This week I want to try something a little different. Rather than taking apart a particular fantasy military system, I thought I might try to lay out a more general sense of how military systems tend to map on to societies, both because such general historical frameworks are handy for thinking about the past, but also because they make useful rules of thumb for imagining fantastical societies. So essentially here we are asking: how do societies end up with the sort of armies they have?
This is going to take a few posts to get through because there are actually quite a few key components to cover: the why and how of recruitment (both ‘why do these people feel obligated to serve’ and ‘how do you get them into the army’), how a society pay for that (or doesn’t), who leads it and how, and how once formed any army coheres in the field. Finally, we’ll wrap up with some historical ‘archetypes’ to show how these different facets link together with the underlying civilian society and also how that shapes what they look like on the battlefield (including weapons and tactics).
This series is also going to be a bit unusual because in some ways its purpose is to link up and summarize a bunch of other posts. We’ve had a lot of posts and series over the years which examined this or that historical or fictional military and discussed the ways in which their militaries reflected civilian society and I wanted to pull a lot of that together in one place. As a result in this series – more than most – the links are going to be ‘load bearing.’ Likewise a lot of the heavy bibliography here is going to live in the links, although I think for someone looking to get a handle on how pre-modern societies and pre-modern militaries come together, the two key readings I would suggest are P. Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (1989) and then J. Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (2003). Also well worth reading as an overview is Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (2006).
Now we’re going to restrict ourselves a bit here in that we are going to stick to pre-modern or more correctly pre-industrial armies. The rules change a lot for industrial and post-industrial armies, though by the same token we really don’t have nearly the same range of examples for industrial armies either: we really have a single dominant model for industrial armies that emerged in Europe from 1914 to 1945 and then a bunch of reactions to that model (along with what we might term an industrial ‘transitional’ period from ~1800 to 1914). It is thus hard to build a complete typology, because the industrial sample size is so small.
By contrast, the sample for pre-industrial agrarian armies is really big, so it becomes a bit easier to spot recurring patterns of organization and structure as different societies stumble on to the same solutions for generating force. So that’s what we’re going to do this week: look at some of the patterns, keeping in mind that these are general rules with many complications and exceptions. In the process, we’re going to pull together a lot of the individual discussions of specific systems – historical and fantastical – as examples.
Fans of fictional worlds will have often run into the most egregious examples of the failure to think in these terms. Professional or seemingly professional armies employed by societies that lack the administrative structure to manage them, armies that are too large or too small for their parent societies, ‘guards’ that seem to spring out of holes in the ground rather than organically fit into society anywhere and so on.
But first, as always, recruiting and maintaining large pre-modern armies is expensive! Much like many of those pre-modern armies, this project is supported by devolving the costs of my ruinous book-buying habit on to recruits readers. You can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
Armies and Societies
I have written this maxim a few different ways, but it is worth writing again: no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield.
When analyzing a historical army or creating a fictional one, everything must begin with that idea, that military systems grow out of and reflect their ‘civilian’ societies or – for societies that lack civilians as such – reflect the civilian side of the lives of their members. That means that armies tend to recreate civilian hierarchies, with similar – often identical – lines of status between the two.
So to understand what kind of military our society might come up with, we first need to ask some key questions about the civilian society.
First: is this society agrarian? Which is to say, are they farmers? In most cases, the answer will be yes because with only a handful of exceptions, if they’re not farmers you’re not going to have cities or states and most settings have those. That said, if your society consists of nomads – either hunter-gatherers or pastoral nomads – they aren’t going to have a state (which is a creature of the agrarian world) and so you want to think about non-state forms of military organization, which is going to channel them towards some specific solutions to our problems below.
Next: is this a state? Is military force in this society collected into a single political entity or is it fragmented among many different centers of power? One odd choice I see in a lot of fantasy settings is to have huge, sprawling cities with non-state systems of organization (power informally divided among a bunch of different groups that all wield force), but that’s not a pattern we see often historically. Instead, the more urban a society is, the more likely it is that military power is concentrated into a single political entity – the state. At the same time, non-state polities may lack a single political entity with a monopoly on the use of force, but that doesn’t mean they lack a military system, it just means that power is fragmented in that system.
Third: what kind of aristocracy does this society have? Every society has a socio-economic elite, but there are different kinds. Does aristocratic wealth mostly flow upwards from large landholdings or flow downwards from employment in a royal bureaucracy (the former is much more common)? Likewise, to what degree does this society have a bureaucracy as such and how much power does it wield? It can be easy to assume modern bureaucratic administrative structures, but these are rare in pre-modern societies: power is often wielded by local grandees than by employed representatives of the state and if the power is wielded by those grandees, the military system is likely to run through them to some extent as well as well.
Your aristocrats are going to assume that – since they lead society in peace – they lead society in war, but how they do so depends on their self-conception. Here, I distinguish sometimes between military aristocrats – aristocracies who understand their primary purpose is warfare generally (often leadership), as distinct from religious or bureaucracy aristocracies that might be of a non-military character – and warrior aristocrats, who understand their primary purpose in society as personally fighting in a specific way (usually but not always mounted).
Note that while warrior aristocrats’ legitimacy in claiming aristocratic status comes from their personal practice of violence, the source of their power is almost invariably wealth from large landholdings: they’re not aristocrats because they’re good at fighting. Instead, they’re aristocrats because they’re rich and then to justify the wealth and power they wield, they practice a certain form of direct, personal kind of warfare. A guy who is really good at fighting but is poor and without title is not a knight; a guy who has wealth and title but is terrible at fighting is a bad knight, but a knight nonetheless. Warrior-elites are thus elites-who-are-warriors, not necessarily warriors-who-are-elite-at-war, though since their social class places a lot of emphasis at being good at fighting, they’re often very good at fighting (in a specific way, again, usually but not always mounted).
Fourth: how do the regular farmers (who are 90+% of the population) connect to the aristocracy? Are they mostly free-holders who own their own land, but are economically dependent on the Big Man? Or does the local Big Man – that is, the aristocrat who is nearest them – own their land itself? Or does the king (or state, in some other form; it might be a temple!) own their land, in which case the aristocrat they engage with is an administrator rather than a land-owner?
For the aristocracy to exist (and for the state to exist, if it does), it has to be siphoning agricultural production from these smaller farmers, so consider how that happens as well. Aristocrats collect rents on the lands they own or control. The state may collect taxes, but in many pre-modern states, royal revenues are dominated by the lands the king owns rather than taxes. Naturally, if taxes are being collected, that implies some kind of bureaucracy collecting them, which non-state societies may not have and which may be underdeveloped in weak-state societies.
What we’re trying to get with all of these questions is thinking about how the peasantry and the aristocracy relate to each other and how that relationship is understood and justified. Those questions are important because civil society comes first – armies are built out of existing subsistence systems and social structures, not usually the other way around – and because the structure of a society limits the possible military systems it can house.
Recruitment Principles
Once we have a sense of our civilian society, the next thing we need to think about is how do we get recruits?
Landers (op. cit.) breaks down recruitment systems based on the principle they function on, distinguishing between general compulsion (conscription by force, levies), the entitlement principle (service as the flip-side of the coin for some set of rights or status), the vocational principle (standing armies or military aristocracies that served because that was their role in society) or devolution (devolve the problem downward onto vassals, communities or households). That’s a useful framework, but I want to shift it around somewhat for our purposes, because I want to separate clearly why the recruits fight from how you get them (and because I think ‘general compulsion’ is actually not the most useful category here).
So we can start with what I am going to call the recruitment principle (as distinct from the recruitment method), which is the why of your recruitment: why do these fellows feel like they must or ought to serve. A lot of historical fiction or fantasy settings fail to address this particular question or else answer it with a very crude ‘because they have to’ (that is, compulsion) but that’s not usually how this works. After all, this society is about to give these fellows weapons, so without some broader social structure that encourages or constrains them to remind at the standard, there is very little preventing them from deserting or revolting. Compulsion can get me into the ranks, but it struggles to keep them there.
The first place most modern folks’ mind goes, of course, is to pattern this task off of their own jobs and so to assume that these fellows are under arms because they are paid to be, which I am going to term the employment principle (separate from the vocational principle). We may sum it up with, “recruits show up purely as an economic transaction: service for money” – it’s a job. These may be foreign troops (in which case they’re mercenaries) or domestic troops, but the key thing here is that the bond which holds them to the army is monetary: they get paid.
The problem is this is not actually the most common recruitment principle. Indeed, while many armies may employ mercenaries as auxiliary troops or maintain some small standing employment-based component (like non-noble professional retainers, for instance), it is fairly rare for pre-modern armies to function purely ‘as a job.’ The exceptions are professional armies, but professional armies are the exception, not the rule: the later Han dynasty, the Roman Empire (but not the Republic) and early modern Europe feature professional armies, but otherwise these are uncommon. Crucially – and we’ll come back to this as we move along – professional armies require a strong state with a capable bureaucracy and extensive revenues, because the state is taking on the whole administrative and financial burden of maintaining the army. Early modern European states famously struggled horribly under those burdens, while the Roman Army of the imperial period consumed well over half of the state’s budget.
Note that warriors and soldiers recruited by other principles might also get paid (although often not as much), the difference is that there is some other social connection that is underlying their recruitment.
Instead, it is more common that the core of military forces in pre-modern societies arise out of three basic sets of principles (two of which I am borrowing from Landers): the entitlement principle, the vocational principle and what I am going to call the clientage principle. All three share an element in that what ties an individual to recruitment is who they are which in pre-modern societies that are generally extremely low social-mobility societies, is almost invariably a product of what family they were born into.
In entitlement principle recruiting, liability for military service is an expectation that corresponds to a set of social rights and privileges, most often citizenship. Note that we’re not talking about citizenship as a reward for service, but rather service as a requirement of citizens. Naturally, for an entitlement system like this to really function, there needs to be some socially valuable position, with connected rights and privileges, available for common folk (we’ll talk about aristocrats in a second). That tends to make entitlement principle service a creature of smaller citizenship-based communities: A Greek polis recruiting hoplites, the Roman Republic recruiting its legions, or medieval town and commune governments establishing a service requirements amongst the townfolk (the burghers), whose citizenship in the town marks them apart from the regular peasantry.
The great advantage of entitlement principle systems is that, because social status and military service are tightly interconnected, getting soldiers to muster and keeping them in the ranks is relatively easier. Think about a Roman citizen soldier in the Middle Republic: if he deserts, where does he even desert to – his hometown where everyone knows he’s supposed to be with the army and where he and his family’s entire social identity is tied up with his liability for military service? The system creates really strong social pressures that make this easier.
The limitation of such systems is that they require that entitlement in the first place and that entitlement almost always comes with the expectation of a political voice through some kind of voting or communal consensus decision-making. That may not sound like a tradeoff to you, but it certainly is to the elites of this society: to recruit on this basis they have to cede power to the commons to some degree in order to create the political entitlement worth fighting for. In practice, it should be noted, the systems don’t generally seem to form that way: they are not grants from the aristocracy to the commons (‘fight for me and I’ll let you vote!’) but rather concessions wrested from the aristocracy by the commons through collective action (‘let us vote or we won’t fight!’), which then acquire the heavy reinforcement of becoming the traditional rights and privileges of the citizenry.
For more on these voluntary shooter’s guilds, see L. Crombie, Archery and Crossbow Guilds in Medieval Flanders, 1300-1500 (2016).
As an aside, this is one case where the fantasy-style ‘large city with fragmented internal power structures’ that one sees frequently in high fantasy RPGs (thinking places like Baldur’s Gate or Defiance Bay), though notably in the low countries, these guilds were subject to a higher political authority, be it a town government or a noble.
The next option is what we can call (following Landers) the vocational principle, which also connects service to who you are, but rather than connecting it to your place in a political order, it connects service to a place in the broader social order: the vocational principle is one in which a certain class of people fight because they are the warrior class, typically because you were born into the warrior class.
The vocational principle can come in two forms. First, in many non-agrarian, (hunter-gatherer or pastoral nomads (like Steppe nomads)), or relatively less complex ‘horticultural‘ societies, it is often the case that the entire free adult male population is part of the ‘warrior class.’ These are, after all, generally very small clan- or tribal-based societies with a lot less social stratification so ‘everybody’ (that is, all free adult males) fights. For men, participating in communal warfare is a core component to belonging to the tribe, camp, clan or village.
The mistake one sees in a lot of speculative fiction (and also certain reactionary political movements) is assuming that this sort of ‘everyone is a warrior’ social structure can be transplanted to more complex societies with greater degrees of specialization. The reductio ad absurdum of this are some portrayals of Star Trek’s Klingons: an entire post-industrial multi-planet empire that can design starships (and so must be hyper-specialized) but where also somehow everyone is a warrior trained in close-combat weapons. Real societies do not train their starship designers (or their blacksmiths) to also be master swordsmen because that isn’t worth anyone‘s time.1 But they pretty clearly can’t: the moment a society begins specializing its labor (required to achieve high population densities), ‘fighting’ becomes to one degree or another a specialized role too.
The thing is, as we’ve discussed, while non-specialized ‘all warrior’ societies can sometimes overwhelm highly specialized agrarian societies by and large since the advent of farming the most resource-rich parts of the world have been dominated by complex, stratified and specialized agrarian societies, because of their higher population densities – pre-modern agrarian societies can get into the 30-70 people per square mile range, compared to something like 0.5 person per square mile for hunter-gatherers outside of very resource rich zones and something like around 2-5 per square mile for nomadic pastoralists. It usually doesn’t matter if everyone in your tribe is trained to be a warrior if those farmers over there can triple your numbers by mobilizing just 10% of their peasants. There are exceptions, of course, but they’re rare.
Instead in more specialized societies we see the second form of the vocational principle: a warrior class in which a distinct specialized class in society are warriors (or military leaders), usually by birth (because, again, these are low social mobility societies). In essence, this is a case where in the more complex society, just as ‘farmer’ and ‘blacksmith’ and so on have become both specialized jobs and also basically hereditary classes (because who is picking ‘subsistence farmer’ if ‘pampered noble’ is an option?), ‘warrior’ becomes just one more specialist social class, defined largely by heredity.
That can take a number of forms, the most common of which is the military aristocracy. The aristocracy – or some part of it (there may be a parallel civic or religious aristocracy) – has as its justification for its existence that it is the part of society that fights or at least that specializes in warfare. These fellows are aristocrats, to be clear, because they’re rich, not because the fight well – but to be a member of the aristocratic class in good standing with the disproportionate access to prestige and resources that implies also requires being a military specialist and so they develop those skills and are available for privileged military positions (like cavalry or command). We’ll get into, in a later part of this series, the differences between warrior aristocracies and what I’m going to call officer aristocracies (does the noble primarily fight or lead?).
That said, this category also includes some other ways of structuring a military vocation for a society. One we’ve discussed only a little bit are military slaves (like the Mamluks)- a low status class of vocational warriors, though these fellows have a habit of not remaining low-status or slaves for very long, because – of course – they have weapons.
Alternately, conquering empires might seek to create a vocational military class by putting soldiers on plots of land (complete with laborers) in the expectation that they and their children will remain liable for an elite kind of military service. These we call military settlers and they are usually a feature of a regime moving in – societies usually do not impose military settlers on themselves. The ‘Macedonians’ in Hellenistic kingdoms make for a good example of this, as do Arab garrison cities in the Rashidun Caliphate. For ‘everyone is a warrior’ societies that do end up overrunning larger, more complex agrarian societies, this is often what happens: the tribal ethnic group becomes a military aristocracy settled as overlords over the resource rich land of the conquered.
Finally, we have clientage principle recruitment, where the recruiting principle is that the men being pulled into the ranks are – in their civilian society – dependents of the fellows recruiting them. In this case military service is part of the obligations of the dependent towards their superior. That may seem strange in some cases – as a condition of giving the local Big Man a chunk of your food, you also sometimes have to fight for him? – but its important to remember that these societies do not see the exchange that way. Instead, they’d frame it that, as a condition of having the Big Man’s protection and being able to farm his land, you give him a chunk of the produce and are also expected to fight for him. It’s important to remember that these principles for recruitment are not laws about the physical universe, but fundamentally questions of psychology and culture: if the entire culture agrees that the land belongs to the lord or the king or the temple and you are paying (in a way) for the privilege of farming it, then that is the reality for all concerned.
Dependents here can come in a few varieties. The highest status such dependents might be retainers, men maintained in an aristocrats household as full time ‘muscle.’ While these fellows might be paid mercenaries, in a lot of societies they’re not getting paid in cash but rather in status and a living: they get to live as part of the Big Man’s household, they get their food and other necessities and they’re a more important person than the peasantry. Crucially, retainers of this sort are not ‘free agents’ to the highest bidder, but often tightly bound by formal ties (clientage, hospitality, familial bonds, homage and so on) to a specific aristocrat.
Below that, a Big Man might expect that as part of the unequal reciprocal exchange of clientage, his clients – the poor farmers around him – might owe him support which would include following his lead in warfare. At the same time, as we’ll see, we can flip this sort of thinking around and say that for the community, the Big Man forms a natural leader around which the community, if it is under threat, can rally (and the flipside of that, the Big Man is probably a vocational warrior, as above). Finally, the dependents here might be some form of non-free persons – not usually slaves, but rather tenants or serfs. Often the package of obligations these folks owed their overlord included corvée labor of some sort, so military service as such an obligation makes some sense.
We can see these sorts of systems at work with the Carolingian general and select levies or the Anglo-Saxon fyrd. In both the Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon system, there was a ‘general levy’ of all free men called up as a local defense militia, but households were also brigaded together and required collectively to furnish a man for the select levy to provide a standing or expeditionary force. It is striking how these systems required the active participation of local magnates in order to act as focal points for organization and leadership. As a result, these systems tend to be fundamentally local: while the king has the authority to call up a whole bunch of regional select-levies or fyrds to make up a field army, in practice these are local units, not a ‘national’ conscription system. Notably, Charlemagne’s effort to impose a royal bureaucracy on the Carolingian levy using royal officials (the missi, ‘those having been sent [by the king]’) emerges as a kind of last-gasp effort to keep this system running as it comes apart and never quite works as a centralized system.
That said, this sort of system could be centralized and extended to form a ‘national’ conscription system, with the example that springs to mind being the early Han dynasty (202BC-220AD) military system in China, which emerged out of the mass conscription systems of the Warring States period, where very large armies were raised for specific campaigns against peer competitor states. Notably, as the Han dynasty’s primary security challenges lay with holding frontiers (the Qin dynasty having already removed all of the peer competitors before being replaced by the Han), the Han system steadily transformed into a professional standing army composed of a mix of paid professionals and military settlers. That said – and we’ll come right back to this next week – mass conscription requires record-keeping, bureaucracy and state centralization that relatively few pre-modern polities have. Still it certainly is possible to have a society with at least the notion that the common peasant is simply obligated to perform some amount of military service.
Putting Society and Principle Together
So to recap, we can list our recruitment principles with a very rough sense of how common they are and where:
- The Employment Principle (because they get paid): frequently used to supplement armies that have a core recruited another way but only rarely the main recruitment principle. Where it is used as such (professional armies), it requires a strong state with a lot of revenue and state capacity. Examples: Imperial Rome, the later Han Dynasty, some early modern European armies.
- The Entitlement Principle (because it is the converse of some set of rights these fellows have): common for city-states or other sorts of republics, but requires having a legal/political status like citizenship which is valuable enough to fight for. Troops recruited on this principle can be expected to basically recruit and arm themselves in many cases, but they’re ‘paid’ in political rights as much as cash. Examples: The Roman Republic, Greek polis-armies, medieval town militias.
- The Vocational Principle (because it is their social role/class):
- All-Warrior Society (every free adult male is a warrior): common in largely non-specialized societies – hunter-gatherers, nomadic pastoralists, very early agriculture. Troops recruited on this basis arm, organize and largely recruit themselves, but these societies tend to be small, low population density and comparatively poor. Examples: Plains Native Americans, Steppe nomads, hunter-gatherer societies.
- Warrior Class or Officer Class (specialized society with a dedicated fighting or military-leadership class): extremely common among complex agrarian societies, a military aristocracy of some sort is practically the default mode of leadership in such societies, but note that warrior-aristocrats and officer-aristocrats may have very different expectations of what that means. Often the fellows provide the leadership for otherwise employment-, entitlement- or clientage-based armies or alternately a core of specialist warriors around which such levies are grafted. Examples: Almost too numerous to provide – non-state Gallic aristocrats, medieval European knights and nobility, the Roman Senate (an ‘officer class’ example!), and so on.
- Military Settlers (an imposed military aristocracy of fighters given land in exchange for future service): a fairly common solution for consolidating conquest (especially for societies which simply lack the bureaucratic infrastructure for direct governance), creating a new upper-stratum of military-aristocrats that are often ethnically distinct from the ruled. Examples: Macedonian military-settlers after Alexander’s conquests; the garrison-cities of the Rashidun Caliphate.
- Military Slaves (a subordinate class of specialist warriors): a relatively uncommon and historically unstable system, but hardly an unknown one, heavily dependent on the availability of an ethnically distinct class of warriors available to be enslaved. Examples: Mamluks, Janissaries.
- We might also put Prisoner Armies (recruitment as punishment for a crime) in this category. These tend to be somewhat more stable, but their military performance is not always stellar. Example: the armies of the Song Dynasty.2
- The Clientage Principle (because it is an obligation they have towards social superiors)
- Retainers and Clientage (little men have specific ties of loyalty to Big Men who can call them to arms): as far as I can tell, the primary way complex non-state societies raise military force. Because it relies on personal ties, it tends to stay fragmented. Examples: non-state Gaul and Spain, but also vassalage-based medieval polities.
- Universal Military Service (little men owe military service to their lord, king or the state): common although rarely as universal or centralized as the name implies. Often takes the form of regional militias agglomerated into a larger army (examples: Carolingian select-levy, the Anglo-Saxon fyrd), but there are rare examples of truly mass conscription systems, particularly in China (examples: Warring States period, Qin Dynasty, early Han Dynasty).
What I hope emerges from this quick comparison is how sensitive these principles are to the structure of the underlying society: for most societies, the options whittle down to just a handful almost immediately. A fragmented state with a weak central bureaucracy will almost inevitably need to reply on military aristocrats, their retainers and clients because it hasn’t the revenues or the political structure for anything else, for instance. A society with specialized economic roles isn’t going to be able to set up as an ‘all warrior’ society and a society without specialized economic roles isn’t going to be able to use any other system. A society without a tradition of universal military service is going to have a hard time conscripting its peasantry and a society without a citizenship-like legal/political status is going to have a hard time recruiting on an entitlement basis. Likewise, if a society lacks a large warrior-aristocrat class, then it lacks a large warrior-aristocrat class and cannot recruit on that basis.
Next week, we’ll look at putting these principles into action, thinking about how armies are raised and paid for.
- The Klingons actually make sense if you assume the Klingons we see are actually the other kind of vocational warriors – a military aristocracy – and that we simply never meet any ‘blue collar’ inhabitants of the Klingon empire. Of course, that would change the ‘noble warriors’ of the Klingon aristocracy into the cruel, brutish slave-masters of an empire in which they exist solely to oppress and exploit their highly productive, specialized victims; one of TNG-and-later Star Trek’s problems is that it is very hard to square the circle whereby coexisting in alliance with the Klingon Empire as we see it is the right and moral thing for the Federation to do.
- I am not really an expert on these systems, which is why I haven’t said much about them, but you can get a sense of the Song system reading E. Alyagon, Inked: Tattooed Soldiers and the Song Empire’s Penal Military Complex (2023).
We might also put Prisoner Armies (recruitment as punishment for a crime) in this category. These tend to be somewhat more stable, but their military performance is not always stellar. Example: the armies of the Song Dynasty.
I’m curious about this: did states (either premodern or industrial/modern) ever think about criminal recruits in terms of their special costs and benefits, beyond just their role as a cheap source of warm bodies? Like, presumably a regiment of criminals is going to be pre-selected for certain tendencies towards…..violence (which might have its benefits at least in certain kinds of warfare), but also pre-selected for a low inclination to obey authority (which would be very undesirable especially in warfare).
Inked by Elad Alyagon is a good source if you’re interested further. Basically they had a penal-military complex with varying ranks based on physical ability and other factors; they were paid and fed in return for becoming legible and controllable to the Song state. Going from criminal to soldier was one-way for the most part, with old or weak soldiers being used as indentured labour. Other influxes also existed, but mostly by compulsion for uncontrolled people- conscription of the poor, or conscripting masses of refugees after disasters, for example. They weren’t very loyal or effective, but internal political stability benefitted a lot from converting ‘chaotic low classes’ into ‘state-controlled low classes’, and so the Song dynasty tended to use diplomatic heft to avoid peer conflicts where possible (e.g tributes).
That’s sounds like a very high level interpretation, which misses the nuances of specific incidents.
Fundamentally, the weakness of Song cavalry meant they could not contest northern armies in the field, which they tried to co-opt by seeking allies. Which led to asking Jin to help fight Liao, then asking Mongols to fight Jin, then being forced to retreat south of Yangtze against Mongols until Middle East siegecraft and etc gave them the means to beat past Xiangyang.
Merseburger
In fiction, I would imagine it highly depends on what are these folks in prison for. A system that is constructed to arbitrarily punish people with impressment is going to end up with different sort than one that periodically rounds up street gangs.
@pontifex,
Obviously this would be wholly immoral, but it seems to me that if you’re engaged, in, say, a war of quasi-extermination, where your target is the enemy people as a whole and not just their military, then you might “benefit” by having e.g. hardened violent criminals in your army. I do wonder if any, e.g., settler-colonial militaries (or for that matter some of the “first system warfare”, pre-agrarian peoples where conflicts were sometimes about displacing a people and taking their land as well) historically have seen things that way.
>but it seems to me that if you’re engaged, in, say, a war of quasi-extermination, where your target is the enemy people as a whole and not just their military, then you might “benefit” by having e.g. hardened violent criminals in your army
That’s not something regular armies have ever had difficulties with, tbh. Rules of engagement are more or less universally there to keep the army from being a wave of annihilation, not to make it one. Being a wave of annihilation is an army’s natural state.
Not necessarily. It wasn’t hard historically to get an pre-industrial army to wipe out civilians if that’s what you wanted it to do.
But even if that’s your goal, you still want an army where warriors aren’t likely to spontaneously decide to wander off looting and pillaging while there might still be fighting to be done. I would think an army of criminals would be useful only to the extent you could both instill cohesion between them all (so they will stand and fight) and sufficient discipline to keep them together as an effective combat force when needed.
Because spreading out to loot and pillage is an excellent way to get defeated in detail if you get surprised while dispersed like that.
In pre-agrarian societies there isn’t really a concept of “criminals.” As a member of such a society, your community consists largely of people you know personally in a relatively small nomadic band or sedentary horticultural village. You may be vaguely affiliated via marriage ties with some of the neighboring communities, but they live miles and miles away and are only tangentially relevant to your life most of the time.
Internally to your community, there isn’t really a concept of ‘criminals.’ Everything’s personalized. There’s no generic “criminal” from central casting. There’s “Og, the jerk who stole my basket of fruit and ate it” or “Ug, who’s a really mean drunk.” Every free adult male in the village is already assumed to be a warrior anyway, though, so there’s no place to send “criminals” as a unique special combat unit. Maybe Ug, who enjoys hitting people with sticks, will personally organize an ad hoc raiding party. Maybe Og, who’s a thieving jerk, will be chronically untrusted and nobody wants to stick close to him in a fight because they don’t trust him to guard their backs.
Externally to your community, there’s no concept of “crime” as distinct from “acts of war committed by rival communities,” in much the same way that in a gangland urban city area the rival gangs don’t see other competing gangs as ‘criminals’ so much as ‘enemies.’ If those jerks from the wrong side of the mountain (the river, the forest, the tracks) come over to YOUR side of the terrain feature and steal a pig or burn down a hut or something, it’s not because they’re uniquely deviant or ‘criminal’ members of a larger society; it’s because your community is now at war with the community on the other side of the mountain, at least until the harm done is avenged.
In general there is very little for a state to gain by specifically concentrating “criminals” into a single combat unit. Historic states that considered atrocities part of routine policy rarely if ever had trouble finding foot soldiers to commit those atrocities, without taking special steps to find them from any particular place.
I suppose it gives you a unit of people who you know to be untrustworthy, which you can use as a recruiting pool for jobs know to be degrading and don’t require trust.
Then again, it cannot be that hard to find such people without such a unit.
Then what’s the point of war?
Genocide doesn’t net you slaves and resources. What good is land without the manpower to use it ?
You had stuff like Han Wudi war of extermination, but that displaced the Xiongniu westwards… And they still came back afters.
“Then what’s the point of war?
Genocide doesn’t net you slaves and resources. What good is land without the manpower to use it ?”
A majority of societies (those not recovering from a disaster at home) have a surplus of manpower. Which means that it´s a matter of conditions whether it´s cheaper to exterminate your neighbours and settle their lands with your own settlers or to spare the neighbours who surrender and get their slave labour but then be stuck with the costs of guarding them.
Snorkack, I don’t think your analysis is correct. It may seem airtight in theory. But look at what happens in practice.
Tribal societies that decidedly do not have consistent populations over carrying capacity (tribes tend to be small enough that they feel vulnerable and will often actively try to seize and assimilate captives if circumstances permit) tend to practice a relatively strongly preferential targeting of ‘civilians,’ or rather, usually have no real concept of ‘combatant’ and ‘civilian’ apart from age and gender roles; every adult male of the tribe is presumed to be a warrior when circumstances warrant it.
Conversely, agrarian societies where the farming underclass is usually very specifically dealing with “too many mouths to feed” on the land immediately available tend to very consistently not seek the ‘solution’ of exterminating rival agrarian populations to settle on their land, barring extremely unusual circumstances (most often connected to the Age of Colonization when the exterminating settler population had muskets and the victims were still mostly reliant on Neolithic technology).
So instead of seeing a trend where populations that generate large populations over and above carrying capacity are more likely to think in terms of killing neighboring populations to take their land… we see the opposite.
I think one reason for this inversion is that you’re conflating what is (in an agrarian society) hypothetically beneficial to the peasantry (the ones experiencing overpopulation) and what is beneficial to the elites (the ones who do the fighting and make the decision about when a war will begin and when it will end).
To the peasantry, if they’re heartless enough, they may consider going to war and getting to build a homestead on the ruins someone else’s farm because they’re dead is a benefit. But to the nobility, there’s no real advantage to doing this, compared to just conquering the peasants that already live there.
