Quotulatiousness

December 19, 2023

Henry Dundas, cancelled because he didn’t do even more, sooner to abolish slavery in the British Empire

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

Toronto’s usual progressive suspects are still eager to rename Dundas Street because (they claim) Henry Dundas was involved in the slave trade. Which is true, if you torture the words enough. His involvement was to ensure the passage of the first successful abolitionist motion through Parliament by working out a compromise between the hard abolitionists (who wanted slavery ended immediately) and the anti-abolitionists. This is enough, in the views of the very, very progressive activists of today to merit our modern version of damnatio memoriae:

Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville.
Portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

Henry Dundas never travelled to British North America and likely spent very little of his 69 years ever thinking about it. He was an influential Scottish career politician whose name adorns the street purely because he happened to be British Home Secretary when it was surveyed in 1793.

But after 230 years, activists led an ultimately successful a push for the Dundas name to be excised from the 23-kilometre street. As Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow said in deliberations over the name change, Dundas’s actions in relation to the Atlantic slave trade were “horrific“.

Was Dundas a slaveholder? Did he profit from the slave trade? Did he use his influence to advance or exacerbate the business of slavery?

No; Dundas was a key figure in the push to abolish slavery across the British Empire. The reason activists want his name stripped from Dundas Street is because he didn’t do it fast enough.

[…]

The petition was piggybacking off a similar anti-Dundas movement in the U.K. – which itself seems to have been inspired by Dundas’s portrayal as a villain in the 2006 film Amazing Grace, a fictionalized portrayal of the British anti-slavery movement.

Dundas was responsible for inserting the word “gradually” into an iconic 1792 Parliamentary motion calling for the end of the Atlantic slave trade. A legislated end to the trade wouldn’t come until 1807, followed by an 1833 bill mandating the total abolition of slavery across the British Empire.

The accusation is that – if not for Dundas – the unamended motion would have passed and the British slave trade would have ended 15 years earlier.

But according to the 18th century historians who have been brought out of the woodwork by the Cancel Dundas movement, Henry Dundas was a man working within the political realities of a Britain that wasn’t yet altogether convinced that slavery was a bad thing.

The year before Dundas’ “gradual” amendment secured passage for the motion, the House of Commons had rejected a similar motion for immediate abolition.

“Dundas’s amendment at least got an anti-slavery statement adopted — the first,” wrote Lynn McDonald, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, in August. McDonald added that, in any case, it was just a non-binding motion; any actual law wouldn’t have gotten past the House of Lords.

The parliamentary record from this time survives, and Dundas was open about the fact that he “entertained the same opinion” on slavery as the famed abolitionist William Wilberforce, but favoured a more practical means of stamping it out.

“Allegations … that abolition would have been achieved sooner than 1807 without his opposition, are fundamentally mistaken,” reads one lengthy Dundas defence in the journal Scottish Affairs.

“Historical realities were much more nuanced and complex in the slave trade abolition debates of the 1790s and early 1800s than a focus on the role and significance of one politician suggests,” wrote the paper, adding that although Wilberforce opposed Dundas’ insertion of the word “gradually,” the iconic anti-slavery figure “later admitted that abolition had no chance of gaining approval in the House of Lords and that Dundas’s gradual insertion had no effect on the voting outcome.”

Meanwhile, the British abolition of slavery actually has some indirect ties to the road that bears Dundas’s name.

The road’s construction was overseen by John Graves Simcoe, the British Army general that Dundas had picked to be Lieutenant Governor of the colony of Upper Canada.

The same year he started building Dundas Street, Simcoe signed into law an act banning the importation of slaves to Upper Canada – and setting out a timeline for the emancipation of the colony’s existing slaves. It was the first anti-slavery legislation in the British Empire, and it was partially intended as a middle finger to the Americans’ first Fugitive Slave Act, passed that same year.

December 16, 2023

Do Droughts Make Floods Worse?

Filed under: Environment — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published 5 Sept 2023

The answer isn’t as simple as you might think!

One statistician famously said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. And even something as simple as the flow of water into the soil has so many complexities to keep track of. Like most answers to simple questions in engineering and in life: the answer is that it’s complicated.
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September 23, 2023

“Canada is, as a whole, a naive, spoiled country that stands a pretty good chance of getting punched in the face by reality”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney praises both the delivery and the content of a recent report by the Business Council of Canada urging Canadian governments to pay a lot more attention to economic security issues that seem to be almost universally neglected in favour of mediagenic gestures and battlespace prep for the next election.

But as I was reading the report, there was this nagging thought in the back of my mind. Why is the Business Council of Canada trying to impress upon the government (and the country at large) the importance of economic security? Why do we need a report from top business leaders to remind our political leadership that poor countries aren’t generally safe and peaceful ones, and that there are countries out there that would wish us harm and that we need to be on guard against? Like, shouldn’t we know that already? Because none of this stuff is revolutionary. It’s all extremely basic stuff that any mature country should just sort of intuitively grasp. Right?

And that’s when the shoulder-slumping realization lands on you like a ton of bricks. We should, but in this country, we don’t. We just don’t. Because, well ….

Uh oh.

It seems to me that a country shouldn’t need a report to impress upon key civilian leadership that economic prosperity is the cornerstone of all security, or that, on the flip side, security is a prerequisite for prosperity. Toronto is a fair bit rougher than it used to be these days — join us at our event next month! — but when I leave the house to run an errand, I’m reasonably confident I’m not going to be abducted by a band of roving pirates prowling the leafy streets of Leaside. When I head up north for the weekend, it doesn’t occur to me that there’ll be a checkpoint along the route, looking to shake me down or carry off my children into slavery. In the mornings, when I lurch out of bed with a groan that gets louder with each passing year, I expect that the light switch will indeed result in light and that the faucet in the bathroom will provide clean water. I don’t have to worry about whether the water treatment plant has been bombed or the power lines shelled.

