Hey folks, fireside this week as I get ready for the start of a new semester! For this week, I wanted to talk briefly about the wrinkles that financing navies poses with regards to our worldbuilding primer on pre-modern armies. “what about navies?” has been a frequent question in comments and from patrons. Now a full answer to that question, I think, would require its own series – naval finance is complex – but I thought I would unspool a shorter ‘off the cuff’ answer.
The first distinction we need to draw really clearly for this question is the difference between purpose-built warships and multi-purpose ships turned to war. For substantial chunks of human history, it has been possible to be competitive in naval warfare using mostly the same sort of ships one would use for commerce. In the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds (where my knowledge is best), this was broadly the case through the bronze age into the early iron age (so to c. 700 BC or so), then stopped being the case for classical antiquity. For much of the Middle Ages, multi-purpose fleets are more common but we still have some purpose-built warships in the Mediterranean. Coming into the Age of Sail (c. 1450-c. 1850), multi-purpose sailing ships make up the bulk of military ships early on; starting in the late 1600s those multi-purpose ships start getting pushed out of the line-of-battle for major actions, leading to the primarily purpose-built navies of the 1700s. Modern navies are, of course, functionally entirely purpose built.
This distinction matters because purpose-built warships are really expensive. As a general rule only states can build purpose-built navies, so in periods where purpose-built warships dominate, non-state polities are often broadly incapable of challenging state societies at sea. By contrast, periods where, for technological reasons, multi-purpose ships dominate warfare, non-state societies can be major players at sea (e.g. vikings), because the cost of ships can be effectively devolved by simply repurposing privately held commercial ships.
What most folks, I imagine, have already sussed out is that what makes naval warfare different is that capital costs (something we were able to largely talk around with armies) suddenly become very important. And that is certainly true, although here there are some pretty substantial differences based on the style of ships and the era of naval technology we’re dealing with.
To draw the point, let’s compare a purpose-built warship from antiquity (a trireme) with a purpose-built warship from the Age of Sail (a frigate, say). A classical Greek trireme displaced around 45 tons and had a crew of 200. The cost of building a trireme from scratch was probably just shy of a talent in silver1 which is a lot of money (a talent might represent about 20 years of work for an unskilled laborer, assuming ~300 working days a year). Sails and fittings probably added around 2,000 more drachmae (1/3rd a talent). Expensive. And the minimum useful fleets of even small poleis would have a few dozen of these ships (big fleets with 100+ triremes for major wars appear frequently). So the ‘minimum expenditure’ to even play the game of naval power in the junior varsity league probably approaches something like 50 talents of silver or more. A state (or coalition of states) that wanted to really push for naval dominance needed to be able to drop hundreds of talents on ship construction, sums just wildly beyond the financial resources of most city-states.
You can start to see why only states play this game.
But – and here is the wild comparison – shipbuilding was not the major cost of ancient naval warfare. Crews were. A trireme has a crew of around 200 men, a mix of a handful of trained specialists (the hyperesia) and a bunch of rowers, often drawn from poorer households. These fellows need to be paid in order to support themselves and you need to pay a lot of them. The maximum field army that a poleis could field, for the largest poleis, was rarely much more than 10,000 men. But the 155 ships the Athenians deployed to the Battle of Arginusae (406) would have required 31,000 rowers! The 330 ships that the Romans deployed to the Battle of Ecnomus (256), the largest naval battle the Mediterranean has ever seen (to the present!) probably demanded something like 140,000 crew. Thucydides straight up tells us that the cost of crew wages for a trireme was one talent per ship per month (Thuc. 3.17; 6.8; 6.31; 8.29). At that price, the cost of the crew would exceed the cost of the ship in just two months.2
So the really crushing cost of ancient fleets is not the ships, but the rowers: only large, well-financed states were able to support the cost of so many rowers.3
But that cost structure is not universal – it changes over time. To get to our comparison, we can use hull displacement (the weight of the ship) as a lazy proxy for the capital cost of the ship as compared to the crew cost of the ship. Our trireme displaces c. 45 tons and has ~200 crew, so about 4.5 men per each ton of ship. By contrast, the USS Constitution (1797), an Age of Sail heavy frigate, displaces 2,200 tons and had an ideal maximum crew of 475, roughly 4.5 tons of ship per man (please note the reversal!). In short there’s something like twenty times more ship per sailor in an age of sail frigate than in a classical trireme. Capital costs follow suit.
In fact, of course, this understates the point because not every ton of displacement is made the same. A trireme’s displacement comes to about 40,000kg of which roughly 150kg or so would be the big metal part: the bronze ram. So that displacement is 0.375% super-expensive bronze, with the rest being cheaper (note: cheaper; not cheap) wood, sail-cloth, rope and so on. USS Constitution was a 44-gun (often ‘over-gunned’ above that number) frigate. In her initial loadout, that was thirty 24-pounder long guns (barrels at 5,556lbs per) and twenty 32-pound carronades (barrels at 2,222lbs per; carronades are the ‘sawed off shotgun’ version of a naval gun), so that’s 211,120lbs (95,762kg) of gun. Constitution has more gun than a trireme had ship. But critically, her gun complement represents close to 5% of her total displacement. So not only is there a lot more ship to Constitution, overall by percentage a lot more of that ship is expensive metal rather than cheap timber.4 So capital costs end up as a much larger part of an early modern navy’s expenses compared to an ancient one.
You can start to see why the question of naval finance would require its own series, perhaps written by someone deeper into naval matters (especially medieval and early modern) than I. I can do a decent job with ancient navies, though, and we may do that at some point.
In any event, to summarize: capital costs are much more important for navies than armies in the pre-modern, but how much more important varies a lot depending on the period and the kind of navy in question. For navies that use multi-purpose ships, those capital costs can be devolved onto civilian ship owners, enabling weak states and non-state polities to be naval players, but for periods where purpose-built warships are the rule, the shattering expensive of having to build large navies that do nothing but fight (and so the costs cannot easily be devolved onto their civilian owners because they do not have any) basically demands a large, complex and relatively financially sophisticated state. Naval warfare thus often ends up as a game that only the largest or most efficient states can play at scale, in contrast to armies. Everybody has an army, but not everyone can afford a navy.
That’s going to come up again in another post I am planning, a military theory primer looking at the role the US Navy plays in making the global economy work.
On to Recommendations.
First off, my own stuff: I was on a slew of podcasts lately. I talked about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey on the Normal Men podcast and I talked about the right-wing authoritarian obsession with J.R.R. Tolkien (and how he would have despised them) on the Fighting Fascism podcast. I also had a grand talk with Stefan Sasse over at the Boiled Leather Audio Hour talking about the Rise and Fall of the Galatic Empire (from Star Wars) and how Star Wars imagines totlitarian regimes. Finally, as I write this, I just recorded an episode of The Rest is History with Tom Holland on the (lack of any) Marian reforms, which is set to come out in early September, so keep an eye out for that. On to better stuff that isn’t mine.
This week also brings a new issue of Pasts Imperfect with a wide range of interesting bits, including a discussion of famed novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s idiosyncratic take on Herod the Great, now published eighty odd years after her passing. It also features links to a wide range of neat history stuff, from the possibility to polar bears in the Colosseum, a new exhibit on medieval manuscripts at the Getty Center, isotopic testing on an Archaic mass grave in Attica, the difficulties of UNESCO World Heritage sites caught in geopolitical power struggles and more. If you are not regularly checking in to Pasts Imperfect, you should be!
In security/defense news, I wanted to highlight recent reporting about the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), deployed in the Indian Ocean in support of the operations against Iran. It is all too easy sometimes, when presidents launch wars far away, to forget that those wars must be waged by people who do not have a choice if they go or not when ordered. As a result of political decisions, the Lincoln ended up deployed at sea for over 260 days with just two days in port – the sort of deployment one might expect in a major, existential war. My views on the abject stupidity of the Iran War are well known, but the absolutely appalling conditions on the Abraham Lincoln equally speak to poor planning, logistics and strategic incoherence of a war that we are told will either result in civilization destruction or world peace on any given Friday (and one imagines that whiplash is part of why the Abe Lincoln has remained deployed for so long, since without a plan the ship couldn’t be recalled nor replaced). The Lincoln is now set to be relieved by the USS George Washington (CVN-73), but the debacle speaks to the deep readiness ‘hole’ developing as a result of this war (alongside similarly dire reporting concerning munitions levels).
This week’s book recommendation was a pretty easy choice: Kori Schake, The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States (2025). The title, of course, recalls Samuel Huntington’s famous The Soldier and the State (1957), which has long been essentially the Bible of American civil-military relations despite being quite substantially flawed. Schake is invoking Huntington but neither reprising him nor attempting merely to repair him – indeed, Schake spends half a chapter illuminating and rejecting the fundamental errors in Huntington’s vision of civil-military relations, a part of the book that I now wish would be appended to the end of every copy of The Soldier and the State sold or issued. Instead, Schake is embarking on a ground-up analysis of the history of American civil-military relations and the unique structures and strains it experienced.
The resulting book is a lot thinner and more readable than Huntington and also frankly a lot better reasoned. Schake’s narrative is a chronological walkthrough of American civil-military relations, reviewing both the crises that happened (the Newburgh conspiracy, Jefferson’s creation of a small, clqiuish and politicized officer corps, Grant’s hard decisions in the constitutional crisis of 1866-7, everything about Douglas “Dugout Doug” MacArthur, etc)5 as well as (as Schake puts it), “the dogs that mostly didn’t bark.” Schake ends up a chapter appropriately titled, “How Worried Should We Be?” which both lays out the considerable grounds for concern as well as the steps that might be taken to reduce the strain.
Fundamentally, Schake’s view, which I am largely persuaded of, is that both now and historically, most of the danger in the American civil-military relationship has come from the ‘civil’ side, particularly political leadership. The military often maintains very high public trust because the public understands it as a “disciplined, merit-based organization obedient to the Constitution.” But precisely because it maintains very high public trust, “It is a truth universally acknowledge that politicians will hide behind the military for as long as the military is more popular than are the politicians.” In short, the core problem the military faces in its civil-military relation is an old one: the effort by politicians to pull the military more completely into the realm of politics, to use it for political gain, against political rivals either rhetorically and symbolically or – more darkly – directly and kinetically. As Schake notes, in both scholarship and public discourse, this is treated as the military’s problem, but most of the solution for a problem created by civilian leadership cannot lie within the military. The public needs to take more ownership of their half of the civil-military relationship (somewhat ironically, this book was coming out at almost the exact time I wrote my essay on the American civil-military relationship and so neither Schake nor I was aware what the other was writing, yet I think Schake ends up fairly close – with greater detail, skill and vision – to my concept of the ‘civil-military bargain.’)
Perhaps most importantly (and in some contrast to Huntington and the other scholarship she cites), Schake’s book is very readable and very accessible, making it a perfect device for educating the public about this issue. And precisely because the public needs to take more ownership over the civil-military relationship, needs to think harder about how to maintain the military as defenders of the constitutional order and the rule of law, rather than tyrants over it, or bystanders as it crumbles, this is a book that is easy to recommend.
- D. Pritchard, Public Spending and Democracy in Classical Athens (2015) figures 5,000 drachma (a talent is 6,000) which I think is roughly right.
- At that rate, the pay for a rower was a drachma a day. I don’t think anyone believes Roman rowers were paid this much (it would have been higher pay than for the higher-status marines on the ships!), but the cost of naval warfare in the First Punic War still bankrupted both Rome and Carthage (the latter a famously wealthy city).
- For more on this, see, uh, me, “Strategy and Cost: Carthaginian Naval Strategy in the First Punic War Reappraised” Historia 69.4 (2020).
- Terminology notes: Ships do not have cannon, they have guns – what is a cannon on land is magically and instantly transmogrified into a gun the moment it is placed on a ship. I don’t make the rules. And yes, I am sufficiently old-fashioned that I still refer to ships as ‘she’ – I taught US Naval History for a few years in classes that had a fair number of NROTC cadets and so it made sense to adopt the US Navy’s preferred form here and in the Navy ships are still she/her rather than it. Although no one tell Pete Hegseth that his navy has pronouns or he might try to take those away too.
- To be blunt, the problem with Dugout Doug – for both his actual military leadership (his defense of the Philippines was…not good) and his messy civil-military issues – is not that Truman fired him (Truman was right to fire him) but that no one had fired him far earlier than that.
It sounds like the Navy series would deserve a guest poster in it. (Jointly written, or with some chapters delegated to guests).
Thank you for this teaser of the topic.
Obvious question: for land matters, one must take a drink for each mention of Clausewitz. For naval matters, what is the corresponding ritual for each mention of Mahan? If there is no established tradition, I would suggest that it be to take a bite of chocolate.
AARRRRHHH, ye landlubber, ’tis most appropriate to take a bite of biscuit, and quaff some rum.
Biting into hardtack (clack clack)? That’s one way to lose your teeth.
Pound it into fragments with a belaying pin and mix with grog, bigod!
That’s why you soften it in the grog
I can hear this comment from reading it.
My 21st C definition of ship biscuit is any biscuit that could be carried on board a ship, so shortbread creams or Tim-Tams for me
Note that hardtack still is made and sold.
It is used in some dishes in e.g. Newfoundland.
When I saw you wrote that I had to look up “hardtack” on Wikipedia. Turns out that Germany, Poland and Russia still use hardtack as part of military rations.
Chocolate? Chocolate-schmocolate. Clearly it should be a good chug of grog!
Worth noting is that “grog” is actually _diluted_ rum. The commander who invented it was concerned that his men were getting too drunk off of their daily ration. Skip the grog, go straight to tapping the Admiral.
Distilled spirits had the advantage of lasting virtually indefinitely, and a measured daily ration– in addition to keeping your crew of hardened alcoholics from going into D.T.s– would also be metabolized as part of their daily calorie allotment. Cutting it with water helped sterilize the often less than pristine water and counteracted the natural dehydrating effect of liquor.
Don’t forget the citrus juice added — very handy for defeating scurvy, by thunder!
I believe the established tradition is to blaze it.
Corbett would be the naval counterpart to Clausewitz, and a sip of tea best suit.
Random: I listened to an Ancient Warfare podcast one time that mentioned trireme era warships as being made out of “fir” (the wood). I heard that as “fur” which gave me a somewhat strange mental image of them.
There are smaller boats made from skins on a wooden or bone frame:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hopson_Whaling_Crew.jpg
I still sometimes wonder how much of Carthaginian policy when Hannibal was running around was informed by what must have been the shattering demographic losses from all the naval warring the first time they locked horns with Rome. They lost a *lot* of ships in that war, and while they presumably recovered some of the crews some of the time, I imagine they still lost tens of thousands of marines and mariners. Maybe even over 100,000, if you posit that recovery is very difficult.
I’m still quite confused on how the “land civilization” of Rome can even go toe to toe to the fucking juggernaut of Mediterranean navy. Maybe it’s socii something something, but this is like Germany or France just outlasting Britain in their own water turf, which I guess is possible, but also quite improbable.
Italy is surrounded by ocean, and the Alps to the north make it a bit harder to get anywhere else by land. From the days of Greek settlement, strong naval traditions across Italy even if the Romans themselves didn’t quite see the point.
Ah it makes sense if Rome subsumes a lot of socii that have quite naval expertise. Though I never see them explicitly mentioned.
Remember that in the time of the First Punic War, the big key to success in a sea war wasn’t just “being a seafaring people” in some nebulous ‘warrior race’ sense. It was logistical. You need to be able to build huge numbers of ships, and the ships don’t necessarily last very long. You need to able to pay and specifically feed very large groups of rowers. If you can afford to do that, finding enough experienced seamen to act as officers for your ships and the shipwrights to build them is probably the least of your worries.
By the time of the First Punic War, Rome had already consolidated most of Italy and was a very rich state with a lot of population to throw around. That made going toe-to-toe with Carthage something they could absolutely do, even if Carthage had a bit of an edge over them in sophistication.
Polybius’s line is that Rome invented the corvus to turn naval warfare – which they were bad at – into hand-to-hand combat which they were, obviously, good at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_%28boarding_device%29
France is a somewhat poor example since it did have a quite powerful navy for a period.
France’s problem was that it almost never got to fight just a naval war, conflicts almost invariably involving defending against or attacking its land neighbors.
If you trade two ships for every one of theirs, but you can build and crew _three_ ships for every one of theirs, you win.
The winner of such a close exchange ratio depends as much on whose economy breaks first as it does being the last man standing. If you can’t outspend your foe, then you can quickly find yourself in trouble.
