Historia Civilis
Published 21 Mar 2017Patreon | http://historiacivilis.com/patreon
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Website | http://historiacivilis.comMusic is:
“Day Bird,” by Broke For Free
“Drums of the Deep,” by Kevin MacLeod
“Flood,” by Jahzzar
In 1981, the social scientist Mancur Olson published his magisterial The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. Olson had already won acclaim for The Logic of Collective Action, which explained why some groups received an outsize slice of the political pie. In his new book, Olson turned to the question of why nations fail. His thesis: nations lost dynamism when insiders managed to stack the rules against disruptive outsiders.
Stable societies with unchanged boundaries, Olson observed, “tend to accumulate more collusions and organizations for collective action over time.” Instead of accepting rules that encourage overall growth, these collusive organizations — trade groups and labor unions were paradigmatic examples — fight to keep what they have, slowing down “a society’s capacity to adopt new technologies and to reallocate resources in response to changing conditions,” thus reducing economic efficiency. Decline follows.
Olson pointed to Japanese stagnation under the Tokugawa shogunate, when, “before Admiral Perry’s gunboats appeared in 1854, the Japanese were virtually closed off from the international economy.” Ruling Japanese society, he writes, “were any number of powerful za, or guilds, and the shogunate or the daimyo often strengthened them by selling them monopoly rights.” The guilds “fixed prices, restricted production and controlled entry in essentially the same way as cartelistic organization elsewhere.”
A second example: Great Britain, “the major nation with the longest immunity from dictatorship, invasion and revolution” and, consequently, Olson explained, suffering “this century a lower rate of growth than other large, developed democracies.” In Olson’s view, the weak performance resulted from limits on change established by a “powerful network of special-interest organizations,” which included labor unions, industrial groups, and aristocratic cliques. By the 1970s, after the conservative government of Edward Heath fell in a losing battle with striking miners, many deemed Britain ungovernable. Olson contrasted the British situation with that of postwar Germany and Japan, where the chaos and destruction of wartime defeat wiped away established industrial and retail groups, leaving the field open to newcomers like Soichiro Honda or the Albrecht family (creators of international supermarket giant Aldi), who could work economic magic.
The word “ungovernable” was also used to describe New York in the 1960s and 1970s, when Mike Quill’s transit union ran roughshod over Mayor John Lindsay’s attempts to control public-sector wage growth. New York was a long-established city with lots of political collusion. The old Tammany Hall could broker deals to keep Gotham going, but Lindsay’s successor, Abe Beame, proved too weak to resist any special interest that wanted more spending or government favors. New York’s spending kept rising even as public services worsened, until bankruptcy loomed and public power wound up in the hands of the unelected Municipal Assistance Corporation. Thankfully, New York reformed itself economically, at least to some extent, under Mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, as Britain did under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Sufficiently strong leaders can buck entrenched insiders.
Edward L. Glaeser, “How to Fix American Capitalism”, City Journal, 2020-12-13.
Historia Civilis
Published 22 Feb 2017Patreon | http://historiacivilis.com/patreon
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Website | http://historiacivilis.comMusic is:
“Light Thought var 2,” by Kevin MacLeod
“Bird Day,” by Broke For Free
“Drums of the Deep,” by Kevin MacLeod
“Thinking Music,” by Kevin MacLeod
“Flood,” by Jahzzar
“Hallon,” by Christian Bjoerklund
Lindybeige
Published 18 Oct 2017A complete guide to the story as depicted on the famous Bayeux Tapestry. There is a lot more to it than just the Battle of Hastings.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige
Other than The Adventures of Stoke Mandeville, this is the longest editing job I have ever done. It took eleven very long days of work to put this together from the opportunist footage I snatched when changing trains near the museum where it is on display. The shoot was not without its problems, one of which was the fact that because the tapestry is behind glass, and the museum has many illuminated displays, the reflections in the glass were a bane, and I didn’t manage to get rid of them all. Another was that my stills camera refused to work after taking a small number of pictures. It had always worked fine before, and has always worked fine since. It wasn’t the battery and it wasn’t the SD card. It was a mystery.
