Hey, folks, Fireside this week! We’re now well into the Teaching Paradox series on Hearts of Iron, but as you may have noticed, the structure of those posts means they tend to be quite chunky (the first two have both been right around 10,000 words) and longer posts take time. Thus, a fireside this week to balance out, before we move from HoI4‘s purely military layer to its strategic, political and economic layer.
For this week’s musing, I want to talk about a series of videos on ‘realistic’ worldbuilding I’ve seen floating around online from a channel called “The Grainbound.” The channel seems to regularly hit the hundreds of thousands of views on its videos and I’ve seen them floating around among friends and in other contexts which makes me think they’re getting pretty wide distribution in the fantasy-worldbuilding space. They are, after all, decently well-produced and authoritative sounding, which is why it is such a problem that they’re not quite right.
I’m going to pick two of the most popular videos to discuss, to give a sense of what I think is the problem here, one on how the logistics of grain transport supposedly shapes maps (really, the distribution of large settlements on maps) and another on the role of sea trade in food supply to cities. And at first, you might be surprised that I am going to take issue with this, because “food production fundamentally determines the shape of pre-modern societies” is very much my brand. And so it is good to try to reason from historical examples to understand how societies – real and fictional – are structured.
The problem, of course, is that the devil is in the details: how accurate is your understanding of historical societies and how effective is your reasoning from them? When i started listening to these videos, it was a strange sort of experience – some of the principles were right, or at least right-ish, but the whole thing was just a touch off, punctuated by moments of sharp dissonance where I detected a real ‘howler.’
Perhaps the sharpest of these howlers – which made me immediately suspicious about the historical knowledge foundation at work – came in the second video on seaborne trade. The overall point – sea transit is highly dependent on wind patterns, which are sometimes seasonal – is good. He neglects, however, coastal winds (sea breezes and offshore breezes) which tend to be more localized and time-of-day dependent than prevailing winds and more variable, which is part of why a lot of pre-modern shipping is cabotage (literally ‘coasting,’ mixed-cargo, small-load, short-distance coastal routes), a type of shipping his model entirely neglects.1
But the point at which I realized this fellow’s knowledge foundation is deeply cracked (and probably very thin) was the claim – at about six minutes in – that “the capital [Rome] was in the wrong place for its own food and rather than move the capital, they spent about a century of moving the harbor towards it.” What he has in mind was the construction of Portus, a large artificial harbor complex built under the emperor Claudius in the mid-first century AD. What he is unaware of is that this wasn’t the first port of Rome: that was Ostia Antica, sitting directly on the mouth of the Tiber (today the site is inland but in antiquity, it was coastal), which construction at Portus expanded. A lot of trade into and out of Latium also went through Puteoli, which the video mentions, but Rome had a port at the mouth of its river and trade-reliant imperial capitals sited inland (often for security reasons) but with dedicated port cities are not rare: Athens and its Piraeus, Antioch and its Seleucia in Pieria, for instance.
Moreover, he was treating the fact that most of the calorie content of Rome arrived in two short bursts as a unique product of the sailing season, when it is in fact an iron law of societies based on cereal cultivation: you eat all year, but the crop only comes in once. For any city pulling from the whole of the Mediterranean – and thus pulling from both spring wheat and winter wheat farming regions – the harvest comes in twice. The boats merely deliver that farming-based timetable on a short delay.
But there’s a deeper problem here, which becomes more visible in his most popular video, “The Ox That’s Breaking You Fantasy Map” where he tries to outline a typology of settlements based on their interaction with grain transport. And the core problem here is a the map is not the territory problem: he is focused on building maps for fantasy worlds and so he is beginning as a map-maker begins: with terrain and then with major settlements and political structures. He thus defines his major settlements as different kinds of ‘Lords’ (really, political regimes): the ‘Chokepoint Lord’ (who controls a trade chokepoint like a mountain pass), the ‘Surplus Lord’ and so on.
The problem is that urban centers and their connected polities don’t emerge this way, springing into existence ex nihilo to respond to fully developed long-distance trade patterns. Instead, they emerge bottom-up. Some clever chap (chaps, really, over many generations) invent farming, enabling sedentary settlements (villages) a greater population density. Those villages get too big (because farmers need to be able to walk to their fields in the morning) and fission, creating new villages (and pushing other less-population-dense communities out of the way, violently, as they do so), as farming communities ‘fill in’ geographic spaces suitable for farming. Lands marginal to farming end up with lower population density strategies (pastoralism, hunting and gathering), often deeply interconnected with the farmers next door.
This ‘carpet’ of farmers isn’t focused on moving grain long distances, these are mostly self-sufficient villages. Now ‘how do towns form’ is a contested question, but there are basically two main schools of thought: towns form when wealthy landholding aristocrats (Big Men) begin centralizing resources (mostly for warfare), or towns form when temples and their priests (Big Men with Fancy Hats) begin centralizing resources (mostly for religious activity, but also for warfare) in the largest, densest villages. In practice, when we look at early settlement formation, both factors appear to be at play. But once the Big Man or the Big Temple have extracted surplus, they’re using it to employ specialists (craftsmen, priests, bureaucrats, domestics and oh so many thugs), which creates a local (still not dealing with long-distance yet) nexus of economic activity, which creates local market-centers. And of course it now makes sense for merchants to stop by those local market-centers (rather than try their luck in random villages) and for the villagers to find artisans or buyers for their crops there.