Many of my Canadian readers may find the above absurd or, at least, a bit of hyperbole. But that’s the point. As I have written many times before, almost everything we do in this country, and almost our entire self-identity as Canadians, accepts internal security and safety from military attack as an ironclad given, just by default. That makes sense: that has been the norm for us, for a long time. It seems absurd precisely because how distant it seems from our normal.

But it isn’t the norm in any historical sense much beyond a human lifetime or two or three, even in Canada. And more to the point, as the voice-over guys in the commercials say, past performance may not be indicative of future results.

We are not owed prosperity in perpetuity. We are not guaranteed security by virtue of our niceness. These are precious things that require more than just good luck — and good luck, thank God, is something Canada still does seem to have. In addition to luck, though, we need realistic understandings of our strengths, weaknesses and the threats we face. We need political leadership that is mature and aware enough to understand the difference between political interest and national interest, and that is seized enough with these issues to devote the necessary resources to building up and preserving our security, from all reasonably foreseeable threats. That includes not just investments of money and people, but also simply intellectual bandwidth and emotional toil. We have to think, hard, about things that aren’t nice to think about, and have robust, effective institutions and a critical mass of people with the necessary combination of mindset, academic and professional training and lived experience to be effective at foreseeing, heading off and, when necessary, managing crises that threaten our safety and prosperity. We need a supportive bureaucracy that is efficient and task-focused and doesn’t get in the way of all this vital work.

Does any of this sound like Canada to you?!

Does it sound like the leader of any of our governments, or any of the people who’ll replace those leaders? Does it sound like any of our institutions except the ones specifically tasked with security and defence? You know, the ones we habitually starve so we can spend a few extra bucks and a bit more political capital on something a bit more pleasing to the average voter? Does it sound like the sort of thing smart, well-read and educated Canadians spare a single solitary moment thinking about as they go about their day to day lives?

Of course not. No one does, and our politics reflect this. These just aren’t issues of concern in Canada outside of the military, the intelligence agencies and a few fellow journalists and academics I could probably recount here in their totality by their first names.

September 16, 2023

QotD: The Persian “Royal Roads”

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The first thing worth clearing up about the Roman roads is that, contrary to a lot of popular belief, the Roman roads were not the first of their kind. And I mean that in a variety of ways: the construction of roadways with a solid, impermeable surface (that is, not just clearing and packing dirt) was not new with the Romans, but more importantly the concept of knitting together an empire with a system of roadways was not new.

The oldest road network that we have pretty good evidence for was the Persian Royal Road of the Achaemenids but these too were not the first (the Achaemenid dynasty ruling a vast empire from 559 to 330 BC; this is the Persian Empire of Xerxes and Darius III). Even before them the Assyrians (Middle and Neo-Assyrian Empires running from 1363 to 609 BC)1 had build roadways to hold together parts of their empire, though I confess I know very little of the extent of that road system except that we’re fairly sure it existed and like the later systems we’re going to talk about, it included not just the physical infrastructure of the roads but a sophisticated relay system to allow official messengers to move very rapidly over the network.

The modern perception of the Persian Royal Road is conditioned perhaps a bit too much by Herodotus who described the royal road – singular – as a single highway running from Susa to Sardis. Susa was one of several Achaemenid royal capitals and it sat at the edge of the Iranian plateau where it meets the lowland valley of Mesopotamia, essentially sitting right on the edge where the Persian “heartland” met the area of imperial conquests. Meanwhile, Sardis was the westernmost major Achaemenid administrative center, the regional capital, as it were, for Anatolia and the Aegean. So you can see the logic of that being an important route, but the road system was much larger. Indeed, here is a very rough sketch of how we might understand the whole system.

Compare the dashed line – the Royal Road as described by Herodotus – with the solid lines, the rest of the system we can glean from other sources or from archaeology and you can see that Herodotus hasn’t given us the whole story. For what it is worth, I don’t think Herodotus here is trying to lie – he has just described the largest and most important trunk road that leads to his part of the world.

This system doubtlessly emerged over time. Substantial parts of the road network almost certainly predated the Achaemenids and at least some elements were in place under the first two Achaemenid Great Kings (Cyrus II, r. 559-530 and Cambyses II, r. 530-22) but it seems clear that it is the third Achaemenid ruler, Darius I (r. 522-486; this is the fellow who dispatched the expedition defeated at Marathon, but his reign was far more important than that – he is the great organizer of the Persian Empire) who was responsible for the organization, formalization and expansion of the system. And in practice we can split that system into two parts, the physical infrastructure of roads and then the relay system built atop that system.

In terms of the physical infrastructure, as far as I can tell, the quality of Persian Royal Roads varied a lot. In some areas where the terrain was difficult, we see sections of road cut into the rock or built via causeways over ravines. Some areas were paved, but most – even most of the “royal” roads (as distinct from ancillary travel routes) were not.2 That said, maintenance seems to have been more regular on the royal roads, meaning they would be restored more rapidly after things like heavy rains that might wash an unpaved road out, making them more reliable transport routes for everyone. They also seem to have been quite a bit wider; Achaemenid armies could have long logistics tails and these roads had to accommodate those. Several excavated sections of royal roads are around 5m wide, but we ought to expect a lot of variation.