For the curious, the edit involved seventeen tracks on the timeline, and has twenty-two animated scenes. Unfortunately, the main animation software I was using could not handle full HD images, and so there is a slight loss of picture quality during most of the animated scenes. You will notice that the close-ups have a better picture quality than the wide shots. This is because they were taken with the camera pushed up against the glass, which improved focussing, and got rid of almost all of the haze and reflections caused by the glass.
It is important to understand that this ‘tapestry’ is a piece of propaganda, and does not tell an accurate version of events. The story I tell here is the one depicted, not what actually happened.
I have enough material for more videos on the tapestry, but am in no great hurry to spend many more days editing this difficult footage. Trying to match the writing and speaking of narration to panning camerawork that had no notion when shot of what might need to be said about some passing scene, was a nightmare, and many editing compromises had to be made, with some scenes skipped past quickly, and others drawn out.
Clarification on the nudity: I said that the figure under the mysterious Cleric and woman was the the only figure displaying genitals on the tapestry. This was misleading. Several animals clearly are pictured with genitals, and on the tapestry in Bayeux today it looks as though a couple of other human figures have genitals. Some of these may have been added later, and these are not being ‘displayed’ as the displaying figure is clearly doing, but look more incidental.
I describe the tall figure emerging from the building with a lance and pennant, being brought his horse, as “William”. It occurred to me after making the video that all the sources I consulted describe this figure as William, but the text does not name him as William, so possibly he is just a Norman knight, representing any and all of the knights setting out for the battle, and that this figure is meant to be “William” could be a modern tradition that has become accepted fact just by repetition.
Buy the music – the music played at the end of my videos is now available here: https://lindybeige.bandcamp.com/track…
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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Kings and Generals
Published 17 Feb 2019We are continuing our historical animated documentary series on the Napoleonic Wars with another episode on the Peninsular War, covering the battles of Somosierra and Corunna. Napoleon attempted to take back Madrid and crush the British resistance led by General Moore.
This script was researched and written by Everett Rummage. Check out his brilliant Age of Napoleon podcast – http://bit.ly/2vC3cIE In our opinion, it is the best podcast on the Napoleonic era.
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We are grateful to our patrons and sponsors, who made this video possible: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Jlq…
This video was narrated by Officially Devin (https://www.youtube.com/user/OfficiallyDevin)
Machinimas were made on NTW3 mod for Napoleon Total War by Malay Archer (https://www.youtube.com/user/Mathemed…)
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#Documentary #Kingsandgenerals #Napoleon
Forgotten Weapons
Published 5 May 2017Armament Research Services (ARES) is a specialist technical intelligence consultancy, offering expertise and analysis to a range of government and non-government entities in the arms and munitions field. For detailed photos of the guns in this video, don’t miss the ARES companion blog post:
http://armamentresearch.com/british-e…
The British military had been working towards a reduced-power cartridge since the end of World War 2, and the ultimate adoption of the FAL/SLR in 7.62x51mm NATO did not end their interest in the concept. It would not be long before the roots of SA80 would take hold, and today we are looking at the very first mockups of the concept that would become the L85A1 and L86A1.
As part of a preliminary study to decide the basic layout and capabilities of a future new individual weapon and light support weapon, five wooden and metal mockups were produced in conventional and bullpup layouts, and also with/without “dropped” stocks to facilitate sighting. The favored mockup was the bullpup seen here, which gave rise to the whole Enfield Weapon System/SA80 family. It is relevant to note that the concept included a universal standard optical sight from the very outset, as this was a cutting edge concept at the time. In addition, note the small features like safety, sling swivels, and magazine catch, as these would vary back and forth through the development program.
After the wooden guns, two functional (or mostly functional) guns were produced. These were standard off-the-shelf rifles converted into bullpup configuration – one Stoner 63 and one Sterling AR18. Neither company was contacted for licensing or technical assistance.
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
World War Two
Published 25 Mar 2021A report on the effect of strategic bombing called the “Dehousing Paper” is spread to justify the targeting of the civilian population of Germany. In Poland, one by one, extermination camps are starting construction. This month, a new one is finished, named Belzec. Here, Jews and other minority undesirables from Poland are gassed.
