The uncritical national admiration, approaching worship, of the NHS has required the subliminal acceptance of a certain historiography: before the NHS, nothing; after it, everything. Before 1948, the poor received no treatment but were left to fend for themselves when they were sick, and more or less, to die. After 1948, the ever-solicitous state system looked tenderly after the health of the population from cradle to grave.
It wasn’t difficult to promote such historiography by using horror stories from the past, stories which were perfectly plausible because almost any conceivable system will give rise to such stories. If, per impossibile, a new system were to replace the NHS, it would not be difficult to justify it by reference to horror stories, whether or not the new system was better. A war of anecdotes, while always gratifying to the human mind, is not the way to decide important questions such as the superiority or inferiority of a system of health care. Only anecdotes that also illustrate statistical trends or truths are valuable in such a context.
The statistics are not favourable to the NHS, at least if one chooses reasonable standards of comparison, namely other European countries. The results are not disastrous, but they are not good either. The NHS has failed even in its egalitarian goal: the gap between the health of the richest and poorest in society has only grown under its dispensation. And yet the belief in its levelling effect persists.
The propaganda in favour of the NHS has been so successful that it now accords with the sentiments of the population, a triumph that no communist regime achieved despite herculean efforts at indoctrination. The triumph has been achieved without compulsion or violence and ought to be an interesting case for political scientists who study the successful inculcation of political mythology. Of course, the danger of such a study would be that it might induce doubt or cynicism about other political mythologies, and we all need such mythologies to live by.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Worshipping the NHS”, New English Review, 2020-05-07.
September 3, 2025
August 26, 2025
Plunder does not explain western prosperity
Lorenzo Warby digs deep into the “mountain range of bullshit” over the issue of plunder, as in the claims that the First World got that way by stealing everything they could from what became identified as the Third World:
I am using mainly European examples because it is the genetically (and archaeologically) best mapped continent. But these grim patterns are normal in the history of Homo sapiens. Consider, for example, the Bantu expansion across Africa that mirrors the march of Anatolian farmers across Europe.
The development of farming and animal herding led to the y-chromosome Neolithic bottleneck: a massive harrowing of male lineages that only about 1-in-17 male lineages survived. The development of farming and pastoralism created much higher populations plus plunderable assets. Folk developed much more coherent kin-groups. Teams of male warriors wiped each other out, taking the land, animals and women of the defeated as their spoils.
Plunder was thus endemic in farming and herding societies. The harrowing of male lineages came to an end via the development of chiefdoms and states. That is, the technology of exploitation — keep defeated males alive so they could breed more payers of tribute and taxes — overtook the technology of aggression (kin-groups).
States were both ordering and predatory. This process worked less well among pastoralists, as the need to defend the mobile assets of animal herds generated highly effective warriors who were harder to control or extract surplus from. Pastoralist states tended to be super-chiefdoms rather than full states and the harrowing of pastoralist male lineages continued, just at a lower level.
Africa was the continent of slavery because, being where Homo sapiens evolved, it was full of pathogens, parasites, predators and mega-herbivores that co-evolved with Homo sapiens, so could cope with them.1 This kept population density down. This meant that labour was more valuable than land. There was more potential wealth in grabbing able-bodied people than in grabbing land.
This made slavery endemic in Sub-Saharan Africa long before the Islamic, then the Atlantic, slave trades developed. Sub-Saharan African states were overwhelmingly slave states. Even those that were trade states traded in slaves.
The Atlantic slave trade looks like the most extreme pattern of Europeans plundering others — in this case, Sub-Saharan Africans. It was certainly true that the Atlantic slave trade was horrific and had multiple adverse effects on African society. But those adverse effects were to intensify patterns that already existed. Moreover, the original plundering of people by turning them into slaves was done by … Africans.
The life expectancy of a European who left the African coast was about a year: it was not practical for Europeans to do the original enslaving. They bought the slaves from Africans. This enabled the slave trade carried on by Catholics to conform to the Papal Bull Sublimis Dei (1537) which banned Catholics from enslaving the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas (and, by implication, elsewhere), but did not ban trading in, or owning, slaves.
Wikimedia Commons
Plunder was endemic across human societies: including turning fellow humans into plunder — aka slavery. It was sadly ordinary. It was not a European pattern, it was a Homo sapien pattern. The Islamic slave trade was on the same scale—given it operated for centuries longer — as the Atlantic slave trade, the Saharan passage was every bit as horrific as the Atlantic passage, and the Islamic slave trade had the extra horror of the castration of male slaves. Hence, there is not an ex-slave diaspora in Islam as there is in the Americas.
Just as plunder was endemic, so was poverty. Mass poverty was the norm across farming societies. While there were economic efflorescences across human history, and evidence of periods of sustained growth, the dramatic shifts to mass prosperity since the 1820s — since the application of steam power to railways and steamships — is utterly without precedent. Moreover, it started in precisely one society — Great Britain. None of the other Atlantic littoral societies of Europe showed any sign of such a take-off.
- The megafauna outside Africa — which did not co-evolve with Homo sapiens — almost all died out when Homo sapiens turned up.
August 8, 2025
Debunking the idea that Japan was about to surrender anyway
Dr. Robert Lyman on the common misunderstanding of Japan’s situation in July and August of 1945 — no, they weren’t “on the brink of surrender so atomic bombing was unjustified” … instead, they were intending to make the assault on the Home Islands the biggest bloodbath ever:
Atomic cloud over Hiroshima, taken from “Enola Gay” flying over Matsuyama, Shikoku, 6 August, 1945.
US Army Air Force photo via Wikimedia Commons.
