft defense.
[…]
The Izumo is part of a trend. In 2009, Japan launched its second Hyuga class “LPH”. Earlier in 2009, it commissioned the first of these “helicopter-carrying destroyers”. This was the first Japanese aircraft to enter service since 1945. The Hyuga class are 197 meter (610 foot) long, 18,000 ton warships that operates up to eleven (mostly SH-60) helicopters from a full-length flight deck. Although called a destroyer, it very much looks like an aircraft carrier. While its primary function is anti-submarine warfare, the Hyuga will also give Japan its first real power projection capability since 1945. The Hyuga was also the largest warship built in Japan since World War II.
South Korea could adapt their Dokdos to handle a few F-35Bs by making the flight deck more heat resistant and rearranging the hanger deck. South Korea is getting land based F-35As which would enable them to determine if it would be worth the time and money to adapt their LPHs to carry some vertical takeoff F-35Bs. Sometimes peacekeeping missions involve some peacemaking and F-35Bs would help with that.
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June 18, 2018
Feature History – Meiji Restoration
Feature History
Published on 21 May 2017Hello and welcome to Feature History, featuring Meiji Restoration, a fancy schmancy collab, and most likely too many bill wurtz references in the comments.
Rackam’s Life & Times of Tokugawa Ieyasu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6fR8oDewdg
Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/FeatureHistory
https://twitter.com/Feature_History
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I do the research, writing, narration, art, and animation. Yes, it is very lonely
Music
Jeff Van Dyck – The Shoto
Jeff Van Dyck – Ona Hei
Jeff Van Dyck – Sonaiyo
Jeff Van Dyck – Now and Zen
Jeff Van Dyck – Fudo Myo March
Jeff Van Dyck – Rock and a Hard Place
Jeff Van Dyck – Winds of Fate
Jeff Van Dyck – Duty Calls
Jeff Van Dyck – Battle of Shinobue
Jeff Van Dyck – The Harvest
Jeff Van Dyck – Death Cures a Fool
Jeff Van Dyck – The Fall of the Samurai
Jeff Van Dyck – Stalemate
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June 13, 2018
June 11, 2018
QotD: Gandhi as filmic hagiography
Gandhi, therefore, the film, this paid political advertisement for the government of India, is organized around three axes: (1) Anti-racism — all men are equal regardless of race, color, creed, etc.; (2) anti-colonialism, which in present terms translates as support for the Third World, including, most eminently, India; (3) nonviolence, presented as an absolutist pacifism. There are other, secondary precepts and subheadings. Gandhi is portrayed as the quintessence of tolerance (“I am a Hindu and a Muslim and a Christian and a Jew”), of basic friendliness to Britain (“The British have been with us for a long time and when they leave we want them to leave as friends”), of devotion to his wife and family. His vow of chastity is represented as something selfless and holy, rather like the celibacy of the Catholic clergy. But, above all, Gandhi’s life and teachings are presented as having great import for us today. We must learn from Gandhi.
I propose to demonstrate that the film grotesquely distorts both Gandhi’s life and character to the point that it is nothing more than a pious fraud, and a fraud of the most egregious kind. Hackneyed Indian falsehoods such as that “the British keep trying to break India up” (as if Britain didn’t give India a unity it had never enjoyed in history), or that the British created Indian poverty (a poverty which had not only existed since time immemorial but had been considered holy), almost pass unnoticed in the tide of adulation for our fictional saint. Gandhi, admittedly, being a devout Hindu, was far more self-contradictory than most public men. Sanskrit scholars tell me that flat self-contradiction is even considered an element of “Sanskrit rhetoric.” Perhaps it is thought to show profundity.
Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.
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May 29, 2018
ESR’s thumbnail sketch on the origins of the Indo-European language families
When you mash historical linguistics hard enough into paleogenetics, interesting things fall out:
The steppe extends roughly from the Dniepr to the Ural or 30° to 55° east longitude, and from the Black Sea and the Caucasus in the south to the temperate forest and taiga in the north, or 45° to 55° north latitude.
Via Wikipedia
What we can now say pretty much for sure: Proto-Indo-European was first spoken on the Pontic Steppes around 4000 BCE. That’s the grasslands north of the Black Sea and west of the Urals; today, it’s the Ukraine and parts of European Russia. The original PIE speakers (which we can now confidently identify with what archaeologists call the Yamnaya culture) were the first humans to domesticate horses.
And – well, basically, they were the first and most successful horse barbarians. They invaded Europe via the Danube Valley and contributed about half the genetic ancestry of modern Europeans – a bit more in the north, where they almost wiped out the indigenes; a bit less in the south where they mixed more with a population of farmers who had previously migrated in on foot from somewhere in Anatolia.
The broad outline isn’t a new idea. 400 years ago the very first speculations about a possible IE root language fingered the Scythians, Pontic-Steppe descendants in historical times of the original PIE speakers – with a similar horse-barbarian lifestyle. It was actually a remarkably good guess, considering. The first version of the “modern” steppe-origin hypothesis – warlike bronze-age PIE speakers domesticate the horse and overrun Europe at sword- and spear-point – goes back to 1926.
But since then various flavors of nationalist and nutty racial theorist have tried to relocate the PIE urheimat all over the map – usually in the nut’s home country. The Nazis wanted to believe it was somewhere in their Greater Germany, of course. There’s still a crew of fringe scientists trying to pin it to northern India, but the paleogenetic evidence craps all over that theory (as Cochran explains rather gleefully – he does enjoy calling bullshit on bullshit).
