Quotulatiousness

October 11, 2022

Looking for a full definition of “Two-Spirit” is a fruitless task

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay tries to find a satisfactory definition of the term “Two-Spirit” but despite his best efforts comes up empty:

On August 28th, Justin Trudeau’s government announced “Canada’s first federal 2SLGBTQI+ action plan: Building Our Future With Pride“, which was described as “a whole-of-government approach to achieve a future where everyone in Canada is truly free to be who they are and love who they love”. One aim of the $100-million plan, the government explained, is to convince Canadians to adopt the term “2SLGBTQI+” in place of “LGBT” — on the basis that 2SLGBTQI+ “is more inclusive and places the experiences of Indigenous 2SLGBTQI+ communities at the foreground as the first 2SLGBTQI+ peoples in North America”.

The two characters given pride of place, “2S”, signify “Two-Spirit”, a term that’s been a form of self-identification among Indigenous North Americans since the 1990s. But the descriptor doesn’t appear to be in wide everyday use outside Canada. And so non-Canadian readers will sometimes ask me to explain its meaning — at which point, I have to admit that I can’t. And I’m hardly alone: While most Canadians know that the “Two-Spirit” category is connected to Indigenous identity in some way, there’s an unspoken rule against requesting more specific information.

Last week, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO), the province’s elementary-school teachers union, published what the authors present as a primer on Two-Spirit identity, a document written in close consultation with 2S-identified Indigenous people. Since the report’s target audience consists of workaday teachers who educate young students, I imagined that Niizh Manidoowag: Two-Spirit might finally provide me with a straightforward explanation of what the 2S identifier actually means.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t. In fact, one of the main themes of the 32-page document is that the task of defining the Two-Spirit concept is (quite literally) beyond the powers of Western language and epistemology. And in any case, the category is almost completely open-ended: The act of proclaiming oneself Two-Spirited could be a statement about one’s gender, or sexual orientation, or both, or neither. Or 2S can be a statement about one’s politics, spirituality, or simply one’s desire to present as “anti-colonial”.

According to the ETFO report, there are only two non-negotiable elements of a Two-Spirited individual—both of which are spelled out multiple times in the document, and in bold letters. Neither rule is concerned with sex or gender, but rather with race and political orientation: To be Two-Spirited requires (1) that you are Indigenous; and (2) that you are engaged in a “decolonizing act of resistance”:

    There is no one way to prescribe usage of the term [Two-Spirit] … There is no one way to define the term Two-Spirit. Two-Spirit people and their roles predate colonial impositions, expectations, and assumptions of sex, gender, and sexual orientation. Where colonial worldviews often frame concepts as linear, compartmentalized, categorical, and hierarchical, Indigenous worldviews tend to be understood as non-linear, reciprocal, (w)holistic, relational, and independent of Eurocentric perspectives and framings. As such, identifying as two-spirit is a decolonizing act of resistance in and of itself.

The term Two-Spirit was first popularized in 1990, at an inter-tribal Native American/First Nations gay and lesbian summit in Winnipeg, and is derived from the Ojibwa words Niizh Manidoowag. By one account, delegates were looking for a term that would “distance Native/First Nations people from non-Natives, as well as from the words ‘berdache‘ [a European term suggesting deviancy] and ‘gay'”. But lore has it that the true originator is a Fisher River First Nation woman named Myra Laramee, who experienced a vision of the world as seen “through the lens of having both feminine and masculine spirit”.

On the surface, that sounds like what today might be called “non-binary”. But that analogy fails on a fundamental level. The idea of gender identity relates to the (perceived) nature of oneself. Two-Spirit people, on the other hand, are described in the ETFO report as possessing a savant-like power (or “lens”) that channels truths about the nature of the external world.

The Two Spirit concept is also entirely distinct from run-of-the-mill gender dysphoria. In everyday progressive gender parlance, it is typically insisted that trans women are just like other women. Two-Spirited people, by contrast, are presented as an entirely unique specimen whose arrival within traditional Indigenous societies was “celebrated” — “highly valued” “gifts” who “possess the best of both gendered identities”.

