Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Nov 2014The M1908 Mondragon is widely acknowledged to have been the first self-loading rifle adopted as a standard infantry arm by a national military force. There are a couple of earlier designs used by military forces, but the Mondragon was the first really mass-produced example and deserves its place in firearms history.
Designed by Mexican general Manuel Mondragon (who had a number of other arms development successes under his belt by this time), the rifles were manufactured by SIG in Switzerland. They are very high quality guns, if a bit clunky in their handling.
The design used a long-action gas piston and a rotating bolt to lock. Interestingly, the bolt had two full sets of locking lugs; one at the front and one at the rear as well as two set of cams for the operating rod and bolt handle to rotate the bolt with. The standard rifle used a 10-round internal magazine fed by stripper clips, but they were also adapted for larger detachable magazines and drums.
Unfortunately, the rifle required relatively high-quality ammunition to function reliably, and Mexico’s domestic production was not up to par. This led to the rifles having many problems in Mexican service, and Mexico refused to pay for them after the first thousand of their 4,000-unit order arrived. The remaining guns were kept by SIG, and ultimately sold to Germany for use as aircraft observer weapons.
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April 27, 2023
M1908 Mondragon Semiauto Rifle
QotD: The unexpected sources of musical innovation
First, I need to provide some background on the sources of musical innovation. Over the course of three decades of research into this matter, I kept encountering new styles of song emerging in unexpected places — but these locations always had something in common.
These epicenters of musical innovation are always densely populated cities where different cultures meet and mingle, sharing their distinctive songs and ways of life. This intermixing results in surprising hybrids — new ways of making music that nobody can foresee until it actually happens in this hothouse environment.
New Orleans provides a great example. Around the time jazz originated in New Orleans, it was the most diverse city in the world — an intense intermixing of French, Spanish, African, Caribbean, Latin American, and other cultures. And the mixture was enhanced by the huge number of travelers and traders who came to the region because of the prominence of the Mississippi River as a business and distribution hub.
Here’s how I described this process in the appendix to my book Music: A Subversive History, where I shared 40 precepts on the evolution of human songs.
I wish I had time to defend these assertions here with empirical evidence. But we don’t have the space to do that. Let me say, however, that these statements are amply documented and supported with dozens of examples and case studies in the course of that book.
Ted Gioia, “The Most Important City in the History of Music Isn’t What You Think It Is”, The Honest Broker, 2023-01-26.
April 26, 2023
Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation Chicken
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 25 Apr 2023
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Tanks Chats #169 | Scimitar Mark 1 & Scimitar Mark 2 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 20 Jan 2023In this week’s video, David Willey continues David Fletcher’s CVRT Tank Chats series, delving into the fascinating history of the Scimitar Mark 1 & Scimitar Mark 2. David provides an in-depth look at the development of these two iconic tracked vehicles, exploring their unique features and capabilities. He also examines how they have evolved over the years, and been used in various military operations.
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April 25, 2023
The Grauniad now thinks sailing ships are racist
Henry Getley on the Guardian‘s ongoing crusade to expiate their historical links to the slave trade which now expands to denouncing the badges of the city’s two professional football teams:
But the latest chapter in this bizarre campaign is really scraping the barrel … targeting the city’s football club badges. Feature writer Simon Hattenstone has homed in on the logos of Manchester City and Manchester United, which both include an illustration of a sailing ship. And he has reached what he clearly sees as a “Gotcha!” conclusion – sailing ships were used to carry cotton, which was produced in the southern United States using slave labour. Therefore, displaying sailing ships is shameful. Both clubs must immediately delete the offending vessels from their badges.
I hold no brief for either Man City or Man United (quite the contrary). But I find it absurd and offensive that the clubs should be thus gratuitously assailed in an attempt to shore up the Guardian‘s increasingly crazed crusade.
For the record, the sailing ships are taken from the coat of arms of the Borough of Manchester. They were granted in 1842, 35 years after Britain’s 1807 abolition of the slave trade, and are there simply to symbolise the city’s trade with the rest of the world. In fact, no large ships were seen in Manchester until the opening of the 35-mile-long Manchester Ship Canal in 1894.
