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.
I remember what bothered me is when he started talking about not just lords, etc. but also ticking them into categories and my immediate reaction was “Wait, what does the historical record say?” I can’t remember exactly what it was he said (it was a long time ago) but he made some really hardline example and I immediatelyl could find a bunch of examples from history that contradicted his “law”.
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/
Mentioning AH.com fiction, and not bringing up Malê Rising?
https://www.alternatehistory.com/wiki/doku.php?id=timelines:list_of_male_rising_posts
C’mon, like if AH had a canon, Malê Rising would top it.
Malê Rising is absolutely incredible, but often bites off more than it can chew due to it trying to cover literally all of the world, it tends to be very very good about the regions of the world that the author knows well and more hit and miss with some other areas of the world.
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.
My experience is that amateur historians are good at their special interests, and as you get further from that they get worse. Tasting History is really good at food, for example, but I would suggest looking elsewhere for info on agriculture. Brandon Fisichella does well with military manuals of his day, but tends to expect too much conformance to written doctrine. Modern History TV does well with Medieval knights, and is getting better at general “Life in the Middle Ages” stuff, but still makes errors.
It’s like anything else. ANY expert is worse the further you get from areas they have adequately studied–something that our culture doesn’t adequately address. Second, caveat emptar. Expertise doesn’t preclude thinking for yourself. And history is huge–stretching some 10,000 years or so (based on the fact that many paleontologists use 10ka as the boundary between “fossil” and “particularly well-preserved bit of rubbish”), and covering the entire globe. No one can be an expert on everything, and often if they are an expert in one area they will make errors in other areas based on that expertise. Think Saruman trying to lead armies–they think “I know X, and X influences Y, ergo I know Y!” and fall into basic errors.
Finally, I will caution against the current trend of rejecting an entire thing because of some error. A thing can be wrong in some particulars, but accurate in others and therefore still useful. It is entirely acceptable to say “I disagree with A, B, and C, but agree with X, Y, and Z.” This blog is a good example for me–I strongly disagree with Bret on the spacing necessary to wield weapons in a shield wall (based on personal experience), as well as some other issues here and there, yet frequently recommend his blog to people as a fantastic source of information. And remember, when something is wrong it’s not necessarily a bad thing IF it makes you think. Coastal wind patterns are non-trivial considerations, both from a technical perspective and from a historical one; thinking more on these topics, even if only to disprove something, is not a bad thing for someone who enjoys pedantic history content!
As mentioned this is also true of non-amateur historians, but it is where having an actual history *education* tends to help, since that by design at least tries to give you “the basics” (not only for how history is done, but some common pitfalls and maybe a bit of basics about the facts).
The “scars of autodidactism” tends to be that kind of stuff; Either missing a shared knowledge base that helps you pupt things into context, and often not even knowing how you’d *access* that knowledge base.
It would be nice if it were a lot easier to access that shared context, without e.g. enrolling in a doctoral program.
Maybe that’s the long term answer to the deficiencies the OP sees with autodidacts involved with history.
There is! Do the same level of work on your own. I know for a fact that one major paleontological journal had as senior editors a full-time fire fighter and a full-time policeman (no sexism–dude was a guy). I met them. And they were treated no different from any of the other senior researchers, because their work was up to par with that of other senior researchers, and their base knowledge was on par with that of the folks with university or museum positions.
I do think, however, that the university system over-emphasizes itself. My point was not that only experts should be consulted. My point was that one should trust someone in their area of expertise. There’s a significant difference here. I know a blacksmith (as in, that was his job), for example, who studied Medieval armor. I trust his views on armor far above our good host’s, not because our host is a moron, but because my friend studied this specific subject in both an academic and a practical manner. That said, if my friend discussed, say, Roman army foraging methods, I’d probably listen politely then forget everything he said. My blacksmith friend is an expert at armor, but not an expert in general.
The space occupied by the YouTube, blogger, and Tiktok historians is that of someone with, at best, expertise in a specific area. In that area they are likely extremely knowledgeable. Outside it, not so much.