It’s the anniversary of Hiroshima again today. I wasn’t going to write anything to mark the event (more coming next week on VJ Day), but I’ve been triggered already by nonsense on the radio which suggests that the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary, because Japan was about to surrender.
Nonsense. There is not a shred of real evidence to support this idea. In fact, the evidence that Japan wanted to keep on fighting is irrefutable. And yet this lie persists, despite the deluge of scholarly work demonstrating Japan’s commitment to the ritual suicide of its entire nation right until the end, when Hirohito pulled the plug. If you are in any doubt about the facts of the case, as opposed to the propaganda, read Toland’s Rising Sun (1970), Frank’s Downfall (2001), Spector’s In The Ruins of Empire (2007), Pike’s Hirohito’s War and, more recently, Stewart Binn’s Japan’s War (2025). All are excellent, clear, analytical and well researched. There are lots more, too.
Why does this canard keep on popping up? Is it because people don’t read? Or is it that they just don’t want to believe in the necessity of such a dramatic event to force Japan to surrender and thus bring about an end to the greatest man-made tragedy the world has ever suffered? The origins of this wishful myth in fact derives from hard right nationalist propaganda in post-war Japan (driven by Admiral Suzuki himself), quickly lapped up by the gullible and wishful thinkers in the West. Its one of the most enduring of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki myths, in part because it seems palatable to many, and because it is inherently anti-American.
What is the real story? In short, the Allies tried hard to persuade Japan to surrender. They demonstrated unequivocally to Japan that it was going to lose the war by defeating its armies and by beginning the long, slow and painful crawl towards the Japanese home islands. All the books I’ve mentioned note the extreme chaos of Japanese decision-making before and during the war. Who really was in charge? Who could one talk to, to secure a commitment to negotiate? In any case, the chaotic government under Koiso which replaced that of General Tojo following the fall to the Americans of Saipan in 1944, made not a single effort to engage with the Allies to seek terms. This government also collapsed on 5 April 1945. The replacement prime minister was Admiral Suzuki, and it was from this man that the myth seems to have arisen, after the war, that Japan was considering surrender and that the A-bombs were unnecessary. This is not true. During his entire time as Prime Minister he resolutely refused to do anything but continue to fight, unless the ending of the war could be secured on Japan’s terms. There were some initiatives to persuade the Suzuki government to surrender, but none of them amounted to much, because they didn’t engage directly with the government in Tokyo, and they didn’t derive from the Allied powers. The evidence that peace-feelers were being put out by various sources (such as the Vatican) in 1944 and 1945 is evidence only that the Japanese government ignored them. None were taken seriously in Tokyo.
Indeed, throughout the period of the Suzuki government, the war parties were dominant. In early June the military Supreme Command submitted a paper entitled The Fundamental Policy to be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War, in which it demanded that the government confirmed that Japan would fight to the very last Japanese in an act of national suicide leading to the “honourable death of the hundred million”:
With a faith born of eternal loyalty as our inspiration, we shall – thanks to the advantages of our terrain and the unity of our nation, prosecute the war to the bitter end in order to uphold our national essence, protect the Imperial land and achieve our goals of conquest.
The proposition was passed, not unanimously, but overwhelmingly nonetheless.
There were some in the government – interestingly including Tojo himself – who saw that this was self-defeating, and that Japan must negotiate to secure acceptable peace terms. Naively, it was hoped that this would enable it to retain parts of its empire. Suzuki was part of this group who thought that Japan could negotiate favourable terms to end the war, in the form of a negotiated settlement such as that had brought about the end of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, but when he suggested this in parliament on 13 June he was shouted down by the war mongers. Hirohito then endorsed an approach to the Soviets in late June. Bizarrely – though Moscow was neutral in the Far Eastern war at this point – Tokyo’s emissaries suggested that the USSR and Japan join forces to rule the world. It was yet more evidence of how Tokyo fundamentally misunderstood the world, and its enemies, and the way the war would have to end: complete and utter surrender by Japan.
Moscow, of course, scorned these “negotiations” as meaningless.
August 1, 2025
QotD: The self-serving mythology of Britain’s NHS
The interesting question of why the NHS should continue to hold the affection of the British people, when it is at best mediocre in its performance and frequently unpleasant to deal with, is one that should be of interest to all political scientists. The answer is not pleasing to those who believe in human rationality.
The affection represents the triumph of rhetoric over reality. This rhetoric contains an implicit historiography, in which the pre-NHS era is akin to that of jahiliyya, the era of ignorance before the advent of Muhammad, in Islamic historiography: in short, that there was no healthcare for most of the population before the NHS. This historiography has for decades been continuously and successfully insinuated into the minds of the population. It has been Britain’s pale imitation of totalitarian propaganda. Intentionally or not, Boris Johnson recently reinforced the mythological status of the NHS. And when, in the present crisis, retired doctors such as I were asked to return to work if they were able, it was to help the NHS. This was like asking a soldier to lay down his life for the sake of the Ministry of Defence. It says something about the credulity of the public that the response to slogans like “protect the NHS” was dull compliance, rather than outraged demands as to why it wasn’t protecting us.
I suspect also that the sheer unpleasantness of the NHS is reassuring to the British population. It evokes the Dunkirk spirit: we are all stranded on the beach of illness together. And if we cannot all live in luxury, we can at least all die in squalor. Justice is served.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Empire of conformists”, The Critic, 2020-04-29.
