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"Why didn't the Holy Roman Empire become a centralized, coherent state like France did?" The first part of my answer to this question is that much of the historical and theoretical writing about the formation of the state has been deterministic and teleological in orientation. For example, in your formulation of the question you ask why one political entity failed to become a "state" and the other did. But the example of the centralized, coherent state that you give became a centralized, coherent state as a result of both long-term processes and contingency. France in particular could easily have failed to become a centralized, coherent state if the course of events at key junctures (e.g. the Wars of Religion, the Fronde) had gone differently. That contingency has given theorists little pause and there are several major schools of thought regarding the development of the state in the early modern period. The first is the Marxist model, for which I would refer you to Anderson's Lineages of the Absolutist State and Wallerstein's The Modern World System. Anderson's thesis is that the fourteenth century (see also why I began this thread in the fourteenth century) represented a "crisis of feudalism," during which nobles lost control over the land due to oversettlement and overpopulation. The concurrent rise of commerce produced a class of urban merchants that weakened noble control of political power. The result is that the Western nobility was driven into an alliance with the "absolutist" new monarchs in France, England, Spain, and Austria, who compensated the nobility for its declining social status through absolutism. Anderson's thesis about Eastern Europe is different, but essentially notes the creation of a second serfdom as the nobility was actually strengthened rather than merely compensated through absolutism. By contrast, Wallerstein places his emphasis on exchange relations rather than class relations. The structure of the state corresponds to its position in the "capitalist world system" that emerged in the early modern period, which is characterized by a division into a core, periphery, and semiperiphery. In the core, the strong state emerges and controls the "terms of trade" in order to serve the interests of the merchant classes. The second is the Fiscal-Military model, for which I would refer you to Charles Tilly's Coercion, Capital and European States, Brian Downing's The Military Revolution and Political Change, and Thomas Ertman's Birth of the Leviathan. Charles Tilly's model is famously summed up in the line "war made the state and the state made war." In essence, wars drove state-formation but he also supposes that economic development affected strategies of mobilization. When resources were scarce, they had to be extracted through centralized administrative apparatuses. When resources were plentiful, rulers could make "compacts with capitalists." The strongest states combine both methods. In contrast, Brian Downing looks back to "medieval constitutionalism," arguing that democratization took hold where constitutionalism survived and autocracy took hold where it withered. The military revolution is the key moment in Downing's model since it strained early modern rulers. In France or Brandenburg-Prussia, representative institutions were replaced by centralized bureaucracy. In England, however, rulers were sheltered from the pressures of the military revolution and in effect preserved constitutional arrangements. (Note: other models look to a post-1688 date for the development of a bureaucratic apparatus in England). Ertman's thesis is more complex and attempts to provide an explanation of most of the European states according to a set of variables, so I'll leave it at that for now. The third is the Confessionalization and Social Discipline model that accompanied the development of confessions in early modern Europe. In essence, confessionalization represented a bargain between the church and state through which they relied on each other. The church looked to the state to impose uniformity, which the state was happy to oblige and the church provided new mechanisms of moral regulation and social discipline. The state also provided poor relief in exchange for taxes. This was not limited to Protestantism, although some, for example Philip Gorski, have argued that the effect of confessionalization was stronger in Protestant (and particularly Calvinist-influenced) states. A fourth model, although not one that predominates in state-building literature per se, is the influence of culture through which rulers constructed and reinforced their states and personal legitimacy through ceremony, artistic and literary production, etc. The Holy Roman Empire would not have had many paths to becoming a consolidated state according to these models. The rulers and nobility in the Holy Roman Empire were not dependent enough on the emperor in a social crisis to need to forge an alliance with him and, indeed, several of the major conflicts of the period resulted from an underlying conflict between these effectively independent rulers and an emperor who lacked the resources and ties to them to reign them in. By the time of the military revolution, the Holy Roman Empire was already effectively divided into its component states. Likewise, confessionalization would not have helped the emperor's cause outside of his own personally controlled territories. That being said, although it would have been more difficult for the empire to have become an effective state in the context of the civil and religious conflict of the period, I do not believe that the structure of the Holy Roman Empire inherently prevented the development of a modern state. Composite monarchies, although seldom discussed and often dismissed in state-building literature, developed their own very effective state apparatuses that did not particularly resemble the nation-state that prevailed in the first three models I summarized. If not for the Reformation and the defeats that Philip II, Philip III, and Philip IV dealt with, Charles V's universal monarchy could have prevailed.