The advantage the university system has isn’t that its experts are better–they often are not–but rather that the university system incentivizes one to become an expert. What that means is that it’s far easier for someone like Bret to BECOME an expert in, say, Assyrian military victories than it would be for the average blacksmith. It’s a professor’s JOB to become an expert in new things (otherwise they stagnate). In contrast, my blacksmith friend’s job is to make things for people, so he a lot harder a time finding time, resources, and access to information necessary to become an expert.
The other advantage is the filter. A bad historian will likely not make it as a professor of history. A bad historian may make excellent YouTube videos–or books or TV or whatever. So you can start with the assumption that a professor knows what they’re talking about (and good ones will tell you where to find the data, and great ones will tell you where to find the contrary data, so you don’t need to trust them), whereas you should start with the assumption that anyone on YouTube or writing books or whatever doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Of course, the issues with the university system have eroded that trust, for good or ill.
I’m really enjoying Gavin the Medievalist. He focuses on literature, but talks about a lot of history-related topics like, “what do we really know about the battle this poem describes?” and, “What did the culture that wrote this value?”
What is Politics is by Daniel Bitton (@WHATISPOLITICS69), who has a Master’s in Anthropology. While a lot of his work covers various historical or political things of particular interest to him and potentially of interest (and, potentially, less accurate, though I didn’t notice any stinkers in the stuff I know a decent amount about), his 7 and 10 series are particularly useful for their discussions of how political systems evolve and shift in response to material conditions, and are specifically in his domain of expertise.
(Not direct linking because that makes it go into auto-mod queue, and I’m already quite a few days late to reply.)
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.
As an old school Breadtube fan this made me giggle.
Sounds like Perun. Perun shows there actually is a pretty big audience for powerpoint slides on youtube.
Perun is also extremely good at delivering engaging powerpoint presentations. (It was immediately clear to me that this is a lot of what his day job involves, even though I’m sure he has jokes in it that wouldn’t be in a more corporate presentation.) He makes it look easy, but it’s not. Then again, our host here also has years of lecturing experience, and I expect that’s similarly transferable skills.
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.
Well, I won’t watch it, however it is put on the screen. I learn by reading. Cannot stand video in this context. This includes history, big tie.
I’m completely in agreement with this – may ACOUP continue to flourish as a blog longer than the Roman Republic!
Same here. I keep returning to ACOUP since I process and understand written information more easily than videos — part of it might be the fact that I can speed up, slow down, or even reread at will, while videos are inherently bound to the presenter’s pace and changing the playback speed or rewinding are inherently more cumbersome processes to my brain than just scrolling back and forth (or even better, flipping back and forth through physical pages). One of the biggest reasons why I haven’t watched the videos discussed here is because even if they had been better than Bret’s stuff, it would have taken me much more effort to digest them.
Text-first (with illustrations) might be a dwindling audience but it’s a little heartening to know that there are spaces on the Web dedicated to serve us.
seconded
I boycott Google, any chance of PeerTube?
Ya, I can’t do videos either for all the same reasons. For learning and comprehension I READ.
‘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.
Not to mention that getting river courses and drainage basins right on your fantasy map is a fraught area by itself, where it’s easy to make mistakes. I still can’t get over how in Skyrim the town of Falkreath sits in an endhorheic basin which somehow has a small stream running into it but doesn’t appear to have flooding issues.
Also, what idiot came up with the Danube? “Let’s just draw this river right through the Carpathian mountains.” Completely unrealistic.
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.
More or less all valid.
Generally the point I was driving at was about how this was a poor choice in trade good compared to grain and that beer and ale are different things with different properties which most people aren’t aware of. Online information about brewing is heinously crude for the most part not helped by the trend of calling various beverages which is infuriating since next to none bear any resemblance to this modern carbonated concoction larded with sugar and caffeine. Gruit is more for analogy’s sake due to how omnipresent hops are today; I can’t say I’m aware of any big company making theirs without.
“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.
…
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.
ad9 then you’ve basically dismissed all history scholarship. The very structure of the thesis and of publication in general pushes the scholar to pick a conclusion and then prove it, even if in order to pass review the conclusion needs to compel people whom are supposed to simply follow the evidence presented. There simply isn’t a way to ever be perfectly comprehensive, and hence you always focus on a subset of the information in order to actually *finish* your work.
And if you don’t, you’re fired.