On top of the physical infrastructure, there was also a system of way-stations and stopover points along the road. These were not amenities for everyone but rather a system for moving state officials, messengers, soldiers, and property (like taxes). While anyone could, presumably, walk down the road, official travelers carried a sealed travel authorization issued by either a satrap (the Persian provincial governors) or the king himself. Such authorizations declared how many travelers there were, where they were going and what the way-stations, which stocked supplies, should give them. Of course that in turn meant that local satraps had to make sure that way-stations remained stocked up with food, fodder for animals, spare horses and so on. Fast messengers could also be sent who, with that same authorization, would change horses at each way-station, allowing them to move extremely fast over the system, with one estimate suggesting that a crucial message could make the trip from Sardis to Susa – a trip of approximately 2,500km (1,550 miles, give or take) in twelve days (by exchanging not only horses, but riders, as it moved).

All of which gives some pretty important clues to why royal roads were set up and maintained. Notice how the system specifically links together key administrative hubs, like the three main Achaemenid capitals (Susa, Ekbatana and Persepolis) and key administrative centers (Memphis, Sardis, Babylon, etc.) and that while anyone can use the roads, the roads serve as the basis for a system to handle the logistics of moving officials and state messages, which of course could also serve as the basis for moving armies. After all, you can send messengers down the royal roads, through the existing system set up for them, to instruct your satraps to gather local forces or more importantly to gather local food supplies and move them to the road in depots where the army can pick them up (and perhaps some local troops) as it moves through to a nearby trouble spot (while the nice, wide road allows you to bring lots of pack animals and carts with your army).

In short this is a large, expensive but effective system for managing the problem of distance in a large empire. Cutting down travel and message times reduces the independence of the satraps, allowing the Great King to keep an eye on them, while the roads provide the means to swiftly move armies from the core of the empire out to the periphery. We can actually see this play out with Alexander’s invasion. He crosses into Asia in 334 and defeats the local satrapal army at Granicus in 334. Moving into the Levant in 333, he’s met at Issus by Darius III with a massive army, collected from the central and western parts of the empire – which means that news of Alexander’s coming has reached Darius who has then marshaled all of those troops from his satrapies (and hired some mercenaries), presumably using his efficient message system to do it and then moved that force down the road system to meet Alexander. Alexander defeats that army, but is met by another huge army at Gaugamela in 331, this time gathered mostly from the eastern parts of the empire. While the Persian army fails in defeating Alexander, the exercise shows the power of the system in allowing the Great King, Darius III to coordinate the military efforts of an enormous empire.

So this is a system meant to enable the imperial center to control its periphery by enabling the court to keep tabs on the satraps, to get messages to and from them and move armies and officials (and taxes!) around. And doubtless it was also not lost on anyone that such a visible series of public works – even if the roads were not always paved and had to be repaired after heavy rains and such – was also an exercise in legitimacy building, both a visual demonstration of the Great King’s power and resources but also a display of his generosity and industry.

And I lead with all of that because the Roman road network works the same way, just on an even larger scale. Which isn’t to say the Romans were copying the Achaemenids (they don’t seem to have been) but rather that this is a common response to the problem of managing an uncommonly large empire.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Roman Roads”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-02.

    1. The Middle Assyrian Empire and the Neo-Assyrian or New Assyrian Empires were, in fact, the same state. We split them up because of a severe contraction in Assyrian power during the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

    2. On this, see Henkelman and Jacobs, 727-8

August 16, 2023

Facts about Africa’s Geography never taught in schools | Thomas Sowell

Filed under: Africa, Books, Economics, Environment, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Thomas SowellTV
Published 20 Nov 2021
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August 12, 2023

The urge to compare our own culture to the declining Roman Empire

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In UnHerd, Alexander Poots wants pundits to stop comparing this or that country in the West to the latter stages of the Gibbonian decline of Rome:

“The Course of Empire – Desolation” by Thomas Cole, one of a series of five paintings created between 1833 and 1836.
Wikimedia Commons.

On both sides of the Atlantic, hysterical comparisons between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the senile polities of the modern West have become the journalistic norm. Every major problem facing our society — from climate change to Covid to inflation — has received the Gibbon treatment.

There are, of course, regional variations. The British, tied by geography to Europe’s fortunes, tend to favour the definitive fall of the Western empire in AD 476. The Americans, ever fearful of an over-mighty executive, linger on the collapse of senatorial authority in 49 BC. And it is also more than a journalistic trope, with the unacknowledged legislators of our world also playing the same game. Elon Musk recently suggested that today’s baby drought is analogous to the low birth rates of Julius Caesar’s dictatorship. Marc Andreessen has compared California to Rome circa AD 250. Joe Rogan, meanwhile, is beginning to suspect that all this gender business might have a worrying ancient precedent.

Such appeals to the past are only human. The fourth word in Virgil’s Aeneid is Troiam. This is the first fact that we learn about Aeneas: he is from Troy. Virgil does not even bother to tell us his hero’s name until the 92nd line. Doubtless, the poets of Ur and Hattusha had their own Troys. And perhaps the first men who placed one mud brick upon another sang of flooded valleys, choked caves and herds that no longer ran. But Rome has been our common loss since the early Middle Ages. As Virgil looked back to Priam, so we look back to Virgil. In 1951, it was perfectly natural for W. H. Auden to compare a dying Britain with a dead Rome: “Caesar’s double-bed is warm / As an unimportant clerk / Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK / On a pink official form”

But journalists and billionaires do not work in a poetic register. They deal in facts and lucre. When they say that Britain or America is following imperium Romanum down the dusty track to oblivion, they seem to be speaking literally. This is not a mistake that Virgil would have made. It is all very well to evoke Rome as an elegiac warning. But if we believe that there are concrete lessons to learn from the Roman Empire’s decline and fall, then we will have to examine the mother of cities as she really was. The results are surprising.