September 28, 2022

Pemmican: History’s Power Bar

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, Food, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 27 Sep 2022
(more…)

August 22, 2022

QotD: The inevitability of World War 1

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If they bother to teach it at all these days, World War I is still presented as a big mystery. You get some stuff about the Triple Entente, some other stuff about the assassination of the Archduke, maybe something about the Zimmerman Telegram. Why any of that should’ve led to the most horrific war in human history up to that point is left unexplained. Also left unexplored is how nobody seemed to see it coming. World War I just kinda … happened, kids are taught.

You can blame the usual suspects for a lot of this — the Kaiser et al are far too White and male to be worth spending time on, especially when you’ve got to devote so many weeks to Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks. But the other reason — the far more important one for our purposes — is this: It’s a mystery to the teachers, too.

As academics who have never set foot in the real world, they take other academics’ words at face value. And the academics of 1913 couldn’t figure it out either. They pointed out that a general European war would cause the world’s financial system to collapse; ergo there would be no war. Besides, they argued, even if Germany did go to war, she lacked the natural resources to sustain the fight. And finally, they claimed, the firepower of modern infantry is just too overwhelming — given their rates of fire, two regiments equipped with machine guns would wipe each other out in less than two minutes.

Credit where it’s due: The eggheads were right about all of that. The global financial system did collapse; Germany as constituted at the outbreak of war didn’t have the resources to keep fighting; and the initial skirmishes showed the overwhelming impact of massed firepower. But the eggheads never learned that people are people, and since people love fighting more than anything else in the world, solutions were quickly found.

The United States, with its shiny new Federal Reserve system (created late 1913), was more than happy to step into the financial breach, just as American companies were more than happy to help Germany (and everyone else) with their armaments shortage. And Walther Rathenau happened, as my students would write, keeping the raw materials flowing to German industry. And faced with the overwhelming firepower of machine guns, soldiers ducked. Then they dug, and there’s your four years of bloody trench warfare.

Even the outbreak of the war, far from being a mystery, is painfully obvious if you know the first thing about the major players. In what historians call the Long 19th Century (1789-1914), it was taken for granted that a nation needed colonies to be a serious power. The reasoning behind this was never too sound, and by the turn of the 20th century various smart guys had figured out that on balance colonies were more trouble than they were worth, but pretty much by definition smart guys don’t hold on to the reins of power. Bismarck didn’t — the Berlin Conference was supposed to keep jingo knuckleheads like Wilhelm II from starting a war over a few acres of scrub jungle, but since Wilhelm II shared his class’s raging hardon for colonial expansion, all it ended up doing was sweeping Bismarck out of office. And as for Tsar Nicholas and his colonial adventures in the Balkans (and the Far East), one could write an entire book about that stupidity and still not cover all of it. Throw in England’s stuffed shirt of a king, and France’s legendary inability to maintain a stable government, and tragedy was inevitable.

In short, World War 1 was a massive, indescribably bloody dick-measuring contest between a few inbred yokels. To anyone who has met the Sons of Privilege*, or who is passingly familiar with the Peter Principle, this comes as no surprise. Hell, Lenin saw it, and a guy with his egg head further up his own ass you’ll never find.** All you have to do is look at the people, not the paper.

* they’re like the Sons of Anarchy, but effete and usually gay.
** though he basically just stole the idea from Hobson, who, though a goofy love-the-worlder, was actually a pretty smart guy.

Severian, “1913”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-08-20.

August 19, 2022

Why Quebec rejected the American Revolution

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Conrad Black outlines the journey of the French colony of New France through the British conquest to the (amazing to the Americans) decision to stay under British control rather than join the breakaway American colonies in 1776:

Civil rights were not a burning issue when Canada was primarily the French colony of New France. The purpose of New France was entirely commercial and essentially based upon the fur trade until Jean Talon created industries that made New France self-sufficient. And to raise the population he imported 1,000 nubile young French women, and today approximately seven million French Canadians and Franco-Americans are descended from them. Only at this point, about 75 years after it was founded, did New France develop a rudimentary legal and judicial framework.