In practice it’s very easy to focus mostly on either the data you can refute, of that which support you. The gradient between lie by omission and pragmatism is broad. History as a field basically works in spite of these incentives.
Note that I’m not saying that you’re wrong for making that claim; I *agree*, and think it’s a problem. But the fact is that all publications by necessity follow a structure that rewards objective oriented research, and project 1619 isn’t notably worse in that regard.
There are parts I disagree with, but a lot of the economic work on slavery in the colonies is very good, as is a lot of the adjacent cultural analysis regarding ownership of intellectual property.
Project 1619 is just very open with what it’s trying to say. I think the critique works broadly as a way of pointing out bias in the system, but we should be careful not to punish it in particular for being honest. That just rewards dishonesty.
Aside, but in regards to 1619 the one part I find crippling to the original thesis is that 1700’s Britain was hardly a monolithic bastion of abolitionist thought, so any conclusion which frames the British as a serious threat to American revolutionary war era slavery is picking and choosing its battles too much for rigor. See India; the British tolerated slavery for decades past abolition and dragged their heels on any extension of law into the Raj long enough that India smoothly transitioned from slavery to long-term indentured servitude with no oversight, I.e. slavery except your kids are nominally free. That’s a meaningful distinction, but only just.
Given how Britain would end up treating its Jewel the idea Britain was institutionally serious about ending American slavery is almost laughable, and hence the thesis requires that the colonists be persistently *wrong* about British intentions in a way that influenced their decision to rebel. And that’s just too much for me. I don’t buy it except on a granular, case by case, basis, and don’t think they ever proved it extended past that.
Which is why the project walked back that claim. My critique of them in particular is then that I think the people who put it together into a package knew their headline conclusion was bunk and pushed it anyway to get attention, which is *precisely* the pattern *so many” history publications fall into, especially ones that interact with the lay public.
@ad9, history isn’t a type of engineering. There’s no master set of historical facts that you can just put into anyone’s hands and have them all built the same story from it like they’re operating an autolathe.
But cynicism isn’t a conclusion at all, it’s as I said a perspective. Reading primary sources you always have to grapple with things like the honest and the awarenesses of the author(s) of the source (for example, sources say that rural Roman population was declining at points when what was more likely happening is that rural Roman tax compliance was declining).
The 1619 Project looked at a long set of facts and sources that placed American chattel slavery and its defense at every turning point in the history of the Virginia Colony and the polity that is arguably it’s modern successor-state (the USA). Usually, this presence of slavery is treated as coincidence and non-pattern, which is a habit that does frequently absolve people who could choose to feel a sense of identity with the enslavers. Asking, “what if it’s not a coincidence?” isn’t jumping to a conclusion, it just turns out that if you’re actually allowed to ask that about American chattel slavery the answer is inescapable (and deeply upsetting). When the Project goes even further and asks “what if there were always people who knew it wasn’t a coincidence?” that is cynicism that leads it to be controversial, but none of the criticism drawn by that controversy has actually proven the negative.
“looked at a long set of facts and sources that placed American chattel slavery and its defense at every turning point”
An extraordinarily dubious proposition, at best.
Endymionologist, to quote yourself: “It’s valid to critique it [the 1619 project] as having cynical perspectives, or even being founded to support cynical interpretations,”
According to your own argument, the project started with its interpretation and then went looking for a way to “read primary sources” that supported that predetermined conclusion. They were, according to yourself, looking for excuses to believe something.
The only evidence that can test the theory is evidence that might prove it wrong. According to yourself, that is the opposite of what they were doing.
That is not scholarship of any value.
“The very structure of the thesis and of publication in general pushes the scholar to pick a conclusion and then prove it,”
Terry, this is why I never trust any book that has a radical new theory of anything. I trust only books that claim to summarize the consensus within the field. If their is disagreement within the field I, a nonspecialist, am not going to resolve it after reading a single book.
ad9, repeatedly asserting that I intended to mean something other than what I did mean, just because I used a word that you would have used differently, is a bit rude.
You’re absolutely correct that if you re-interpret my words to mean what you want them to mean, they would mean something I can’t (and don’t) support. Because this is a conversation rather than an examination of historical documents, you have the additional resource of my reply to you. Most research has no such luxury and has to draw conclusions based on perspectives and context.