Hattenstone’s argument is that the city was still using slave-produced US cotton up to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, so the symbolic use of the vessels must be denounced. Talk about clutching at straws! I wonder if he knows that in 1862 Manchester mill workers supported US President Abraham Lincoln’s call for an embargo on Confederate cotton, even though it meant destitution and starvation for them and their families. He could have read about this selfless gesture in a Guardian article ten years ago.
I’ll tell you what, Mr Hattenstone, if we’re talking about links to slavery, how about demanding that the Guardian abandons its main headline typeface, which is shamefully called “Guardian Egyptian”? After all, slavery was practised in Egypt from ancient times right until the late 19th century. Yes, it’s a ridiculous link to make, but no more ridiculous than calling for the removal of ships from football badges. Sorry, Mr Hattenstone, you may be a self-proclaimed City fan, but this is an own goal.
QotD: What is military history?
The term for works of history in this narrow mold – all battles, campaigns and generals – is “drums and trumpets” history, a term generally used derisively. The study of battles and campaigns emerged initially as a form of training for literate aristocrats preparing to be officers and generals; it is little surprise that they focused on aristocratic leadership as the primary cause for success or failure. Consequently, the old “drums and trumpets” histories also had a tendency to glory in war and to glorify commanders for their “genius” although this was by no means universal and works of history on conflict as far back as Thucydides and Herodotus (which is to say, as far back as there have been any) have reflected on the destructiveness and tragedy of war. But military history, like any field, matured over time; I should note that it is hardly the only field of history to have less respectable roots in its quite recent past. Nevertheless, as the field matured and moved beyond military aristocrats working to emulate older, more successful military aristocrats into a field of scholarly inquiry (still often motivated by the very real concern that officers and political leaders be prepared to lead in the event of conflict) the field has become far more sophisticated and its gaze has broadened to include not merely non-aristocratic soldiers, but non-soldiers more generally.
Instead of the “great generals” orientation of “drums and trumpets”, the field has moved in the direction of three major analytical lenses, laid out quite ably by Jeremy Black in “Military Organisations and Military Charge in Historical Perspective” (JMH, 1998). He sets out the three basic lenses as technological, social and organizational, which speak to both the questions being asked of the historical evidence but also the answers that are likely to be provided. I should note that these lenses are mostly (though not entirely) about academic military history; much of the amateur work that is done is still very much “drums and trumpets” (as is the occasional deeply frustrating book from some older historians we need not discuss here), although that is of course not to say that there isn’t good military history being written by amateurs or that all good military history narrowly follows these schools. This is a classification system, not a straight-jacket and I am giving it here because it is a useful way to present the complexity and sophistication of the field as it is, rather than how it is imagined by those who do not engage with it.
[…]
The technological approach is perhaps the least in fashion these days, but Geoffery Parker’s The Military Revolution (2nd ed., 1996) provides an almost pure example of the lens. This approach tends to see changing technology – not merely military technologies, but often also civilian technologies – as the main motivator of military change (and also success or failure for states caught in conflict against a technological gradient). Consequently, historians with this focus are often asking questions about how technologies developed, why they developed in certain places, and what their impacts were. Another good example of the field, for instance, is the debate about the impact of rifled muskets in the American Civil War. While there has been a real drift away from seeing technologies themselves as decisive on their own (and thus a drift away from mostly “pure” technological military history) in recent decades, this sort of history is very often paired with the others, looking at the ways that social structures, organizational structures and technologies interact.
Perhaps the most popular lens for military historians these days is the social one, which used to go by the “new military history” (decades ago – it was the standard form even back in the 1990s) but by this point comprises probably the bulk of academic work on military history. In its narrow sense, the social perspective of military history seeks to understand the army (or navy or other service branch) as an extension of the society that created it. We have, you may note, done a bit of that here. Rather than understanding the army as a pure instrument of a general’s “genius” it imagines it as a socially embedded institution – which is fancy historian speech for an institution that, because it crops up out of a society, cannot help but share that society’s structures, values and assumptions.