I’d ask you to listen to Bret’s breakdown of the first Punic war on Ancient History 101 (https://shows.acast.com/ancient-history-101/episodes/first-punic-war). Near the end, he notes something important, which is that while Carthage was a more naval power than Rome, it was actually just as new to large-scale naval warfare and especially warfare with quinquiremes, as Rome was. Reading Polybius uncritically can give a bit of a lopsided impression (like intended by the author), where Carthage appears like a naval juggernaut and Rome as completely incapable landlubbers. But they’re (as usual) much closer to each other than they’d like.
This is a nice, succinct way to cover a question I’ve had for a long while.
It’s actually interesting to think of ancient navies in terms of being an atypical enterprise in which the state (or anybody, really) needs to be responsible for truly massive numbers of employees like that (compared to public works that might be folded into military duties or made obligatory). It gives a perspective on how, even if the ship crew are underpaid, the cost would be significant, but at the same time the pay is probably decent because it helps incentivize people towards the otherwise unattractive work of being on a ship.
Likewise with putting into perspective just how much raw material it takes to put together a ship in any event, and a dedicated fighting ship in the Age of Sail in particular.
It makes me think of a recent comment I’ve seen concerning the logistical failures of supporting the USS Lincoln while it’s engaged in the Persian Gulf. Modern people in a prosperous country might regard management of food as something more incidental, but that becomes more acute when looking at how to supply several thousand people, even before getting to the challenges of transporting supplies to a very large ship at sea.
Also, don’t forget that in ancient warfare, equipment is almost entirely self-provided. So your cavalry pool is formed of people who can own horses, your infantry pool people who can afford body armor, etc. There’s serious wealth-gating.
To be a rower on a trireme, you don’t need to provide the ship. You only really need to provide a seat-cushion for yourself. Assuming that wealth distribution is largely pyramidal, you get a large body of people who could serve as rowers but can’t obtain weapons and armor to serve on land.
The key constraint on army size was usually logistics, and boats make that a lot easier since by definition your navy literally always has seaborne supply lines.
Actually, ancient navies weren’t really capable of naval logistics. They couldn’t transport enough water for their men. It’s why they hop between ports or go to ground every night.
Having logistics ships which can carry enough potable water and food and can keep up with your warships is a hard problem. Even loading supplies from one ship to another at sea is non trivial. It took until the *1900’s* for navies to figure out how to resupply coal at sea, eighty years after the first steam warships and fifty after they had basically replaced non steam vessels, and they had modern scientists and engineers working the problem for several decades.
The ability of age of sail navies to carry enough water to make months long voyages without resupply and to resupply at sea, either from islands, a supply ship or by various clever tricks like funneling rainwater with their sails into barrels, was a very complicated logistical and technological innovation. And foundational to that capability was that the ships didn’t rely on speed to fight, as they had guns, so they could have holds full of water.
Er…to clarify, they weren’t capable of naval logistics for their warships. Their troop transports and resupply ships were constructed differently, with wide bowl shaped bottoms and sails, which could absolutely transport water and food.
For an analogy, an ancient warship is to an ancient transport what a falcon is to an albatross. They are both highly optimized to travel in some medium, but in almost completely different ways, and they look quite different in profile.
They also usually didn’t carry much food. At least at some points in history Greek sailors, on top of the drachma per day of wage, received two obols per day as siteresion (ration money). Athens’ loss at Aegospotami seems to have happened because they beached their ships fifteen stades (~1.75 miles) from the closest market at Sestus, and the Spartans attacked while the Athenians were scattered getting supplies.
The exceptions were when a fleet commander planned to overnight at a harbor with no nearby market, and in that case they’d ship in supplies to keep the crews fed, but that was both rare and typically only for a few days.
That very much depends.
– A fleet of sailing ships can carry supplies, rather than relying on supply lines as such. However, unless you can rely on buying fresh food from the locals, or have scientific knowledge that was simply not available at the time, your crews tend to get scurvy (in addition to whatever diseases are prevalent in the theatre).
– You can run a supply line to friendly ports if you can defend it. Until the later 18th century, a ship at sea simply couldn’t determine its longitude, and even measurements of latitude were often quite inaccurate. Thus prearranging a meeting in the middle of a sea was impractical; most likely, the ships would not be able to get close enough to the agreed location to sight each other. Therefore, navigation to meet had to be based on the shore; and in any case, until oceanic (!) sailing became routine, traders (as may be contracted to resupply the navy) preferred to follow coastlines, with a limited number of known shortcuts across the open sea. In effect, possible resupply routes were almost as much of a limited spiderweb as the land routes that armies could take. And just like a fort not circumvallated can cut a land supply route, a port not blockaded can cut a naval supply route.
> And just like a fort not circumvallated can cut a land supply route, a port not blockaded can cut a naval supply route.
If anyone doesn’t understand the mechanics here: it’s difficult to resupply at sea in the first place because of the moving of the ships deck. Novel mechanical apparatus had to be invented to enable it. It’s basically *impossible* to do so while also making ready for battle or to defend yourself.
Hence harassment pressure by smaller fleets forces larger fleets to be careful, and let’s them inflict attrition; most extended blockades feature small actions precisely because of this, where a couple ships ambush vessels as they resupply or rotate out of position.
Additionally the only ships which can carry lots of goods are generally much less seaworthy and combat worthy than proper warships, particularly prior to the age of sail. So if you attempted to bypass a port guarding a major landmark, like the island of Rhodes or the Bosphorus to name two massive ones, your going to get a lot of your supplies raided. Now consider that a ship *waiting* for supplies can’t *know* if it’s resupply ship was raided, and you start to see the shape of the problem. Even if you can set rendezvous for supplies the second something goes wrong everything completely goes to shit. Do you wait assuming resupply will arrive, make for friendly port, attempt to forage for supplies? Every option is bad, and depending on your stores you may only get to try one.
You need an operational window that can accommodate this…and Triremes just don’t have that. I think I saw an estimate they can go like a week max without basing somewhere, and they’d be overloaded a bit to do that.
So it’s not quite the tyranny of the wagon equation, but you end up in a similar place.
“Until the later 18th century, a ship at sea simply couldn’t determine its longitude, and even measurements of latitude were often quite inaccurate.”
There were methods for determining longitude but they were not as simple or reliable as using what is basically a watch.
In the late eighteenth century a timepiece that did not rely on a pendulum (useless at sea) that was accurate to a few seconds after months without any way to double-check it was a triumph of cutting-edge metal working technology.
I can understand it was not possible to make until then.
> There were methods for determining longitude but they were not as simple or reliable as using what is basically a watch.
More to the point, they weren’t accurate enough to help with navigation much.
The pay is also decent because your crew could, and sometimes did, decide to row for neutral or hostile ports and either start raiding merchants or sell their ship to your enemy. We see this more with age of sail ships, golden age of piracy and all that, but it’s almost certain that some of the ships used by Mediterranean pirates had similar sources.
It made more sense to simply store vessels if they were too expensive to crew and keep them as a reserve, although of course that had its own limits. Alternatively you could try to assign ships to tasks which had some theoretical profit, either ferrying officials around (taxes!), protecting merchants (more taxes!), or “protecting” merchants (piracy taxes!). Patrolling trade routes may not be the purpose for which ships were made, but a way to offset costs to keep them at sea instead of decommissioning of mothballing them.
Even sailing warships (particularly those in the line of battle) were usually laid up “in ordinary” when not needed, and commissioned into service only when needed. (Technically different navies defined these terms differently, even if they did almost the same thing in practice.) Likewise, some sailing ships have seemingly nonsensical build times — multiple decades, often. Generally this happened because the ship was assembled on the slipway (this may have indeed taken a long time, if it was not a priority) and then simply the completed hull was left there until war broke out, which is when it would be launched and commissioned.
This made sense; a wooden ship begins falling apart almost the moment it first touches water. And in fact some ships’ timbers continued to “cure” years after they were first assembled; a ship that had been laid up for an extended period before being launched was often far sounder for it.
Indeed, although there are some perils on dry land too, like termites and other pests, so you still needed inspections and maintenance.
There’s some irrational thinking here too; sure, having a bunch of ships in dock ready to sail might be the best way to keep a reserve fleet safe, but they’re still and expense and they aren’t *doing* anything. Couldn’t they be better used at sea? And surely we don’t need to spend so much on inspections, right? They almost never discover a problem!
“Couldn’t they be better used at sea?”
Terry, they could not. They are warships and in peacetime there would be, in the nature of things, no war to fight. In the meantime, there would be much more wear and tear on the ship, not to mention the cost of a trained crew. So it was entirely rational to keep them safe in a friendly harbour with a scratch crew aboard until you needed them.
USS Pennsylvania is a classic example of this. Construction started in September 1821. She launched from the Philadelphia Naval Yard on 18 July 1837 and began outfitting. On 2 January 1838 she was dry-docked at Gosport Naval Yard (Norfolk, VA) for coppering the bottom of the ship. In September 1838 she was laid up in ordinary, then became a receiving ship in 1842, and was burned at the outbreak of the Civil War to prevent capture by the Confederates. In the 40 years between her keel being laid and her burning, she sailed exactly once, from Philadelphia to Norfolk.
I think a ship which had started to be built in 1821 would have been outdated by the outbreak of the American Civil War.
It would have made a highly useful commerce raider.
Thank you, I did not think about merchant ships still being sailing ships by then.
So many things become much more difficult at scale. I work for a logistics company, and it’s easy to hire one driver or ten drivers, but if you want to hire a thousand drivers (or move a hundred thousand packages, or whatever) it’s an entirely different ballgame.
One of the oddities of classical naval warfare is that because the biggest expense is staffing and the capital cost is relatively cheap is that it’s comparatively cheap to challenge a naval hegmon if you’re an up and coming power with some spare cash. So naval hegmonies can be built over generations and just evaporate overnight.
The capital costs are relatively cheap once you are doing it at scale. But doing it at scale is itself both a massive capital and staffing cost. Maritime experience is a specialized trade and then the military aspects of that require a bunch of additional specialized knowledge. Naval hegemony doesn’t evaporate overnight, it’s slow and steady erosion just might not be apparent for quite a while.
In the Greek case, experienced seamen and willing rowers were to be had for the right money all around the eastern Mediterranean. The ships could be built quickly. Hence Persian money enabled the rapid development of a Spartan fleet, and there were similar episodes in the Hellenistic period. Money was the key.
I have a couple of caveats to Brett’s piece. First, it was quite possible for non-states to generate large numbers of dedicated warships: viking long-boats were built by local jarls (they were for raiding/war; the round-hulled knarr was for trading). Some Scandinavian naval battles involved a hundred or more ships a side. The pirates of the classical Mediterranean used adapted biremes (the bi-hemolia) and were so numerous it took a major effort by Rome to put them down.
The pentekonter – the typical warship of the early iron age, was again a dedicated warship. Merchant galleys were an occasional thing, but the crew costs meant that only small expensive cargoes could be carried. Again, trade used round-hulled sailing vessels.
Merchant ships could be used in war from the Middle Ages up to the early modern in northern waters. All they needed was to be fitted with ‘castles’ – high platforms at bow and stern for missile troops.
Viking warships were not that different from their merchant ships other than their proportions. A least I think they were both moved the same way by both sail and oars. In contrast there is a huge difference between a ship primarily built to be rowed and one built to be almost entirely sailed. Also, the warships succeeding galleys were using cutting-edge technology.
Proportion is the whole point. A longship was shallow draft, could carry 50 or so raiders over the North Sea, stay at sea for no more than a week and carry not much more than the men and their loot. A roundship had a deeper draft, a small crew (maybe 10 or so), could make a voyage of a few weeks and carry a load of grain to Iceland.
Iceland sits right on the northern tree line. The historical inability to grow grain there was caused by soil erosion. I was thinking more in term of transporting livestock to Iceland and later Greenland. The horses kept by the Vikings would likely have been considered ponies today. Their cows would likely have weighted 400 – 500 kilograms and their bulls 600 kilograms. This is considerably less than present-day European cattle. In contrast sheep and goats would have been about the same size as today. Still, you have to transport all livestock with enough fodder to stay alive an if possibly healthy throughout the trip. Of cause you need a quite wide ship for that.
Possible Typo:
” I also had a grand talk with Stefan Sasse over at the Boiled Leather Audio Hour talking about the Rise and Fall of the Galatic Empire (from Star Wars) and how Star Wars imagines totlitarian regimes.”
ITYM “Galactic”
“the shattering expensive of having to build large navies”
-> expense
“and I talked about the right-wing authoritarian obsession with J.R.R. Tolkien (and how he would have despised them) on the Fighting Fascism podcast.”
Which makes me wonder: has there been anyone else in the history of podcasts who was both on a podcast published by “The Nation” *and* on a podcast hosted by Jonah Goldberg?
“Terminology notes: Ships do not have cannon, they have guns – what is a cannon on land is magically and instantly transmogrified into a gun the moment it is placed on a ship. I don’t make the rules.”
But are they really cannons on land in the first place? I mean, Barbara Tuchman didn’t write the classic “The Cannons of August”. And people usually don’t talk about bringing out the big cannons when they get really serious about something.
If you ask me a cannon is a type of gun.
Yeah, but neither of us speaks English as our first language. And the sort of “elastic” meaning of the word “gun” confuses me a bit.
I think it is a fuzzy word too. My native Swedish have a lot of words for different types of guns used in idiomatic expressions instead of a generic word. The closest equivalent of the word “gun” in scope I can come up with is “eldvapen” literary meaning “fire-weapon”. It refers to any gunpowder weapon other than fire arrows and grenades.
I believe that “cannon” originally referred to one specific model or type of artillery; as opposed to a culverin for example.
Being a native English speaker barely helps. The word cannon has largely fallen out of usage, and typically when people say cannon they refer to only historical muzzle loading guns which fire solid slugs.
Except modern guns can fire solid slugs, muzzle loading cannons had non slug ammunition, and early breach loading guns are also often called cannons. And even when talking about modern weapons the rapid firing gun on top of a Bradley infantry fighting vehicle is an Auto Cannon, while the bigger thing on top of an main battle tank is a Tank Gun. Despite that the tank gun is closer in use and technical derivation to a traditional cannon.
The etymology is even more confused, as Cannon seems to come from the italian Cannone, referring to the shape of a reed or tube, which can be traced to Canna from Latin and Kánna from Greek, whereas Gun might be from a female given name derivative of Gunnhildr. In other words one means one means “tube” and the other has as much etymological logic as calling the device “Lena”. Neither etymology has any descriptive clarity which helps inform usage.
And then there’s just such confusions as carronade, a naval gun which has a *completely* unrelated spelling and etymology to cannon, but which every dyslexic and half the non dyslexics I know misread as cannonade, which is a term for a heavy cannon barrage.
It’s a mess. English speakers have a sense of which term to use, but that’s basically arbitrary and any dialect might prefer a different term in different circumstances. I’m fairly sure this is true of naval terms here too, they’re just picking a term as a little corporate cultural flag.
Ah, thank you for clearing it up, or perhaps I should say, explaining why it can’t be cleared up.
At least the names Gundhild, Gunhilda, Gunhilde, Gunhjild, Gunilda, Gunnhild, Gunnhildr, Gunnhildur have etymologically with war to do.
Former tanker here.
We usually referred to it as the main gun but cannon was also used from time to time. Mortars could also be designated as such.
When it came to Brads, we mostly just called it the “25 mike-mike.”
Picking an arbitrary term and using it insistently and consistently is a cultural flag. But it’s also useful because it trains people to speak precisely and consistently in stressful situations, and creates stable expectations for what other people will say to you. As long as those expectations are upheld, you’re less likely to see misunderstandings in a combat situation or costly wastes of time in peace.
It is useful that sailors know that “douse the mainsail and make fast” doesn’t mean “throw water on the sails to make the ship go faster.”
This is what jargon is for!
Cannoneliterally means “big tube”, which is after all what a cannon fundamentally is. In contemporary military lexicon, a cannonecannot shoot higher than 45°, a mortaio (mortar) cannot shoot lower than 45°, and an obice (howitzer) can shoot whatever.
However, we don’t have an Italian equivalent for the English “gun”, which seems to me it may mean any and all types of gunpowder weapons.
Any native English-speakers who can tell if bombs, grenades or fire arrows are considered “guns”? The fire arrow was the first gunpowder weapon. Bombs and grenades contained gunpowder before the development of modern explosives. These three type of objects are not included in the Swedish concept of “eldvapen”.
Lena Synnerholm:
In American English, bombs, grenades and fire arrows are not “guns.” Guns means only firearms that shoot projectiles out of a currently sealed tube using a propellant that all burns inside the tube. So rocket or missile launchers aren’t guns either.
Projectile weapons using something other than burning propellant may be guns, though most of them are too new to have settled linguistically. Compressed air guns are guns.
Note that there is a traditional quibble in the military distinguishing “rifles” from “guns”, where hassling recruits for calling their rifle a gun is a thing. A military friend of mine claimed it can’t be a “gun” unless it requires at least two people to operate normally. Something requiring three or more people is also “crew-served.”
