Sparta had a formidable military reputation, but their actual battlefield performance hardly backed it up. During the fifth and fourth centuries, Sparta lost as often as it won. Spartan battlefield tactics were a bit better than other Greek poleis, but this is damning with faint praise. The Spartiates themselves were mostly like every other group of wealthy Greek hoplites. But the Spartan military reputation was extremely valuable – the loss of that reputation during the Peloponnesian War does much to explain the rough decades Sparta would experience following its end.
That is one of the core things we can learn from Sparta: a reputation for military excellence can often be more valuable than the excellence itself – real or imagined. A powerful army can only fight one battle at a time, but the idea of a powerful army can intimidate any number of enemies all at once. […] when Sparta was forced to turn from intimidation to force, it ran out of force with frightening speed.
Those who have been here for a while may already be wondering, “Wait, though – this is the guy who is always telling us that winning battles isn’t as important as achieving strategic objectives and who is always on about logistics and operations! What about that?” I think that actually goes a long way to explaining how an army with a modest advantage in tactics and organization ends up without a winning record. […] I want to stress something here: the horrors of Spartan society cannot be justified on the grounds they produced superior soldiers, because they quite evidently did not. Sparta’s actual military record was, in fact, depressingly average. Only the reputation was special; the men were just men.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-20.
May 18, 2022
QotD: Sparta’s excellent military reputation was not matched by actual battlefield excellence
May 17, 2022
Mary Whitehouse, “The avenging angel of Middle England”
At First Things, Jonathon Van Maren considers the legacy of Mary Whitehouse, the often mocked champion of public decency and crusader against pornography and blasphemy in the media from the mid-60s onwards:
I was surprised to find few public domain images of Mary Whitehouse available, so here is a selection of thumbnails (hopefully this won’t violate any copyright restrictions)
We have reached the point where our post-Christian elites, having safely enshrined the sexual revolution in law, can afford the luxury of occasionally admitting that their opponents were right. Exhibit A is the new BBC documentary Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story, which details the life of Great Britain’s most infamous morality campaigner. Beginning with a crusade to keep smut and blasphemy off TV in 1964, Whitehouse rallied hundreds of thousands of women (and ordinary Britons) to her campaigns against “the permissive society”, culminating in her war against the porn industry. Alas, she lost most of her battles — but her warnings proved prophetic.
Mary Whitehouse was born in Warwickshire in 1910. She first started organizing in the 1960s because she — and millions of other mothers — did not like what her children were seeing on TV. A committed traditional Christian, she watched with dismay as the country she loved began to change around her. The metropolitan elites she faced off with thought she was “a provincial Birmingham housewife”. They didn’t underestimate her for long. She hosted her first mass meeting in 1964, and her organizing skills soon highlighted the subterranean power of Britain’s women. Whitehouse tapped into the gardening associations, the mothers’ unions, and other grassroots community organizations filled with folks who cared deeply about their children and the moral fabric of their nation. She brought them together, and when she spoke, it was with the voices of legions of little people. Her nickname summed it up: “The avenging angel of Middle England”.
Whitehouse’s first major campaign was to “Clean Up TV”, and her parliamentary petition to that end garnered around 500,000 signatures. In 1971, Whitehouse began organizing against sex ed in schools, triggered by an “educational” video she saw that was filled with pornographic scenes. Whitehouse was accused of hysteria — but Banned! features a pornographer admitting that, by using sex ed, “we gradually pushed back the barriers”, much as Whitehouse warned they would. Now that they’ve won, they can admit they were lying.
Whitehouse and others appalled by attempts to corrupt their children were accused of being “horrified by sex”. In reality, they were horrified by the version of sex presented by sex educators — in much the same way an art lover would be appalled to see vandals approaching a great masterpiece with cans of spray-paint and lewd laughter. Progressives never understood this, and consequently Whitehouse has been almost entirely defined by what she fought against rather than what she fought for.
Whitehouse’s lobbying resulted in several pieces of legislation, including the 1981 Indecent Displays Act, which sought to restrain sex shops and the display of porn, as well as the 1984 Video Recordings Act, intended to limit the sale of extreme video content. Unfortunately, these acts were rendered moot by the internet. But her greatest achievement was the 1978 Protection of Children Act, which criminalized child pornography. It seems remarkable that such a law did not already exist, but in the ’70s the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) was operating openly in Britain; it was supported by some British elites who believed that sex with children was the natural next step in sexual liberation.
The Crusades: Part 6 — The Loss of Jerusalem
seangabb
Published 27 Feb 2021The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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History of Rome in 15 Buildings 09. The Arch of Constantine
toldinstone
Published 27 Sep 2018The many statues and reliefs from older monuments integrated into the Arch of Constantine – the focus of this ninth episode of our History of Rome – advertise the continuity of traditional Roman values into the fourth century. The Arch’s inscription, however, alludes to the religious revolution set in motion by the first Christian emperor.