May 12, 2025
QotD: The Gracchi
But it is also generally the only reading students get and it is not the only valid reading of the evidence we have. So for this week, I want to complicate the Gracchi, presenting some of the details that often get left out of introductory surveys. In particular, we’re going to discuss the problems that Tiberius Gracchus’ key law, the Lex Sempronia Agraria was designed to solve and I am going to argue that Tiberius was attempting to solve a problem that didn’t exist (though he couldn’t have known it), a view which is now quite common in the scholarship but almost entirely absent in how we tend to teach the Gracchi.
But more to the point, I am going to argue that Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ behavior did, in fact, violate the norms of the Republic and that it was not entirely unreasonable for the senatorial elite to conclude these men, in their unrestrained and nakedly ambitious approach to politics, represented a real threat to the Roman political order and that they might be aiming for something approaching a “soft coup” in the context of a political order whose features – including the democratic ones – worked through an unwritten constitution of norms (what the Romans called the mos maiorum, “the customs of the ancestors”), which both brothers actively undermined. The claim that the Gracchi threatened to make themselves tyrants was not an empty claim and that is the dark reflection of their role as well intentioned reformers.
In short, then, if the only version of the Gracchi you have encountered is that of the near-saintly, then martyred proto-progressive reformers, that’s not quite the complete picture (and the left-coding of their ideas is decidedly anachronistic). Naturally, in trying to complicate this picture, I am essentially taking the position of prosecutor, so this “take” is going to be far more negative on the Gracchi than how I would, say, teach them in class or, indeed, how I regard them myself.
So the way we’re going to approach this problem is first to discuss the problem that Tiberius Gracchus thought he was addressing (and some of the issues there), before walking through the means he used to push forward the Lex Sempronia Agraria. Then I want to look at some of the wide-ranging laws proposed by Gaius Gracchus to assess the degree to which those laws cohere and ways we might understand his program and actions, potentially rather more negatively.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.
May 4, 2025
The Clean German Myth, Doomed B-17 Pilots, and Japan’s Rapid Victories – Out of the Foxholes Live
World War Two
Published 3 May, 20205Indy and Sparty tackle some more of your interesting questions in another live Out of the Foxholes. Today they look at loss rates of B-17 crews, the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, and ask why the West was apparently so unprepared for Japan’s attack.
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April 18, 2025
QotD: Literature in (and after) the late Western Roman Empire
Well, no.
Here I think the problem is the baseline we assess this period against. Most people are generally aware that the Greeks and Romans wrote a lot of things and that we have relatively few of them. Even if we confine ourselves only to very successful, famous Greek and Roman literature, we still only have perhaps a low single-digit percentage of it, possibly only a fraction of a percent of it. In our post-printing-press and now post-internet world, famous works of literature do not simply vanish, generally and it is intuitive to assume that all of these lost works must have been the result of some catastrophe or intentional sabotage.
I am regularly, for instance, asked how I feel about the burning of the Library of Alexandria. The answer is … not very much. The library burned more than once and by the time it did it was no longer the epicenter of learning in the Mediterranean world. Instead, the library slowly declined as it became less unique because other libraries amassed considerable collections. There was no great, tragic moment where countless works were all lost in an instant. That’s not how the chain of transmission breaks. Because a break in the chain of transmission requires no catastrophe – it merely requires neglect.
The literature of the Greeks and Romans (and the rest of the ancient iron age Mediterranean) were largely written on papyrus paper, arranged into scrolls. The problem here is that papyrus is quite vulnerable to moisture and decay; in the prevailing conditions in much of Europe papyrus might only last a few decades. Ancient papyri really only survive to the present in areas of hard desert (like Egypt, conveniently), but even in antiquity, books written on papyrus would have been constantly wearing out and needing to be replaced.
Consequently, it didn’t require anyone going out and destroying books to cause a break in the chain of transmission: all that needed to happen was for the copying to stop, even fairly briefly. Fortunately for everyone, Late Antiquity was bringing with it a new writing material, parchment, and a new way of putting it together, the codex or book. The transition from papyrus to parchment begins in the fourth century, but some books are still being produced in papyrus in the 7th century, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean. Whereas papyrus is a paper made of papyrus stalks pressed together, parchment is essentially a form of leather, cleaned, soaked in calcium lye and scraped very thin. The good news is that as a result, parchment lasts – I have read without difficulty from 1200 year old books written on parchment (via microfilm) and paged through 600 year old books with my own hands. Because making it requires animal hide, parchment was extremely expensive (and still is) but its durability is a huge boon to us because it means that works that got copied onto parchment during the early middle ages often survive on that parchment down to the present.
But of course that means that the moment of technological transition from short-lived papyrus to long-lasting parchment was always going to be the moment of loss in transition: works that made it to parchment would largely survive to the present, while works that were not copied in that fairly narrow window (occupying Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages) would be permanently lost. And that copying was no simple thing: it was expensive and slow. The materials were expensive, but producing a book also required highly trained scribes (often these were monks) who would hand copy, letter by letter, the text for hundreds of pages. And, for reasons we’ll talk about later in this series, the resources available for this kind of copying would hit an all-time-low during the period from the fifth to the seventh centuries – this was expensive work for poor societies to engage in.
And here it is worth thus stopping to note how exceptional a moment of preservation this period is. The literary tradition of Mediterranean antiquity represents the oldest literary tradition to survive in an unbroken line of transmission to the present (alongside Chinese literature). The literary traditions of the Bronze Age (c. 3000-1200 BC and the period directly before antiquity broadly construed) were all lost and had to be rediscovered, with stone and clay tablets recovered archaeologically and written languages reconstructed. The Greeks and Romans certainly made little effort to preserve the literature of those who went before them!