Eighty years later, when the British captured Québec City and Montréal in the Seven Years’ War, a gentle form of British military rule ensued. A small English-speaking population arose, chiefly composed of commercial sharpers from the American colonies claiming to be performing a useful service but, in fact, exploiting the French Canadians. Colonel James Murray became the first English civil governor of Québec in 1764. A Royal proclamation had foreseen an assembly to govern Québec, but this was complicated by the fact that at the time British law excluded any Roman Catholic from voting for or being a member of any such assembly, and accordingly the approximately 500 English-speaking merchants in Québec demanded an assembly since they would be the sole members of it. Murray liked the French Canadians and despised the American interlopers as scoundrels. He wrote: “In general they are the most immoral collection of men I ever knew.” He described the French of Québec as: “a frugal, industrious, moral race of men who (greatly appreciate) the mild treatment they have received from the King’s officers”. Instead of facilitating creation of an assembly that would just be a group of émigré New England hustlers and plunderers, Murray created a governor’s council which functioned as a sort of legislature and packed it with his supporters, and sympathizers of the French Canadians.

The greedy American merchants of Montréal and Québec had enough influence with the board of trade in London, a cabinet office, to have Murray recalled in 1766 for his pro-French attitudes. He was a victim of his support for the civil rights of his subjects, but was replaced by a like-minded governor, the very talented Sir Guy Carleton, [later he became] Lord Dorchester. Murray and Carleton had both been close comrades of General Wolfe. […]

The British had doubled their national debt in the Seven Years’ War and the largest expenses were incurred in expelling the French from Canada at the urgent request of the principal American agent in London, Benjamin Franklin. As the Americans were the most prosperous of all British citizens, the British naturally thought it appropriate that the Americans should pay the Stamp Tax that their British cousins were already paying. The French Canadians had no objection to the Stamp Tax, even though it paid for the expulsion of France from Canada.

As Murray and Carleton foresaw, the British were not able to collect that tax from the Americans; British soldiers would be little motivated to fight their American kinfolk, and now that the Americans didn’t have a neighboring French presence to worry them, they could certainly be tempted to revolt and would be very hard to suppress. As Murray and Carleton also foresaw, the only chance the British would have of retaining Canada and preventing the French Canadians from rallying to the Americans would be if the British crown became symbolic in the mind of French Canada with the survival of the French language and culture and religion. Carleton concluded that to retain Québec’s loyalty, Britain would have to make itself the protector of the culture, the religion, and also the civil law of the French Canadians. From what little they had seen of it, the French Canadians much preferred the British to the French criminal law. In pre-revolutionary France there was no doctrine of habeas corpus and the authorities routinely tortured suspects.

In a historically very significant act, Carleton effectively wrote up the assurances that he thought would be necessary to retain the loyalty of the colony. He wanted to recruit French-speaking officials from among the colonists to give them as much self-government as possible while judiciously feeding the population a worrisome specter of assimilation at the hands of a tidal wave of American officials and commercial hustlers in the event of an American takeover of Canada.

After four years of lobbying non-stop in London, Carleton gained adoption of the Québec Act, which contained the guaranties he thought necessary to satisfy French Canada. He returned to a grateful Québec in 1774. The knotty issue of an assembly, which Québec had never had and was not clamoring for, was ducked, and authority was vested in a governor with an executive and legislative Council of 17 to 23 members chosen by the governor.

Conveniently, the liberality accorded the Roman Catholic Church was furiously attacked by the Americans who in their revolutionary Continental Congress reviled it as “a bloodthirsty, idolatrous, and hypocritical creed … a religion which flooded England with blood, and spread hypocrisy, murder, persecution, and revolt into all parts of the world”. The American revolutionaries produced a bombastic summary of what the French-Canadians ought to do and told them that Americans were grievously moved by their degradation, but warned them that if they did not rally to the American colours they would be henceforth regarded as “inveterate enemies”. This incendiary polemic was translated, printed, and posted throughout the former New France, by the Catholic Church and the British government, acting together. The clergy of the province almost unanimously condemned the American agitation as xenophobic and sectarian incitements to hate and needless bloodshed.