Compressed air guns are a good example of Swedish using more specific words than “gun”. They are called “luftgevär” (“air-rifle”) or “luftpistol” (“air-pistol”) depending on size. Those familiar with them probably don’t consider them “eldvapen” (the closest Swedish equivalent of “gun”) since their working don’t involve any explosives.
At least the names Gundhild, Gunhilda, Gunhilde, Gunhjild, Gunilda, Gunnhild, Gunnhildr, Gunnhildur have etymologically with war to do.
@Lena,
Is that the same root as in Germanic names like Gundobad, Fredegund etc.?
I don’t know the meaning of the name Gundobad but it is a male name. In contrast the name Fredegund is female. However, it is quite evident to me it has a different meaning. Germanic-type names are often compound words consisting of two linguistic roots stuck together. The names Fredegund and Gundobad appear to be of this type.
@Lena,
Some cursory searching indicates that, yea, in both cases the names have something to do with battle or war.
https://www.behindthename.com/bb/fact/157483
Sorry, I can’t read it. When I open the link I get a pop-up window I can’t get rid of. My point is them not being variants of the same name. At least I don’t consider them as such because both halves of the compound word don’t overlap.
I’m curious, what factors make multi-purpose fleets more or less viable when compared with purpose-built fleets? Looking at your overview, it seems to me that the periods of purpose-built fleets tend to correlate with periods of higher state capacity in general, so is the “limiting factor” for purpose-built fleets simply whether states could afford them? Or is the main factor technological?
My understanding is that the difference had to do with how wars were fought that was mostly technological with the social element secondary. Until the age of sail and gunpowder, boarding actions utterly dominated so dual-use ships were generally effective enough to be used alongside dedicated warships. In the Mediterranian triremes could have rams that were useful in boarding actions so there was more incentive for a proper warship. Dedicated sail warships (as used in the middle ages) designed for boarding actions had stronger and taller castles but weren’t as specialized.
By the time of the proper age of sail, while boarding actions still occurred proper battles were generally dominated by naval guns rather than boarding and so purpose built warships largely took over. Notably the early US Navy, with much less state capacity backing it up than the British Royal Navy built better frigates over ships of the line. Privateers or pirates often still used civilian style ships but were merely commerce raiders who avoided tangling with real navies.
Ancient galley warfare in the Mediterranean was specialized. As noted above, rams were useful in boarding actions and could sometimes sink a ship without having to board it if you were careful with your oars. Moreover, the incentives for a ramming galley evolved in very specific directions. You wanted ships to be light so they could accelerate quickly. You wanted them to carry very large crews of oarsmen for high speed and maneuverability. You wanted them to be long and narrow and generally optimized for peak rowing speed as far as possible.
All of this made these ships relatively unseaworthy (very dangerous to use out on the open oceans of the world) and gave them very limited supply endurance (not much room for even modest supplies of food and drink if the ship is fully crewed and thus combat-effective). In the Mediterranean Sea, where islands and coastal cities were relatively densely scattered across the map and where the waters were relatively sheltered (though by no means immune to storms), ramming galleys were much more practical than in many other parts of the world.
Almost anywhere else or at other times in history prior to the invention of mass-produced naval guns to be mounted broadside on a sailing ship, the dominant paradigm of sea warfare would almost have to be boarding, I would think. The ramming galley was not purely a Mediterranean invention (I don’t think, I could be wrong), but it didn’t really seem to dominate naval warfare in most other places, probably due to the issues of unseaworthiness and short endurance, I would guess.
>Almost anywhere else or at other times in history prior to the invention of mass-produced naval guns to be mounted broadside on a sailing ship, the dominant paradigm of sea warfare would almost have to be boarding, I would think. The ramming galley was not purely a Mediterranean invention (I don’t think, I could be wrong), but it didn’t really seem to dominate naval warfare in most other places, probably due to the issues of unseaworthiness and short endurance, I would guess.
We have depictions of ramming ships in Chinese, and there might have been some traditional Japanese, Korean, or Indian ramming ships too. The Chinese sources are the most detailed and state that ramming is a *secondary* weapon used to disrupt enemy formations so that the primary arms of battle, massive tower ships and boarding ships, could win.
There’s even an extended analogy where each type of ship is compared to a type of land based unit, I.E. chariots, battering rams, castles, although I cannot find an open source way to access the one English translation of the source (the Yuejueshu) so can’t read or link the full text right now.
From what I can access and have studied in the past the basic paradigm was that of large castle ships providing artillery and firepower, smaller double banked ships forming the main battle line and firing projectiles from the top bank while boarding and maneuvering ships with hooks and poles from the lower bank, and smaller, more nimble covered ships trying to outmaneuver enemies to flank them and either ram or otherwise hinder the ungainly castle ships, which were prone to capsize.
This might be because of structural limitations, with Greek and Chinese ships being constructed differently and suited to different environments. Greek ships were made for the Mediterranean, Chinese ships for coastal waters and the massive rivers of China, so they naturally operate differently. There’s been suggestions Chinese ships simply couldn’t deliver enough of a shock to be truly effective rammers due due to the way the wood was joined, but that’s more speculative.
The terrain also informs the weapons used. Chinese navies basically started using fire based artillery as soon as we have detailed records of their operations, and as soon as gunpowder was invented it started getting used as well, which make sense given that navies often had to contest river fortifications. You can’t ram a tower using a boat (mostly), but a traction catapult can absolutely destroy both a ship and a fortification, and archers can suppress men manning either. Periodically the fate of China turned on single massive fight where a northern polity tried to conquer a southern one and got absolutely annihilated by a combined arms defense of the Yangtze river, so this flexibility was a real concern.
This appears to be a topic *actively being studied* though, the Yuejueshu appears to have been fully translated only 15 years ago and comparative studies between the Greek and Chinese designs are relatively new.
The Indian sources, at least in English, seem to be very bad. I’m only saying they had rams because I’m pretty sure a coin I’m looking at from their Wikipedia shows a ram, but it could also be a row depicted weirdly. Their primary tactic war boarding, as attested to in writing.
I do know that the Korean turtle ships were capable of ramming, but these were more versatile weapon platforms and they were primarily armed with early cannons that fired fin stabilized arrows and had anti boarding defenses too. They are also quite late ships to be using as examples of traditional warships, being armed with gunpowder.
And Japanese ships are also almost always depicted as boarding platforms, with some archery being used, but likewise most of their major naval engagements occur after the invention of gunpowder and this significantly changed the paradigm. I vaguely recall some errant depictions of ramming, but only in passing.
So that’s basically two independent evolutions of the naval ram, and probably only one significant exploration of the technology.
Pretty sure the earlier japanese naval battles (eg. Dan-no-ura) were mostly archery and boarding affairs, yes.
Only a high capacity state can afford to build purpose-built fleets, so in a sense that’s causation not correlation. Whether the high capacity state needs a purpose-built fleet depends more on technology, but not entirely.
In the industrial era it’s all about the technology. Warships with guns and armour, or radar and missiles, are very expensive and have no civilian use, but without them you can’t compete at sea. (Yes the Iranians and Houthis can block narrow chokepoints. The Iranians cannot challenge the US Navy warships sitting in the Gulf of Oman and intercepting civilian ships on their way to or from Iranian ports.)
There was a time, mentioned by Prof Devereaux, in the early modern era when a European sailing ship with a few cannon on board could outfight almost anything that didn’t have cannon, except in unusual circumstances. That’s how the Portugese and others made their seaborne raids / conquests in the 16th C. But once everyone knows about guns, a purpose built ship with heavier construction and a lot more guns will now outfight the civilian ships. (There were still armed merchant ships in WW2, but they were never expected to fight any warship of equal size.)
In the medieval period there were Mediterranean states that still had purpose built galley fleets, parts of Spain and Italian city-states. These were very expensive, but justified because their owners relied so heavily on trade and in the Med galleys were still useful. Countries like England and France didn’t, because the kings mostly spent money on armies and fortifications. So when a Spanish fleet allied to France started cruising around south-east England in the mid 14th C during the Hundred Years War, the English couldn’t do anything about it. (On the other hand the Spanish galleys didn’t have enough troops to be a serious threat on land, so in the end it didn’t matter that much.)
Before that Alfred the Great of England is generally credited with the first English purpose-built navy. This was the time of serious Viking invasions. Here the boundary between purpose built and civilian is a bit fuzzy. A Viking longship isn’t great for long distance cargo (and the Vikings did have other ships specifically for that), but it’s still OK for non-warlike purposes. Alfred the Great funded the construction of large ships specifically so that they’d have an advantage in boarding actions against Viking longships, but I don’t think we know much more about them so they were probably also dual-use as well.
“So when a Spanish fleet allied to France started cruising around south-east England in the mid 14th C during the Hundred Years War, the English couldn’t do anything about it.”
Was this before or after Black Death? Because this pandemic caused so many deaths it more or less changed the economic situation in Europe.
Viking longships were, as far as we can tell, purpose built warships: As you mentioned they had other ships for that. The difference seems to mostly have been that warships were much narrower and longer (allowing them to be faster) which meant they weren’t very good for cargo (and also much less seaworthy)
While longships were typically dedicated warships, they are one end of the same design continuum as the other ships (including trade ships) from the same area and era. Individual ships got built at various points on that continuum for various reasons (speed, portability, cargo volume, etc). If you’re going on an expedition down the Volga, you’re taking something much closer to a raiding ship.
In contrast, galleys are different in kind to the contemporary ‘civilian’ ships of the Mediterranean.
Ships used on the great rives of Eastern Europe had to be lighter since they had to drag them over the water dividers between them.
Should be noted that we’re usually not talking *entirely* multipurpose fleets: The vikings had noticeably distinct warships. But usually more what is a core of specially built warships supplanted by large numbers of multipurpose ships.
Note that as we start getting into the early Age of Sail partially it’s just that often long distance ships still needed to be armed.
Isn’t the U.S.S. Constitution exceptionally heavy for a frigate constructed in that period?
I believe the initial strategy for the US navy was to have six super frigates in contrast to major powers’ hundreds of ships, so even if we couldn’t escalate we could dominate one frigate vs one frigate battles.
Yes the USS Constitution is exceptionally heavy, but not so much that she can’t be used as an example. It’s like measuring the weight of a full plate armour harness, you don’t really need to know how tall the person wearing it is to get a good idea of how heavy / expensive full plate is.
Wait, are you implying that the plate armor of a ten foot tall person would only have trivial weight price differences to a normal suit of armor?
As best I can tell, the Constitution is about 50% heavier than a typical period frigate.
There are no ten feet tall people as far as I know. But of cause armour for a seven feet person would weight considerably more than for a five feet person.
I suspect that the reason to have only a small number of very powerful frigates may have had something to do with the US Navy not having access to nearly enough shipyards (or nearly enough cannon foundries) to build and arm a larger fleet of ships. The US spent much of the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 under entirely predictable British blockades. I can’t imagine that this was an enjoyable state of affairs for the Navy, but at the time the US simply did not have the economic and industrial scale to compete with the British. The best they could do, one supposes, was have a handful of ships powerful enough that the British at least had to take them seriously and couldn’t just casually bully the entire Eastern Seaboard with literally the smallest and weakest ships in their military.
AIUI, the US in that era had one of the western worlds largest merchant fleets and shipbuilding industries. It probably could have built a sizable fleet. But the cost would have made all of the taxes that people were complaining about a generation before look trivial.
A handful of large frigates were perfectly adequate to fight the Barbary Corsairs, and many times cheaper.
It’s also noticeable that while it is a very big and overgunned frigate, it is still a *frigate* IE: A smaller type of warship. Compare her to HMS Victory who had about twice the guns (and crew)
Even compared to a 74 (the “workhorse” of the line of battle in Age of Sail navies) Constitution was significantly outgunned. At pistol range the weight of a broadside from either was fairly comparable (910 lb for the 74 compared to 704 lb for Constitution as equipped in the War of 1812), but a lot more of Constitution’s broadside was short-ranged carronades. Out of carronade range, Constitution was only throwing 360 lb of metal, while the 74 was still throwing 838 lb.
In the unlikely event that she did meet a solitary enemy line-of-battle ship, Constitution was expected to run rather than fighting, and at one point carried a shot furnace to help with this- the intention was that a red-hot ball fired from one of the stern chasers could start a fire which would distract the enemy long enough for Constitution to get away. The furnace was only really capable of heating shot for one gun at a time, so there was no question of firing a red-hot broadside.
I’m only aware of one action where frigates (plural- HMS Indefatigable and HMS Amazon) destroyed a ship of the line, and that was in weather conditions that very much favored the frigates- their adversary, the French Droits de l’Homme, couldn’t open her lower gunports and bring her heavier guns to bear due to rough seas.
If I recall correctly the concept of the big frigates did have a ship of the role in concept. The ideal was quickly lost since the US turned west and its land grabs did not need a navy and it was in the end it was too far from the UK and France. Again this is something I can only sorta remember reference too. But the ideal was France and the UK or any other European power was was going to have to keep most of it line of battle in Europe and not rotting away trying to blockade the US. So If the US had say 12 line ships at 74 and 12 big frigates (again it never built either altogether) and supplies and guns ready to double that. You could deter even the UK since it could not on the cheap just send say 10 74s and round that out with any grab bag of frigates and sloops since the big US frigates would demand real involvement to counter and concentrated with an equal number of ships of the line would be a formidable fleet in distant waters to Europe.
Out of carronade range is a misnomer for pre-tangent sight gunnery (say 1830).
Guns before that were mostly ‘pointed by line of metal’ and directed at different ranges by the selection of the loading – single balls with distant, standard or reduced charge, or a doubled shot with reduced charges. This gives (for a British 32pdr heavy gun and Waltham Abbey powder a ‘useful’ range of direct pointing of about 700yds – while further distances could be reached by pointing the gun at an offset aimpoint high in the rigging, these are range-unstable (the angle increases as range decreases and the greater angle result in a longer throw). Direct pointing gives the same angle regardless of closure, and while the shot rises on the target it isn’t thrown further as well.
The carronade was fitted from 1782 with a notched dispart which gives multiple stable aimpoints from zero to the line of metal angle and this is used instead of charging differences to fire closer than the line of metal range. The carronade with the same diameter shot as the heavy 32pdr gun will throw its shot to about 900 yds, with steps set to give pointing to 100/200 yds increments short of this. (say 800/600/400/200/0 yds).
An alternative pointing in elevation could be found from quartersights – these are for 0-3 degrees in 1/4qtr degree intervals for the heavy guns and from 0-15 (in 100 yds) for the carronade. The 3 degree angle of fire for a heavy gun is approximately 1400-1450 yds, which is comparable to, but not above that marked on the carronade.
Accuracy and penetration are limitations for the carronade before those of a gun of the same shot size, but larger shot will allow heavy carronades to outperform smaller guns in most respects (only flatness of fire being to the gun’s advantage, and this is useful in chase/retreat fire – elevation and the ship’s rolling throw carronade fire left/right in train much more than with guns used with distant charges, and this hinders ‘single gun’ point fire on masts and spars or to target the rudder/wheel, which are small, vertically predominant targets).
So the problem (as I see it) is that the Constitution’s personnel/material ratio was extraordinary.
A ship of the line was of course had more material, but I also assume it had more crew.
A quick search of frigates that fought in the 1812 war gives USS Chesapeake at 3.6 tons per crew, Essex at 3.2. For the Brits HMS Macedonian and Phoebe are 3.5, HMS Guerrière and Shannon 3.2, and HMS Java the “lightweight” at 2.7. Note that all these figures are based on not very precise displacement measurements in a couple of different types of ton and that crew sizes also varied quite a bit from action to action.
So yes USS Constitution (and her sisters) are heavy for frigates, but for the argument being made in this particular context it doesn’t matter. The comparison is between triremes, which are multiple crew per ton and crew costs are more than capital costs; and Age of Sail warships, which are the reverse. Even the lightweight frigate is far, far, heavier in proportion to crew than a trireme.
My thoughts on the subject of navies:
The necessity of paying rowers reasonably well and thus making them more expensive than infantry follows from the fact that infantry in the field were expected to forage for much of their sustenance and supplementing whatever stipend they might receive with looted booty (including slaves in some times and places). This obviously wasn’t possible (usually?) for rowers, so the state had to assume the full burden of their compensation.
Which leads to a question: in the age of sail boarding and seizing prizes was a large part of naval warfare, including prize money distributed to successful crews. For purpose-built warships such as triremes or medieval/Renaissance galleys, was boarding and seizing enemy warships practical or were they most often sunk or otherwise too destroyed to be worth much to the victors?
