|
Hogge Wild posted:Turncoat. Look, the Swedes got her a better deal. Business as usual, don't make this weird.
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 12:39
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 18:39 |
|
|
Non-sapient posted:EvanSchenck, effortposting like that is what makes this forum worth the bux. Actually this one isn't hugely complicated. France was the largest and most populous polity in Europe, also among the wealthiest. Also, partly as a result of how the Hundred Years War shook out, it was administratively centralized around the King of France. Not coincidentally he was among the first monarchs to develop a professional standing army and had the best artillery on the continent. That is, France was a really big and rich country that was also very well-run when it came to fighting wars. Therefore the King of France tended to do well in wars. In aggregate the Habsburg possessions were bigger, but they were also spread out all over Europe whereas France was compact. They were also divided into a lot of different principalities that were ruled by the same man or dynasty, but were still administratively separate. All this made it harder to coordinate resources and led to a higher risk of fracturing, and in the end large parts of the Spanish Empire wound up breaking away, to France's advantage.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 13:32
|
|
|
EvanSchenck posted:It's honestly beyond my expertise. What I know about the 17th century crisis is that human societies in pretty much every region of the planet appear to have been under serious stress at around the same time, and some of them were worse off than others, Spain among them. Sometimes its easier to say what happened rather than why. Thanks, that doesn't sound too different from how it worked in France pre revolution. I assume church lands in Spain weren't taxed by the crown? Was there a big difference between cities and rural areas in how they were taxed? I know that comes up a lot in other regions whose tax policies I'm slightly more familiar with.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 14:06
|
|
|
So next question, how did Germany supplant France as the big European mainland power? Demographic collapse from constant warfare, and Bismark uniting enough smaller Germanic states into something bigger than France?
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 14:38
|
|
|
Phobophilia posted:So next question, how did Germany supplant France as the big European mainland power? Demographic collapse from constant warfare, and Bismark uniting enough smaller Germanic states into something bigger than France? France's population grew much more slowly than the rest of Europe from 1800 to WWII, which certainly had something to do with it, and was the source of much anxiety in France. They still had more people than Prussia at the time of the Franco-Prussian war, though.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 14:58
|
|
|
Phobophilia posted:So next question, how did Germany supplant France as the big European mainland power? Demographic collapse from constant warfare, and Bismark uniting enough smaller Germanic states into something bigger than France? From what I understand, the French also industrialized much slower than Germany.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 15:09
|
|
|
Fragrag posted:I remember a goon posted his father's Vietnam War memoirs way back, around 2006-2007. Does anyone remember that? I don't remember anything of that sort, but I wish I could find goon Humper-Monkey's memoir of being stationed in the German Alps in (my best guess) the 70s and 80s. They were written pretty well, I wish I'd kept the copy someone made with the posts being put into a word doc. It was like those mundane diaries y'all probably pore over daily, but with the same kind of "and then we all nearly died, but had booze and laughs over it afterwards" passages. He was shacked up in an old ex-Nazi bunker that was allegedly haunted and verifiably terrifying, one of his group walked off in a blizzard and got found like a year later, dead, the lovely wiring and weather sealing made it so snowmelt would short phone wires and make them ring at random intervals and induce a breathing-like static into the line if the ringing phones were picked up, etc. If anyone knows of those stories/the poster who wrote them, please do share. It brings to mind the phrase "War is Hell" but for the tenuous peace during detente - Peace is Hell.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 15:31
|
|
|
For anyone wanting some decent reading on the formation of early nation-states during the early modern period, with some degree of emphasis on either the bureaucratic growth of the state or the way that the economy and how they managed it tied into this: John Brewer's The Sinews of Power: War Money, and the English State 1688-1783. This is at the far end of the period we've been discussing as of late, and it's specifically about England which is always it's own bizarre little special case in many ways when compared to continental powers, but it also deals a lot in some generalities of how money, power, and the need to organize the distribution of them both lead to the rise of what we would recognize as the modern nation-state. Absolute classic. Thomas Ertman's Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Works great in conjunction with Brewer, essentially beginning the tale that Brewer finishes. He concentrates on how different administrative traditions intersected with different basic forms of governance to produce the spectrum of government types that we see during the early modern period. In essence he spreads governments along a spectrum of absolutist<-->constitutionalist and administration on a bureaucratic<---->patrimonial axis to create four basic archetypes, which he then further nuances throughout the book. As with any analytical model imposed on a broad basis across as diverse a conceptual landscape as "early modern europe" it has its flaws and one can certainly argue with aspects of it, but as a general approach to begin understanding that period it's excellent. Those two are where I would really start. One can, of course, quibble with their explanations and seek others, but they are well written and compelling and, taken together, provide a pretty plausible road from the political organization of Europe as it existed at the end of the medieval period to what we observe on the cusp of the French revolution and all of the enormous change encompassed within that span of time. More importantly they're both also really, really well sourced and have excellent secondary bibliographies that you can plunder for further reading on various aspects of their arguments. The books are a touch dated, being about 20 years old now, but not so badly that the bibliographies are going to be missing breakthrough scholarship. FAUXTON posted:I don't remember anything of that sort, but I wish I could find goon Humper-Monkey's memoir of being stationed in the German Alps in (my best guess) the 70s and 80s. I, uh, wouldn't exactly take Humper Monkey stories a reliable snapshot of a particular historical time or place. Let's just politely call them part of SA's rich tradition of compelling story telling.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 18:19
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:I, uh, wouldn't exactly take Humper Monkey stories a reliable snapshot of a particular historical time or place. Let's just politely call them part of SA's rich tradition of compelling story telling. Sure it's a smokepit story, but most military stories are exactly that anyway. And it's a good one. I could have sworn that I still had a copy of the .doc somewhere, but I can't find it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 18:37
|
|
|
Fearlessly - heedlessly - I searched for "Humper-Monkey" Apparently, they were compiled into a book at some point?