The broader version of this lens often now goes under the moniker “war and society”. While the narrow version of social military history might be very focused on how the structure of a society influences the performance of the militaries that created it, the “war and society” lens turns that focus into a two-way street, looking at both how societies shape armies, but also how armies shape societies. This is both the lens where you will find inspection of the impacts of conflict on the civilian population (for instance, the study of trauma among survivors of conflict or genocide, something we got just a bit with our brief touch on child soldiers) and also the way that military institutions shape civilian life at peace. This is the super-category for discussing, for instance, how conflict plays a role in state formation, or how highly militarized societies (like Rome, for instance) are reshaped by the fact of processing entire generations through their military. The “war and society” lens is almost infinitely broad (something occasionally complained about), but that broadness can be very useful to chart the ways that conflict’s impacts ripple out through a society.
Finally, the youngest of Black’s categories is organizational military history. If social military history (especially of the war and society kind) understands a military as deeply embedded in a broader society, organizational military history generally seeks to interrogate that military as a society to itself, with its own hierarchy, organizational structures and values. Often this is framed in terms of discussions of “organizational culture” (sometimes in the military context rendered as “strategic culture”) or “doctrine” as ways of getting at the patterns of thought and human interaction which typify and shape a given military. Isabel Hull’s Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (2006) is a good example of this kind of military history.
Of course these three lenses are by no means mutually exclusive. These days they are very often used in conjunction with each other (last week’s recommendation, Parshall and Tully’s Shattered Sword (2007) is actually an excellent example of these three approaches being wielded together, as the argument finds technological explanations – at certain points, the options available to commanders in the battle were simply constrained by their available technology and equipment – and social explanations – certain cultural patterns particular to 1940s Japan made, for instance, communication of important information difficult – and organizational explanations – most notably flawed doctrine – to explain the battle).
Inside of these lenses, you will see historians using all of the tools and methodological frameworks common in history: you’ll see microhistories (for instance, someone tracing the experience of a single small unit through a larger conflict) or macrohistories (e.g. Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (2008)), gender history (especially since what a society views as a “good soldier” is often deeply wrapped up in how it views gender), intellectual history, environmental history (Chase Firearms (2010) does a fair bit of this from the environment’s-effect-on-warfare direction), economic history (uh … almost everything I do?) and so on.
In short, these days the field of military history, as practiced by academic military historians, contains just as much sophistication in approach as history more broadly. And it benefits by also being adjacent to or in conversation with entire other fields: military historians will tend (depending on the period they work in) to interact a lot with anthropologists, archaeologists, and political scientists. We also tend to interact a lot with what we might term the “military science” literature of strategic thinking, leadership and policy-making, often in the form of critical observers (there is often, for instance, a bit of predictable tension between political scientists and historians, especially military historians, as the former want to make large data-driven claims that can serve as the basis of policy and the later raise objections to those claims; this is, I think, on the whole a beneficial interaction for everyone involved, even if I have obviously picked my side of it).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Military History?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-11-13.
April 24, 2023
Even fighter pilots and gunners have love lives
In The Critic, John Sturgis reviews a new book by Luke Turner titled Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, which considers the myths and reality of wartime relationships during the Second World War:
Spitfire pilot Ian Gleed shot down five enemy aircraft in just a week in May 1940 — the fastest time in which this had ever been done, making him an official “ace” who would be quickly promoted to Wing Commander.
Gleed had become a poster boy for “the few”, the hero pilots of the Battle of Britain to whom so many would owe so much. He lived up to the popular image with his talk of “a bloody good show” and shooting down “damned Huns”, after which he’d sink a few warm beers and spend some “wizard” free time recuperating with his girlfriend Pam, whom he “loved now more than ever”.
Gleed’s luck finally ran out over Tunisia in April 1943 when his plane was hit by a German fighter and crashed into dunes. Gleed was killed. He was just 26.