If you displace the local elite but continue taxing the peasants in the valley, you get about as much rent/taxes/grain/??? from the valley as you would have done from exterminating the valley peasants and resettling them. Probably more, because it will take considerable time for the settlers to get established. Furthermore, if you as an elite open up huge areas of land for settlement by killing off the local populations, that means that the surplus labor in your former holdings all dries up as they move out to the new territories to farm. This is actively bad for the elite’s interests in an agrarian society, because they depend on that surplus labor being available to work for money or provisions so that the elite’s landholdings can be put to work by tenant farmers.
Suppose you are depending on Farmer Brown’s second and third sons being willing and able to put in 120 days a year laboring in your fields in exchange for Farmer Brown getting the food it takes to feed them, which he cannot reliably do on his own fields. The last thing you want to hear is that the Brown lads have packed up to start a homestead on the other side of the mountain range. Farmer Brown’s household is still in order and successful now, but there’s no hired men to work your fields.
So elites in an agrarian society rarely have an incentive to exterminate during conquest. There are exceptions, but usually… All that gets them is a new territory ruled by a sparse yeoman population that cannot generate the density of tax revenue the territory used to provide, and who will resist any attempt to return the taxes to the old levels. By contrast, knocking over the elite and setting oneself up as the new overlord is much easier (the entire local population does not fight you to the death) and gets you a more reliable revenue stream.
This presupposes genocide to be a viable option in the first palace. For the most part I don’t think it was. Melee weapons, bows, crossbows or even muskets can’t kill nearly as fast as modern firearms. Armies were typically in the numbers of thousands or tens of thousands. Groups this size can’t kill something like 90-95% of a preexisting population in the millions. They would get too tired long before that. Moroover, in agrarian societies populations were too dispersed. Especially since they tended to run for the hills in case of war. Or rather to run for the forest or any comparably difficult terrain.
The one exception I know about was the Mongols. They had armies in the hundreds of thousands organised like a modern one. Many of the areas they invaded had no forests (or comparably difficult terrain) where people could hide. Instead they sought protection among the buildings of cities. The Mongol-led armies could then surround a city, set it on fire and attack anyone trying to escape the flames. They were able to kill millions of people only because they were already assembled in those cities.
Genocide by leaving people in a devastated wasteland to starvation, exposure and accompanying disease usually produced more civilian death than direct slaughter.
I don’t think it’s necessary. Inperial Japan essentially engineered (possibly accidentally, possibly deliberately) an army that spontaneously generated war crimes out of otherwise conformist, law-abiding citizens largely by virtue of training methods and indoctrination.
I’m convinced that the Imperial command handing out methamphetamine like it was candy, and regarding the accompanying side effects (grandiosity, mania, paranoia, rage fits and blunting of empathy towards others) as a feature rather than a bug, had a lot to do with it.
Also, the Japanese never had a taboo against using weapons against the unarmed. Their current peacefulness arose as a way to handle a high population density. Still, there must be a reason why the Japanese use the standard phrase “be kind to me” when introducing themselves to a new workplace.
Lena, I’m a bit skeptical of this. First, the history of the rest of the world doesn’t seem to suggest that some kind of ironclad taboo against killing unarmed people using weapons is actually playing much of a role in any major culture’s history.
The last major round of internal violence Japan had before contact with the West was the Sengoku Period, a timeframe roughly correlating with the Wars of Religion and Thirty Years’ War in Europe… which were waged with broadly similar technology and which were shockingly violent, including plenty of massacres of unarmed peasants by armed soldiers. Was Japan really that different?
I’m furthermore very skeptical about reading tea leaves to the extent of “Japanese people routinely say ‘please be kind to me’ when introducing themselves to an unfamiliar group, this is because Japanese culture has some kind of secret super-vicious streak that isn’t normal by other societies’ standards.” Which seems to be what you’re saying.
Maybe it is just a polite reminder that the person is new and might not know the relevant things in context?
IIRC the Russian army did (and to some extent still *does*) recruit extensively from prisons and as punishment.
The Wehrmacht in WW2 also had penal units, and volunteering for the SS was also sometimes used as a way to “rehabilitate” prisoners. The SS maintained at least one unit that was largely composed of felons, and they had a reputation as dangerous and cruel even by SS standards.
SS maintained at least one unit that was largely composed of felons, and they had a reputation as dangerous and cruel even by SS standards.
That’s exactly what I would expect, yea, and the Nazis are exactly the kind of state I would expect to see that as a good thing.
I do kind of wonder if it was used by other, less malign but still settler-colonial type societies.
Individual judges granting some level of clemency, especially for juvenile offenders, to enlistees used to be common enough in the USA. This is a little different from what’s discussed in the post because this almost never involved the military having a direct interest in the recruit, it was like the military was being used as a special parole system. The changes resulting from the War on Drugs seem to have deprecated the practice, as Black (and other minority) teenagers became much less likely to be prosecuted as juveniles and White teenagers became much less likely to be charged with things that brought them to court, leading to both populations not getting the kind of sentencing hearing necessary.
Note, however, that the Strafbataillone (“punishment battalions”) of the Wehrmacht existed to punish *already recruited soldiers* . They were an alternative to the firing squad, *not* a recruitment tool to put criminals into uniform. As a rule, the Wehrmacht didn’t do that. In the Nazi worldview, “criminal” isn’t something you *do*, it’s something you *are* – and the fact that you *are* criminal makes you unfit for service. At least the ones the Nazis regarded as “habitual criminals”.
That the numerous atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht and occupation forces were committed by otherwise ordinary men is rather well attested, at this point.
During WW2, the Soviet Union got inspired by Nazi Germany to create its own penal battalions (as might be expected, in the face of a manpower shortage).
But the Dirlewanger Brigade was no ordinary unit of this kind. It was made up of criminals from the start (and was led by one) and distinguished itself with the worst war crimes record. It does matter whether your leader is a Prigozhin and your soldiers are evil!
The Nazis found criminals useful for self-administering concentration camps. They were put in charge, sandwiched between the guards and other inmates. Their sadism could cow the more low-abiding inmates, and deflect hate away from the guards. And the threat of terrible revenge from their victims should they be demoted back to the ranks was meant to ensured their loyalty.
The British Empire’s 90/9/1 thumb-rule strikes again!
(“90% of the population with spears, 9% some local force – culturally distinct, if possible – with rifles, 1% colonial forces out from home with Maxim guns” is how I’ve seen it described.)
And an absolutely abysmal combat record–when thrown into the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, they got shredded.
I don’t want to downplay the fact that Russia/SU did pardon criminals in exchange for enlistment, but I think it is valuable to think of it as specifically “WWII recruitment” and “Ukraine war recruitment”. I do not think legal mechanism for that kind of thing exited at any point between 1945 and 2022.
I was actually thinking about earlier, in the 18th century, rather than the USSR.
‘the scum of the earth, enlisted for drink’?
not forgetting the rest ‘but it is wonderful what fine fellows we make of them’
Are you thinking specifically of Cossacks, or of the Czarist regular army?
Because I was specifically wondering if Russia in that context (especially since, like America, they were an expanding settler-colonial power, at least with respect to Siberia) used criminals as part of its military efforts to displace indigenous nations.
“I was specifically wondering if Russia in that context (especially since, like America, they were an expanding settler-colonial power, at least with respect to Siberia) used criminals as part of its military efforts to displace indigenous nations.”
You’re absolutely correct to qualify Russia as a settler-colonial project across Siberia, in much the same way as the USA is across its entire geography.
My understanding is that criminals were used as a method of settler-colonialism in Russia, but more in a civilian than military context (e.g. deporting criminals to penal colonies in Siberia).
My understanding of the military situation around these penal colonies that blended the civilian/military situation (i.e. if there were militias) isn’t strong enough to tease that bit out. However, as I understand it this practice occurred after the initial military conflicts were resolved, as a method of further solidifying their colonial hold of the area rather than the initial push.
Hector, Cossack settlements were 100% used to “pacify” the people of Caucases and Siberia, but it would be extremely strange to be made Cossack as a punishment. If anything Cossacks were one of the mildly privileged estates. People sentenced to military service would just find themselves in regular military units mostly composed of select conscripts with a small amount of volunteers. After military service was done all of them would neither be assigned any particular place to live, nor given any plot of land, instead receiving a (small) monetary pension.-
I thought Cossacks were a social group descended from escaped serfs. The later Russian emperors finding them useful is another thing.
I think you get this more often once gunpowder repeating weapons make it much harder to escape from such a battalion, and it’s much easier to put prisoners in the front line with a line of guards with guns behind them.
It’s a lot harder to find enough archers that are good enough to reliably kill escapees and are willing to do that work.
Now that I think about it, there’s arguably a slight distinction between “sentenced to military service” and “offered military service *instead* of another sentence”.
Supposedly in the 1950s peacetime draft era, local judges overseeing the disposition of petty troublemakers would sometimes offer to waive their sentences if they agreed to join the military. The thinking being that minor offenders would benefit most by being placed under a system of discipline. I don’t think this ever had legal force but was essentially a handshake deal.
I suppose the easy thing is that the accused could presumably literally sign up (as in “sign here, here, and here, and now you’re in the army, son”), then have their sentence waived, and while the agreement to join the military had no legal weight between the judge and the accused, the agreement between the accused and the military had quite a bit (as you’d be punished more for desertion than… well most crimes – in peace time the army can’t just shoot you for it, but they can do any other punishment available to a court martial if I’m reading correctly)
Nah, these are mostly kids being sent to the military, the USA still refuses to be party to international agreements banning the recruitment of minors. The enlistment agreement functioned because it had the force of community and parental expectations behind it, it was a way for the kid to avoid publicly shaming their family by going to jail.
This was, IIRC, fairly common in C18 Britain. The JP was, of course, likely to be a friend or cousin of the colonel.
they can be used to pacify civilian revolts though. Not very good at anything else.
The Song dynasty example raised didn’t rely on penal troopers. Rather, they featured a combination of all the types described here.
You had aristocratic nobles who on either passing trials or via recommendation would be chosen to lead soldiers, you had a professional army that recruits and is viewed with very low social status, you had Fubing, hereditary households who contributed soldiers for service (although the older form of Fubing dating back to Han era, which was military settlers is not in use by Song ) ,and finally penal troops who were essentially manpower pressed into service to buttress their needs
This dated from the Tang dynasty and frontier service though.
The requirements for prisoners would be the same as for slaves. You need to be able to send them far enough away that they’re basically lost in a foreign land so that they’re less likely to run.
This requires a fairly large state. Or you sell them on to some other state far away.
Keep in mind that most pre-modern states don’t imprison most offenders, it’s far too expensive.
The exceptions are politically important people, or debtors who might be able to beg enough money to repay the debt.
Generally offenders were fined, corporally punished (including permanently marking them), exile, or death.
Actually imprisoning them, or sending them away to be in a prisoner battalion, requires a lot of state capacity.
If you have that large state capacity, presumably you also have the capacity to deal with reluctance to obey.
Are you sure about the Dani being from western PNG? As far as I know they live in the western half of Papua, so west of the Indonesia/PNG border, so it’d be correct to say that they’re from western Papua but not from western Papua _New Guinea_ (as in the country).
(And this is ignoring the fact that there’s actually a West Papua province in Indonesia but it’s in the Bird’s Head Peninsula well west of where the Dani live.)
After reading the post, I’m not sure if my question is still really on topic here, but, well, I had planned to ask it in this thread ever since you announced this series a week ago. It’s a slight rephrase of something I posted on a partly worldbuilding-focused forum years ago, and something I’ve long wanted to ask people with some knowledge of military matters.
So…
I have a question about how to half-way plausibly run the military of one of my fictional cultures, and since I have no military experience myself, I have no idea how to answer the question.
In modern armed forces on Earth, it’s generally the norm to have two completely, or almost completely, separate career tracks for officers and enlisted ranks – you can join the military as an enlisted recruit, or you can apply for officers’ training and, if you get accepted and successfully complete officers’ training, become a second lieutenant or whatever the equivalent rank in your service is right after completing training.
Apparently, this dates back to the European wars of the middle ages and early modern ages, when men who had been born into the nobility usually served as officers and men who had been born as commoners usually served in the enlisted ranks.
So my question is: is this, strictly speaking, necessary? That is, is there something in the very nature of modern warfare, or of running large military organizations, that requires this in order for things to work? Or is it just a historical artifact of the way things were done in early modern Europe?
Wikipedia informs me that in the US armed forces, “mustang” is the general slang term for someone who first served in the enlisted ranks, then successfully applied for officers’ training, and is now a commissioned officer. So, in terms of US military slang, my question is: would it be plausible to have a fictional military in which all the commissioned officers are mustangs?
The reason why this is an issue there at all is that the fictional culture in question has a strong taboo, both cultural and legal, against giving a young person any serious amount of power. So the idea of twentysomethings commanding platoons or companies would strike them as somehow wrong. The social background is that of a society built around an explicitly ageist hierarchy, where you’re supposed to put in your time doing unpleasant jobs and taking orders while you’re younger, and should ideally get rewarded with higher-status positions when you’re older.
Will the series touch on warfare at levels below the state? I’m curious about how it works when for example two aristocrats who have retainers and peasants obligated to service but who also owe service to a king fight each other. If they serve the same king is he likely to view this as a waste or an offense to his own rule? Are there rules and when can a king step in a settle things and when can’t he? What if the fueding aristocrats serve different kings but those kings are at peace? Does this threaten the peace. Do the kings war, or stamp out the brushfire, or grab a bucket of popcorn and watch?
It’s likely the sovereign would at least attempt to broker a peace unless he is preoccupied. Like for instance away on a war himself.
But if both parties are stubborn, compromise may not be possible
Or the sovereign might just be weak/ineffective, or sadistic.
A lot of the time the goal of these minor fights seems to be to present a fait accompli before the sovereign can react (and usually put his weight behind one or the other of the scufflers)
Chris Wickham’s book Medieval Europe opens with the story of how Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Aquitaine and Normandy, (and King of England), attempted to conquer the county of Toulouse to which he believed he had a legitimate claim. Louis, King of France, rode down to Toulouse with just his personal retinue and commanded him (in his capacity as Duke of Aquitaine, not his capacity as King of England), not to attack the city of Toulouse. Henry decided that it was better to lose face as a strategist than to be seen as breaking his oath to his liege (in his capacity as Duke) and didn’t take the city.
Varied greatly according to the King and Kingdom. All this was governed by common law and vassal contracts.
To explain-Common law refers to basically the agreed on meaning of terms and customs, determined through precedent and tradition. Vassal contracts were the often quite literal written or oral contract between a lord and his vassal, which defined their duties, dues, and obligations. Most were oral and ceremonial, made in the presence of witnesses, but they could and were often attested to by the church of by some administrator writing down the actual text of the contract too-some of these even survive until today.
There often wasn’t any formal text defining that the King could arbitrate disputes over land ownership, but there might be text saying the lord agreed to respect the Kings decision for civil disputes. This means that depending on how the local custom dictated, this may or may not include wars-and often that was purely political. So the option generally existed to go to King, but to what extent depended on local custom. What aid he’d feel empowered to give, however, was much more nebulous.
In the most general sense, England offers the archetypical example where feudal wars were illegal and France the archetypical example where feudal wars were legal. As has been humorously noted by others, the Dukes of Normandy, having gained their throne by Feudal war and thus eclipsed or rivaled their nominal lieges, were not in any hurry to let their own vassals replicate their feats. However even then this was all *locally dependent*. Often the King of France could still *try* to exercise authority to stop wars.
Here’s an illustrative example of a French system feudal war in all it’s glory; the War of the Succession of Champagne in 1216 involved a bunch of complicated alliances and such, and crusades and oaths and female inheritance and all sorts of nonsense.
To answer your question about how this worked out we have to go into some of it. The local barons favored one candidate, Erard a male cousin of the last ruler. The King supported another, Theobald IV, who was a preteen and represented by his mother, Blanche. Blanche in particular had carefully navigated this moment by paying homage to the King of France, swearing a vassal contract with him for her son and making various financial deals with him. Notably, she gave up her right to marry without the Kings permission in exchange for his support.
The local laws and the contract were such that the King *could* arbitrate inheritance, plus it was in his interest to do so. Hence it started with the King of France arbitrating in favor of Blanche. However he was then ignored, triggering two years of rebellion without any major royal interference, with Blanche gradually taking control away from rebellious barons with her own forces. Hence the Kings arbitration was not *final*, in that it didn’t instantly end the conflict-it just favored one side.
Complicating the matter further was that the duke of Lorraine, in the Holy Roman Empire, was *also* involved in the conflict. The Holy Roman Emperor favored Blanche, and *his* feudal contract with Lorraine and common law understanding made it a felony for Lorraine to support a different candidate than him. So a cross border war breaks out with both kings *on the same side*, against their vassals.
Throw in the fact that the Pope *also* favored Blanche, as Blanche was the widow of a crusader, and you another legal wrinkle added in where the Popes understanding of the law also gets factored in, and in his case the understanding of the law is “You’re all going to hell for rebellion”.
In the end the King of France and Holy Roman Emperor both intervene on the same side and, in conjunction with the pope excommunicating the rebels and Theobald IV proving to be a courageous military commander at 13, crushed the rebellion. Some lands were transferred from Lorraine to Champaign, which means the Holy Roman Empire sortuve lost land in this war, despite being allied with the side that it lost land to, although this obviously isn’t really a useful way to discuss it.
Hence you have a combination of tenuous legal authority, a lack of the ability to exercise it except with force, the Pope weighing in, an international conflict, and a massive array of interpersonal relationships all arising out of the feudal contract. And this was a relatively tame conflict-basically every international figure agreed on who the successor was and it was all just a matter of disciplining the rebels. It could, and does, get *much* more complicated.
Tl;dr the way it works is *messy*.
“Here’s an illustrative example of a French system feudal war in all it’s glory; the War of the Succession of Champagne in 1216 involved a bunch of complicated alliances and such, and crusades and oaths and female inheritance and all sorts of nonsense.
To answer your question about how this worked out we have to go into some of it. The local barons favored one candidate, Erard a male cousin of the last ruler. The King supported another, Theobald IV, who was a preteen and represented by his mother, Blanche. Blanche in particular had carefully navigated this moment by paying homage to the King of France, swearing a vassal contract with him for her son and making various financial deals with him. Notably, she gave up her right to marry without the Kings permission in exchange for his support.
The local laws and the contract were such that the King *could* arbitrate inheritance, plus it was in his interest to do so. Hence it started with the King of France arbitrating in favor of Blanche. However he was then ignored, ”
I think describing Erard as “a male cousin of the last ruler” misses the real grounds of the claim.
The last *undisputed* count of Champagne, Henry II, had left his country for a crusade – being then a 24 year old, and a bachelor (though engaged to a little girl).
He took from his barons an oath to accept his little brother, Theobald (to be III), then 11, if he died on the crusade and did not return.
The problem which nobody then foresaw was that he was urged to marry in Outremer, and did. Incidentally breaking his engagement to the little girl back home.
And in 1197 died in Outremer… except he had fathered two daughters in Outremer who survived (and one who did not).
Which meant that in 1197, when news of his death in Outremer arrived in Champagne, the choice was between making his 18 year old, nicely available brother Theobald the count as explicitly sworn, or making faraway little girl Countess as implied by general inheritance law.
Theobald III became Count, so that made for explicit dispute but not then armed.
The war broke out in 1216 because Erard was husband of the elder brother´s daughter Philippa, then 19, and she had come to her father´s homeland to demand his inheritance.
About ignoring king´s judgment: the problem here was that anyone who did not like king´s judgment could call it “obviously unjust” and have a decent cause under some of the conflicting principles of law.
Yeah, but I was already posting way too much text to explain that :X
The thing about the Kings judgement isn’t really dependent on the legitimacy of the claim, so much as the politics involved. Politics not incidentally tended to follow legitimacy, if for no other reason than the fact that everyone had a lot to lose if inheritance wasn’t honored, but not always.
I’d argue to real motivating factor here was particularism. The local barons and other rulers favored a candidate with fewer tries to the central authorities, which is a common story in the low countries. The legitimacy of the claim was secondary; in fact it was tertiary to the claiment being an adult who could perform leadership.
Thank you both for the write up and the example. It’s fascinating.
We see this in the Crusader Kings series. Both 2 and 3 have both policies on the table.
First argument against which springs to mind is that there are a lot of things an officer needs to know to be good at the job, and the later in life they get started on learning all that, the narrower the window is between attaining competency and succumbing to senescence.
If the sole recruitment pool for officers is those who’ve already survived a certain span of time as grunts, that also means that in the aftermath of serious losses – arguably when the society is in greatest need of officers young enough to be adaptable – the pool is empty.
This is really not the case, but the experience shows a completely contrary situation. During the WWII, after Winter War and during Continuation War, the officer recruitment of the Finnish Army proved to be remarkably easy. Even as junior officer corps was suffering dramatic casualties, the battle has the effect of proving who in the ranks are capable leaders. It was easy to select battle-proven NCOs and men and send them for officer training.
The key here is that the junior officer’s job is not really that hard, academically. The key is overall excellence. You need to be suitably bright and creative to function well as an officer, but you also need to be capable enough soldier that you command respect also in that sense. Simply put, the platoon leader needs to be the best soldier of his unit, the man (or woman) who would be elected as the leader by the platoon if there were an election.
One key issue is, also, deep internal motivation. You need to really believe in the righteousness of your cause because otherwise, you are not capable of bearing the stress and motivating your unit.
All these things come up during war, so your troops are revealing potential officers steadily. The key problem is that your replacement manpower will be worse than peace-time trained men, and getting good squad leaders out of it will be problematic.
Oversimplifying, the modern officer/enlisted divide solves for three big problems:
1) The sort of people who you want piloting fighter jets or commanding armies have better options than spending their early 20s doing hard manual labour under tight supervision.
2) Many “management” roles in the military are far more physically demanding than a civilian post with similar responsibility would be.
3) The military is an enormous structure that is orders of magnitude more complex than any civilian entity, and no one wants to try removing a load bearing pillar when it works well enough as if.
Your societal ageism could fix that first problem; you’re going to spend your 20s doing grunt work no matter what. The second one could be resolved if this is a sci-fi story with some sort of advanced medical care that keeps people healthy longer. The third one can be handwaved away by your society following a different historic path.
In reality there would still be a lot of details to fill in, but I’d say its plausible enough for fiction.
Given modern medicine, its certainly possible to do things differently than we do. A whole bunch of US military manpower policy can trace back to WWII. One of the takeaways from the opening years of that war, was that too much of the senior officer corps was literally too old to handle the stress demands of the job– so postwar we ended up with a 20-year military career track (cliff-vesting pension paying 50% of base pay after 20 years of service, then ramping up to 75% at 30) designed to “top out” almost everyone in their early 50s unless they make flag rank.
My first company commander- equivalent was a Mustang major. He ended up retiring, as a major, with 30 years of service, less than a year after I made captain (and I was still a bit short of 30 years of age). He was an extreme example, having been enlisted far longer than most before making the change, but that was the kind of age-rank combination that the system tries to avoid after seeing it go badly too often c.1942.
The 20-and-out pension system went away about 15 years ago; it’s likely that the military will eventually re-evaluate the way it presses “up-or-out” in light of how much more physically effective a 60 year old is today compared to one 85 years ago. There’ve been more-or-less constant rumbles for years about adjusting the rigidity of the system to better accomodate skillsets like cyber etc.
Once the military decides it can deal with 10 extra years of age on the high end, then maybe it can re-evaluate whether or not an all-mustang (or very mustang-heavy) officer corps is worth the other tradeoffs (and there are many– the first few that come to mind are “socialization” “throughput” and “wear and tear”).
Large organizations tend to have special class of “managers” with a different skill set from the people who are actually doing the job. The bureaucrats at the Wallmart HQ are different from the cashiers. Typically in the western world you enter the managerial class by education, but it’s still possible to rise through the ranks, especially if you build your own business.
So it would be a huge waste for a society to demand that young people spend decades working as cashiers before they can work at the Wallmart HQ, or decades being grunts before they become officers. Rich societies can afford to waste a lot (example: the US healthcare system). So it’s not impossible.
But a more plausible system to me is that young managers-to-be are given tasks that are manager-like but unpleasant and subservient. This is not too far from the current system: ask any second lieutenant or Wallmart HQ intern on a bad day, and they will tell you that they did grueling pointless coursework at university to get a position where they work too many hours for little pay and recognition, that they lack any real power, that their bosses takes the credit for all their achievements and that they spend most of their time navigating pointless rules and fixing their bosses mistakes. Tune this system up a little and it’s a plausible model for your world. You can adjust how much this system is driven by credentialism (young people have to study long and hard to get diplomas needed to advance), clientalism (young people need to find patrons to work under to advance) and bureaucracy.
> So my question is: is this, strictly speaking, necessary? That is, is there something in the very nature of modern warfare, or of running large military organizations, that requires this in order for things to work? Or is it just a historical artifact of the way things were done in early modern Europe?
So both as an answer to this and as a muddying factor, the soviets (and other revolutionaries) *tried* to abandon this system, and reverted back.
The justifications for switching was obvious; personal ranks were a Russian nobility thing. If you needed leaders, you assigned them a positional rank again. They weren’t “General Alexi, to whom army group center was assigned” they were “Comrade Alexi, commander army group center”. The position derived all authority. Getting into position, or other business that didn’t necessitate authority, was a democratic process. Sortuve. It was a mess.
This…almost works. It kinda works for revolutionaries, sometimes. However the problems are obvious, particularly when you have to motivate men to do things they’d really rather not do, like invade others, or die on fortified positions until the enemy runs out of shells. Plus, if you can get men to do such things they will often find motivation-such as the looting and brutalization of civilians.
The issue is that the other aspect, that states want an army they can order to shoot protestors, results in the same push for ranks. You need hierarchy to get the military to massacre your own people. Not always, the early red army was in an idealogical fervor and a fully democratic process would have resulted in soldiers firing on tzarist protestors (we know, because to an extent it did) but as the machinery of state institutes social hierarchy those on top want to oppress others, no matter what you call your state.
Which is precisely why the early soviets abandoned ranks.
And also why Stalin reestablished them.
Sure, the practical concerns were used as justification and probably *did* justify the switch, but it’s fucking Stalin. The real reason for abandoning a system where horizontal cohesion bonds were paramount for one where vertical ones were paramount was that he could sit on top of the web of vertical loyalty bonds and move the military where he wanted, like a spider.
So we have an example, and it seems to prove both sides point. You seem to need vertical hierarchy to be effective and also it’s so very obviously a tool of oppression and the people who want it are evil.
There are other examples that tried to split the difference, but they were rarer. The most obvious one to me is pirate captains and other outlaws, who, as far as we can state a general rule, were internally egalitarian. Caribbean pirates in particular had a semi formal system where the captain was elected for battle decisions and the quartermaster was elected for quartering decisions, and the captain was master during combat and no further. However this was A. Not actually standardized, who would do the standardizing, just a social expectation, and B. Only possible because of a very unique set of conditions and not scalable. Rome also elected consuls, but that’s it’s own can of worms.
So as a final word; this is one of the big philosophical questions. There’s good reason to want an alternative system and no one has really managed to implement one. No one actually knows why.
My understanding is that the Russian military to this day has a different relationship with its commission/non commission officers as a legacy of this history and its relationship with conscription. Privates and NCOs are drawn from short-term conscripts, while officers are professionals who intend to stay in for their career. So you end up with a different dynamic where the platoon NCO is a conscript who’s probably only got a few months left in his service while the officer is a long term professional. (I don’t know whether Russian officers enter as privates or lieutenants, though that seems like a detail that a fictional society could change.) This results on a system where your officers tend to be a little better motivated but often end up having to do the job of the short-term NCO as well, though there were some reforms attempting to mitigate this with a semi-professional NCO class. In general the American stereotype is that this is an inefficient system that discouraged low level initiative while the Soviets preferred higher echelon planning. In the wake of the Ukraine war I’m not going to go to the mats for the effectiveness of the Russian military, though it definitely seems like the best case for this system overlaps with the Red Army’s performance in late WW2 where you’ve got a pool of highly motivated and battle hardened veterans for your NCOs, rather than inexperienced short timers promised an illusionary victory. (Also very much not an expert so open to people correcting or expanding on anything here!)
These days it’s more of a three-tier system, with both career officers and contract NCOs serving as professionals while conscripts fill the private and a few junior NCO ranks. The kontraktniki NCOs are actually more similar to the E-4 mafia of Specialists in the US Army, largely making up the bulk of the professional grunts not bearing special leadership responsibilities, with junior officers still carrying out the equivalent of US NCO duties as they’ve done for the past 40 years or so.
Just to point out an error, without contending with the primary point: Officer ranks were re-introduced by Trotskiy during the Russian Civil War, Stalin may have benefitted from it be he did not (re-)introduce that system.
To clarify, *personal* ranks were reintroduced by Stalin. Positional ranks were reintroduced by Trotsky. So if you were the commander of a battalion you were addressed as comrade battalion commander X, no rank. Your position was the rank. There was also a more secret rank system introduced in 1924 called service categories which were alphanumeric designations of hierarchy and experience, but helpfully to my point that’s the year Stalin took power.
Stalin later reintroduced terns like Lieutenant or Captain.
In a small enough anarchist syndicate, task-specific leadership by acclamation is possible; and, in theory, this is the best form of leadership for human endeavors. Scaling up to larger systems requires the hierarchy we see in statist societies.
@Terry,
This is really interesting, thanks!
Do you know how things worked in other Communist-ruled states, either the Warsaw Pact states in Eastern/Central Europe, or those in Yugoslavia, Indochina, Cuba etc. where they came to power through independent armed struggle?
To my knowledge most of them eventually adopted the Soviet style ranks used by Stalin, but I’m not sure of the details. The soviets had significant influence over how revolutionary movements developed because they provided aid and equipment to them, independent struggle or not, so this isn’t surprising.
The PLA has two parallel tracks for ranks. One is ranks with traditional names, parallel to NATO-style armies. This is for diplomatic comparability with peers abroad. The other one is grades, which work like ranks and have the same promotion system as ranks in NATO-style armies, but they’re divided up differently (there are 15 of them vs. 9-10 NATO-style officer ranks), and are named more logically after the unit one commands or is 2IC of, from platoon commander up to Central Military Commission vice chair. Like ranks, the grades are generalized, so having the grade “company commander” means one has the same authority as a company commander but can also serve on staff without having the job of a company commander, just like the rank “captain.” Pay is based on a combination of ranks and grades.
