As I’ve noted in each of these posts, the fundamental claim we are evaluating here is this one, made baldly by George R.R. Martin:
The Dothraki were actually fashioned as an amalgam of a number of steppe and plains cultures … Mongols and Huns, certainly, but also Alans, Sioux, Cheyenne, and various other Amerindian tribes … seasoned with a dash of pure fantasy.
We may, I think, now safely dismiss this statement as false. What we have found is that the Dothraki do not meaningfully mirror either Steppe or Plains cultures. They do not mirror them in dress, nor in systems of subsistence, nor in diet, nor in housing, nor in music, nor in art, nor in social structures, nor in leadership structures, nor in family structures, nor in demographics, nor in economics, nor in trade practices, nor in laws, nor in marriage customs, nor in attitudes towards violence, nor in weapons, nor in armor, nor in strategic way of war, nor in battle tactics.
We might say he has added “dashes” of pure fantasy until the “dash” is the entire soup, but the truth is clearly the reverse: Martin has sprinkled a little bit of water on a barrel of salt and called it just a dash of salt. There is no historical root source here, but instead pure fantasy which – because racist stereotypes sometimes connect, in thin and useless ways, to actual history – occasionally, in broken-clock fashion, manages to resemble the real thing.
It seems as though the best we might say of what Martin has right is that these are people who are nomads that ride horses and occasionally shoot bows. The rest – which as you can see from the list above there, is the overwhelming majority – has functionally no connection to the actual historical people. And stunningly, somehow, the show – despite its absolutely massive budget, despite the legions of scrutiny and oversight such a massive venture brings – somehow is even worse, while being just as explicit in tying its bald collection of 1930s racist stereotypes to real people who really exist today.
Instead, the primary inspiration for George R.R. Martin’s Dothraki seems to come from deeply flawed Hollywood depictions of nomadic peoples, rather than any real knowledge about the peoples themselves. The Dothraki are not an amalgam of the Sioux or the Mongols, but rather an amalgam of Stagecoach (1939) and The Conqueror (1956). When it comes to the major attributes of the Dothraki – their singular focus on violent, especially sexual violence, their lack of art or expression, their position as a culture we primarily see “from the outside” as almost uniformly brutal (and in need of literally the whitest of all women to tame and reform it) – what we see is not reflected in the historical people at all but is absolutely of a piece with this Hollywood legacy.
But Martin has done more damage than simply watching The Mongols (1961) would today. He has taken those old, inaccurate, racially tinged stereotypes and repackaged them, with an extra dash of contemporary cynicism to lend them the feeling of “reality” and then used his reputation as a writer of more historically grounded fantasy (a reputation, I think we may say at this point, which ought to be discarded; Martin is an engaging writer but a poor historian) to give those old stereotypes the air of “real history” and how things “really were”. And so, just as Westeros became the vision of the Middle Ages that inhabits the mind of so many people (including quite a few of my students), the Dothraki become the mental model for the Generic Nomad: brutal, sexually violent, uncreative, unartistic, uncivilized.
And as I noted at the beginning of this series, Martin’s fans have understood that framing perfectly well. The argument given by both the creators themselves, often parroted by fans and even repeated by journalists is that A Song of Ice and Fire‘s historical basis is both a strike in favor of the book because they present a “more real” vision of the past but also a flawless defense against any qualms anyone might have over the way that the fiction presents violence (especially its voyeuristic take on sexual violence) or its cultures. No doubt part of you are tired of seeing that same “amalgam” quote over and over again at the beginning of every single one of these essays, but I did that for a reason, because it was essential to note that this assertion is not merely part of the subtext of how Martin presents his work (although it is that too), but part of the actual text of his promotion of his work.
And it is a lie. And I want to be clear here, it is not a misunderstanding. It is not a regrettable implication. It is not an unfortunate blind-spot of ignorance. It is a lie, made repeatedly, now by many people in both the promotion of the books and the show who ought to have known better. And it is a lie that has been believed by millions of fans.