Reading the history of the development of English/British navies we see the evolution of professionalism and its associated practices and institutions as ships evolved from multi-purpose to specialized war vessels. Compare for example the quasi-feudal system of levied ships that Francis Drake met the Spanish Armada with to the standardized and professional state navies of later times. But this was a slow process: witness how difficult it was for Samuel Pepys to convert the “King’s Navy” from a sinecure that was largely about extracting graft at every level to an actual responsible institution. Even then vestiges of the old system clung on; as late as the Napoleonic Wars British captains and masters were still responsible for recruiting or otherwise obtaining manpower for their ships rather than be assigned crew from a central pressing system.
Finally, regarding Kori Schake, does she mention the Ur-example warning of a hypothetical breakdown of US military subservience to the civil power: the novel and movie adaptation Seven Days In May?
Can anybody explain “a small, clqiuish and politicized officer corps”?
Initially, appointments to the US Military Academy at West Point were made by Congressmen. The point, supposedly, was to make sure that the political sympathies of the officer corps would be in line with those of the representatives of the people, thereby ameliorating one of the risks of a standing army–namely, the officer corps deciding they should be the ones in charge, directly or indirectly, because the current crop politicians are (fill-in-the-blank for your pejorative).
Congress didn’t gain a hand in West Point appointments until 1843, and even then it was because the Secretary of War at the time wanted recommendations because Congress had suddenly expanded the incoming class by fixing its size as identical to the House of Representatives.
Early on, most appointments were made by the Secretary of War, and between that and commissions outside the academy process, when Jefferson left office in 1809 the military’s officers were ~90% Democratic-Republican.
Ah, thank you.
Important notice:
Besides the navies, the other branch of military where capital costs are vital is fortifications.
Which are to an even greater degree than navies purpose-built rather than multipurpose!
I think we see both there as well — purely military fortifications where the only people inside are soldiers, vs fortified towns/cities. The cost of maintaining town walls can in fact be devolved onto the citizens rather than the state.
At the cost, of course, of the town being able to demand independent political power.
“I think we see both there as well — purely military fortifications where the only people inside are soldiers, vs fortified towns/cities.”
Fortified city is not as multipurpose as a transport ship, though. You can live perfectly well in a city that is completely unwalled, or that has decayed walls around/in the city. Walls don´t have much of an actual civilian benefit.
They do have somewhat of one, both for political delineations, and for making collecting tariffs and such easier. It’s not enough to actually *pay* for them, but its there.
Ollie and Percy Rule OK!!!
Listening to the Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire podcast about Disney turning the Republic/First Order into Red versus Blue.
It reminded me how on the Galactic Starcruiser (you know, the Star Wars hotel) guests could support either the Resistance or the First Order on their LARP missions. Apparently guests who did the First Order storyline would be awkwardly absolved of blame in the big speech at the end or something like that.
But it’s so wild, isn’t it? Imagine a Disneyland attraction set in Nazi-occupied France, and you can support either the French Resistance or the Nazis because it’s your adventure!
“Let’s see, our next mission is to go down to the cargo hold and scan crates until we find the one the Resistance is using to smuggle… Jews out of the country.”
“Let’s see, our next mission is to go down to the cargo hold and scan crates until we find the one the Resistance is using to smuggle… Jews out of the country.”
Well, you wouldn’t necessarily phrase it that way, and that leads to some…interesting storytelling possibilities. “Alright, we’re going to check the crates to make sure that the cargo matches the manifest and that no one’s stolen anything.” And then, when you check the crates, one of the crates shows signs of tampering. Then, when the player gives it a closer look, it’s obvious that there’s a person inside.
What do you do?
“What do you do?”
Hopefully go find a better hobby.
The single most important lesson for learning to enjoy table top roleplaying games is that No D&D is better then Bad D&D. There is a subset of people out there who act in ways that ruin the fun for others, generally excusing their behavior as “this is what my character would do” as if they aren’t the one who invented that character or that characters aren’t malleable things that evolve during good stories. They become a much bigger problem when everyone else just assumes they should go with the flow, that passively accepting what other people bring to the table is the only thing to do.
Nah, if you want to bring an edgy villain to a table where I’m GMing then the responsibility is on you to have “this is what my character would do” remain stuff that doesn’t ruin the game for others (including me!). If that twists your character concept up like a pretzel then tough luck; you chose to create this problem so it’s your problem to solve. And if you can’t accept that then either you leave the table or I do because I understand that no D&D is better then Bad D&D.
Why, exactly, are you assuming “edgy villain PC” rather than “naive newcomer PC”?
Never ascribe to evilness what could sufficiently be explained by incompetence!
This is a theme park managed adventure you are taking your ten year old through. Thought-provoking adventures might have a place at the right RPG table, but probably not there.
I admit that I never went, but IIRC the Galactic Starcruiser was rather more adult-oriented than kid-friendly, so I think there’s a little more room for that sort of thing than in, say, EPCOT or the Magic Kingdom.
Uh, siding with the bad guys has been a big part of the Star Wars fandom long before Disney got involved.
Disney’s mistake was trying to be darker and edgier by leaning so heavily into the First Order being a Nazi analogy vs the over-the-top space opera villainy. You can do that in a spinoff show like Andor, but its very tough to pull off in your family friendly space-fantasy adventure film.
Part of the problem is the Star Wars franchise chronically being tugged in two directions at once. You want to sell family-friendly stuff that the parents are comfortable showing to their kids, while at the same time you want to sell stuff to grown adults who are now 40-60 years of age and have very clear memories of Star Wars being wildly popular when they were young… But who now engage with that material on a different level.
Especially since with American politics being the way it is, some of those adults are now sympathizing with the stormtroopers and don’t want to be told that’s wrong.
Those sympathizing with the Empire don’t understand other people’s problems. This is my best explanation for their attitudes towards people different from themselves.
I don’t know if that’s a problem exclusive to them.
Consider the Star Wars ‘verse from the perspective of someone who lives in it but doesn’t know everything the audience knows:
1. The Republic is corrupt and starting to fall apart. (Functional polities do not have one constituent element putting blockades on another constituent element)
2. There’s a big civil war, during which stories about the malfeasance and misfeasance of the Senate run rampant. The Chancellor is untouched by these accusations.
3. Towards the end of the war, the Chancellor is briefly taken hostage by the losing rebels.
4. Right as the war is almost finished, with the Republic triumphant, the Chancellor claims that the shadowy order of warrior monks tried to launch a coup, and shows his ruined visage as evidence.
5. He promises to bring order and stability back to the galaxy.
Now, of course, we the audience know that said Chancellor was orchestrating the whole thing from beginning to end, but all your average inhabitant of the Star Wars ‘verse is going to see is that an obviously failing entity has been replaced by someone who seems to actually know what they’re doing.
Sorry, I thought too much about those voting for fascists. I think most of them either don’t understand the problems of others. Or they believe their own problems to be caused by people different from themselves having rights. The connection between “they benefit” and “we are harmed” has never been explained to me.
“The connection between “they benefit” and “we are harmed” has never been explained to me.”
Simple. Goes by the assumption that there are limited amounts of goods available in the society/your country, limited resources of Earth etc.
If the zero sum game is the assumption and mutual benefit an exception then “they benefit” by default “harms us” unless we know or are explained how it actually produces mutual benefit. And if we are explained how mutual benefit should arise, the most likely probability is still that the claim of mutual benefit is a self-serving lie on the part of them actually benefiting from harming us. The explanation actually being true faces a heavy burden of proof.
@60Guilders
I’ve always thought that the Emperor particularly foolish… because after the assassination attempt he had no need nor benefit from actually killing the Jedi. All he had to do was walk into public, say he was a Sith, and broadcast some selected clips from his office. The Jedi would see their highest leaders attempt to brutally murder an old man and turn on themselves and the public would react with righteous *hate* at the betrayal. The purge, while probably emotionally validating to the Sith Lord, did far less idealogical damage than simply forcing the Jedi to confront their hypocrisy.
But fascists aren’t rational on a personal or idealogical level.
The best lesson of Star wars is in how political institutions fall. As you say there’s a real problem with the Republic and a real desire for a reform movement. Palpatine simultaneously makes himself the embodiment of *both sides* of this, arguing for broad reforms of the political structure to concentrate power whilst also capturing the conservative institutions of the Senate.
This is, not incidentally, exactly what modern right wing demagogues are doing. Figures like Trump, Farage, La Pen, etc. position themselves as reformers and then co opt establishment institutions and engage in levels of blatant corruption that *dwarf” all previous administrations, while justifying their power with irrational rhetoric. To writ: it’s fine that everything about your life is materially and objectively worse, at least we’ve made the lives of immigrants and dissidents *tortuous*.
This isn’t a problem unique to right wing politics. Obama represented a similar movement, he campaigned on reform and ultimately became the embodiment of the establishment. Even if he didn’t openly enrich himself, he certainly increased the power of the surveillance and military state at the expense of citizens.
But it’s universal amongst right wing politicians; conservatism had no solutions on any level so it must rely on the abuse of raw power to mimic reform.
I’ve never gained any impression that public opinion matters 2 centicreds in the Star Wars galaxy. The Republic seemed to be more of a galactic United Nations, with the Senate composed of ambassadors from planetary governments rather than reflecting any popular plebiscite; and really given the sheer size and heterogeneity of the galaxy, how could it really be otherwise?
> I’ve never gained any impression that public opinion matters 2 centicreds in the Star Wars galaxy.
Then the Rebellion would have failed.
Something “mattering” in the scale of nations is often subtle, but the Republic lasted twenty millennia and the Empire something like three to four decades, counting remnants, *and the Empire inherited the Republics legitimacy*. It took Palpatine less than one *thousandth* the time the Republic existed to lose any and all its institutional strength, based solely on Rebellion from groups inside the Republic. Maybe the exact circumstances of his coup hastened an inevitable decline, but I think said decline is also, well, inevitable-Palpatine had to blow up planets to maintain power, it’s hard to imagine him doing that for millennia without fatally crippling his own industrial base.
> If the zero sum game is the assumption and mutual benefit an exception then “they benefit” by default “harms us” unless we know or are explained how it actually produces mutual benefit. And if we are explained how mutual benefit should arise, the most likely probability is still that the claim of mutual benefit is a self-serving lie on the part of them actually benefiting from harming us. The explanation actually being true faces a heavy burden of proof.
This is only the rationalization of those justifying the movement post-facto, though.
The truth is that the assumption being made is unproven; it’s as irrational to believe that human society is a zero-sum-game as it is to believe that it’s not, absent any evidence. And working from actual societies, those that devolve into this logic by trying to safeguard their resources in isolation, from internal and external others, collapse *entirely*. It’s not actually possible to rationally look at human history and come to the conclusion that society is some zero-sum-game, at least not for hundreds of years now. This *is* a rhetorical attack fascists use, but rhetoric is secondary to *cause*.
The true motive for politics is always emotional first, giving rise to justification later. For fascism it’s not that “they” take “our” resources, it’s that “they” take “our” privilege. This privilege is unbound from actual resource constraints or concerns, it’s about *dominance* and *power*, and is rooted in psychosexual neuroses common to humans that *aren’t* based in reason, but cultural or biological biases. “They” won’t take “my” resources, “they” will take “my” position, and “my” position let me own “my” women.
That’s very common to fascist movements, and listening to the *stated* justifications loses that the people actually forming the movement are stupid and terrible fuck up humans.
@Terry:
With all due respect, that has about as much explanatory power about the motives of right-wing politics as the right-wing claim that leftism is motivated by envy.
@60guilders We were talking about fascism.
What are you disputing in particular, that fascism co-opts reform movements to achieve institutiona power before exacerbating the very trends they claimed to be reforming, that modern fascists use the same methods to achieve their ends by promising reform and engaging in corruption and oppression instead, or that the emotional core of fascism is psychosexual possessiveness untethered from intellectual justification?
I am fully prepared to defend all three of those-they are not *new* ideas, and are well supported by evidence and scholarship.
Or are you simply weakly protesting because you had an emotional reaction but don’t have any intellectual justification for your protest?
@Terry: I understand that you’re perfectly prepared to defend the notion that fascism is based on psychosexual neuroses and that you believe this is backed up by scholarship.
While I have little doubt that there are people who are attracted to fascism due to such, the idea that the whole thing is based on that doesn’t quite work, much for the same reason that claiming that authoritarian leftism is based on envy doesn’t work–not only is it far too reductionistic, but “people believe in (ideology) because they have bad brain wiring” is far too common a rhetorical trope for anyone but an ideological fellow-traveler to take seriously.
I was referring to juridical rights being treated as if it was a zero-sum game. The only right you lose from others getting rights is the right to force you own double standard on them. Also, the belief that members of other ethnicities/populations automatically benefiting from your own being physically attacked. This is not about war in a strict sense. This is about members of certain ethnicities/populations being claimed to have made it into as system to physically attack members of another.
@chornedsnorkack
“If the zero sum game is the assumption and mutual benefit an exception then “they benefit” by default “harms us” unless we know or are explained how it actually produces mutual benefit. And if we are explained how mutual benefit should arise, the most likely probability is still that the claim of mutual benefit is a self-serving lie on the part of them actually benefiting from harming us. The explanation actually being true faces a heavy burden of proof.”
I don’t see why I should buy the underlying assumption that there has to be mutual benefit to avoid harm to myself.
Let’s say some guy at the other end of my street buys himself some new furniture. That probably benefits him in some way, or at least he himself thinks it does, or else he wouldn’t do it. But as long as I don’t visit him at his place, there’s no mutual benefit whatsoever. Does that mean that his new furniture harms me somehow? In that case, how? How exactly? Does it somehow keep me from using my own furniture?
As for the point about limited resources, yes, that’s true as far as raw materials are concerned. But concrete wealth, on a global scale, has been increasing for centuries. So there’s not even a need for mutual benefit to have situations where people benefit without automatically harming others. All that’s needed is a sufficient increase in the overall amount of wealth.
And this non-zero assumption makes even less sense when it comes to more intangible stuff, like, say, social acceptance. Why on Earth would it harm me if other people get more social acceptance than they had before?
@60guilders:
I don’t see what’s supposed to be generally wrong with at least partly blaming people’s politics on their psychological wiring. After all, politics is a part of human behavior, and political thoughts are a part of human thoughts. And both human behavior and human thoughts are clearly very much influenced by the psychological and neurological wiring of human brains. Why wouldn’t what is happening inside human brains be at least partly determined by the structure of these brains?
Now, of course it’s more complicated than “leftists are all just jealous”. But that’s simply an unusually stupid attempt at political psychoanalysis. There are some fairly striking mental features common among people in at least some parts of the Left where I’m reasonably certain that they have at least some neurological causes.
Rapheal: “Why on Earth would it harm me if other people get more social acceptance than they had before?”
Social status is inherently a zero-sum game. If those people who have always been inherently inferior to me before stop being so, at least some of them will end up being socially superior to me, so I’ve lost status.
And while you may not care about social status, lots of people care about it very deeply.
Keeping up with the Joneses isn’t really about your car, or you lawn, or your house, it is about not being socially inferior to the Joneses.
>While I have little doubt that there are people who are attracted to fascism due to such, the idea that the whole thing is based on that doesn’t quite work, much for the same reason that claiming that authoritarian leftism is based on envy doesn’t work–not only is it far too reductionistic, but “people believe in (ideology) because they have bad brain wiring” is far too common a rhetorical trope for anyone but an ideological fellow-traveler to take seriously.
Either we’re all fellow travelers against fascism or I don’t give a damn what you think, to be blunt. Note that what you said has nothing to do with if the assertion is correct, only if people will accept it; I’m bluntly rejecting that this matters.
More to the point, I get the instinct to assume that people are deep and complicated, but this is as wrong as assuming they are simple and stupid. The *evidence* supports that fascists are simple and stupid, ruled by emotion, petulance, and spite. If you allow an preconception to lead you to reject that conclusion you’re actually being reductionist, trying to simplifying complexity in the world.
The steps most of us take to become interesting humans with valid beliefs must be steps other people can not have taken. Every time you’ve had a moment of self reflection where you’ve changed something about yourself and accepted it, you could easily have not changed. Do that enough, and it becomes a habit. You deaden your ability for self reflection and emotional growth.
Once you accept that it’s possible for people to truly just be stupid, you realize that of course an ideology whose results are national suicide through self-cannibalism would concentrate all the stupid people into it. Everyone else avoids it.
As for leftists, you can’t reduce it to envy but other principles *are* accurate; you can say leftists search for political identity in rejection of the status quo, and assign an emotional term to describe that-rebelliousness or counterculturalism. You can say they feel that there is an ideal justice to society which is being violated, and that they search for retribution outside traditional law structures, vengeance as a motivating principle. There are others, some flattering and others not, because it’s a mass political movement-it’s always motivated by emotions first. Envy is just inaccurate, it’s not that there aren’t descriptions you can use, nor that these descriptions are all “positive” or “negative”, just that some are wrong.