While our maps generally show just the largest handful of Really Big Market Towns, the territory is a tightly woven carpet of smaller farming villages (interlinked with non-farmers where relevant), so ubiquitous we don’t put them on our maps. I think Tolkien – with his Middle Earth being a world depopulated by catastrophes and thus having large stretches with minimal settlement – is in part to blame here, but folks often don’t seem to quite grasp some times how dense the tapestry of settlement gets in agrarian societies where transit is slow. Here, for instance, via Stanford’s POLIS is a map of the Greek poleis in the broader Aegean:
And of course the ’empty’ spaces here aren’t in most cases really empty: some of them are unsuited for farming and so have low population density, but a lot of them (particularly in Anatolia) are just inhabited by non-Greeks whose communities were thus not captured by the Inventory of Archaid and Classical Poleis (2004) on which the project relies.
Now, human beings are not stupid and so they will recognize key geographic spots and intentionally put centers of control on them, but they do not need to do so. Byzantium and Vienna should both be classic examples of Graindbound’s ‘chokepoint Lord’ but neither was a hugely important place until the Romans chose to make them so – Constantine putting his shiny new capital on top of Byzantium and the Romans building a major military base on the Wienfluss in 97 AD, though Vienna really only becomes an important place because successive German dynasties (the Babenbergs and then the Habsburgs) choose to live there. They could have chosen to live somewhere else! The role these cities served was not the product of some immutable law of long-distance trade, but rather a direct and intentional choice by specific human actors.
In short, everything I’ve seen from the channel is pockmarked with the scars of autodidactism.
Given all of that, it is not a huge surprise that the fellow behind Grainbound has a background in software development, rather than history, archaeology or anthropology. Coming from software development, it is perhaps not surprising that his effort is explicitly to “systematize worldbuilding,” but the result is reducing the complexity of the real historical world to the simple maxims and rules of thumb we use to describe it. My description above of how towns form is more faithful to our evidence for what the development of early states and urbanism looks like, but it is every bit as simplified because actual historical demographics are complicated and highly contingent.
I worry that the popularity of channels like this serve to mislead audiences but also to reinforce the false perception that history is a skill which doesn’t require any specific training or knowledge beyond a collection of historical ‘facts.’ But as we’ve discussed, doing history (or anthropology, or archaeology) well does require trained skills – a lot of them, in fact.
Mostly though, what the success of this channel brings home is that there’s clearly a strong market for this sort of thing and that we professional historians are mostly not reaching it, in part I suspect because of the perception in the field that writing this sort of thing would be ‘beneath us,’ rather than what it is: a valuable opportunity for an exercise in public education. As a corollary to that, it is also increasingly clear that the place to go for the audience here is YouTube, especially with the decline of the micro-blogging (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) ecosystem. I’ve had plans to put together a space for recording video in my home office for a while now (delayed by annoying repair work we’re having to have done on the basement where that is) and while I expect to remain primarily a ‘written word’ guy, everything I see suggests that I need to give serious thought about branching into video, even if it is just the form of “person speaks into camera for 10 minutes.”
On to Recommendations!
Speaking of YouTube, I ran across an interesting channel mostly focused on film criticism and social media, but branching out to a range of topics, The Morbid Zoo, run by University of Illinois Urbana-Campaign PhD candidate Mariana Colin. Of particular relevance to our interests here, she has a really good three-part video series on monsters in Lord of the Rings, covering Orcs, Ents and the Nazgul. I also thought the recent video essay ostensibly about Brand New Day but really about the place of The Punisher in Marvels’ moral universe to be really neat and frankly on point for our current moment.
Also on YouTube, for those who like naval artillery, Forgotten Weapons got out to the USS New Jersey (BB-62, laid down in 1940) to do a series of videos showcasing the operation of New Jersey’s guns, including the multi-purpose 5 inch Mk 12 and of course the big 16 inch main battery. The video run through the entire loading and firing procedure, which gives a lot of insight into how many sailors it took to fire these weapons in combat and also the remarkably clever and technical pre-microchip mechanical computing used to perform range-finding and generate firing solutions. Forgotten Weapons got to film in a number of places that tourists cannot normally go (and touch things they can’t normally touch), so it really is a neat chance to see the whole process walked through.
Meanwhile, for something to read, over at Tales of Times Forgotten, Spencer McDaniel has a really awesome deep dive into the figure if Persephone: the plausible origins for her as a mythical figure, her apparent role as ruler of the Underworld (more frequently so than her husband, Hades), and the suggestion of the evidence that Persephone as a mythological figure may actually predate Hades in terms of the development of Greek religious belief. There’s so much here – Indo-European etymologies, discussions on the influences of early Greek myth, later presentations of Hades and Persephone – that this summary really doesn’t capture it all, but do give it a read.