That is what the 1619 Project did, examine sources without excluding the possibility that the consistent presence of chattel slavery might have a continuous meaning. That is cynical in the sense that it is the opposite of Panglossian. I don’t know what you need me to mean when I say ‘cynical’ but I’m not predisposed to care at this point. You describe yourself as a person unwilling to consider multiple perspectives in the first place, only allowing predigested overviews to inform your thoughts on a topic.
When you write, “The only evidence that can test the theory is evidence that might prove it wrong. According to yourself, that is the opposite of what they were doing.” I find you have strayed so far from my point that I have trouble following at all. As I said, this isn’t engineering; sometimes theories are tested with experimentation, but the vast majority of scholarship in the arts is merely proposing theories and describing how the known evidence could support them.
What makes the arts essential is that they shape a human mind into something that can understand that there can be, that there are, multiple *correct* readings of a single thing. You don’t (yet) see things that way, and I’d like to suggest you visit some museums.
“Terry, this is why I never trust any book that has a radical new theory of anything. I trust only books that claim to summarize the consensus within the field. If their is disagreement within the field I, a nonspecialist, am not going to resolve it after reading a single book.”
This is broadly reasonable, although of course authors do just lie about how accepted their conclusions are.
It isn’t a reason for authors, including lay authors, to not publish controversy, just a good rule of thumb as someone without involvement in the research. There’s probably a discussion to be had over how authors are expected to present their conclusions to the public, but I think we’re already at the point where everyone is shouting past each other on this.
The scholarship was shoddy, and the math was wrong. It has no value except to keep the grift going.
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.
The problem is that while these typologies can be useful, they’re not ironclad laws. Just vague patterns (and Grainbound *absolutely* fails at not stating this)
Then there’s the entire “City was founded for one reason but changes in the geography over time has rendered the reason it was founded no longer applying but since the city is *already there* it’s still remains important”. Thing.
I risk overstepping since i’ve never seen a Grainbound vid, but this is very weaksauce criticism. Effective communication requires discarding irrelevant information and distilling a correct summary of the relevant facts. Demanding that every statement is preceded by a midwit guard just destroys the information density of the text.
“you said that humans walk at 4km/h but this isn’t an ironclad law and depends on gender, age, height, presence of legs” <- bad criticism
"you said that humans walk at 4km/h but we are planning the force march route for a 5man SAS squad in light gear" <- good criticism
I've known many engineers who you simply cannot get a straight answer from; some have even gotten fired for it. The problem seems to exist in academia too. Yes, nuance exists, no, you don't have to regurgitate every single bit of information. Take a lesson from cartographers; I have a small map that depicts all of Europe, it fits in my jacket pocket, and they didn't even feel the need to plaster it with disclaimers like "this is only a map, not all rivers are depicted, roads may have been renamed, villages may have been renamed, not all buildings depicted, intentional errors may have been added to detect unlicensed copying, maps generalize information in a lossy way, do not treat as gospel and use your eyes, grass color may not fit, airspace not depicted, shoreline position may differ, …". The lack of those disclaimers makes the map better, not worse.
No, when someone repeatedly says “This is physics”, “This is ironclad law” and then you have the actual historical record contradicting this *that’s a shitty argument*. Simply saying “Things tend to shake out this way” isn’t neccessarily.
@Arilou What if someone doesn’t say it? The problem is that you’re chiefly concerned with a hypothetical that’s different, very clearly very different from what’s being presented here. That someone else says something @ey81 and @Anon don’t say gives no reason to be mentioned here.
“What if someone doesn’t say it? ”
Grainbound *does* say that. He repeatedly tries to make his patterns look more.. consistent, ironclad etc Than they are. Doing that is misrepresenting things.
I can confirm that both you (and @xellos down below) are missing the elephant in your eye for the ant on Arilou; Grainbound _did_ present his way as axiomatic. from quotes that goes “it’s not just suggestion, it’s physics” on a rule of thumb, to consantly tilting his videos like “your ${idea} can’t exist” or “the ${x} that breaks your worldbuilding”. It’s not that he distills general patterns and typology and teach them efficiently, it’s that he says those patterns are ironbound law and if you think otherwise you need corrections. Especially when he’s aiming your videos at a crowd that, per his description, “loves worldbuilding but don’t know where to start.”.