See Wikipedia’s article on “The Iron Law of Oligarchy” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy for the theory proposed by Robert Michels that even organizations that champion egalitarianism end up drifting towards a specialized managerial class.
My understanding (and I could be misremembering) is that in the nineteenth century French army, most officers commenced their basic officer training after their period of national service in the ranks, and in most cases after a short stint of volunteer service as a NCO as well. There was a military academy at Saint-Cyr which took teenage cadets but it wasn’t the standard route to a commission. This of course had cultural roots in the Revolutionary period, and the French considered it superior to the alternative system of separate promotion paths because it gave the officers more experience of military life right from the outset of their first posting as subalterns.
@raphael, a fictional military in which all the commissioned officers are “mustangs” is that of Starship Troopers. (The book, not the movie.)
In European history, yes officers were often a very separate career track from enlisted. Wouldn’t want the commoners thinking they can match their social superiors! The British army particularly suffered from this, and IIRC a USA military historian described the US West Point academy system for officers as a successful British sabotage effort 🙂
The French revolutionary army was an early success in breaking down the division, “a field marshal’s baton in every knapsack”. The post WW2 Israeli military supposedly insists on officers rising through the ranks, ditto the West German now German army as a way to distinguish themselves from the Prussian tradition.
So I’d say you can choose whichever you want for your fiction, and it’s historically justified.
“In European history, yes officers were often a very separate career track from enlisted. Wouldn’t want the commoners thinking they can match their social superiors! The British army particularly suffered from this”
Did they? I seem to recall the pre-1789 French army required all officers to be third-generation aristocrats. What exactly leads to the conclusion that it was Britain that “particularly suffered from this”?
The nobility had legal monopoly on becoming officers before the French Revolution.
The aristocracy had an inside track (as in Britain and elsewhere) but there were other paths. An ordinance of 1782 required all officers to have three generations of noble ancestry – but in 1789 a quarter of officers were bourgeois. The artillery and engineers needed merit and technical education.
The “three generations” rule was probably because their absolute monarchs had ennobled a lot of people they liked resulting in inflation of noble titles. This would also explain why registered nobles consisted more than 1% of the country’s population in the 1780ies.
I know commoners were allowed to become sergeants. However, I don’t know if this rank counts as an officer.
In Britain it persisted into the 1910s, where it resulted in major failures like the Navy not supporting the Gallipolli campaign, and cataclysmic failures like letting the French be the first to figure out how to take territory in trench warfare.
“a field marshal’s baton in every knapsack”
I have read something similar as a quote from Jean Bernadotte. Don’t know how different this expression would sound when translated from French to English or Swedish. (I am a native Swedish-speaker and a non-native English one.) Certainly Jean Bernadotte came from a middle-class background and had been born a commoner. He only got a chance to become a commander because noble privileges were abolished in his lifetime. If I understand it correctly several of his colleagues had a comparable background. One was even a former slave who had been freed as a child and given an education by his slave-owning father.
That would be probably be (General) Alexandre Dumas, father of the writer and grandfather of the playwright. He signed up as a private since he couldn’t get a commission as an officer on account of his race. His father made him use a nom de guerre to avoid tarnishing the family name by having served as a private, hence the Dumas name.
Yes, it was him I thought about. He was a mulatto having a White father and an actual Sub-Saharan African mother.
One should not ascribe North American style racism to Europeans. The Gypsies are of partially South Asian descent and frequently look like Iranians. Apart from this particular ethnic group I don’t think there was any significant number of non-Whites in Europe before the late 19th century. Instead, what people were concerned about at the time was noble descent. Even if your father was a nobleman this would not count of your parents were not married at the time of your birth. I think Thomas-Alexandre Dumas had to start off as a private because he was known to be illegitimate and not because he was a mulatto.
The Gypsies are of partially South Asian descent and frequently look like Iranians.
Some of them look a *lot* darker & less “European” than Iranians, for what its worth. I live in the US, but the Republican candidate for state legislator here two years ago (she lost her race) was a Bulgarian Roma immigrant, and you can tell from this clip that she’s very *obviously* of (partially) South Asian ancestry.
I have met enough Iranians through the years to recognise a Persian accent. They are not all unquestionably light-skinned as a large fraction are light brown. On the other hand I can’t remember ever meeting a Gypsy which was any darker than that. (These can often be recognised from how they dress.) Which is why I wrote that they “frequently look like Iranians”. If I remember it correctly you are a South Asian so you know what they look like.
Notably, all the examples you list have (or in the case of Germany, had) universal male conscription so officers-to-be serving in the ranks as normal conscripts would be a given for most of them.
It’s notable that some Star Trek episode writers think Starfleet works one way and other writers think it works the other way.
In TNG, it often seems like Starfleet has *only* commissioned officers, except for O’Brien. Even the “lower decks” episode is about lieutenants.
There are many things in Star Trek that it’s easiest to think of as inserted by the Universal Translator. I choose to believe there is no commissioned/non-commissioned divide in Starfleet, but the UT referenced it due to the Computer’s noted difficulty with metaphors.
ditto the West German now German army as a way
we did what?
How deep is the recruitment pool for officers in this system? I am not intuitively familiar with what counts as an officer, but Brett highlighted that one difference between the Roman and other armies was the density of NCOs and such. If you want one leader and one assistant commander per 10 men, you’re forced to open these positions up to the youth. It’s less of a problem in a more tactically rigid system, or I guess if you have an inverted population pyramid.
I don’t entirely agree that centurions and optios are, in fact, equivalent to modern NCOs.
AIUI, a centurion was administratively responsible for 60 to 80 soldiers, expressly including disciplinary authority, i. e., they could decree punishments for (some) infractions. In terms of authority, that’s much closer to a modern O-3 company commander than anything else.
Now, tactically, the centurion’s role is more similar to a Landsknecht Feldweibel than to any kind of modern officer, but modern officers, including squad leaders, are tactical decision-makers. This wasn’t true of any army before 1914.
Bear in mind that officer’s commissions are themselves a modern thing that, AIUI, derive from rulers commissioning, i. e., contracting, a man to set up a regiment for some war or other. This man, in turn, commissioned, i. e., hired, junior officers to fill subordinate roles.
Rome doesn’t really do any of that. A military tribune no more has a commission than a consul, or an optio.
According to sources, at the battle of Cynoscephalae between the Romans and Macedonians in 197 BCE a key moment was an anonymous Roman centurion halting the pursuit of fleeing opponents and leading 15 maniples in an attack on the rear of the main phalanx. So yes centurions could make tactical decisions.
Quick “mostly-mustang” counterexample – the Israeli military gets most of its officers its officer training course after regular enlisted training, not as a parallel track. Everyone takes their vocational aptitude tests up and goes off to basic, then takes their branches’ common training, then from there gets sorted into assorted technical specialties. In this, officer training is just another technical specialty (though one of the more time-intensive ones, hence requiring signing on to a non-conscript professional term of service), and transitioning from an enlisted-rank specialty to an officer-rank specialty after a year or two of service is AFAIU the common case.
(From my vague understanding of early IDF/PalMa”Kh history, the all-mustang system was a conscious divergence from PalMa”Kh’s British trainers’ military system, motivated in part by a socialist view of the two-track model as a feudal relic. That ideology has faded, though, while the career advancement structure remains – it’s proven stable and compatible with good military performance, though with officer-from-the-start being necessary for a few technical specialties.)
Tying it into your fictional world’s age-based hierarchy: while this does usually result in junior officers up to two years older than the enlisted soldiers they command, there are BIG exceptions. Notably, long service enlisted professional soldiers, or reservists called up years or decades after their initial service (lots of that now), can still end up serving under twenty-something officers. The army tries to avoid the latter by keeping reservist formations from the same age cohort together, with aging reservists serving under the same aging reserve officers for decades, but there’s always a “seam” in the hierarchy where the reservist formation slots into the active duty army, and some younger active duty officer ends up commanding an older but junior-in-rank reservist officer. That age/rank inversion is absolutely considered awkward, and the system is built to insulate the rank and file soldiery from it.
While Israeli society is no longer socialist, it’s still far more “classless” than even America, and due to how recruitment works it’s very likely that officers come from a poorer background than some of their men – a soldier that expects to be released and learn to be a doctor might serve under an officer that will learn to be a plumber (or in reserve service, a doctor-serving-as-soldier might be under a plumber-serving-as-officer).
Also, an Israeli officer, especially junior officer, is supposed to lead from the front, and it’s hard to lead from the front if you don’t have at least some experience as a grunt.
Israel has higher inequality than nearly any rich democracy these days (the US has even higher inequality). I’m unaware of good enough research on income mobility in Israel, and most likely any such research would just capture Jewish-Arab and mainline Jewish-Haredi inequalities, neither of which is relevant to the IDF.
Income mobility in Israel is complicated not only because of Haredis (which are in a culture that cares much less about working for money than non-Haredis), but also because many Israelis are immigrants or children of immigrants from countries that are much poorer than Israel.
Israel is a capitalist society with the typical income differences arising from capitalism. It’s however less classful than the US – people with different incomes are normally treated far more as equals than in say the US, so there’s far less will to have an army of “high-class” officers and “low-class” soldiers.
@Ariel Yes and no. Israel achieves a lot of its apparent classlessness by designating large portions of its poor as outside the scope of its demographics. Much like a private school that expels every student with a C or below posts much better student performance than a public school.
The US is not and has never been a classless society. It is just believed to be by people unaware of just how much its differs from its ideals:
https://bigthink.com/the-present/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you/#rebelltitem1
Modern Switzerland would be an exception – every man (T&C apply) starts off with basic training as a recruit, there’s no direct entry to officer school, nor is there in civil society an “upper class” in the British sense.
The UK still has noble privileges. I don’t know if any other country has this today.
@Lena,
A few postcolonial African and Pacific Island countries do have a kind of House-of-Lords equivalent, I think, though less powerful than the House of Lords is.
But are the seats in these juridically hereditary? If I understand it correctly the British ones are.
@Lena,
They’re for hereditary chiefs and “nobles”, i.e. the remnanents of the precolonial aristocracies, so i think yes. Again, I think their powers are much more limited than those that the British House of Lords had historically, though.
@Lena
I know for quite some time the vast majority of the House of Lords was appointed. Wiki says since 1999 only 92 out of more than 700 Lords are hereditary.
Also in 2026 hereditary posts were abolished entirely.
It is still a lifetime appointment and it still has 26 bishops in it but by now it does not seem vastly different from senates of quite a few other European countries
The United Kingdom eliminated hereditary seats in the HoL this year. It seems to be the only Labour Government action that Labour voters don’t broadly hate. At the time, I heard that Britain remains the only country in the world that grants voting seats in its legislature to clerics without guaranteeing some of those seats be reserved for minority religions like the Iranians do.
The United Kingdom eliminated hereditary seats in the HoL this year
@Endymionologist,
Yea, I was actually aware of that (and am aware in a much more hazy sense that the House of Lords has lost most of its powers and hereditary nature gradually over the last century-and-a-quarter or so), which is why I qualified it as “the historical House of Lords”.
My understanding is that the African and Pacific Island countries I mentioned have political bodies that are, unlike the modern House of Lords, explicitly hereditary (i.e. for traditional precolonial monarchs or nobles), but on the other hand their powers are either strictly advisory, or else limited to customary law regarding stuff like marriage, inheritance, property disputes etc.. Advisory power is still pretty important, of course, but it’s not the same thing as the House of Lords was in the 19th c, as far as I understand it.
Thank you, I was unaware of how far this development had gone.
Switching back to the topic of recruiting systems, the nobility in the UK has never been more than a few hundred people, who either inherited a title after their father died or were granted it in later life. Either way, they were not in general young.
You are not going to be recruiting, or even officering, much of an army from a few hundred old men, so from that point of view they are irrelevant.
You are thinking about a small subset of nobility holding titles such as duke, marquess, count, viscount and baron. Feudal European armies consisted mainly of knights. These would have been relatives of those with specific titles or the sons of previous knights taught their fathers’ job. England could have had at least thousands of knights at its peak.
But of course the sons of those old nobles may not have inherited yet but are looking for a way to make a name for themselves, and the classic way to do that was to get a command, or else go into the clergy.
The official English nobility with titles and special legal privileges was quite small. But the much larger gentry class served the same role as the lower aristocracy elsewhere in Europe and was the source of most officers for a long time.
I was thinking about this larger group as lower nobility, thank you.
The swiss army (a militia army based on universal conscription) draws all officers from its soldiers. Since compulsory service is only about a year, the downsides other people have mentioned are less impactful
The social background is that of a society built around an explicitly ageist hierarchy, where you’re supposed to put in your time doing unpleasant jobs and taking orders while you’re younger, and should ideally get rewarded with higher-status positions when you’re older.
This sounds really interesting (and I think there are historical societies that have worked that way).
It’s often seemed to me that if you’re going to have a hierarchy (and I think every society has, and probably always will), there’s a lot to be said, on paper, for making it fairly closely linked to age. Partly because it intuitively seems more egalitarian and ‘fairer’ than a system where status is based on, say, ownership of land or ownership of capital or family ancestry. Most of us have at least a fair shot of getting old someday (even if, yes, even that isn’t wholly egalitarian, since longevity does have a genetic component). Certainly better than the chance we have of acquiring lots of land and capital. And also, partly because it would push the culture strongly in the direction of deferred gratification, which would be a pro-social thing (at least to a large extent).
The more junior ranks of officer are expected to lead soldiers in battle, which is an enormously physically demanding task. There’s a reason why junior commissioned officers are generally young: because their job requires physical strength, stamina and energy, at levels few can achieve much past 30.
If your fictional culture has technology (or is a different species) that doesn’t have physical deterioration in middle age, then there’s no reason you couldn’t have lieutenants at 40. Note that this would change a lot of things about society: if people in their 50s were routinely expected to be in better physical condition than those in their 20s (e.g. most Olympians would be 50+) then all sorts of expectations of the nature of age would change.
Plenty of modern militaries don’t directly recruit officers (e.g. Germany, Switzerland, Israel), but they do promote into officer careers straight out of basic training, ie within a year or two of initial recruitment. Trying to operate a military with a single hierarchy, where you have to reach senior NCO rank before becoming a junior officer is not going to work with the roles that are currently expected of junior officers – you won’t get people to platoon commander (lieutenant) fast enough or in enough numbers.
That’s not to say you couldn’t have a single hierarchy, but you’d have to put the lower officer ranks below the more senior NCOs. Would make company and regimental staffs (which are usually filled with both senior NCOs and junior officers) very interesting – promoting from platoon command to a master sergeant’s berth in the company or regimental HQ would change the dynamics. Not necessarily in bad ways, but it would be a very different military culture.
Do it this way, and you put platoon command and the like (ie junior officer rank) as jobs achieved in the soldier’s late 20s/early 30s, ie the last age when they are still physically capable of keeping up with 19-22 year old recruits.
This would result in behind-the-lines headquarters and the like being filled with older men, rather than the present situation where they have a substantial leavening of younger junior officers gaining experience in “staff” roles before being rotated back out to the front.
Germany does definitly recruit Officers from the start
Finland does the same as Israel and Switzerland: everyone enters the military as conscript, and does the same basic training. You get selected to the NCO training after 12 weeks based on your performance, aptitude and peer reviews. The best students of the NCO school go forward to the reserve officer training after six weeks of NCO training.
If you wish to go career, both reserve officers and NCOs are allowed to apply both to career officer and to career NCO path, though if you are a reserve officer and a career NCO, your NCO rank will always be an acting rank, and you will keep your officer rank for mobilisation, and will revert to officer when you resign – and reserve NCOs who are selected to National Defence University for career officer education will need to first pass a course that supplements their training to the level of reserve officers.
We actually have a rather finely tuned system of reserves that also takes care of the age issue: as reservists age, the unit to which they are assigned gets a lower priority, and lower-priority units have more reservists in officer positions. So, when you are a young reservist and have a career officer company commander almost straight out of university (a lieutenant in their mid-twenties), and top-of-the-line equipment, and a platoon leader (reserve officer) of you own age. (In fact, the same guy was probably commanding your platoon even during your conscription, then as an “officer cadet”, under professional supervision.) In your mid-thirties, your unit has Cold War equipment (perhaps even some WWII stuff), and the company commander and battalion staff will be reserve captains of senior lieutenants in their early fourties.
A big part of it is that non-junior officers are to a large extent middle-managers – they are supposed to keep politics under control. NCOs are supposed to be technical experts, not political experts. There’s little gain from moving people between technical and political roles.
I’ll point out that in the modern USA military there’s a very wide grey zone occupied by two classes: non-commissioned officers, usually sergeants, who are technically enlisted but have some (or even substantial) practical command authority; and warrant officers, primarily specialists whose jobs require some autonomy of decision making. (In the Navy those would be “petty officers” such as boatswains). The jump to commissioned officer is still significant enough that non-coms and W.O.s sometimes actively choose not to pursue the opportunity to do so.
In addition to what others have said about other modern armies, like the IDF, the Swiss Armed Forces, and the Finnish Defense Forces, I’ll add that Cold War Western European armies often ended up with a different class system from the UK/US one of officers and enlisted, due to the use of universal conscription for men for 1-2 years. In some NATO members, one could choose at 18 to go career military, and sign a long-term contract, in which case one would immediately begin NCO training. Mobility between conscripts and NCOs was in contrast limited. At the same time, quite a lot of officers would be NCOs; in the French Army today, half of the officers are mustangs.
This is, in fact, a temptation against which our military has been striving hard. The idea of training volunteers as career NCOs and the ordinary conscripts as rankers is an appeaking one, and it has obvious benefits. However, the problem is that it means that for the ordinary conscript who doesn’t want a long volunteer commitment, the service experience will be rather dull. And naturally, this means that service as a conscript will not appeal to an intelligent man.
In Finland, the military has gone quite far to make it so that the military conscription offers interesting opportunities that are at least comparable to qht you would experience in civilian alternative service. The most typical are the “normal” NCO and reserve officer training which allow you an opportunity to actually get to lead your own squad or platoon, even in technical branches like artillery, armour or signals.
However, there are also branches for which you need to apply, like the Conscript Band of the FDF, chaplain (for divinity students and graduates), medical officer (for medical graduates and students in clinical phase), aircraft mechanic, electronic warfare, aircraft pilot, research assistant (for science and engineering students and graduates), lawyer (for law graduates and students), journalists and cameramen for the Defence Force media operations, cyber operations (for computer nerds), gunsmith (for trained mechanics) etc.
These allow people to get duties that are both suitable for their talens and demanding enough for their capacity, which helps to keep conscription a “respectable” thing. In addition, they allow you to have an extremely versatile reserve that includes people who would not necessarily consider a military career as a choice, but who can be easily called up for duties that require their talent.
This traditional system is very much not necessary. After the Great War, the German military instituted a three-track system (enlisted, NCO, commissioned officer). This was initially still pretty damn classist, hence all the “von Wherever” generals of WWII, but not formally so. The current German army retains that system.
Unteroffiziere (lit. “subaltern officers”) are in charge of squads or platoons, and also act as the hands-on experts of their branch / field. They’re the ones teaching new fish how to do things, because they know how to do things, that’s their job. They’re also the ones telling officers whether something is physically even possible.
Offiziere (officers) are platoon leaders training to be commanders, but to become an officer, you must first serve what amounts to an apprenticeship where you go through the same training regime and actual battlefield roles as junior NCOs, i. e., squad leader and assistant platoon leader, the latter preferrably under a long-service Unteroffizier (this was a postwar change, the Wehrmacht did have an equivalent to US OTC). Officer candidates *are* trained, after completing their time as 2IC of a platoon, to handle formations up to battalion tactically; this was also a postwar change, reflecting that at times, losses can make that a thing.
And *everyone* goes through the Allgemeine Grundausbildung, the General Basic Training. You can’t get into either Unteroffizier or Offizier tracks unless you pass the test at the end of Basic (which wasn’t all that hard when I was in, but I did see people fail at their first try).
A military that puts *everyone* into Basic, then spends the next six to twelve months training and evaluating recruits, then offers promising ones officer training is, IMHO, workable. In fact, it might work better, in some ways, than the existing ones.
You will still have a distinction between the master craftsmen of war (that’s what NCOs are), and managers of war (commissioned officers). You really need both skillsets in an army.
In worldbuilding I think it’s important to avoid the trap of making everything logically effective, and this seems like one of those instances.
Societies, both civilian and military, are riddled with inefficiencies that arise from societal ideological commitments. An example of this is the deeply racially segregated armies of pretty much all the major world powers in WW2, which left enormous amounts of non-white personnel ineffectively utilised.
I suppose this is the topic of the whole blog post by Brett. Societies fight with the armies thay can produce, rather than producing an ideally structured army regardless of the society. And when there’s a mismatch between the two (i.e. a reformer trying to make things more efficient despite societal expectations), they tend to have to fight for it. Use that as a source of narrative tension in your society.
As an aside, have you looked at the Age-Set systems of sahelian pastoralist cultures before? Folks like the Karimojong, the Ateso and the Turkana (e.g. ‘Ateker’ peoples). They have something not all that dissimilar, with generational age-sets expecting to take on political power consecutively, a little like if the whole ‘boomer, gen x, millennial’ thing was enshrined as a societal expectation for who should have political power. And yes, it does produce friction. Every hierarchical method of organisation causes friction, societies have to figure out where to place it (before anyone here starts talking about how ‘inefficient’ it is compared to how we do it). The reason I bring it up is having strong age-related expectations for holding societal power produces some specific tensions within a society, and these groups can be used to learn what those tend to be. Plus, they’re fascinating to learn about.
As a Mustang, here is my two cents:
The NCO and O grades are so different in job requirements and tasks that if you don’t specialize in one or the other then you will never be great at either. You can’t really be a great blacksmith and a great carpenter at the same time, it takes time to master both. Either you are really good at small unit operations: face-to-face relationships, team building, interpersonal tact, weapons operations, tactics, etc. Or you are good at the large unit operations: management of large organizations, staff building, cross domain knowledge, combined operations, strategy, etc. An NCO and an Officer must understand all topics listed here and be proficient in both the management and politicking, but eventually you are either a manager or politician, and anyone who tries to balance both are either really really good, or fired.
Thus I think most generals across history skip over the lower ranks due to the time constraints on a career. If you wait too long to join the higher echelon leadership, then you won’t be competitive against those that study logistics and strategy all day long.
As to your fictional universe. Managing a bunch of 17-19 year olds is a huge fucking pain in the ass. I would much rather be wining and dining at the local O-Club then deal with the fact that Private Pile got a DUI and now I have to get him out of jail. There is nothing worse then losing your weekend plans to go to Japan because some dumb ass started fighting with the Korean National Police (real story). So I would believe that in that fictional universe, where age is primary factor for social value, that a 20 year old would be given a platoon, 30 year old a company (with 20 year olds managing stuff for him), a 40 year old with a Battalion (with the corresponding 30 and 20 year olds), etc. Before you know it, you have the organization reminiscent of the current US Army.
The distinction between enlisted and officers in contemporary armies essentially exist as a form of specialization. The skills it takes to successfully lead large unit or to plan operations is significantly different from the skills it takes to actually inflict the violence on a lower level.
There is a significant overlap between senior NCOs and junior officers, but being a senior NCO is the *end* of the enlisted track, while being junior officer is the *beginning* of the officer track. This presents a problem: If it takes significant amount of time to climb the career ladder to become say a platoon leader, and the only way to become a company commander is that you were a platoon leader previously, and the only way to become a battalion commander is that you were a company commander previously and so on, then everyone simply ages out of the system before they can become generals – you lack the entire upper part of the system.
A remotely modern military has to contend with a particular issue that makes officer-enlisted divide stick around in spite of egalitarian mores. Someone needs to do combat managerial jobs at various levels including being a general of a whole army. So you need a pipeline for training those people. The US armed forces solution, which is similar to other advanced states’ solutions, is to make an explicit career track for them which starts with a position of actual responsibility, so that you can eventually have someone learn to be a halfway decent general before they’re too old to to the job.
There are other possible solutions to the problem, but you do have to solve the problem of finding managers from somewhere. I will note that this solution maybe does mirror US civilian society in that it’s fairly uncommon for people to rise to high level management positions having started as a nonmanagerial worker.
So I think as long as you have a plausible answer about where the generals come from, and where do officers (middle management) come from, in requisite numbers, and where do technical specialists come from, are they the same people (hard to be a good manager and a good technical specialist at the exact same time) and that answer isn’t too alien to civilian society career dynamics and general social dynamics, you’ll have done a more than good enough job for story telling purposes.
The exception to being both a specialist technician and a manager are the technical arms: artillery and engineer (and now numerous other technical branches – signals, EW etc). Technical proficiency has been seen as essential in these for a long time, without precluding management skills.
I always found this strange too – why did we keep this formal distinction when the underlying class distinctions no longer exist? – and asked about it on AskHistorians once. I got an answer that was soon deleted because it didn’t meet AH standards, but which really made it click for me. The gist of it being that *officers have to send soldiers to their deaths sometimes.*
This is why almost all modern militaries keep officers and enlisted soldiers physically and socially separate where possible. You want the soldiers to bond with each other (cohesion!) but you do *not* want the guy making potential life-or-death decisions about them, to be included in that chummy camaraderie. The officer’s job is to make those decisions – send a unit into that high-risk area or not? Commit forces to pull them out when they do get in trouble or not? Which areas to reinforce? – in a bloodless, calculating way. The more you mingle and bond with the people those decisions are about, the harder that becomes. If anything, with the erosion of class distinctions, formal policies to separate officers from soldiers have only become MORE important: modern officers are no longer nobles who come with their own ingrained cultural values about “peasant” lives being less important.
This does not force you to *recruit* officers separately, but that mostly-separate recruitment obviously helps create an “officer corps” with a distinct culture and identity, making that psychological separation easier.
Reaching its epitome in the dilemma voiced by John Kerry back when he was a young officer in the Vietnam era: “”How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
The movie “Saving Private Ryan” is the story of an officer losing this ability and ultimately paying the price of losing it. The film is now part of the American Television Canon and an important element of American self-mythology.
My sense is that such an officer/enlisted distinction is not strictly necessary, but real-world historical armies tend to develop them anyway because the “civilian” societies also tend to develop such inequalities as they develop beyond a certain level of complexity (and it’s a rather low threshold). In the case of your ageist society, we also have examples of similar ageism in East and Southeast Asia (to the point that it’s quite important to know whether you’re talking to an older or younger person since that changes the linguistic register you have to use), but age is _never_ the only dimension of social inequality in them.
It’s worth noting that the distinctions don’t have to map directly to our modern military rank systems. The Romans had something similar where a male citizen with enough financial or political clout would start his military career as a tribune in the legions, so not a very high post (and one without fixed responsibilities since the commander of the legion — the consul, praetor, whatever — would assign them ad hoc) but still not just a mere grunt in the ranks. There’s the added complication of how the social classes map to military ranks/billets, since if I remember correctly an eques could sign up to serve as a centurio (again, not starting as a bottom-feeding grunt) bun in doing so he actually took a downgrade in social status and would only regain his birth privileges upon becoming a primus pilus (i.e. the highest-ranked centurion in the entire legion).
I don’t think it would be necessary, but it might cause some new problems.
First is that the qualities of a seasoned soldier or even NCO (essentially a leader of a small direct report or *overseer* of a larger unit) are not necessarily the qualities needed for an officer. Second is that wartime expedience (in replacing casualties or mustering an army) might lead to needing leaders, specifically, and not having experienced personnel to fill these ranks. These problems become worse at higher ranks, especially if the army in question is sophisticated enough to have/need a general staff.
As such it is often useful to have an alternative source of officers or at least a ‘procedure’ through which soldiers are trained for command, and screening for promotion candidates. Not everyone of the same seniority will be equally suited for command and there probably can’t be enough slots. This society might have problems obtaining officers in dire straits, as beyond existing soldiers, their recruitment base is going to be mainly somewhat established people who will have to be retrained. Instead of grabbing some 21 year old out of college and doing your level best to mould him into a lieutenant for his first job, now you need to take a 35 year old away from whatever they’re already doing, retrain them, and then replace or un-retrain them. This might result in more strain from established adults being recruited in this way, or difficulties as lower-quality officers are drawn from seasoned soldiers who are less than ideal for command.
More… grimly? Promoting from the ranks might have a tendency to lead to more cautious leaders as they have bonds with subordinates and may not want to risk them, if this is deemed a problem you can perhaps rotate leaders into new units. Or I guess encourage a culture of hazing and ladder-pulling, but that has its own issues.
In TNG era Trek, it’s pretty clear that the Klingons we see are almost all military aristocrats. General Martok in DS9 explicitly struggles with legitimacy because he got his position through competence and not by birthright (and iirc he’s still a noble, just from a minor house).
And it is questionable how moral it is to be allied with them, though the morality of warring against them to liberate the commons from an aristocracy they believe in as an important part of their culture is even more fraught.
I think they are a combination of a military aristocracy and a sort of military caste. They all seem to be members of such and such a house. But I also get the sense that we’re also looking at like third son of a third son kind of people. They still count as warriors by vocation, but they’re not really all elites. There’s certain attitudes involved in being of that caste like the “good day to die” ethos and the all important honor. But there are also a lot of non warrior Klingons. They don’t as frequently have roles that interface with starfleet and so don’t show up on screen as much. I remember one episode where a young an naive federation citizen is talking to some sort of Klingon scientist and comments about how he thought all Klingons were warriors, and the scientist has this eye rolling attitude about the warriors behavior and says something about that not being possible in a huge multi system empire. I think it also goes to explain how a multi species empire has an all Klingon military. No non Klingons are in the right caste – though some half Klingons actually are!
Is it possible that you have something between “technical / logistics military personnel in a totally militarized society” and a lot of the population being “warrior-reservists” or something like American Founding-era militiamen?
I am fairly certain that Martok married into the nobility (the House of Linkasa becoming the House of Martok when Sirella’s father died), not that he was a member of even a minor House. Martok has always struck me as a very Sharpe-like figure; a lowborn commoner that translated his military excellence into rank and privilege.
We do also see Klingon scientists, doctors, and lawyers in the shows. Worf’s grandfather famously defended Kirk and McCoy during their trial in ST6. It’s just that we more-commonly see our Starfleet crews interacting with soldiers and politicians, so we don’t see as much of Klingon society beyond that.
It is by no means impossible for “lawyer” to wind up as a special privileged position available only to the aristocratic warrior class, especially when the trial in question involves someone who is indisputably an alien warrior (Jim Kirk) and the highest-ranking political leaders within the Klingon state (themselves of the warrior class) are acting as the jury.