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 18:40
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Let's just politely call them part of SA's rich tradition of compelling story telling. Oh, I wouldn't call it anything else. Dude claimed he was in the 1988 airshow disaster that happened at Rammstein AFB, and later on that he was clearing out an old warehouse full of airdropped land mines and a crate broke open, deploying a bunch of tripwires, causing a long interim of standing very still. It's still written well and quite an engaging read if a little (lot) depressing at parts with the whole "getting dropped back into civilian life" issue. It's like Forrest Gump, but for the post-Vietnam, pre 9/11 era.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 19:18
|
|
|
Thanks, I'll put those on my list. A broad synthesis like Ertman is pretty much what I'm looking for, since it seems popular financial history focuses heavily on the Dutch and English which as you said aren't necessarily representative.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 19:32
|
|
|
So I'm reading about the Spanish Civil War (primarily Orwell's memoir about it) and I've got a few questions: 1. To what degree did the Anarchist forces commit atrocities? I know Franco's troops did horrific things, did the anarchists match the nationalists' brutality? 2. Was Anarchist Catalonia really an anarcho-syndicalist paradise? Not exactly a scientific question, but I guess what I'm asking is if the anarchist communities in spain were as well run as later anarchists claim they were.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 20:16
|
|
|
Briefly, on early-modern Germany in general and its emergence as a real nation in the 19th century: To start with, it's important to recognize that there really isn't a time when Central Europe wasn't a major factor in European politics or European power structures. I should also say from the outset that a lot of the very latest scholarship is really challenging the old notion that it primarily existed as a vacuum, an absence on the geo-political map of Europe, between the fall of the Carolingian empires and the rise of a politically powerful Prussia. There is a lot of work going on right now that's re-evaluating just how important the Holy Roman Empire was and how much real power they wielded, especially compared to traditional estimations of medieval/early modern France and Britain which might have somewhat over-emphasized how centralized and focused they really were. That said, it also can't be denied that the political landscape between the Rhine and the Vistula from the time of the Reformation to the eve of the French Revolution is fractious to say the least and didn't really lend itself well to projecting large amounts of power outside that region. For a whole host of reasons that I really don't want to get too mired down in - ranging from the VERY self-conscious meddling of powerful neighbors who didn't want a single, powerful state in Central Europe to the not inconsequential internal power wielded by the HRE and the Church - the process of dynastic and political amalgamation and (rough) consolidation of power that took place in England, France, and Spain never really happened to the same degree in German Central Europe. This was not helped by the Thirty Years War. The impact of that can not be underestimated. Basically all of Europe trampled all over the region and settled their dynastic, religious, and political disputes in someone else's back yard for a change. Given the way that campaigning - and especially the provisioning of troops - worked during this period that was a real problem for the people who lived in the area. It was a demographic, cultural, and political disaster that probably compares better to something like the loving Black Death than just about any other pre-industrial war. Finally, there's the Holy Roman Empire. This is a mess of a subject unto itself. If anyone has any specific questions about it I'll answer to the best of my ability, but please understand that I'm far from an expert on it. I do modern Germany, and my grasp on what's going on with the HRE is pretty strongly tied to that, so just about anyone who has done any amount of actual work on it is going to know more. I beg anyone in this thread who has worked on the HRE to pipe up and jot down some thoughts that are better organized than this. The main thing you have to understand for the purpose of this narrative is that the HRE, while it certainly exercised very real power, exercised a different type and more diffuse form of power than we usually think of when we think early modern proto-nation state. One of the really big, important issues was that the dynastic power blocks which did begin to emerge towards the end of the Early Modern Period were not strictly constrained within its borders, had strong political and dynastic ties to powers outside its borders, and had concerns and ambitions of their own. So while the HRE acted as a weak unifying force for the patchwork of small principalities, free cities, and ecclesiastical estates that made up the region, these dynastic forces and the external alliances and responsibilities they had also acted as a dividing force, pulling the region apart from without. These powers were roughly organized on a northern and southern basis. In the north you have the eventual emergence of the house of Hohenzollern as the regionally dominant power. From their home territory of the Electorate of Brandenburg they eventually, via successful dynastic policies, secured the rights to the Duchy of Prussia (which lay outside the HRE - more on that later) and a few minor states out west in the Rhineland. This gave them a strong East/West axis of power and influence that they would continue to expand on throughout this period, eventually dominating all of what we would today call northern Germany and Poland. Their Prussian holdings also complicated matters for HRE politics, as it technically made them vassals of the King of Poland, at least within their Prussian lands. In the south you have something very similar happen with the lands held by the Habsburgs. Traditionally based out of what we would today roughly