In AD 384, 400 years after Virgil composed his Aeneid, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus had a bridge problem. Symmachus was Urban Prefect of Rome, a role of huge responsibility. By the fourth century, the city of Rome was no longer the imperial capital of the western empire; it had been replaced in 286 by Mediolanum (modern Milan), which was a good deal closer to the empire’s febrile northern borders. But Rome remained the nation’s hearthstone. Her good governance was of the highest priority. The Urban Prefect dispensed justice, organised games, fed the mob and looked after the material fabric of the city. It was not an enviable position. One man had to keep the vast, turbulent metropolis ticking over with the minimum of rioting. Symmachus was well aware of the touchiness of the Roman pleb. His own father had been burned out of his house and chased from the city after making a catty remark of the “let them eat cake” variety during the wine shortage of 375.

The bridge problem went like this. Around 382, the emperor Gratian ordered that a new bridge be built across the Tiber. It soon became clear that construction was taking too long and costing too much. Two years later, as the project neared completion, one span collapsed. Such waste of public funds could not be ignored, and so an inquiry was launched. A specialist diver was engaged to examine the structure; he discovered that the job had been bodged. The engineers responsible for the project, Cyriades and Auxentius, were summoned to account for their failure. Each blamed the other, before Auxentius, who had been caught backfilling sections of the bridge with bales of hay, fled the city — pockets doubtless jingling with public gold.

On the face of it, this sounds like a very late Roman story: a nation once famous for its engineering prowess could no longer build a bridge across the Tiber without everything going horribly wrong. But I’m not sure that’s true. Problems arise all the time, and in themselves tell us very little about a society. What matters is the response to those problems. And Symmachus’s dispatches to the imperial court make it clear that his response was considered and comprehensive. The bridge was completed in the end, and stood for over 1,000 years until its demolition in 1484. Now think of 21st-century London: remember what happened the last time we tried to build a bridge across the Thames?

August 2, 2023

How Shipping Containers Took Over the World (then broke it)

Filed under: Business, Economics, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Calum
Published 5 Oct 2022

The humble shipping container changed our society — it made International shipping cheaper, economies larger and the world much, much smaller. But what did the shipping container replace, how did it take over shipping and where has our dependance on these simple metal boxes led us?
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July 29, 2023

QotD: How pre-modern cities shaped the surrounding landscape

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

When it comes to shaping the landscape outside of the city – our main point of investigation – the key element of the pre-modern city that matters is the intense demand it creates for agricultural products that the non-farmers who live in the city cannot produce themselves, chiefly (but not exclusively!) food. The intensity of that demand scales with the size of the city. A small town might only really shape land-use and farming patterns out a few miles; a huge mega-city like first century Rome (c. 1m people) re-shapes land patterns for hundreds of miles, its economic influence intruding into the territory of other, smaller cities.

Every town or city, of course, will be different. For agricultural societies especially, local terrain sharply constrains possible land uses. Some land is simply too wet or dry or rough or rocky or infertile for this or that purpose. In a modern city, apartments or factories or offices can be built almost anywhere; the sort of land suitable for intensive farming is more limited. This is even more true for pre-modern societies working without modern fertilizer, without electric-powered irrigation and without the industrial technology to massively reshape terrain (draining swamps, filling ravines, flattening hills, irrigating the desert, etc – some of these can be done with hand tools, but not to the extent we can today).

Still, we want to begin thinking about how cities impact the land around them without all of these difficult and confusing variables. We want to image a city, isolated and alone in the middle of an endless, flat and featureless plain. This is exactly what J. H. von Thünen did in The Isolated State (Der isolierte Staat). This kind of exercise can give us a baseline of what the landscape around a decent sized city might look like, which we can then modify to respond to different terrain, technology and social organization.

(Note: I would be remiss if I didn’t note that my discussion of these ideas owes heavily to Neville Morley’s Metropolis and Hinterland (1996), where he applied this very method to the city of Rome and its hinterland (and also first introduced me to von Thünen’s ideas). That book and also his Trade in Classical Antiquity are both great books to give a read if you want to begin building a sense of how pre-modern economies work).

The key factor von Thünen looks at is transportation costs. For a society without trains or trucks, moving bulk materials of any kind over long distances is extraordinarily expensive. Moving grain overland, for instance, would cause its cost to double after 100 miles. Thus land close to our theoretical city is extremely valuable for production, while land far away is substantially less valuable (because the end goal is transporting the agricultural production of that land to the city). As a result, transit costs – and thus distance – dominates how cities influence land-use patterns (along with population, which determines the intensity of the city’s influence).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Lonely City, Part I: The Ideal City”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-12.

July 11, 2023

What is a HUMP Yard?

Filed under: Business, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

V12 Productions
Published 24 Oct 2022

Hump yards are amazing pieces of engineering that allow railroads to use gravity to sort cars and build trains. Of course, not all railroad equipment can be humped.
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June 26, 2023

America can’t build anything these days and “it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault”

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism by Paul Sabin. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

Today, pundits across the political spectrum bemoan America’s inability to build.

Across the country, NIMBYs and status-quo defenders exploit procedural rules to block new development, giving us a world where it takes longer to get approval for a single new building in San Francisco than it did to build the entire Empire State Building, where so-called “environmental review” is weaponized to block even obviously green initiatives like solar panels, and where new public works projects are completed years late and billions over budget — or, like California’s incredible shrinking high-speed rail, may never be completed at all.

Inevitably, such a complex set of dysfunctions must have an equally complex set of causes. It took us decades to get into this mess, and just as there’s no one simple fix, there’s no one simple inflection point in our history on which we can place all the blame.

But what if there was? What if there was, in fact, a single person we could blame for this entire state of affairs, a patsy from the past at whom we could all point our censorious fingers and shout, “It’s that guy’s fault!”

There is such a person, suggests history professor Paul Sabin in his new book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. And he isn’t isn’t a mustache-twirling villain — he’s a liberal intellectual. If you know him for anything, it’s probably for being the reason you know what a hanging chad is.