One thing that I hope is clear from this treatment is just how trivial the amount of research I’ve done here was. Certainly, it helped that I was familiar with Steppe nomads already and that I knew who to ask to be pointed in the direction of information. Nevertheless, everything I’ve cited here is available in English and it is all relatively affordable (I actually own all of the books cited here; thanks to my Patrons for making that possible, especially since getting materials from the library is slower in the days of COVID-19; nevertheless, the point here is that they are not obscure tomes). Much of it – Ratchnevsky on Chinggis Khan, Secoy and McGinnis on Great Plains warfare – were already available well before the 1996 publication of A Game of Thrones. 1996 was not some wasteland of ignorance that might have made it impossible for Martin to get good information! For an easy sense of what a dedicated amateur with film connections might have learned in 1996, you could simply watch Ken Burns’ The West, which came out the same year. I am not asking Martin to become a historian (though I am asking him to stop representing himself as something like one), I am asking him to read a historian.
Instead of doing that basic amount of research, or simply saying that the peoples of Essos were made up cultures unconnected with the real thing, Martin and the vast promotional apparatus at HBO opted to lie about some real cultures and then to put hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting that lie.
And I want to be clear, these are real people! I know, depending on where you live, “Mongols” and “Sioux” and “Cheyenne” may feel as distant and fanciful as “Rohirrim” or “Hobbits” or else they may feel like “long-lost” peoples. But these were real people, whose real descendants are alive today. And almost all of them face discrimination and abuse, sometimes informally, sometimes through state action, often as a result of these very lingering racist stereotypes.
In that context, declaring that the Dothraki really do reflect the real world (I cannot stress that enough) cultures of the Plains Native Americans or Eurasian Steppe Nomads is not merely a lie, but it is an irresponsible lie that can do real harm to real people in the real world. And that irresponsible lie has been accepted by Martin’s fans; he has done a grave disservice to his own fans by lying to them in this way. And of course the worst of it is that the lie – backed by the vast apparatus that is HBO prestige television – will have more reach and more enduring influence than this or any number of historical “debunking” essays. It will befuddle the valiant efforts of teachers in their classrooms (and yes, I frequently encounter students hindered by bad pop-pseudo-history they believe to be true; it is often devilishly hard to get students to leave those preconceptions behind), it will plague efforts to educate the public about these cultures of their histories. And it will probably, in the long run, hurt the real descendants of nomads.
But this is exactly why I think it is important for historians to engage with the culture and to engage with depictions like this. Because these lies have consequences and someone ought to at least try to tell the truth. With luck, even with my only rudimentary knowledge, I have done some of that here, by presenting a bit more of the richness and variety of historical (and in some cases, present-day) horse-borne nomadic life, in both North America and Eurasia.
Because there is and was a lot more to nomads than just “that Dothraki horde”.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: That Dothraki Horde, Part IV: Screamers and Howlers”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-08.
August 5, 2024
QotD: George R.R. Martin’s Dothraki rank with the lazy racial sterotypes of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” westerns
August 4, 2024
The rise and (rapid) fall of the Levittown model
Virginia Postrel linked to this interesting post at Construction Physics which traces the brief heyday of William Levitt’s “Levittown” model for mass-producing modern housing:
Prefabbed components and appliances for a Levittown home.
Image from Construction Physics.
For decades, people have tried to bring mass production methods to housing: to build houses the way we build cars. While no one has succeeded, arguably the man that came closest to becoming “the Henry Ford of homebuilding” was William Levitt, with his company Levitt and Sons. Levitt is most famous for building “Levittowns”, developments of thousands of homes built rapidly in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. By optimizing the construction process with improvements like standardized products and reverse assembly line techniques, Levitt and Sons was able to complete dozens of homes a day at what it claimed was a far lower cost than its competitors. William Levitt styled his company as the General Motors of housing, and both he and it became famous. Levitt graced the cover of Time magazine in 1950, and Levittowns became a household name.
For a time, it appeared that Levitt might actually sweep away the old way of building and become the Henry Ford of housing through modern mass production techniques. Levitt boasted that he could build more cheaply than anyone else, and for decades Levitt and Sons was the largest homebuilder in the U.S., and probably the world.1 But Levitt’s success unraveled. By the late 1970s, Levitt and Sons had barely escaped bankruptcy, and it emerged as a small, conventional homebuilder, which it would remain until it went out of business for good in 2018. Levitt himself would leave Levitt and Sons in the early 1970s, lose his fortune after a series of failed development projects in the U.S. and abroad, and die penniless in 1994.