Carleton astounded the French-Canadians, who were accustomed to the graft and embezzlement of French governors, by not taking any payment for his service as governor. It was entirely because of the enlightened policy of Murray and Carleton and Carleton’s skill and persistence as a lobbyist in the corridors of Westminster, that the civil and cultural rights of the great majority of Canadians 250 years ago were conserved. The Americans when they did proclaim the revolution in 1775 and officially in the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, made the British position in Canada somewhat easier by their virulent hostility to Catholicism, and to the French generally.

June 25, 2022

Colonial Berthiers: 1902 Indochina and 1907 Senegalese

Filed under: Africa, Asia, France, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Jul 2017

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

The sharpshooters of the French colonial forces in Indochina (the Tirailleurs Indochinois) had never been issued Lebel rifles, and were still using single shot Gras rifles at the turn of the century. The Indochinese soldiers were rather short statured, and the Lebel was simply too long for them to use efficiently. The colonial government requested a special weapon for these men, and the result was the 1902 Berthier.

The Berthier carbine was much more compact than the Lebel, and it was also less expensive to manufacture and simpler to instruct troops with. So after some brief experimentation, a version was produced with a 25 inch (635mm) long barrel, which was a nice balance between the carbines and the Lebel rifle. In my opinion, the 1902 is the ideal size for a Berthier, and I think it handles best of all the different variations made.

An initial production run of 22,500 of these 1902 rifles was made by Chatellerault between 1902 and 1912. A second batch of about 25,000 more would be produced in the 1920s, but we will discuss these in a separate video, as they incorporated the 1916 upgrades.

With the successful implementation of the Berthier in the Indochinese colonial forces, it would stand out as an obvious solution for the need to upgrade the arms of France’s African colonial troops as well. These soldiers were not short, but also had outdated Gras rifles, and Lebel production was no longer active by 1907. As a result, a further lengthened Berthier was suggested for the Senegalese troops, with a barrel 31.5 inches (800mm) long; equal to that of the Lebel. This was accepted into service, and 25,000 were manufactured by Chatellerault between 1907 and the beginning of the Great War in 1914.

With the urgent need for more rifles because of World War One, the 1907 Berthier (renamed to the 1907 Colonial and issued to colonial troops besides just the Senegalese as of 1908) would attract the interest of the military because it was cheaper to manufacture than the Lebel, and still in active production. The result would be the 07/15 Berthier, which would become a dual standard infantry rifle alongside the 1886 Lebel in the war.

If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

May 31, 2022

A new history of the evil empire. No, not that one. Not that one either. The other evil empire!

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Books, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Barnaby Crowcroft reviews Caroline Elkins’ new history of the British empire, Legacy of Violence:

Elkins is correct that British decolonisation after the end of the war — if not “white-washed” — has got off lightly among historians, often via a contrast with the dreadful behaviour of the French. We remain far too influenced by the impression that Britain willingly and amicably handed over power (as Harold Macmillan put it) to Asian and African representatives of “agreeable, educated, Liberal, North Oxford society”.

There is a single map in this book which should definitively dispose of such ideas, showing all the colonial conflicts and states of emergency Britain was engaged in around the world after 1945. There are the well-known counterinsurgencies in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden. Alongside other, less well-known ones, however — British Guiana, Malaysia, Belize, Oman and the New Hebrides — bring us pretty much into the 1980s without a single year of global colonial peace.

In Kenya and Malaya, the British carried out massive coercive interventions in the 1950s, including the forcible resettlement of over a million people into closely monitored “new villages”, which, if they cannot be likened to concentration camps, certainly resemble the kinds of things the French were doing in Algeria. Difficult though it is to believe today, until very recently the British were a “warlike” and patriotic people, and their agents could be ruthless in the pursuit of imperial interest overseas.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to take seriously the more grandiose claims of Legacy of Violence, including Elkins’ presumption to have uncovered the Key to All Mythologies of British imperial wickedness in the form of Liberalism and Racism. The prose is part of the problem. Her introductory statement of the book’s bombastic aims reads more like something written by a professional satirist, than a professional historian.