That’s right: it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault.

How’d he do it? By creating what’s now called the public interest movement: a new form of activism through which citizens force change — or, more often, block change — by suing the government. Though it was begun with the best of intentions and achieved some real good along the way, this political innovation led to the constipated governance we all complain about today.

How did a movement launched by an unassuming 30-year-old lawyer become the dominant form of activism in the country, and completely change the way our government operates?

To find out, we have to go back to a time before Ralph Nader had even hit puberty — the era of the New Deal.

[…]

It is the inherent nature of politics that no reform works forever, because the next generation of political entrepreneurs will inevitably discover new ways to bend the process to their will. Eventually, there will always be another Dick Fosbury revealing a way to work the system that no one saw coming.

Still, I do think some of the blame for the way this all panned out can be laid on Nader’s particular personal idiosyncrasies. His ironclad black-and-white view of the world, combined with his near-pathological aversion to dealmaking and compromise, made him uniquely suited to a form of activism that focused on regulatory and legal action rather than coalition-building and electoral politics. Nader was infamously rigid and inflexible, so it’s no surprise that his movement was too. But a less rules-oriented movement might have created fewer of the bureaucratic barriers that have now become a hindrance to progressive action.

Much like the movement whose story it tells, Public Citizens the book is a worthwhile project that nonetheless suffers from significant flaws. The main problem is that it can’t decide if it’s a historical narrative or a work of political theory. As a work of political theory, it doesn’t take nearly a strong enough stand — I’ve made explicit a lot of claims that are only lightly implied in the book. I think we’re making the same argument, but the book makes its argument with such a delicate touch that it’s hard to be 100% sure.

As a historical narrative, Public Citizens has a much simpler problem: it’s boring. The author writes like an academic (which, to be fair, he is), and the book is quite light on colorful details. The uncreative chapter titles (chapter three is called “Creating Public Interest Firms”) give you a taste of what the writing is like. One particularly egregious issue is how little biographical information is provided about Nader, even though the majority of the book is about him. For someone who apparently subscribes to the Great Man theory of history, the author includes surprisingly little information about the Great Men themselves. Any interesting biographical fact you read in this review — even something as basic as the fact that Nader never married—is almost certainly something I found through other sources.

Paradoxically, this book manages to be simultaneously boring and too concise. It’s over in less than 200 generously-spaced pages, and I frequently had to look stuff up on the internet to get a full understanding of what was going on. I get the sense that the author is trying to give this book mass appeal, but come on: anyone who’s willing to read a nerdy book like this is willing to read an additional hundred pages or so. Besides, Robert Caro and Ron Chernow have proven that people will read thousand-page tomes if the story is compelling and the details are juicy.

Basically, my critique of Public Citizens is like that old Catskills joke about the restaurant where the food is terrible — and the portions are too small.

June 12, 2023

QotD: Cities in the pre-modern era

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

This week and next, we’re going to look at an issue not of battles, but of settings: pre-modern cities – particularly the trope of the city, town or castle set out all alone in the middle of empty spaces. Why does the city or castle-town set amidst a sea of grass feel so off? And what should that terrain look like – especially in how it is shaped by the human activity taking place in a town’s hinterland. This is less of a military history topic (though we’ll see that factors in), and more of an economic history one. If that’s your jam – stay tuned, there will be more. If it’s not – don’t worry, we won’t abandon military topics either.

I find myself interested in pre-modern economies and militaries in roughly equal measure (in part because both are such crucial elements of state or societal success or failure). One of the reasons is that they are so interconnected: how military force is raised, supplied, maintained and projected is deeply dependent on how the underlying economy (which supplies the men, food, weapons and money) is structured and organized. And military institution and activities often play an important role in shaping economic structures in turn. So even if you are just here for the clashing of swords, remember: every sword must be forged, and every swordsman must be fed.

(Additional aside: I am assuming a west-of-the-Indus set of cereals: grain, barley and millet chiefly. Specifically, I am not going to bring in rice cultivation – the irrigation demands and density of rice farming changes a lot (the same is also true, in the opposite direction, to agriculture based around sorghum or yams). Most (western) fantasy and historic dramas are not set in rice-planting regions (and many East Asian works seem to have a much better grasp on where rice fields go and need no correction), so I’m going to leave rice out for now. I’m honestly not qualified to speak on it anyway – it is too different from my own area of research focus, which is on a Mediterranean agricultural mix (wheat, barely, olives, grapes), and I haven’t had the chance to read up on it sufficiently).

Lonely Cities

There’s a certain look that castles and cities in either historical dramas or fantasy settings set in the ancient or medieval world seem to have: the great walls of the city or castle rise up, majestically, from a vast, empty sea of grassland. […] These “lonely cities” are everywhere in fantasy and historical drama. I think we all know something is off here: cities and other large population centers do not simply pop up in the middle of open fields of grass, generally speaking. So if this shouldn’t all be grassland, what should be here? Who should be here?

What is a City For?

I think we need to start by thinking about why pre-modern towns and cities exist and what their economic role is. I’ll keep this relatively brief for now, because this is a topic I’m sure we’ll return to in the future. As modern people, we are used to the main roles cities play in the modern world, some of which are shared by pre-modern cities, and some of which are not. Modern cities are huge production centers, containing in them both the majority of the labor and the majority of the productive power of a society; this is very much not true of pre-modern cities – most people and most production still takes place in the countryside, because most people are farmers and most production is agricultural. Production happens in pre-modern cities, but it comes nowhere close to dominating the economy.