Given how stiff the Klingon warrior class is about honor, it’s quite possible for them to have some kind of principle like “only a warrior has the right to even stand up in court and contradict a judge who is himself a warrior, a non-warrior who did that would be just to disrespectful.”
I don’t think that the point that a soldier can’t also be a professional is correct.
reserve armies exist. A man can work at Intel and be a tank commander on reserve duty.
>And it is questionable how moral it is to be allied with them, though the morality of warring against them to liberate the commons from an aristocracy they believe in as an important part of their culture is even more fraught.
The Federation has, at least nominally, an answer for this; the prime directive. Basically, err on the side of letting an alien culture figure their own shit out. No liberation wars. Act as an external example of a better world and win culturally.
In practice no Starfleet officer seems to adhere to it, in part because the entire point of a rule like that in television is to explore its limits, but it does make sense that Starfleet would be in conflict with this directive given it’s own mission statement.
Still, there’s good reason for the federation to be like this. It’s obvious that interstellar war in Star Trek can very easily become genocidal, with a single capital ship being capable of wiping out multiple planetary populations in the right circumstances; Deep Space Nine explores biological warfare being used to commit genocide a half dozen times or so, and several planets are rendered uninhabitable over the course of that show.
The Klingons actually don’t go for this kind of genocidal warfare by preference, instead trying to dominate and control populations as part of an imperial system, which means they’re actually *the good neighbors* compared to what the federation finds elsewhere. In fact they actually have internal systems in place to punish war criminals, which we actually see working, which is highly unusual for the alpha quadrant. If the Klingons conquer the federation the population of the federation largely exists afterwards-we see several indications this is to be expected. For one instance, there’s a episode where time displaced Klingons are convinced they *utterly won* the federation Klingon war, by Worf, a half Klingon, who is in charge of a human crew. They are suspicious but buy that this is what victory looks like.
As an aside-it seems that typically, non-Klingons don’t serve military roles. However by the end of the Klingon-Federation war, the Klingons had developed a healthy respect for Humans as warriors, and might integrate them as a subordinate military race in victory.
Hell, the federation had probably done the math and determined that if the Klingon empire did defeat them they’d culturally conquer the Klingons in a few generations anyway. The Klingons were not that bad to lose a war to, compared to any other Alpha quadrant power.
Note this includes the federation itself-the Klingon empires preference for taking populations and planets intact is unusual *in comparison to the federation*. The few times the federation feels the need to fight a total war, they prefer their enemies to *not exist anymore at the end*. They just don’t choose to go to war often, but it’s clear that there are effectively no internal brakes on what the federation high command is willing and able to authorize if they do. It takes the protagonists going rogue-multiple times!-to contradict the genocidal tendencies Starfleet exhibits when pressed.
Which its worth noting humans are the military class of the Federation. They seem to make an outright majority of Starfleet. Also an awful large share of colonists too. Humans are clearly the driving force of the Federation and went all-in on it while everyone else is sort of bolted on. They often have their smaller private fleets while outsourcing much of their foreign policy and and presumably paying dues to support Starfleet. Not necessarily so different from the Athenian Empire, but hopefully the Federation is less prone toward genociding and enslaving member communities who aren’t paying their dues…
Later series (DS9 and then DISCO) seemed to explore this explicitly, with the “human-centric” Starfleet being resented or even collapsing in DISCO with each Federation species reverting to its own indigenous fleets. It was surprising to me how “confederal” the Federation was, as opposed to a centralized government.
While I wish that DISCO hadn’t gone that route overall, it was interesting to see.
I think you’re correct on how much less bad the Klingons are compared to things like the Borg. That means it’s perfectly reasonable to have an ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ style alliance. I mean, historically, you only have to look at WW2 where neither ‘side’ made much sense based on the principles of the individual countries. Japan had very little actually in common with the rest of the Axis, but a good reason to enter into military alliance against common foes, whilst Spain had a lot in common with Italy and Germany in principle, but no reason to commit militarily. The USSR got on with the western allies even less.
And it’s clear that even the Klingons think that the Federation poses a cultural threat to their culture via peaceful coexistence, to the point that they treat the federation as something akin to the Borg at times. It’s also probably notable that whilst it’s command structure is heirarchical, Starfleet members do not consider starfleet to even be a military and are also unpaid volunteers. So for the purposes of the above divisions, Starfleet members may believe that being part of starfleet it part of their vocational duty and tied to their role in society, but waging wars of liberation is explicitly not part of that duty, no matter how many civilisation-ending warheads are technically on their ship (they’re actually for adapting to use against weird space anomalies). .
Well Japan was actually pretty much idealogically aligned with the Axis. Its brand of fascism wasn’t naturally antisemitic, nor was it part of the same racial hierarchy, but then again there was a gradient among the European fascists too where the shared characteristics were actually quite varied.
But we don’t really need to debate that.
The interesting thing about the Klingon empire idealogically is that it’s actually suggested most client races are okay with the situation in the commentary and lore. They were conquered centuries ago and are now technically a serf race, but their overlords are basically uninterested in interfering except to produce war materials. Given how stressful warfare is to most species letting a bunch of crazy aliens do it isn’t a bad deal. It’s unclear how much actual slave labor is used in the Klingon empire, with this possibly changing over time, but the less compulsory depiction of the Klingon empire is probably a more realistic system.
Of course there are still klingons who were particularly bad aristocrats, and the system was obviously unstable in the long run, but that doesn’t contradict any depiction of Klingons.
Hence by the time of the Klingon federation alliance you can make a case that the Klingon military would basically be unchanged if they had starfleets social system; the primary forcing effect on “oops all Klingons” was cultural, not compulsory. Every traditionalist Klingon would volunteer for starfleet as the closest analog for military service, the ex clients would stay at home, and you’d accidentally end up with more than half your crew being Klingon warriors.
Amd as for starfleet itself and why it’s not aggressive; we see precisely your explanation textually. I was a bit trite here, but we see rebellions by basically every protagonist against Star fleets nominal authority at some point, brought on by star fleet being too aggressive or violent for them. We see *lower ranked* officers engaging in varying degrees of loud or soft rebellion too; Riker comes very close to torpedoing his career over his involvement in a secret cloaking project. Somehow high command seems to be infested with nutjobs (actually this makes perfect sense) but the average captain and under does not feel like their duty involves war not do they feel compelled to honor the rules to any real degree.
Its worth nothing if less extreme the Federation also has a warrior race. Humans seem to make an outright majority of Starfleet (lore pushback about other ships we don’t focus on being mostly alien etc don’t seem to really work given even those above captain in rank highly skew human) and a lot of the remaining are mixed race. Also seem to disproportionately make up colonies.
Basically Humans were the driving force to create and maintain the Federation and others got bolted on. Not quite the Romans, maybe more like Athens empire? Many systems still seem to maintain private fleets. The Federation takes over foreign policy, you presumably pay dues to support Starfleet, in return you get security against far stronger powers.
Starfleet goes for a less aggressive vibes than the Klingons but Humans are probably maintaining a level of peacetime mobilization that would not economically viable if they weren’t acting as the primary military arm of a large confederation…
Perhaps part of it is because if Starfleet was more overtly militaristic in its tone members might start to wonder if outsourcing their military capability to the Humans would end poorly. After all Athens wasn’t above using that collectively funded military to do a bit of genociding and enslaving if you got behind on your dues…
What you point out is an interesting byproduct of the show’s internal logic (and the need to make The Protagonists heroic and have villainous foils).
Starfleet Command seems to have very poor civilian oversight – perhaps because it’s a bizarre organization of highly idiosyncratic, ambitious, genius-level adrenaline junkies?
“Starfleet members do not consider starfleet to even be a military and are also unpaid volunteers”
It’s worth noting that Starfleet are at least a mostly post-scarcity society, so no-one’s getting paid to do anything.
This leads to a rather interesting thought, which is ‘how might a state effectively man a fleet of warships doing very dangerous work if you can’t use finance to withhold the means of survival from people’. It seems like Starfleet squares this through pitching service in their military branch as ‘exploration’.
The Klingons, who being a peer competitor to the Federation may reasonably be assumed to be a similar degree of post-scarcity appear to have squared that issue differently by leaning into deep-rooted concepts of individual honour. You might even read that the Romulans majored on hierarchical status, the Vulcans on scientific understanding, and the Ferengi by twisting capitalism into something in-between a religion and a state-wide national game/passtime.
On the face of it, if the Federation is a post-scarcity society, everyone can get what they want at no cost to anyone else. Otherwise, there would be scarcity of something. Which means they don’t need anyone to do anything. So they don’t actually need anyone to crew the starships. The crew must be there for the fun of it.
If your society needs people to do things for other people, you don’t live in a post scarcity society.
@ad9, a “post-scarcity society” is not literally one where you can ask for, say, three galaxies and get them. It’s one where the basics of human survival – food, water, living space, clothing, medical care, probably something I’ve forgotten – are all **freely and readily available**. No-one, no-one at all, needs to worry about starving or freezing or not having a place to sleep or dying of an infected rat bite. That’s the radical difference to all of human history and prehistory.
People doing things for other people will still happen. Anyone who truly wants both unlimited resources and total avoidance of other people could plug themselves into a really good VR system.
Oh, and in the Culture by Iain Banks the warships are fully sentient AIs, and any human crew are along just for curiousity or fun.
@ad9 Scifihughf has hit the nail on its head. Post-scarcity simply means that the basics of human survival are freely available to everyone without individual cost or object.
Roughly totting up the cost of essentials against global production capacity we’re perilously close to being able to produce a post-scarcity society now (were that global production capacity be dedicated to the goal of feeding/clothing/housing everyone). That doesn’t mean that everyone can just down tools, stop doing what they’re doing, and go play badminton for the rest of their lives. Stuff still needs to get done. It just means you can’t hang ‘starvation’ and ‘exposure to the elements’ over peoples heads as a motivational tool for the unpleasant stuff.
And that’s specifically the interesting thought experiment that occurred to me. If you can’t motivate people through restriction of essentials, how do you motivate people to do stuff they don’t really want to do (e.g. man a warfleet…which evidently is still required in the Trek universe given the near-complete lack of autonomous vessels).
The Federation’s solution seems to be ‘lie’. Or at least ‘be economical with the truth’. ‘No citizens, you see, it’s not a warfleet patrolling the perimeter. It’s an…errr…exploration fleet gathering…errr…vital scientific information on all of these space anomalies. Here, better take a full compliment of weapons-grade warheads with you just in case’.
The Klingons’ solution seems to be ‘it’s deeply honourable to serve us aboard a warbird…and you wouldn’t want to be dishonourable would you? You know what happens to dishonourable people don’t you?’.
The Romulans’ solution seems to be ‘it’s terribly important to be the highest status person in the room, and
Each of these produce some quite interesting side-effects from the perspective of a central military command trying to pull together a warfleet from a citizenry that’s got very little direct motivation to go join one.
1. The Klingons appear to generate no small number of complete and total morons from a tactical perspective, repeatedly valuing honour over tactical advantage.
2. The Federation appears to be beset with continual insubordination and outright mutiny when vessels are tasked with doing something even slightly outside the purview of ‘we’re nice guys doing peaceful exploration’.
3. The Romulans also seem to beset with continual insubordination and outright mutiny, but largely through internal scheming and backstabbing.
Viewed through the lens of states fighting with the armies/warfleets their societies can produce it seems like a fascinating depiction of how states might struggle to leverage effective military capacity in a post-scarcity situation.
Starfleet does actually emphasize its exploration role though, and the stated ideals of star fleet do bias its recruits to embody those ideals. For one piece of evidence, every time star fleet builds a warship it’s immensely more effective than their peacetime ships; the Abrams movie shows one example where a bridge crew can basically command the entire ship, which is capable of shredding a peer capital ship in seconds, and deep space nine has the defiant which routinely punched above its weight. Point being, starfleet warships are exceedingly dangerous in a way their other ships aren’t.
So it’s obvious that if starfleet is just lying to get people to go into space they’d be doing a much better job of designing warships. They also intentionally avoid certain technologies, like cloaking, that would fit this goal.
When starfleet actually needs to motivate its population it goes with “serve or we all die”, which is a good one. We see this fervor motivating the militarization of star fleet. Even then the main timeline goes in a direction that makes clear this is a defensive fleet, as the defiant sacrifices operational range to an extent, with less redundancy for crew and non replicated supplies than a traditional galaxy class despite a similar warp core and armament.
In the Abrams verse the Vengeance showcases another approach; the size is kept large, with lots of weapons and power, but without sacrificing storage. The trade off here is damage control and oversight, as the ship is automated. Notably, the Abrams ship was designed *by rogue elements*, which defied starfleets philosophical backing, whereas the defiant was not and hence represents a development of that philosophy.
In fact I’d say the defiant is basically a synthesis of the Klingon and Federation philosophy into a more stable form. There’s a dedicated navy formed by motivated volunteers who are making a sacrifice to the greater good out of obligation, earning respect and cultural honor in turn, which is expected to operate in a close intercept role around the homeland.
As a final word it actually doesn’t make much sense to judge starfleet for having a bunch of torpedos on board their ships, because the torpedos are a renewable resource in normal operation, being fueled by miniature versions of the warp drive; if you have fuel you can make weapons. The complicated outer components can be replicated.
The only actual limited resources are the crystals which regulate antimatter reactions and the antimatter and matter that fuel them, and Federation planetary grids can synthesize both (albeit not to an unlimited degree). Hence if you have a fueled warp core you have unlimited weapons. Plus the warp core itself is a suicide bomb, obviously. This both explains why warp travel is a key milestone (if you’re using a warp drive you are definitionally a threat and can also definitionally defend yourself) and why starfleet sees no conflict with arming it’s ships, every ship is already armed. If anything the torpedos and phasers are just a *reduced threat* compared to yeeting the warp core at a target.
“It’s worth noting that Starfleet are at least a mostly post-scarcity society, so no-one’s getting paid to do anything.”
“Post-scarcity simply means that the basics of human survival are freely available to everyone”
It would seem that either no one in the Federation gets more than “the basics of human survival”, or those sentences contradict each other. Is a holiday on Risa really part of “the basics of human survival”? If not, how do you get one?
I feel the problem here is that the show merely declares that no one in the Federation uses money any more, and then has no idea how to depict how such a society might both work, and be an attractive place to live.
It is hard to depict an attractive society in which no one is ever rewarded for doing anything; yet if people are rewarded in some fashion, they are clearly being paid by the reward. Of course, it might be that rewards in the Federation are paid in kind rather than in cash, but it is hard to see why that is so much better than being paid in cash.
I think Starfleet relies heavily on a self-selection process where certain crews become combat specialists.
A podcast suggested that in the TOS era, the reason the Enterprise gets to do all the exciting stuff is because every other crew is hopeless. In Wrath of Khan the USS Reliant gets captured by a double digit number of future hippies who don’t even have guns. (OK, genetically engineered super hippies, but still.) In Search for Spock the command crew of another Starfleet ship see a Klingon warship decloaking, do nothing, see the Klingon ship opening fire, and are presumably still debating if they should do something when the ship explodes.
Star Trek Lower Decks, set post Voyager/DS9, has the USS Titan commanded by Riker, which seems to have replaced the Enterprise as Starfleets designated troubleshooter. The crew are all adrenalin junkies, with the show depicting lead character Ensign Boimler getting a prized transfer to the Titan, and then being constantly terrified and unable to understand why everyone else is so upbeat to be in dangerous situations.
Presumably in a major conflict the rest of Starfleet starts listening to and emulating these successful crews.
@ad9 “It would seem that either no one in the Federation gets more than “the basics of human survival”, or those sentences contradict each other.”
I can see how those two might look contradictory out of context. The context is that you were stating: “On the face of it the Federation is a post-scarcity society…which means they don’t need anyone to do anything.”
I was trying to expose that this is a leap of logic that doesn’t track. There is a lot of space between ‘a society is post-scarcity’ and ‘no-one needs to do any work to make the whole thing function’. Presumably, the Federation is somewhere in the middle of that.
Apologies if I didn’t explain my argument clearly.
“I feel the problem here is that the show merely declares that no one in the Federation uses money any more, and then has no idea how to depict how such a society might work.”
I broadly agree, but not having it explained to us we’re left to speculate from what we do know.
1. The Federation is depicted as post-scarcity (but not to the point of being able to abandon the need for people to do things)
2. No-one uses money for anything anymore
From that I speculated that if I were tasked with the defence of the Federation (which according to the show requires a lot of clandestine off-the-books questionable stuff that your average Federation citizen doesn’t much like doing, and relatively little ‘everyone needs to muck in or we’re all dead’ easily-motivated simple wars)…I’d probably find it difficult to recruit enough people to Starfleet to do it. So I’d probably try something like ‘come join Starfleet’s exploratory mission…never mind the photon torpedoes, they’re for your safety’. It’s the equivalent of ‘Join the army, see the world’…but a little more obscured.
That’s not saying that the whole exploratory mission is a complete fabrication. They clearly do a lot of that as well. But it could serve a double-purpose.
“Is a holiday on Risa really part of “the basics of human survival”? If not, how do you get one?…it is hard to see why that is so much [different] than being paid in cash.”
I agree that that’s something to consider, and that we don’t really have enough information to say one way or the other.
@Terry “Starfleet does actually emphasize its exploration role though”
Oh absolutely. The things can do double-duty though. And it’s far from unusual for armies on campaign (or patrol) to bring their cultural baggage with them.
It was mainly just a fun little speculation about what I would try to do if I was tasked with the Federation’s defence and given a bunch of hopeless idealists that I can’t coax into joining the army by paying them. Personally I can sympathise with some of those exasperated admirals that *know* what they’re doing is kinda sketchy, but still feel it’s necessary for the security of the Federation…and then Kirk sabotages the entire thing (putting Lord knows how many lives at risk).
Not that I actually hold that view. One of the things I love about Trek is its idealism. I’m just able to put myself into the shoes of someone on the other side of that as a thought experiment.
“For one piece of evidence, every time star fleet builds a warship it’s immensely more effective than their peacetime ships”
Yeah I did think about that. Even if you ignore the Abrams interpretations (which I tend to), examples like the Defiant and some of the excellent storylines about Mbenga and Nurse Chapel in Discovery show that the Federation on a war footing is a different beast entirely.
However, we also know that the Klingons went toe-to-toe with the Federation on its war footing just fine. Yet both of them keep flying oodles of regular manned missions on vessels with boatloads of crew, rather than mass-producing fleets of nasty-little-Defiants.
To my mind, the most parsimonious explanation for those two seemingly contradictory things is that the various powers are in a sort of ‘immediately pre-Dreadnaught’ situation, but have actually held the line beforehand. Perhaps they *know* that if they start producing Defiant-equivalents en-masse they’ll end up obsoleting what seem to be fairly considerable fleets, so a gentleman’s agreement is reached (and then breached during the Klingon War, before being settled upon again). It’s a bit weak, but I’m just speculating (likely on something that the show-runners didn’t really think through the implications of).
“When starfleet actually needs to motivate its population it goes with “serve or we all die”, which is a good one.”,/i>
It’s a good one when you’ve got a war narrative that’s nice and simple. But that seems to happen extremely infrequently compared to the shadier, covert, off-the-books, slightly questionable manoeuvring that our protagonists are perpetually asked to engage in by command (and seems to get routinely messed about with by insubordinate crews).
Either everyone in Starfleet believes in their mission wholeheartedly…except the folks giving the orders. Or there’s a bigger game afoot that our protagonists only really get a little glimpse into.
And I’ll note that none of this is incompatible with a Starfleet that is deeply moral, idealistic, and genuinely interested in exploring and scientific discovery. It’s just that, by the looks of things, they’re also required to do some shady stuff in a bit of a ‘cold war balance of powers’ way to ensure their state security.
Heck, a changeling manages to build a supernova bomb from what appears to be reasonably common industrial components, and this isn’t some kind of super-science thing but a known hazard in a “Wait, we’re missing Tekasite and Protomatter… Oh shit.” kind of way.
Which actually brings up a good point. There’s almost zero technical control of limited resources in Star trek. There are only four major non limited goods, dilithium crystals, which regulate antimatter, antimatter for matter anti matter reactions, Trilithium which can stop fusion, and Latinum which is useless except as a financial asset. Almost everything else can be replicated, even if it’s not economical to do so.
There are a few others that can be replicated but are kept rare, such as pharmaceuticals that need careful handling and replication or are too complicated to replicate safely. Or are banned for being too dangerous, like fucking tribbles and other living creatures.
As an aside, yes, programmed restrictions for replicators are explicitly noted. No weapons, living things, or poisons by default, but it’s not a technical limitation.
This leaves an absolute plethora of ways to turn a replicator into a weapon of mass destruction if you can bypass these restrictions. And, of course, all warp drives are anti matter bombs.
Nothing to add but I loved this comment.
The Prime Directive only applies to pre-warp societies. It doesn’t apply to warp-capable civilizations, let alone peer competitors.
The Federation may have somewhat similar reasons for not trying to wage liberation wars against “undesirable” warp-capable cultures, but the Prime Directive has nothing to do with it.
You’re right about the prime directive, though I agree that it’s likely an extension of a deeper ideological position that likely applies to peer conflicts as well, considering the weight that’s applied to it.
I’ve taken the Prime Directive to mean that pre-warp cultures are left alone so that the Federation doesn’t end up playing God, or creating neo-colonialism, or doesn’t just meddle with the best of intentions leading to tragic consequences. By the time a culture develops warp drive it has the power one way or another to destroy itself, and if it doesn’t it means that it has found some sort of equilibrium. As a practical matter warp drive is taken as the dividing line because pre-warp cultures can be left isolated from interstellar relations, whereas once they have the ability to initiate contact they have to be dealt with.
I mean, the shows cannot make up their mind what the Prime Directive means in practice!
Like @Ynneadwraith says, it seems the Federation has a strong “non-interference” principle, even if it’s honoured mostly in the breach by The Heroic Protagonists of the shows.
It’s actually a more nebulous non interference directive; there are two parts, a semi absolute part regarding pre warp cultures, and a less concrete one ordering star fleet officers to respect all other cultures and avoid interfering in their social development.
Star fleet never honors this in practice, but as Picard says it’s a philosophy of non interference, based on the understanding that meddling with less advanced cultures never ends well even when undertaken with the best of intentions.
Some early TOS stories make this message explicit; Kirk has to unfuck a pre warp civilization an observer named John Gill accidentally turned into literal nazis, after Gill tried to make their society more efficient.
Based on the myth of Nazi super-efficiency resulting from honour by association.
Really looking forward to this series! It’s one of those subjects that has been buzzing around in the back of my mind for a long time, so it’s great to see our host breaking it down.
One minor quibble, I’d personally classify slave-armies as a subset of the employment principle rather than the vocational one. While its true that they become soldiers because they’re slaves, crucially they stay soldiers because they’re being paid.
More broadly, I find that emphasizing their enslavement tends to pack a bunch of unhelpful assumptions with modern audiences, and its actually better (albeit still an oversimplification) if people envision of them as “professional armies with an unusually cruel recruitment system”.
I don’t know. In the Song Dynasty the “soldiers are getting paid” principle kind of broke down among the de facto enslaved army. The soldiers often weren’t paid, and weren’t even supplied with food- they were expected to grow their own. What kept them in the ranks wasn’t that they were being well compensated or even compensated at all. It was that the government was a massive bureaucracy (one of the most sophisticated of pre-industrial history) which could actually make credible threats like “we will tattoo you so everyone knows you’re a soldier, and if you desert from your unit the local cops will round you up and kill you, there is literally nowhere you can go in all of China where you’d be safe.”
If this sounds like a system that produces either ineffective armies, or armies that have to be painstakingly kept ineffective by the central government for fear that they’ll revolt against such bad treatment… Well, you’re right, and that’s one of the reasons the Song Dynasty collapsed.
The Baldur’s Gate we see in BG3 seems to have centralised power – Gortash is able to fit himself onto the top of it without any rearrangement. He doesn’t seem able to arrest random adventurers without good cause, but I think that’s a matter of legitimacy. Most of the other centres of force have to operate covertly.
I have a feeling that the model for fantasy cities with multiple centres of force is something like Shakespeare’s Verona: the Montagues and Capulets have enough power to wage a feud with each other; the Prince can halt a fight but can’t arrest anyone who hasn’t actually killed someone.
But neither Montagues nor Capulets could put an army in the field.
Baldur’s Gate’s constitution varies a bit on exactly when in time you’re talking about but Gortash manages to basically parley the Absolute emergency (that he caused) into being granted well, emergency powers. Generally speaking its a fairly conventional city-state with a series of elected dukes (the Council of Four) ruling collectively (the Grand Duke is normally a first-among-equals who gets to break deadlocks)
The origin story is that the first dukes were pirate captains who refused to pay the tolls for entering the city and instead took it over and made themselves the leaders.
This feels like a throw back to the ACOUP of old, where world building was a common theme. It’s nice to have a positivist “how to do things” once in a awhile rather than “how they do it wrong”.
I wonder if one of the later parts will delve into equipment type, and if the trop that:
Urban recruits tend to become heavy infantry
Rural peasants light infantry
Rural elites heavy cavalry
Pastoralists heavy cavalry
is as true as it superficially looks to me
Well, since you’re going by the name “Polybius,” fairness compels me to point out as a counterexample, uh, Rome. Where the bulk of the legions of the Roman Republic were recruited from landholding peasants rich enough to afford a suit of chain mail, and were kind of the poster boys for heavy infantry. Not that the legions didn’t recruit actual residents of the city of Rome proper along with the farmers, I’m sure, but it’s not as if the farmers all became javelin-chuckers and the city boys became the heavy infantry.
Insofar as what you say is correct about infantry, I think it’s because in most societies the rural peasantry is taxed heavily enough, and kept from amassing enough land, to the point where they literally cannot personally afford heavy infantry equipment reliably. Which makes it hard for them to fight as heavy infantry without something like the Saxon fyrd, wherein every X households pool their resources to support one well equipped infantryman.
Yes, I should have been more specific. While legionaries were mostly land owning farmers (in the republic), Roman society as a whole was still city centric. Even those who didn’t live in an urban centre were politically and economically linked to a city or colonia or municipia. Same thing with Greek hoplites, but not with somewhere like Crete that was highly deurbanised and famously produced archers.
I guess I was thinking less of where people lived, but of the relative political importance of cities Vs countryside.
I would probably say pastoralists are light cavalry, simply because heavy cavalry worthy of the name has to be armoured and pastoralists by definition don’t have mines and forges to make armor.
Oops, yes, that was a typo, last line was indeed meant to be light cavalry
Pedantic point: most nomad armies had a core of medium cavalry, armoured and on heavier horses ( these were the nobles, of course). Nomad empires always included areas like the Urals and the Altai, where agriculture and metalworking were usual. Often empires started in these areas (eg Turks in the Altai, Magyars in the Urals).
Nomad empires always included areas like the Urals and the Altai, where agriculture and metalworking were usual. Often empires started in these areas (eg Turks in the Altai, Magyars in the Urals).
Right, and in the African context you could also add the close relationship between the pastoralist Fulani and the agriculturalist Hausa.
Plus, in general, pastoralists are going to be able to *buy* armor from settled peoples, since they have easy access to high value goods (meat, wool, hides, possibly milk, and if you’re talking about cattle, then draft labour as well) that agriculturalists tend to want.
What do you mean by “close relationship”? The Fulani have a much larger extent than the Hausa.
There is some land near Lake Baikal suitable for intense agriculture. This is within the area of the tribal coalition which gave rise to the Mongol Empire. Even today the vicinity of Lake Baikal is partially inhabited by the Buryats speaking a language related to Mongolian. They exist as a minority within Mongolia too.
@Lena,
Yes, the Fulani extend over a much bigger area (and established states in many non-Hausa areas), but the biggest and most influential of their states were in Northern Nigeria where they had close interaction w/ the Hausa.
If I understand it correctly the Hausa primarily live in northern Nigeria and southern Niger. I think they are in local majority in large parts of this area.
You have mentioned here and previously about the issues of not having a bureaucracy, but I’ve never been entirely clear, what is actually needed to create one? What do you need to be able to administer a larger area? Is it literacy? Legitimacy that you have the right to involve yourself in those decisions far away? Wealth enough to pay for it? Or is there more that I’m missing?
Also, I adapted the Select Levy for a fantasy RPG I run, where instead of one armed soldier per a certain number of households, it’s one literate member who can then be trained in magic (literacy being required to be a wizard in this world), magic makes it easier to get hold of writing than it was in our world at the time, but not as easy as the printing press made it, so this seemed a reasonable level of imposition.
Not just literacy, a high level of education would be necessary. There is also political resistance by local Big Men when the central government is trying to impose its will with bureaucrats. And simply the societal knowledge to create a permanent bureaucracy is non-obvious. Should you use tax form 3B/A-R or 66F?
One interesting element of local Big Men’s resistance to a central government- something that is real or relevant to the Big Men on the ground even if it seems a bit odd to us or even just an excuse- has to do with status. In most decentralized societies, a Big Man local landowner socially outranks nearly everyone else around him. The bureaucrat is fairly likely to be the son of a peasant, or at ‘best’ the son of some townsman or something. If the Big Man is being told to do things by this “jumped-up peasant” it may well violate his sense of his own status in the community. And since much of that status comes from prestige, him being seen to obey the dictates of a bureaucrat can further undermine him. This contributes to the local aristocracy’s multiple incentives to disrupt the formation of a centralized state bureaucracy. Any such bureaucracy, simply by existing, makes hereditary aristocratic titles and legal status less valuable, by creating an alternate path to power in society that frankly cares a lot less about who your great-grandfathers were.
” If the Big Man is being told to do things by this “jumped-up peasant” it may well violate his sense of his own status in the community.”
True, but most people are unhappy about someone else getting a new way to order them around regardless. The Big Man will be no happier about the Bigger Man finding a way to micromanage him, than the Little Men are happy about the Big Man finding a way to micromanage them.
Except a Big Man being ordered around by a Bigger Man still confirms the legitimacy of Bigness. If you’re a Baron and you’re getting bossed around by a Count or Duke, you accept it (if sometimes grudgingly) because the system that puts the Count above you is the same that puts you above the peasants. Questioning it would mean questioning your own authority and everything that defines you.
Whereas, if you’re a Baron being bossed around by a royal bureaucrat who may or may not be noble, but at any rate doesn’t get his authority *from* his personal noble bloodline, that’s different. That’s a competing, potentially threatening claim to legitimacy and power.