“To study the British empire,” she writes, “is to unlock memory’s gate using the key of historical enquiry. But once inside, history’s fortress is bewildering … Unlike mythical fire-breathing monsters, however, the creatures inhabiting the annals of Britain’s imperial past are not illusions [but] monstrosities [which] inflicted untold suffering …”

Much of the book is given over to a plodding chronicle of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British history, in which events are construed — and often misconstrued — to give the meanest possible interpretation. British “arch-imperialists” resemble cartoon villains, who wear “Hitleresque moustaches” and “racist coattails” and are awarded MBEs and OBEs according to how much harm they inflict upon colonial subjects. There is even an imaginative reconstruction of British pilots all but laughing as they machine-gun “defenceless women and children”; readers are invited to listen to their “screams of pain”.

To determine whether Britain’s empire was uniquely violent invites the question: compared to what? Niall Ferguson earned opprobrium for suggesting in 2003 that alongside the rival empires which arose to challenge it in the middle of the twentieth century, Britain’s looked pretty attractive.

To her credit, Elkins does not disagree with this. Her treatment of Malaya’s communist insurgency suggests that she is not particularly exercised by violence when it is committed by ideological confrères. The only thing we get in the way of any broader comparison, however, is the notably wishy-washy one implied between the “East and the West”, which she describes as the contrast between “humanity and inhumanity”.

May 16, 2022

The Hudson’s Bay Company in Canadian history

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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.

April 22, 2022

Lucy Worsely on The Jacobites & the Scottish Enlightenment

Filed under: Britain, Education, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Whitehall Moll History Clips
Published 22 Jul 2018

A segment on the Jacobites and the Scottish Enlightenment that blossomed in the face of Hanoverian oppression.

April 18, 2022

QotD: Colonialism in the British Raj

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A few years back during my doctoral research, I was invited to a colloquium on imperialism at Oxford, which, because of our modern standards of free and open intellectual discourse, was effectively a secretive little conclave. This was during the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, around the time when, due to mob pressure, Portland professor Bruce Gilley’s “The Case for Colonialism” paper was redacted by an academic journal. The seminar’s organisers did not want hysterical teenagers egged on by activist dons to disturb what turned out to be the nuanced discussion you’d hope scholars would, and could, engage in.

There I met a man of very advanced age, whose name I cannot remember (to my shame) who had been a civil servant in India during the final days of the Raj. He told me something I have pondered ever since. “We were just a handful of people providing guidance and administration”, he said, “with overwhelming consent in a gigantic country. We even slept in the streets during summer on khatias and had no fear of being killed.”

Whatever politics was happening was between the British and Indian political elites, and plainly did not affect most normal Britishers or Indians.

Consider, that in 1901 Indians numbered nearly 300 million while the British-born population of India was around 150,000. Colonialism was indeed by the consent of the governed, and the independence fight was primarily an intra-elite affair, where the mostly western-educated native would-be boss class fought with the foreign overlords who taught them, for political control.

In the sub-continent, the civil service, lower (and some higher) judiciary, magistrates, police officers, intelligentsia, landed gentry and local businesses were primarily Indian, a lot of them pro-imperial to the end of their time. What happened to those voices? In current post-colonial discourse, one cannot read any pro-imperial literature, which is either lost or considered too reactionary to be taught at universities, an injustice to a clear understanding of history.

Sumantra Maitra, “Pro-imperial truths of the old world”, The Critic, 2021-11-09.

April 3, 2022

QotD: Life in the Imperial outposts

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The colonies were paradise until White women showed up.