Levitt’s model of large-scale, efficient homebuilding using mass production-style methods worked for a brief window in the 1950s, but by the end of the 1960s a changing housing market and increasingly strict land use controls meant that such methods were no longer feasible. And even at its peak, Levitt likely pushed large-scale building beyond what could be justified on pure economic terms. Levittown was ultimately a response to a temporary set of housing market conditions, not the herald of a new, better way of building.
[…]
First Levitt homes at Levittown.
Image from Construction Physics.At Levittown, the construction process was broken down into 26 separate steps, each performed by a separate crew. Crews would go to a house, perform their required task (using material that had been pre-delivered), then move on to the next house. Within the crew, work was further specialized: on the washing machine installation crew, William Levitt noted that “one man did nothing but fix bolts into the floor, another followed to attach the machine”, and so on. By breaking down the process into repetitive, well-defined steps, workers didn’t have to spend time figuring out what they should do (what Levitt described as “fumbling and figuring”).
In addition to task and product standardization, Levitt and Sons took advantage of machines and mechanization wherever possible. It had its own cement trucks, and operated its own foundation-digging machinery and cinder block-making machinery. Levitt and Sons was an early user of power tools like paint sprayers, power saws, routers, and nailers. The company also made extensive use of what at the time were relatively novel factory-produced materials, like plywood and drywall.
Like any mass production process, the ultimate enemy of building Levittown was delay: keeping construction on track meant a steady, uninterrupted stream of material that arrived at the jobsite exactly when needed. On a typical construction site, as much as half the time was wasted while workers wandered around looking for needed material. In Levitt’s operation, wasted time was close to zero. To ensure timely material deliveries (and to cut out middlemen), Levitt and Sons had its own distribution company, the North Shore Supply Company, which stretched for half a mile along a railroad stop near the jobsite. To avoid delays, North Shore Supply kept a sufficient supply of material on-hand to build 75 houses, and pre-assembled items like plumbing trees, stairs, and cabinets. North Shore was also where lumber was pre-cut to the correct size. By using standardized designs, planned work sequences, and carefully controlled precutting, Levitt and Sons was able to almost entirely eliminate rework during the construction process.
But assuring an uninterrupted flow of material required far more than just owning a distribution company. William Levitt described some of the extreme measures the company went to avoid delays or slowdowns:
We wouldn’t let ourselves be stopped by shortages. When cement was unavailable in this country we chartered a boat and brought it in from Europe. When lumber was in short supply, we bought a forest in California and built a mill. When nails were hard to come by, we set up a factory in our backyard and made them ourselves.
At its peak Levitt and Sons was completing 36 homes in Levittown a day. And the huge backlog of demand meant that housing was sold quickly. Months before the first Levittown homes were completed, families stood in line for the opportunity to rent one (roughly the first 2,000 Levittown homes were built as rentals). On a single day in 1949, Levitt and Sons sold 1400 homes, some to families who had been waiting in line for days. At $7,990 for a 800 square foot home, Levitt boasted that he could sell his houses for $1,500 less than the competition and still make $1,000 in profit.2
[…]
William Levitt tried harder than anyone else to make housing mass producing happen, and for a brief moment it looked like he might succeed. But Levitt’s dreams were predicated on a particular set of housing market conditions — a huge backlog of demand, relatively few competitors, compliant building jurisdictions and little public opposition — that quickly dissipated. In The Merchant Builders, Ned Eichler notes that as early as the mid-1950s, the Levitt model of a single, enormous project built rapidly with mass production-style methods no longer made sense. Says Eichler, “There simply was no market in which an appropriate site could be bought cheaply enough or in which demand was great enough to sustain such a pace”. Many of Levitt’s innovations — slabs instead of basements, power tools, drywall and plywood — did not require large volume production, and were adopted by other, smaller builders (and have since become standard). The enormous increase in land use controls starting in the late 1960s only further inhibited the sort of large-scale developments that Levitt favored.
1. Levitt and Sons was at least the largest in the U.S. in 1950, and was in 1968 when it was acquired by ITT, and probably for some years after that.
2. The first Levittown demonstration homes were sold for $6,990.
Mokusatsu! – WW2 – Week 310 – August 3, 1945
World War Two
Published 3 Aug 2024The Japanese reaction to the Allied ultimatum for unconditional surrender is … mokusatsu. This can be translated several ways, but all involve not giving a response. Meanwhile, materials for atomic bombs to be dropped on Japan are delivered to Tinian, though the ship making the delivery is sunk by a Japanese submarine days afterward. The active war continues in Burma and China, and the Potsdam Conference ends in Germany with the map of Poland very much re-drawn.