Meanwhile we also have a new Pasts Imperfect. The headline essay is a meditation by Joel Christensen (of Sententiae Antiquae) on the way that the Iliad and Odyssey change in the retelling and how these poems have always done so: changed by the oral tradition, by the decisions of translators, by the impact of scholarship, by each new hearing. Also noted is the new research paper from the Itiner-e project on the Roman roads, but what I especially like is the emphasis on how these projects build on each other, reaching back to The Barrington Atlas (2000), through the important work of the Pleiades Project, which provides the data baseline used by all sorts of geographic antiquity projects (like Itiner-e). It’s a good reminder that our discipline isn’t just repeating the same facts over again: we are learning new things about the past all the time, advancing the frontier of human knowledge and at the same time this is a collaborative, iterative project, building on each discovery with new ones.
This week’s book recommendation, somewhat in tune with the theme of our musing, is very much “one for the nerds,” but I thought it might be useful to get a sense of what actual, serious pre-modern (in this case, ancient) demography looks like, so I am going to recommend L. de Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers: Studies in the Demographic History of Roman Italy 225 BC – AD 100 (2015). Immediate caveats are required: this book is, in paperback, mercifully reasonably priced, but whereas most of my book recommendations here are selected for at least some degree of approachability for a non-specialist reader, I am going a bit more technical with this one; this book is first and foremost written for other scholars. It is not the case that Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers is badly written, to be clear – it is quite well written – but it assumes a fair bit of background knowledge about the Late Roman Republic and Early Roman Empire. That said, there isn’t a ‘for beginners’ approach to Roman demography really out there, so this is as good a starting place as any.
Because it is written for other scholars, the true structure of Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers is basically a series of proposed solutions to points of scholarly dispute; it is organized by academic beefs (although de Ligt is too professional to present them quite so bluntly), rather than a straight chronology or a series of lessons. De Ligt, writing for other scholars, assumes you basically know the outlines of the major debates on the topic, though he is generally pretty good in laying out (fairly!) where each ‘side’ stands.
That said, for a non-specialist reader, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers has two major virtues. The first is simply that de Ligt here persuasively addresses most of the major scholarly disputes (with a lot of their subfacets, e.g., what does this mean for the Gracchi? For land settlement? for the enfranchisement of the Italians? etc) concerning Roman demography in this period. As a result the book offers a good overview, of a sort, of the methods we use to try to answer those questions. De Ligt engages in demographic modeling, uses the archaeological evidence, engages in textual close reading and so on. The book thus gives a reader coming from outside a very good sense of what actually rigorous approaches to the core question – how many people lived in Roman Italy – looks like.
And the second great virtue is simply that de Ligt is (for now at least) part of what we might represent as a ‘winning coalition’ in the debate. He is a champion of a revised (upward) version of the ‘low count’ (the lower estimate of Roman population); the revisions carry him and other low-counters very close to to the ‘middle count’ (which arrives at similar numbers by slightly different reasoning), while remaining very far below the ‘high count’ (a much higher estimate of Roman population). And as Walter Scheidel pointed out in his review of this volume,2 the 2010s saw the low and middle count largely triumphant (largely through the use of more archaeological evidence), narrowing the debate to just between high version of the low count and the middle count, which are quite close together in any event. Consequently, de Ligt, while again a somewhat challenging read for the non-specialist, will also bring them up to speed fully with where the question of the population of Roman Italy is right now.
I saw these videos recently. I’m pleased to say that after years of reading ACOUP (and r/askhistorians), I immediately felt there was something not quite right about the way the arguments were presented and the conclusions he comes to. (Although of course I couldn’t quite articulate what ).
I had the exact same reaction.
I’ve been in history-adjacent spaces for long enough that I knew that something wasn’t quite right about the channel (even if I couldn’t point to every specific flaw in his reasoning). Part of it was his absolute certitude; another was how he never admitted to gaps in our knowledge.
I also had what the wonderful comic “Bone” calls “the gitchy feeling.” Like…something’s not right, here.
Unexpected Bone reference, but appreciated.
I think part of the issue is that his scripts all seem heavily AI-written. It’s not exactly pure slop, but it has that same oozy sheen of AI prose.
darn now I just realize it. Thought it was just his unique talking style.
Are there any other historians (or more reliable non-historians) you do recommend doing that more public facing work? Especially blogs or youtube channels that deal with basic structures of society and military in the way you do, but perhaps for other areas, like Africa or Asia?
Also, yeah his video on culture was so definitive about things that are very contextual, I couldn’t even finish it.
Alternate History dot com has some very very knowledgeable people writing out some alternate history timelines, for example this one I’m reading know is written by someone with encyclopedic knowledge of late 17th century court politics: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-spanish-heir-what-if-carlos-ii-had-a-son.535736/
Alternate History dot com has some timelines written by very knowledgeable people, for example this one displays an encyclopedic knowledge of late 17th century court politics: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-spanish-heir-what-if-carlos-ii-had-a-son.535736/
There is a small fantasy worldbuilding community on Youtube that is less concerned with fantasy maps and D&D medievalisms, and more with building real-feeling cultures and societies in fantastical places.
Worldbuilding Notes and Nakari Speardane are two channels I watch regularly. While most of their work is probably not “historical” enough because they deal with fictional premodern societies and cultures in worlds unlike our own, they clearly do research on their subjects and at least Nakari seems to have a background in either archeology or anthropology.