That’s what all the Old Hands said in the 19th century, and if you think about it for a second, it’s obvious. Going East of Suez was more or less a life sentence. Retiring to a nice country house back in dear old Blighty was the standard-issue dream, but it almost never came true — and everyone knew it. You went to India knowing you’d die there — You went, so your brothers wouldn’t have to. Life in those circumstances, surrounded by like-minded men, is a blast. Ask anyone who has spent time in a war zone.

But, of course, the Raj wasn’t a war zone for long. The Mutiny took care of that, so much so that guys actually started coming home at the end of their tours. Word leaked out about how the Ruling Caste lived over there, and all of a sudden Calcutta harbor was home to “the fishing fleet”, the boatloads of single girls that arrived each spring determined to snag themselves a husband. Think about that for a second — take the kind of girl who doesn’t have the looks or connections to get married back home, then plop her down in a situation where she’s the only White woman in a thousand miles. Give her an army of servants, a basically unlimited budget, and the whole power of the State enforcing her whims. Is it any wonder social relations got so awful so quickly? The burra memsahib was a staple of Imperial fiction for a reason.

Severian, “If there is Hope, It Lies in the PUAs”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-02-27.

March 3, 2022

QotD: Diversity was Rome’s strength … as is true of almost every empire in history

Filed under: Europe, Gaming, History, Italy, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The actual Roman Empire was fantastically diverse and more importantly, its military success hinged on its diversity at every stage of its existence. In many games and cultural products, that diversity is obscured because we lose sight of ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural divisions which were very important at the time, but no longer matter to us very much. Let’s take a snapshot of Roman territory in 218 B.C. to give a sense of this.

Quite a few people look at a map like that, classify most of Rome’s territories as “Italian” and assume there is a large, homogeneous ethnic core there (except, I suspect, anyone who has actually been to Italy and is aware that Italy is hardly homogeneous, even today!). But Roman Italy in 218 B.C. was nothing like that.

Peninsular Italy (which doesn’t include the Po River Valley) contained a bewildering array of cultures and peoples: at least three distinct religious systems (Roman, Etruscan, Greek), half a dozen languages (some completely unrelated to each other) and many clearly distinct cultural and ethnic groups divided into communities with strong local identities and fierce local rivalries (if you want more on this, check out Salmon, The Making of Roman Italy (1982), Fronda, Between Rome and Carthage (2010), and Keaveney, Rome and the Unification of Italy (2005)).

The Roman army was by no means entirely Roman – it was split between Roman citizens and what the Romans called the socii (lit: “allies”) – a polite term for the communities they had subjugated in Italy (a periphery!). Rome demanded military service – this was the resource they would extract – from these communities; the socii pretty much always made up more than half of the army. Diversity was literally the Roman strength, in terms of total military force. Without it, Rome would have remained just one city-state in Italy, and not a particularly important one besides.

(As an aside: while citizenship is extended to nearly all of Italy in the 80s B.C., by then Rome is making extensive use of non-Italian troops in its armies. by the early empire, half of the army – the auxilia – were non-Roman citizens recruited from the provinces. Roman armies were essentially never majority “Roman” in any period, save possibly for the third century. And before anyone asks what about even earlier than my snapshot – it is quite clear – both archaeologically and in the Romans’ own foundation myths – that Rome was a fusion-society, culturally diverse from the city’s foundation. Indeed, sitting at the meeting point of Latin and Etruscan cultural zones as well as upland and coastal geographic zones was one of the great advantages Rome enjoyed in its early history, as near as we can tell.)

Outside of Italy, narrowly construed, the diversity only increases. Sicily’s population included Greeks, Punic (read: Carthaginian) settlers, and the truly native non-Greeks. Sardinia and Corsica had their own local culture as well. Cisalpine Gaul – the Po River Valley – was, as the name implies, mostly Gallic! As the Romans expended into Spain during the Second Punic War, they would add Iberians, Celt-Iberians, and yet more Punic settlers to their empire. And even those descriptions mask tremendous diversity – Iberians and Celt-Iberians were about as diverse among themselves as the Italians were; a quick read of Strabo reveals a wonderful array of sub-groups in all of these regions, with their own customs, languages, and so on.