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesHosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Joram Appel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Miki Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Miki Cackowski, Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Colorizations by:
Mikołaj Uchman
Daniel Weiss
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/
Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/Sources:
Yad Vashem 1935/15, 3016/2, 1137/217, 10094/1, A4613/1116, 3518/7,1554/1
IWM ART 15747 12, HU 56848, MH 24747, CL 2377, ME(RAF) 3703, HU 107752, C 2364, C 4748, C 4743, HU 74904
Bundesarchiv
Graphic of Vickers Wellington bomber, courtesy of Emoscopes https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Graphic of Short Stirling bomber, courtesy of Emoscopes https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
www.auschwitz.org
www.deathcamps.org
USHMM
Picture of scratches on a wall of a gas chamber at Auschwitz, courtesy of Lasy https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
from the Noun Project: Watchtower by EliriconSoundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Johan Hynynen – “Dark Beginning”
Wendel Scherer – “Growing Doubt”
Peter Sandberg – “Document This 1”
Jon Bjork – “Disposal”
Philip Ayers – “Trapped in a Maze”
Fabien Tell – “Never Forget”Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
2 days agoOn the horrors of crafting this, on age restriction, and on covering Allied war crimes – by Spartacus
All episodes of War Against Humanity are difficult to make, but this was an especially harrowing episode to host. When I wrote the conclusion based on Joram’s initial draft, I was composed — it was an intellectual exercise still. That changed once I started giving the words a voice, and as you can see at the end of the episode I had difficulties keeping my composure — when I was done I cried bitterly. But that is how it is supposed to be — the totality of our creation is what brings it home, together with Joram I compile the knowledge, Miki or Karo put it into images under Wieke’s direction, and within all of that it is my job to express it in spoken language as best as I can.
Yes, it is difficult to make and it is difficult to watch — but we sincerely believe that none of us should look away lest we forget. We take upon ourselves to spend hours every week to sift through the minutiae of these events so that we can compress it into 15 minutes every two weeks. We do it not for money, not for fame, and not out of pleasure, but because it needs to be done so that others can spend less time on it than us and still see this time for what it was. It needs to be done by neither glossing over any events, nor the images as horrible as they are. This has two important purposes:
1. driving home that this really happened and
2. defeating any claims towards that we’re just making this up, or exaggerating.
Within that responsibility it is also our duty to report, without prejudice, on what the Allies did that was against human values and rights in this war. We don’t do that because there is an equivalence between events, or to create such an equivalence — we do it for the exact opposite purpose — to show the complete picture and preempt any calls for “what about the bombing of Germany and Hiroshima!?” We do it because we are dedicated to the facts, and the events must be permitted to speak for themselves.We’re doing all of this in a time when the horrors of WW2 are ever further away in the rearview mirror, when survey after survey shows that the younger generation have little or no knowledge of how earth-shattering this war was. An indication of a growing educational gap, and in many of the countries where you are watching it has long been decided that reporting on these atrocities is of especial importance. That includes decisions to also expose younger people to the reality of it despite the graphic nature of the content. In most places these images are purposefully excepted from age restrictions that befall content made for entertainment, that is to say they do not fall under an 18+ restriction. They are regulated as PG 16 or the equivalent, in some places even PG13.
It then troubles us deeply that YouTube chooses to go against the decisions made by democratically elected bodies and restrict this content to over 18 only. It troubles us even more when this leads to the inevitable result that our viewership has dropped by 50% since they started doing that. That is a drop far above the share of our viewers that are under age, because with the restriction comes a reduction in recommendation to view — users that are not logged in and age verified don’t get notified — the content can no longer be embedded on external sites — in some countries it is blocked entirely, regardless of your age — and all of that further decreases the value of the video in YouTube’s algorithms. The result is that the War Against Humanity videos are now an echo chamber where we only reach those that already know the content.