Most historians will deal with topics that are more context sensitive and localized than the generalized “basic structure” kind of content you are looking for.
Ancient Americas, Dig, and The Historian’s craft all make really good and in-depth historical content, and at least the latter two channels are made by trained historians and archeologists.
Dig it with Raven is another really good channel by an actual archeologist, but it focuses mostly on archeological sites and their history.
Someone doing the “academic historian talks at the camera for 10 minutes” genre that could be some inspiration is https://youtube.com/@BenjaminParkHistorian/videos
I think he has a good balance of 1) simple filming 2) short videos 3) real knowledge and quality content, and 4) not excessively click-baity titles and thumbnails.
Another good channel for that is under the fig tree, https://youtube.com/@underthefigtreee. She likewise has a fairly simple yet engaging setup of her talking to the camera about a given topic, has quite a bit of knowledge about the ancient world (Bronze Age Greece in particular, what with that being the focus of her masters degree), and most importantly actually gives citations for most of the claims she makes.
Please don’t go all the way to the darkside of video communications, or even start mixing videos into this blog – unless you come up with a way for readers to only subscribe to new text posts.
I enjoy this blog, but I’m not a video person. Too often, when I search for information about something, I get video or nothing.
To be honest, I think it would more be in the form of ‘video version of a written post.’ I’d probably start by doing basically slide-show presentations of existing post series. Given the format, they’d probably be a bit less detailed than the written post versions, so I’d be doing a ‘cliff notes’ version of, say, like, the farming posts, as videos, with links to the posts themselves for viewers who wanted more.
I would recommend looking at the recent video work of Jamelle Bouie as an example of how to make an originally text-based body of knowledge like your own into, uh, “content.”
I am eagerly waiting for BretTube.
Sounds like Perun. Perun shows there actually is a pretty big audience for powerpoint slides on youtube.
I like this idea. As somebody who watches (and listens in the background) to a lot of YouTube stuff, from political commentary to educational, I would definitely subscribe to your YouTube channel, and I would hope that you acquire a good following. With that in mind, I have some thoughts I hope you’ll consider.
If you’re going to address the works of other creators, as you have here, I would be wary of gatekeeping. If you give the impression that ONLY trained historians should be listened to AT ALL, you risk coming across as elitist. When bringing up other creators, I suggest emphasizing what they get right as well as what they get wrong, and be sure to emphasize that your critique isn’t personal. Commentor “Si” below suggested reaching out to some of these creators for a collab offer. Some will probably say no, but others would likely welcome a chance to talk with a professional historian who respects their enthusiasm and desire to learn while still gently correcting the record. They might also be up for a spirited debate with someone who’s willing to take what he dishes out. And don’t be afraid to include critique of fellow historians, as you have here on the blog, so you’re not just punching down.
I also invite you to think carefully about how political you want to be (and I say this knowing I’ve been kind of a conservative gadfly here). If you choose to weigh in on current events, you might consider putting those takes on a seperate channel, which can help contain the flame wars. On that channel, you might want to put your political philosophy in the channel description, so people know what they’re in for. Also, I hope you will consider critiquing the far left as you have the far right.
Regardless of how you approach politics, I also recommend you take the time to police the comment sections. I know the standard advice of video creators is “don’t read the comments”, but in your case, comment moderation should be easy unless your content REALLY blows up (the Sword of Damocles comes to mind). You’ll particularly want to watch for bots, (which sometimes hide in replies to other comments) and ban their accounts from commenting. Apart from that, I expect most of us will follow you to YouTube, and our comments should set the tone for newcomers, and the tone there should be similar to the one here. I’ve observed that YouTube creators tend to “get the audience they deserve”, with the more thoughtful YouTubers getting more thoughtful comments, the ragebaiters getting the ragers, and the cancellers getting “cancelled” themselves.
I’m completely in agreement with this – may ACOUP continue to flourish as a blog longer than the Roman Republic!
‘which becomes more visible in his most popular video, “The Ox That’s Breaking You Fantasy Map”’
Was that supposed to link to the video? It isn’t a link for, while their other videos mentioned are.
If Perun has proven one thing, than it is that people are willing to watch/listen to an hour long power point presentation if the content is interesting enougth. So man-talking-to-camera is fine to be honest.
Seconded! Nice nerdy background in the home office, the occasional audio / sound effect, it’s great!
* For the non-video watching among us, I personally love YouTubers who release a podcast version of their primarily audio-based videos!
I’m somewhat amused that that video turned up here as I grumped about it half a year ago on reddit.
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God save me from LogistiBros. So it seems Bret Devereaux’s writings have filtered down to the lowly world of worldbuilders in the same way as someone falling down 20 flights of stairs with the result being irrevocably mangled.
The historical perspective Bret brings to his writings is here to be found in its gaping absence.
Most prominently this crops up in the outright error in what a baron is. Here a baron is seen as some enterprising individual who either creates and maintains a toll road, manages a granary for a local area or outright builds cities with ports and warehouses to exploit trade, and is then rewarded with titles. This is rather wrong overall with barons historically emerging (in England) as grants of land to William I’s followers in return for military service and being directly in service to the crown rather than another middleman; this is a top down, not bottom up, and is concerned chiefly with military service with other bits and pieces being tacked onto the core boilerplate contract and with administrative positions like coroner, justicar, etc being entirely separate jobs.