Even if the Romans didn’t raise military force directly from any one of these groups, they do need to raise revenue from them – remember, the entire point of having the empire is to raise revenue from it, to make other people do the farming and mining and other labor necessary to support your society from the proceeds of their tribute. To keep that revenue flowing – revenue that, as the Roman army professionalized in the late second century B.C., increasingly paid for Roman military activity which held the empire together – you need to be good at managing those groups. Empires that are bad at handling a wide array of different cultures/religions/languages do not long remain empires.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-22.

January 16, 2022

QotD: Once “discovered”, colonization of the Americas was inevitable

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Another major structural issue is this: what precisely would our pious anthropology professors have had Europeans do with the New World once they found it?

This is not a joke. Political reality has a way of crashing in on the pipe dreams of liberal academics. The reality is, if the English had not colonised, then the French or the Dutch would have. If the Spanish had not colonised, the Portuguese would have. This would have shifted the balance of power at home, and any European country which had not colonised, would have been relegated to secondary status. And it is easy to overestimate the amount of control that European governments actually had. As soon as the New World was discovered, many fisherman and traders sailed across the Atlantic on their own, in hopes of circumventing tax authorities and scoring a fortune. Long before colonies were established in most regions, the New World was crawling with Europeans whose superior technology gave them an edge in combat. Nonetheless, it was extremely dangerous for Europeans to provoke fights with Native Americans, and most of them tried to avoid this when possible. In retrospect, one could in theory be impressed that so many European governments showed a genuine concern to rein in the worst excesses of their subjects, with an express eye to protecting the Indians from depredation. The logic was simple: they attempted to protect their subjects at home, in order to secure good order and a better tax base. So they would do the same to their subjects in the New World. For a long time, few Europeans harboured any master plan of pushing the Native Americans out of their own lands. In more densely populated regions such as Mexico, such an idea must have seemed an absurdity. Reality tends to occur ad hoc. Boundaries often took generations to move, and would have seemed fixed at the time. For several centuries, many Europeans assumed that they would long be a minority on the North American continent. In Mexico and Peru, they always have been.

Population density mattered, a lot, when it came to pre-modern global migrations. China and India were “safe” from excessive European colonisation because they had the densest populations in the world, and they were likewise largely immune to any diseases brought by Europeans. SubSaharan Africa had a lower population density depleted by slave raiding, but they still outnumbered European colonists by a large margin throughout the colonial era — again because European contact did not decimate their numbers through disease the way it did in the Americas. It is worth noting that no one claims that Europeans committed genocide in India, Asia or even Africa, although their technological advantages gave them every opportunity had they actually been of a genocidal mindset (as were for example the Mongols). In fact, the European track record shows them to be almost shockingly un-genocidal, given their clear technological advantages over the rest of the world for a period of several centuries. Few other civilisations, given similar power over so much of the world’s people, would have behaved in a less reprehensible manner. This is not to give Europeans a pat on the back. Rather it is to point out that Europeans are regularly painted as the very worst society on Earth, when in fact they had the power to do far, far more evil than they actually did. Let us at least acknowledge this fact.

Jeff Fynn-Paul, “The myth of the ‘stolen century'”, Spectator Magazine, 2020-09-26.

January 11, 2022

QotD: The decline of the “Blimp class” in the British empire

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone in England, but it had an especially direct effect upon two important sub-sections of the middle class. One was the military and imperialist middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and the other the left-wing intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic opposites – the halfpay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a dinosaur, the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck – are mentally linked together and constantly interact upon one another; in any case they are born to a considerable extent into the same families.