We have spoken to YouTube to remedy this fault, but we have had no success thus far. As a result we have decided to start making a censored version of the videos that we will upload if or when they get age restricted. We already upload all of our content to https://odysee.com/@WorldWarTwo:6 but that is not a place where anyone will find our content by chance. On that note we should point out that the videos only get age-restricted because they are reported to YouTube by the community as inappropriate, offensive, or false. We take umbrage at that, because in effect this means that YouTube is helping those who would like these events to be forgotten, or even deny that they ever happened. It’s a pity; even morally wrong in my viewpoint. It leaves me despondent and the last weeks have been extraordinarily difficult for me — I have questioned my purposes and wondered why I put myself and our team through all of this, if all we’re doing is preaching to the choir. At first it left me sad, but after YouTube’s glib, bureaucratic responses I got depressed. I considered throwing in the towel, but then I would be nothing else than a coward refusing to stand for those who no longer have a voice. So, I will continue, I will resist, and we will fight against anyone that tries to silence us and the dead — because we must not look away, we must never forget.
Spartacus
It is only because of the TimeGhost Army that we can go forward in this battle — join us at https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory or at Timeghost.tv
The Tank Museum
Published 6 Nov 2020The 100th Tank Chat milestone has been reached as the Rolls-Royce Armoured Car turns 100 years old! In this special edition, everybody’s favourite moustachioed tank historian David Fletcher examines his favourite vehicle in The Tank Museum’s collection: the Rolls-Royce Armoured Car, on its 100th birthday.
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#tankmuseum #tanks
Bella Wallersteiner on the vast difference between Boris Johnson’s hopes for his premiership and the actual role he’s been playing:
A year has passed since the British public accepted lockdown as the best way to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, yet we are still living under the strictures of the Coronavirus Act.
In the name of virus protection, we have experienced a level of authoritarianism not seen in this country since the time of Oliver Cromwell – restrictions on freedom of movement, forced closure of businesses, and prohibitions on weddings and funerals have challenged many of our most cherished beliefs about the limits of government power, while the ban on large gatherings means we cannot even legally protest them.
Today, as we mark the anniversary of the first lockdown, we would do well to reflect on just how compliant we have become to what were intended to be “emergency” powers.
Cheery platitudes have ranged from “we’re all in this together” and “we’ll send this virus packing” to the hopelessly inaccurate “it will all be over by Christmas”. But history tells us that governments tend to hold on to additional powers far longer than is necessary.
The Defence of the Realm Act of 1914, for example, granted the government wide-ranging powers in the name of public safety, including heavy censorship of the press and the introduction of rationing. Pub licensing laws remained in place for decades, only relaxed in November 2005.
The Second World War brought The Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939 which ceded immense regulatory powers to the government, including provisions “for the apprehension, trial and punishment of persons offending against the Regulations and for the detentions of persons whose detention appears to be expedient to the Secretary of State in the interest of public safety or the defence of the realm”. The Act was finally repealed on 25th March 1959, but the last of the Defence Regulations (which included the maintenance of public order) was not lifted until 31st December 1964.
- The Lucas motto: “Get home before dark.”
- Lucas is the patent holder for the short circuit.
- Lucas — Inventor of the first intermittent wiper.
- Lucas — Inventor of the self-dimming headlamp.
- The three position Lucas switch — Dim, Flicker and Off.
- The Original Anti-Theft Device — Lucas Electrics.
- Lucas is an acronym for Loose Unsoldered Connections and Splices
Andrew Stoy, “Joe Lucas, Prince Of Darkness: British Electrical System Jokes”, Jalopnik, 2008-08-04.
Calum
Published 22 Aug 2020Pre-war shipwrecks are disappearing from the seabed. Why? A look at the sad reality of illegal salvaging that is destroying numerous war graves and historical wrecks around the world, told from the site of some of the most famous shipwrecks in the world; Scapa Flow.
The Guardian has done some amazing work in documenting this problem, worth a read if you have the time:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/201…
00:00 – Introduction & History of Scapa Flow
01:00 – Scuttling & Salvaging of the German High Fleet
02:45 – The Value of Pre-War Steel
03:54 – The Disappearing Shipwrecks
06:03 – HMS Royal Oak
10:16 – Disappearing Wargraves
10:58 – OutroTwitter………………….►https://twitter.com/calumraasay
Instagram…………….►http://instagram.com/calumraasay
Website………………..►http://calumgillies.com
Theodore Dalrymple on the British diet (at least before the neverending lockdowns):
“The Joy of Cookbooks” by shoutabyss is licensed under CC BY 2.0
As in many other things, the population has divided into two: those with increasingly refined tastes in gastronomy, and those who eat mainly junk and takeaway food for the quickest but also crudest possible gratification.