It would only emerge decades later that much of the popular image he had cultivated simply wasn’t true. Gleed was gay. Pam was an imaginary character he had invented as a cover to keep his double life as a sexually active homosexual firmly secret.
Gleed’s story is one of many similar vignettes in this alternative history of the Second World War. Its author Luke Turner’s previous book was a memoir about his own grappling with issues around his identity as a bisexual. Here he takes up the question of how this would have played out for him and other sexual non-conformists in 1939–45.
Turner grew up obsessed with the war — everything from Airfix kits and Dad’s Army to Stalingrad and the Berlin bunker — and here he examines what it was to live through that period as a sexually active person of whatever hue. It proves a particularly rich subject matter as sex seems to have been everywhere in war time: everyone was sleeping with everyone else, apparently. It’s a perennial truth that you or I might be hit by a bus tomorrow — but make that bus a bomb, and suddenly this seems to create a sense of urgency which frequently manifests itself sexually, lending daily life what Turner calls “an aphrodisiac quality”. As Quentin Crisp put it when describing the shenanigans in blacked-out, Blitz London: “As soon as the bombs started to fall, the city became like a paved double bed.”
Whilst war may see an explosion of sex of all kinds, the establishment was not always comfortable with this. A Home Office report on public behaviour in London during the Blitz noted, “In several districts cases of blatant immorality in shelters are reported; this upsets other occupants of the shelters.”
One contemporary account suggests, “In wartime a uniform, whether of the Army, Navy or Air Force, to the average girl ranks as a fetish.” This had consequences in the field: Dear John letters from home could be a real problem in this regard. As an Army report in 1942 put it, morale is often damaged by “the suspicion, very frequently justified, of fickleness on behalf of wives and girls”.
Amongst all this sex was, of course, sex with Americans. Turner cites George Formby who captured this mood in the song “Our Fanny’s Gone All Yankee”: “She don’t wait for the dark when she wants to have a lark/In a bus or train she does her hanky panky.”
Then in a dark reversal of this two-nations-colliding-sexually motif, we get the horror of the Red Army’s organised rape of as many as 1.4 milllion German women during the Russian advance on Berlin, whose residents would later refer to the city’s grandiose monument to Soviet war dead as “the tomb of the unknown rapist”.
Pedersen Selfloading Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Nov 2014When the US military decided to seriously look at replacing the 1903 Springfield with a semiautomatic service rifle, two designers showed themselves to have the potential to design an effective and practical rifle. One was John Garand, and the other was John Pedersen. Pedersen was an experienced and well-respected gun designer, with previous work including the WWI “Pedersen Device” that converted a 1903 into a pistol-caliber semiauto carbine and the Remington Model 51 pistol, among others.
Pedersen’s rifle concept used a toggle locking mechanism similar in concept to the Borchardt and Luger pistols, but designed to handle the much higher pressure of a rifle cartridge. Specifically, the .276 Pedersen cartridge, which pushed a 125 grain bullet at about 2700 fps. Both Pedersen’s rifle and the contemporary prototypes of the Garand rifle used 10-round en bloc clips of this ammunition.
Ultimately, Pedersen lost out to Garand. Among the major reasons why was that his toggle action was really a delayed blowback mechanism, and required lubricated cartridges to operate reliably. Pedersen developed a hard, thin wax coating process for his cartridge cases which worked well and was not prone to the problems of other oil-based cartridge lubricating systems, but Ordnance officers still disliked the requirement. This combined with other factors led to the adoption of the Garand rifle.
After losing out in US military trials, Pedersen still had significant world-wide interest in his rifle, and the Vickers company in England tooled up to produce them in hopes of garnering contracts with one or more other military forces. About 250 rifles were made by Vickers, but they failed to win any contracts and production ceased — making them extremely rare weapons today.
Pedersen lived until 1951, and was well regarded for his sporting arms development with Remington — none other than John Moses Browning described him as “the greatest gun designer in the world”.