Thirty years ago the Blimp class was already losing its vitality. The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less room for individual initiative. Men like Clive, Nelson, Nicholson, Gordon would find no place for themselves in the modern British Empire. By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay. The one-time empire builders were reduced to the status of clerks, buried deeper and deeper under mounds of paper and red tape. In the early ‘twenties one could see, all over the Empire, the older officials, who had known more spacious days, writhing impotently under the changes that were happening. From that time onwards it has been next door to impossible to induce young men of spirit to take any part in imperial administration. And what was true of the official world was true also of the commercial. The great monopoly companies swallowed up hosts of petty traders. Instead of going out to trade adventurously in the Indies one went to an office stool in Bombay or Singapore. And life in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and safer than life in London. Imperialist sentiment remained strong in the middle class, chiefly owing to family tradition, but the job of administering the Empire had ceased to appeal. Few able men went east of Suez if there was any way of avoiding it.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

January 6, 2022

The 1874 Gras: France Enters the Brass Cartridge Era

Filed under: France, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 May 2019

After the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War, it was clear to the French military that the rationale for using paper cartridge in the Chassepot was no longer valid — a future rifle would need to use brass cartridges. A competition to design a conversion of the Chassepot to use modern ammunition resulted in the 1874 adoption of the rifle designed by French Artillery Captain Basile Gras. This maintained the use of the bolt handle as a single locking lug, but introduced a separate bolt head and extractor. The new cartridge was the 11mm Gras; very similar to the Chassepot loading but at a slightly higher velocity.

The Gras would be produced from 1874 until 1884, with more than 4 million made in total. Most were full length infantry rifles, but two patterns of carbine and a musketoon were also included for cavalry, gendarmerie, and artillery troops. These rifles saw significant use in colonial conflicts, but the much-anticipated war of revenge against Germany would not happen while the Gras was the standard French rifle. Instead, it would see a supporting role in the First World War, both in the original 11mm caliber and also converted to 8mm Lebel.

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December 20, 2021

Foreshadowing WW1 – Italo-Turkish War 1911-1912 I THE GREAT WAR

Filed under: Africa, Europe, History, Italy, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published 17 Dec 2021

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The Italo-Turkish War 1911 was one of the last classic imperial wars over colonial processions between two great powers. But it was in many ways also a first glimpse into what would come during the First World War: trenches, artillery, combat aircraft, motorboat attacks. This war in Ottoman Libya was fought between the Italian Army and Ottoman-led local Senussi forces.

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» SOURCES
Askew, William C., Europe and Italy’s Acquisition of Libya, 1911-1912, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1942)

Caccamo, Francesco, “Italy, Libya and the Balkans” in Geppert, Dominik; Mulligan, William & Rose, Andreas (eds.), The Wars before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics Before the Outbreak of the First World War, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Childs, Timothy W, Italo-Turkish Diplomacy and the War Over Libya, 1911–1912, (Leiden: Brill, 1990)

Griffin, Ernest H., Adventures in Tripoli: A Doctor in the Desert (London: Philip Allen & Co., 1924)

Hindmarsh. Albert E. & Wilson, George Grafton, “War Declared and the Use of Force”, Proceedings of the American Society of International Law at Its Annual Meeting (1921-1969) Vol. 32 (1938)

McCollum Jonathan, “Reimagining Mediterranean Spaces: Libya and the Italo-Turkish War, 1911-1912”, in Mediterraneo cosmopolita, 23 (3) 2015.

McMeekin, Sean, The Ottoman Endgame (Penguin, 2013).

Paris, Michael, “The First Air Wars – North Africa and the Balkans, 1911-13”, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 26, No. 1 (1991)

Stephenson, Charles, A Box of Sand: the Italo-Ottoman War 1911-1912: the First Land, Sea and Air War, (Ticehurst: Tattered Flag Press, 2014)

Tittoni, Renato, The Italo-Turkish War (1911-12). Translated and Compiled from the Reports of the Italian General Staff, (Kansas City, MO: Frank Hudson Publishing Company, 1914)

Uyar, Mesut, The Ottoman Army and the First World War, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021)

Vandervort, Bruce, Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa 1830-1914, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998)

Wilcox, Vanda, Italy in the Era of the Great War, (Leiden: Brill, 2018)

Wilcox, Vanda, “The Italian Soldiers’ experience in Libya, 1911-12” in Geppert, Dominik; Mulligan, William & Rose, Andreas (eds.), The Wars before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics Before the Outbreak of the First World War, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

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