Then there have been the non-nutty proposals. There was a scientist named Colin Renfrew who for many years (quite respectably) pushed the theory that IE speakers walked into Europe from Anatolia along with farming technology, instead of riding in off the steppes brandishing weapons like some tribe in a Robert E. Howard novel.
Alas, Renfrew was wrong. It now looks like there was such a migration, but those people spoke a non-IE language (most likely something archaically Semitic) and got overrun by the PIE speakers riding in a few thousand years later. Cochran calls these people “EEF” (Eastern European Farmers) and they’re most of the non-IE half of modern European ancestry. Basque is the only living language that survives from EEF times; Otzi the Iceman was EEF, and you can still find people with genes a lot like his in the remotest hills of Sardinia.
Even David Anthony, good as he is about much else, seems rather embarrassed and denialist about the fire-and-sword stuff. Late in his book he spins a lot of hopeful guff about IE speakers expanding up the Danube peacefully by recruiting the locals into their culture.
Um, nope. The genetic evidence is merciless (though, to be fair, Anthony can’t have known this). There’s a particular pattern of Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA variation that you only get in descendant population C when it’s a mix produced because aggressor population A killed most or all of population B’s men and took their women. Modern Europeans (C) have that pattern, the maternal line stuff (B) is EEF, and the paternal-line stuff (A) is straight outta steppe-land; the Yamnaya invaders were not gentle.
How un-gentle were they? Well…this paragraph is me filling in from some sources that aren’t Anthony or Cochran, now. While Europeans still have EEF genes, almost nothing of EEF culture survived in later Europe beyond the plants they domesticated, the names of some rivers, and (possibly) a murky substratum in some European mythologies.
The PIE speakers themselves seem to have formed, genetically, when an earlier population called the Ancient Northern Eurasians did a fire-and-sword number (on foot, that time) on a group of early farmers from the Fertile Crescent. Cochrane sometimes calls the ANEs “Hyperboreans” or “Cimmerians”, which is pretty funny if you’ve read your Howard.
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QotD: Gandhi on the Holocaust
I am aware that for many not privileged to have visited the former British Raj, the names Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Deccan are simply words. But other names, such as Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, somehow have a harder profile. The term “Jew,” also, has a reasonably hard profile, and I feel all Jews sitting emotionally at the movie Gandhi should be apprised of the advice that the Mahatma offered their coreligionists when faced with the Nazi peril: they should commit collective suicide. If only the Jews of Germany had the good sense to offer their throats willingly to the Nazi butchers’ knives and throw themselves into the sea from cliffs they would arouse world public opinion, Gandhi was convinced, and their moral triumph would be remembered for “ages to come.” If they would only pray for Hitler (as their throats were cut, presumably), they would leave a “rich heritage to mankind.” Although Gandhi had known Jews from his earliest days in South Africa — where his three staunchest white supporters were Jews, every one — he disapproved of how rarely they loved their enemies. And he never repented of his recommendation of collective suicide. Even after the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed, Gandhi told Louis Fischer, one of his biographers, that the Jews died anyway, didn’t they? They might as well have died significantly.
Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.
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May 22, 2018
The Fightinest Marine – Dan Daly I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
The Great War
Published on 21 May 2018Dan Daly was one of only two Marines to be awarded Medals of Honor in two separate conflicts. The first, for his actions in 1901 during the China relief. His second, for his actions during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Haiti in 1915. But he wasn’t done yet and after the U.S. entry into WW1 in April 1917, he was close to receiving his third one on the battlefield of Belleau Wood in France.
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A variant factor in Chinese economic statistics
I’ve long been on the record as not trusting Chinese government statistics (some examples here, here here, here, here, here, here, here, here here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), but this is a twist I hadn’t previously noticed:
A useful and basic rule of thumb about international economic statistics. Never, but just never, believe nor pay attention to anything about the Chinese economy for the first quarter of the year. No, this isn’t because our inscrutable bretheren dissemble more or less at this time of year, it’s not because their statisticians spend January drunk or hungover (unlike our own), it’s because the Chinese New Year obeys its own little calendar.
The modern Chinese New Year begins on the first new moon between January 21st and February 20th. Earlier calendar systems were more complicated:
Chinese five phases and four seasons calendar, used during the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046 BC-256 BC).
Image by Orienomesh-w, via Wikimedia Commons.
Well, OK, so if this was a western country that really celebrated the New Year (say, Scotland) then everyone would be back at work 48 hours later. However, the Chinese New Year is also the start of the two week holiday. Sorta a mixture between American Thanksgiving (you WILL eat at your mother’s table or a close simulacrum of it) plus a Wakes Week (English industrial towns would shut every single factory so that all could get away to the beach for a week. Well, beach not so much, Skegness maybe). The combination of the two means that near every factory in the country shuts for a couple of weeks as the largest migration in history takes place. All those migrant workers heading back to Mom’s dumplings.
If this all took place at the same time each year then our economic statistics would take account of it just fine with our seasonal adjustments. Just like we do with Christmas. We know very well that hundreds of thousands get hired for temporary jobs packing and delivering just before, get laid off immediately afterwards. We don’t see that reflected in the unemployment numbers because we’re not interested. We want to see trends, not known seasonal variations. So too with output and all that – many European factories do close in that week after Christmas. We don’t measure a drop in GDP then because we know about it therefore ignore it.
So Chinese official economic statistics are even less likely to correspond to reality during the first quarter than at any other time of the year.
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Feature History – Opium Wars
Feature History
Published on 19 Oct 2016Welcome to Feature History, featuring the Opium Wars, western imperialism, and this fancy new intro and vignette.
The super sexy stuff like animation, voice, and script are all by the super sexy me.
The music is Anamalie and Clash Defiant, both by Kevin MacLeod
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Feature_History
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