Gastronomy often seems the only aesthetic sphere in which the modern British display any real interest. Their dress, their music, their art (or at least such as gains any publicity), their literature, and of course their architecture, are hideously ugly, even militantly so, but a Michelin-starred restaurant receives their adulation — or did in the now-distant days when restaurants were open.
But the modern interest in food is not the same as a mass market for fish, which has, alas, mainly to be cooked, and the fact is that the British are, grosso modo, too lazy and ignorant to cook properly. Many millions of them would be horrified by the sight of a whole fish, or even any part of a raw fish: they don’t want to eat anything that hasn’t been through a complex industrial process, had chemicals and preservatives added to it, and cannot be just stuck in a microwave for a few minutes before consumption in front of the television. Besides, they wouldn’t know what to do with a fish, let alone a crustacean.
It is said that about a fifth of British children do not eat a meal with another member of their household (family would, perhaps, be a misleading term) more than once a fortnight, turning meals into asocial and even furtive occasions. Many households do not have a dining table, and in my visiting days as a doctor I discovered that the microwave is often a household’s entire batterie de cuisine.
This slovenly and asocial approach to eating — evident in the detritus left behind in British streets as people eat wherever they happen to be, in their cars, walking along, in trains and buses, in fact anywhere but a dining room and with others — is not the consequence of poverty, but of a degraded style of life.
Many years ago I noticed that shops in poor areas where there were many immigrants of Indian origin had enormous piles of a vast array of vegetables so cheap that the problem was carrying them home rather than their cost. I would see Indian housewives selecting their purchases with care and attention: the quality and not just the price mattered to them. Uncompelled by economic necessity to shop there, I would nevertheless do so; but I never saw poor whites doing so. The problem with all those vegetables was that they required cooking, preferably with skill, which very few poor whites, as against poor Indians, had. And this is a cultural problem, if the taste for and consumption of a diet of junk food (what the French more vividly call malbouffe) is a problem.
The Indians are fat, with bad health consequences, from eating too much good food; the native British, with bad health consequences, from eating too much bad food. The prevalence of obesity in Britain, greater than in most other European countries, is possibly one of the reasons that its death rate from COVID-19 is so high, among the highest if not actually the highest. And this obesity is immediately obvious on arrival in Britain from any European country.
World War Two
Published 20 Mar 2021MacArthur makes one of the most iconic remarks of the whole war, but considering the fact that the Philippines seem unsalvageable, it’s pretty unclear just how he’ll do it, especially since even though ever more American soldiers are arriving in Australia, the Japanese threat to Australia grows daily. Bill Slim arrives in Burma to take command of I Burma Corps, and Joe Stilwell has taken over two Chinese Nationalist armies, so the defense of Burma looks like it might go on a while longer, though the Allies are at a serious disadvantage after losing Rangoon. The Japanese, for their part, are trying to figure out how the heck they’re going to administer all the territory they’ve taken this year and bring natural resources to Japan itself. There is still scattered fighting in the USSR, but the spring muds have put pad to any major offensives for the time being. As for the British, they launch Operation Outward, a hydrogen balloon campaign over Germany. Yep, you read that right. What a week.
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Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvFollow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Colorizations by:
– Mikołaj Uchman
– Daniel Weiss
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
– Adrien Fillon – https://www.instagram.com/adrien.colo…
– Olga Shirnina, a.k.a. Klimbim – https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com/Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
– Rannar Sillard – “Easy Target”
– Jo Wandrini – “Dragon King”
– Wendel Scherer – “Time to Face Them”
– Howard Harper-Barnes – “London”
– Philip Ayers – “The Unexplored”
– Farrell Wooten – “Duels”
– Johan Hynynen – “Dark Beginning”
– Craft Case – “Secret Cargo”
– Johannes Bornlöf – “The Inspector 4”Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit.
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers some of the technological innovations which helped English sailors to overcome powerful adversaries of the Spanish and Portuguese navies in the late 1500s and early 1600s:
Stern view of a model of the Revenge as an example of a race-built galleon, 1577.