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April 23, 2023
The Biggest Offensive in Japanese History – WW2 – Week 243 – April 22, 1944
World War Two
Published 22 Apr 2023Japan Launches Operation Ichigo in China, their largest offensive of the war … or ever, but over in India things are not going well for the Japanese at Imphal and Kohima. The Allies also launch attacks on the Japanese at Hollandia, while over in the Crimea, the German defenses at Sevastopol are cracking under Soviet pressure.
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My Review of Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse
Thersites the Historian
Published 17 Jan 2023In this video, I review Graham Hancock’s new series on Netflix, where he presents his case for a globe-spanning prehistoric civilization to a general audience.
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April 22, 2023
Hitler’s Revenge on the Italian People – War Against Humanity 101
World War Two
Published 21 Apr 2023As the RAF closes in on Berlin and the German Army is running dangerously low on men, the Nazi leadership is determined to use their resources to spread their crimes deeper into Hungary and Italy.
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The action off Pula Aura, February 1804
Ned Donovan recounts a very dangerous moment for the British East India Company — and the larger British economy — as a French naval squadron threatened the EIC’s China Fleet carrying a cargo that would be the rough equivalent of £750 million in today’s money:
It will not be surprising to any reader that the East India Company was arrogant. A company that, as William Dalrymple describes, had become “an empire within an empire”. It controlled much of India, had its own army, and its revenues kept Britain afloat. Its navy was also not to be sniffed at, made up of large, well-built ships (known as Indiamen) capable of being as armed as any British warship, but its commercial arrogance prevented this. Rather than fill these Indiamen with cannons and the hundreds of sailors needed to man them, it instead filled its gun ports with dummy cannons and its decks with luxurious cabins and storage for trade goods, maintaining crews only large enough to sail these ships and be stewards to its paying passengers.
Commodore Dance would have been pondering those dummy cannons as the ships he had sent to look at the four strange sail in the southwest reported back that it was four French warships, Linois’s squadron. He was practically defenceless. To protect his 30 ships and their precious cargo, he had one small armed brig named the Ganges with around a dozen guns. Up against him were the 186 guns of the French squadron, 74 in Marengo, 40 in Belle Poule, 36 in Semillante, 20 in Berceau and 16 in Aventurier. As Dance watched through his telescope, the French ships hoisted their colours, and the admiral’s flag of Linois broke out above Marengo. He needed a plan. Fast.
The lead East Indiamen challenge Admiral Linois
After a night of cat and mouse between the French and British, Dance ordered his convoy into a long single line and at the front put four of the largest Indiamen – the Royal George, Earl Camden, Warley, and Alfred. He then commanded that these four hoist blue ensigns, the sign of Royal Navy ships. This wasn’t the most absurd plan; the East India Company, in their arrogance, had a policy of painting their Indiamen to look like Royal Navy ships – as Dance records in his despatch: “We hoisted our colours and offered him battle.” But Linois and his ships continued to approach the convoy slowly, with Dance realising that the French intended to separate the convoy and take it apart piece by piece. It was now or never, and Dance took the initiative. At 1 pm, he ordered the Ganges, Royal George, Earl Camden, Warley and Alfred to turn and intercept the French. All the ships turned perfectly and crossed Linois, and at 1:15 pm, the French opened fire on the Royal George. In the preceding night, the convoy had put all the guns they had on these five ships and filled them with as many brave volunteers as they could. All five returned fire on the French warships, and one sailor on the Royal George was killed. I will let Dance take over here:
“But before any other ship could get into action, the enemy hauled their wind and stood away to the east under all the sail they could set. At 2 pm, I made the signal for a general chase and we pursued them until 4 pm.”
In around 40 minutes, Dance and his handful of real guns and dummy cannons had forced the French warships to withdraw under the belief it had engaged an elite squadron of Royal Navy ships. Not content with this victory, he then ordered his ships to chase the French down and stop them from returning. By the later afternoon, it was clear Linois had run, and Dance ordered his convoy to regroup and make for the safety of Malacca.