In that context, what is actually historically remarkable here is not that the people of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages lost some books – books had always been being lost, since writing began – but that they saved some books. Never before had a literary tradition been saved in this way. Of course these early copyists didn’t always copy what we might like. Unsurprisingly, Christian monks copying books tended to copy a lot more religious texts (both scriptures but also patristic texts). Moreover, works that were seen as important for teaching good Latin (Cicero, Vergil, etc.) tended to get copied more as well, though this is nothing new; the role of the Iliad and the Odyssey in teaching Greek is probably why their manuscript traditions are so incredibly robust. In any event, far from destroying the literature of classical antiquity, it was the medieval Church itself that was the single institution most engaged in the preservation of it.
At the same time, writers in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries did not stop writing (or stop reading). Much of the literature of this period was religious in nature, but that is no reason to dismiss it (far more of the literature of the Classical world was religious in nature than you likely think, by the by). St. Augustine of Hippo was writing during the fifth century; indeed his The City of God, one of the foundational works of Christian literature, was written in response to the news of the sack of Rome in 410. Isidore of Seville (560-636) was famous for his Etymologies, an encyclopedia of sorts which would form the foundation for much of medieval learning and which in its summaries preserves for us quite a lot of classical bits and bobs which would have otherwise been lost; he also invented the period, comma and colon. Pope Gregory I (540-604) was also a prolific writer, writing hundreds of letters, a collection of four books of dialogues, a life of St. Benedict, a book on the role of bishops, a commentary on the Book of Job and so on. The Rule of St. Benedict, since we’ve brought the fellow up, written in 516 established the foundation for western monasticism.
And while we’ve mostly left the East off for this post, we should also note that writing hardly stopped there. Near to my heart, the emperor Maurice (r. 582-602) wrote the Strategikon, an important and quite informative manual of war which presents, among other things, a fairly sophisticated vision of combined arms warfare. Roman law also survived in tremendous quantities; the emperor Theodosius II (r. 402-450) commissioned the creation of a streamlined law code compiling all of the disparate Roman laws into the Codex Theodosianus, issued in 439. Interestingly, Alaric II (r. 457-507), king of the Visigoths in much of post-Roman Spain would reissue the code as past of the law for his own kingdom in 506 as part of the Breviary of Alaric. Meanwhile, back at Constantinople, Justinian I (r. 527-565) commissioned an even more massive collection of laws, the Corpus Iuris Civilis, issued from 529 to 534 in four parts; a colossal achievement in legal scholarship, it is almost impossible to overstate how important the Corpus Iuris Civilis is for our knowledge of Roman law.
And it is not hard again to see how these sorts of literary projects represented a continuing legacy of Roman culture too (particularly the Roman culture of the third and fourth century), concerned with Roman law, Roman learning and the Roman religion, Christianity. And so when it comes to culture and literature, it seems that the change-and-continuity knight holds the field – there is quite a lot of evidence for the survival of elements of Roman culture in post-Roman western Europe, from language, to religion, to artwork and literature. Now we haven’t talked about social and economic structures (that’s part III), so one might argue we haven’t quite covered all of “culture” just yet, and it is necessary to note that this continuity was sometimes uneven. Nevertheless, the fall of Rome can hardly be said to have been the end of Roman culture.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part I: Words”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-14.
April 17, 2025
Why TOG II was BETTER Than You Think
The Tank Museum
Published 20 Dec 2024It was rejected and ridiculed for years — but TOG II is actually much better than you think.
In 1939, the UK Ministry of War issued the spec for a heavy assault tank. This hefty brief included the requirements to cross a 16ft gap, climb over anti-tank obstacles and enough firepower to penetrate 7 inches of concrete. Enter “The Old Gang”, a group of expert engineers, responsible for most of the tanks created during the First World War.
Two vehicles were created during this process — TOG I and TOG II. While the TOG projects have often been rejected as tanks out of time — relics of thinking from trench warfare — Content and Research Officer, Chris Copson, argues that these vehicles were highly innovative in terms of their mobility, armour and firepower.
Despite fulfilling their brief, TOG was sidelined in favour of other projects, and the lone survivor — TOG II — arrived at The Tank Museum in the 1950s. This lumbering beast that never saw active service, sat sidelined whilst surrounded by WW2 legends like the Churchill, Sherman, and the infamous Tiger 131.
But in 2012, a miracle happened. World of Tanks included the super heavy tank in their online video game — launching TOG II into viral popularity. Since then, interest in this unique vehicle has skyrocketed, and now more than ever people want to see TOG II in real life and find out more about its interesting history.
Shop TOG II merch at our online shop: https://tankmuseumshop.org/
00:00 | Introduction
01:24 | An Innovative Spec
05:00 | Innovations in Mobility
10:11 | Innovations in Armour
11:49 | Innovations in Firepower
16:21 | Would TOG II Have Worked?
18:46 | The Legend Lives OnIn this film, Chris Copson unpicks the misconceptions surrounding TOG II — that it was a ridiculous super-heavy tank built for a war from 30 years ago. Instead, this is a vehicle that was highly innovative and represented a significant engineering achievement. Thanks to videos games such as World of Tanks, TOG II is now celebrated as the goofiest super heavy tank in history, and lives on as an internet legend for a whole new generation of tank nuts.
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March 17, 2025
QotD: Myths from Norman Rockwell’s America
The complaint generally continues that we were robbed of this by bad policy choices. But that is at best only half true.
World War II smashed almost the entire industrial capacity of the world outside the U.S., which exited with its manufacturing plant not only intact, but greatly improved by wartime capitalization. The result was that for about 30 years, the US was a price-taker in international markets. Nobody could effectively compete with us at heavy or even light manufacturing.