This problem extends to how baronial success is framed being seen as a circle of grain -> garrison troops -> safe roads -> grain. The problem is this frequently breaks down like with The Anarchy or, over in France, the conditions that saw the Jacquerie but the various lords keep plodding along and don’t see some sharp decline. Garrisoning troops is also the wrong way to frame this too since we’re here, you’d normally be looking at retainers for a local noble with out and out standing garrisons being anomalous; the garrison at Calais was exceptionally effective during the War of the Roses because of its professionalism.
The other big problem is that this rides high on geological determinism.
A bold statement is made that power can’t be projected more than 3 days away “because of the tyranny of the ox cart”. It throws out some hard distances coverable in those three days that are outright rubbish. 50 miles is somehow the “hard limit” overland, meanwhile:
– In 1173, Henry II while fighting against rebellious Breton barons made a lightning ride of 150 miles from Rouen to Dol in little more than a day
– Even the Romans marching for only six hours a day could cover 60 miles in the same time [3 days] whilst buggering about setting up and dismantling a fortified camp each day with a baggage train in tow
– Messengers on horses can easily outstrip this with Roman couriers using post roads managing 160 miles a day
– Tiberius meanwhile managed 200 when going to see his dying brother
– Bret meanwhile states “An infantryman might carry around (very roughly) 10 days or so of rations on his person, which is enough to move around 120 miles […] Adding one large wagon per each company of 30 infantrymen doubles this distance, but diminishing returns hit fast” and “60 miles is a believable distance for an army to make an unsupported ‘lunge’ out of its logistics network.”
The distances for rivers are also bull as it presumes tidal rivers don’t exist, that the current is strong and the wind can’t be favourable to going upstream.
This determinism then manifests in the politics with a bold declaration that areas downstream will never rebel; Flanders was never a trouble area for France and Spain because logistics or something. A chaser to this is the statement “landlocked areas will be fractured patchwork of weak local lords” meanwhile rivers which they’ve been banging on about are nearly omnipresent in reality and despite the presence of the great rivers in France and Germany, they take very different courses during the central to late medieval period.
That this schlock is being treated as some kind of gospel is baffling.
Stray thoughts I couldn’t otherwise work in:
– Ale “travels better and keeps longer” than grain. Particularly wrong and I’m grateful for the choice of ale, not beer. Ale and beer are, or were, different things with ale being brewed without hops like a modern gruit and beer being brewed with. Ale went bad quickly, the lack of hops (and probably a post mash boil) didn’t give it long shelf life, unlike beer which kept (to say nothing of IPA).
– Grain meanwhile moves well, particularly when drying ovens are invested in.
– A good deal of this presumes some sort of nucleated village for rural aristocrats to lord over as a central hub, something that prior to roughly the middle Saxon period in England didn’t exist with dispersed homesteads being the norm (even during the Roman period too).
– A baffling claim that peasants couldn’t store or move grain and were unable to defend it, particularly the last.
Another subtle corker that interferes with Grainbound’s analysis, I think, is that he doesn’t quite grasp that rivers are much denser on the ground in reality than they are on the typical fantasy map. Fantasy maps often include only the largest and most narratively important rivers, especially in areas that aren’t explicitly being presented as “this is where the rivers are important,” such as Egypt or Mesopotamia-inspired societies or the aptly named “Riverlands” of A Song of Ice and Fire.
(The Riverlands and Neck regions of Westeros would need some staggeringly strange topography to explain how they are the way that they are, but that’s a separate issue)
By way of illustrating this concept, one might imagine the typical fantasy author drawing a map of Europe, or at any rate Europe west of European Russia, and potentially only including a relative handful of major rivers actually on the map. Let’s say, the Danube, the Elbe, the Rhine, the Vistula, the Loire, the Rhone, the Ebro, and the Seine. Maybe a few stubby little things flowing into the Mediterranean in Italy.
The mapmaker might very well stop and go “hey, that’s good enough.” There’s now a couple of major rivers flowing into each of the seas that surrounds the big old peninsula that represents the main continent. It looks pretty good, right? That’s probably more rivers than his viewpoint characters will ever even see unless he expands the series out to a dozen or more novels!
But suppose Grainbound looks at that map of Europe and imagines that that’s all the rivers there are, especially all the rivers that exist for purposes of being navigable to medieval barge traffic, which was a pretty high bar to limbo under, as it were. Some of those barges were for quite shallow water.
He’s going to be ignoring a lot of places where grain barges could absolutely load up, including, importantly, all the tributaries of all those major rivers, which collectively do a huge amount to increase the river’s drainage basin and by extension the list of regions within convenient oxcart distance of the river’s traffic.
The Neck’s weird topography was created by magic so that one can be handwaved a bit.
I was traveling south on the Amtrak to NYC. About 50 mi. or more north of the city, I looked out the window and saw the Hudson River flowing backwards. Huh? What? Then I remembered tidal rivers, which I had never seen before.
Exactly, if you tried to cram in every river in BC on a map you’d have no room for anything else!