Ad9, I’m not saying you disagree with me about this, but I want to make it specific. What I’m talking about here isn’t the idea that local oligarchs (“big men”) have to defer to more powerful regional oligarchs or monarchs (“bigger men.”) What I’m referring to is the fact that in the process of bureaucratizing and turning a proto-state institution into a state, it becomes necessary for the rulers to be able to issue orders and impelment regulation, not by personal decree, but by empowering institutions.
The baron may not like it if the king tells him to his face “do this and that,” and finds a way to enforce it, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
The baron may not like it if the king writes him a certified letter that clearly and unambiguously is a personal order from the king himself telling him to do something and finding a way to enforce it. That’s not what I’m talking about either, not entirely.
What I’m talking about is the case where the baron is getting told “you must do this” or “you can’t do that,” not by the king personally or even by a direct message personally sent by the king, but by some clever peasant boy who is now a senior clerk in the king’s bureaucracy. That is going to rub the baron the wrong way, specifically, in a way that may help to explain why elites opposed centralizing state power from their own perspective, even when they acknowledged formally that the king actually had the kind of power to do these things and considered themselves loyal to the king.
Because they conceive that loyalty as a personal relationship with the guy on the throne, not some kind of sacred obligation to do the bidding of an upjumped peasant waving a clipboard under their nose.
Certain European nations, for instance, squared this particular circle by automatically giving the bureaucrats noble titles in their own right, so that there would be at least that much of a face-saving measure for the existing nobility. France during Louis XIV’s period developed a whole new aristocracy “of the robe” to go with the medieval aristocratic class “of the sword.” The Russians had a loosely comparable approach of granting formal titles to sufficiently senior bureaucrats too, though I can’t rattle off the details without doing research.
The Sun King actually did something good for France. By making them work for him instead of fighting each other he considerably decreased violence in the country.
When I think about it ennobling competent administrators may explain why the nobility consisted more than one percent of Frence’ population by the outbreak of the French Revolution. Absolute monarchs ennobling people they liked could not have been common enough to explain this.
The counterpoint to this are the late Roman and Chinese empires. In both, bureaucratic office conferred power and prestige and as eagerly sought after by landowners – not least because having a close relative in the tax office was helpful when assessment time came around.
This seems like more like Big Men adapting to the system, not favoring it and may still resent it.
It was more that bureaucracy was a parallel – and prestigious – career track. Ditto the church (also a bureaucracy). One cousin a bishop, another a clarissimus and the family is well set.
You aren’t wrong, but it is also the case that rich people throughout history are remarkably consistent in their desire to lower taxes on rich people and will frequently destroy important state structures, including infrastructure vital to their own existence, if it will reduce the state’s capacity for taking or even justification in asking for taxes on them.
They might imagine they could do without this infrastructure. Some present-day super-rich certainly do.
Literacy is a must, many medieval schools and universities were created by rulers for this reason (e.g., the university of Naples was founded by Frederick II to train bureaucrats needed for his emprie).
Also, any bureaucracy has an agency problem and if your bureaucrats *only* want to enrich themselves, the whole thing will collapse very fast. So you also need an ideology that puts the state/common good above the bureaucrat’s family/clan.
Technically it’s not a must, though it certainly helps: The Incas clearly had a bureaucracy but not writing. (though quipu could be used for recordkeeping it’s not really a written language) and that’s the crucial bit.
Quipu is a form of proto-writing. You can make a table out of strings if there is a common agreement on what the different materials, knots and possibly colours are for.
Would it make sense to generalize to “bureaucracy requires some form of record-keeping outside of the human mind”?
Yes, you can’t have any bureaucracy without at least proto-writing:
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/futurelang.php#id–Futuristic_Human_Language–Future_Alphabet–No_Written_Language
Well, it’s not black and white – having a record keeping system helps even if it’s still full-fledged writing. I imagine that being able to write down and transmit stories – rather than just quantities of goods – makes for a more effective ideology and hence bureacracy
Quipu is ‘not written language’ in the same way ASL is ‘not spoken language.’ Technically correct, but not meaningfully correct.
I’m interested in quipu. Do we know enough to be confident that any concept which can be expressed in spoken language could be expressed using quipu?
Simon Jester: AFAIK, *theoretically* yes, but it is unclear if the andean peoples ever did so.
There’s also the rather hazy distinction between when something is a mnemonic aid and when it encodes the full set of information (not just a problem with qiupu but also some mesoamerican texts, though not mayan ones, those are fully logo-syllabaric scripts)
Simon, I don’t know, but I regularly find that when a colonized technology is described as being deficient in some way that description is tendentious and false.
So, I’m curious if that ideology idea basically links to Bret’s previous talks about legitimacy. Essentially, if you think it is legitimate that you do that work for the common good, that’s the same as having an ideology that promotes you working for the common good. Very curious how Bret would see it in terms of modern thinking vs ancient thinking.
This is what things like Confucianism are for. Originally, it was a political ideology rather than a religion.
Just want to point out that Confucianism is never a religion. It was (and still is) always a political ideology and later a socio-political belief. But not religion – “civil religion” is only an analogy, not a definition; “belief” is different from “religion”.
The only religionized case of Confucianism is in Indonesia where they have a organized religion-version of Confucianism, the Confucian Church of Indonesia (which only developed in 1920s-1960s).
Probably to get legal benefits from calling itself an organised religion.
@Lena,
It’s a little more complicated than that. Indonesia’s constitution and official state ideology have since independence prescribed “Belief in One God”, i.e. all Indonesians are expected to belong to a monotheistic religion. WHile it’s not *illegal* to be a polytheist or animist or atheist, it is officially discouraged at some level (although i think they’ve liberalized a bit on that more recently). This created pressure on, say, Hindu authorities to redefine their religion as monotheistic, on various animist religions to redefine themselves as broadly “Hindu”, and presumably on practicioners of Chinese Folk Beliefs to move themselves more in the direction of what Muslims or Christians would recognize as a “real” religion as well.
Though @8roomsofelixir indicates this process happened earlier starting in the 1920s, so i’m sure it’s more complicated than that.
Is the view of the different Hindu gods as aspects of God a modern idea? Or does it exist in writing from Antiquity or the Middle Ages?
@Lena,
It’s not modern, it’s at least medieval. It’s never been universal or normative though (there are not many things that are really “normative” in the Christian sense), it’s one perspective among others.
Really, I wish people would stop thinking about Hinduism as a single religion and use a term more like “South Asian Folk Religion” instead, similarly to how we talk about Chinese Folk Religion or European paganism etc., with no implication that it’s a single religion with shared views.
As a friend of mine put it, the Brahmin in a monastery meditating on the essential unity of all things, and the person in the village making sacrifices to the goddess of sickness and healing so that their child won’t get sick, aren’t in any meaningful sense practicing the same religion, and probably don’t have the same actual beliefs, even if they in some sense venerate the same sacred literature (Puranas, etc.) and have some shared cultural practices (not eating beef, etc., although even that can be overstated). “Hinduism” was historically a term mostly applied by outside observers.
One point is that an “ideology” may take many forms. For instance, the “ideology” can to some extent be replaced by means of enforcing honesty and rectitude.
It is very bad if your tax collector starts enriching himself by taking 50% more taxes than the state is owed, then pocketing the difference. But this can be prevented, not just by trying to convince the tax collector to believe he is working for the greater good and should care about that, but also by trying to convince the tax collector that if he steals he’ll almost certainly get caught and horribly punished by the god he swore an oath to. Or by the imperial inquisition, which has magical lie detectors and the power to force you to sit in a chair and answer questions. And so on.
Absent such an ideology, many pre-modern and early modern states tried to make the bureaucrat’s greed work *for* them, through the practice of tax farming. Literally sell the office of tax collector to the highest bidder, who is then – implicitly or explicitly – allowed to pocket whatever else he thinks he can squeeze out of the citizens, on top of the sum he’s promised to raise for the government. Examples range from the Romans all the way to the Dutch Republic and pre-revolutionary France.
(This understandably tends to make the tax collector absolutely reviled among the population, but perhaps from the perspective of the authorities, it’s actually positive to have a focal figure for public hate who is not you?)
Or in the case of occupied peoples like the Judeans, the tax farmer is a quisling who’s getting rich off the subjugation of his own people.
On a similar note, the word “sheriff” (like the Sheriff of Nottingham) was derived from “shire reeve”, as in the guy who went about the shire and harvested taxes and dues from the peasantry like a farmer harvesting wheat.
>You have mentioned here and previously about the issues of not having a bureaucracy, but I’ve never been entirely clear, what is actually needed to create one?
Well, the pressure to create one was enough to lead to the invention of writing at least twice (Mesopotamia and Egypt), possibly four times (add China and Mesoamerica). Maybe five, jury is out on the Indus Valley script-or-not. Plus a number of societies that reached the immediate pre/proto-writing stage (West Africa, Andes).
So the need for a bureaucracy in sufficiently complex societies is great enough that they’ll literally invent complex sets of abstract symbols to run it. Repeatedly.
So the first thing we can say is that there is an immense pressure to create a bureaucracy. It’s not so much that it has to be forced to exist, it will make itself exist.
The form the bureaucracy takes is of course a different matter. You get temples running their own businesses but also having to answer to the state (Mesopotamia/Egypt), which can however devolve and spread into the common population if the state loses interest in centralisation (Amorite/Kassite periods). Medieval Europe had a very unusual case where the church took up a great deal of the bureaucracy that the fragmented worldly authorities couldn’t handle (Food for thought: How much institutional damage/loss would occur if you removed the church from the early and high medieval era?). This may or may not have resulted in a stronger bureaucratic presence than is normal in such fragmented societies.
Tokugawa Japan was relatively centralised (well, the Daimyo stopped fighting each other for a while, at least), yet it somewhat unusually outsourced a lot of its bureaucracy down to individual villages (which caused Japan to have a ~50% literacy rate in 1800, three times higher than China’s; just the consequence of forcing the peasants to do their own accounting/taxes).
A bureaucracy is so fundamentally necessary, it basically creates itself ex nihilo. To the point of people inventing abstract communications systems out of nowhere just to have it.
The form this bureaucracy takes otoh, can be immensely variable, and at a glance, has surprisingly much to do with human decisions – very similar socio-economic environments can still lead to very different outcomes.
Fully developed writing systems have been independently invented three times. Once in the Middle East, once in China and once in Mesoamerica.
I personally lean towards Egyptian writing being independently developed, but regardless of one’s stance on that particular matter, the point here is not the development of writing as such, but /why/ the development of writing. Specifically, instances where writing was developed specifically to deal with bureaucratic challenges.
We can see this very clearly with cuneiform, which was developed entirely to deal with bureaucratic/accounting challenges. Egyptian (specifically hieratic) isn’t meaningfully different, although we don’t see intermediate steps as clearly as we do with cuneiform.
For Chinese, the evidence for a bureaucratic origin is AFAIK less clear cut, and it’s entirely invisible for us for the Mayan script (paper and rainforest, not ideal for preservation).
The area of the Ancient Mayan civilisation is actually quite seasonal. We are talking about distinct wet and dry seasons here. However, you are right in that something similar to paper would not last that long in the hot, moist climate. Our scarce contemporary sources to the Ancient Mayans are inscriptions in stone or written or ceramic.
We know there were Mesoamerican codices because we have accounts of them being sought out and destroyed.
We have plenty of mesoamerican writing, and yes, including codices. One of those factoids is that we have more classical nahua writings than classical greek ones.
I’m not sure I’d all ‘Four’ ‘Plenty’.
But that aside, none of them concern themselves with bureaucratic matters, and none show the earliest periods of Maya writing that’d let us understand the factors that led to its development, so I really don’t understand the point you’re trying to make.
There are hundreds of preserved Mesoamerican documents. However, I think they were all written in the last few generations before Spanish conquest.
@Lena ..and in the decades afterwards. There are some fascinating ‘mixed methods’ writing that blends Mesoamerican and Spanish styles and conventions.
Hundreds of codices. This is quite distinct from hundreds of written documents, since barring the aforementioned handful of Mayan ones, none of the pre-colonial codices contain any writing. There’s an argument to be made that they contain proto-writing, but they’re not texts that can be read exactly, but rather pictographs to be interpreted in one’s own words.
And again, to my knowledge, none of them contain ‘bureaucratic’ information and thus weren’t used for accounting or inventory purposes.
Which leads into somewhat esoteric debates (if it was proto-writing that could’ve developed into a full writing system, there’s clearly a path other than bureaucratic accounting that can lead to writing; if we treat bureaucratic accounting as a requirement to ‘push’ for writing, they weren’t proto-writing, but a dead end), but that’s neither here nor there. Point being, aside from pre-colonial non-Mayan codices not containing a full script, we don’t see anything suggesting a bureaucratic/accounting origin for any of the Mesoamerican maybe-proto-scripts, nor for their one actual script.
Which is why they’re listed under ‘Maybe’ in the original comment, because that comment is about writing originating from bureaucratic/accounting pressure. Writing systems that came to be through some other means need not apply.
I think there is preserved Aztec proto-writing listing what goods they demanded from the peoples they had conquered. There is also similarly preserved information on the area and soil types of cultivated fields.
Incidentally on the Japan note, I think people vastly overestimate how easy pulling a Meiji was. Japan’s literacy rate was 3 times that of China or Korea, themselves rather higher than pretty much anywhere else outside the West. It was the third-most populous non-European country for good measure. Really it had such a huge advantage in becoming an industrialized non-European descent great power than anyone else. And even Japan was only slightly more industrialized in absolute (less in per-capita) than Italy, weakest of the Great Powers, by WWII…
Now we certainly could have more Thailands or Ethiopias, that is much easier then becoming a post-Industrial Revolution country.
Thailand is a mid-income country and Ethiopia a low-income one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index
That’s sort of my point. Becoming an industrialized country is hard, surviving colonization is a much lower threshold. But they are not necessarily much more prosperous than neighbors that were colonized.
Some other countries have managed to industrialize since Japan but they are mostly other East Asian states. Literacy tends to correlated with functional, stable government, human capital, and economic sophistication. Since 1800 literacy rates have been *more* predictive for future growth than current GDP. That probably traces even earlier, East Asia and Europe have been the world regions with the highest literacy rates since the late Middle Ages.
Extrapolating that forward, I would say it is a good sign particularly for Latin America, who have finally largely closed the literacy gap with the developed world.* Conversely, Subsaharan Africa, particularly the Sahel, has tended to fall behind other developing countries the last 50 years and if anything that probably accelerates.
*Even the most prosperous Latin American countries were still basically resource economies. Argentina’s literacy rate in the 1930s (already a significant improvement) was about the same as the US in 1775…
I think Ethiopia escaped colonialism due to its scarcity of resources. It does have good land for growing coffee (this plant originated there). But the colonialists ether did not knew, did not care or did not consider it worth the effort.
@Hastings,
The interesting thing is that Thailand and Ethiopia both became sort-of imperial states in their own right (subjugating Lao and to a smaller extent Malay peoples in the first case, and all of the surrounding peoples in the second: it’s interesting that Ethiopia is one of the few countries where the official language today is *one* native language, but not the *biggest* native language, because the Amhara were the conquering, state forming group in spite of being a bit outnumbered by the Oromo). It really underscores the point that I think Bret has made here before, that the war-of-conquest game is not really something you can opt out of on moral grounds, it creates a negative sum equilibrium that rewards aggression. If wars of conquest are acceptable, then that creates strong pressure on everyone to expand to the extent possible to avoid being swallowed up by *other* expanding polities.
The Lao people are divided between Thailand and the independent state of Laos. The later is a former French colony.
@Lena,
Modern day Laos was a Thai possession before the French took it, and there actually more ethnic Lao people in Thailand than in Laos (which seems to be partially a legacy of enslavement and deportations).
Thailand was allowed to remain independent as a buffer state between British and French colonies. Seems like France still took a fair chunk out of the east of the country.
I’m going old school here, but according to Max Weber, you need a large, stable empire to endure for a decently long time for a bureaucracy to develop. He sees bureaucracies as an alternative to personalistic power. Bureaucracy, you create set of positions based on division of labor and a chain of command. Bureaucrats are slotted into the positions and they are loyal to the bureaucracy, rather than to the specific people above them. It’s a much more efficient system than born based on personalistic ties, since the latter is constantly affected by personal relational drama. (And, you know, your patron dying.)
However, in an unstable, potentially violent society, it makes much more sense for people to build personal connections to powerful people with resources. As long as that’s the case For most people, it’s difficult for a political leader to establish a bureaucracy. With increased ability and decreased risk of violence, however, it starts making sense for elites to replace personalistic systems with bureaucratic systems because they are more efficient and meritocratic.
There are a few social differences that come to mind, between your system and the fyrd or other select levy systems, by the way.
First, equipping one lad from one of several households to be a soldier in the fyrd provided no immediate benefits to the households in peacetime or even, necessarily, in wartime (barring the soldier finding some choice piece of loot and bringing it home with him to share out among Our Mam and his other benefactors, and this is offset by the risk that he won’t come home at all or will come home unable to work on the farm).
By contrast, depending on what magic does in your setting, having a magician, even a weak one, who is beholden and friendly to your small community of a few households banded together may be very valuable. This changes the calculations as to how hard you have to try to force people to get their kids into the “learn to read” schools.
Another point is that the arms needed for a soldier of the ‘select levy’ were generally things that could be maintained by village-level specialists. A spear or a shield is something that any medieval carpenter, smith, et cetera who is accustomed to working on agricultural implements will be able to make or repair. Chain mail is a bit different from what the village blacksmith is used to, but the main labor sink is making all those fiddly little rings and that is relatively low-skill work. Thus, the actual task of supporting that soldier, for the group of households, mostly came down to “make sure he’s acceptably well-fed and if any of his equipment breaks, sweet-talk the village blacksmith into fixing or replacing it.”
If all villages in your setting need to do is teach children to read, the arrangement will likely be similar- most of the kids in the magical select levy learn how to read from some literate individual in the village. Such as a priest, mindful that the priest may or may not be a magic-working individual, depending on whether religious ceremonies require magical ability to perform and how common such literal miracle workers are. The village priest, conveniently, is probably willing to take payment in the form of “one of us has him over for dinner every other night” or something along those lines, so it fits well into the local economy.
By contrast, if the “select levy” arrangement involves sending the students to centralized schools to learn, and the schools have to be paid tuition and don’t take payment in a form the village economy can directly provide (e.g. “I’ll come over and re-thatch your roof” or “have a chicken”), something interesting happens. Functionally, the “select levy” involves in effect paying a tax to the schools or whoever runs them. The fact that this tax is labeled a school tuition is window dressing; what’s actually happening is that the group of households is being pressed to send a child (whose labor is moderately valuable) and pay a tax (“tuition”) to a specific institution for a specific period of time while they learn to read (a skill of limited value to the households, unless the child then becomes a magician, which might well involve further expenses.
Another consequence is that whoever is running the schools has accumulated considerable money and power by the standards of their society, what with having a ‘royal monopoly,’ as it were, on a process that more or less mandates that everyone pay some taxes to them.
Yeah, I was imagining more the version with a literate individual or a few teaching them to read (as this system lasts, more people have that skill already), learning magic does definitely then come with that boost to your lifestyle and that of your community, but, important to note, not everyone in this version of the select levy goes on to be a magician.
Essentially, I’ve got it so that basic magic training can be quite simple, so long as you are literate. This means when the state needs wizards who can cast the basic war needed spells, they call up the levy, put them through essentially a basic training, and then take the ones who managed to get the spells down. It’s obviously all a bit more involved than the actual Fyrd or Select Levy, but I considered it plausibly so for the setting.
This does still mean a lot of people come back from war with basic magic, which is a similar idea to coming back with loot or stuff. A nice boost for the community, so long as they didn’t die. It was a nice way to make magic more available in the setting in a way that made sense to me.
Or automation has reduced labor hours so much that the average Klingon has time to imitate the warrior aristocrat’s habits, in particular Bat’leth fighting, which was already not truly warfare related anymore and primarily a status symbol. A SciFi society that expands surplus into allowing everyone to be a warrior would not be the most natural development, but it wouldn’t be entirely implausible either. Interestingly, the Klingon’s at a time of relative peace (TNG) seem more insistent on their warrior status than during a time when wars were more common (TOS). Though of course that wasn’t intended by the creators of the show to imply the warrior culture of the Klingons is partly an expression of cultural and status anxiety.
Automation doesn’t reduce labor hours; it increases them. The more your society can automate, the larger the productivity gap between directing machines and doing things by hand. You are then incentivized (through wages or other money-equivalents) to spend more time directing machines and less time playing with bat’leths.
It’s similar to the “lump of labor” fallacy. The higher wages from automation get you away from subsistence-poverty faster, and the temptation is to conclude that the wages then get you to “enough money” levels faster. But in practice there is no “enough money” point. There’s always something more you could be buying.
But part of what you’re buying is social status by doing stuff like Bat’leth practice.
But in practice there is no “enough money” point. There’s always something more you could be buying
While this is true in a sense, that people will always value money irrespective of what their standard of living is already, it’s also true that, on the whole, they value it less. This is borne out in people’s political choices, for example (which we can see from history and political science, and also from current events): the more that people’s material needs are met, the more they start valuing nonmaterial goods like, say, environmental protection, or nationalism, or religious values*, or sexual and gender self-expression, or any number of other things. But it’s also pretty clear from anthropology and from personal observation, and plays out in nonpolitical contexts as well. There’s a reason that, say, the Human Development Index linkes “development” to a log-scaled version of income (and also uses a cutoff of, apparently, $75k).
Once you have enough economic resources not to worry about survival even more does not make you much happier.
And yet in practice, industrialization has reduced average hours worked in most societies. Say, from “dawn till dusk six days a week” being the norm in Europe to something more like a 35-hour work week in much of Europe today, plus various household chores that are themselves heavily automated to take less time than they used to. You normally only see people laboring more hours, or as many hours as a pre-industrial society, in situations where there is strong top-down pressure to do it for reasons that are closely akin to survival.
(e.g. Japanese salarymen are going to have a very bad work experience and likely be first to be laid off unless they’re performatively pretending to work very long hours and also spend a significant fraction of what little leisure time they have left off drinking with the boss, American GenZ-ers are likely to end up needing to work two jobs if they want what used to be American middle-class touchstones like “being able to afford housing of reasonable size by themselves” and “able to afford to think about having kids.” These are, however, in both cases the result of specific economic structures the worker has little control over, placing them in a position where the hard work is seen as avoiding disaster, not as a deliberate and voluntary decision to perform more labor in exchange for more money.)
Working more than 60 hours per week is now considered unhealthy. If you add the time needed for housework you probably reach the 72 – 84 hours a week the heavily economically exploited was forced to before Industrialism. This means people working more than 60 hours a week are either heavily economically exploited or workaholics.
This sounds plausible. IIRC Mark Twain described the antebellum South as “Sir Walter Scottland”. Everyone was pretending to be an extra in Ivanhoe. Perhaps the Klingons are similar. A society of accountants and lawyers and vending machine repairmen all pretending to be the reincarnation of Kahless.
Sound like Twain’s own war time experience: LARPing as an officer.
It doesn’t strike me as totally impossible for a country with the overall industrial pattern and capabilities of the USA to have, to a first approximation, every military-age male citizen in the National Guard (the non-deployment / “peacetime” obligation for this is 22 weeks for initial training, two drill days a month, and two extended training weeks a year.) And bargain-basement modern infantry kit is maybe about $750 – 1500 as a rough estimate (going to be rather third-world-looking). Add about $5000 for a radio, night vision, and thermal scope.
Combine this with the whole thing where shooting is a common sport / hobby in the USA (esp. certain parts) even without much social pressure towards it, and people who take the sport / hobby aspect seriously tend to do better than police and military. It’s not hard to imagine a society where something like airsoft, IPSC or 3-gun is *the* national pastime.
That will get you a setup where everybody has the baseline “warrior” skills and is engaged enough that it’s not totally lying to say that they’re “a warrior”. Meanwhile the question of whose job is *actually* “warrior” and not anything else versus “warrior, but most of his time is spent working in a machine shop” would shade into the question of whether you deploy frequently, occasionally, or barely ever (compare tales of down-and-out military aristocrats working jobs).
What I’ve thought of as perhaps a first step along those lines would be the Federal government exercising its constitutionally mandated authority over militia training standards to enact the following: require anyone who elects to own a firearm to undergo marksmanship and firearms laws knowledge education equivalent to what some states require today to have a public carry permit. The problem is that this alienates both gun control advocates who want the USA to have fewer guns not more, and firearms owners who bristle at any suggestion that the right to keep and bear arms should in any way be conditional.
Maybe those gun nuts fear that if it becomes illegal for people with mental problem to own guns they would be stopped themselves. It can be hard to tell the difference between a fanatic and a mad(wo)man, however.
The basic issue is (as it always has been) a mix of due process and “who decides”.
“this alienates both gun control advocates who want the USA to have fewer guns not more”
Why would making it harder to own a firearm necessarily alienate people who want the USA to have fewer guns?
It would only indirectly make owning a gun harder by adding a civic responsibility to gun ownership. (In case I wasn’t clear, since this would be a government mandated program it would be government funded). It would be a duty similar to serving on a jury if called. It wouldn’t actually forbid anyone to own a firearm, and that’s what a substantial percentage of gun control advocates want: for firearms to be rarer in American society, and to discourage and disqualify as many people as possible from owning guns. For those who see privately owned firearms as a scourge upon society, anything like a universal militia requirement is a step backwards as far as they’re concerned.
This would make it harder to own a firearm overall.
However, it would strongly legitimize the basic idea of private weapons ownership in America, in a way that implies taking a side on the culture war.
People who want to delegitimize the basic idea of private weapons ownership, who want the State to be able to unilaterally restrict it, would not accept that.
The problem with “the right to keep and bear arms being conditional”, from the firearms owners / NRA’s point of view, is that the people who advocate this rarely seem to have any intention of actually letting much of society fulfil those conditions — the long view tends towards “what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable”.
Well as I implied, a Swiss-style “everyone is trained in the use of firearms” is pretty close to the last thing that gun control advocates would like to see.
I think they have an oversimplified and probably in-group centred view of society.
Sorry, I’ve lost track of who “they” are; supporters or opponents of firearms ownership?
I was referring to the NRA. They seem to take it for granted that they themselves are good.
This post talks about when a society has a specific shape. But how would transitions between societies look like and how this affects armies? E.g. an empire has a centralized bureacracy and uses the collected taxes to fund a standing army. When such empires start to collapse, raising taxes becomes difficult yet armies still need to be paid. This forces the generals to find “irregular” methods of revenue collection. The Late Han Dynasty comes to mind. The generals who suppressed the Yellow Turban peasant rebellion became the warlords of the Three Kingdoms era.
Usually a general sets himself up as a regional governor, combining civilian and military authority. Since the circumstances are chaotic he probably doesn’t have an effective bureaucracy to collect taxes. This puts a limit on the Employment principle. The Entitlement principle is a non-starter because the general is an autocrat. There are no voting rights to give. Are there counter examples? Obviously the general won’t turn his whole province into a republic but maybe he could grant privileges to local communities or guilds?
Which leaves the Vocational Principle. Give direct land grants to his soldier, creating a caste of soldier farmers. If the soldiers get enough land to be gentleman farmers and don’t have to work the land themselves, depends on available resources. This ties into the Clientage principle. The soldiers are clients of the general and his family.
From which segment of society do soldiers in such armies come from? I think such armies are usually completely new creations, not the former professional imperial armies which are often ineffective when the empire is collapsing. And who are the officers? The obvious first choice are local aristocrats. But surely there are also more colorful historical examples?
A lot of the cases at least the nucleus is the former government forces, but the general in question is forced to find new ways to pay for them (and potentially raise more of them)
Sometimes (like with Liu Bei) he starts without much in the way of government support and is raising forces himself basically in the hope of distinguishing himself and getting a job.
This happened in both the eastern and western Roman empires. In the west, as tax revenues fell, the ‘solution’ was to enlist outsiders with military followings and grant them territory in return for military support. The hope was that the empire could retain enough of a military core to keep them subordinate. Tax revenue eroded further, the new arrivals set up independent states, found themselves unable to maintain the imperial system (they usually tried) and fell back on clientage/obligation.
The east kept more of a tax system so could employ mercenaries, a professional core and supplement it with local obligation. Over time it tended to the latter the themes with their soldier-farmers).
This was a political rather than practical decision. The “outsiders” were people trying to immigrate into the empire seeking citizen status, and imperial elites decided to create a system wherein the immigrant populations could be (multi-generationally, perpetually) leveraged as disposable troops without granting them rights as citizens. It was, ‘what if Entitlement Principle, but we don’t actually give them the entitlement rights’ and it did (predictably IMO) implode spectacularly.
> The reductio ad absurdum of this are some portrayals of Star Trek’s Klingons: an entire post-industrial multi-planet empire that can design starships (and so must be hyper-specialized) but where also somehow everyone is a warrior trained in close-combat weapons. Real societies do not train their starship designers (or their blacksmiths) to also be master swordsmen because that isn’t worth anyone‘s time.
With increases in lifespan, labor productivity, and educational capacity, society gains greater ability to educate people in whatever it feels like. Society can afford to indulge in cultural quirks.
Consider how many people in our modern society get taught to play a musical instrument in school, or a sport, or something else that isn’t particularly economically useful.
Given Star Trek technology levels, there is no way that swordfighting makes sense as an actual combat strategy. They are doing it as a sport. For fun. (And perhaps to keep fit if they don’t have fitness pills).
With holodeck technology, it should be possible to make a really good VR fight training sim. If every schoolchild gets an hour a day of VR fighting as their equivalent of PE, and it’s also used widely as their main form of recreation, then most of the population could end up pretty good at close combat.
If the klingons were genetically a bit more predisposed to fighting than humans, then this might help explain why the VR fight sims were so popular compared to other potential forms of recreation. It might also explain a society that encourages everyone to get their aggression out in VR, under the belief that a klingon deprived of VR fights will start real fights.
Minor pedantic note: being able to play a musical instrument was very common, at least in pre-industrial Europe. Any village could provide a decent band, and often a good chorus. In Wales and Ireland a good singing voice or a deft hand on a fiddle was essential to impressing the ladies.
One thing that you kinda have to remember is that there were no recording media: if you wanted music you had to either do it yourself or find someone who did. Read 19th/early 20th century novels and you find quite a few instances of people just getting together and playing music for fun.