The role of infrastructure is also different. We are also used to cities as the center-point lynch-pins of infrastructure networks – roads, rail, sea routes, fiber-optic cable, etc. That isn’t false when applied to pre-modern cities, but it is much less true, if just because modern infrastructure is so much more powerful than its pre-modern precursors. Modern infrastructure is also a lot more exclusive: a man with a cart might visit a village where the road does not go, but a train or a truck cannot. The Phoenician traders of the early iron age could pull their trade ships up on the beach in places where there was no port; do not try this with a modern container ship. Infrastructure is largely a result of cities, not their original purpose or cause.

So what are the core functions of a pre-modern city? I see five key functions:

  1. Administrative Center. This is probably the oldest purpose cities have served: as a focal point for political and religious authorities. With limited communications technology, it makes sense to keep that leadership in one place, creating a hub of people who control a disproportionate amount of resources, which leads to
  2. Defensive/Military Center. Once you have all of those important people and resources (read: stockpiled food) in one place, it makes sense to focus defenses on that point. It also makes sense to keep – or form up – the army where most of the resources and leaders are. People, in turn, tend to want to live close to the defenses, which leads to
  3. Market Center. Putting a lot of people and resources in one place makes the city a natural point for trade – the more buyers and sellers in one place, the more likely you are to find the buyer or seller you want. As a market, the city experiences “network” effects: each person living there makes the city more attractive for others. Still, it is important to note: the town is a market hub for the countryside, where most people still live. Which only now leads to
  4. Production Center. But not big industrial production like modern cities. Instead it is the small, niche production – the sort of things you only buy once-in-a-while or only the rich buy – that get focused into cities. Blacksmiths making tools, producers of fine-ware and goods for export, that sort of thing. These products and producers need big markets or deep pockets to make end meet. The majority of the core needs of most people (things like food, shelter and clothes) are still produced by the peasants, for the peasants, where they live, in the country. Still, you want to produce goods made for sale rather than personal use near the market, and maybe sell them abroad, which leads to
  5. Infrastructure Center. With so much goods and communications moving to and from the city, it starts making sense for the state to build dedicated transit infrastructure (roads, ports, artificial harbors). This infrastructure almost always begins as administrative/military infrastructure, but still gets used to economic ends. Nevertheless, this comes relatively late – things like the Persian Royal Road (6th/5th century BC) and the earliest Roman roads (late 4th century BC) come late in most urban development.

Of course, all of these functions depend, in part, on the city as a concentration of people. but what I want to stress – before we move on to our main topic – is that in all of these functions the pre-modern city effectively serves the countryside, because that is still where most people are and where most production (and the most important production – food) is. The administration in the city is administering the countryside – usually by gathering and redistributing surplus agricultural production (from the countryside!). The defenses in the city are meant to defend the production of the countryside and the people of the countryside (when they flee to it). The people using the market – at least until the city grows very large – are mostly coming in from the country (this is why most medieval and ancient markets are only open on certain days – for the Romans, this was the “ninth day”, the Nundinae – customers have to transit into town, so you want everyone there on the same day).

(An aside: I have framed this as the city serving the economic needs of the countryside, but it is equally valid to see the city as the exploiter of the countryside. The narrative above can easily be read as one in which the religious, political and military elite use their power to violently extract surplus agricultural production, which in turn gives rise to a city that is essentially a parasite (this is Max Weber’s model for a “consumer city”) that contributes little but siphons off the production of the countryside. The study of ancient and medieval cities is still very much embroiled in a debate between those who see cities as filling a valuable economic function and those who see them as fundamentally exploitative and rent-seeking; I fall among the former, but the latter do have some very valid points about how harshly and exploitatively cities (and city elites) could treat their hinterlands.)

Consequently, the place and role of almost every kind of population center (city, town or castle-town) is dictated by how it relates to the countryside around it (the city’s hinterland; the Greeks called this the city’s khora (χώρα)).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Lonely City, Part I: The Ideal City”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-12.

April 13, 2023

Beeching plus 60

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Politics, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Peter Caddick-Adams notes that it’s just past 60 years since one of the most controversial documents the British government published during the latter half of the 20th century: The Beeching Report.

The British Railways Board’s publication The Reshaping of British Railways, Part 1: Report, Beeching’s first report, which famously recommended the closure of many uneconomic British railway lines. Many of the closures were implemented. This copy is displayed at the National Railway Museum in York beside a copy of the National Union of Railwaymen’s published response, The Mis-shaping of British Railways, Part 1: Retort.
Photo by RobertG via Wikimedia Commons.

Wednesday, 27 March 1963 marked the day when a civil servant with a doctorate in physics, seconded from ICI, proudly flourished a report he had written. That man was Dr Richard Beeching, and the result of his recommendations contained in The Reshaping of British Railways are with us to this day.

Beeching identified many unprofitable rail services and suggested the widespread elimination of a huge number of routes. He identified 2,363 stations for closure, along with 6,000 miles of track — a third of the existing network — with the loss of 67,700 jobs. His stated aim was to prune the railway system back into a profitable concern. Behind Beeching, seconded to the newly-established British Railways Board, stood the figure of the publisher-turned-Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. He knew a thing or two about railways, having been a pre-nationalisation director of the Great Western Railway. It put him in the delightful position of never having to pay for a train ticket.

Macmillan observed from a shareholder’s point of view, “you can pour all in money you want, but you can never make the damned things pay for themselves”. In his view, the railway network and infrastructure of wagon works, tiny branch lines, cottages for signallers, crossings keepers and station masters, with most halts staffed 18 hours a day, amounted to a social service, albeit an expensive one. It had made the prosperity of Victorian Britain possible and was sustaining it still. From nationalisation in 1948, the railways themselves had attempted to make savings, closing 3,000 miles of track and reducing staff from 648,000 to 474,000. That famous Ealing comedy film of 1953, The Titfield Thunderbolt, about a group of villagers trying to keep their branch line operating after British Railways decided to close it, already reflected concern and railway nostalgia.