@cptbutton
“Social status is inherently a zero-sum game. If those people who have always been inherently inferior to me before stop being so, at least some of them will end up being socially superior to me, so I’ve lost status.”
Sortuve, there’s a distinction between social position, social hierarchy, and social status which isn’t well defined even in academic literature yet. There are statuses and positions which do not necessarily imply a social hierarchy, like being a PhD or a Scout, that confer a unique status and prestige. We could always have more PhD’s or Scouts, there isn’t an inherently limited supply. Other statuses, like being the most prestigious scientist in a field, or having a formal role as a project lead, are obviously hierarchical.
There’s no small amount of social engineering in how a society assigns, rewards, and manages these statuses. It’s often absurd, and I’d hardly be the first to point out that a lot of the obsession with hierarchical social status is a neuroses that verges on mental illness. It doesn’t make the people who vie for it happier or in any was enrich them, Elon should find a hobby like fishing instead of rigging elections, etc. etc. repeat appropriate social commentary as you desire. This is all well tread ground in media.
@Terry, re: political psychology:
One caveat I’d have is that psychological factors might influence not only people’s political views *in absolute terms*, but also people’s political views *relative to the people around them*. That is, when you have one local community where 80 percent of the locals or more are right-wing, and another local community where 80 percent of the locals or more are left-wing, then you *might* have very different kinds of psychological types in those two places – but it might also be the case that some people in the 80 percent in each place are in some ways more like some people in the 80 percent in the other place than like people in the 20 percent in the other place, even though the 20 percenters in the other place are closer to them ideologically. And in reverse, a contrarian right-winger in Berkeley and a contrarian left-winger in a small Bible Belt town might be *psychologically* more like each other than either of them would care to admit.
@Raphael
I refuse to accept this because it is devastating to my worldview.
No, but you’re right-there’s nothing about any of the emotive aspects of a particular group that require them to gravitate towards a specific philosophy, nor is there anything about the emotive aspects of individuals that requires them to move towards a particular group. There’s always edge cases. I could dispute the particular examples, but that’s just being onery. If nothing else I imagine certain leftist groups in Eastern Europe are psychologically identical to fascists, as a legacy of Stalinism.
I just truly do believe that almost everyone who supports a fascist movement has simplistic emotions, if only because fascism has been the loser thing for losers to do for most of a century. Even the current rise in right wing authoritarianism is dealing with a serious problem in that for them to achieve cultural dominance it needs to be acceptable to *be a Nazi*, but they’re all such miserable losers they can’t meaningfully make progress on that-it’s just *lame* to be a fascist. Plus everyone involved in the movement is openly corrupt, so no matter how much money they throw at propaganda it all disappears into a black hole of grift and you end up with cultural products that no one likes.
Terry’s furniture analogy is a very good one. If a society’s economy was a zero-sum game no increase in the average standard of living would be possible. There are loads of empirical evidence to the contrary. Sure, the world’s resources are finite. But there is a difference between a comfortable life and one indulging in overconsumption. Most people don’t need air travel, beef steaks or the latest in electronics. A comfortable life does not have to include any of those.
@Terry:
Oh please. Antifascism as an ideology is as coherent as anticommunism. Please try that particular thought-stopping tactic elsewhere.
Let me make an example of disconnection between “we are harmed” and “they earn from it”. Countries A and B are neither neighbours nor at open war with each other. Group X consist 80% of the population of country A. Meanwhile, group Y consist 90% of the population of country B. Moreover, group Y consist 5% of country A’s population. Fascists in country A accuses members of group Y of systematically assaulting, killing and raping members of group X. They make it sound like group Y in general would earn from that. I don’t think they would.
If nothing else I imagine certain leftist groups in Eastern Europe are psychologically identical to fascists, as a legacy of Stalinism.
@Terry,
I’d say it’s more complicated than that. Both because I think “fascism” is a wildly overused term (though I would also say that the current Trump regime does qualify) and also because I want to stay out of the normative debate over politics.
It is true more narrowly though, that in postcommunist countries, people with left-wing economic views, hostility to capitalism etc. tend to be more friendly to nationalism and in some situations to authoritarianism. Or as a political statistician friend of mine likes to say, “in postcommunist countries, leftism is anti-correlated with liberalism”. There’s a good paper on the topic here:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/are-cultural-and-economic-conservatism-positively-correlated-a-largescale-crossnational-test/83AFEDEA5E004CF23631C5388E7C9F67
Hungary is actually an exception to that trend (polling suggests that people with sympathetic views of the Communist past tend to oppose the Orban regime) but I think that’s partly because Orban appealed a lot to anti-communist, conservative ideology, and also because, as I understand it, the communist government in Hungary was less amenable to nationalism and ethnic identity politics than their sister parties/governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria.
“Conservatism” is not a meaningful concept to me anymore. Those calling themselves “conservatives” vary too much in their views of and attitudes towards other people. I can’t lump together sensible Tories with rabid Reactionaries or outright Nazis. That would ascribe far too many people views they don’t hold and attitudes they don’t have. So I use more specific terms for the various groups.
To me the Orbán regime appears pre-modern. They don’t understand why people different from themselves should have rights and ascribe to them goals they don’t have. The later are supposed to use methods which would not work in real life. All in all, they seem to have a lot of severe misconceptions on what other can and want and base their politics on those.
> Oh please. Antifascism as an ideology is as coherent as anticommunism. Please try that particular thought-stopping tactic elsewhere.
You seriously read the part about where disagreement with fascism was a requirement for me to care about your opinions and stopped reading because you *don’t*? What a dolt.
You’ve fucked your rhetorical argument anyway. You are saying that claiming fascism is purely stupid is reductive.Yet you’re saying anti fascism is purely stupid. You obviously don’t actually think idealogies can’t be reduced, you just don’t like reducing fascism; you’re being hypocritical.
So which is it: are all idealogies special little unique snowflakes, or can it be shown that some are just an incoherent jumble?
@Hector
Thanks for the paper link; I knew in broad terms that there was an anti liberalism link but know I’m ignorant of the real emotive core here and how it breaks down. There are probably groups which fit my preconception and groups that don’t, I’ll have to look into it. Most of what I do know is vague information I looked up to try to understand Ukrainian politics when they became very relevant very quickly.
@Lena that’s part of the intellectual collapse of the right as they tighten around fascist rhetoric. The incoherence of their ideas is not a mistake.
Most of the people I know who actually believe conservative things have basically disengaged from politics; they are disgusted by Trump (and Reform, speaking to a north Irish expat, particularly after what happened in Belfast) yet are too traditionally religious and concerned with their own personal finances to vote for left wing candidates.
I know one family of upper middle class conservative voters are the kind of people who can acknowledge that they benefit from certain inequalities, being richer, but don’t actively hate anyone under them in society. They just don’t think that the reforms people on the left advocate will work, or believe they’ll cause worse social damage in trying them. They focus on charity, being deeply involved in elder care, and the church. This is frustrating, but their conservatism is based in an actual lived experience informing an argument. I try to keep them in mind whenever I get too frustrated at right wing partisans, as their beliefs are sincere and coherent, even if I think they’re dangerously wrong…
But some of their *kids* are deeply estranged because they went deep into the fascism thing and lost their goddamn shit, committing crimes and nearly roping their parents into it. These are, at best, deeply troubled and at worst despicable. This generational and rhetorical divide *rapidly* developed over the last eight years, and means it’s very hard to generalize to all conservatives.
I suspect the parents you talk about are taking the capacities and opportunities of others for granted. Also, I am under the impression that a considerable number of Americans believe certain reforms to have horrible consequences which has failed to materialise in other countries. About their children they may have gotten stuck in the belief that large groups in society are out to the destroy their country. What these groups would earn from supposedly destroying the country has never been explained to me.
@Terry:
I misunderstood you. As it happens, I dislike fascism, and think it is a dangerous ideology. However, I have found that most self-proclaimed “anti-fascists” who attempt to claim that as their ideology also want me to swallow a whole bunch of other things in order to be properly “anti-fascist.” Based on your comments, you don’t seem to be doing that, and for making that assumption I apologize.
Snopes once wrote on this issue:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/06/09/what-or-who-is-antifa/
“siding with the bad guys has been a big part of the Star Wars fandom long before Disney got involved.”
One of the interesting things about the old Star Wars EU, before Disney torched it, was that it tried to bring a somewhat more nuanced version of the Empire into play, where while the Empire (and the post-Endor warlords) were still clearly the bad guys and frequently indulged in over-the-top space opera villainy, they at least occasionally put down piracy, criminal activity, and outside threats–y’know, legitimate government stuff–rather than just twirling their mustaches while terrorizing people.
I think TIE-Fighter was fairly interesting in that regard in that the most “Heroic” thing you’re doing (basically stopping a war and forcing the participants to cooperate) is also done under the command of Admiral Harkov, who is a corrupt admiral only out for himself (and who later kicks off the main “plot” by first selling arms to the Alliance and then defecting when his embezzling gets caught)
This is very pedantic, but I don’t think I can be blamed for that on here of all places: did either Rome or Carthage actually go _bankrupt_ during the first Punic War (footnote 2)? Aka, did they default on their debts?
Rome, AFAIK, didn’t. They just ran out of money for new fleets because the taxpayers said no, so they had to raise the cash via donations (technically, loans) from volunteers. I guess you could argue that Carthage did, because they struggled to pay their mercenaries after the war ended. But I’m not sure that counts as bankruptcy as much as choosing to not honour their promise to pay because they thought they could get away from it.
The broader question probably is “Did ancient economies have well enough developed financial institutions for state bankruptcy to be a thing?” In translations of Cicero’s letters somethings are occasionally referred to as “banks” but I don’t know how much they resemble an (early) modern bank.
I am neither historian nor an economist, but I do think it is just a matter of wording. In the strict sense bankruptcy is a legal procedure intended for insolvent debtors. So states do not enter bankruptcy because in the interstate anarchy there is no higher authority.
But when a state or other major actor, say a feudal lord, defaults on its financial obligation because of the objective inabilty to pay and not as some strategic move, it is not weird to equate this with the bankruptcy.
I think this requires a deeper look into how ancient economies handled money.
I know many ancient economies simply didn’t. Or at least, not at any scale. Realistically money is just a way to standardize value, so you can have money on paper but use other things in practice. To give a random example, let’s say I owe you a debt of 16 silver pieces. I can pay you the silver, sure–but it may be better for both of us to agree that a silver piece is worth a day’s labor, and I work for you for 16 days. On paper I’ve paid you the silver, but the silver never actually existed. It’s just a convenient way to compare apples to zebras.
With ship construction the expenses are going to be materials and manpower. So maybe in addition to silver this year, my city pays its taxes in lumber for your ships. On paper we’ve still paid the taxes in silver, but in reality you got the lumber you’d otherwise have to buy with that silver. Likewise, maybe I pay in slaves that are trained in ship-building (this is Rome and Carthage, we need not condone slavery but we must acknowledge its existence). Or I pay my taxes in food for the ship builders. Again, on paper I’m paying silver, but it’s more convenient for you because it cuts out extra steps; instead of me giving you silver and you buying food with it, you just get the food.
I’ve read of ransoms of Medieval nobility that explicitly allowed for this sort of thing. The ransom was X pounds of silver or equivalent in grain, cloth, and goods.
With Rome you also have to consider the patronage system. If I’ve got one too many sons and my patron is involved in ship-building, it’d be tempting to offer the skills of my youngest son as a favor. Plus it gives the boy a trade and a better chance in life than being the fourth son on a small farm, so really we all win here. Or I donate cordage, or wood, or nails, or something–stuff the ship needs but which I can relatively easily obtain. Such exchanges are hardly unknown in the Roman world–the Roman economy was fundamentally built on this–and it’d be rather silly to think this didn’t extend into ship-building. This would help reduce the cost to any individual by spreading at least some of it across a larger number of small investors. Basically think of it as a mutual fund for ship-building, only you pay in labor and materials and the dividends you get is the favor of your patron.
There are probably many more ways to defray the cost of ship-building. These are just a few that I can think of off the top of my head. Rome being Rome, I’m reasonably certain someone sat down and thought through ways to do this and, if they weren’t standardized, at least discussed them with folks involved in ship-building.
Addendum: To the Romans in the first Punic war, a ship did have a monetary component which could not be paid with coins of account. That’s because the money was made of bronze, and so were the ship rams. Which meant that making a ram was basically like melting down actual coins. For that reason, casting the rams was overseen by the state, with quaestors officially signing off on each ram made by stamping their name into the metal.
In that way, the state might not be strictly by definition bankrupt (as in, unable to repay loans and defaulting on payments), but it could certainly be insolvent because it literally had no more material to make coins (or rams) out of.
The gold looted from the First Punic War was saved by the Romans. It was later melted down to help paying for the Second Punic War.
“Which meant that making a ram was basically like melting down actual coins.”
A very valid argument. Remember what coins were. Initially coins were merely standardized weights of metal–the idea was to simplify transactions by pre-weighing the metal, so merchants didn’t need to do so. Well into the Middle Ages it was standard practice for jewelers to melt coins to make jewelry, and even today you can legally do it. I’ve seen people cast bronze swords using pennies. (It’s legal, but I’m not 100% sure on the specifics, so please consult someone who does know if you’re going to do this!)
This is not a counter-argument. You just touched on something that I’m mildly obsessed with. I don’t get to nerd out about coinage NEARLY enough! Sadly Rome had already switched from negative to positive stamping (ie, the images were raised, not indented).
“…but it could certainly be insolvent because it literally had no more material to make coins (or rams) out of.”
Is that true, though? If your economy traditionally runs in payment in equivalent of coin, can you temporarily switch to that? Not for some transactions, I’ll grant you–hard to buy fast food with a bundle of wool, and Rome was famous (infamous?) for its fast food!–but in other areas Rome was already running on a gift economy and a barter economy (two different things).
The downside is Rome during the Punic Wars hadn’t captured Britain yet. I know Britain had some very useful mines, but those were still quite a ways down the road. For a geologist with MSHA training I’m remarkably poorly versed in locations of mines, especially historical ones.
Plus, you don’t need coins. Bronze is copper and tin, and we know Rome had mines for both (otherwise they wouldn’t have used bronze for coins). We also know they shipped bars of the material–we actually found a shipment of orichalcum a few years ago, made a huge splash at the time, but it’s proof they were shipping bars of the stuff. While coins may be needed, it would make more sense to use something NOT currently running your economy to make the rams. You’d end up with some interesting economic issues related to stagnant monetary supply, but better that than actually running out of species. Or you could switch to some other metal for the coins. I know the USA switched from making pennies out of copper to making them out of steel in WWII–I have a few proof sets, and I’ve always wanted on from each mint–and there are other metals available. Gold and silver were more rare, but were available. So was iron and a few other metals.
The last option is adulteration of the coins. You can use less bronze to make the coins. It’s something that people have been complaining about since coins started, so we know it happened. Or you can slowly shrink the coins, hoping no one notices, but that relies on you having a pretty strong state and merchants willing to have nominal value instead of hard metal. We could do it in the USA without anyone giving two hoots, but I’m not sure Rome could do it. Adding base metals with a thin cover of bronze seems more likely to work.
When they found “a shipment of orichalcum” exactly what metal did they find? As far as I can tell there is some uncertainty on what “orichalcum” actually was.
“As far as I can tell there is some uncertainty on what “orichalcum” actually was.”
It was a specific bronze alloy labeled as orichalcum in the ship. You’ll have to look up the reports for specifics.
Part of the ambiguity seems to stem from there being multiple things called orichalcum. There’s discussion of orichalcum lights, for example, and this bronze alloy is no better at making light than any other alloy. So the mystery isn’t entirely solved, but we know that at least one version of the substance did exist.
Sweden also made coins out of iron during WWII. (We were not directly involved but did not know if it would happen.) Eventually inflation made their metal of higher value than what was stamped on them. This led to the great majority of them being melted down. However, my grandfather saved a considerable number of them in a chiffonier. I suspect they can still be found at the vacation home now belonging to his youngest son. If so they could be quite valuable now thanks to their rarity.
Bronze was always a fiat coinage in the classical world. It would work at nominal value only where the law enforced its value. You really are not going to have much of a debasement issue with it comparable to silver or gold. In general use it was small change outside of specific cash grab situations by certain states able to enforce such.
What do you mean by “specific cash grab situations”?
Today I got verified my uncle still have some of the WWII iron coins. He just don’t think about them as particularly valuable.