If you enjoyed this video, you might be interested in my book Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants: Frequently Asked Questions about the Ancient Greeks and Romans. You can find a preview of the book here:
https://toldinstone.com/naked-statues…
If you’re so inclined, you can follow me elsewhere on the web:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…
https://www.instagram.com/toldinstone/To see the story and photo essay associated with this video, go to:
https://toldinstone.com/the-arch-of-c…
May 16, 2022
Heaviest Air Raid in Human History – WAH 060 – May 15, 1943
World War Two
Published 15 May 2022As the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is being quashed, there are renewed Japanese atrocities in China, and the RAF sets a world record by bombing German civilians.
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The Hudson’s Bay Company in Canadian history
As a kid growing up in the late 60s and early 70s, “The Bay” was just a department store. It wasn’t as upscale as Eaton’s, but had different stock than Eaton’s or Simpson’s so occasionally you’d find something there that wasn’t available in the other major central Canadian department stores. It took me an embarrassingly long time to make the connection between the big retail store in the mall and the company that owned vast swathes of what eventually became Canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At Terra Nullius, Ned Donovan tries to put that massive geo-political organization into context:
At the turn of the 17th Century, felt hats were all the rage and felt hats are made of beaver skin. At the time, this relied on Russia’s long-established fur trade. But as demand grew, quality dropped significantly as the native European beaver population began to be hunted out of existence. Within decades, it was very difficult for merchants to find high quality felt from Russia, and customers in England were complaining that they were having to wear felt made from rabbit instead.
Approximate extent of Prince Rupert’s Land in the late 17th to early 18th century – note that this is the range of the company’s trappers and traders, not military or political control.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.But around the same time, irregular and rare shipments began to arrive from the European colonies in North America where beaver – mostly trapped by French settlers and Indigenous Americans – was still plentiful and of very good quality. In 1669, the ship Nonsuch dropped anchor in the Thames with a large shipment of some of the highest quality furs London had ever seen, selling them immediately for £1,233 (equivalent to around £1 million in 2022). The Nonsuch had led an expedition invested in by some of London’s richest merchants and sponsored by Prince Rupert, a first cousin of King Charles II. It had done its trapping in Hudson’s Bay in the north of what is now Canada. The purpose of the expedition was to demonstrate that the issues with fur supply could be solved if its trapping in North America could be optimised, leaving behind the slow and traditional approach of the French and First Nation trappers.
This was not the first time Prince Rupert had seen to make money from exploiting colonised lands, having poured large amounts of his wealth into the slave trade from West Africa and sitting on the board of the Royal African Company. With this financial success made from trading in human lives, he turned his interest to North America and helped put together the syndicate that sent the Nonsuch to Hudson’s Bay. In 1670, his cousin King Charles II granted the syndicate a royal charter to form the Hudson’s Bay Company, giving the company a monopoly over “Prince Rupert’s Land” made up of the land drained by rivers and streams flowing into Hudson’s Bay – or 3,861,400 square kilometres.
In short order, the company had established trading posts throughout its monopoly, known as factories (as each was controlled by a company official known as a factor). The only thing that mattered to these factories and its parent company was beaver. Nothing could stand in the way of ensuring the safe passage of furs and pelts to Europe. By 1690, the demand in England for hats and caps was five million per year – or one per person. Hundreds of thousands more would be exported onwards from England to Europe such was the demand for the well-known quality of the Hudson Bay beaver. For example in 1756, Portuguese customers spent more than £20 million in today’s money on English beaver felt hats.
As Prince Rupert’s Land was largely still wilderness, besides company staff it was inhabited only by European and First Nations trappers and as a result there was only a barter economy, to both subjugate indigenous residents and prevent private wealth. There were standardised prices throughout Prince Rupert’s Land and instead of a normal currency, the company instead pegged everything against the unit of 1MB (1 Made Beaver). For three made beaver pelts, you could be given one clay pot in exchange at a company store, or for 10 you could get a gun. Private trading was outlawed and all beaver pelts that left Prince Rupert’s Land traveled through the warehouses and accounts of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Look at Life — The Flying Soldier (1965)
PauliosVids
Published 20 Nov 2018A look at helicopter training within the British Army.
QotD: The difference between surface meaning and actual intent
Tim Worstall, “That Chinese ‘BreedReady’ Database – Check The Translation”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-03-11.
May 15, 2022
The End of the War in Africa – WW2 – 194 – May 14, 1943
World War Two
Published 14 May 2022With the end of the Tunisian Campaign, the Allies have won the war for the African Continent. What next? They meet at the Trident Conference in Washington DC to try and figure that out. Meanwhile, the fight in the field continues — in Burma, the Aleutians, China, and the Kuban.