So if say you happen to be a DM homebrewing a region and nicking the geography of BC for it, well… Let it be known I only put the most important river on the map because otherwise I’d still be mapping.
“Ale “travels better and keeps longer” than grain. Particularly wrong and I’m grateful for the choice of ale, not beer. Ale and beer are, or were, different things with ale being brewed without hops like a modern gruit and beer being brewed with. Ale went bad quickly, the lack of hops (and probably a post mash boil) didn’t give it long shelf life, unlike beer which kept (to say nothing of IPA).”
Some nitpicks here:
-The separation of “ale” and “beer” you’re referring to is real but only really existed in England during a limited time period and even then wasn’t ironclad (we have court records of ale brewers being fined for using hops without a beer brewing license).
-Modern people tend to massively overstate the extent to which gruit was used, both in time and space. Traditional English ale generally did not have spices or herbs in it.
-You can extend the shelf life of unhopped ale by brewing it very strong, while hopped beer can have a longer shelf life while not being very strong (hence a lot of characters in Shakespeare plays complaining about beer and loving ale).
-Yes, unhopped ale would generally have a short shelf life and would often not have a post mash boil, which makes it a very poor trade commodity and explains why long distance trade only started in a meaningful way with the rise of hopped beer
-It’s not just amateurs, I’ve read some HOWLING errors about brewing from professional historians.
“oh, so many thugs”?
Can’t stay a Big Man without a store of violence to fall back on!
“A lot of them (particularly in Anatolia) are just inhabited by non-Greeks whose communities were thus not captured by the Inventory of Archaid and Classical Poleis (2004) on which the project relies.”
On that (semi-related) note, I’d be curious as to what the good Pedant might know about peasants/peasant-soldiers in Byzantine Anatolia.
>priests (Big Men with Fancy Hats)
Post contains no pictures of fancy hats. 🙁
I listen regularly to AGreatDivorce’s podcast readings of your essays; as someone who primarily does home/childcare at the moment I have a lot of time where hands are busy and mind is bored. Audio or video is a lot more approachable! One suggestion: Put spellings of words a non-specialist might not be familiar with (whether English or otherwise) on the screen when they turn up for the first time?
I feel that you’re being too harsh on the terrain=city part of this. For one Byzantium was important prior to Constantine putting his fancy capital on it, it just wasn’t a world city or even regionally dominant like Pellas, Athens, etc. because it was somewhat on the northern fringe of the regional polities. Vienna likewise arises only after the region north of the apps starts becoming more intensively populated, with the Germany population doubling maybe twice between the Roman and Hapsburg era, while the Italian population had much more modest growth. Likewise the Black Sea trade had drastic changes in that time period, including the emergence of numerous urban centers in what would become Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, and Russia. Constantinople was built up early into this process, although it had already begun, and the relevance of the empires northern border increases drastically during this period, while Vienna was a later bloomer.
Regardless this explains why those cities didn’t exist until later, not truly; the distant populations that made them relevant imperial trade hubs either hadn’t urbanized or were in the process of doing so.
As pertains to world building the issue here is the lack of frontiers, regions that still have to be populated or repopulated. Similarly to your examples Australia, particularly New South Wales, is famous for having less urbanization than you’d expect simply because there wasn’t a historical urban foundation prior to the last two centuries. The natives had settlements, and while there’s active historiography that is emphasizing their presence, there just were not that many of them compared to any other continent. We’d invented the conservation movement by the time city building really began in Australia, and so today large areas of potential farmland are kept unplowed compared to what we’d expect from subsistence.
(This isn’t a bad thing, of course, Australia has enough food production and all that).
In other cases the explanation is very specific. Cairo illinois isn’t very developed, historically or today, because it’s just not convenient in terms of terrain. It’s too wet, and flat land is so available nearby that reclaiming it is a silly idea. St. Louis/Cahokia is a much better trading settlement location and hence it’s arisen as the regional center multiple times. All of which is likely too granular to be clear from a map overview.
But all of this is a variation on a central theme. It seems to me that critiques of a historical model that produces estimates that these would be cities isn’t so much a critique of the background of the author, as it is being nitpicky over the details of a valid technique. Even in situations where it’s wrong it’s wrong in *interesting ways*. All models are wrong in interesting ways, it’s inherent to making a model.
Maybe I’m just confused as to the specifics of what you’re critiquing. From what I’m reading it seems you’re pointing out exceptions to his model, but I can’t see a clear thesis on why the model is wrong or what it’s doing wrong other than the fact it’s not accounting for the complexity of reality, which is a critique of modeling in general.
The other thing I take some umbrige at is the emphasis on history as a trained skill. Historically this hasn’t been the case until recently; we’d scoff at the “training” of figures from the 1800’s and their methods were positively formulaic compared to earlier historians. Many of our ancient histories are basically “I asked a guy what happened” and “i collect old letters, here”s a compilation”. This isn’t a critique of that, those are exceedingly valuable reproductions of sources that might be lost, but a lot of their analysis is shaky at best. We don’t hold them to the same standard of traditional rigor when critiquing their participation.