Oh, the part saying farming population density might be 30-70 per square mile vs 2-5 for pastoralism reminded me of something I’ve been wondering. I see a lot of different figures quoted for population density of various regions, and one thing that is not clear to me is if they are always talking about the whole thing (say, all of France, or all of Burgundy) vs the population density of the farmland (which would be very different). It seems important to note because obviously an area with more mountains and desert and marsh and whatever else would have less population density overall, but the actual experience of people farming there might be at the same density in the suitable farmlands (or higher as they all pack in to the workable land more). Which would be two very different experiences of “Sparsely populated” between actually spread out and simply densely clustered in specific hotspots.
2 points
a) do these points apply to navies as well?
b) you distinguish two systems – where money comes from holding land and one where money comes from serving in the bureaucracy. What about systems where money comes from commerce, a plutocracy like Venice?
b-I would guess money from commerce is still an upwards movement of money, as it still comes from holding something, in that case, trade goods, owning ships, dockyards, etc.
British naval impressment was backed by a legal framework that made it a form of conscription, but to the impressed men it probably seemed more like a slave/prisoner system.
I suspect the main difference is that in a sufficiently long distance navy, pressganged sailors for the navy don’t have the disadvantages of slave-armies – after all, you don’t need to arm them, they’re sailors, not marines (who can be recruited differently as a result), and they can’t desert because leaving on foot is a bit hard when you got where you are by boat, and most of. the time where you are is in fact ‘the sea’.
They can desert, mutiny, turn pirate, abandon their post when people start shooting at them, etc.
Just because they are afloat doesn’t mean you don’t have to worry about their loyalty.
Look at the Kronstadt and Kiel mutinies if you don’t believe me.
It was one of those weird C18 mixes of custom, flexible enforcement and law. There were not enough seamen to man both the navy and the merchant service in war, so the navy used impressment, inducement and the quota system (the latter provided landsmen). Much of it was left to individual captains. For the men, it was part of life, but a trade-off. The navy paid worse but did pay, fed much better and was safer (better maintained, more crew). Desertion was tolerated to an extent, and protests against harsh or incompetent officers mostly met by replacing the officers (so long as the protest did not involve violence or was at sea). NAM Rodger’s The Wooden World is a fascinating exploration of how it worked.
It almost certainly did not. As OGH pointed out above, armies recruited on this principle tend not to fight too well: they have been recruited specifically from people you don’t like and who don’t feel loyal to you. Since the early modern English/ British navy fought perfectly well, you should not expect to treat it as a slave prisoner system.
(I might also point out that well into the 18th century most warships would pay-off the crew as winter approached, and slavery is not something that lasts a few months.)
The problem for the navy was that if you need a lot of trained seamen in a hurry at the start of a war, then not only are you probably going to need an element of compulsion/ duty, but the trained people you need are almost constantly on the move quite as fast as any draft notice that might be sent after them.
The French naval conscription scheme was more unpopular than the British system – it provided less freedom to choose one’s ship and bore more heavily on the maritime population. The problem was that in both Britain and France the number of skilled seamen was much less than what was needed to serve both an expanded navy and the merchant marine. Some form of compulsion was inescapable.
Naval war vessels were manpower hogs because they needed enough sailors to maneuver the ship AND man the guns AND do both after taking losses. Merchant vessels were left to skimp along with skeleton crews, which did not endear merchant captains or owners to the Navy.
Navies have the added quirk that ships are largely self-contained, so my guess would be that they shift from having a problem with desertion to a problem with mutiny.
The employment principle definitely holds — professional armies are ruinously expensive. The US is the extreme case right now: all-volunteer, ~$900B/year. Imperial Rome consumed over half its state budget on the military; the US isn’t at that ratio yet but in absolute terms it’s the most expensive military force in history. The question isn’t whether you can — it’s how long the fiscal basis holds. When Rome’s tax base atrophied, the professional army degraded right back into a semi-clientage model.
On the “everyone’s a warrior” point — I think the author’s “labor specialization” explanation misses the harder constraint. It’s not that you *can’t*, it’s that you can’t afford the gear. After the Iron Age, equipment costs jumped massively. A set of bronze armor plus weapons was several years of an ordinary person’s income. By the high medieval period, a full suit of plate armor cost what a luxury car does today; a warhorse with barding ran to what an entire village produced in a year. Once metallurgy advanced, equipment mattered too much, and not everyone could pay the entry ticket.
Equipment cost itself is the physical driver of military power concentration — from iron to starships, the more expensive the gear, the fewer people can fight, and the more power concentrates. No conspiracy theory needed to explain every instance of military aristocratization.
I disagree on the Klingon example. Klingons were never worldbuilding — they’re a Cold War metaphor. 1960s American writers needed a Soviet projection, so they produced this all-warrior honor-culture species. It works fine at the level of narrative function — the problem is when you treat it as a worldbuilding textbook, it falls apart. Which actually proves the author’s own point: a fictional military projection and real structural constraints aren’t the same thing. Using the former’s standards to critique the latter’s failure is a bit of a straw man.
>1960s American writers needed a Soviet projection, so they produced this all-warrior honor-culture species.
I mean, 1960s writers didn’t. They produced a Russia/USSR analogue – an expansionist and militarist empire, intent on spreading its ideology (their first appearance being a literal cold war, spreading your ideology to unsuspecting third parties metaphor).
TOS Klingons use subterfuge and cheat wherever they can. They demonstrate cultural sophistication and have a clear division of roles. They’re not obsessed with honour nor while close quarter combat.
Modern viking-style Klingons could be argued to evolve over the course of the films in the 70s and 80s, but this is debatable. Klingons receive a wilder, more barbaric appearance, but they still show a stratified society.
Then TNG happens and Klingons become a caricature.
Point being, 60s writers created a perfectly believable Klingon society and archetype.
80s writers tossed this into the bin and replaced it with a meme.
Absolutely! TOS’s “Soviets” were the Romulans; the Klingons almost had more in common with Perfide Albion (the British) or Imperial Japan (in an uncomfortable Orientalist caricature sort-of-way) than the Soviets.
TOS was a lot more nuanced than TNG in some of their worldbuilding and depictions of war, perhaps as many of the cast and crew had more personal experience in combat zones!
Modern setup is kinda bifurcated, meanwhile.
Basic infantry kit is something like $1500 if you don’t want total Viet Cong poverty, maybe $10K if you want to include a decent but not gold-plated complement of night vision and other good equipment.
Meanwhile, an F-35 is something like one and a half *thousand* yearly incomes.
Did any of these preindustrial societies have every combatant wearing metal armor?
1960s Trek didn’t have the warrior society Klingons, just a distant militaristic Klingon state.
After the Iron Age, equipment costs jumped massively. A set of bronze armor plus weapons was several years of an ordinary person’s income. By the high medieval period, a full suit of plate armor cost what a luxury car does today
A luxury car today is less than a year’s wage for a first-worlder, so this analogy doesn’t make much sense if your aim is to prove massive jumps in cost. But that’s fortuitous, because I don’t think there were really any.
By the high medieval period metalworking was vastly cheaper than in the Bronze Age and the transition from copper and tin to commoner iron facilitated this. An awe-inspiring full-body suit of plate armour in the high medieval is a just half a year’s wage for a “middle-class” mason; a simple bronze axe and helmet in the early Bronze Age would have likely come out not much cheaper in effective terms, and full bronze panoplies were assuredly many times more costly.
The real cost-driver in the noble cavalryman is the horse; horses have been employed in warfare since the Bronze Age and were more expensive as military assets back then, since you needed twice as many of them and a finely-built chariot to boot. We could acknowledge however that the cavalryman grew in prominence over history as riding technology matured, and this did lead to a greatly straightened military enfranchisement in many societies, those of Western Europe and the Mediterranean Basin perhaps most dramatically.
One thing I’ve noticed is the proportion of cavalry increases quite a bit with time. Carthaginian and Macedonian armies averaged 10-15% cavalry. Rome is maybe 10%. 1600/1700s Western European field armies averaged closer to 25%; Russian and Swedish armies closer to 40%.
A trained warhorse in the 1200s was worth between 15 and 40 pounds, when a shilling a day was a skilled wage – so equal to one to three years wages.
“A set of bronze armor plus weapons was several years of an ordinary person’s income. By the high medieval period, a full suit of plate armor cost what a luxury car does today; a warhorse with barding ran to what an entire village produced in a year”
One thing that strikes me about the Dunk & Egg stories is that, while they repeatedly emphasize how poor Dunk is, at the start of the first story, he owns 3 horses, one of which is a warhorse, a sword, and a suit of plate armour (albeit one that doesn’t fit him). That by itself is probably enough to place him above the median in terms of wealth (although I don’t know enough about the wealth distribution in Westeros to say for certain).
Poor for a knight is a different thing than poor for a peasant.
I have noticed a lot middle-class people in historical contexts being claimed to have had a “poor upbringing” or coming from a “simple background”. Such expressions may give the impression of them having grown up under miserable conditions. Or may give the impression of the poor masses having had economic resources which did not exist at the time.
I was thinking of remarking, an itinerant knight who owned the equipment but had no fief or holding and was not part of a lord’s retinue was in very precarious position; “poor” indeed by the standards of his class.
It looks like the thema system of the Byzantine empire doesn’t fit neatly in your classification. These fellows were military settlers but weren’t ethnically distinct from the rest of the population. They got land in exchange for their service but no political representation.
Military settlers don’t have to be ethnically distinct, but there’s no certainty that the early mercenary-settled thema were fully Greek, nor that the first Armenian thema weren’t settled with Armenians, nor that the later reinforcements to the de-Hellenized frontiers weren’t Greek.
Here’s the quote
“Military Settlers (an imposed military aristocracy of fighters given land in exchange for future service): a fairly common solution for consolidating conquest (especially for societies which simply lack the bureaucratic infrastructure for direct governance), creating a new upper-stratum of military-aristocrats that are often ethnically distinct from the ruled. Examples: Macedonian military-settlers after Alexander’s conquests; the garrison-cities of the Rashidun Caliphate.”
In the Byzantine case it was not to consolidate conquest but to stabilize the frontier. The bureaucratic infrastructure for direct governance existed but was found inadequate. The thematic soldiers were hardly aristocrats – I’ve never seen them described as such. We don’t know their ethnic makeup but there is no evidence it was too different.
> _often_ ethnically distinct
That is, not always.
The Byzantine thema system wasn’t imposed on a newly conquered area. The Macedonians in the Successor states and the Romans in places like Britain were a conquering army, with members of that army being installed as the local Big Men who now owned the land that supported them.
The Byzantine thema system was a re-organisation of existing territory already part of the Empire. The locals were already Byzantine/Roman, and weren’t being conquered. (Or, the conquest had taken place sufficiently long ago to not be a factor.) It was a change over from employment to an entitlement system. Instead of paying taxes to the central government who recruit professional troops to defend your thema (province), now the thema has to provide soldiers themselves. And the Empire did maintain a professional central army, just much smaller than before, that could reinforce areas under threat.
The system was created at a nadir of (in response to a nadir of) the Empire’s size and power, and nearly all of the Thema were created in land that had not been part of the Empire when the system began.
I do agree with you that Bret is sliding between a very narrow definition of “Military Settler” (ethnically distinct military imposed upon conquered people) and a more general use (people who are granted land to farm in return for continued military service) without quite making it clear.
In addition to the Byzantine theme system you mentioned, I’d also note the Tang dynasty fubing system, in which part of the soldier package was a land grant, where you were expected to be when not called into service. Depending on how far from the frontier or capital you were, the length of the military service compared to the farm time varied. It’s also interesting since it deliberately aimed to produce a “Settler Reserve”, in a way. Soldier-Farmers near the capital were not expected to fight regularly (unlike the frontier garrisons), but had to come in to drill a few months out of every year, so that in case the emperor did need a field army loyal to him, instead of the frontier generals, there was a well-drilled, battle-ready population to draw from.
I think the key to understanding the Klingons comes from from the Undiscovered Country homage episode of the prequel series Enterprise. The Klingon lawyer complains that these days, all the kids want to be warriors. This guy is old enough to remember a time when this wasn’t the case.
My hypothesis is that the Klingon Empire started as a personalistic regime around Kahless, with an honor-society warrior-aristocracy at its core. After Kahless dies, the warrior-aristocrats aren’t able to hold the whole thing together by personal connections alone, so they have to build an institutional state. It is built, deliberately or accidentally, to be highly permeable to corruption so that the existing aristocrats can extract resources from it and place their families and clients in key postings. The result of which being that the Empire is completely for sale by the TNG/DS9 timeframe, but can allow a commoner like Martok to rise through the ranks with the right aristocratic connections.
I think we should generally understand that most Klingons with speaking parts are aristocratic officers, and when they complain about there being no more honor in the Empire they’re complaining about upjumped peasants in positions of power or other aristocrats expanding their own influence by exploiting state institutions rather than cultivating personal bonds.
As an aside, I think the Federation deliberately turns a blind eye to Klingon occupations. The official death tool on Bajor from the Cardassian occupation was five million, which is a lot of dead individuals but is a remarkably small proportion of a society of billions to have been killed after 60 years of war and famine and purges. I think that the Federation deliberately counts only a narrow set of unjustified but deliberate killings by the Cardassian state in their tally because if you measure the death toll in occupations that way, the “honorable” Klingons get off relatively light. Of course in their very first appearance on the show, the Klingons go straight to mass reprisal killings, so who knows what sorts of fantastic lies the Federation tells to maintain the alliance (apart from the underlying truth that Starfleet can’t beat the Klingons in a war).
I suspect the alliance is part ‘this is mostly a military alliance of mutual defence’, which is no way requires anyone involved to actually like each other (The Allies in WW2 were made up of an empire, a nation founded in armed revolt again said empire, and a nation that had recently executed the emperor’s close relatives, and that’s before you need to mention political philosophy). That and both sides know full well that peaceful co-existence with the Federation is a threat to the Klingon Empire’s culture, to the point that the Klingons had repeatedly listed ‘peacefully co-existing with you is destroying our warrior culture’ as their reason to declare war on the Federation. I mean, why fight a war when offering an alliance is both easier and still lets you achieve everything declaring war might (and only provided you win) – I suppose the moral conundrum is really only Star Fleet having to acknowledge that they can’t force the Klingons to change next week, but can change them in a few centuries.
I agree! Federation policy towards the Klingons always seemed like, “We could fight you but we don’t want to.”
To me, it always seemed like the Federation *could* beat the Klingon Empire but crucially *chose* not to – or, the Federation’s leaders balked at the costs (material, cultural, social) of fighting that war. Looking at how the Federation retooled for the Dominion War always made me think they could have, like the USA vs Japan in WWII, massively out-competed the Klingons if they ever switched their post-scarcity replicator economy to a genuine war-footing.
Still cheaper (and more ethical) to let the Empire collapse after a few more decades of the Federation’s peaceful and genial alliance!
I agree that it feels like the Klingons of the time period covered in the show(s) are in a period of intense cultural transformation – and the collapse of the Empire “as it was in the good old days”) – with a lot of whinging warriors distressed to see their social status changing!
But it always seemed like the Federation *could* beat the Klingon Empire but crucially *chose* not to – or, the Federation’s leaders balked at the costs (material, cultural, social) of fighting that war. Looking at how the Federation retooled for the Dominion War always made me think they could have – like the USA vs Japan in WWII – massively out-competed the Klingons if they ever switched their post-scarcity replicator economy to a genuine war-footing.
I’ve never understood how the idea of a feudalistic, chaotic, civil-war prone imperial regime could ever compete with the Federation (let alone the Cardassians or Romulans, who don’t play as nice). *I’m straight up ignoring the Klingon War in DISCO as it made even less sense somehow.
It’s semi-canon that behind the scenes keeping the Federation together is an extremely delicate balancing act, one we got a brief glimpse of in “Journey to Babel”. Given the sheer heterogeneity of the member species, the last thing the Federation needs is additional strain.
@Michael Huston That’s a good point – sadly proved (in canon) by the Federation’s ignoble collapse in DISCO.
I feel like the Federation is analogous to modern democracies, where wars of choice are harder to support and require a delicate political balancing act to justify, but an existential war of defence can inspire tremendous industrial and military efforts, like the USA after Pearl Harbour or Ukraine today…even if said “war of defence” is mostly a mirage.
The Federation however is remarkably “confederal” – further weakening it’s ability to organize during a major state conflict. Perhaps it’s more like the USA pre-Civil War, where during the War of 1812 many individual states essentially refused to support the federal government’s “war of choice” with Britain, leading to the US being unable to take on even Britain’s diminutive Canadian colonies despite the American advantage in manpower and logistics (among other factors leading to America’s inability to achieve it’s war aims).
Nothing brings people together as much as an outside enemy.
If the Federation sits back and lets the Klingons fight each other, they’ll remain relatively weak. Various factions will battle one another, and none will become a real hegemony. But if the Federation were to attack, suddenly all those factions will unite under some ruler and instead of a bunch of factions going in different directions, you suddenly have an empire fully committed to destroying you.
Instead of thinking of the Klingons like Rome, think of them like the Holy Roman Empire–fragmented, disjointed, easy to pit against one another. If the Federation attacked in force, suddenly the Klingons become like Germany–maybe not victorious, but with a strong direction from a central authority and powerful enough to do absolutely massive damage to the opposition.
In such a situation there would likely be a (very) brief period where various groups vie for control, and that gives the Federation a window of opportunity to win. If they can’t achieve victory in that span, it becomes much, much harder and more costly to win. And the gains may not be worth the cost, since now every loyal son of the Empire is going to oppose the occupying force in any way they, a proud warrior race with a history of violence both overt and covert, can imagine. The fact that there are a thousand different factions actually makes the Federation’s position worse, because they will need to deal with each faction individually. Any victory or deal or concession is limited to the faction involved, and the rest will simply ignore it and fight harder, because No True Klingon would have made such a deal.
In other words: Can the Federation win? Possibly. Should they try? ABSOLUTELY not.
Was the later Han fine with the employment?
For a while. Then somebody lobbied the emperor to press the “state deconsolidation” button and things unravelled from there.
More seriously, I think there’s probably some interesting comparanda one can do regarding the effect of Confucianism, which classed soldiers as low status, on the effect of military organisation and effectiveness, compared to other places which did not have that cultural script. It’s certainly notable that there’s not really a hereditary warrior-aristocrat class in China.
Two or maybe three typos, all in one paragraph, in “Recruitment Principles.”
After all, this society is about to give these fellows weapons, so without some broader social structure that encourages or constrains them to remind at the standard, there is very little preventing them from deserting or revolting.
remind -> remain
Also, if by standard you mean something like “flag,” shouldn’t it be “under the standard”?
Compulsion can get me into the ranks, but it struggles to keep them there.
either me -> them or them -> me.
I wonder if this line of thinking will lead some to reconsider som modern questions. Such as, how did Russia get people of Donbass, Ukrainian citizens, to bear arms and fight against their Ukraine?
Your media will arrive with “compulsion” every time, which this article has just knocked out.
Some of them politically sympathises with the Russian regime. These are numerous enough to cause the outbreak civil war in 2014. For eight years a low intensity civil war waged on in eastern Ukraine. This was possible because the two splinter groups got military support from Russia. Then the Putin regime decided to do a full-scale invasion out of a combination of irredentism and paranoia.
Bret clearly states that this article is about per-industrial societies and this is not applicable to modern wars.
On the one hand compulsion is rarely 100% of the solution, but it often is not insignificant either. Not sure how you are saying this article has just knocked it out. One of the categories listed is literally slaves!
Much of the Russian-controlled Donbass has a significant pro-Russia element, but it is also true Russia does a lot of dubiously consensual recruiting. Most modern states in its situation would rely more on broad-based conscription but Putin clearly considers that politically complicated.
One strategy for making use of involuntary soldiers who fight under compulsion is to have them be a minority within a larger army. If my empire is trying to conquer a nearby territory and I want to expend the population of the border region between my empire and my target so that it can be replaced with settlers drawn from deep within the empire, one option is to do this gradually, forcibly conscripting, say, fifty thousand of them at a time along with hundreds of thousands of my own soldiers. The disaffected conscripts from the border region then cannot revolt safely and can be disproportionately fed into the guns of the defenders of the territory I’m trying to conquer. When I start to run out, I conscript more men from the border region, and so on until it is largely depopulated of military-age males.
Putin appears to have come up with the same plan.
Don’t you think that unmotivated ethnic formation will revolt or become uncontrollable, to the extent of looting on the back lines instead of figthing?
If you mix them with your core population then losses will also be distributed between two soldier demographics.
You’ve convinced yourself that is what Putin is doing, if you tried that yourself you’ll get a disaster.
Making disastrous decisions is easy if you refuse to listen to any critics.
Ilya, we both know that an autocrat can solve the problem you describe. Arguing that the Russians haven’t heavily conscripted from the Donbass to fuel this war and break the prewar population of the area is like arguing that the Russians don’t breathe. You find yourself asking absurd questions like “and how would the oxygen get into their bloodstream, huh, they’d have to have, I don’t know, entire organs for doing that!”
If you are a cruel and bloody-handed tyrant trying to break the population of a recently acquired border region in a war against their co-nationalists who you are trying to conquer, you address the problems as follows:
1) You DO mix the borderlanders in with troops from your core territory. The catch is that if you are Putin, the troops from your core territory are mostly not, uh, really from the core. There are specific regions of Russia that have seen much heavier recruitment and conscription than others, because Putin is trying to avoid letting the war have an impact on the areas he most needs to keep control of. Such as, say, Moscow.
2) You can use barrier troops and special military police units to exercise control over the borderlander and other ‘ethnic’ troops. These units are drawn from more trusted elite social classes and ethnicities within the empire (e.g. they actually might be from Moscow). In exchange for keeping the rest of the army coerced and suppressed and actually going forward to fight on the front lines, the barrier troops and military police are rewarded with not being sent to the front themselves.
None of this is difficult to understand as what the Russians are in fact doing in Ukraine.
“will almost inevitably need to reply on military aristocrats,” -> “will almost inevitably need to rely on military aristocrats,”
I think that this sort of thing is valuable because not only does it let world builders make societies that make sense, it also lets you actively choose when to contrast the more alien variations ‘the armies of evil’ or ‘these are not actually humans at all’ against a human society with a plausible seeming military recruited plausibly. After all, sometimes you do want a non-human society to look not like a metaphor for some human societal ill, but be genuinely different, and so having their military look actively insane to a human observer (Warhammer orks have the most obvious and comedic example, in that the basic principles that apply to humans, either in agricultural or hunter-gathering societies do not apply to a species of photosynthesising fungi, no matter how much they ape many other human attributes, like having limbs)
There’s a DS9 episode (can’t remember the name) where Worf is up for war crimes, and the klingon prosecutor and him have an argument about battle and honor, that could go some way towards explaining what’s on screen. Worf disparages him, and the prosecutor asserts that the courtroom is his battlefield, and he fights with words as his weapons. This could suggest that battle and war are a pseudo religious / intellectual concept in Klingon culture that the military caste (who the federation characters largley get their ideas of klingon culture from) take literally, and everyone else takes metaphorically. So an engineer might ‘do battle’ with a technical problem and doing so ‘honorably’ is not slapping together a quick solution or using AI.
One of the first TNG episodes dealing with the Klingons (s2ep8 ‘Heart of Glory’) kinds of hints at this itnerpretation: three klingons are taking the warrior cult literally and trying to start a war with the federation so they can live as ‘true klingons’. And worf berates them for taking battle so litrally as a concept. To quote from the memory alpha entry: ‘Worf tells him he is looking for battles in the wrong place, that the true test of a warrior lies within. He hasn’t mentioned duty, honor, or loyalty, the things a true warrior must have.’
This idea is dropped pretty quickly after this though, and Worf reverts to a much more literal interpretation of battle and honor. A lot of our understanding of klingon culture, especially in TNG is filtered through Worf, who is very much a second generation immigrant whose understanding of his culture isn’t lived in, caliciphied at a really young age, and is reversed engineered from legends.
(this is all of course headcannon; the series very clearly understand the klingons to be viking samurai who all take battle very seriously.)
The federation’s alliance with the Klingons can mostly be understood as not so much ‘they’re our buddies’ as ‘we’re keeping them in the alliance of the status quo because it makes them conquer less.”After the destruction of Praxis (the Empire’s main energy source) in The Undiscovered Country, the empire is left in a crippled state, and seems like it can’t maintain itself as a peer equal with the Federation for at least a generation. The Federation jumps at the chance to define and shackle Klingon territorial ambitions with treaties while they have the high ground, and they more importantly bring the klingons into the Alliance of the Status Quo trade network. This has the effect of making new klingon wars more costly and less likely. Which actually seems to have worked; the klingon empire we see in TNG mostly hasn’t conquered anywhere new in awhile (I think?)
The military caste, not having anywhere to blow off steam and felling insecure in what is now no longer a primary role in the Empire, start obssessing about honor and battle in a way TOS klingons never did (a bit like the samurai did in their later periods of peace). They still exert a lot of politicall power though, and under Gowron are able to breach a generation longs peace treaty with the Federation over some vague changeling casus belli. Gowron himself has always struck me as a kind of return to warrior ideals; the klingon emperor we first meet in TNG, the one that transferred blame to Worf’s family for the Kitimer disaster, was very aware of how fragile the empire was, and specifically the warrior idealogy. He was quite old, and so it seems plausible he was able to keep the klingon warrior caste of his generation from starting wars, but in so doing frustrated them so they pivoted hard to Gowron after his death.
>So an engineer might ‘do battle’ with a technical problem and doing so ‘honorably’ is not slapping together a quick solution or using AI.
Apparently Adolf Hitler with his violence obsession really liked this kind of rhetoric.
Contrast my suggestion in a different comment — it could be something like “everybody’s in the National Guard with a combat arms MOS, but only some Klingons deploy with any frequency”.
Excellent analysis, thanks for this reading of Klingon history!
I agree that it feels like the Klingons of the time period covered in the show(s) are in a period of intense cultural transformation – and the collapse of the Empire “as it was in the good old days”) – with a lot of whinging warriors distressed to see their social status changing that you mention, leading them to follow “aspirational” warriors like Gowron.
To me, it seemed like the Federation *could* beat the Klingon Empire but crucially *chose* not to – or, the Federation’s leaders balked at the costs (material, cultural, social) of fighting that war. Looking at how the Federation retooled for the Dominion War always made me think they could have – like the USA vs. Japan in WWII – massively out-competed the Klingons if they ever switched their post-scarcity replicator economy to a genuine war-footing.
I’ve never understood how the idea of a feudalistic, chaotic, civil-war prone imperial regime could ever compete with the Federation (let alone the Cardassians or Romulans, who don’t play as nice). *I’m straight up ignoring the Klingon War in DISCO as it made even less sense somehow.
I always thought TNG and DS9 did reasonably good jobs of highlighting the tensions of the (never fully outlined) Khitomer Accords. Even a basic non-aggression pact was fundamentally unstable, due to the instability of the highly personalist Klingon political system. And we only saw Klingon and Federation forces fighting as actual military allies when basic realpolitik *clearly* demanded it. The Dominion was an unambiguous existential threat to the Federation *and* to Klingon elites. (One might quibble over the question of whether Klingon *subject* peoples might greet the Dominion as a Cyrus, but that seems unlikely – the Cardassian experience demonstrates that the Dominion did not feel constrained by treaty obligations to vassal states, or by any particular standard of treatment for civilians).
>(One might quibble over the question of whether Klingon *subject* peoples might greet the Dominion as a Cyrus, but that seems unlikely – the Cardassian experience demonstrates that the Dominion did not feel constrained by treaty obligations to vassal states, or by any particular standard of treatment for civilians).
To be fair to the Dominion here, the Cardassians were in a queue for extermination for having tried to exterminate the Founders (the female changeling telling Garak as much when she visits DS9). Just because the Dominion decided to advance the timetable doesn’t mean they’d treat every subject species like that.
And even then, the Cardassians were initially given a lot of leeway. It’s only with Dukat out of the picture and Damar proving himself inadequate for everything ever that the reins are slowly, and after a multitude of chances, tightened. Indeed, I’d argue that if it wasn’t for Damar’s ego driving him towards rebellion, the Dominion would’ve seen little reason to tighten its grip on Cardassia for the duration of the war.
Sure, after the war, the Cardassians would’ve become tragic victims of a genetically engineered plague wiping out every last one of them or something, but hey.
But as long as you’re not trying to exterminate the Founders, or put up inconvenient levels of resistance (e.g. the Teplan), you should be fine.
Hell. The Dominion allowed the Betazed to keep existing after occupying their world, and to be blunt – if I was the Vorta in charge of conquering and occupying the homeworld of a telepathic species, that species could only be found in history books after I’m done.
“sprawling cities with non-state systems of organization (power informally divided among a bunch of different groups that all wield force), but that’s not a pattern we see often historically. ”
We actually sorta do see this here and there. Italy in particular during the middle ages. (though thats’ partially because of the entire complicated set of theoretically overlapping obligations and stuff) eventually it kinda solidifies into “proper” city-states, but there’s quite a bit of points where you have eg. nobles, some kind of representative assembly and church/imperial authorities all sorta wielding power to *some* degree but not one realyl being “in charge”. (and with various guilds/merchant families/nobles all being able to raise force when needed)
Those societies were in the process of developing from Feudalism to something more like a Polis. I don’t think each of the steps in the process would be stable in the long run.
“”Feudalism”” and “”Polis”” were not stable in the long run either (no human organization is) so this is a false distinction
It’s not a false distinction to distinguish between systems of governance that might plausibly still be around in recognizable form if you step into a time machine and come back 300-400 years later, versus systems of governance that are likely to have changed noticeably if you come back 50 years later. Both are ‘unstable’ in the sense of ‘no one lives forever,’ but it’s the difference between having five years to live and fifty years to live.
You are right in that life-spans matter. When I say “planned economy is doomed to fail” I mean it would last a single human lifetime or less.
Between Polis and Feudalism, which one lasts longer and why?
I’m not sure it’s feasible to measure whether polis systems “last longer” than feudal systems. First, because it’s unclear whether we’re tracking the mode of governance of the polity, or the ability of a single group to keep control of the polity, or the independence of the polity.
If we look at a Greek city-state in 400 BC, they may have undergone several rounds of political upheaval in the past few centuries, running from democracy to oligarchy to autocracy and back again. So clearly no one group has held power for that long, and their political governance has not been long lived. But on the other hand, the city’s citizens consider themselves to be part of a traditionally independent city that has been independent since time immemorial (that is, since some time in the Greek Dark Ages when the settlement was founded). Is their polis form of social organization “short-lived” purely because the balance of power between the leaders, the elites, and the populace shifts every couple of generations?