The profits from that advantage built Norman Rockwell’s America — lots of prosperous small towns built around factories and mills. Labor unions could bid up salaries for semi-skilled workers to historically ridiculous levels on that tide.
But it couldn’t last. Germany and Japan and England recapitalized and rebuilt themselves. The Asian tigers began to be a thing. U.S. producers facing increasing competitive pressure discovered that they had become bloated and inefficient in the years when the penalty for that mistake was minimal.
Were there bad policy choices? Absolutely. Taxes and entitlement spending exploded because all that surplus was sloshing around ready to be captured; the latter has proven politically almost impossible to undo.
When our windfall finally ended in the early 1970s, Americans were left with habits and expectations formed by the long boom. We’ve since spent 50 years trying, with occasional but only transient successes, to recreate those conditions. The technology boom of 1980 to 2001 came closest.
But the harsh reality is that we are never likely to have that kind of advantage again. Technology and capital are now too mobile for that.
Political choices have to be made within this reality. It’s one that neither popular nor elite perception has really caught up with.
Eric S. Raymond, X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, 2024-07-08.
March 11, 2025
The Myth and Truth behind Croissants – A Recipe from 1850
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 29 Oct 2024Crescent-shaped bread rolls, from before the croissant was a flaky pastry
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1853Croissants weren’t always the buttery, flaky pastries that we know and love. While today, that flakiness is what defines a croissant, in the past, it was the crescent shape that was most important.
This recipe from the mid-19th century, a good 50 years before the croissant got its flakes, is a wonderfully soft bread. It doesn’t bear much resemblance to a modern croissant besides the shape, but it is much easier to make. The bread is a little plain, but would be lovely with some butter and jam.
In luxury bakeries, small loaves called croissants are prepared, usually in the semi-circular shape of a roll curved and tapered at the ends. The liquid is used to form the dough with one kilogram of flour consists of one or two eggs beaten and mixed with about five hundred grams of water. Moreover, the choice of flour, the dose of yeast, as well as the working of the dough, require the same care as when it comes to the other luxury breads mentioned.
— Des substances alimentaire et des moyens de les améliorer by Anselme Payen, 1853.
January 21, 2025
Claim – First Nations lived sustainably and harmoniously with their natural environment. Reality – “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump”
Pim Wiebel contrasts how children are taught about how First Nations before contact with Europeans were living fully sustainable lives in a kind of Garden of Eden until the white snakes man arrived and the rather less Edenic reality:
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump near Fort McLeod, Alberta.
Photo by Mike via Wikipedia Commons.
Among the many “proofs” offered in First Nations circles to support the claim of a pre-contact Eden imbued with an ethos of environmental harmony, is the idea that before the Europeans arrived, the buffalo was considered sacred, treated with great respect, and killed only in numbers that would sustain it in perpetuity.
Each of these notions require scrutiny.
For the Great Plains tribes, the buffalo was an essential source of food and of materials for tools, clothing and lodges. It is unsurprising that the buffalo featured prominently in tribal mythology. Among the Blackfoot, the animal was considered Nato’ye (of the Sun) sacred and to have great power. Buffalo skulls were placed at the top of the medicine lodges and prominently featured at communal ceremonies.
It is ubiquitously asserted that the tribes only killed as many buffalo as they needed for their sustenance between hunts, and that every part of the animal was used. A Canadian history website suggests, “The buffalo hunt was a major community effort and every part of the slaughtered animal was used“. An American publication states, presumptuously: “It’s one of the cliches of the West; Native Americans used all the parts of the buffalo. It’s something that almost everyone knows, whether you are interested in history or not.” The Assembly of First Nations weighs in, teaching Canadian school children in their heavily promoted “Learning Modules”, that “Hunters took only what was necessary to survive. Every part of the animal was used.”
But was the Indigenous relationship with the buffalo in reality one of supreme reverence? Was every part of the animal used, and were the buffalo always killed only in numbers that would satisfy immediate needs while ensuring the sustainability of the herds?
The evidence suggests something quite different.
Archaeologists have studied ancient buffalo “jump sites”, places where Indigenous bands hunted buffalo herds by driving them over high cliffs. Investigations of sites from the Late Archaic period (1000 B.C. to 700 A.D.) reveal that many more buffalo than could be used were killed and that rotting heaps of only partially butchered bison carcasses were left behind.
Buffalo jumps continued to be used as a hunting method long after first contact with Europeans. Early Canadian fur trader and explorer Alexander Henry, made the following entry on May 29th, 1805 in his diary of travels in the Missouri country: “Today we passed on the Stard. (starboard) side the remains of a vast many mangled carcasses of Buffaloe which had been driven over a precipice of 120 feet by the Indians and perished; the water appeared to have washed away a part of this immense pile of slaughter and still there remained the fragments of at least a hundred carcasses they created a most horrid stench. In this manner the Indians of the Missouri distroy vast herds of buffaloe at a stroke.”
Alexander Henry described how the buffalo jump unfolded. The hunters approached the herd from the rear and sides, and chased it toward a cliff. A particularly agile young man disguised in a buffalo head and robe positioned himself between the herd and the cliff edge, luring the animals forward. Henry was told on one occasion that the decoy sometimes met the same fate as the buffalo: “The part of the decoy I am informed is extremely dangerous if they are not very fleet runers the buffaloe tread them under foot and crush them to death, and sometimes drive them over the precipice also, where they perish in common with the buffaloe.”
The Blackfoot called their jump sites Pishkun, meaning “deep blood kettle”. It is not difficult to imagine the horrendous bawling of the animals that suffered physical trauma from the fall but did not immediately succumb. Did the hunters have the ability, or even make an attempt, to put them out of their misery with dispatch? We do not know.