I think it’s much more useful to try to identify what a particular interpretation is missing than simply say that it’s lacking a specific knowledge base, particularly if this interpretation isn’t trying to be hyper specific. Your first critique seems much stronger than the second as such. It’s much more relevant that the author is misunderstanding coastal winds, the role of Roman ports, and the Mediterranean growing pattern, than it is to say that the territory isn’t the map. The first might point to a fixable general error leading to the author making a strong specific claim, one which likely a core assumption that the Mediterranean sea trade works like Northern Europe Atlantic trade. It’s a fixable error for the future, and a methodological reminder to test assumptions.
I think there probably is a valid critique of the second part, too. Basically that the author is assuming the regions have reached something like carrying capacity, and thus there is a lack of frontiers. And I think this arises from an overly static view of history which assumes that the past is unchanging; the reason certain trade routes cities don’t work as predicted is because the populations they mediate trade between don’t *exist*. Hence the world building lacks a historical dynamism that should exist.
But presenting those methodological flaws seems much better a critique than just saying that the author isn’t an expert.
The background for the “history is a skill set and trained historians are important” is that the 20th and 21st century historians (the ones who ARE highly trained to standards of rigor that would be remarkable compared to the past, as you say) are in many ways an endangered species. As other posts on this blog and many elsewhere document, universities are methodically lowering funding for the humanities in general, history in particular, and this sort of history of the distant past even more particularly. Moreover, the rise of mass media and blogging creates a large demand for pop history that is easily satiated by bad pop history- by material that is confidently wrong, potentially in ways that not only lead to ‘interesting mistakes,’ but also to people forming conclusions with consequences for their entire framing and understanding of history in broad. See also the ‘RETVRN’ crowd for symptoms of this process in action.
The field of professional history is in no small danger of withering, cut off from support. This is the case, even as faux-history or sincere but poorly done history is on the rise. This content, made by amateurs (some of whom are good-faith and some not) bids fair to expand to fill the public demand for historical knowledge with a sort of pseudo-knoweledge.
And if we wish to picture the consequences of this for society at large, we need look no farther than our own history, ironically. As you point out, 19th century and earlier historians often had standards of research and intellectual rigor little or no better than a modern YouTuber. By the same token, they got a lot of things wrong, often consequentially wrong. Their incorrect ideas about the history of, say, post-Roman Europe could directly feed into, for example, the enhancement and acceleration of violent nationalist movements trying to ‘avenge’ perceived ‘national insults’ from the past that never happened in real life or never happened the way they were imagined.
While someone like Grainbound making mistakes is not obviously going to threaten to cause real harm, it is not hard to imagine how Grainbound’s level of historical analysis becoming all there is unless you go far out of your way to seek out one of a handful of more rigorous experts might cause problems overall in the long run.
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Therefore, there is considerable value in staking out and defending a position roughly as follows:
“There is great value in having not just a cadre of enthusiastic amateurs who care and have strong, confident opinions about history and associated subjects, but also a cadre of professionally trained historians. Trained historians who will not routinely and casually make “rookie mistakes” such as casually assuming they know how Mediterranean trade patterns work without bothering to look up the underlying facts, then give a confidently wrong explanation that trains into still other confidently wrong explanations, et cetera, et cetera. Thus, it is worth making a deliberate effort, when analyzing the work of an earnest but overconfident autodidactic amateur, to point out the ways in which the amateur has erred due to lack of underlying scholarly disciplines that the professionally trained historian possesses.”
People in that cadre of professional historians have come up with real howlers, like the 1619 Project. There is a lot of good work being done, but it is overshadowed by this stuff.
So it’s not too surprising that laymen are looking at the field and saying “I can do better than that.”
It’s also not too surprising that at least some people are thinking that if this is common then it’s because there are too many historians and they’re looking desperately for things to publish.
If you’re under the impression that the scholarship in the 1619 Project was false or without rigor, your personal media environment is an ideological echo chamber. It’s valid to critique it as having cynical perspectives, or even being founded to support cynical interpretations, but the facts and primary sources the project was built on are real and were not newly discovered.
It seems to me that if the 1619 project was “founded to support cynical interpretations”, the scholarship can not be good. No one who *started with the conclusions* is to be trusted. However impeccable their sources. Whatever the conclusions.
The thing about technical training in a skill – safe driving for example – is that it should make more capable of achieving it. It is not a guarantee that you will, in fact, try to achieve it.
I think Bret is overstating the case. No doubt the development of any particular city is historically contingent, but surely one can discern some general patterns and formulate a typology. (I know some historians disapprove of such typologies, but others approve, so it cannot be described as something historians don’t do.) So one can’t just put a city anywhere on a map. As a first stab, I would suggest that almost every major city falls into one or more of the following categories (some cities qualify in more than one):
1. Hilltops, which can be easily fortified and defended. Examples: Athens, Jerusalem.
2. Good natural ocean ports. Examples: Marseille, New York, Miami.
3. River ports, commonly at river junctions. Examples: St. Louis, Norwich, England (which has declined relatively, but was once England’s second largest city), Berlin.
4, River islands, which are also often good defensive sites. Examples: Paris, Stockholm.
5. Good natural river crossings (which has to do with the strength of the current, the shape of the banks, etc.) Examples: London, Paris.
6. Road or trade route intersections. Examples: Berlin, Atlanta. This one is less dependent on strictly natural features, since roads and trade routes are human constructions, though that doesn’t mean they can be anywhere.