Feudalism is subject to similar questions. If the Normans invade and the king redistributes the land titles in the region to the new nobility, but the new nobility follows a feudal mode of political organization and the previous nobility did too, has feudalism been overthrown?
It has to be remembered that throughout the Middle Ages Italy was caught in the tug of war between the Papacy and the self-styled “emperors” of the Holy Roman Empire. This left Italy too fragmented even for an Italian monarchy to arise.
Were the Holy Roman Emperors of this period self-styled at the time, or were they elected by a council as I believe was the case in the seventeenth century?
The Weberian ‘monopoly of legitimate use of force’ does not really apply pre-industrially. It’s more ‘final point of arbitration on whether the force used is granted legitimacy’. With a lot of violence never being arbitrated, just accepted.
If you think it applies post-industrially you’re mistaken. We may have the International Circlejerk of Statehood Acknowledgement but that’s just words, and monopoly over force is nothing more than an acceptable compromise in the division of force where the exceptions are minor enough to be diplomatically brushed under the rug.
Across something like 90% or more of the Earth’s habitable surface, if you decide that “the state’s monopoly on force” is just words and try to raise up a private army to assert territorial control, the result is that your private army gets kicked apart by a state military, probably before even fighting a battle because your troops aren’t dumb enough to want to die for you.
Never assume that just because all the other arguments of a king are ‘only words,’ that the final argument of kings is also ‘only words.’
I dispute your understanding of the Klingons. It is proven possible to create a human society where all able-bodied software engineers are able to play table-tennis, and sometimes do so as part of establishing prestige-relationships in workplaces. It follows then that humanlike aliens who practice less-obscured interpersonal violence as part of the cultural expectations in their intellectual workplaces are plausible.
The Papuans have developed an intermediate form in modern times. Instead of actually fighting they run around on a field with spears in their hands shooting swearwords and insults at each other.
I would agree, but perhaps the Professor is thinking more along what we see as most common in the actual shows – bloodwine swilling morons getting bamboozled by the Starfleet protagonists.
It’s not every Klingon character, but it’s a significant slice of the pie.
One may imagine that the bloodwine-swilling morons are the Klingon equivalent of modern America’s “techbros” and well connected heirs whose educational background can be summarized as “fratboy everyone was afraid to flunk out of a class for fear of what his parents would say.”
If the armed starships of a US-like state were mostly commanded by the sons and daughters of billionaires who were themselves mostly wealthy heirs, who had been performatively making themselves more and more high on their supply of “warrior culture” for two or three generations, it would be no surprise that some of those captains would be easily manipulated idiots with a drug habit who could never have maintained their positions by merit.
Admittedly, this then creates the problem of the idea of “Klingon promotions,” that an ambitious underling actually stands to gain something by assassinating their boss. Not sure how to square that circle.
I have long suspected this is how Donald Trump got his degree from Harvard. He is so habitually thoughtless I doubt he has ever been fit for university.
Point of information: Donald Trump graduated from the Wharton School of Business, not Harvard. Which doesn’t really alter anything you said; the dynamic is still a clear-cut case of “rich man’s son is given a diploma that reflects coursework he didn’t do, because nobody was ever going to flunk him out of a class even if he read and wrote at an eighth grade level.”
Thank you for the correction. I think he was there as required but did not spend much time actually studying. He does not seem to have ever realised the need to consciously reflect over things.
“If the armed starships of a US-like state were mostly commanded by the sons and daughters of billionaires who were themselves mostly wealthy heirs, who had been performatively making themselves more and more high on their supply of “warrior culture” for two or three generations”
Pete Hegseth is Secretary of War. Be careful what you wish for 😉
I ain’t wishin’ for it, it just happened anyway.
I’ve always found the swedish medieval military system to be interesting, in that it kinda isn’t *quite* like any of those but has elements of them?
Like, the swedish peasantry had some degree of political rights (at least in a judicial sense, while the local assemblies were clearly dominated by Big Men all free landowners could attend) and were also expected to serve in the military (either directly in case of local defence or by furnishing a man, or in coastal areas, several vilalges pooling togehter resources to furnish a ship for expeditionary warfare) a lot of these obligations over time gets converted into taxes, and then a feudal “tax-exemption in exchange for service as a mounted warrior” (and the latter actually does seem to be somewhat permeable: We see people move in and out of the tax exemption depending on if they could afford to pass muster that year) gets grafted on top of that…
Sweden (and Finland) never developed much of a Feudal system. We tried to adapt too late and did not get that far before it became outdated.
Sort of. What never really developed was the actual infeudation (IE: Where nobles were granted land in exchange for military service) instead it was handled via tax-exemptions. (there were land grants for nobles but they tended to be more in the form of appointments to positions like castellans and generally weren’t heridatery)
I don’t see any significant differences between the Swedish system and others for the purposes of this classification scheme.
The Swedish peasants are operating under the Entitlement Principle, with close equivalents being the free cantons in the medieval Holy Roman Empire and the Swiss, and similar to town militias – or for that matter Greek hoplites. It’s not always written down, but all these free farmer (“peasant” if you’re an aristocrat) communities are aware that if they want to stay free farmers in a state dominated by warrior aristocrats, every household has to be able to provide at least one guy with a polearm whenever the community needs to demonstrate on bandits / slavers / wanna-be aristocrats that they can defend themselves.
Converting obligations into taxes that pay for Employment mercenaries was common in other medieval societies (“scutage”), and I’d guess the same is true for the Roman Republic moving from everyone serving to the Roman Empire where taxes pay for long term professionals.
Mounted warriors getting tax-exemption is another form of Entitlement principle if people are moving in and out from year to year. If you’ve got the money to equip yourself as a man-at-arms equivalent, the state lets you keep the rest of your money. Usual pattern is for the mounted warriors to turn themselves into a hereditary Warrior Class, did that happen in Sweden?
What I know is that the boundary between nobles and commoners was always quite permeable. The year-by-year variation probably stopped in the 16th century when we started developing a professional bureaucracy. By then knighthood was already outdated. Still, people were passing the legal boundary on a regular basis. A considerable number were ennobled or voluntarily left nobility every generation. The areas of land controlled by various noble families shifted all the time as well.
>The official death tool on Bajor from the Cardassian occupation was five million, which is a lot of dead individuals but is a remarkably small proportion of a society of billions to have been killed after 60 years of war and famine and purges.
I can’t believe Scifi writers have problems with scale.
It is a recurrent problem in the genre:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale
I am trying to avoid this problem by using real world physical geography. There are just some smaller changes to account or global warming. The population of various areas is actually calculated using spreadsheets. Net migration is decided in absolute numbers but is fairly limited. With the lose of motorised transportation it is simply not practical to transport large numbers of people. Net population loses from various causes are calculated as a fraction of the regional population.
Or “let us vote or we’ll fight against you!”. One example of which was the Dorr Rebellion in 1840s Rhode Island. Originally only the propertied– land owners– could vote; and the state government represented such land owners and therefore had no institutional interest in extending the franchise. So the rebels held an unsanctioned convention that declared itself the new government of Rhode Island, armed themselves, and the matter nearly came to a state civil war. Although technically a failure in the military sense, the rebellion convinced the status quo government to unbend enough to extend voting rights to anyone who would pay a poll tax.
So the Social War, except1800 years later?
Certainly it would seem to highlight the relationship between an armed populace and political rights!
And for a highly negative example, the British passing the Irish Penal Laws in sharp contrast to the nearly contemporaneous English Bill of Rights.
“Those questions are important because civil society comes first – armies are built out of existing subsistence systems and social structures, not usually the other way around”
“Military Settlers (an imposed military aristocracy of fighters given land in exchange for future service): a fairly common solution for consolidating conquest (especially for societies which simply lack the bureaucratic infrastructure for direct governance), creating a new upper-stratum of military-aristocrats that are often ethnically distinct from the ruled.”
And that´s a qualification to the previous statement.
Subsistence systems and social structures of military settlers are built out of army.
The army is drawn from the subsistence systems and social structures of the conquering society, sure – but military settlers do not simply reproduce the society of the motherland.
Note how different societies the Englishmen built in Ulster, Virginia, New England and West Indies.
None of these was heavily based on a conquered society (like India was). Ulster, Virginia and West Indies had ethnically distinct ruled – England and New England did not.
England had an ethnically distinct ruling class for centuries after the Norman conquest (the court language was essentially a dialect of French for much of the Middle Ages); they just eventually assimilated. Especially after it became politically advantageous for the English kings to play up their ties to England as a source of troops to help them hold and expand their more prosperous but also more hotly contested French holdings.
New England had an ethnically distinct ruling class (English settlers), it’s just that the relations between the settlers and the natives broke down so hard in the mid-1600s that the natives were exterminated and expelled from the regions around the settlements, rather than being subjugated for labor.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me when reading previous “Big Man” articles, but the line
“The highest status such dependents might be retainers, men maintained in an aristocrats household as full time ‘muscle.’”
made me realize that criminal organizations often follow the same pattern as these “Big Man” societies, complete with hereditary leadership and reciprocal obligations.
Keep going, you’re almost there!
LF, just to note this, while some people will say that there is no meaningful difference between a government and a criminal organization because both do similar things (such as rewarding loyal followers with property), it should be noted that many (though not all) modern governments provide mechanisms by which they can be removed for unsatisfactory performance or for abuses.
If the people of 1930 Chicago think that William Thompson shouldn’t be the mayor of Chicago anymore, they do have a direct way of getting him out of the position. By contrast, if the people of 1930 Chicago think that Al Capone shouldn’t be big crime boss of Chicago anymore, they have no direct way of removing him except to indirectly yell at the police to do their jobs and arrest him already.
One of the ways to tell that a government leader wishes he could run his government like it was a gang of thieves is if he tries to alter the election process to make sure his supporters cannot be removed from control by normal means.
‘Government’ is distinct from organized crime, but ‘aristocratic government’ is not.
If the aristocrats hold positions of de facto absolute power I would agree with you.
Well, Lena, crime bosses usually don’t hold de facto absolute power either. They can have any given individual assassinated, maybe, or any individual businessman robbed. But if crime bosses push that power far enough, other leaders within the community will start to push back, as illustrated by the example of the Secret Six:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Six_(Chicago)
Bret actually used the Godfather intro bit as a good example of a Big Man doing his thing: He grants favours, dispenses justice, rewards his followers, etc.
Often, organized criminals are simply trying to do the things that any successful warlord would do… Except that unlike a successful warlord, they are trying to do so “in the shadow” of an existing state apparatus. And obviously, any existing state will make it illegal to be a successful privately operating warlord inside their territory. So whereas under conditions of anarchy the Al Capones of the world might set themselves up as princes, in the presence of a stable national government this does not happen.
“Compulsion can get me into the ranks, but it struggles to keep them there.”
I know I’m not the only person to point this out, but this should be “can get them” or “keep me there”, but as it is you’re changing the subjects.
I just want to point out that nearly every American man knows how to throw a football, despite not being part of the professional athlete aristocracy. I can see a Klingon society where some of that warrior identity continues as a part-time hobby rather than full time job, with a mentality where everyone takes pride in being ready to be called up if necessary.
“As an aside, this is one case where the fantasy-style ‘large city with fragmented internal power structures’ that one sees frequently in high fantasy RPGs (thinking places like Baldur’s Gate or Defiance Bay), though notably in the low countries, these guilds were subject to a higher political authority, be it a town government or a noble.”
The main clause of this sentence seems to be missing a verb. Possibly “this is one case where the fantasy-style ‘large city’…makes sense”, or maybe “this is one case of the fantasy-style ‘large city’…”.
This may never be seen by the author, but… Dr. Devereaux, was “remind at the standard” supposed to be “remain at the standard?”
Regarding Klingons, I’m not certain if this applies to them specifically but I tend to assume these sorts of “all warrior” societies work fairly similarly to contemporary societies with universal (male) conscription, where 100% of the (adult male, though possibly also female) population is expected to know how to fight and have at some point done a stint in the military, but this doesn’t preclude them having a different primary vocation, such as engineering. It might not necessarily be the most efficient allocation of human capital, but we have enough real world examples to know that it’s not *ruinously* inefficient, meaning it could potentially remain in place indefinitely due to either cultural norms or perceived necessity.
I think you need a bit more than that — my impression is that you don’t get this self-concept from *just* mass-conscription-and-reservist societies or among military veterans in professional militaries like the USA.
I proposed something more like “every military-age male is in the National Guard” (which has drill once a month).
The problem is that that sort of universal military obligation is only supportable in a democracy if it’s perceived as a vital necessity: Israel surrounded by hostile neighbors, Switzerland maintaining a defensive neutrality, or Finland having to face down the Russian giant next door. Or earlier, city-states of various eras at times literally defending the walls. Drilling is both expensive for the state and a pain in the butt for the populace, and the People are not likely to vote in legislators and governors who will demand such public duty if they don’t see the need. The lackluster response to attempting to mobilize the populace against the Whiskey Rebellion was an early indicator of this. In the absence outside the frontier of any real threat, the early United States devolved into the states having a “select” militia of those who stepped forward to volunteer for training– more or less the equivalent of today’s civil police forces or National Guard. And if neither the People nor the state governments particularly wanted a universal military obligation, the Federal government attempting to impose one would have been met with suspicion that the Fed was attempting to regiment the populace under military control— see the Anti-Federalist Paper #29 and the corresponding Federalist Paper #29.
Here my assumption is that this is 1. strongly supported culturally and 2. that there’s something of a mixed Entitlement System and Vocational System going on here, where refusing to drill *at all* would mean falling out of the citizen class.
The USA never really developed these pressures and didn’t have the military aristocracy meme whereas I’m assuming that the Klingons do, just universalized through society (similar to how capitalist societies universalize being petit bourgeois or commies universalize being working class).
tbh military slavery as a mainstay of an army was unstable, but it had a very stable arrangement as part of a navy. The Venetians and other Italian city states extensively made use of galley slaves from the 13th to 16th century and even after galley slaves ended (due to galleys being obsolete) the British navy impressed sailors into service into the early 19th century, and impressment laws are still on the books today. The dynamics are alot different when you’re literally trapped at sea.
British sailors may have risked being press-gaged. But they were not completely without rights like slaves typically were.
Absolutely! The idea that pressed sailors were slaves is complete nonsense. ESPECIALLY in the British Royal Navy. For a variety of reasons. The press gangs get the, well, press, but honestly made up a small portion of recruitment; most sailors were volunteers, sailors looking for work who’d served in the Navy before, often following captains from ship to ship. And at sea the “pressed” sailors were often volunteers–captains or lieutenants would go on merchant vessels and say “I need ten hands, anyone want to sign up?” It was a hard life, sure, but not much harder than a merchant vessel (see “Two Years Before the Mast”–a British naval captain had to hold a trial before a flogging, unlike merchant captains).
The other thing about the British navy is how loquacious they were. The ordinary sailors wrote to the Admiralty CONSTANTLY. A surprising number were literate. This included pressed sailors. How many slaves wrote to the local mayor or governor about their masters? Sailors did the equivalent all the time. Makes for good naval fiction, as we can cite some rather absurd and spectacular events in the past that otherwise wouldn’t be believable!
And how did sailors act on shore? They were given leave as often as possible, and they certainly weren’t under armed guard! Some ran, sure, but most were quite happy with the life of a sailor and when their time came they’d go back to the ship. This is not the behavior of slaves.
Even the complaints of mutineers don’t read like they were written by slaves. They were profoundly concerned with justice, and wanted the heads of certain people (captains could make a ship an absolute living Hell), but for the most part the complaints were that their superiors violated military and/or moral law. I forget if the Spithead group mentioned flogging or not, but they certainly didn’t call for an end to it, and the captain had violated military law by issuing more lashes than he was legally allowed to at any rate. (The Admiralty had VERY strict rules of punishment, though how strictly they were enforced was highly variabl.)
Remember: An able seaman was a master of multiple crafts. To be able to hand, reef, and steer, knot and splice, man a gun, and handle a boat were all considered normal requirements. You cannot make a slave do that. A sailor in the 1800s, particularly a British one, was no more a slave than someone working on an oil rig at sea today is.
Indeed one tactic of sailors to protest against poor treatment was “malicious compliance”: carrying out their orders with robotic imbecilic obedience to the letter rather than the spirit of those orders. A ship could not be run without sailors who were at least somewhat willing to do their jobs.
I have heard of German civil servants doing this instead of striking since they don’t have the right to strike.
It is absolutely possible for a slave to carry out complicated, motivated tasks in circumstances where their refusal to do so would result in lots of deaths. These are human beings, they can be harmed in complicated ways and still operate in complicated ways themselves. The punishments common to the British Navy were all adapted from punishments for captive labor.
No – they were just the common practice of the time. Merchant captains flogged, school-teachers flogged, the army flogged, thieves and prostitutes were flogged. The navy was, if anything, more regulated than civilian life.
Flogging was a punishment such that in all but the most severe instances the sailor could go back to work soon. Removing a sailor from the labor pool wasn’t viable at sea.
Is it possible? In the sense that the laws of physics specifically do not forbid it, sure. Technically in is within the set of “Things which could in theory happen.”
However, history rather clearly demonstrates that humans don’t work that way, not at any reasonable scale. Slavery is NOT amenable to complex tasks. This is why the North in the USA more or less abandoned slavery as it industrialized, while the South–an agrarian society where many of the tasks were relatively simple–continued to embrace the practice. The North was no less racist than the South, they simply found that slavery didn’t work with their economic activities. Turns out beating and brutalizing people isn’t an effective way to teach them complex and dangerous tasks.
There are also cases such as the Hermione. Where sailors were treated overly brutally the sailors–powerful men with access to a variety of weapons, many capable of commanding a ship themselves–would take over the ship. The sailors were lower in the hierarchy, but captains had limits in law, in justice, and in practical fact as to how far their powers went.
“The punishments common to the British Navy were all adapted from punishments for captive labor.”
No. You personally, would see them as such. But the sailors did not. This is not speculative; again we have their own words to go by. And in any argument where one side says how a group felt, and the other side is the group saying how they felt, the group saying how they felt wins. Your fine feelings are, to be blunt, irrelevant to the discussion.
One simple fact destroys your argument: Most sailors in the Navy in the 1700s/1800s were volunteers. Again, the press gang gets our attention, but that’s because we are obsessed with it. The reality is that pressed hands were often more trouble than they were worth, and ships’ companies were largely composed of men (and more women than most realize) who WANTED to go to sea. It’s a contradiction to say those who go out of their way to do something are captives.
As for punishment, the punishments seem harsh to you or me, but at the time they were LESS severe than many on land. It was a time when physical punishment was routine and brutal, and the fact that the Admiralty limited what a captain could do to his crew (at least in theory) was actually quite progressive for the time. A sailor wasn’t a soldier; they weren’t viewed as the scum of the Earth. They were valuable experts and were treated as such. And again, this isn’t speculative, we have their own words to go by. They complained about too much flogging and starting, but not even Dana complained about the practices as such; those were normal parts of their life on land and at sea and were accepted as such.
It is an error to project modern views–especially personal preferences–into the past. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. And if we wish to understand the past we must accept that the views of the members of those cultures are relevant to the discussion. British sailors DID NOT view themselves as captives, and WERE NOT treated as captives. They were skilled experts in a dangerous and difficult profession that necessarily included harsh conditions. There is a very large difference.
British foot soldiers during the same time period were requited from the bottom of society. So I can understand they were seen “the scum of the Earth”.
@Dinwar,
This is why the North in the USA more or less abandoned slavery as it industrialized, while the South–an agrarian society where many of the tasks were relatively simple–continued to embrace the practice.
I’m not going to argue that British Navy sailors were akin to slaves, you and others here have pretty convincingly argued that they’re not, but I don’t think it’s fair to describe agrarian work as simple, or to suggest that slaves can’t do highly complex work. Agricultural work is different than industrial work, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it simpler, it can require a lot of skill, knowledge and intelligence in its own way.
In fact we have at least two examples of 19th century slaves succeeding at some of the most complex agricultural jobs, making advancements in plant breeding. Pecan domestication in the southern US and vanilla pollination in the French Indian Ocean collonies were largely innovated by two specific slave individuals, named I think Antoine or Anthony in the first case and Edmond Albius in the second.
“Agricultural work is different than industrial work, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it simpler, it can require a lot of skill, knowledge and intelligence in its own way.”
We’re talking averages, sure. A major mid-20th century complaint about factory jobs was that they weren’t intellectually stimulating, and the farmers I knew growing up could raise and breed animals, raise a huge variety of plants, do framing, plumbing, electrical work, welding, concrete work, site grading, operate heavy equipment, hunt, fish, do accounting, and all sorts of other things.
A better way to phrase my point would be, agrarian work has more room for 18th and 19th century style slaves. There’s more work on the lower end of agrarian work than in industrial work. Slaves are not an efficient work force–they’re going to do the minimum necessary to avoid the worst brutality, but that’s about it (with, obviously, some exceptions). They can pick stones out of a field, harvest crops, do some basic processing. But again, with some exceptions, they’re just not going to devote a lot of brainpower to the tasks. You cannot–CANNOT–whip people into thinking. To be clear, I’m NOT saying slaves were stupid. Robert Smalls is a great example of how intelligent some of these people were (we should expect the normal variability in intelligence, due purely to population size, possibly a bit lower due to poor diet and physical and mental abuse). Rather, it’s a question of motivation. Violently abused people are not going to give their abusers their full efforts.
As for factory workers, slavery has little value in such situations. First, you WANT your workers to be able to think. An operator who can fix his machine gives you two people for the price of one and reduces downtime, which also saves you money. And you can incentivize people to do so in ways that are incompatible with 18th and 19th century style American slavery. And the other thing is, factories have fundamentally different schedules than farms. Not just when you work, but the concept of a schedule is different. You can actually see this in how we discuss time over…well, time. How people plan and schedule things changes when you move from an agrarian society (which looks at time based on day/night and what work needs done) vs industrial society (which looks at time based on clocks), for example.
But again, we can speculate all day about causes (it’s fun and potentially useful). There’s no argument about outcomes. The experiment was run, and the result is that agrarian societies can use slaves, whereas industrial societies have little to no use for them.
@Dinwar,
I think your amended point is very much a fair one, and I agree. There’s definitely scope for unskilled labor *at the low end* of agrarian work, which there might not be for factory work. Even in the 20th c after slavery itself was abolished, one can observe that low-end agricultural work was often a social role that societies found useufl to fill with people who might not be professional farmers, and who might not even be particularly willing (e.g. drafted soldiers, prisoners, “volunteers” under strong social pressure), which does underscore that you probably can trust these people to pick stones out of a field or weed a field in a way that you might not trust them to work in, say, a steel mill or auto parts factory.
“ major mid-20th century complaint about factory jobs was that they weren’t intellectually stimulating, and the farmers I knew growing up could raise and breed animals, raise a huge variety of plants, do framing, plumbing, electrical work, welding, concrete work, site grading, operate heavy equipment, hunt, fish, do accounting, and all sorts of other things.”
I think a lot of European farmers can still do a lot of these things. There is a Danish TV series named “Bonderøven” (“The Hillbilly”). It shows an ordinary Danish farmer doing all sorts of things on his farm including various handicrafts. I actually got impressed by him the first time I saw it.
@Dinwar:
This is why the North in the USA more or less abandoned slavery as it industrialized,
This isn’t quite true.
If you look at the 1790 census, before industrialization kicked off, those states north of the Mason-Dixon already had very few slaves compared to how many people resided there:
https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1790/number-of-persons.pdf
The only state north of Maryland where more than 10% of the populace was enslaved was Delaware, with 14%.
Meanwhile, every state from Maryland southward kept at least a quarter of its population as slaves, the sole exception being Kentucky.
Apparently scale made a difference: crops conducive to plantation growing were economically viable to farm with slaves whereas other crops were not. I wonder what made, say, tobacco a slave crop but not wheat or corn. I’m tempted to say cash crops but weren’t almost all crops sold for money at some point?
I suspect it was the climate making slave plantations profitable. There might not be any obvious difference between the climates of Maryland and Pennsylvania. But different crops have different hardiness to cold. At least one out of the four cultivated cotton species can be grown in present-day Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Wasteful irrigation methods for growing it there is the main cause of the Aral Sea drying up. I think it should be referred to as “the Aral Lakes” nowadays.
Also, it may have been a matter of what was most profitable per unit of area. When the slave plantations were first set up there may have been a cost / benefit analysis. If so growing cotton, sugar or tobacco may have been more profitable then growing wheat, maize or rice. Then the plantation owner may have been stuck with that even if it was not profitable anymore.
There are many different definitions of ‘slave’ and the word typically is used to translate words with more specific meanings. In a modern context, what makes a person enslaved is that they are subject to two simultaneous conditions (both either de jure or de facto): a) the worker is subject to wage theft, b) the worker is unable to leave their assigned employment. For pre-modern sailors, this is tricky because the normal pay period for such sailors was ‘a voyage’ and thus they often wouldn’t know they were subject to wage theft for months. Some would assume they were enslaved immediately upon waking up trapped on a ship at sea.
To me being a slave is being equal to a working animal in a country without any animal protection laws. Or at least being routinely treated by the ones you work for like you were.
Even in the antebellum United States a slave owner could not– quite– torture a slave to death solely for their own amusement. Witness the scandal when one slave owner was revealed to have done so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphine_LaLaurie Slaves were acknowledged as human, albeit on a level with mentally handicapped children and of course abusive “guardians” were as old as humanity.
In the decades before the American civil war most slave-owners controlled their slavers through fear. I consider the methods for keeping them responsible so insufficient they can be said to have held absolute power over them. The woman you mention was likely a sadist on top of that.
Part of the (very weak) legal protections slaves tended to have is that slaves were property, and just wantonly destroying your property was seen as ruining thing for your potential heirs. Just killing slaves with no justification was often at least theoretically illegal (though more of property crime than anything else) though the threshold for “justification” was really, really low.
For the purpose of this discussion, I would argue that to be a slave means to be someone’s property. Not “to work for someone I don’t like”, not “to have a bad working environment”, not even “to be the victim of a crime” (which is what wage theft is). To be PROPERTY.
To expand the term beyond that definition is to invert reason. Basically people have decided that sailors were slaves, and are re-defining the term so that they are right by definition. This tells us nothing about how sailors lived, nothing about how they interacted with the rest of society, nothing about how society viewed them (slightly different, but in significant ways), just…..nothing. It tells us that the speaker is using the term “slave” to mean “someone working in a situation I personally would be horrified by”, which isn’t useful in any way to a discussion of history.
Regarding sailors’ wages, sure, they were often deducted. Part of their wages was things like slops (cloths), tobacco (remember the time we’re dealing with), and some other things. On the flip side, a voyage would last months or even years, during which time they were housed, clothed, and fed, which was going to be most of their expenses anyway. You’d never get rich as a foremast jack (barring a major prize), with even a modest attempt at economy and a reasonable skill level (which allowed you to take ship again) you wouldn’t starve either. And there was a chance, however slight, of upward mobility. The British Navy had a history of making officers out of common sailors. Not a huge number, but certainly more upward mobility than you see on land.
Whalers, privateers, and a few others operated differently. Whalers often sailed for shares–basically a crude employee-owned company where pay is based on dividends. Privateers were often the same. Some merchants allowed small ventures if it didn’t discommode the ship as well. There was a lot of variety.
Again, while WE would be horrified to be in such a situation, it’s not like land-based employment among free people was any better. Check out the riots over pottery factories sometime, with an eye to the causes. If anything, again, the Navy was more progressive than the rest of society. To call sailors slaves because we would be horrified to be treated that way, while ignoring how the vast majority of people in that society lived, is rather ridiculous.
In 2023 I wrote a blog post explaining just how cruel chattel slavery could be:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/What-chattel-slavery-meant-in-practice#wbb1
You are right in that slavery is never as simple as being forced to work for someone having the right to beat you. A lot of people still thought of as having rights has been in such a situation. In historical context a human being another human’s legal property is a useful definition. After this becomes formally illegal the combination of income theft and being unable to leave becomes more useful.
“After this becomes formally illegal the combination of income theft and being unable to leave becomes more useful.”
I disagree.
These are separate issues that need to be addressed separately. And I think the objection to this view is worth addressing. The reason people want to call these things slavery (not just here, but elsewhere as well) is because of an emotive response, basically “This is bad, so I need to call it something bad.” Or, more cynically, to induce an emotive response in their listener–“Slavery’s bad, they call this the equivalent, so it must be bad, and anyone who says otherwise is evil and can be ignored.” (That’s not necessarily how people here are using the term, but it’s absolutely how it’s used in other instances.) But the thing is, these can be bad without being slavery.
To give an example: Company scrip. Many company towns “paid” their workers in scrip instead of money, which could only be exchanged for goods and services in the company store. This is evil–it’s a way to ensure workers can’t save, can’t realistically leave, and have no choice but to work for you regardless of the conditions you set. But it’s NOT slavery. If a worker did leave (which did happen), the company could not send packs of armed men after them to drag the former worker back, usually beaten and bloody. Workers could, and usually did, marry and have children and have a reasonable expectation of not having the company rip the family apart by selling the children off. Workers has a choice in food, clothing, and other amenities–not GREAT choices, I’ll grant you, and they were all dictated by the company store, but they had choices.
To be clear: NONE OF THAT makes scrip a morally justifiable thing. The whole concept is evil, a bare-faced lie every paycheck, nothing but a way to refuse to pay workers while pretending to pay them. But they do make it not slavery.
Jim Crow wasn’t slavery either. Nor was share cropping. They were ABSOLUTELY evil, but they were a different kind of evil. To call the slavery obfuscates what was being done to the people of those times (which, remember, is in living memory). Frankly we owe it to the people who endured that systematic abuse to look it square in the face and call it what it is, rather than hiding behind slogans and terms that allow us to gloss it over.
The current idea of “wage slavery” is nonsense. It’s an attempt to equate the difficulties of a job you don’t like with the difficulties of literally being property, and there is no comparison. It’s childish and need not be taken seriously by adults. Again, workplaces can be really, really bad, but the idea that a bad workplace is the equivalent of being literal property is not rational.
I am trying to express myself as to avoid the trap you describe. If you use terms for one-sided exploitation too loosely you make the worse forms seem less bad and/or the less bad forms seem worse. However, subjectively bad working conditions are not equally bad either. I think the expression “wage slavery” is appropriate if the employee can’t make a living without working him- or herself ill or at worst to a premature death.
The Venetians adopted galley slavery last, kept them mixed with free rowers and, interestingly, armed them (the outboard slaves were given a sword to use in self-defence).