“I know many ancient economies simply didn’t. Or at least, not at any scale. Realistically money is just a way to standardize value, so you can have money on paper but use other things in practice. To give a random example, let’s say I owe you a debt of 16 silver pieces. I can pay you the silver, sure–but it may be better for both of us to agree that a silver piece is worth a day’s labor, and I work for you for 16 days. On paper I’ve paid you the silver, but the silver never actually existed. It’s just a convenient way to compare apples to zebras. ”
Err No. Try that in classical Athens if you owed me a debt 16 Athenian drachma and you would be laughed at if not taken to court or direct to a magistrate for violating a contract.. For a bigger debt sure you could seamlessly offer me Darics of Cyzicene starters.. If you eat the conversion cost you might pass on silver from Corinth or Aigina (and a few scraps of evidence say to honor the cool considerate and loyal oligarchs of Chios their silver was valid in Athens so you might pay with that). By why do I want 16 days of your labor. Do I need it all now? Are you good at everything? In two years if I don’t use it all – what if you are dead. What are you good at. This Athens I can lease a slave or hire a day labor free citizen or metic or just buy goods in the market with 16 real drachmas. I can store 16 drachma forever essentially or add it to an interest bearing account with my banker or most import pay any debts I ow in coin. If I am a trader or mercenary or any other traveler I can carry coins on a ship with me to the next port. Can I transfer your days of labor to someone else – if so my friend you seem to be selling yourself into slavery. Or close to it If I let you do it I would doing you a favor you would own me you stop being free my inches.
Good you pointed out Ancient Athens was already to monetarised for that.
I have no option to reply on the other post so as to
“What do you mean by “specific cash grab situations”?”
A mix of two examples really. The closed Lagid system that they set up in Egypt with what was as I recall light silver and bronze but importantly a solid enforce exchange of heavy/good silver at the boarder. And than the Byzantine Iron coinage (if it was real) as likely the same thing. Leveraging their position to enforce a very stiff tax on commercial activity and taking either quality silver or electrum from the Black Sea trade.
On the second point, I did pick Athens but I think the same holds for anywhere the Greeks adopted coinage and quickly so. The lack of small change was a myth created by biased archeology. Nobody but the traditional landed aristocrats would see benefit in the just ‘nominal coinage; and we retain the barter system – to thier particular advantage and maintenance of patronage (until you all (hoi polloi, traders, foreigners etc) fall into seldom or slavery.
If the Byzantine Empire ever made iron coins I suspect they would be too rusty to be identified as such by now.
“Try that in classical Athens if you owed me a debt 16 Athenian drachma and you would be laughed at if not taken to court or direct to a magistrate for violating a contract.”
There’s a lot of territory outside Athens, and a lot of timeframes where being taken to court wasn’t a thing. Plus, you’re talking certain social groups (the upper class); no one cared what the lower class did, at least not enough to write it down.
Plus, you rather miss my point. In a lot of cultures a lot of money existed on paper only. It was a convenient way to record exchanges even if the physical coinage didn’t exist. If I paid you 16 drachma of product instead of coins, it may very well have been recorded as being paid in coins because that’s how the accounting was done in that time and place. There are incidents of this (again, including royal ransoms from the Middle Ages). And it makes good sense. Frankly often it wasn’t an option to pay in coin. Okay, maybe 16 drachma probably is, but what about 16,000 drachma? In a town that only CONATAINED around 2,000 total? (These are just figures to illustrate the problem; please don’t get caught up in how common specific coins were here.) That doesn’t mean there’s not 16,000 drachma of goods to provide, just that the economy is under-monetized and to make trade happen we need to figure out a work-around. (It should be noted that ancient peoples didn’t really understand monetary theory or how value changed in different places–it’s one reason why merchants were despised much of the time–which exacerbated the whole issue.) The way people have historically gotten around that was to record payments in kind as if they were payment in money.
There are also situations where it’s better to have the stuff than to have the money. If I know you’re building a ship and need sails, and I’m in debt to you, and my household is really good at weaving, it’s very likely that you and I could come to an agreement to accept a certain number of yards of sail cloth as being the equivalent of 16 drachma, plus of course a bit extra for the inconvenience. As I said above, you’re just going to use the money to buy the sails anyway, why not cut out the middle man? I accept that it’s not always going to work like that, but given that such deal still happen today it’s hardly outlandish to think they happened in an under-monetized economy.
Do we both have to be on the same page? Sure, absolutely. If I came to you and said “I made sail cloth instead of giving you silver” you’d obviously be right to be upset. But if I came to you and said “I know we agreed that I pay 16 drachma in two months, but could I instead provide 20 drachma worth of cables for your new ship this month instead?” you may find the deal more palatable. And it may not be so formal. You, as a magnanimous Roman patron, may forgive my debt to you in order to look generous–both of us conveniently ignoring the fact that I gave you a gift worth twice as much in food, or slaves, or cloth, or whatever is more convenient to me than coinage. Or the culture could just run this way and everyone just assumes that’s how trade works, you trade goods but record it in coins. Again, this happens today (happened a lot aboard ships in the 1700s/early 1800s, as sailors didn’t have a lot of coins), so it’s not like this is an unreasonable thing to assume was happening in the past, especially in cultures where the gift economy was semi-formalized like in Rome.
Informal mutual exchange of goods and services certainly occur today. Although all examples I personally know about are between socially more or less equal individuals. It was not long ago that I read about Swedish farmers mutually exchanging services. In my lifetime there have been North European farmers not even wanting cash in such situations. My parents met such a one circa 1983. (I was born at the time but not my two years younger brother.) On vacation in the Netherlands our motorhome got stuck and my dad asked a local farmer for help. After helping unstuck it with his tractor he did not want to get paid in money. However, a package of biscuits was fine to him.
Last Thursday my mum turned eighty. Instead of the usual home-made baked goods served at birthday parties she ordered a Lebanese buffet. You could not order less than ten servings yet the amount of food was huge. We were eleven people having it for lunch. One of the guests had a dog with him who was served some chicken on a paper plate. My brother could not be there for lunch since he was working. When he finally turned up he took as much food as he thought he could eat that day. I offered to take the rest of the falafels to keep in my freezer. Still, there was loads of food left over. My mum told me the next day it had been given to neighbours. I suspect most or all was given to the woman who had watered her garden when she herself was on vacation.
“choosing to not honour their promise to pay because they thought they could get away from it.” I mean, isn’t that what a default is?
Not paying what you promised is default. Bankruptcy is one but not the sole reason for the default.
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In Ancient Athens, I know they used citizens as rowers, while other sea powers in the Mediterranean in the early modern period used slaves. What about other ancient navies? And would using slaves change the financial equation at all, since they still need to be fed and housed and provided with fresh water, not to mention confined and guarded?
Apparently the notion of slave rowers in ancient times is a myth. It does make sense, given the option of mutiny, that you wouldn’t fill your boat with a lot of disgruntled people and then let them sail off.
There was SOME use of slave rowers in ancient times, although this was definitely an unusual practice. The Greek city of Corcyra seems to have made substantial use of slave rowers (Owen Rees mentions this in his description of the Corcyraean fleet in the Battle of Sybota chapter in “Great Naval Battles of the Ancient Greek World”).
(I don’t know of other examples of the use of actual slaves, although Athens did once use slaves who were promised freedom after serving.)
Maybe it is something of the Early Modern Era wrongfully ascribed to Antiquity? I don’t know how slave galleys before the breakthrough of naval artillery worked.
I thought it was Renaissance era galleys that were often rowed by convicts; perhaps this was anachronistically attributed to classical antiquity?
During the Renaissance it became fashionable to try to emulate Antiquity. Which might have lead to contemporary phenomena being ascribed to an earlier time period.
There is actually at least one example of slave rowers being used in antiquity. In Chapter 4 (Battle of Sybota) of “Great Naval Battles of the Ancient Greek World” (2018) by Owen Rees the description of the Corcyraean fleet notes that it is “powered predominantly by slaves”.
That said, the use of slave rowers in antiquity does seem to be rather unusual.
I suspect they were promised manumission if they survived the war.
Slaves were used in late medieval/early modern times for two reasons. The first was that a couple of centuries of constant shore-raiding by both Christian and Muslim powers had depleted the Mediterranean coastal populations, making the pool of free rowers much smaller (while the religious hostility also made a convenient excuse for enslaving Christians or Muslims), while changes in galley arrangements made it feasible to use less skilled labour (triremes were one man per oar, while medieval galleys were rowed with multi-man sweeps, each needing only one skilled rower). That said, Venice, which relied on dash and manoeuvre, used slaves last and reuluctantly, and was pretty lenient too (they issued swords to the outboard slave rower to defend themselves against boarders).
With the rise of drones, I guess there’ll be rise of all-purpose ships again in warfare, where most ships are just drone containers.
Also about female pronoun for ships, I thought it’s usually the left who’s more up in arms against it, because something something misogyny something something.
Half of that happened. For the last decades, most warships (frigates, destroyers, cruisers) have been “just” blocks of VLS cells, containing whatever mixture of missiles is considered an appropriate loadout for the mission/circumstances. There are occasional calls for “arsenal ships” which are exclusively that, and for unmanned smallish versions thereof to supplement the firepower of the crewed ships of navies who regret some procurement choices (e.g. not putting enough cells on their ships).
But, 1) there is as yet no civilian use of VLS cells, 2) your warships need to detect enemy ships and planes and missiles (whether aimed at the ship, or at another vessel they are escorting) so they can shoot them. So a warship needs a big radar (or multiple big radars for the different purposes; this has mostly fallen out of fashion). And the compute to turn the data from the radars into tracks. And the comms facilities to talk to other ships, aircraft, etc., receive tracks from them, and to collate those with their own tracks. (Of course you can also put a radar on a plane launched from a different ship. That has benefits — a vastly better horizon — and drawbacks.)
And because — depending on your strategic situation, of course — you may have to deal with enemy submarines and/or mines, it would be nice if they had a flight deck sufficient to carry a helicopter that can do things like dunk sonars. And/or the ship can directly carry a sonar, maybe in the bow, maybe deployable from the stern to be towed.
In the future (and somewhat the present), you might also want to put some lasers and/or high-powered microwave emitters on the ship, to at least temporarily dazzle, or permanently blind the sensors on, or possibly outright destroy cheaper missiles (such as “drones”). Until then, you may want to stick a bunch of e.g. chaff dispensers on the ship. And bolt on a CIWS.
All of this equipment needs a massive amount of power and cooling. It is also generally expected that warships will be able to get up and go, hence a propulsion system to match (and a hull correspondingly shaped).
Now, this isn’t to say you can’t use e.g. a container ship in modern combat. You absolutely can use them as e.g. a fireship. Load them with tens of thousands of tons of explosive and demolish some key naval infrastructure (port, canal, etc.) as an opening move of a war.
There is also the issue that merchant ships tend to be slow compared to purpose built warships. Speed is an advantage not only in battle but also for strategic mobility. The other advantage a purpose built warship has over a converted merchant ship is survivability. A purpose built warship has a lot more subdivisions, allowing it to better survive fire or flooding.
Yeah. A big part of the issue is that nearly all civilian ships are engineered rather ruthlessly to optimize for cargo capacity. Modern container ships are practically just gigantic motorized barges designed to stack cargo containers on top as high as possible without capsizing. Speed hardly matters and the ships don’t necessarily even need enough room aboard to move around between the cargo containers on deck, because the cargo is transferred on and off by gigantic cranes and everything is heavily automated.
You can’t design a useful warship based on that design paradigm, and anything you do design will be crammed so full of fighting machinery that it will be far, far more expensive than a cargo ship and not really useful as one in peacetime.
The closest we see in the industrial age to dual-role ships is ocean liners being pressed into service as fast troop transports during the World Wars. And with the fast ocean liners being largely obsolete… nah.
Today’s professional navies do use dedicated supply ships that presumably have to make compromises between cargo capacity and being able to operate as potential targets in a war zone. I don’t know anything about that style of ship design myself.
There’s also occasionally use of speedboats and other civilian ships as conventional fast attack craft in addition to the suicide tactics. Famously this was done during a mock gulf war with General Paul K. Van Ripper command red force. The rules of the wargame let red force “win” before they were patched. It probably *wasn’t* realistic to convert every civilian watercraft into the gulf into a torpedo boat, but the *kind* of vulnerability showcased, that of asymmetrical warfare where the civilian profile and number of attackers confuses targeting and overwhelms defense munitions, was real.
In modern warfare you’d probably make them into drone platforms or stick a bunch of launch tubes and slave them to a better targeting system, but there’s still probably a theoretical use for civilian ships if you are creative enough.
It’s just a question of if this is worth the effort-modern economies are so vast that it might be cheaper to just build ten million drones than even bothering with water craft. Assuming your procurement hasn’t been completely fucked by corruption and stupidity.
I have never yet met a leftist or near-leftist who specifically objected to the use of she/hers pronouns for ships.
It feels like on of those issues where you might find people on tumblr going “That’s kind of messed up”, but where there is no actual political constituency that would fight for getting this changed.
So basically exactly the kind of issue for the current US cabinet loves to melt down over.
The whole pronoun thing has been entirely driven by the left. You don’t get to push people to adopt your specific speech preferences and then say “Why are you making a big deal out of it” when people push back. Our host’s Pete Hegseth quip was a cheap shot at a strawman.
I agree, Pete Hegseth may as well be made of straw for all the good he does
I view this as just a linguistic quirk. Although it becomes a bit awkward when the ship has a male name. To my knowledge all our icebreakers have.
For a moment there I thought you were podcasting with Tom Holland the actor.
He did play Telemachus, after all…
Tom Holland, the actor, was interviewed by Tom Holland, the podcaster, a couple of weeks ago.
Oh so many questions for the ancient navy series.
1. How was Rome (and maybe Carthage) able to raise navies so much higher than the successor states? The Seleucids and Ptolemies had significantly more money than the Romans.
2. Were Roman navies manned by citizens and/or socii? If so how was Rome able to convince citizens and/or socii to row triremes? I thought part of the reason Rome was able to devolve costs for equipping soldiers was that the citizen soldiers and socii were able to earn plunder and glory by winning battles and taking the losers’ stuff. You can’t loot the losers after a navy battle.
3. I believe Athenian navies were manned by Athenian citizens who could vote for rowers getting better wages. Could Roman rowers vote for better wages?
4. How did Rome pay for ship upkeep? I get at the end of the First Punic War Rome had a gigantic navy (or the remnants of a gigantic navy after Rome and Carthage lost 4 figures of ships and hundreds of thousands of rowers) but the upkeep cost would have been enormous. How did pay enough to still have the largest navy by far 75 years after the end of the First Punic War?
4. How would a Roman navy circa 180 B.C. or 180 A.D.) have done against the Vikings? Would Rome have been as navally dominant? Were the Vikings able to succeed navally because there was no state able to mobilize resources like Rome could in 750 A.D. or were there naval advancements that made the Viking longships better per ship than a a Roman warship?
I’ve never heard that the Vikings conducted anything like naval battle. I’ve only heard of them in the context of raiding/invasions.
Norse people going a-viking may have been not too interested in the naval battle, but Norse lords were. And even more so were the Normans – still the part of the same naval tradition. I think it is not too absurd to pit the Norse feudal fleet vs the Romans.
My hunch would be that home field advantage would decide the majority of it. In Mediterranean Romes has the upper hand. In much rougher North Sea Norse have the upper hand.
“Norse people going a-viking may have been not too interested in the naval battle, but Norse lords were. And even more so were the Normans – still the part of the same naval tradition. I think it is not too absurd to pit the Norse feudal fleet vs the Romans.
My hunch would be that home field advantage would decide the majority of it. In Mediterranean Romes has the upper hand. In much rougher North Sea Norse have the upper hand.”
Compare the actual Germanic sea attacks of 3rd century AD.
In Britain, the Saxons forced the Romans to build Saxon Shore (to what effect?). On Black Sea, the Heruli achieved the feats of forcing Bosphorus against opposition, capturing Byzantium, attacking as far as Cyprus and returning safely.
Neither Saxons nor Heruli had Viking ships. If they had had them, how much more effective would they have been against Romans than they actually were?
Probably not at all – I know more about the late Roman/Saxon side of it, but certainly there nothing about what’s going on appears to be linked to the specific ship technology.
There were plenty of Norse naval battles. They were essentially boarding fights – you laid alongside and had at it. Often the ships were lashed together to create a single fighting platform (and prevent the other side from splitting off vulnerable ships and then ganging up on them). Larger/higher ships had an advantage. A Roman galley in calm waters would probably have the upper hand – higher sides, more manoeuvrable, possibly able to ram. Offsetting this, the whole crew of a longship joined the fight, as against the 20 or so marines a trireme carried.