I think it’s an interesting coincidence that this was posted the same day Language Jones reviewed EtymologyNerd’s “Algospeak” book.
I guess all I need now is a statistician to tell me why I shouldn’t be surprised by this.
It reminds me of a video I watched (or at least tried to watch) about dwarven and mountain kingdoms which really bugged me because it dismissed out of hand the prospect of ‘actually, I want an impoverished kingdom which can just about feed itself and put a couple luxuries in the respectability basket and has basically no spare resources’.
Which is really annoying when you have an idea for a story where the kingdom in the mountain range is dirt poor and knows it.
With the rise of the amature YouTube historian crowd I absolutely see the point about the harm that can come from them not having a proper knowledge on historical methods and having information gaps that cause them to get important things staggeringly wrong.
They’re not trained historians and you are, they however are enthusiastic and have a fair amount of reach.
So isn’t this the perfect opportunity for a collaboration? You’re both a trained historian and a trained educator. These people lack an education in how to be a good historian but seem to have plenty of enthusiasm.
Maybe it’s not logistically viable, maybe they wouldn’t be willing to admit their lack of knowledge and have their mistakes be corrected publicly, but it’s worth considering. I feel like the clickbait crowd could get solid traction from doing a video titled “A real historian tells me what I’ve been getting wrong in my videos and shows me how to get things right!”
> So isn’t this the perfect opportunity for a collaboration? You’re both a trained historian and a trained educator. These people lack an education in how to be a good historian but seem to have plenty of enthusiasm.
Bluntly, this requires the person in question to be receptive to and interested in that input – and one of the near-universal traits of “techbro moonlighting in a humanities subject” is an unshakeable confidence in their own ability to just work it out from first principles by being really smart. It’s a theme so common that it’s been in XKCD: https://xkcd.com/793/
Looking at that comic: Are physicists really “techbros”? Are youtubers “techbros”?
One of my favourite YouTube channels is the Constitutional Clarion, an Australian constitutional lawyer reading out a prepared script. Despite that (and my aversion to half-hour YouTube videos that could be a 500-word post) I enjoy watching it due to her clear presence and enjoyment of the topic. Perun has already been mentioned, I don’t watch every one but they are perfect presentations where he speaks to the slides rather than reading them. And his sales pitch for space marines is one for the ages.
I guess I would mostly caution you that video is not something you can just pick up, there will be a learning curve and you would do well to reach out to other YouTubers for tips. It’s also a serious investment in time, even if you have plenty of content to draw on, which you do. You’ll need editing skills, perhaps some visual presentation, and perhaps random things like dealing with sponsor inquiries and moderating comments. You already have a patreon so I would suggest releasing your videos there a week early for feedback. I do wish you success if you decide to go down the video essay path.
I like others. Lasted a short time with the video i watched.
To quote Robert Ardrey, a zoologist turned playwright and script writer who them went back to the sciences and paleoanthropology.
A half truth presented as the whole, becomes in the end, a complete lie.
The only way to counter it is to make sure the better knowlege is more easily accessable.
Kind of interested in a vibe check on https://www.youtube.com/@JustInTimeWorldbuilding who popped up in my recommendations because who knows what the algo thinks.
I did like the couple videos I opted to watch. Some quibbles about the details, but it’s pretty blatantly meant to be a broad overview, so I don’t really mind.
“I think Tolkien – with his Middle Earth being a world depopulated by catastrophes and thus having large stretches with minimal settlement – is in part to blame here, but folks often don’t seem to quite grasp some times how dense the tapestry of settlement gets in agrarian societies where transit is slow.”
This is half of it, the other half is the (massive and underrated) influence of Westerns on D&D both directly and indirectly through fantasy stories like Howard’s Conan that had been influenced by Westerns.
Due to D&D AND Tolkein both featuring the sort of depopulated countryside that didn’t really exist historically, you get some deeply weird demographics in a lot of fantasy media.
The HoI series has prompted me to rewatch Timeghost Army’s series on World War II week by week. Specifically the time between Kursk and Bagration on the East Front. I’m beginning to suspect that Hitler may not actually be the “greatest general of all times.”
I think a significant issue is that, certainly, systematising things is a fraught process that smooths over historical complexity. But the audience for the system are home worldbuilders who are usually making something for a D&D campaign, to be seen by maybe 6-7 people top end. There’s not going to be enough historians to advise that process and in the wake of it some kind of system to build off is going to be highly desired.
“Moreover, he was treating the fact that most of the calorie content of Rome arrived in two short bursts as a unique product of the sailing season, when it is in fact an iron law of societies based on cereal cultivation: you eat all year, but the crop only comes in once. For any city pulling from the whole of the Mediterranean – and thus pulling from both spring wheat and winter wheat farming regions – the harvest comes in twice. The boats merely deliver that farming-based timetable on a short delay.”
There was an obvious alternative.
The iron law is that the crop comes once a year.
If you transport the crop for any distance, however, you have choices as to where you have granaries.
Rome might have had granaries near the fields only, and shipped the grain to Rome as needed. However, Rome did build granaries in/around Rome and Ostia, and shipped the grain in at short bursts (after harvest?).