00:00 Intro
00:56 Mokusatsu
05:47 Delivering Atomic Material
07:22 Sinking The Indianapolis
09:26 Bombing Japan
12:22 The War In Burma And China
14:07 Potsdam Confernece Ends
17:02 Conclusion
(more…)
Caesar Crosses the Rubicon – Historia Civilis Reaction
Vlogging Through History
Published Apr 22, 2024See the original here – Caesar Crosses the Rubicon (52 to 49 …
#history #reaction
August 3, 2024
The Battle of Lepanto, 7 October 1571
Big Serge looks at the decisive battle between the “Holy League” (Spain, Venice, Genoa, Savoy, Tuscany, the Papal States and the Order of St. John) against the Ottoman navy in the Ionian Sea in 1571:
“The Battle of Lepanto”
Oil painting by Juan Luna, 1887. From the Senate of Spain collection via Wikimedia Commons.
Lepanto is a very famous battle, and one which means different things to different people. To a devout Roman Catholic like Chesterton, Lepanto takes on the romanticized and chivalrous form of a crusade — a war by the Holy League against the marauding Turk. At the time it was fought, to be sure, this was the way many in the Christian faction thought of their fight. Chesterton, for his part, writes that “the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, and called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross”.
For historians, Lepanto is something like a requiem for the Mediterranean. Placed firmly in the early-modern period, fought between the Catholic powers of the inland sea and the Ottomans, then on the crest of their imperial rise, Lepanto marked a climactic ending to the long period of human history where the Mediterranean was the pivot of the western world. The coasts of Italy, Greece, the Levant, and Egypt — which for millennia had been the aquatic stomping grounds of empire — were treated to one more great battle before the Mediterranean world was permanently eclipsed by the rise of the Atlantic powers like the French and English. For those particular devotees of military history, Lepanto is very famous indeed as the last major European battle in which galleys — warships powered primarily by rowers — played the pivotal role.
There is some truth in all of this. The warring navies at Lepanto fought a sort of battle that the Mediterranean had seen many times before — battle lines of rowed warships clashing at close quarters in close proximity to the coast. A Roman, Greek, or Persian admiral may not have understood the swivel guns, arquebusiers, or religious symbols of the fleets, but from a distance they would have found the long lines of vessels frothing the waters with their oars to be intimately familiar. This was the last time that such a grand scene would unfold on the blue waters of the inner sea; afterwards the waters would more and more belong to sailing ships with broadside cannon.
Lepanto was all of these things: a symbolic religious clash, a final reprise of archaic galley combat, and the denouement of the ancient Mediterranean world. Rarely, however, is it fully understood or appreciated in its most innate terms, which is to say as a military engagement which was well planned and well fought by both sides. When Lepanto is discussed for its military qualities, stripped of its religious and historiographic significance, it is often dismissed as a bloody, unimaginative, and primitive affair — a mindless slugfest (the stereotypical “land battle at sea”) using an archaic sort of ship which had been relegated to obsolescence by the rise of sail and cannon.
Here we wish to give Lepanto, and the men who fought it, their proper due. The continued use of galleys well into the 16th century did not reflect some sort of primitiveness among the Mediterranean powers, but was instead an intelligent and sensible response to the particular conditions of war on that sea. While galleys would, of course, be abandoned eventually in favor of sailing ships, at Lepanto they remained potent weapons systems which fit the needs of the combatants. Far from being a mindless orgy of violence, Lepanto was a battle characterized by intelligent battle plans in which both the Turkish and Christian command sought to maximize their own advantages, and it was a close run and well fought affair. Lepanto was indeed a swan song for a very old form of Mediterranean naval combat, but it was a well conceived and well fought one, and Turkish and Christian fleets alike did justice to this venerable and ancient form of battle.
The Rise, Fall, And Revival Of Art Deco | A Style Is Born W/ @KazRowe
Wayfair
Published Jun 15, 2023Welcome to A Style is Born, hosted by YouTuber, cartoonist, and champion of under-represented history, Kaz Rowe!
Join us as we go down the rabbit hole and uncover the unique histories and origin stories behind your favorite design styles. In this first episode of Season 2, we delve into the history-rich Art Deco movement.