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Sep 14, 2014 20:42
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I have. There's not so much interest, or not really many people still reading it. I'll put an effort post together when everything is done. There's always compound shooters popping in every now and then, and us longbow and whatever-shooters have been called Larpers. It's really ironic when that comes from a bunch of people who dress up in camo cloth and use these bows, because they do not take any skill or effort to operate, beyond "don't destroy your bow".
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Sep 14, 2014 20:44
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JaucheCharly posted:I have. There's not so much interest, or not really many people still reading it. I'll put an effort post together when everything is done. There's always compound shooters popping in every now and then, and us longbow and whatever-shooters have been called Larpers. poo poo, when you do your effort post cross-post a link to the milsurp thread. There's a whole host of people there who I know would dig on reading an effort post about how old bows were put together just because they're history weirdos who wouldn't normally venture into the bow-specific thread.
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Sep 14, 2014 20:48
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JaucheCharly posted:I have. There's not so much interest, or not really many people still reading it. I'll put an effort post together when everything is done. There's always compound shooters popping in every now and then, and us longbow and whatever-shooters have been called Larpers. Cyrano4747 posted:poo poo, when you do your effort post cross-post a link to the milsurp thread. There's a whole host of people there who I know would dig on reading an effort post about how old bows were put together just because they're history weirdos who wouldn't normally venture into the bow-specific thread.
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Sep 14, 2014 20:54
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do they make repros of olde timey matchlocks with rifling so they're useful to hunt with?
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Sep 14, 2014 21:07
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Sexgun Rasputin posted:lol why the hell would you want my input on it that is why i asked the question in the first place Machiavelli no doubt had a critical and perhaps ironic distance between his own positions and the precepts given in the text, but Diderot and Rousseau, as typical Enlightenment thinkers, badly misread the text. The Prince really does not read like satire and chapter twenty-six, which specifically touches upon the aspect that you consider to be satirical, is anything but satirical in its ultimate exhortation. More importantly, it certainly was not received as satire except by a few indulgent eighteenth century thinkers.
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Sep 14, 2014 21:22
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Cyrano4747 posted:poo poo, when you do your effort post cross-post a link to the milsurp thread. There's a whole host of people there who I know would dig on reading an effort post about how old bows were put together just because they're history weirdos who wouldn't normally venture into the bow-specific thread. So you're the god-king of the milsurp thread? HEY GAL posted:One day I'm going to buy the kit for this, put it together, and photograph the results for the Internet. I'd be really surprised if you wouldn't reek of black powder and beer. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 21:24
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JaucheCharly posted:So you're the god-king of the milsurp thread?  quote:I'd be really surprised if you wouldn't reek of black powder and beer. And match, of course, but you only smell that when a musketeer is standing right next to you, it's not like powder smoke which gets everywhere. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 21:39
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JaucheCharly posted:So you're the god-king of the milsurp thread? No but I post there a poo poo ton and would like to think I have a pretty good sense of how most of the regulars in it would react to a neat post about how the things people killed each other at distance with 1000 years ago worked.
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Sep 14, 2014 23:05
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This is a horribly vague question so apologies in advance. I remember reading (though not where I read it) that slaver ships were particularly well-suited to conversion to privateer vessels. Have you come across anything like that and if so do you know why that is? Or more generally, what was the preferred design for a slave ship and what was the preferred design for privateer ships? And how feasible would it be to adapt one to the other? I am ideally thinking of the earlier ships, during the 16th century if possible, but I am open to later information as well. Thanks in advance.
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Sep 18, 2014 17:05
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Railtus posted:This is a horribly vague question so apologies in advance. I can't really think of a reason. Custom building ships for X purpose wasn't really a thing outside of 'what body of water do I not want this to sink in?' unless you were a major navy.* Most privateers (and pirates) were 'regular' trade ships, as were slaver ships. You just kinda hosed around with the guts of the ship depending on what you wanted to do with it. If piracy/privateering, weapons and ammo (maybe you'd have a few light cannon, if you were a real big shot) stores, and room for booty. If slaver, strip out everything and put in more chains. More chains. More chains. It's kinda horrific how the calculations went 'well, we can stick in enough water for the whole cargo or we can stuff in an extra 20 people. Sure that means we'll lose 15 more than normal, but that's still a net gain.' Later on maybe you start seeing slavers run more along smuggler lines (because the Brits dropped slavery and damned if they were going to let anybody else have that cheap labor either) and a privateer, if you were in a position to be choosey, would run along similar lines. *Okay this is wrong, what I'm saying is you weren't generally laying down a hull for a specific reason and more for types. River boat, brown water, cargo, warship, Trans-Atlantic, Caribbean. But a lot of time traders couldn't pick and chose, most times you're doing one leg of your journey trading X, the next leg trading Y, so on. Plus, one year there might be a war on and Letter of Marque to buy, the next year sugar is looking super profitable, the next year you can't get the capital for initial goods but you've got some guns so yarr matey, the next year the crew mutinies... and so on.