January 13, 2025
QotD: The rise of coal in England
And not far along the coast from the city were also the huge woodlands of the Weald, which stretched across the southeastern counties of Sussex, Surrey and Kent, and which did not even send much of their wood to London at all. Firewood from the Weald was not only exported to the Low Countries and the northern coast of France, but those exports more than tripled between 1490 and the early 1530s, from some 1.5 million billets per year to over 4.7 million. That level was still being reached in 1550, when not interrupted by on-and-off war with France, but by then the Weald was also meeting yet another new demand, for making iron.3
Ironmaking was extremely wood-hungry. In the 1550s Weald, making just a single ton of “pig” or cast iron, fit only for cannon or cooking pots, required almost 4 tons of charcoal, which in turn required roughly another 28 tons or so of seasoned wood. England in the early sixteenth century had imported the vast majority of its iron from Spain, but between 1530 and 1550 Wealden pig iron production increased eightfold. The expansion would have demanded, on a very conservative estimate, the sustained annual output of at least 50,000 acres of woodland — an area over sixty times the size of New York’s Central Park. Yet even this hugely understates the true scale of the expansion, as pig iron needed to be refined into bar or wrought iron in order to be fit for most uses, which required twice as much charcoal again — or in other words, a total of 86 tons of seasoned wood had to be first baked and then burned, just to make one ton of bar iron from the ore. And all this was just the beginning. By the 1590s the output of the Wealden ironworks had more than tripled again, for pig iron alone (though the efficiency of charcoal usage had also halved — a story for another time, perhaps).4
Given the rapidity of these changes, it will come as no surprise that there were complaints from the locals about how much the ironworks had increased the price of fuel for their homes. No doubt the wood being exported was having a similar effect as well. But the 1540s and 50s were also time of rapid general inflation, because of a dramatic debasement of the currency initiated by Henry VIII to pay for his wars. This not only made imports significantly more expensive, and so likely spurred much of the activity in the Weald to replace increasingly unaffordable iron from Spain, but they also made exports significantly cheaper for buyers abroad — and thus unaffordable for the English themselves.
In 1548-9, in a desperate bid to keep prices down, royal proclamations repeatedly and futilely banned the export of English wheat, malt, oats, barley, butter, cheese, bacon, beef, tallow, hides, and leather, to which the following year were added — like a game of inflation whack-a-mole — rye, peas, beans, bread, biscuits, mutton, veal, lamb, pork, ale, beer, wool, and candles. And of course charcoal and wood.5 For us to have records of the Weald exporting large quantities of wood in 1550 then, they must either have been sold through special royal licence, or have all been shipped out before the ban came in force just halfway through the year in May. Presumably a great deal more than recorded was also smuggled out. In 1555, parliament saw the need to put the ban on exporting victuals and wood into law, adding severe penalties. Transgressing merchants would lose their ship and have to pay a fine worth double the value of the contraband goods, while the ship’s mariners would see all their worldly possessions seized, and be imprisoned for at least a year without bail.6
It’s perhaps no wonder that the Weald’s ironworks continued to expand at such a rapid pace: the export ban would have freed up a great deal of woodland for their use. And ironmaking soon spread to other parts of England too, to where it did not have to compete for fuel with people’s homes. Given iron was significantly more valuable by both weight and volume than wood, it could easily bear the cost of transporting it from further away, and so could be made much further inland, away from the coasts and rivers whose woodlands served cities. In the early seventeenth century, iron ore and pig iron from the southwest of England was sometimes shipped all the way to well-wooded Ireland for smelting or refining into bar.7 In the early eighteenth century scrap iron from as far away as even the Netherlands was being recycled in the forested valleys of southwestern Scotland.8
Whenever ironmaking hit the limits of what could be sustainably grown in an area, it simply expanded into the next place where wood was cheap. And there was almost always another place. England, having had to import some three quarters of its iron from Spain in the 1530s, by the 1580s was almost entirely self-sufficient, after which the total amount of iron it produced using charcoal continued to grow, reaching its peak another two hundred years later in the 1750s.9 Had iron-making not been able to find sustainable supplies of fuel within England, it would have disappeared within just a few years rather than experiencing almost two centuries of expansion.10
And that’s just iron. The late sixteenth century also saw the rapid rise in England of a charcoal-hungry glass-making industry too. Green glass for small bottles had long been made in some of England’s forests in small quantities, but large quantities of glass for windows had had to be imported from the Low Countries and France. Just as with iron, however, the effect of debasement was to make the imports unaffordable for the English, and so French workers were enticed over in the 1550s and 60s to make window glass in the Weald. Soon afterwards, Venetian-style crystal-clear drinking glasses were being made there too.
What makes glass even more interesting than iron, however, is that its breakability meant it could not be made too far away from the cities in which it would be sold, and so had to compete directly with people’s homes for its fuel. Yet by the 1570s crystal glass was even being made even within London itself. Despite charcoal supplies being by far the largest cost of production, over the course of the late sixteenth century the price of glass in England remained stable, making it increasingly common and affordable while the price of pretty much everything else rose.11
What we have then is not evidence of a mid-sixteenth-century shortage of wood for fuel, and certainly not of those demands causing deforestation. It is instead evidence of truly unprecedented demands being generally and sustainably met.