Chapters
Intro – 00:00
History – 00:45
Influences, Elements, & Materials – 04:58
1980s Art Deco Revival Via Memphis Group – 07:46
Conclusion – 09:13
(more…)
QotD: Grain farming and the rise of organized states
But you can tax grain farmers! You can assign them some land, and come back around harvest time, and there will be a bunch of grain just standing there for you to take ten percent of. If the grain farmer flees, you can take his grain without him. Then you can grind the grain up and have a nice homogenous, dense, easy-to-transport grain product that you can dole out in measured rations. Grain farming was a giant leap in oppressability.
In this model, the gradual drying-out of Sumeria in the 4th millennium BC caused a shift away from wetland foraging and toward grain farming. The advent of grain farming made oppression possible, and a new class of oppression-entrepreneurs arose to turn this possibility into a reality. They incentivized farmers to intensify grain production further at the expense of other foods, and this turned into a vicious cycle of stronger states = more grain = stronger states. Within a few centuries, Uruk and a few other cities developed the full model: tax collectors, to take the grain; scribes, to measure the grain; and priests, to write stories like The Debate Between Sheep And Grain, with immortal lines like:
From sunrise till sunset, may the name of Grain be praised. People should submit to the yoke of Grain. Whoever has silver, whoever has jewels, whoever has cattle, whoever has sheep shall take a seat at the gate of whoever has Grain, and pass his time there
And so the people were taught that growing grain was Correct and Right and The Will Of God and they shouldn’t do anything stupid like try to escape back to the very close and easily-escapable-to areas where everyone was still living in Edenic plenty.
… turns out lots of people in early states escaped to the very close and easily-escapable-to areas where everyone was still living in Edenic plenty. Early states were necessarily tiny; overland transportation of resources more than a few miles was cost-prohibitive; you could do a little better by having the state on a river and adding in water transport, but Uruk’s sphere of influence was still probably just a double-digit number of kilometers. Even in good times, peasants would be tempted to escape to the hills and wetlands; in bad times, it started seeming crazy not to try this. Scott suggests that ancient Uruk had a weaker distinction between “subject” and “slave” than we would expect. Although there were certainly literal slaves involved in mining and manufacturing, even the typical subject was a serf at best, bound to the land and monitored for flight risk.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Against The Grain“, Slate Star Codex, 2019-10-15.
August 2, 2024
Why WW1 Turned Into Trench Warfare
The Great War
Published Apr 12, 2024Trench warfare is one of the lasting symbols of the First World War, especially on the Western Front. But when the war began, the German and French armies envisioned sweeping advances and defeating the enemy swiftly. So, how and why did the Western Front in 1914 turn into the trench system we associate with WW1?
(more…)
August 1, 2024
The Rarest 1911: North American Arms Co
Forgotten Weapons
Published Apr 22, 2024In the summer of 1918, the US government wanted to increase production of M1911 pistols, but all current manufacturers were working at capacity. So they looked to issue new contracts, and someone realized that the Ross rifle factory was a potential option. Now, the Ross Rifle Company was bankrupt by this time, and its factory lay essentially abandoned. So in June of 1918, two Canadian lawyers by the names of James Denison and Edmond Ryckman incorporated the North American Arms Company Ltd in Quebec, signed a contract to manufacture 500,000 1911 pistols for the US, and then leased the Ross factory for a term of 18 months. Whether they would have been successful in producing pistols at scale is unknown, because their contract was cancelled on December 4, 1918 before any deliveries were made. With the end of the war, arms requirements plummeted, and pretty much all ongoing weapons contracts were cancelled, not just this one. However, parts for 100 pistols had been produced, and these were assembled and sold commercially after the contract was cancelled.
(more…)
July 31, 2024
The Korean War Week 006 – Stand or Die! – July 30, 1950
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 30 Jul 2024The UN Forces have been pushed back ever further, but this week, US 8th Army Commander Walton Walker issues the order to “stand or die”; he sees no other options. American reinforcements are finally getting into the actual fight, though, and Britain has decided they will send in ground troops, so things might turn around … if they can hold out long enough for those troops to arrive, because a brilliant North Korean strategy might win the war and soon.
(more…)
The History of the British Rail Symbol
Jago Hazzard
Published Apr 21, 2024Moving forward or indecision?
July 30, 2024
Sparta’s bane – Cicero labelled him “the foremost man of Greece”
The Theban general who finally broke the military power of Sparta:
Epaminondas defending Pelopidas by William Rainey.