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Sep 18, 2014 21:00
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the JJ posted:I can't really think of a reason. Custom building ships for X purpose wasn't really a thing outside of 'what body of water do I not want this to sink in?' unless you were a major navy.* Most privateers (and pirates) were 'regular' trade ships, as were slaver ships. You just kinda hosed around with the guts of the ship depending on what you wanted to do with it. If piracy/privateering, weapons and ammo (maybe you'd have a few light cannon, if you were a real big shot) stores, and room for booty. If slaver, strip out everything and put in more chains. More chains. More chains. It's kinda horrific how the calculations went 'well, we can stick in enough water for the whole cargo or we can stuff in an extra 20 people. Sure that means we'll lose 15 more than normal, but that's still a net gain.' If cannons on privateers were as rare as you suggest, how did they go about their privateering business? Heave up next some merchantmen and threaten to shoot a few musket volleys at the crew? And anything else the thread can add about privateering/piracy! My familiarity stops at "it happened."
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Sep 19, 2014 01:26
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brozozo posted:If cannons on privateers were as rare as you suggest, how did they go about their privateering business? Heave up next some merchantmen and threaten to shoot a few musket volleys at the crew? Basically. You might have a few deck guns too, but in an age when a goodly portion of sailors are impressed and the rest basically blue collar workers ranging from unskilled to pretty skilled no one is really going to put their lives on the line for the sake of some rich jagoff's cargo. You didn't need a cannon to rob a stage coach either, and you don't need a tank to knock off a bank now a days. A reasonable amount of anti-personnel fire power mostly suffices. Not that a captain is going to say no to a big old gun or two, but it's not a necessity. Cannons were most helpful in that you could shoot at a ship further off (or put a few across her bow, from which we get the term) but there were other ways of stopping a boat, from luring them in with false distress signals/just pretending to be friendly, or just straight up being faster and more maneuverable so you could point your muskets at dudes. A lot of your Caribbean buccaneer types also did a lot more of raiding coastal towns and stuff instead of faffing about with boats. Sometime that required more serious firepower.
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Sep 19, 2014 01:54
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For some reason I keep mulling about sea explorers. When I was young, I took for granted that actions of sailors in the West were qualitatively different from sailors in the East, where I thought was no of that "go to new places and take stuff". No Hanno, no Pythias, no Vasco da Gama. Then I grew up and learned few bits about SE Asia and of chinese reaching Madagascar. But still, I dunno. I keep trying to find some reasons for the way the portuguese (and other europeans) behaved in India and the way they were connected to the state they came from. I mean I reasons other than Portugalnis poir and da Gama is a maniac. So what led to Europeans to swarming eastern trade ports like that, canon fire and all. And were there any qualitative differences in the approach to trade? I know my question is pretty bad, I do not enough knowledge to ask better though.