I mean, sure, but there’s still a large degree of historical contigency involved, even once you’ve narrowed down the significance of a particular micro-region for trade or industry or agriculture or mining or whatever the case may be. For example, is there any obvious reason why Detroit, specifically, became the automotive capital of North America as opposed to, say, Port Huron or Toledo?
There’s basically no explanation for that other than Ford being born there. Every advantage detroit possessed could easily have shifted almost anywhere on a river in a few hundred miles. Further Detroit could have specialized into almost anything; we know this because it was once not the *motor* city, but the *stove* city. It made stoves, as well as ships and other large metal steam engines. The skill base built there translated to car engines, but a lot of other skill bases also translated; in Modena the early Italian automobile pioneers were originally fine musical instrument makers.
I am not too knowledgeable about Detroit, but the cities whose history I do know well (e.g., New York, Chicago) developed for a variety of reasons, some involving fairly unalterable geography (e.g., the deep harbor of New York) and some involving contingent human action (e.g., the building of the Erie Canal).
Urban history, like most historical inquiry, involves the interplay of general rules and specific contingent events. Autodidacts typically focus on the general rules to the exclusion of all else. Some professional historians are prone to go the other way, to dismiss general rules, denigrate typologies, and insist on discussing only particular contingent events.
There’s often more complicated stuff and contingency than you might think, yes a city might be located at a place where there’s a good harbour, but there are many good harbours (in some places) and that the city ended up there isn’t neccessarily because it was the *best* harbour. (and the reason the second harbour isn’t setted was because someone got to the toher one first and it ended up eating al the oxygen, so to speak, so the second harbour never grew)
See Signapore. While it’s very complicated, too much to quickly summarize because it changes over time, the basic gist is this: there are always going to be harbour cities in the Malacca strait, but which one is dominant and if a particular harbour is developed depends on a lot of human factors. For various reasons George Town, Signapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Malacca itself have been the winners at various different times, to the expense of a lot of potential harbours particularly on the Indonesian side of the strait, as well as each other.
It’s probably fair to say Signapore is dominant now, mostly because it’s a city state which has zero non maritime interests distracting its laws or government, but that could easily change.
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”?
Bret noted that the chap here comes from software development, and if you haven’t seen exactly the same pattern when programmers dabble in history then frankly you haven’t been looking.
Bluntly, in my experience a majority of people are as arrogant as is popularly attributed to software developers as if it were an unusual trait of the profession. It is probably one of a few common natural states for people who haven’t been humbled repeatedly by errors of misplaced confidence.
You are one such arrogant person. Some of these history-tubers are probably also arrogant an unreceptive to correction, to varying degrees. Does that mean something actionable?
Tangentially, it is rare that I see someone use the phrase “tech bro” with any attempt at precision. It’s very common to conflate the attitudes of software developers with those of their bosses, or to conflate the attitudes of software developers with those of various scientists, or various sorts of engineer, or with abnormally communicative figures from any of those fields, which are hardly homogeneous to begin with, never mind that they tend to draw very different sorts of people.
It may be an overly simple heuristic, but I lose a lot of respect for someone’s intellectual humility when they use the phrase “tech bro” or similar under the impression they are making a real argument. Basically I stop being optimistic that this person can reason usefully about anything genuinely uncertain.
There is an extremely clear cultural pattern, with numerous examples, of “STEM-types” looking at other fields and obnoxiously presuming that they can trivially understand them because they are good at reasoning. XKCD has in fact called it out _twice_, both in the one I linked above and separately about engineers (https://xkcd.com/1570/). It’s not quite strictly STEM either, you can see similar patterns with doctors and lawyers.
The underlying reason is probably something to do with how all these fields are something of a cultural model for “smart people”: by being able to get into one you are clever, and other people who aren’t doing something like this are conversely not clever. So it’s easy to then reason that you should obviously be able to turn your smarts to their thing as well, and do it as well or better than them since you’ve got the superior brains.