Illustration from Plutarch’s Lives for Boys and Girls: being selected lives freely retold (1900) via Wikimedia Commons.
The ancient Roman orator and statesman Cicero labeled him “the foremost man of Greece”. Cornelius Nepos, a biographer and contemporary of Cicero’s, regarded him as “incorruptible”. The 16th-century French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne judged him “one of the three worthiest and most excellent men” in all of history.
This man was a warrior-philosopher, a revolutionary, an ascetic, a statesman and diplomat, a liberator, and a military genius. Yet the deeds for which he is best remembered spanned less than two decades (379–362 BC), 2,400 years ago.
To whom am I referring?
His name was Epaminondas. If it doesn’t ring a bell, you’re not alone. Outside of Greece, few people anywhere today know of him. I never heard his name until this past April when an economist friend, Dr. Luke Jasinski of Maria Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland, suggested I write about him. Luke says he:
…was a broad-minded man with a libertarian streak, a visionary who showed the Greek world a viable alternative to the endless wars of the time. For modern libertarians, his story is worth remembering. Impressed by it myself, I dedicated one of my economics books to him.
What we know about Epaminondas comes entirely from secondary sources. He left behind no writings that have survived, but from contemporaries and later historians, we do know at least this much about him:
- He was born in the Greek city-state of Thebes in the central Greek region of Boeotia, sometime between 419 and 411 BC, when Thebes was a tiny backwater. It would be largely due to Epaminondas and his loyal friend and fellow general Pelopidas that Thebes would become a powerhouse a few decades later.
- Sparta, the brutal city-state that governed the Greek region of the Peloponnesus, orchestrated a coup against the Theban government in 382 BC and installed an armed garrison there. Three years later, Epaminondas played a key role in a revolution that ended the Spartan dictatorship, restoring local, democratic government.
- In the wake of the Theban revolution, Sparta went to war with Thebes and its Boeotian allies for the next decade. When peace talks broke down in 371 BC, the stage was set for the climactic Battle of Leuctra. Through masterful and unprecedented tactics on the battlefield, Epaminondas led the outnumbered Theban armies to a decisive victory over the Spartans.
- To end the Spartan threat for good, Epaminondas invaded the Peloponnesus a year later. He liberated the region of Messenia that the Spartans had occupied and savaged two centuries earlier. Epaminondas did not subsume and subdue the Messenians; instead, he introduced democratic rule and then left. Grateful for their liberation, the Messenians became allies of Thebes and a buffer against the Spartans. Shortly thereafter, Epaminondas founded a new city in the northern Peloponnesus and named it Megalopolis. With Sparta shrunken and bottled up, its days as a menacing bully were numbered.
QotD: The Roman Republic and the Social War
Consequently, instead of being added to the system of the socii, these new territories were organized as provinces (which is to say they were assigned to the oversight of a magistrate, that’s what a provincia is, a job, not a place). Instead of contributing troops, they contributed taxes (in money and grain) and the subordination of these communities was much more direct, since communities within a province were still under the command of a magistrate.
We’ll get to the provinces and their role in shaping Roman attitudes towards identity and culture a bit later, but for the various peoples of Roman Italy, the main impact of this shift was to change the balance of rewards for military service. Whereas before most of the gains of conquest were in loot and land – which the socii shared in – now Roman conquests outside of Italy created permanent revenue streams (taxes!) which flowed to Rome only. Roman politicians began attempting to use those revenue streams to provide public goods to the people – land distribution, free military equipment, cheap grain – but these benefits, provided by Rome to its citizens, were unavailable to the socii.
At the same time, as the close of the second century approached, it became clear that the opportunity to march up the ladder of status was breaking down, consumed by the increasingly tense maelstrom of the politics of the Republic. In essence while it was obvious as early as the 120s (and perhaps earlier) that a major citizenship overhaul was needed which would extend some form of Roman citizenship to many of the socii, it seems that everyone in Rome’s political class was conscious that whoever actually did it would – by virtue of consolidating all of those new citizens behind them as a political bloc – gain immensely in the political system. Consequently, repeated efforts in the 120s, the 100s and the 90s failed, caught up in the intensifying gridlock and political dysfunction of Rome in the period.