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Sep 24, 2014 23:00
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Cannons, caravels, and state interest on the projects. That plus some luck. I should add on, China never had to go and make people trade with them. Their MO was to roll in and demand tribute from states that wanted the PRIVILEGE of dealing with them. That's a pretty fundamentally different mentality. It did, with the grand fleets, have a mode that led to reaching out to the outside world, rolling up, throwing down garrisons and forts but it didn't last long. the JJ fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 23:12
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Gladi posted:For some reason I keep mulling about sea explorers. When I was young, I took for granted that actions of sailors in the West were qualitatively different from sailors in the East, where I thought was no of that "go to new places and take stuff". No Hanno, no Pythias, no Vasco da Gama. Not sure if this really answers your question, but I think part of why Europeans went gangbusters exploring and colonizing and trading is geography (oceanography, really). Disclaimer: I'm an oceanographer, not a historian. If I'm on the Iberian peninsula, I can hop on the Canary current and take the trade winds west to the Americas very easily, and return on the Gulf Stream or up the Benguela along the west coast of Africa. In the age of sail, it's an oceanic freeway.  Asia has a couple problems taking advantage of this. To explain part of this, I need to mention the Intertropical Convergence Zone (aka the "doldrums") which is where the northern and southern hemisphere trade winds meet. Right at the doldrums, winds are unpredictable and weather is nasty, but importantly for our purposes the north-south position of the ITCZ shifts with seasons, and in the Southern Hemisphere the shifts are more extreme because most of Earth's land mass is in the north (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertropical_Convergence_Zone). Have a look at the currents in the Indian Ocean. They're a bit of mess, but you can see how it wouldn't be too tough to get to Madagascar on the trade winds. However, think about what happens during Southern Hemisphere summer: the ITCZ (and trade winds) shift northward. The trade winds hit the Himalayas and bam, East Asian monsoon season. Headed east from China, the position of the trade winds in the Indian Ocean is highly variable and the presence of land masses for the ITCZ and trade winds to collide with means potentially more nasty weather to deal with (the waters of SE Asia and Indonesia are also by far the warmest on the globe and this contributes to storm formation). Edit: basically this is all to say that the Indian subcontinent and Himalayas push the trade winds southward and that makes the Indian Ocean a monsoony mess. How about west across the Pacific? Well, assuming you can survive the incredible length of the voyage, you could hop on the Kuroshio and California currents (counterparts to Gulf Stream and Canary) and get to California. Portugal has very favorable winds to get to the Americas and back, and it's a reasonable distance. Starting in Asia, it's much more difficult to head east and while you have the same circular current system in the North Pacific as the North Atlantic, the distances involved are far greater. Here's a bit of a mind trip: this is all fundamentally due to the Coriolis effect. All those major current systems circulate clockwise in the N Hemisphere and counter in the South. If the Earth spun in the opposite direction, that would be flipped and the favorable sailing routes would be very different. Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 08:30 on Sep 25, 2014 |
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Sep 25, 2014 01:27
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Any of you guys know about fencing? Specifically, Spanish rapier fencing in the 18th century or thereabouts. I'm kinda curious about it, because by that time France had moved on to smallswords, and the fad had taken over most of Europe. However, the nefarious Spaniards were apparently intent on doing their own thing, and from what I've understood, a bigass rapier was part of the court dress for a long while. Here's a page from the French fencing master P.J.F. Girard's book Traité des armes, illustrating the huge-rear end Spanish rapier against the French smallsword.  Look at that guy's moustache.  Anyhow, that's about the extent of my knowledge. Wikipedia is utterly unhelpful on the topic, and I suspect Zorro might not be a trustworthy historical account. I'm sure there's a Destreza geek in here, tell me all about Spanish fencers in the early modern ages.
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Oct 20, 2014 20:54
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My study of early modern Spain, which is principally of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries anyway, has yet to extend to eighteenth century fencing, unfortunately. However, a cursory search on Google found the 1885 Schools and Masters of Fence by Egerton Castle. I also found the 1904 Bibliografía é historia de la esgrima española if you can read Spanish, which you can find on the HathiTrust digital library. Beyond fencing, there is a bit of literature about the preservation of older customs, literary traditions, etc. in Spain and Latin America despite French influences.
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Oct 22, 2014 03:25
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Thanks, I think I'll start off with Castle, then. Too bad I don't know any Spanish, that sounds like exactly the book I was looking for. Edit: I'm so mad at this guy right now. He's got good facts and references a dizzying number of fencing manuals, but his conclusions are utterly loving terrible. He shits on basically every school of fencing that his own sports fencing tradition didn't claim direct lineage from. The Spanish school stuck around for two centuries, but because it looks goofy and the people writing about it wrote insufferably, Castle just writes it off as a joke. Siivola fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Oct 22, 2014 |
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Oct 22, 2014 05:05
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Siivola posted:Thanks, I think I'll start off with Castle, then. Too bad I don't know any Spanish, that sounds like exactly the book I was looking for.
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Oct 22, 2014 11:14
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Siivola posted:Any of you guys know about fencing? Specifically, Spanish rapier fencing in the 18th century or thereabouts. I'm kinda curious about it, because by that time France had moved on to smallswords, and the fad had taken over most of Europe. However, the nefarious Spaniards were apparently intent on doing their own thing, and from what I've understood, a bigass rapier was part of the court dress for a long while. Ask from the medieval history thread.