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The young man who might have been King Henry IX of England
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers what might have been had the eldest son of King James I and VI lived to take the thrones of England and Scotland:
Portrait of Prince Henry Frederick (1594-1612), Prince of Wales by Isaac Oliver
National Trust, Dunster Castle; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/prince-henry-frederick-15941612-prince-of-wales-99804 via Wikimedia Commons.
Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, was the eldest son and heir of James I of England. He would presumably have become Henry IX had he managed to outlive his father. But he died in 1612 aged just 18. The kingdom instead ended up with his younger brother Charles I and civil war. I’m not sure how far Prince Henry was influenced, but it seems that many of the major innovators of the period were purposefully cultivating him as a kind of inventor-scientist king.
It reminds me of a very similar and successful scheme, which I noticed when researching my first book on the history of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. This was the scheme to cultivate George III — famed for his madness and losing the Thirteen Colonies, but also for his collection of scientific instruments and interest in agricultural innovation. Those interests were no accident: his upbringing had included lessons in botany from the inventor Stephen Hales, in art and architecture from William Chambers, and in mathematics from George Lewis Scott. These were not just experts, but active innovator-organisers. Hales was a key founder of the Society of Arts; Chambers helped organise the artists who split off from it to form the Royal Academy of Arts; and Scott was involved in updating Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences — an early encyclopaedia focused on technical knowledge. And their efforts bore fruit. Unlike his predecessor and grandfather George II — whose interests mainly fell under the headings of Handel, Hanover, hunting, and heavy women — George III became an active patron of science, invention, and the arts.
Given how successfully the inventors cultivated George III, it makes me wonder how things might have looked had Prince Henry lived to be king. His younger brother Charles I had an education heavily geared towards languages, theology, and overcoming various health issues through sports. But Henry — naturally athletic and charismatic — had an upbringing tightly controlled by Sir Thomas Chaloner, who had a major financial stake in innovation.
Chaloner housed and supported his alchemist cousin (also, confusingly, called Thomas Chaloner). This cousin had published an early treatise on the medical applications of saltpetre, or nitre (what we now call potassium nitrate), and had tried to produce alum on the isle of Lambay, off the coast of Ireland. Alum was a valuable substance used to fix cloth dyes, which had hitherto been monopolised by the Pope, who owned Europe’s only alum mine. Opening a competing, English-controlled, Protestant supply of alum was not just about starting a new industry. It was a matter of Europe-wide religious and strategic urgency.
[…]
Henry’s circle also included the Dutch polymath Cornelis Drebbel, who would become famous all over Europe for travelling in a submarine under the Thames, for his improvements to microscopes, and for inventing a perpetual motion machine (which isn’t as silly as it sounds — it was effectively a kind of barometer, exploiting changes in temperature and air pressure to move).
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The more I look into the circle of inventors around Prince Henry, the more familiar names crop up. There even seems to be some connection to Simon Sturtevant, one of the original patentees of a method to make iron by using coal instead of wood — Chaloner was seemingly responsible for evaluating Sturtevant’s inventiveness, to see if he merited a patent. I found it very striking that when Sturtevant’s iron-making business was about to get going, Prince Henry was to have a share.
Given such innovative company, we can only imagine what kind of a king Prince Henry might have been. If George III grew up to be “Farmer George”, might a Henry IX have become associated with navigation or hydraulic engines? We’ll never know. But even during his brief lifetime, there was plenty of patronage to be had for inventors at the court of their would-be Inventor-King.
Tank Chat #147 M14/41 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
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QotD: Parliament
Winston S. Churchill, speech around the time of the Munich crisis, 1938.
May 14, 2022
Operation Chariot, the “Greatest Raid of All”
The raid on the French port of St. Nazaire in March 1942, codenamed “Operation Chariot” by the British, was one of the most daring and successful special forces operation of the Second World War. In The Critic, Richard Hopton reviews a new history of this operation by Giles Whittell:
Operation Chariot, the Raid on St Nazaire, has long been known as “The Greatest Raid of All”. The audacity of the plan, the lethal danger of the operation, the inadequacy of the equipment provided, the astonishing courage of the participants and the spectacular success of its primary object have ensured its place in the annals of British martial heroism.
In the early hours of 28 March 1942, a force of 623 commandos and naval personnel stole up the Loire estuary to attack the port of St Nazaire. Leading the force was HMS Campbeltown, a superannuated destroyer acquired from the Americans, which had been converted into a floating bomb by the addition of four tons of high explosive secreted in her bows.
The plan was that she would ram the steel gate of the port’s immense dry dock where the charge would explode, demolishing the dock gate. The commandos would then swarm ashore to attack the dockyard installations, particularly the pumps and winding mechanisms which operated the dry dock. With the dock out of action, Hitler would not risk his battleship Tirpitz in the Atlantic where she could wreak havoc among the convoys supporting the war effort in Britain. This was the immediate, supposed object of the raid.