For 1, the societies of Rome and Carthage are structured differently and able to get more value for their money in military expenditure. This article by our host talks about it in the context of land armies, but the same would apply at sea:
https://acoup.blog/2024/01/19/collections-phalanxs-twilight-legions-triumph-part-ia-heirs-of-alexander/
For 4, the Romans would have beaten the stuffing out of the Vikings, because the Roman Empire is so much bigger and better organised. Yes, the Vikings were helped immensely by the states they were raiding being poor and fragmented.
Viking longships were better in some ways, the Vikings were quite capable of crossing large stretches of ocean without hugging the coast. (Because if you’re in the North Sea, you kind of have to be.) Not that much better though, it’s routine in Viking sagas for a fleet of twenty or thirty ships to set off from Norway for Iceland, or Iceland to Vinland, and five or so are lost along the way.
@Michael, Vikings did fight at sea, mostly against other Vikings. Example is the Battle of Hafrsfjord in 872 CE, part of a Norwegian civil war. Very much boarding and fighting hand to hand, ships even being tied together rather than trying to move around.
I think Vinland refers to present-day Newfoundland as this is where ruins of Viking settlements have been found.
2) Our host has previously theorised that the capite censi (the lowest class of citizen, who did not own any property) served as the rowers for the Roman fleets.
There were also dedicated socii navales, coastal cities that were obliged to send warships rather than soldiers. Most of these were greek speaking settlements in the southern part of Italy.
4. On the timescales you’re talking about, the answer to “how did Rome pay for ship upkeep” could easily be “they didn’t.” While fleets of galleys were quite expensive and you absolutely did want to build them and keep them in storage sheds out of the water if possible, you wouldn’t usually bother to maintain them for decades with no foreseeable use.
Remember that these ships require two very different kinds of crew: experienced officers (who can be recruited from the merchant marine) and rowers (who need to be good at what they do but what they do is a very specific kind of manual labor so you can hire a farmer and make a rower of him on short notice).
It is entirely possible for a nation that doesn’t expect to fight a major sea-war in this period to just let its galleys rot, then when it realizes it needs new ones twenty years later, to just build an entire new fleet. You can’t do that with steel warships in the industrial age and you can’t do that nearly so easily in the Age of Sail with bigger, more heavily built ships… But you can get away with it with ancient galleys, I gather.
The Romans, remember, maintained a military and were nearly always at war, but conceptually their military was “supposed” to be composed of large forces called up for specific campaigns via the dilectus and so on. Building a new fleet to fight an overseas enemy, while also pulling together the relatively modest standing forces of galleys the Romans and their allies would maintain even when not obviously needed (just for pirate-hunting and so on) was part of the job.
6. Not a complete answer, but others have covered other things. If the Romans were impressed by Norse shipbuilding techniques they would likely have been happy to hire Norse experts to build similar ships for them. They did things like that plenty of times in their history.
“It is entirely possible for a nation that doesn’t expect to fight a major sea-war in this period to just let its galleys rot, then when it realizes it needs new ones twenty years later, to just build an entire new fleet.”
To the point that Carthage had a system for mass production and assembly; their ship-parts were numbered!
I would also like to note that the carpentry is quite difficult if you are replacing individual rotten parts. You need to carve an exactly fitting part and place it into joints that have swollen from wetness or are loose from being too dry. While this is doable, it is, in fact, easier to build a new ship of you need to replace lots of parts.
No ‘maybe’ on Carthage, their *Second* Punic War navy might well do the job. The Seleucid fleet in their war with Rome was large but ramshackle. A few hundred ships but only about 70 not triremes (admittedly a few of them quite large) or undecked. Carthage started in 218 with 60, peaked at 130 (versus Rome’s 220).
Really the Second Punic War had a large navel element if your point of comparison is anything but the First Punic War. In 212 combined there would have been roughly a hundred thousand sailors plus marines between the two sides. Including naval components, Rome peaked at probably about 250,000 men in the field and Carthage over 200,000.
re: Star Wars and totalitarianism, if there is a 20th century dictatorship that would work better for the Galactic Empire when fleshing out and deepening the world-building of Star Wars, Fascist Italy arguably makes much more sense than Nazi Germany, particularly in the ways it deviates from the “ideal” model of a fascist society – a party that is subsumed into the state rather than dominating it, an ideology with bigotries but which is not dominated by any one brand of hatred, a society where nationalism is comparatively weak and localism is in many ways stronger, a much more ambiguous power-sharing arrangement between the traditional elites and the new regime, and of course a deeply disappointing military performance when push comes to shove.
The situation in Star Wars doesn’t perfectly model to any historical authoritarian or dictatorial regime because of the absolutely unique person of Palpatine aka Darth Sideous. All real political systems are based on one inescapable fact: sooner or later, the Leader dies. Palpatine was planning on living forever because he had discovered a way to use the Force to transfer his mind to new bodies; only the problem of clone stability still eluded him at the time of his death. By a combination of being virtually invincible at the personal level and exploiting a new superweapon technology that would give him irresistible military power, Darth Sideous expected to become and remain the perfect vessel for the Dark Side forever. Something akin to a dark god as omnilord has no precedent outside of fiction.
“All real political systems are based on one inescapable fact: sooner or later, the Leader dies. Palpatine was planning on living forever because he had discovered a way to use the Force to transfer his mind to new bodies; only the problem of clone stability still eluded him at the time of his death.”
Was Palpatine´s plan for immortality widely known and trusted by his supporters?
I think it was since Palpatine said he could rule for a millennium or more.
> All real political systems are based on one inescapable fact: sooner or later, the Leader dies.
This is true, but it doesn’t seem to be a major factor in the planning of many “first gen” authoritarian regimes.
Aha. You made a brief comment a long time ago about how the examples of naval resupply in antiquity were performed basically exclusively by the highest state capacity entities in the Mediterranean and there was a reason for that, which was never explored further until now. It sounds like the reason is that only the strongest of states could make the seas safe for their grain shipments?
The sheer expense of maintaining a navy sort of answered a question I’ve had for a while about ancient and medieval China, mainly why they tended to avoid big naval expeditions (with the exception of Zheng He under the Yongle Emperor). Given how expensive maintaining their army, bureaucracy, and countless infrastructure projects would have been, I can absolutely see why a given emperor might decide that spending a ton of money on a navy that he wouldn’t really be using against anyone wouldn’t be worth the trouble.
I’m not sure it’s 100% accurate to say that ancient and medieval China had no navy. They did have a navy, but it was deployed in and optimised for the big inland rivers. And these are rivers wide enough that there’s several naval battles on them with dozens of ships in them during Chinese history, and long enough that you have remote places where pirates can station at. So the Chinese navy was focused on ensuring a Mahanian control of the sea (blaze it!) on its inland rivers. But I think you’re correct that the emperors faced a decision whether to spend extra money to also extend the control out into the Yellow Sea, and often decided against it.
Yeah, chine has plenty of large naval battles, it’s just that they often happen either on the major rivers or at thier mouths.
I tried to anchor (naval pun!) the capital costs with some more numbers.
1. Per Our Gracious Host, a trireme cost something like 25x the annual wage of a laborer, so perhaps 75-100x per capita “GDP”, given that the first is the wage of a free adult man and most people weren’t free adult men.
2. The all-in cost of the Constitution when first built was just over $300k in 1790s dollars. US GDP was something like $500m nominal with a population of ~5M, so it cost around 3000x per capita GDP.
3. The closest modern warship if we index on a ship’s complement of ~200 would be a large frigate or small destroyer. Per unit costs can be exceptionally high because we just don’t build very many of these things these days, so a lot of the cost is amortized R&D rather than true cost of construction. If we take the relatively widely-constructed European FREMM, the unit cost is around $800 million. Maybe round that down to $500 million to estimate the marginal cost. That works out to 5000-10000x per capita GDP.
This is surprising – the Age of Sail ship is vastly more expensive than the trireme, but the modern warship is within an order of magnitude of the cost of the Age of Sail one, relative to the wealth of the society.
Age of Sail warships were arguably the largest, most technologically complicated and most expensive things their societies could produce (exception perhaps for major fortifications) they’re really top-of-the-line in a way that’s I think hard to comprehend.
I’ve heard this before, but is it really unique to the era?
An 18th century royal palace, cathedral, large infrastructure project (canal, turnpike) or proto-industrial facility considered as a unit (like the Plymouth Dockyards) cost more than an individual warship.
Conversely, in the 21st century, warships are still the most expensive single *mobile* objects out there. An aircraft carrier costs more than a cruise ship, supertanker, heavy launch vehicle, or mile-long freight train. (I suppose the ISS’s cost exceeds that, but that’s really 20+ objects bolted together). Some of the largest single-site structures cost more (the Three Gorges Dam, maybe the LHC), and lots of large infrastructure projects do (like the Interstate Highway System).
So I don’t necessarily see a categorical difference between the eras.
For size and complexity and expense, the Age of Sail warship has no equivalent in that era.
A palace is big, but with all respect to architecture, it’s a lot of blocks stacked on top of each other, something humans had being doing for a very long time by the 17th C. There’s a lot of work to be done in running a palace but again cleaning a hundred toilets instead of ten is not something new.
A dockyard is expensive, but it is made up of lots of smaller units. And if the rope making work workshop is out of action for a week, the whole dockyard isn’t going to slide into the sea.
The Age of Sail ships were like our fictional ideas of early space travel. Build a ship, tens or hundreds of people on board, and send it off alone and out of communication into the Atlantic or Pacific for weeks at a time. They truly were amazing.
“The Age of Sail ships were like our fictional ideas of early space travel.”
I suspect early fictional ideas on how space travel would happen were based on these. In reality spaceships would always have radio. Although the waiting time for a return message would increase the further away from Earth it gets. I am assuming that faster-than-light travel or communication will never become possible.
Early science fiction writers presumed that an inverse-square law of dropping signal strength would mean that ships couldn’t communicate over interplanetary distances. That in reality we can is rather remarkable.
Do you know how this problem was solved in reality?
@Lena, basically the communication problem was solved by the invention of the maser (the microwave equivalent of the laser) in the late 1950s. What the maser effectively works as is a fantastically sensitive microwave signal detector. In principle it can detect single photons of microwave energy. Combined with encoding schemes that allow a signal to be distinguished from almost any level of background noise and this allows for example Voyager 2 at a distance of 143 times Earth’s distance from the Sun to communicate with Earth with only a 3.7 meter dish and a few watts of power.
Haven’t researched it, but I assume the solution was transistors. Back when radio electronics all used vacuum tubes which are large, power-hungry, hot, and unreliable.
Transistors are smaller, use less power, generate less heat, and are much more reliable. I suspect they make much more sensitive receivers possible also.
This was the reason for the classic SF “Venus Equilateral” stories by George O. Smith. A giant manned space station in Venus’s L4 point (60 degrees ahead in Venus’s orbit) to do communications relays between Earth, Venus, and Mars when the Sun is in the way. It has to be manned because the high power tube-based radios require frequent maintenance.
Nowadays we’d just put an transistor-based unmanned communication satellite there.
I was thinking more of making radio transmissions far-reaching enough for interplanetary communication.
“making radio transmissions far-reaching enough for interplanetary communication.”
That’s what I meant also. Especially the much more sensitive receivers part. Computerized signal processing also gets involved, I am sure.
We can detect incredibly faint signals these days.
See also the “No stealth in space” standing flamewar.
A lot of authors want to use stealth tropes in their science fiction. I think this is the reason for the “flame war” you mention. However, I accept that there is no stealth in space. This is why I don’t think any UFO reports are alien spaceships. Such being first discovered by the unaided eye I find patently absurd.
To Michael Hutson:
Thank you for the explanation. I knew about masers since I have read about them in popular scientific literature. It just did not occur to me they could be relevant to interplanetary communication.
“However, I accept that there is no stealth in space. This is why I don’t think any UFO reports are alien spaceships. Such being first discovered by the unaided eye I find patently absurd.”
The Chelyabinsk Meteor was first discovered by the unaided eye.
I don’t think they keep track of asteroids as small as 18 meters. In this case we know it was a natural airburst. An 18 meters alien space probe designed to enter the Earth’s atmosphere? Do you find that plausible?
The ISS has its various parts made by several different countries and stuck together in orbit. This is why it is called the ISS – Internation Space Station.
I seem to remember doing a similar calculation with regard to capital ships – HMS Victory, HMS Dreadnought (the battleship), and HMS Queen Elizabeth (the carrier) all cost roughly 0.1% of British GDP at the time they were launched. (That isn’t in contradiction to your finding because you were looking at percap GDP and of course the population had grown!)
How exact are those figures? IIRC Britain built on average 4-5 battleships and battle cruisers per year in the decade before WW1, including Dreadnought. I do not get the impression that modern Britain would be up to 4-5 QE class carriers per year.
(And while that decade includes a period in which they were in a naval race with Germany, it also includes a period in which they were unusually free of worry and building comparatively few ships.)
“How exact are those figures? IIRC Britain built on average 4-5 battleships and battle cruisers per year in the decade before WW1, including Dreadnought. I do not get the impression that modern Britain would be up to 4-5 QE class carriers per year.”
It was a while ago that I did the calculation, so I’ll have another look. HMS Dreadnought cost £1.8 million in 1906, when UK GDP was £2.1 billion.
HMS Queen Elizabeth cost £3 billion and was launched in 2014, when UK GDP was £1.9 trillion.
So my memory was at fault – Dreadnought was 0.086% of GDP, QE was more like 0.15% of GDP. Victory, by the way, was £63,000 in 1760, when GDP was estimated at £106 million – so around 0.06% of GDP.
The modern UK certainly couldn’t produce 4 QE-class carriers a year, but that has more to do with the lack of suitable shipyards, a problem exacerbated by the longer build time. It takes seven years for a QE to launch, against only two for a dreadnought, meaning that you would need eight large shipyards to build four dreadnoughts a year, but 28 to build that many QEs a year (though modular construction might reduce this number a bit). Britain has, as far as I know, one.
The UK could certainly afford it, though.
“The 330 ships that the Romans deployed to the Battle of Ecnomus (256), the largest naval battle the Mediterranean has ever seen (to the present!) probably demanded something like 140,000 crew”
The post noted that ancient greek triremes had around 200 crew apiece, what were these Roman ships that required some ~140k crew/330 ships=~424 crew each?
And how good are the sources on the size of this fleet engagement? My chat and i wonder whether the numbers might have been inflated for propaganda or other purposes.
As with so much of history, we don’t have a lot of sources. It’s basically Polybius AFAIK.
The Romans and Carthaginians started using quadremes, four rowers per 2/3 oars (either 2×2 or 1×2 2×1, no-one seems really sure) and quinqueremes, five rowers per 2/3 (probably 2×2 1×1). That would push the crew size up to around 250 or 300. The Romans in particular liked to pack more marines on board than your typical Greek trireme, so maybe add another 10 or 20? As you point out the math doesn’t really work out for an average of 424 but this was an invasion fleet, so there were probably a lot more soldiers than usual on board the ships and/or Polybius is not counting warships and transports separately.
The number of ships looks reasonable to me. For the battle of Lepanto in 1571 there were over 200 galleys per side, and neither the “Christians” nor the Ottomans were sending everything they had.
Not only the largest naval battle ever in the Mediterranean, but possibly the largest naval battle ever *in the world* by number of combatant crew. Salamis holds the record for number of ships, Leyte Gulf for total tonnage.
@ajay,
How does it compare to the battle between Romans and Vandals outside Carthage in the mid 5th c (I forget the year?). Do we know how many ships were involved in that one?
N. A. M. Rodger has a trilogy on “A Naval History of Britain” in three volumes. _The Safeguard of the Sea_, _The Command of the Ocean_, and _The Price of Victory.
A lot of text and pages are spent on the challenges of financing the construction and maintenance of ships, finding and paying the crews of the ships, and developing and keeping at least a cadre of well-trained officers to command ships and lead fleets. Plus the underlying state politics affecting these efforts. Primary focus is on England/Great Britain but attention is paid to the other states like France, Spain, The Netherlands, etc. since their naval policies and politics are all part of the situation.
I can recommend – along with his ‘The Wooden World’ – an exploration of life in the Georgian navy.
I’d be fascinated by a naval history such as you suggest. As always, I would be curious how you think the Eastern Roman Empire both paid for an impressive fleet, and later failed to do so. An examination of Venice, Genoa, and others would also be interesting.
Love the writing, thank you.
The early moderns pretty famously had a way of getting private owners to bear the capital costs of purpose-built warships. Is there any analogy to a letter of marque in the classical world?
Privateers could seize merchant ships and even occasionally plunder shore locations, but did they ever fight naval engagements beyond defending themselves if attacked by a navy? A commerce raider is an armed ship but I’m not sure it comes up to the standard of a warship.
