{"id":34102,"date":"2016-01-13T03:00:40","date_gmt":"2016-01-13T08:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34102"},"modified":"2019-07-18T10:29:43","modified_gmt":"2019-07-18T14:29:43","slug":"the-death-of-the-duel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/01\/13\/the-death-of-the-duel\/","title":{"rendered":"The death of the duel"},"content":{"rendered":"

ESR<\/a> has a theory on the rapid decline of the duelling culture that had lasted hundreds of years until the mid-19th century:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read all the scholarship on the history of dueling I can find in English. There isn\u2019t much, and what there is mostly doesn\u2019t seem to me to be very good. I\u2019ve also read primary sources like dueling codes, and paid a historian\u2019s attention to period literature.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m bringing this up now because I want to put a stake in the ground. I have a personal theory about why Europo-American dueling largely (though not entirely) died out between 1850 and 1900 that I think is at least as well justified as the conventional account, and I want to put it on record.<\/p>\n

First, the undisputed facts: dueling began a steep decline in the early 1840s and was effectively extinct in English-speaking countries by 1870, with a partial exception for American frontier regions where it lasted two decades longer. Elsewhere in Europe the code duello<\/em> retained some social force until World War I.<\/p>\n

This was actually a rather swift end for a body of custom that had emerged in its modern form around 1500 but had roots in the judicial duels of the Dark Ages a thousand years before. The conventional accounts attribute it to a mix of two causes: (a) a broad change in moral sentiments about violence and civilized behavior, and (b) increasing assertion of a state monopoly on legal violence.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think these factors were entirely negligible, but I think there was something else going on that was at least as important, if not more so, and has been entirely missed by (other) historians. I first got to it when I noticed that the date of the early-Victorian law forbidding dueling by British military officers \u2013 1844 \u2013 almost coincided with (following by perhaps a year or two) the general availability of percussion-cap pistols.<\/p>\n

The dominant weapons of the \u201cmodern\u201d duel of honor, as it emerged in the Renaissance from judicial and chivalric dueling, had always been swords and pistols. To get why percussion-cap pistols were a big deal, you have to understand that loose-powder pistols were terribly unreliable in damp weather and had a serious charge-containment problem that limited the amount of oomph they could put behind the ball.<\/p>\n

This is why early-modern swashbucklers carried both swords and pistols; your danged pistol might very well simply not fire<\/em> after exposure to damp northern European weather. It\u2019s also why percussion-cap pistols, which seal the powder charge inside a brass casing, were first developed for naval use, the prototype being Sea Service pistols of the Napoleonic era. But there was a serious cost issue with those: each cap had to be made by hand at eye-watering expense.<\/p>\n

Then, in the early 1840s, enterprising gunsmiths figured out how to mass-produce percussion caps with machines. And this, I believe, is what actually killed the duel. Here\u2019s how it happened\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ESR has a theory on the rapid decline of the duelling culture that had lasted hundreds of years until the mid-19th century: I\u2019ve read all the scholarship on the history of dueling I can find in English. There isn\u2019t much, and what there is mostly doesn\u2019t seem to me to be very good. I\u2019ve also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,7,9,15,13,663],"tags":[1299,49,1266,174,678],"class_list":["post-34102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-history","category-law","category-technology","category-usa","category-weapons","tag-bladedweapons","tag-guns","tag-handguns","tag-innovation","tag-swords"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8S2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34102"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34104,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34102\/revisions\/34104"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}