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Oct 22, 2014 14:29
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Siivola posted:Thanks, I think I'll start off with Castle, then. Too bad I don't know any Spanish, that sounds like exactly the book I was looking for. Welcome to reading virtually every history of Spain written in English before the mid-twentieth century.
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Oct 22, 2014 14:34
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Hogge Wild posted:Ask from the medieval history thread. There's also some fencers in the martial arts thread that might be helpful.
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Oct 22, 2014 16:20
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King Hong Kong posted:Welcome to reading virtually every history of Spain written in English. Fixed that for you. Seriously, the english language literature on the Iberian peninsula is a joke, and it paradoxically gets worse as you approach the 20th century. If you created some kind of map of Europe based on the weight of literature Germany would be the size of Russia and Spain would be a pimple on France's rear end that someone scrawled "here there be Franco" across.
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Oct 22, 2014 19:26
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Cyrano4747 posted:Fixed that for you.
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Oct 22, 2014 19:31
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Cyrano4747 posted:Fixed that for you. At least for early modern Spanish history, the material written in English after Hamilton and especially from the beginning of Elliott's career to the present, while often and oddly still indebted to old historiographical concepts, is relatively decent. By relatively, I mean not reading de Bry's prints as fair and accurate depictions of Spanish imperialism or ascribing Spanish cruelty in the Sack of Rome to Spaniards' so-called "gloomy pride." Yet, despite all that, the Anglo-American historical writing about Spain from the mid/late-twentieth century on somehow still manages - at least for the most part - to be better than the histories coming from within Spain. If you don't count Braudel or Chaunu, the best and most interesting prominent historians of Spain are probably Elliott or, to a lesser extent, Parker. This is a field in which Henry Kamen of all people is influential and notable. King Hong Kong fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Oct 22, 2014 |
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Oct 22, 2014 20:07
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King Hong Kong posted:This is a field in which Henry Kamen of all people is influential and notable. Could you expand on this?
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Nov 15, 2014 21:04
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khwarezm posted:Could you expand on this? Gladly! Henry Kamen is one of the more notable late-twentieth century British historians of Spain, principally because of how prolific a writer he has been but also because he has a claim to being a supposedly serious revisionist historian of early modern Spain. In particular, his fame rests on revising and attacking the "Black Legend," most famously in his treatment of the Inquisition - The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision - which is actually among his better works. In addition to that high profile work, Kamen has written several relatively accessible biographies as well as what is essentially a textbook and has succeeded in parlaying his scholarship into modest public recognition, particularly in Spain. The problem is that despite his claim of being a revisionist, Kamen's brand of revisionism is not at all a satisfying one. If it makes any argument at all, Kamen's oeuvre attempts to remove Spaniards and Spain from the Spanish imperial project and pins empire on an ostensibly foreign Hapsburg Crown, which is such a manifestly incorrect argument that it is absolutely laughable that he is considered to be one of the better historians of Spain. Kamen ignores basic, obvious facts in pursuit of his quixotic attack on the Black Legend. Take, for example, Kamen's credulous belief that the triumph at St. Quentin was not a Spanish one because the formal administrative structure for the army involved went through the Netherlands. Yet, at the same time, Kamen essentially buys into the basic tenets of the Black Legend. For example, Italy, for Kamen, was waiting for a chance to overthrow its Spanish masters and supposedly nearly succeeded in doing so in 1647 - an argument that is hardly novel and part and parcel for Italian nationalist interpretations and, of course, the Black Legend. But the revolt that Kamen points to was not so much an attack on Spain or the Hapsburgs as it came out of internal social and political conflicts in Naples and Sicily that the action of the Spanish Crown could have played a decisive role in resolving. Indeed, the Crown's actions in the century before 1647 show that it had been acting in such a way. Instead, Kamen misreads the revolt as an emblematic moment for a crumbling, declining, and bankrupt Hapsburg empire - an interpretation that is the absolute opposite of revision - that took advantage of Spain. Empire, for Kamen, was thus a tragedy for Spain and so he adheres to an interpretation that is false. Spain was not bankrupt and broken from the moment of its imperial rise, its decline only came with defeats later in the seventeenth century. King Hong Kong fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Nov 16, 2014 |
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Nov 16, 2014 02:32
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