Giles Whittell’s new book is not the first full-length history of the event. C.E. Lucas-Phillips’s account, The Greatest Raid of All, was published in 1958 followed 40 years later by James Dorrian’s Storming St Nazaire, which remains the most detailed, authoritative account of the operation. In 2013 Robert Lyman published Into The Jaws of Death which told the story of the raid anew, with a greater concentration on the genesis and planning of the operation.
In 2007 Jeremy Clarkson took time away from messing around with cars to make a documentary for the BBC about the raid. The result was an “affectionate and enthralling” piece of television which brought the exploits of the Charioteers — as the men who took part in the raid have always been known — to a wider audience.
Although the ostensible object of the raid was to discourage the Germans from risking the Tirpitz in the Atlantic, it is now known that, by the spring of 1942, the German high command had already decided to keep the battleship moored safely in a distant Norwegian fjord. Accordingly, destroying the dry dock at St Nazaire was, strategically, a futile gesture.
The Crusades: Part 5 – The Role of Women
seangabb
Published 19 Feb 2021The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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Nostalgia for the Middle Ages?
In Wrong Side of History, Ed West considers the apparent rising interest in Europe’s Middle Ages and Renaissance in popular culture:
A social media heretic faces trial
The genre has been aided by developments in cinematic technology, allowing the sort of special effects that made such productions in the 1980s and 90s somewhat ridiculous. But there may be deeper cultural significance to this medieval revival, and it is one that evokes a strange discomfort in many people. Because, while the academic field of medieval studies has become a branch of progressive theology, medievalism as expressed through popular culture feels much more conservative, and to some minds, even fascistic. At the very least, it is “Right-coded”.
This discomfort often flares up whenever a new film or series attempts to capture our imagination, voiced in comment pieces warning us that they might be popular for the wrong reasons, among unsavoury elements.
This is what happened with Viking epic The Northman, despite director Robert Eggar’s impeccably progressive politics. “The Northman‘s 10th-century society appears to be uniformly white and firmly divided along patriarchal lines,” The Guardian warned: “Men do the ruling and killing; women do the scheming and baby-making. Its hero, played by Alexander Skarsgård, is not a million miles from the ‘macho stereotype’ Eggers complained of – a brawny warrior who settles most disputes with a sword and without a shirt. Skarsgård’s love interest, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, could be the far-right male’s dream woman: beautiful, fair-haired, loyal to her man and committed to bearing his offspring. Even before the film’s release, far-right voices were giving their approval on the anonymous message board site 4chan.”
Wow, expressing approval of a beautiful, fair-haired woman who wants to settle down and have your children? Better call Prevent!
According to a piece in the Economist, the new fixation with the Middle Ages dates to the September 11 attacks, when “the American far right … developed a fascination with the Middle Ages and the Renaissance — in particular, with the idea of the West as a united civilisation that was fending off a challenge from the East …
“The embrace of the medieval extends from the alt-right online forum culture that has exploded in the last few years to stodgier old-school racists. Helmeted crusaders cry out the Latin war-cry ‘Deus vult!’ from memes circulated on Reddit and 4Chan. Images of Donald Trump, clad in mail with a cross embroidered on his chest, abound. Anti-Islam journals and websites name themselves after the Frankish king Charles Martel, who fought Muslim armies in the 8th century, or the (slightly post-medieval) Ottoman defeat at Vienna.”
This concern is real enough that I’ve noticed a trend for medieval historians to introduce their books with what might be best described as health warnings, lest they be enjoyed in the wrong way. Neil Price’s The Children of Ash and Elm, for instance, comes with a declaration of values in the introduction:
Over the centuries, a great many people have eagerly pressed the Vikings into (im)moral service, and others continue to do so… I strongly believe that any meaningful twenty-first-century engagement with the Vikings must acknowledge the often deeply problematic ways in which their memory is activated in the present …
The Viking world this book explorers was a strongly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic place, with all this implies in terms of population movement, interaction (in every sense of the word, including the most intimate), and the relative tolerance required. This extended far back into Northern prehistory. There was never any such thing as a “pure Nordic” bloodline, and the people of the time would have been baffled by the very notion. We use “Vikings” as a consciously problematic label for the majority population of Scandinavia, but they also shared their immediate world with others – in particular, the semi-nomadic Sami people. Their respective settlement histories stretch so deeply into the Stone Age past as to make any modern discussion of “who came first” absurd. Scandinavia had also welcomed immigrants for millennia before the Viking Age, and there is no doubt that a stroll through the market centres and trading places of the time would have been a vibrantly cosmopolitan experience.
Well, I won’t be recommending Mr Price’s book to my friends at 4Chan, I can tell you that.