Britain’s literary and celluloid love affair with iron rails and steam began as long ago as 1905 with the publication of Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children, a success which peaked when the book was made into a highly successful movie in 1970. Meanwhile, professional sleuths and loafers like Sherlock Holmes, Bulldog Drummond, Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot and Bertie Wooster capitalised on the branch line network in their methodology of moving swiftly about pastoral England in their hunts for miscreants. It was the success of The Lady Vanishes, a 1938 mystery thriller set on a continental train, that launched Alfred Hitchcock as a world-class director. David Lean’s Brief Encounter of 1945, based on Noël Coward’s earlier one-act play, Still Life, attached deep romance to station platforms and waiting rooms, reminiscent of so much heartache in the recently fought world war. It is still regarded as one of the greatest of all British-made films. None of this mattered to Beeching, the man who was “Britain’s most-hated civil servant” at his death in 1985, a moniker still used today.

There’s an argument that Beeching was deliberately set up as a patsy for the real villains, Ernest Marples and Harold MacMillan:

The cold, dispassionate Beeching was absolutely the wrong man for the job. As he told the Daily Mirror at the time, “I have no experience of railways, except as a passenger. So, I am not a practical railwayman. But I am a very practical man.” John Betjeman, writing persuasively and eloquently in the Daily Telegraph each week, and later Ian Hislop, hit the right note in observing that Beeching, and all he stood for were technocrats. They “weren’t open to arguments of romantic notions of rural England, or the warp-and-weft of the train in our national identity. They didn’t buy any of that, and went for a straightforward profit and loss approach, from which we are still reeling today”.

However, it has also been argued that Beeching was the unwitting fall-guy for the Minister of Transport of the day, Ernest Marples. He was a self-made businessman who “got things done”, but he retained an air of shadiness about him. Macmillan should have known better. Marples had been managing director of Marples Ridgway, awarded contracts to build the first motorways. When challenged about a conflict of interest, he sold his 80 per cent shareholding to his wife. Elevated to the peerage, Marples fled to Monaco in 1975 to avoid prosecution for tax fraud. So, in some ways, the thing was a stitch-up. Marples directly benefited from the widespread cuts advocated by his subordinate, Beeching. Macmillan had his eye off the ball and was already considering retirement, hastened by an operation for prostate cancer six months after Beeching’s report.

The Prime Minister was astute enough to ensure the press presented the cuts in a positive way, however. From the Cabinet papers of the day, we now know the day before the publication of The Reshaping of British Railways, Beeching’s findings were rewritten to suggest the cuts were the first phase of a co-ordinated national transport policy, with advanced plans to replace the axed rail networks with improved minor roads and local bus services. In reality this was political fantasy (my inner lawyer cautions against more extremist language), for the bus-road subsidy would have cost more than that already paid to the railways. The promise of replacement bus services should have come with a guarantee of remaining in place for at least 10-15 years, because most were withdrawn after two, forcing more motor traffic onto an already inadequate road network.

March 5, 2023

QotD: The role of the “big” landowners in pre-modern farming societies

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

What generally defines our large landholders is their greater access to capital. Now we don’t want to think of capital in the sort of money-denominated, fungible sense of modern finance, but in a very concrete sense: land, infrastructure, animals, and equipment. As we’ll see, it isn’t just that the big men hold more of this capital, but that they hold fundamentally different sorts of capital and often use it very differently.

Of course this begins with land. The thing to keep in mind is that prior to the modern period […] the vast majority of economic activity was the production of the land. That meant that land was both the primary form of holding wealth but also the main income-producing asset. Consequently, larger land holdings are the assets that enable the accumulation of all of the other kinds of capital we’re discussing. By having more land – typically much more land – than is required to feed a single household, these larger farmers can […] produce for markets and trade, enabling them to afford to acquire labor, animals, equipment and so on. Our subsistence farmers of the last post, focused on producing for survival, would be hard-pressed to acquire much further in the way of substantial capital.

The next most important category is generally animals, particularly a plow team […] while our small subsistence farmers may keep chickens or pigs on some small part of the pasture they have access to, they probably do not have a complete plow-team for their own farm […]. Oxen and horses are hideously expensive, both to acquire but also to feed and for a family barely surviving one year to the next, they simply cannot afford them. They also do not have herds of animals (because their small farms absolutely cannot support acres of pasturage) and they probably have limited access to herdsmen generally (that is, transhumant pastoralists moving around the countryside) because those fellows will tend to want to interact with the community leaders who are, as noted above, the large landholders. All of which is to say that while the small farmers may keep a few animals, they do not have access to significantly large numbers of animals (or humans), which matters.

The first impact of having a plow-team is fairly obvious: a plow drawn by a couple of oxen is more effective than a plow pushed by a single human. That means that a plow-team lets the same amount of farming labor sow a larger area of land […]. It also allows for a larger, deeper plow, which in turn plows at a greater depth, which can improve yields […]. You can easily see why, for a landholder with a large farm, having a plow-team is so useful: whereas the subsistence farmer struggles by having too much labor (and too many mouths to feed) and too little land, the big landholder has a lot of land they are trying to get farmed with as little labor as possible. And of course, more to the point, the large landholder has the wealth and acreage necessary to buy and then pasture the animals in the plow-team.