I think it’s a lot easier to recruit in a fantasy scenario when the elites of the society can honestly say “the monsterous servants of the Dark Gods intend to kill/torture/enslave everyone, so every able man has to serve in the militia and anyone willing to sign up for the professional army will be blessed by our Gods. By the way, the nobles, priests, wizards above you have been selected and blessed by said Gods and their intermediaries, so you should do what they say.” Completely different situation to real life, especially when they elites can actually perform miracles or cast divine magic.
Indeed. Secondary worlds with functional magic should have “magocracy” as the most common form of social organization! “Well, the gods have spoken! The ‘Big Man’ can throw fireballs and I can’t, long like the new mage-king!”
Depends – fiction provides a wide degree of freedom (I write fantasy with functional magic – no mageocracy for various reasons).
I’ve argued a number of times that this situation operates identically to real-world people who simply ardently believe that they will go to hell if they don’t do what their king tells them to do because their king is chosen by god to rule them.
It makes the job of the folks doing the convincing a bit easier, but once the belief is societally ingrained there’s no functional difference between someone doing something because they believe something is true (that actually isn’t) vs because they believe something is true (that actually is).
Being killed/tortured/enslaved was a not-uncommon fate for a conquered people in the real world, no “Dark Gods” required. So the fear of being conquered works pretty well as a motivation for recruitment, even in cases where the enemy doesn’t consist of literal monsters.
Some notes regarding the Imperial Chinese armies, as a Chinese historian:
Describing Later Han China as an example of an empire with a professional army is not entirely inaccurate, but it is slightly oversimplified. If anything, such an example from Imperial China would be the Song dynasty.
In short, the Later Han Chinese Army could be divided into three parts: 1. A semi-professional core (the soldiers were rotated yearly rather than having lifelong or fixed employment terms) around the capital city; 2. A semi-hereditary military settler army in the border regions (Dong Zhuo was from this group); and 3. a general levy in the interior regions.
For the majority of the Chinese history, the Chinese empires only had a semi-professional core protecting the imperial court or acting as a Praetorian Guard, surrounded by a semi-warrior-class and semi-military-settler army (such as the Tang Fubing, the Ming Weisuo/Junhu soldiers, and the Qing Bannermen), then a general levy in case of emergency, as well as client and private armies to fill the gaps (such as Qi Jiguang’s Zhejiang Army). Most of the army was not professional, but rather semi-professional or vocational – think of the Byzantine imperial tagmata vs. regional themata.
The only Chinese empire where the majority of the army was professional, standing, and salaried was the Song (esp. the Northern Song). It was the result of a specific development from the late Tang regional armies (cf. Zeng Ruilong’s works on early Song military history), and the system was discontinued after the Mongol conquest. Then the Ming empire picked up the old route of a semi-professional core with a military settler army once again.
Overall, the Chinese empires, despite having a centralized fiscal structure and bureaucracy, mostly relied on an absolute patchwork of different systems and solutions.
I’ve never found the Klingons that ridiculous. One could argue that teaching a starship engineer swordsmanship is a waste of time, but many in our society also argue that teaching an engineer literary analysis or history is a waste of time, or that teaching algebra in high school to someone who will likely work in retail their whole life is a waste of time.
All the arguments we produce for not overspecializing education would apply here, just filtered through the Klingons’ particular mores about what skills make a person well-rounded.
I kinda have a pet peeve going in the opposite direction of this article. I find it grating how settings will try to mimic history when there society should clearly have very different social dynamics. If your society can reliably call upon the gods or use some other magic to keep harvests reliable and infant/maternal mortality low that should impact their political economy. Why are there peasants and hereditary nobles in a society where farmers dont make up the overwhelming bulk of the population? Why wouldn’t that society have been overthrown or overrun to make way for a society that values labor specialization and has much higher outputs? Yet stories seem to assume that if you dont have guns and steam engines, you automatically have feudalism.
Or to paraphrase what was said in another reply, why isn’t magic politicized?
Maybe that’s just my choice of reading material, but I do find that “not divergent enough” is rarely a problem in the books published within last 20 years. Either magic is rare and weird, or the society is entirely unlike historical feudal societies (which does not mean that the state power is strong – you may have family alliances being more important than the state like in Italian republics, or appointed governors going rogue like it happened in Japan in 15th century or in China in 20th). Existence of guns matters little.
On the other hand too professional armies or too capitalist economy do appear quite frequently
As far as I know the daimyo were not appointed governors. They were large landowners fighting each other during the 15th and 16th centuries. After Ieyasu Tokugawa reunited Japan they became strictly controlled by the shogun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimyo
See the section of “Sengoku daimyo”.
Multiple possible backgrounds:
1) Shugo daimyo. That is, “governors” appointed by the Ashikaga shogunate, normally residing in the capital with contingents but drawing income from and as absentees supervising administrations of specified territories. Examples in the article: Satake, Imagawa, Takeda, Toki, Rokkaku, Ōuchi, and Shimazu
2) Shugodai. Actual resident governors, appointed by the shugo rather than shogun. Examples in the article: Asakura, Amago, Nagao, Miyoshi, Chōsokabe, Hatano, and Oda
3) Jizamurai – local landholders. Examples in the article: Mōri, Tamura, and Ryūzōji
4) Lower shogunate officials or “ronin” – outside adventurers. Examples in the article: Late Hōjō, Saitō
5) Governors appointed by the imperial court rather than shogunate. Example in the article: Kitabatake
6) Courtiers of imperial court who managed to emigrate from capital and seize control of territory outside. Example in the article: Tosa Ichijō
Note that some of these examples are disputable and in any case they cover just 21 out of about 200 clans by end of Sengoku (and more over the period). Still, “an appointed governor running out of control” was common.
Thank you, I did not know the origin of the daimyo. I only knew they controlled large areas of arable land and used income from this to sustain equally large numbers of samurai.
Yeah, I think “this society is more similar to a 21st-century WEIRD society than makes sense” is a far, far more common problem in fantasy than “this society is more similar to a 12th-century feudal society than makes sense”.
A lot of people are unaware there were any changes in society before their lifetime. Which may lead to the things they grew up with being ascribed to a society centuries earlier.
Except for the ultimate cause of the apocalypse my post-apocalyptic world is completely mundane. However, its population can still benefit from surviving technology and knowledge. They have inherited a considerable number of high-yield crops and animals from the previous technological civilisation. Agricultural methods are comparable to those developed in the Netherlands and later Britain during the 17th and 18th centuries. A considerable number incorporate additional ones such as companion planting, intercropping, keeping non-interfering livestock in cultivated fields or even terra preta. All this means much less starvation than one would expect in an agrarian society.
Some medical knowledge has also survived the apocalypse. Such as how contagious diseases spread and which ones of available methods actually work. Some bad habits needlessly risking children’s lives and health have long been abandoned too. Combined this means childhood mortality is quite a bit lower than it was in real life. Moreover, nearly all societies have reliable contraception. Since cultural progress can’t be entirely reversed various societies are perhaps surprisingly egalitarian and tolerant.
Some form of division of power is nearly universal. Slavery is only ever practiced by a small number of authoritarian regimes as collective punishment. Not a single one of those regimes lasts longer than 50 years. There is no serfdom and if indentured servitude is allowed it is strictly regulated to prevent debt bondage. Something resembling European Feudalism only occurs in some parts of the world lacking printing presses. Even then there is considerable power sharing among the elite. When printing presses are established in these societies they lead to drastic increases in literacy. Which in turn result in major political upheaval and ultimately the end of local Feudalism.
‘Game’ epic fantasy, in contrast to Tolkien pastiche, is generally composed by: taking Early Modern society -> subtracting out all the elements that aren’t also present in Medieval societies -> adding magic -> calling it Medieval.
And that’s when it’s not a blatantly 20th/21st century society with a medieval coat of paint.
“If your society can reliably call upon the gods or use some other magic to keep harvests reliable and infant/maternal mortality low …..”
That’s a big “If”. And it’s not an “If” believed universally by previous cultures. Gods could be….opinionated. Previous cultures believed there was a certain aspect of the Gifting Cycle between men and gods–we offer sacrifices, you give us a good harvest, that sort of thing–but, well, it’s a god. If Poseidon takes a dislike to you, you’re up the creak without a paddle, as it were. Odin broke oaths repeatedly, with gods and giants and the like; why should you be surprised when he does the same to you? The idea that gods are inherently good, let alone omnibenevolent, is not a universally held idea.
Magic in fantasy is also often very complex, and success isn’t ensured. It can be limited, it can be extremely expensive, and it can be very dangerous. See Discworld for example. I think the Conan books also do a good job of portraying this. The gods exist. Magic exists. And it does influence society. But it’s neither an unmitigated good, nor entirely stable, so the effects are limited.
“Why are there peasants and hereditary nobles in a society where farmers dont make up the overwhelming bulk of the population?”
Given that we see this in modern societies–England, for example–I’d hardly call this unrealistic. There are plenty of reasons to continue having a hereditary nobility, including “We always have and that’s our culture, and who are you to tell us how to do things?” Cultural touchstones like this can become MORE important as they become less practical, oddly enough. It becomes a cultural anchor, something to connect you to the past, something to remind you you’re Us and not Them.
If you want to get truly weird you can have different forms of reproduction. An elven culture where only select few can breed, for example–those who can would obviously be the hereditary nobility, because they’re the ones that HAVE heredity.
“Why wouldn’t that society have been overthrown or overrun to make way for a society that values labor specialization and has much higher outputs?”
DOES specialization produce higher outputs? Again, look at the Conan books. Specialization tends to be better for the individual, but worse for the society in that setting. It tends to be a destabilizing force. This is contrary to modern thought, but there’s no reason at all to assume the views of the West in general and the USA in particular are universally held by fantasy societies.
“Yet stories seem to assume that if you dont have guns and steam engines, you automatically have feudalism.”
The issue is twofold–communication and state capacity. You can have all the guns you want, but if your state capacity is extremely limited you’re going to end up with an essentially feudal setup. And you can have all the guns you want, but if your communication is “man on horse” you end up with feudalism. Modern governments only work because of mass communication and mass recognition of the legitimacy of the institutions. If either breaks down you either get a bunch of little states or a bunch of individuals with authority over territories based on personal loyalty.
To summarize: This is projecting a very specific suite of modern beliefs onto fantasy cultures. It’s a very specific worldview–that the modern age is inevitable and that the past was trying to become the present. In reality, the present isn’t all in the present; there are plenty of cultures today that violate every ideal you present. And there’s ample justification for any fantasy culture to do so.
But the real reason is simple: Tolkien wrote in a Medieval setting. We’re all playing in his attic. Note the absurdly low population density in Game of Thrones, for example; that’s 100% because Tolkien did it.
A historian would object. ‘Feudalism’ was government by personal relations: oaths, kinship, homage .. it was relatively brief (roughly 950 to 1200), mostly western and central Europe and resulted from the breakdown of legitimate central institutions. Normal rule – a strong role for royalty and courts and the church came back quite quickly. The titles remained, the content changed. Neither Rome nor the Carolingian empire nor the Abbasid caliphate were “a bunch of individuals with authority over territories based on personal loyalty.”
Mass recognition of the legitimacy of the institutions is central to effective modern governance. Elite recognition was enough before then.
I thought Feudalism started breaking down in the middle of the 14th century due to population loses from Black Death.
While money had never vanished from western Europe, it took the reintroduction of having the majority of economic activity (including taxation) be via money rather than barter or payment in kind before national governments could centralize to the degree necessary to end feudalism.
The maximalist position within the academic debate here is “feudalism never existed at all”, so it’s not like there’s a single coherent answer on the topic. In general, historians of the period tend to much more limited definitions of feudalism and place much more emphasis on the variations and inconsistencies across time and place.
Really the biggest problem with using “feudalism” in any discussion is that any two people using the term will almost inevitably mean wildly different things.
Tea Kew @June 11, 2026 at 6:10 am:
As I recall it, OGP deprecates the word “feudalism” and instead says “manorialism” if you are talking about local peasant vs lord or “Big Man” relationships, or “vassalage” if you are talking about military and political relationships between lords or big men and overlords and bigger men.
It was never a neat hierarchy, and really the breakdown was limited to Francia, the Netherlands and parts of Italy. By 1200 or so the King of France or the Duke of Flanders or the town governments of Italy were cracking down on lordly independence, insisting that royal etc courts have a final and enforceable say and starting to collect taxes across the whole realm. There was a long way to go, the aristocracies were still turbulent, but it was not government by oath and friendship any more.
To me Feudalism means decentralisation without much in the way of power sharing. Add political power over those closest below one in the hierarchy being dependant on personal loyalty. Then you have a useful definition. Far from all agrarian civilisations have worked like this. Feudalism arose as a solution to inability to uphold a bureaucracy. Literacy rates had sunken too low for that. With a considerably higher literacy rate Feudalism is not needed. However, this requires much higher population density than was the case when Feudalism developed. Having the printing press also helps.
@Dinwar,
An elven culture where only select few can breed, for example–those who can would obviously be the hereditary nobility, because they’re the ones that HAVE heredity.
Certain eusocial insects (some types of ants and bees, etc.) would be a relevant example from our world. And that isn’t even the strangest breeding system you see in the insect world (there are lots of systems of reproduction that are even weirder).
Magic exists. And it does influence society. But it’s neither an unmitigated good, nor entirely stable, so the effects are limited.
Another reason its effects might be limited would be if you have rival powers *both* capable of using magic, that can each in some sense limit the other.
IRL societies with constrained natural-born child reproduction simply expand adoption mechanisms or/and add inheritance to mentor-protégé bonds.
Ronald Tolkien modelled his Middle-Earth on the Early Middle Ages. Back then Europe was under-populated in real life. This was due to a combination of climate change, a pandemic in the 6th century and regionally environmental destruction. Unfortunately, at lot of his admirers base their works on the High Middle Ages without considering their much higher population density.
In “The Lord of the Rings” Middle-Earth might be sparsely populated for narrative reasons. But the author gave in-universe reasons for this. Large parts of Middle-Earth were deforested under Númenorean rule. The forest being unable to regrow even after a couple of millennia indicates soil erosion as well. There has been a pandemic in the historically recent past too. (Ronald Tolkien could have known about the Plague of Justinian and had also lived through the Spanish Flu.) Mordor’s neighbours to the north and west are having an overrepresentation of certain diseases. This gives them trouble to recover after the pandemic. Incidentally northwestern Mordor has noticeably reduced light levels due to air pollution. At times this air pollution would blow to its northern and western neighbours. I think this can explain their pubic health problem without invoking magic.
“The idea that gods are inherently good, let alone omnibenevolent, is not a universally held idea.”
Not sure where I said anything about benevolence. If your issue is the unreliable nature of the gods, your society should be built around priests to keep the gods happy not kings and knights.
“DOES specialization produce higher outputs”
As an economist the short answer is “Yes” and the long answer is yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees.
Anyways… The English hereditary nobility is a vestigial institution with only superficial resemblance to when it was the government. Discworld is a tongue in cheek comedy so I’m not talking about stuff like that.
What I’m more talking about is ttrpgs like DnD; there are a lot more Game Masters in the world then published fantasy authors. Just at level 1 you’ve got cure disease, purify food, unseen servant, mold earth. And there are various magical tools like potions or magical scrolls that make it possible for non-casters in rural areas to make use of spells prepared long in advance by someone else. What isn’t this a service based economy? An unskilled laborer would be far more useful delivering magical ingredients to spellcasters or acting as a traveling salesperson then farming. Arguably their society should have higher per capita production then our own.
“But the real reason is simple: Tolkien wrote in a Medieval setting. We’re all playing in his attic.”
My hot take is that Tolkien wasn’t actually writing in a Medieval setting. He was writing a setting like the legends people described in the past. Those legends dont actually have the same economy or political economy as the middle ages. Even setting aside the explicitly magical aspects, population migrations and political upheavals of legends are impossible in the real middle ages and people at the time would have known that. If you read the hobbit and the lotr in that light, it fits much better IMHO.
Well, he did consider himself writing a sort of fanfic on such stories.
Another way to make the Klingons work is if you imagine the dominant recreational activity in the Klingon Empire is practicing some sort of martial art or combat sport.
Teaching someone to be a competent modern infantryman – let alone a useful combatant in a sci-fi setting – would likely be prohibitive for non-specialists, but you can absolutely learn to sword fight for fun on evenings and weekends and then go back to your boring day job designing widgets and overseeing widget distribution mechanisms. It might even be useful in an emergency if most of the people in your society have some level of combat training, though you probably wouldn’t want to rely on such non-specialists being anywhere near as good as someone who fights for a living.
And it’s also easy to imagine these martial practices serving useful functions, such as:
1) Exercise! Even your engineers do their best work when they keep in shape.
2) Social functions! Going to a fencing practice and inviting someone to spar with you can be a good way to make friends, and you could easily imagine that Klingons would be very devoted to the people they met at their first Bat’leth class, for example.
3) Courtship; if this is a culture that values martial prowess, and has fairly egalitarian gender roles, then perhaps boy klingons and girl klingons might spar with bat’leths to impress one another with their cool moves in the same way that young people in real life might try to dance with someone in a club or something.
(These are all basically descriptions of how the Historical European Martial Arts community works, incidentally, so they’re not entirely hypothetical)
I was thinking something along these lines as well.
One thing to remember is that Klingons are not 13th century blacksmiths. What constitutes “work” is fundamentally different in a technologically advanced civilization than it is in an agrarian one. A blacksmith in 1236 could only realistically be a blacksmith; the job required so much time, effort, and training that once you were in, you were locked in and didn’t have time to do things like practice with weapons. In contrast, a professional blacksmith in the 2000s has plenty of time to do so–I can say this from experience, having gone against a few in sparring matches. We also have Army Reserves, who have regular jobs but train and work periodically as military members. In some parts of the USA it’s simply assumed boys will either join the military proper or the Reserves, and not doing so carries some social penalties.
Klingons, being more advanced, will obviously take this further. Obviously someone who’s just a warrior is likely to be better at combat than someone who’s a Reservist or equivalent, but the Reservist would still serve useful combat roles.
There are a few things to add to your list of why martial arts would be so important:
4) Religious reasons. If the Klingon religion (or equivalent) views martial prowess as a form of worship/devotion/prayer/meditation/whatever, it would push members of the community to practice martial arts.
5) Welfare. A question every society needs to answer is “How do we handle the least fortunate members of our society?” In the Middle Ages the Church handled that–people could join a monastery (Cluny had institutions for men and women, and some for married couples). In our society we have private charity and public welfare. I can see the Klingons using the military as a way to handle this. If everyone’s a warrior, everyone has a place in society and you don’t HAVE extreme poor–at least, this being an empire, not among the core group and who cares about the folks you’re exploiting?
6) Outlet for natural hostility. The thing about Klingons is they’re aliens. We need not assume they function as we do. Some species are inherently violent at certain times–think deer in rut–and need an outlet for that. If Klingons are similar, their society would have been faced with the question of how to handle that. Undirected violence tends to be bad for a culture, but carefully directed violence, through a military and strictly-enforced hierarchy, can be good for the society (less so for the neighbors). If you’re facing off against the Borg or some other implacable enemy, it’s useful to have rough beings eager to do violence on your behalf!
I would really take exception to the idea that teaching someone to be a competent infantryman is prohibitively expensive. Infantry combat is grueling and difficult, but it is nothing that special. Anyone who is reasonably fit and mentally suited, can learn the job in a few months of efficient training, demonstrated by experiences of Finnish military from both the foreign deployments and international exercises.
The key here is the word “efficient”. The military learning follows the same rules as civilian learning, and one of the most important things for officers and NCOs to learn is to learn enough paedagogy to be effective teachers.
Star Trek Lower Decks has the Hysperians, a human colony of Ren Faire enthusiasts who turned the planet into a high tech medieval society.
I’m acquainted with a number of SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) people, and when the Marvel Thor movie came out Asgard was jokingly described as the SCA a thousand years from now.
Most of the Starfleet characters in Lower Decks know some sort of martial art too (even Boimler, the wimpy slapstick victim of the cast, knows how to fence). My theory is that Starfleet has noticed that hand to hand combat comes up weirdly often on away missions, so officers get training for when they inevitably get put in The Space Arena or some shit.
Excellent point! Probably part of the standard survival training for primitive planets by later series. Shame we never heard T’Lyn quoting the percentage of junior Starfleet personnel killed in gladiatorial contests.
As I see it, there’s no significant difference between entitlement principle and vocational principle-warrior class? You can swap “citizen” and “warrior” and it’ll end up the same. A little difference is that entitled citizen don’t have lower class to oppress, but they sometimes do! Either the lower class is inside the polis or outside.
Entitlement principle: fighting is something you might have to do as part of your life, but it doesn’t define you. You can be a Greek polis citizen who qualifies as a hoplite, or a medieval town burgher who is part of the militia, but if you never have to fight, that’s fine for you and for the state. (I was going to add Roman republic citizen, but as our host has pointed out in podcasts, the Roman republic is almost always at war.)
Vocational principle: fighting does define who you are. If you’re a mercenary and there’s no fighting going on locally, you move somewhere there is. If you’re a knight and there’s no local war going on, enter tournaments. Macedonians in the successor states are a bit more complex: the state is not too worried if you’re not actually fighting all the time, but it’s essential to keep the subject population in line so you must be there, armed and and ready to fight.
” (I was going to add Roman republic citizen, but as our host has pointed out in podcasts, the Roman republic is almost always at war.)”
I’m not sure that distinction is as clear as suggested. Rome was for various reasons always in the hegemony business thus at war a lot. Any polis in the same period that also set itself a hegemony goal was more or less always at war as well until it lost or voluntarily decided not be ambitious anymore. Carthage’s hegemony is off camera (scroll?) a lot but I doubt it happened or stayed around by the equivalent of town hall meetings and I can seem to find the big block of peace Athens enjoyed between the inception of the democracy and its death (+/-) 507-322 BC.
To put it more snappily – the entitlement principle says that you fight because you’re part of a specific class, while the vocational principle says that you’re part of a specific class because you fight. They look similar from the outside, but cause and effect are reversed between the two of them.
The author’s article is very good, but there is one flaw. That is the part mentioning China. The author seems to be deceived by the watered numbers in Chinese history books, so much that introducing this as a special case actually weakens the author’s own core viewpoint.
As a Chinese, I want to mention one point. Because of the book burning movement carried out after the Qin unification, the historical materials of the Warring States period only have Qin’s official historical records left. The military strength numbers of other countries recorded inside are all greatly exaggerated. At present, the surviving historical materials of other countries are very rare, but not nothing.
Take the Battle of Diaoyin (331 BC) for example. According to the Wei State’s own historical records, they sent out 40,000 soldiers in total, but Qin State’s historical records Shamelessly claimed to have killed 80,000 enemy soldiers. This is not merely exaggerating the number by two times, because we also need to consider those defeated soldiers who successfully escaped the battlefield.
It is a pity that China’s current official historical circle does almost no dewatering to the bs numbers in ancient war history reconstruction. This leads to those numbers spreading to the West and misleading the author.
All in all, those numbers in China’s Warring States are no different from Herodotus recording the Greeks defeating a 300,000 Carthaginian army at the Battle of Himera. Do not let it weaken your core viewpoint!
PS: I am an author on Royal Road, and I found you here following the forum discussion.
Medieval European exaggerated the size of their own armed forces to a comparable degree. No historian on this subject believes such bragging anymore. However, I can’t help wondering how you can know the actual size of Wei’s army. Is this one of the few reports which have survived?
I would be interested in links to the authors on here, such as yours to Royal Road.
I don’t know enough to give an educated opinion, but I’ve been always rather suspicious of the Chinese multi-hundred-thousand armies. Army across the realm as a whole, sure! In one place? Eh.
Most obvious in the Chinese-Tibetan War. Taking the numbers at face value for some of those campaigns given their location the surprising thing is not that the Chinese lost, but they didn’t starve to death before the Tibetans got to them!
We know in the European context often both sides were overstated by earlier sources. Like Bannockburn you could see in old history books numbers like 100,000 English and 30,000 Scots. The real number is thought now to be a quarter or third of that and we can be fairly confident of that at least for the English since we have the *actual* numbers for some components of their army. I wonder if the same thing is happening with China…
On the note of standing armies, the first one of post-Roman Europe was the Ottoman Kapıkulu, founded in 1363, and composed of the Janissary Corps and the Palace Cavalry. The first one in Western Europe were the French Compagnies d’Ordonnance, a mounted combined arms force founded in 1445. It’s interesting that in the late 15th century both had about the same fighting strength of about 12,000 men*, even though the French Kingdom’s population was 15 million to the Ottoman Empire’s 11-12 million, which shows the strength of the Porte’s better centralized bureaucracy. In terms of recruitment, the Kapıkulu were vocational, while the Compagnies d’Ordonnance were a hybrid between vocational and employment.
*Note that the salaried numbers for the Compagnies count four fighting men and two servants, while salaried numbers for the Janissaries and Palace Cavalry only count fighting men. I have corrected for this in the above figure.
Are there any other good examples of officer-focused military aristrocracies other than the Romans in the ancient world? The only other example that come to mind is the transition in Early Modern Europe caused by firearms rendering heavy cavalry obsolete, but I’d be the first to admit that my historical knowledge is pretty limited.
I hope we can get a few sentences on transhumance mixed-system pastoralists like the Scottish Highlanders. There’s Big Man warrior aristocracy and farming, but also cattle raiding that pushes toward the ‘all free males’ nomadic model. And of course there’s a long tradition of romanticizing this kind of culture, perhaps because they interact with settled society but also have the Fremen aura of being ‘half-wild’
I’ve heard it claimed that Scottish military practices were ultimately dictated by how poor Scotland was: farming there simply didn’t produce enough of a surplus to support a specialized military class.
I think there is a feedback loop of weak kings leaving weak taxing ability and lots of low-level wars. Scotland’s revenue in the early 1600s was something like 5% of England’s and famously the Stuarts were not very good at raising revenue there. Like Scotland was poorer, but particularly the lowlands were not *that* poor. Conversely Scotland could raise proportionately far more men, just funding and supplying them long-term wasn’t really viable.
Damn, wish my Star Trek hot takes had ever provoked two hundred responses.
On Mamluks. You do mention that they don’t have a tendency to remain low-status for very long “because they have weapons”. However, I think that sort of gives the impression that Mamluks somehow “wrested” high status in their societies through arms, which I’m not really sure I agree with. To be sure they did use arms to seize control of their societies, but I would argue that by and large the slave soldier systems already invested them with high/elite status before that.
The various Mamluk sysyems didnt only employ them as rank-and-file elite soldiers in the way something like the Unsullied are portryed as in Game of Thrones as I’m sure you know. But Mamluks were frequently also employed, and in those cases often selected early on IIRC, to be military commanders (though I feel like alot of these also rise out of the ranks essentially) and administrators and the like. I would argue that the system inherently invested them with high social status and standing.
I would say the idea wasn’t as much that slave origin (I often think it’s more useful to consider Mamluks as being recruited “from slaves” rather than “being slaves”, even if legally that’s often what they might be, though it varies a bit form system to system, where in some systems the recruits were legally freed as part of recruitment and training and conversion to Islam) brought with it low social status, as much as the idea that it allowed you, in theory, to build up a military and administrative elite who were disconnected from the normal power politics of a society’s (hence why they are actively recruited from outside ethnic groups) aristocracy and who as slaves (or former slaves) would have their loyalty focused solely towards the ruler, their master and client.
So I don’t really think low social status really was ever a thing with Mamluks, nor was it intended to be. And as far as I’m aware Mamluks in Islamic societies often do not seem to have ever been very deferential but typically proud and even chauvinistic (remember they are a distinct group, with their military prowess, their training, their closeness to the ruler, and their ethnic origin, which was a thing often jealously guarded and maintained, hell the Egyptian Mamluks regarded Turkic and Caucasian descent as foundational well in the 19th century IIRC), which I think probably played a large part in why Mamluks so often end up taking control of a state themselves in the societies that employed them.
I would be _very_ interested in someone doing a crossover on patriarchal & feminist theory of this analysis, to be honest. It seems wildly similar to Gerda Lerner’s thesis in “the creation of patriarchy”, except more grounded. The word doesn’t appear in your writings but it seems incredibly central to the issue.
It’s a popular belief* amongst historians that early hunter-gatherer societies were relatively egalitarian because they were organized around small kinship groups with shared resources and cooperative labor. Although men often hunted a bit more and women often gathered and cared for children a bit more, both forms of work were essential to the survival of the community. Women would go on hunts when needed and men would gather when it was required.
(*It’s not universally held, but it is fairly widespread.)
The shift to agriculture gradually encouraged greater social inequality through the development of surplus production and private property. The introduction of the plow around 6,000 years ago accelerated this process in many regions by making farming more physically demanding which thus prioritising what the man brough to the table. It also allowed larger areas of land to be cultivated. As land ownership became increasingly important, women’s economic roles were more often confined to the domestic sphere and patriarchal social structures became more common.
This pattern was not universal. In many wet rice growing regions of Southeast Asia, southern China, and parts of Africa, the digging stick remained the primary agricultural tool and women’s labor continued to be central to farming. As a result, women often retained stronger property rights, greater freedom to divorce, and a prominent role in trade and commerce compared with many wheat growing societies in Europe, the Middle East, and northern China.
Without a surplus you can’t have social stratification. Which meant differences in social status was relatively small. I think in typical hunter-gatherer societies men tend to do the riskier tasks and women the less risky ones. But both are considered equally valuable.
No no no no no. You were doing so well until you spoke about a non-human sophont without acknowledging that *they are not humans*!
And it’s not just you. A lot of people here have commented on the Klingon, and so far I’ve yet to see a single person bring up it up.
The Klingon are not human. They are a completely different species that function distinctly on a psychiological level. Due to SPOILERS they aren’t completely unrelated to humans, but they are more different from humans than humans are from chimpanzees. They are not supposed to be humans with funny hats!
Given how psysiological different they are, it is absolutely possible that their societies may be able to function in ways human societies simply cannot.
I’ll note that we do see plenty of Klingon that specalise in other paths, who become politicians, lawyers, engineers, and bureaucrats rather than mere warriors.
I digress: different sophonts will engage in state-building differently. Any conversation that doesn’t immediately include that line is prima-facie incomplete.
This is a fantastic framework for understanding how a society’s values and constraints shape its military. I especially appreciated the breakdown of why different groups feel obligated to fight—it’s a crucial point often overlooked in fantasy worldbuilding. It makes me reconsider the armies in my own setting. Looking forward to the next parts!