No, of course this doesn’t mean every time a programmer starts to get interested in history they’ll be an asshole about it. Most are perfectly reasonable, aware that they don’t understand something and willing to learn. But once you look at the subset who are making their living by being Smart On The Internet about a thing they don’t really understand, the chance that they’re going to be this sort of asshole rapidly approaches 100%.
“There’s no point trying to talk to this person because he’s from a social group I don’t like. Here’s a comic strip as proof that I’m right.” Projection at its finest.
“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…”
I’ve not seen this being the case. For example, a WWII reenactor I occasionally watch (I’m a sucker for “I tried X diet for Y days” types of videos) recently posted a video stating that he was wrong, and providing the details about how he was wrong and additional details proving the other side’s point. I’ve also seen more than one channel with a regular “Here are errors I’ve committed” type posts. In my experience non-professionals are quite willing to accept correction, because they haven’t made this particular theory their identity. Plus being wrong drives engagement, which drives views, which is good for their bottom line.
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.
Funnily enough DnD having depopulated countrysides is a relatively new phenomenon (3rd edition and up), in older editions you could barely stick your neck out of a settlement before encountering bands of orcs or goblins or berserkers, or “dervishes” often hundreds strong. The obvious conclusion being of course that the worlds of early DnD were very much populated, just not populated by people in state societies.
I suspect bands of orcs are the reason for depopulated countrysides.
That kind of depopulated countryside definitely did exist: It’s just not the default. Frontier regions is as mentioned one example of where you often see that kind of dynamic.
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.”
The comments on the first HoI post made me re-play some Starcraft II. Still time well spent, although now I’ve got some Thoughts about the realism of the warfare models it depicts (mostly negative ones). I guess I can blame Bret for making me look a the game in a new way.
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.
Speaking as a member of both that audience and the fiction worldbuilding audience, we don’t need very many historians. We just need to be able to find them.
And we want to be able to create worlds which hang together properly. We don’t want to be lied to about how this works!
“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?).
There’s a very obvious reason why you want your granaries to be closer to Rome than to the fields – it means if there _is_ a disruption in transport, you have the contents of the granaries to hand while you weather it.
I mean there’s an obvious reasons for that: A short term disruption in shipping when you have granaries in the city isn’t a problem. (you’ll eat some from the granaries and it’ll hopefully be enough for the next shipment) While if your granaries are elsewhere it *is*.
I’m just going to note, because it was so much of a swing and a miss, that the Morbid Zoo recomendation is bad because the analyst has never been a teenage boy who woke up sticky and unable to fit into his clothes, and then expected to keep being ‘a man’ and so somehow missed the entire theme of Spiderman:Brand New Day, altogether. Her LoTR analysis seemed well thought through, but the recommendation is for ‘analysis of a film by someone who entirely missed the plot of said film’, which is bad enough that i came back here to summarise my much longer dissent about coming of age stories in spiderman & x-men to warn people that ‘she actually did great analysis elsewhere, but misses this one entirely, even whilst providing a in-depth analysis about Frank Castle that nevertheless misses why he’s actually in the film’.
You really think boys are the only ones who have a horrifying transition into adolescence? Christ-on-a-stick.
With all due respect to our genial host’s knowledge, “Some clever chap (chaps, really, over many generations) invent farming” deserves a well documented footnote. First of all, farming is older than writing so we do not have historical records about it. Second, according to Jared Diamond actual invention of farming requires excellent knowledge of local wild plants to spot the most suitable ones. And although all prehistoric societies were different and not specialized, gathering tends to be woman’s domain because it is easier to do at the same time as child care and provides a more predictable and, in warm climates, more abundant supply of calories. So please treat this as a “citation needed” mark on that sentence 😉
I suspect the word “chaps” (which implies men) was carelessly chosen. The truth is unknowable (absent some scientific breakthrough), but there is certainly reason to suspect that agriculture was primarily a female invention.
Step 1: Define farming. This is non-trivial. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that animals you spent your life learning about prefer certain plants, and you can encourage plants to grow in an area. And it wouldn’t take much creativity, or hunger, or even boredom, to munch on the stuff yourself. And then you have a backup food supply–if the animals don’t provide enough food, the plants (which, remember, humans were already eating) can make up the difference. From there groups dedicated to growing food are hardly a stretch. But when does it become farming? And before you answer, I invite you to study the subsistence strategies of some Native American groups in the Desert Southwest; the whole “Let’s plant this stuff and hope it’s there when we come back” subsistence strategy persisted much longer than most people think.