And despite these unprecedented demands, the intensity with which under-woods were exploited for fuel seems to have actually decreased. During the medieval population peaks, the woods and hedges that supplied London had been squeezed for more fuel by simply cropping the trunks and branches more often, cutting them away every six or seven years rather than waiting for them to grow into larger poles or logs. After the Black Death killed off half the population, the cropping cycle could again lengthen to about eleven. But under-woods in the mid-sixteenth century were being cropped on average only twelve or so years — about twice as long a cycle as before the Black Death — which by the nineteenth century had lengthened still further to fourteen or fifteen.12
The lengthening of the cropping cycle can imply a number of things, and we’ll get to them all. But one possibility is that in order to meet unprecedented demands, more firewood was being collected at the expense of the other major use of trees: for timber.
Anton Howes, “The Coal Conquest”, Age of Invention, 2024-10-04.
1. Estienne Perlin, “A description of England and Scotland” [1558], in The Antiquarian Repertory, vol.1 (1775), p.231. Perlin must have visited Britain in early 1553, as he mentions the arrival of a new French ambassador, which occurred in April 1553, as well as the wedding of Lady Jane Grey, which occurred in May of that year. Also Danielo Barbaro, “Report (May 1551)” in Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Vol 5: 1534-1554 (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1873). And: Paul Warde and Tom Williamson, “Fuel Supply and Agriculture in Post-Medieval England”, The Agricultural History Review 62, no. 1 (2014), p.71
2. Galloway et al., p.457 for the estimate of 17.4 miles overland as the outer limit of London’s firewood supply; Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, Vol I: 1558-1581, ed. T.E. Hartley (Leicester University Press, 1981), p.370: specifically, the London MP Rowland Hayward complained of the cost of firewood billets and charcoal having increased in price over the previous 30 years (which would encompass the period of debasement-induced inflation), before noting that “Sometimes the want of wood has driven the City to make provision in such places as they have been driven to carry it 12 miles by land”.
3. Mavis E. Mate, Trade and Economic Developments, 1450-1550: The Experience of Kent, Surrey and Sussex (Boydell Press, 2006), pp.83, 92, 101.
4. These statistics are derived from a combination of Peter King, “The Production and Consumption of Bar Iron in Early Modern England and Wales”, The Economic History Review 58, no. 1 (1 February 2005), pp.1–33 for the iron production estimates, and G. Hammersley, “The Charcoal Iron Industry and Its Fuel, 1540-1750”, The Economic History Review 26, no. 4 (1973), pp.593–613 for the estimates of how much charcoal, wood, and land was required at a given date to produce a given quantity of pig or bar iron.
5. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations., Vol. I: The Early Tudors (1485-1553) (Yale University Press, 1964), proclamations nos. 304, 310, 318, 319, 345, 357, 361, 365, 366.
6. 1 & 2 Philip & Mary, c.5 (1555)
7. William Brereton, Travels in Holland, the United Provinces, England, Scotland and Ireland 1634-1635, ed. Edward Hawkins (The Chetham Society, 1844), p.147
8. T. C. Smout, ed., “Journal of Henry Kalmeter’s Travels in Scotland, 1719-20”, in Scottish Industrial History: A Miscellany, vol. 14, 4 (Scottish History Society, 1978), p.19
9. See King. Note that there was an interruption to this growth in the mid-seventeenth century, for reasons I mention later on.
10. There was a period in the early-to-mid seventeenth century when English ironmaking stagnated, but this was due to the growth of a competitive ironmaking industry in Sweden.
11. D. W. Crossley, “The Performance of the Glass Industry in Sixteenth-Century England”, The Economic History Review 25, no. 3 (1972), pp.421–33
12. Galloway et al. On cropping cycles in particular, see pp.454-5: they note how the average cropping of wood in their sample c.1300 was about every seven years, but by 1375-1400 — once population pressures had receded due to the Black Death — the average had increased to every eleven. See also Rackham, pp.140-1. John Worlidge, Systema agriculturæ (1675), p.96 mentions that coppice “of twelve or fifteen years are esteemed fit for the axe. But those of twenty years’ standing are better, and far advance the price. Seventeen years’ growth affords a tolerable fell”.
January 11, 2025
We Produced a Video with 22 Students from the University of Zürich (Hoplite Revolution Debate)
SandRhoman History
Published 22 Sept 2024In this video, we will look at the core arguments in the hoplite revolution debate to provide you with 1) an overview of the debate itself, 2) a glimpse into warfare in ancient Greece, and 3) evidence of why historical revisionism is necessary. To achieve this, we will follow a similar overview used in a seminar we taught at the University of Zürich in the spring of 2024. Throughout the video, the participants of this seminar will contribute the expertise they have acquired by providing critical information about the ancient primary sources they analysed during the seminar.
Chapters:
00:00 Revisionism, really?!
04:21 19th Century Germany and Ancient Greece
05:39 A Hoplite Revolution?
11:53 Political Implications
16:19 Agonal Warfare (Fair War?)
22:49 Training and Discipline
25:53 Phalanx Formation
30:13 Exclusivity of Hoplites
33:04 Revisionist Battle
36:46 History is not the past.
(more…)
December 16, 2024
Winners and losers from free trade
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Patrick Carroll responds to a recent Robert Reich rant about the winners and losers under free trade:
Image Credit: YouTube screenshot – Robert Reich
Myth #6 on Robert Reich’s list of economic myths is called “Global Trade Benefits Everyone”.
“Have you heard this lie?” Reich opens. “‘Global trade is good for everyone.'” His pants then light on fire. “Ahh!” he screams. “That’s bunk!”
Watching that opening sequence was an immediate déjà vu moment for me, because I had recently come across an article making the same claim as Reich. The article argued that free market economists are simply wrong to claim that “everyone gains” from free trade, because clearly there are some losers.
The ironic part is, that article was written by none other than Bryan Caplan, one of the world’s leading free market economists.