Depends on the era. And the country, and I’ll confess I’m mostly familiar with the British navy. I know in the 1700s/1800s they would occasionally partake in small engagements–there are records of “His Majesty’s ships XX and hired vessels” or “letters of Marque” engaging in small actions. Cutting out expeditions, engagements with one or two ships, that sort of thing. For every Trafalgar or Nile there were probably a hundred or more single-ship engagements, and many more ungazetted engagements. The glory went to the Navy in pretty much every case where they were present, but there are a few exceptions.
And remember, a lot of Navy ships were quite small. The Bounty is a good example. Sloops and coasters and other vessels could be far smaller than what we generally consider ships. There were quite a few sloops in the early 1800s, considerably more than there were ships of the line (6th rates and above). For every HMS Victory there were dozens of smaller craft. As for the size of privateers, there was a wide range. American privateers in the War of 1812 were considered particularly large and powerful, and not a few privateers of that age on the British side were old war ships sold out of the service. I know on the British side some captains removed from the Navy list took to privateering, as did other officers who couldn’t find a ship. So the boundary between “Navy” and “Privateer” was a bit fuzzy.
There’s also laws to consider. Letters of Marque carried certain requirements, and the captains may be compelled to lend men, boats, or their ship to an engagement if required. Privateers were subject to impressment (usually, anyway), and it wouldn’t be out of the question for a captain to press men for a particular action. It can make reading the records a bit tricky.
In earlier eras, particularly in the Caribbean, privateers WERE the warships. Spain and England were not exactly friendly, and while open hostilities were officially not allowed, raiding was semi-officially countenanced. Looking back on that time it’s hard to argue it wasn’t a war.
All of which is to say, it’s largely correct that privateers didn’t partake in naval engagements–it wasn’t their job, and generally not what they were built for–but there are a significant number of exceptions and complexities as the term shifted both de facto and de jury meaning.
A privateer was an armed robber at sea. The key to successful armed robbery is not to try to rob people anywhere nearly as well armed as you are.
It seems that the strategy of using ships OR horses can be grouped in stages…
1) use ships/horses to just get passengers and freight to a destination, peacefully and as cheaply as possible
2) use your transport ships or horses to get to enemy land, fight there and return with the loot
3) use ships or horses to intercept and engage enemy transports
4) use ships or horses to intercept and engage enemy war parties.
Number 4 is difficult and dangerous – it needs a lot of men, courage and specialized tooling to attack an enemy warship or cavalry unit, compared to attacking an undermanned transport ship or an undermanned packhorse caravan.
And 4) also has obvious issues of remuneration. ESPECIALLY when the enemy raiding party is incoming and therefore unladen. When you capture an enemy raiding party, whether on horseback or ships, laden with booty and captives, there is the booty and captives… though there is actually a competing claimant for the booty and captives, because the people who the booty was taken from, and the captives, are of your community. But when you defeat a raiding party incoming, none of your community get killed or raped… how do you bill your neighbours for not getting raped because you stopped an attack?
Also, was nr. 2) (that is, attacking and looting enemy coast) a major task of the privateers with letters of marque?
I would draw the distinction between *choosing* not to honour your debts, and being *unable* to pay them. Although I concede that the dividing line between the two is blurry.
Reference for that claim? Seems unlikely that they would sit on looted gold for that long and do nothing with it for a generation, especially when the Romans had cash flow problems during the first Punic War.
James Tan in Power and Public Finance at Rome (Oxford Press, 2017) argues that the loot from 1PW was used to pay for the ship building in that very war. The evidence isn’t water tight, but that the Romans started building fleets only after they’d already sacked some Sicilian cities (rather than right at the start of the war), and struggled to do so in the later stages when the war was bogged down and there was less ransacking to do, is compelling.
Sorry, I don’t know the name or origin of the TV documentary where I recently saw it. At least some of the gold looted from Carthage in the First Punic War was kept in the Temple of Saturn at Forum Romanum. When the Second Punic War started it was moved from there to another temple right next to where they minted their coins. Roman gold coins made during the Second Punic War have miniature impurities matching the gold hidden away by Carthaginians during the First Punic War.
On how ancient warships were financed, I remember reading about the Athenian practice of “liturgies”. In short, instead of being taxed, wealthy citizens could be told that it was their turn to finance a particular public project. The only way out of this was to point to someone else wealthier who hadn’t had a liturgy in the last couple of years.
(Because wealthy citizens were expected to use their wealth for the benefit of the city in this way, it was a crime against the state to squander one’s fortune)
One of the more expensive liturgies was a trierarchy- being officially named as captain of a trireme. This meant that the trierarch had to pay out of his own pocket to equip the ship and pay the crew. I believe that the cost of actually *building* the ships came out of central government funds but they would be laid up until needed, at which point a trierarch was appointed.
There are a few aspects of this I’m not quite sure about. I don’t know whether there was an open labor market for trireme rowers or whether any particular thete (the lower class of citizens, who rowed as they couldn’t afford hoplite gear) would be told “this is your ship, this fellow is paying you”. Similarly, while I have read that the trierarch would hire a professional captain to actually command the ship, I don’t know if the trierarch was also expected to serve on board.
I also don’t know if this systems- of liturgies in general, or trierarchies in particular- was unique to Athens, or if other poleis had something like it.
Ancient Athens relied on self-reporting for their military services. So I think they just expected each other to show up when the opportunity arose.
I understand that with hoplites, they were organized by deme, so a hoplite knew roughly where to stand in the phalanx- with his neighbors.
What I’m wondering is whether there was similar organization for the rowers to decide who served on which ship, or whether there was some other way of dividing rowers among the fleet and making sure that each ship got a full crew.
Would a poor citizen know “this is my ship, I need to show up at Piraeus if and only if this specific ship is going to sea”? Would a huge crowd of rowers appear if any ship was being deployed, and leave the trierarch or kubernetes to choose the crew from among them? Or was it something in between?
My educated guess is them rowing with their neighbours as long as was practical. Each ship needed a certain number of rowers and if they could be taken from the same neighbourhood I think it would be done.
As I understand it hoplites were organized by deme, so when they mustered for service they had some idea of where in the phalanx they needed to be rather than the entire army milling around aimlessly.
My question was whether the navy had a similar (or different!) system to ensure that each ship got the right number of rowers. Would an individual rower know “this is my ship, I need to report for service only if this specific ship is ordered to sea?” Would they call up the rowers by deme and assign them to ships? Or would a huge crowd of rowers show up at Piraeus and be assigned to ships effectively at random?
(sorry for the double post, my first post appeared to have gotten lost)
Like others, I strongly recommend the podcast Prof Devereaux did with the US Navy History people about classical galley warfare. Economics, logistics, tactics.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ancient-naval-warfare-galleys-strategy-tactics-more/id1532555765?i=1000629891482
(Apologies if this shows up twice, something something logon)
Like others, I strongly recommend listening to the podcast Prof Devereaux did with US Navy History about classical warfare. Operations, tactics, logistics, economics
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ancient-naval-warfare-galleys-strategy-tactics-more/id1532555765?i=1000629891482
Hey, I remember reading about trieararchs in a children’s/young readers’ non-fiction book about all things maritime in ancient Greece back when I was growing up!
“In short, instead of being taxed, wealthy citizens could be told that it was their turn to finance a particular public project. The only way out of this was to point to someone else wealthier who hadn’t had a liturgy in the last couple of years.”
That sounds like a fascinating potential source of historical fiction plots along the lines of Dallas meets Game of Thrones.
It gets better. Of course, if you accused someone of being wealthier than you, he might disagree. And as there were no tax records or land registry, it was hard to prove how much wealth any individual had.
The solution was the *antidosis* or exchange of properties. If another citizen said he was poorer than you, and you disagreed, you could offer to exchange everything you owned for everything he owned. If he was telling the truth, he’d take the offer.
(AIUI there are records of an *antidosis* being proposed, but there’s no evidence that one ever actually happened)
That is *elegant*. Reminds me of the proposal to have a self-assessed property tax. You pay 1% (or whatever) of your property value every year. You do your own valuation and the state takes your word for it. BUT your valuation is publicly visible and you are obliged to sell your property, on demand, for that amount, to anyone who wants to buy it.
Reminds me of the proposal to have a self-assessed property tax. You pay 1% (or whatever) of your property value every year. You do your own valuation and the state takes your word for it. BUT your valuation is publicly visible and you are obliged to sell your property, on demand, for that amount, to anyone who wants to buy it.
This was actually how some Latin American countries conducted agrarian land reform in the 20th c.. These were moderate/centrist governments, as I recall, so the land reform was meant as a way to avoid socialism/communism, not a step towards them, and that’s why they were careful to do it through the established framework of property rights, tax evaluations, compensation etc..
Hector: I did not know that! Thank you. Can you point me in the direction of a reasonably accessible source? It’s an area I know virtually nothing about.
It is worth noting that communism and socialism are not synonymous. Communists are an extreme subgroup of socialists.
@ajay,
Thanks for asking! My memories are vague since I was paraphrasing some stuff I read in university, which at this point is…..a fairly long while in the rearview mirror. But, I *think* the source was Albert O. Hirschman’s book on land reform in Latin America:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0837101069?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback
I’ll see if I can find the book and get more details. Looking at descriptions of the book online it seems he primarily focused on Colombia, Brazil and Chile, which generally is consistent with my vague memories (especially Colombia).
On the subject of civil-military relations, the US’ long-serving professional civil servants seem to be, by and large, sincere believers in their department’s mission. The armed forces want us to be safe against enemies and strong on the global stage, the department of agriculture want our food to be safe, healthy, and available, the judges want the law to be a fair and consistent basis for society, and the IRS wants all of that to be possible to pay for. I definitely think that there’s problems with how those are done, especially the armed forces and IRS, but I don’t think the issue comes from people who work there not caring about providing value to America.
But politicians are not selected from qualified, idealistic people, they are selected from ambitious, charismatic people. So politicians love to do all sorts of unscrupulous things to various branches of government (weaponize them against opponents, use them to serve people they owe favors, weave bullshit stories about how opposing their actions is unpatriotic, etc.) while claiming that they’re just trying to help them do their job or cut waste.
I don’t really have a good solution beyond the very hard option of getting everyone educated about what the government does and why, but that’s my view of where a lot of the problems come from.
Educating as much of the population as possible about what the government actually do is really a good idea. Otherwise I would suggest abolishing the opportunity to gerrymander. The near-universal use of gerrymandering has resulted in too many politicians not being elected but appointed by committees. Which in turn appoint individuals with a hostile attitude toward their opponents leading to frequent pollical deadlock.
I am reminded of Joseph Heath in The Machinery of Government: Any given Civil Servant can expect a career to last through several different administrations. So it is advisable not to do anything that will be career-ending when the other lot come into power. Civil service neutrality, therefore, is there not because it benefits the country, but because it benefits the senior civil servants to be neutral, to enforce that neutrality among their underlings, and to be loyal to whoever is ruling at the moment. The same argument applies to the military.
He was mostly talking about Canada but I feel the same argument applies, if perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, to the United States.
I suspect the Canadian government is organised considerably differently than the American one. But having apolitical civil servants is always good.
IIRC the direct appointees of the political leadership go further down in the US. That being a trade-off between rewarding loyalists and keeping positions in the hands of loyalists on the one hand, and having appointees who know what they are doing on the other.
A second term American President knows everyone knows he will not be President again and a second term Canadian governing party knows that everyone knows that it will govern again, even if not necessarily in the next term. So the President feels more paranoid about everyone’s loyalty.
My son and I recently watched “Hunt for Red October”, and there’s a fantastic line that relates to this: “I’m a politician, Jack, which means I’m a liar and a cheat, and when I’m not kissin’ babies I’m stealin’ their lollypops.” And the guy that said it was one of the good guys!
The problem I have with many civil servants is that, as you say, they believe in their mission. This becomes a problem when it moves into zealotry, and it becomes a HUGE problem when they believe that laws and regulations and general human decency can be ignored in the pursuit of the mission. It’s not just politicians who are willing/able to weaponize various aspects of the government to punish perceived offenses. I know more than one long-term civil servant who was told in court that they aren’t supposed to do that sort of thing, and that at a certain point you’ve moved beyond the mission and into harassment.
Don’t get me wrong, many are good people as well! And I’ve known politicians who genuinely want to make their communities better. But let’s not pretend that civil servants are saints. Anyone who’s had to work with the various departments can tell you that they have their share of bad apples.
“The problem I have with many civil servants is that, as you say, they believe in their mission…
Don’t get me wrong, many are good people as well!”
This sounds vaguely as though you are saying they are not all bad people who do what they think is right – some of them are good people who do what you think is right instead.
Heaths main point was that they are mostly trying to do things that will be subsequently thought right by the existing government, acceptable by the next government, and reasonably popular with the voters the existing government wants to stay in with. They are servants trying to please three masters, but not equally hard. The immediate current master is the one they care about most.
“This sounds vaguely as though you are saying they are not all bad people who do what they think is right – some of them are good people who do what you think is right instead.”
I’m saying that you get the normal mix of petty tyrants, idiots, zealots, and others that you’d expect from any large group of people. Given that these people’s decisions have consequences they don’t always think through, however, such people can cause tremendous problems when they act without due deliberation.
“Heaths main point was that they are mostly trying to do things that will be subsequently thought right by the existing government, acceptable by the next government, and reasonably popular with the voters the existing government wants to stay in with.”
Mostly, sure. Most folks in various regulatory agencies are constrained by bureaucratic red tape. But there are exceptions, at all scales, and those exceptions can cause tremendous trouble.
All large organisations contain their share of assholes. It is just a matter of being able to stop them before they do too much damage.
Eh, the judiciary in particular has always been political, both in the literal sense that it can affect policy (ever since Marbury versus Madison!) and in the sense that judges often have very strong ideas of what the law ought to say or what ‘fairness’ means. (They’re usually conservative ideas; the civil rights era Supreme Court is a historical outlier!)
As long as they don’t demonstrate hatred of entire social groups I would not complain.
So, question about the amazing statistic that a two-month cruise for a trireme cost more than the trireme itself – my assumption is from this that triremes didn’t go on many two-month cruises, but spent most of their time on the beach, occasionally putting to sea for very short deployments. (Also, a trireme cruises at about fifty or sixty miles a day, so a month would take you from Colchis to the Pillars of Hercules – ie the longest voyage anyone in the ancient Mediterranean would conceivably want to make!)
Is this right?
I was thinking I terms of getting back and forth between various places around the Eastern Mediterranean rather than systematically rowing in about the same direction.
And further to this – two months of running cost for a trireme at sea costs one trireme. 80 days of flying (non-stop) for an F-15E costs one F-15E. Running an Abrams tank for 4,000 miles costs one Abrams.
> Modern navies are, of course, functionally entirely purpose built.
Objection! A lot of Ukrainian “navy” circa 2023 was just civilian speedboats minus the crew plus some explosives. And it was still quite competitive with the purpose-built Russian navy (of course it helped that it was the *Russian* navy rather some more competent navy).
The Ukrainians had to improvise a lot because of their shortage of weapons. I suspect a considerable fraction of the money intended for the Russian navy has disappeared into bribes.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15076/15076-h/15076-h.htm
Friend of mine is more of a fan of Corbett than Mahan
Why do air forces not yet have their Corbett?
I asked in a comment thread here a while back who was third in the list after Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. One of the suggestions was John Boyd, who wrote about air power.
Subthread here:
https://acoup.blog/2025/03/28/gap-week-march-28-2025/#comment-79367
AIUI, Boyd is famous for Energy-Maneuver Theory, which is about air combat tactics, and the OODA loop, which applies to decision-making generally. Neither strike me as especially useful to an Air Force general considering how his service can help win a war.
Whereas Corbett was explicitly generalizing from Clausewitz to consider how a Navy could help win a war.
Perhaps you should talk to Drachinifel again?
Does anyone have a timestamp, transcript or article from the section in one of those podcasts where Bret talks about the inanity of calling your product “Palantir” when every use of the Palantir in LotR resulted in the user being deceived to their detriment?
There was at least one use of a Palantir that obtained vital information. Aragorn saw that the corsairs were attacking the costal fiefs of Gondor and he needed to take the fastest route through the paths of the dead to save them.
So the message is that a Palantir only works for a Truly Worthy Superior Being. It doesn’t work for common scum.
No. Saruman and Sauron are truly superior beings – fallen angels – and it still doesn’t help them. Aragorn is probably their rightful owner, and they work for him. That is explicitly why he risks using them.
It works for the King or his designated representative. Superior willpower can override that (“The right cannot be contested; the will was enough, just!”). And all of this can be ruined, as the Seeing Stone of Minas Tirith demonstrates (it only shows the horror of Denathor’s last few minutes). But having a right to use it is usually a trump card.
Also, based on the appendices, the Palantiri were just fine to use to until Sauron took the one in Minas Ithil and could start influencing the network.