“Second, according to Jared Diamond actual invention of farming requires excellent knowledge of local wild plants to spot the most suitable ones.”
Ancient societies lived with this information the way we live with information on our cities, cars, computers, and coffee makers. It would take an exceptionally stupid person to fail to identify that certain plants grow best in certain areas. And remember, they had been experimenting with this since somewhere around the Paleolithic. They knew the local flora and fauna the way you know the streets of your hometown, or the way you know your favorite sports teams. And they started training very, very young.
“And although all prehistoric societies were different and not specialized, gathering tends to be woman’s domain…”
Dear gods in Hell no!!!
First, gathering WAS NOT easier to do with young children. Have you ever tried to forage with small kids? Or even done a significant hike with a toddler? It’s a nightmare! If you’ve never done it, let me assure you that foraging enough to sustain even one person, even in an area with abundant food, is a tremendous amount of work. If you disbelieve me, watch “Survivorman” sometime. Les Stroud has the advantages of modern technology and preparations, and still runs into some really significant problems. Now imagine feeding a family of four that way. Oh, and remember that gathering the easy stuff–water–was a significant cause of death up until the Industrial Revolution. That’s the easy stuff. Things only get harder from there. The idea that “gathering” was easy is nothing but a continuation of the disparagement of what is viewed as “women’s work”.
Besides, do you really think that those men who go out hunting in Diamond’s imagination would neglect to munch on some things along the way, or bring back stuff for their families? I can speak from experience when I say this is not the case. I know I used to bring home a pocketful of nuts when I was hunting–always annoyed my father, who didn’t like hickory nuts–but my grandfathers encouraged it. Put in more academic terms, hunting IS a form of foraging and it would require a very special and extreme type of stupidity for a tribe to allow men to hunt without bringing back additional foodstuffs. Plus, if you’re a married man, or a man who’s dated a woman, you know the value of “I saw this rare, valuable thing and just had to bring it to you.”
Second, we know for a fact that women hunted with men; we have multiple examples of women buried with hunting equipment same as men, for example, and as I recall we have evidence of specialized equipment allowing women with young children to hunt with the tribe.
That word “tribe” is significant–hunting back then wasn’t usually “Dude goes out with a bow to kill a deer”, but rather “The ENTIRE TRIBE, or at least a significant portion of it, drives a bunch of animals off a cliff, then harvests the corpses”. We are not talking an occasional event where getting skunked is an amusing story; we’re talking mass slaughter on an industrial scale (remember how many of these animals went extinct). Ancient hunting is as similar to modern sport hunting as modern industrial fishing fleets are to drowning a few worms with your kid. Under such a subsistence style the risks to any individual are minimal, precisely because there are so many people involved.
Diamond’s understanding of ancient subsistence practices says FAR more about Diamond than it does about ancient hunting practices.
@Dinwar,
To be fair, as someone who’s read a lot of Jared Diamond’s stuff, it’s not totally clear from @kwoz’s phrasing that he/she is directly paraphrasing Diamond about the gendered nature of hunting vs. gathering, versus combining Diamond’s thoughts with those of someone else.
Jared Diamond actually had personal experience with subsistence hunters, or at least people very close to it (he worked in New Guinea back in the 1960s, up in the mountains with people who were just being exposed to modernity for the first time), and so i doubt he believes in a super crudely gendered caricature of how hunting and gathering worked. Though it’s possible his informants gave him a somewhat unrealistic picture of how gendered things actually were (people often describe things, including gender roles, in terms of what they’d *like* to be the case, or how they think things should work, instead of how things actually typically do).
wait, “Chap” is gendered? I thought it was specifically chosen _because_ it is neither Masculine, Feminine nor Neuter.
That would be a recent development. I’ve always known it as a male-indicating term, but “guys” and “dude” went through phases in the 90s and 2000s where they were used neutrally.