In the Straits of Malacca, Dance met the ships the Royal Navy had sent to escort him on the outbreak of war but would have been too late had the commodore not thought fast. The China Fleet passed the rest of its voyage without incident, returning to Britain in the summer of 1804.
To say the country was ecstatic would be an understatement. If the China Fleet and its £8 million had been taken, as Linois would have been perfectly able to do, it is evident that both the East India Company and Lloyds of London would have faced bankruptcy and collapse. Nathaniel Dance was knighted by George III and given a fantastic sword by Lloyds worth 100 guineas. With the sword came £5,000 (£403,000 today) from the Bombay Insurance Company and £500 a year (£40,000 today) from the East India Company, along with a share in the £50,000 given to all who sailed in convoy. Sir Nathaniel retired immediately and never took to the sea again, dying peacefully in 1827.
Poor Admiral Linois, on the other hand, never lived down the fracas, with Napoleon writing after the event, “[Linois] has shown want of courage of mind, that kind of courage which I consider the highest quality in a leader”. Despite that, Linois remained in the French navy … only to once again run into the fickleness of fate:
It is worth remarking that following the defeat at Pulo Aura, Linois had a similarly pathetic rest of the war that ended in a wonderfully ironic way. In 1806, the admiral was captured when he mistook a British squadron of warships for a merchant convoy.
Irony? That’s cosmic level stuff.
The Big Four
Jago Hazzard
Published 1 Jan 2023It’s 100 years since the Grouping – what happened, why and how?
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April 21, 2023
Tiberius Caesar, the second Roman Emperor
Andrew Doyle considers how the reputation of Emperor Tiberius was shaped (and blackened) by later historians:
Tiberius Caesar
Original in Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen via Wikimedia Commons.
I am at the home of a psychopath. Here on the easternmost point of the island of Capri, the ancient ruins of the Villa Jovis still cling to the summit of the mountain. This was the former residence of the Emperor Tiberius, who retired here for the last decade of his life in order to indulge in what Milton described as “his horrid lusts”. He conducted wild orgies for his nymphs and catamites. He forced children to swim between his thighs, calling them his “little fish”. He raped two brothers and broke their legs when they complained. He threw countless individuals to their deaths from a precipice looming high over the sea.
That these stories are unlikely to be true is beside the point; Tiberius’s reputation has done wonders for the tourist trade here on Capri. The historians Suetonius and Tacitus started the rumours and, with the help of successive generations of sensationalists, established a tradition that was to persist for almost two millennia.
All of which serves as a reminder that reputations can be constructed and sustained on the flimsiest of foundations. Suetonius and Tacitus were writing almost a century after the emperor’s death, and many of their lurid stories were doubtless echoes of those circulated by his most spiteful enemies. Or perhaps it’s simply a matter of prurience. Who can deny that the more lascivious and outlandish acts of the Roman emperors are by far the most memorable? One thinks immediately of Caligula having sex with his siblings and appointing his horse as consul. Or Nero murdering his own mother, and taking a castrated slave for his bride, naming him after the wife he had kicked to death. For all their horror, who doesn’t feel cheated when such tales turn out to be false?
Our reputations are changelings: protean shades of other people’s imaginations. More often than not, they are birthed from a combination of uninformed prejudice and wishful thinking. And we should be in no doubt that in our online age, when lies are disseminated at lightning speed and casual defamation has become the activist’s principal strategy, reputations are harder to heal once tarnished.
I am tempted to feel pity for future historians. Quite how they will be expected to wade through endless reams of emails, texts, and other digital materials — an infinitude of conflicting narratives and individual “truths” — really is beyond me. At least when there is a dearth of primary sources it is possible to piggyback onto a firm conclusion. “Suetonius said” has a satisfactory and definitive air, but only because there are so few of his contemporary voices available to contradict him.
Localism versus centralism
Theophilus Chilton offers some support to localism as an antidote to the centralization of powers we’ve seen in every western nation since the early “nation state” era at the end of the Middle Ages:
Cropped image of a Hans Holbein the Younger portrait of King Henry VIII at Petworth House.