Consequently, just as Rome’s expanding empire had made citizenship increasingly valuable, actually getting that citizenship was made almost impossible by the gridlock of Rome’s political system gumming up the works of the traditional stepwise march up the ladder of statuses in the Roman alliance.
Finally in 91, after one last effort by Livius Drusus, a tribune of the plebs, failed, the socii finally got fed up and decided to demand with force what decades of politics had denied them. It should be stressed that the motivations behind the resulting conflict, the Social War (91-87), were complex; some Italians revolted for citizenship, some to get rid of the Romans entirely. The sudden uprising by roughly half of the socii at last prompted Rome to act – in 90, the Romans offered citizenship to all of the communities of socii who had stayed loyal (as a way of keeping them so). That offer was quickly extended to rebellious socii who laid down arms and rejoined the Romans. The following year, the citizenship grant was extended to communities which had missed the first one. The willingness to finally extend citizenship won Rome the war, as the socii who had only wanted equality with the Romans, being offered it, switched sides to get it, leaving only a handful of the hardest cases (particularly the Samnites, who never missed an opportunity to rebel against Rome) isolated and vulnerable.
The consequence of the Social War was that the slow process of minting new citizens or of Italian communities slowly moving up the ladder of status was radically accelerated in just a few years. In 95 BC, out of perhaps five million Italians, perhaps one million were Roman citizens (including here men, women and children). By 85 BC, perhaps four million were (with the remainder being almost entirely enslaved persons); the number of Roman citizens had essentially quadrupled overnight. Over time, that momentous decision would lead to a steady cultural drift which would largely erase the differences in languages, religion and culture between the various Italic peoples, but that had not happened yet and so confronted with brutal military necessity, the Romans had once again chose victory through diversity, rather than defeat through homogeneity. The result was a Roman citizen body that was bewilderingly diverse, even by Roman standards.
(Please note that the demographic numbers here are very approximate and rounded. There is a robust debate about the population of Roman Italy, which it isn’t worth getting in to here. For anyone wanting the a recent survey of the questions, L. de Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers: Studies in the Demographic History of Roman Italy 225 BC – AD 100 (2012) is the place to start, but be warned that Roman demography is pretty technical and detail oriented and functionally impossible to make beginner-friendly.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-25.
July 29, 2024
MG11: The Magnificent Swiss Maxim Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published Apr 19, 2024The Swiss were one of the first countries to test Hiram Maxim’s new automatic machine gun in 1887, and they found it far superior to their just-recently-purchased Gardner guns. The first Swiss Maxims were delivered in 1889, and the country came back three more times for newer models. The MG94 was the first major adoption, followed by the MG00 for cavalry. Finally, after the Maxim patents expired and DWM introduced their improved 1909 commercial pattern, the Swiss adopted it as the MG11. The first 167 MG11s were produced by DWM, but deliveries ceased in 1915 because of the war. This prompted the Swiss National Assembly to order the government arsenal W.F. Bern to begin production, and between 1915 and 1946 the Swiss made 10,269 more MG11s domestically. They were absolutely beautifully made weapons.
In 1934/35, a modernization program made a number of improvements to the guns. The booster was simplified, the trigger was made one-hand friendly (so the second hand could be used to adjust aim while firing), a bracket for antiaircraft sights was added, and traverse and elevation stops were added to the tripods. Most significantly, the cloth belt was replaced by a fully metal belt. That belt is widely regarded as the best Maxim belt ever produced, and it is particularly valuable to shooters today, as it will function with essentially any caliber in any model of Maxim.
Swiss Maxims were never exported in quantity, and they are quite rare today.
(more…)
July 28, 2024
Allies Issue Potsdam Declaration – WW2 – Week 309 – July 27, 1945
World War Two
Published 27 Jul 2024China, Britain, and the US issue a Declaration demanding Japan’s unconditional surrender, and promising complete destruction if this does not happen and happen soon. The plan is to for the Americans to use their atomic bombs on Japan if she does not comply, but by the end of the week the Japanese have not replied. They still have hopes for the Soviets to mediate some sort sort of peace. What they don’t have is a navy, as its final destruction comes this week.
00:00 Intro
00:50 Recap
01:32 The Potsdam Conference
04:41 Japanese Hopes
05:56 The Potsdam Declaration
10:53 The Initial Reaction
14:48 The End Of The Japanese Navy
15:05 The War On Land
19:10 Summary
19:30 Conclusion
(more…)