Chap/chaps is specifically a masculine term. Just like other examples it is sometimes applied to women, especially if the subject is a mix-gendered group or a woman who is considered one of the bros.
And yet all the dictionary I find kept saying it is a synonym of “man”, which is ambiguous whether it meant the male man or the human man, while not specifying, as you do, that it is mainly masculine. And the word is not used enough in my circle for me to absorb its meaning osmosisly.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, i’m just exasperated as an English As A Third Languager.
“gathering tends to be woman’s domain because it is easier to do at the same time as child care ”
Good lordessa and goddessas, that is something men who have never done anything even remotely involved with trying to accomplish a job while moving on foot while pregnant or breastfeeding an infant, a toddler and other young children.
What you’re seeing is a phenomenon noted in the First Gilded Age (and probably before): Expertise derived from institutions becomes exclusively housed in people who are beholden to reified institutions, and so any locus of controversy becomes the exclusive playground of cranks and robber-barons.
The alliance of frontier-born autodidact lawyers and local-government sewer socialists that pulled America out of that isn’t coming back, but you’re more effective creating fascination that inspires a new wave of common humanitiesophiles than you are perpetually re-entrenching around the value of academies.
I would guess there’s a 90% chance you’ve heard of Perun because of the military history connection but I think his presentation style (faceless slideshow with good narration, serious topics, can be listened to as audio only but video adds something) would be a good fit for ACOUP. Your usual posts seem like they wouldn’t be too hard to turn into slideshow, especially if you used AI to do a first draft. I don’t know about workflows for making slideshows from AI but to save on tokens you could presumably use latex or similar language to generate the slideshow, ie not necessarily using any AI-generated images.
I wouldn’t trust AI to summarize the information correctly. Remember, the modals are mathematical text predictors. They don’t understand the meaning of the text being fed into them or the text of they output. That’s why they do things like transcribe an officer turning into a frog or translate elder abuse as child abuse.
Bret deals in topics with unusual word choices, and AI is really bad at accurately handling unusual inputs, so it’s almost certainly less work for him to do it himself and get it right the first time than it would be to run it through AI and hunt down every last error.
> especially if you used AI to do a first draft.
I’m honestly quite impressed – I’m not sure I can think of a single way you could lose any and all respect from anyone here faster than suggesting OGH uses AI drafts to pump out slop slideshows onto Youtube.
Honeestly, a Bret YouTube channel would be so peak!
Finally had the time (and mental energy) to watch one of his videos, and I can feel my memory of Regional Language classes coming back. Forget the historicity; the way he presents, from literal tone (why does he keep. talking. like he’s. emphasizing. every. noun phrase.), to figurative tone (it feels like he has to actively stop himself saying “I’m way smarter than you”) is just so off-putting. It’s like functional programmers looking down at anything resembling objects, or Clippy Accounts denigrating you for not wanting to deal with Linux’s horrible multilanguage UX.
There’s a locust of people like him, those that sees a creative excersice and seeks to “systematize” it, reducing creative possibilities to a narrow system of axioms and turning into a people of the book, labelling other ways as irreconcibially wrong. i’ve had encounters of these types when drawing, when writing, when languagemaking and conscripting. They are more concerned with being (maybe-sorta) right over being fun, missing the forest of creative experiences for the tree of “believability” or “naturalistic” etc.
I lasted less than a minute on watching the ‘grain transport’ YouTube.
‘Forget the stories’? Really? Why the heck am I supposed to be watching a video relating to fantasy worlds if I am supposed to ‘forget the stories’?
‘Sea trade’ video seemed to be trying to sell me some kind of good or service called ‘campfire’ inside the opening minute. I’ll stick to a large wooden board I can push pieces of paper and counters and other markers around, thank you. I can use it to try and get a narrative timeline to slot together as I want and so I can see what events influence which later ones – or to timetable Hogwarts for a Harry Potter fanfiction.
Okay, I don’t know how useful these videos might be to someone just starting up, trying to create their first ever ‘home brew’ setting to run a Dungeons & Dragons game. ‘Dungeon’ and ‘Dragon’ magazines, back in the days of print, used to run articles on things like that – Ray Winninger is one name I remember from back in the day – but I don’t know if anyone’s doing anything like that now.