Photo by Hans Bernhard via Wikimedia Commons.
The history of the West has, among other things, included a long, drawn-out conflict between two functional organizing principles – localism and centralization. The former involves the devolution of power to more narrowly defined provincial, parochial centers, while the later involves the concentration of power into the hands of an absolutist system. The tendency toward centralization began as far back as the high Middle Ages, during which the English and French monarchies began the reduction of aristocratic privileges and local divisions and the folding of this power into the rising bureaucratic state with a permanently established capital city and rapacious desire for provincial monies and personnel. The trend towards the development of absolute monarchy continued through the Baroque period, and the replacement of divinely-sanctioned kingship with popular forms of government (republicanism, democracy, communism) did not abate the process, but merely redirected power into different hands. The ultimate form of centralization, not yet come to pass, would be the sort of borderless one-world government desired by today’s globalists, whether they be neoconservatives or neoliberals, which would involve the ultimate consolidation of all power everywhere into one or a few hands in some place like Geneva or New York City.
[…]
The historical transition from localism to centralization in medieval Europe was seen in the decline of aristocratic rights and the institution of peer kingship, and their replacement with consolidated administrative control over a much larger and generally contiguous geographic area. This control was manifested in the person of the absolute monarch, and was exercised through an impersonal, disinterested bureaucratic apparatus which came to demand a greater and greater share of the national wealth to cover its expenses. This process, I believe, can ultimately be traced back to the strengthening of English and French royal power beginning in the 13th century, especially under Philip IV of France. Its fruition came (while monarchy still exercised effectual power in Europe) in the 17th-18th centuries before being undermined by Enlightenment and democratic dogmas which merely transferred the centralizing power to demagogues claiming to speak “for the people.”
Under the old aristocratic system, executive power formed a distributed system and rested on local nobility ruling over a local population with whom they were knowledgeable and on generally good terms. Despite the jaundiced modern view that feudalism was always “tyrannical” and “oppressive,” the fact is that most aristocrats in that era were genuinely devoted to the welfare of the commoners in their land, and it was the responsibility of the nobility to dispense justice and to right wrongs. The picture presented in Kipling’s poem “Norman and Saxon” most likely serves as a fair reflection of the relationship between lord and commoner. Kingship certainly existed, but the king was viewed as a “first among equals”, one who was the prime lord over his vassals, but who could also himself be a vassal of other kings of equal power and authority (as many of the earlier Plantagenet kings were to the Kings of France, by virtue of their holding fiefs as Dukes of Aquitaine).
False impressions about the role of the aristocracy generally correlate with false impressions about serfdom, the dominant labor relationship of the time. Contrary to popular notions, serfdom was generally not some cruel form of slavery that destroyed human dignity. Indeed, many serfs had liberties approach those of freemen, could transfer allegiances between nobles, enjoyed dozens of feast days (which were effectively vacation days to be devoted to family and community), and could even take themselves off to one of the many free cities which existed and be reasonably sure of not being compelled to return to their former master unless their case was especially egregious.
However, under centralization, the nobility was generally reduced to being ornaments of the royal court, their judicial and administrative functions removed and replaced by a bureaucracy personally loyal to the king. This, in effect, served to remove opportunities for serfs and other commoners to “get away” from the rule of a bad king. Whereas before, a serf could at least hope for the opportunity to flee a bad ruler and seek shelter with a good one, under the uniform rule of the absolute monarch, this was no longer an option unless the commoner wished to flee his entire nation and culture completely. Likewise, the ever-increasing regulation of his daily life by the bureaucracy followed him everywhere he went. By the end of the period, the centralization of power and the rise of crony capitalism led to the destruction of serfdom and the rise of wage capitalism, acting to reduce serfs and freemen alike to the status of cogs in profit-generating machines. The rise of absolute monarchy, part and parcel with the appearance of bureaucracy and the professionalization of military power, led directly to the rise of the modern managerial state.