Image from modellmarine.de
Apart from the adoption and refinement of celestial navigation techniques, however, English seafaring capabilities also benefited from some more obvious, physical changes. In 1588, for example, on the eve of the Spanish Armada, a senior Spanish officer believed that the English had “many more long-range guns”. By the 1540s, medieval ironmaking techniques involving the blast furnace had gradually spread from Germany, to Normandy, and thence to the Weald of Sussex and Kent. Whereas in the first half of the sixteenth century England had typically imported three quarters of its iron from Spain, by 1590 it had not only quintupled its consumption of iron but was also almost entirely self-sufficient. And by allowing England to exploit its plentiful domestic deposits of iron, the blast furnace resulted in it producing many more cheap cannon.
Iron guns were in many ways worse for ships than those of bronze. They were heavier, prone to corrosion, and more likely to explode without warning. Bronze guns, by contrast, would first bulge and then split, but in any case tended to last. When the British captured Gorée off the coast of Senegal in 1758, they found a working English-made bronze cannon that dated from 1582. Yet iron was only 10-20% the price of bronze. Although the Royal Navy for decades continued to prefer bronze, cheap, medium-sized cannon of iron proliferated, becoming affordable to merchants, pirates, and privateers — a situation that was unique to England.
English ships were thus especially well-armed, allowing them to access new markets even when they sailed into hostile waters. They were soon some of the only merchants able to hold their own against the latest Mediterranean apex predator, whether it be the Spanish navy, Algeria-based corsairs, or Ottoman galleys. And they were able to insert themselves, sometimes violently, into the inter-oceanic trades — all despite the armed resistance of the Spanish and Portuguese, who had long monopolised those routes. In the 1560s, John Hawkins tried a few times to muscle in on the transatlantic Portuguese and Spanish trade in slaves. With backing from the monarch and her ministers, he captured Portuguese slave ships, raided and traded along the African coastline himself, and then sold slaves in the Spanish colonies of the Americas, sometimes having to attack those colonies before the local governor would allow them to trade. (The attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, as Hawkins’s privateering fleet was all but destroyed in 1568 and the English were not involved in the slave trade again for almost a century.)
The English hold over the hostile markets was only threatened during times of peace on the continent, when their ships’ defensiveness no longer gave them a special advantage. The Dutch usurped English dominance of the trade with Iberia and the Mediterranean, for example, during the Dutch Republic’s truce with Spain 1609-21. Their more efficient ships, especially for bulk commodities — the fluyt invented at Hoorn in the late 1580s — were cheaper to build, required fewer sailors, and were easier to handle. But these advantages only made them competitive when the risk of attack was low, as they were hardly armed. When wars resumed, the English had a chance to regain their position.
Finally, the English acquired a few further advantages when it came to ship design. Thanks to the shipwright Matthew Baker, who had been on the trial voyage Cabot dispatched to the Mediterranean, England experienced a revolution in using mathematics to design ships. Baker’s methods, seemingly developed in the 1560s, allowed him to more cheaply experiment with new forms, and by the 1570s these began to bear fruit. The old ocean-going carracks and galleons, with their high forecastles and aftercastles, became substantially sleeker. Taking inspiration from nature, Baker designed a streamlined, elongated hull modelled below the waterline upon a cod’s head with a mackerel tail. Above the waterline, too, he lowered the forecastle and set it further back, as well as flattening the aftercastle.
Starting in 1570 with his prototype the Foresight, and more fully developed in 1575-77 with the Revenge, these razed or “race-built” galleons gave the English some significant advantages. Drake even chose the Revenge as his flagship to battle the Spanish Armada in 1588, and to lead an ill-fated reprisal invasion of Portugal the following year. The higher castles of carracks and old-style galleons were suited to clearing an enemy’s decks with arrows and gunfire, as well as to defend against boarders. They were designed for combat at close quarters, in which height was an advantage. They were floating fortresses, their imposing height known to inspire terror. The race-built galleons, by contrast, by making the ship less top-heavy, could have longer and lower gundecks, with more of the ship’s displacement devoted to ordnance — especially useful when taking advantage of the cheaper but heavier cannon made of iron. Rather than killing an enemy ship’s sailors and soldiers, the race-built galleons were optimised for blasting through its hull. What they lost in “majesty and terror”, they made up for with overwhelming firepower. They aimed to sink.
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