The second major impact is manure. Remember that our farmers live before the time of artificial fertilizer. Crops, especially bulk cereal crops, wear out the nutrients in the soil quite rapidly after repeated harvests, which leaves the farmer two options. The first, standard option, is that the farmer can fallow the field (which also has the advantage of disrupting certain pest life-cycles); depending on the farming method, fallowing may mean planting specific plants to renew the soil’s nutrients when those plants are uprooted and left to return to the soil in the field or it may mean simply turning the field over to wild plants with a similar effect. The second option is using fertilizer, which in this case means manure. Quite a lot of it. Aggressive manuring, particularly on rich soils which have good access to moisture (because cropping also dries out the soil; fallowing can restore that moisture) allows the field to be fallowed less frequently and thus farmed more intensively. In some cases it allowed rich farmland to be continuously cropped, with fairly dramatic increases in returns-to-acreage as a result. And by increasing the nutrients in the soil, it also produces higher yields in a given season.

Now the humans in a farming household aren’t going to generate enough manure on their own to make a meaningful contribution to soil fertility. But the larger landholders generally have two advantages in this sense. First, because their landholdings are large, they can afford to turn over marginal farming ground to pasture for horses, cattle, sheep and so on; these animals not only generate animal products (or prestige, in the case of horses), they also eat the grass and generate manure which can be used on the main farm. The second way to get manure is cities; unlike farming households, cities do produce sufficient quantities of human waste for manuring fields. And where small subsistence farmers are unlikely to be able to buy that supply, large landholders are likely to be politically well-connected enough and wealthy enough to arrange for human waste to be used on their lands, especially for market oriented farms close to cities. And if you just stopped and said, “wait – these guys were paying for human waste?” … yes, yes they sometimes did (and not just for farming! Check out how saltpeter was made, or what a fuller did!).

Finally, there’s the question of infrastructure: tools, machines and storage. The large landholder is the one likely to be able to afford to build things like granaries, mills and so on. Now there is, I want to note, a lot of variation from place to place about exactly how this sort of infrastructure is handled. It might be privately owned, it might be owned by the village, but frequently, the “village mill” was actually owned by the large landholder whose big manor overlooked the village (who may also be the local political authority). And while we’re looking at grain, other agricultural products which don’t store as well or as easily might need to be aggregated for transport to market and sale, a process where the large landholder’s storage facilities, political standing and market contacts are likely to make him the ideal middleman. I don’t want to get too in the weeds (pardon the pun) on all the different kinds of infrastructure (mills for grains, presses for olives, casks for wine) except to note that in many cases the large landholder is the one likely to be able to afford these investments and that smaller farmers growing the same crops nearby might well want to use them.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part II: Big Farms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-31.

November 8, 2022

“Just Stop Oil” and other nihilistic doomsday cults

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Spiked, Tom Slater says we have to accurately label groups like the Extinction Rebellion spin-off “Just Stop Oil” rather than giving them the rather anodyne label of “protest groups”:

We need to stop calling Just Stop Oil a protest group. Protesters is far too positive a word to describe this strange assemblage of middle-class agitators, with their cut-glass accents and self-parodying bohemian names (shouts out to Indigo Rumbelow), who have been gluing themselves to roads and throwing soup at great works of art in an attempt to end oil and gas production. This thing is a doomsday cult, masquerading as a political campaign. There’s really no denying it any longer.

Take the case of that 24-year-old woman who climbed up one of the gantries over the M25 this morning, in order to bring all the ignorant, carbon-spewing plebs to a standstill. She posted an unnerving video online. In it, she is fighting back tears. She gives vent to a seemingly sincere apocalyptic terror. “I’m here because I don’t have a future!”, she says, in between sobs. She accuses the government of murder, of fuelling a “climate crisis” she seems to be convinced is killing millions, for having the temerity to exploit oil and gas to keep the UK’s lights on.

That what she’s saying is alarmist nonsense should be obvious to anyone. The truth is almost the inverse of what she is saying. Thanks to economic development, fuelled by cheap and reliable energy, annual deaths worldwide from climate-related disasters have plunged by more than 95 per cent over the past century. She also implies that the floods in Pakistan are the fault of fossil fuels, even though those feted IPCC reports say there is insufficient evidence to show that climate change is making floods more frequent, lengthy or intense. What would be considerably more murderous would be for our government to shun reliable oil and gas supplies as the nation’s pensioners head into a harsh winter, amid sky-high energy prices and talk of blackouts.

Such blithe disregard for the details reminds us that these people don’t really care about climate change. They’re hysterical about climate change. They’re apocalyptic about climate change. They aren’t taking to the streets, motorways and art galleries because they are convinced of a particular scientific view with regards to the environment and think something really ought to be done about it. They are in the grip of a fact-lite and doom-laden narrative that insists literally billions will die in short order, that the twentysomethings of today might not live to see their dotage, because of our damnable desire to live comfortable and free lives.

All of this is why environmental protest – with Just Stop Oil and the various other Extinction Rebellion offshoots to the fore – has become so much weirder in recent years. And that’s saying something. Beyond all the crying and talk of having no future, there’s also the setting of arms on fire, the pouring of human shit over memorials to Captain Sir Tom Moore, the throwing of soup over great works of art … it’s all become rather visceral, iconoclastic, scatological. In a word, it’s all become rather creepy. These are the acts not of future-oriented protesters keen to shape and change the world, but of cultists convinced that doomsday is almost upon us.

As someone else pointed out recently, there’s more than a bit of a resemblance between the kind of actions taken by protest groups like “Just Stop Oil” and the tantrums of very small children.

November 6, 2022

How Do You Steer a Drill Below The Earth?

Filed under: Environment, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published 5 Jul 2022

When the commotion of construction must be minimized, try horizontal directional drilling!

Like laparoscopic surgery for the earth, horizontal directional drilling (or HDD) doesn’t require digging open a large area like a shaft or a bore pit to get started. Instead, the drill can plunge directly into the earth’s surface. From there, horizontal directional drilling is pretty straightforward, but it’s not necessarily straight. In fact, HDD necessarily uses a curved alignment to enter the earth, travel below a roadway or river, and exit at the surface on the other side.
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