“What makes me so sure that ‘Everyone gains from X’ is invariably a blatant falsehood? Because every change causes price movements, which are automatically bad for someone or other,” Caplan writes. “The Industrial Revolution was great overall, but hurt traditional craftsmen. The Internet is great overall, but hurt travel agents. Congestion pricing is great overall, but bad for cheapskates with high traffic tolerance. Free trade is great overall, but not for workers and investors in industries that can’t survive at world prices.”
[…]
This would be a rather short article if Reich were simply making the same point as Caplan. “I agree, but Caplan said it better,” would probably be my thesis. But alas, Reich goes in a rather different direction than Caplan does, and that’s where some more rigorous analysis is needed. Here’s how he presents his argument:
Many economists believe in the doctrine of comparative advantage, which posits that trade is good for all nations when each nation specializes in what it does best. But what about costs to workers and the environment? What if a country’s comparative advantage comes from people working under dangerous or exploitative conditions, or from preventing them from forming labor unions, or allowing employers to hire young children? Or from polluting the atmosphere or the ocean, or destroying rainforests and polluting groundwater?
Reich makes a fair point that global trade isn’t all sunshine and roses. Working conditions in some places are atrocious, and environmental damage is also a very real problem. But the fact that working and environmental conditions are far from ideal in many parts of the world does not mean that restricting trade will necessarily make things better. In fact, it’s quite likely that less trade would make things worse, because it would cut off the global poor from opportunities for production and economic growth.
Reich highlights the costs of trade, but there are also immense benefits that the global poor reap from the arrangement. If these benefits outweigh the costs — as they likely do in most cases — then who’s really the advocate of the downtrodden: the ones cheering on mutually beneficial trade, or the ones trying to stop it because they can only see the downsides?
To be fair, Reich doesn’t come out and advocate for cutting off trade. But this raises the question: what exactly is he advocating for? Anyone can point out problems, but the real question is: what solution are you proposing? Maybe he’ll tell us in the next section:
My old boss Bill Clinton called globalization “the economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water”. But globalization is not a force of nature. Global trade is structured by rules negotiated between nations about which assets will be protected and which will not. These rules determine who benefits and who is harmed by trade. Over recent decades, trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) and agreements under the World Trade Organization (WTO) have protected the assets of US corporations, including intellectual property.
Reich goes on to list a few ways that these rules have helped large corporations, such as oil companies, financial institutions, Big Pharma, and Big Ag.
Watching this part of the video ushered in a second instance of déjà vu. I remembered reading somewhere, just recently, that NAFTA was rotten to the core, just like Reich was saying.
Yet again, it was a staunch free market economist making this point — Murray Rothbard, in a number of incisive articles that were part of his 1995 anthology Making Economic Sense. The problem, said Rothbard, is that NAFTA was really the opposite of free trade.
November 27, 2024
QotD: The Great Library and its competitors
The Ptolemies were not the only successors to Alexander who built a Mouseion with a library; their Seleucid rivals in Syria also built one in Antioch in the reigns of Antiochus IX Eusebes (114-95 BC) or Antiochus X Philopater (95-92 BC). Roman aristocrats and rulers also included the establishment of substantial libraries as part of their civic service. Julius Caesar had intended to establish a library next to the Forum in Rome but this was ultimately achieved after his death by Gaius Asinius Pollio (75 BC – 4 AD), a soldier, politician and scholar who retired to a life of study after the tumults of the Civil Wars. Augustus established the Palatine Library in the Temple of Apollo and founded another one in the Portus Octaviae, next to the Theatre of Marcellus at the southern end of the Field of Mars. Vespasian established one in the Temple of Peace in 70 AD, but probably the largest of the Roman libraries was that of Trajan in his new forum beside the famous column that celebrates his Dacian wars. As mentioned above, this large building probably contained around 20,000 scrolls and had two main chambers – one for Greek and the other for Latin authors. Trajan’s library also seems to have established a design and layout that would be the model for libraries for centuries: a hall with desks and tables for readers with books in niches or shelves around the walls and on a mezzanine level. Libraries also came to be established in Roman bath complexes, with a very large one at the Baths of Caracalla and another at the Baths of Diocletian.
Several of these libraries were substantial. The Library of Celsus at Ephesus was built in c. 117 AD by the son of Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus in honour of his father, who had been a senator and consul in Rome, and its reconstructed facade is one of the major archaeological features of the site today. It was said to be the third largest library in the ancient world, surpassed only by the great libraries of Pergamon and Alexandria. The Great Library of Pergamon was established by the Attalid rulers of that city state and it was the true rival of the library of the Alexandrian Mouseion. It is said that the Ptolemies were so threatened by its size and the reputation of its scholars that they banned the export of papyrus to Pergamon, causing the Attalids to commission the invention of parchment as a substitute, though this is most likely a legend. What is absolutely clear, however, is that the idea that the Great Library of Alexandria was unique, whether in nature or even in size, is nonsense.
The weird idea that the loss of the Great Library was some kind of singular disaster is at least partially due to the fact that none of the various other great libraries of the ancient world are known to casual readers, so it may be easy for them to assume it was somehow unique. It also seems to stem, again, from the emphasis in popular sources on the mythical immense size of its collection which, as discussed above, is based on a naive acceptance of varied and wildly exaggerated sources. Finally, it seems to stem in no small part from (yet again) Sagan’s influential but fanciful picture of the institution as a distinctively secular hub of scientific research and, by implication, technological innovation.
Tim O’Neill, “The Great Myths 5: The Destruction Of The Great Library Of Alexandria”, History for Atheists, 2017-07-02.