recognize as Austria they rather famously built an empire via intermarriage and political alliance that would eventually come to include most of the early modern Mediterranean world, stretching from Spain to southern Italy, and on through to the borders with the Ottoman Turks. Key to our story of German unification (or lack thereof), however, very early on they pushed east into Hungary, securing a second royal crown for themselves. For anyone who has ever looked at a Habsburg eagle before, that's why they have two heads and two crowns - it represents the dual monarchy and the fact that the family essentially ran two states, one inside and one outside the HRE. Somewhat similar to the Hohenzollerns in the north, they also were organized along a strongly East/West axis that crossed the borders of the HRE. What this means for German speaking Central Europe in the early modern period is that you have two major dynastic powers, one in the far north and the other in the far south, that have major non-German dynastic concerns. Rather than dynastic politics forming a nucleus around which a proto-state can form (such as we see with the French, English, and Spanish kingdoms) German dynastic politics worked in the opposite direction, consolidating into two strong poles which worked to pull the region apart. That's more or less the status quo in Mitteleuropa for roughly-ish 250 years. Then along comes Napoleon. I won't get into the French Revolution, the beginnings of modern nationalism, and any of that stuff right now. Just accept that it happens. What's important for the Germans is that both the Prussians and the Austrians - who at this point were powerful states in their own right - got their asses handed to them in a most humiliating way by M. Napoleon, who then proceeded to radically re-draw the map of Central Europe. He basically consolidated all of the pre-revolutionary crazyness down into 39 nations, many of which received family members or loyal generals of his as their new kings. This situation didn't last long beyond his inevitable defeat, but it did have a few major consequences. After Napoleon most of the major powers of Europe came together at the Congress of Vienna to hack out a stable post-war order. One of the things that was recognized is that the HRE was effectively dead and something needed to be done with central europe. In the end they created a loose "German Confederation," which very, very quickly came to be dominated by the Prussians and the Austrians. Herein lies the key tension of our story of 19th century German unity: once again, you have one hypothetical state with two major royal dynasties as strong poles of political power, both of which have major concerns outside of German central Europe. The Hohenzollerns still had their holdings in Prussia and Silesia which, while increasingly German, were still at best a mix of German and Polish from a cultural perspective and the Habsburgs - much diminished though they were from the heights of their power in the 17th century - still simultaneously holding the crowns of both Austria and Hungary. Hungary, obviously, was no more German back then than it is today. At the same time you had a general recognition that there was some kind of entity missing from the map of central Europe, a roughly Germany-shaped cultural and linguistic thing that didn't have a nation corresponding to it. This is not to say the region was homogenous in any way; even today there are hugely significant linguistic and cultural differences between, for example, the residents of Lower Bavaria and East Frisia to name two extremes. Even so, they had more commonalities than differences when compared to their French, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, etc. neighbors. What eventually emerged were two basic ideas for how to answer this "German problem:" The "Big Germany" solution and the "Little Germany" solution. The Big Germany solution is what the German Confederation attempted. Basically you grab all of the German speaking lands - from the "Meuse to the Memel, from the Etsch to the Belt" to steal a rather appropriate lyric - and cram them into one state. Problem: there are Germans loving EVERYWHERE. Congrats, you've just created a single nation that reaches from the English Channel to the goddamned Balkans and has a dizzying array of non-German ethnic and cultural minorities in it, largely due to having to digest the Habsburg domains. Most people were rather skeptical of the ability of a country like this to stay together for long, and those who weren't were loving terrified of how potentially powerful such a large entity could be. How would you like to be the French and wake up one morning to find that instead of a bunch of sleepy little Rhenish kingdoms on your eastern frontier, none much bigger than Switzerland, you all of a sudden had a single nation with a single foreign policy and, worse, a single military that could draw on the industrial resources and manpower of half the continent? The second solution was the "Little Germany" approach, which amounted to picking either the Hohenzollerns or the Habsburgs and running with them as the core of a German state, and pulling in as many of the peripheral little petty states as possible. This had the downside of leaving a whole lot of German speaking peoples outside of what was supposed to be the new German nation, but it had the very convenient upside of being a lot more culturally homogenous. The German Confederation doesn't last long. On paper it kind of dribbles onward until the actual unification in 1871, but in reality it was a dead issue by the 1830s, and everyone recognized it was toast by 1848. Something else happened after Napoleon, and that's the fundamental reorganization and reformation of the Prussian state. Starting in 1806 and accelerating for the next decade or two King Friedrich Wilhelm III, convinced by his advisors that the embarrassing defeats inflicted by Napoleon exposed some really deep and troublesome problems in his state, oversaw the wide-scale reorganization and bureaucratization of the Prussian state in a truly breathtaking series of reforms. This is a period of history near and dear to my heart, as this is when we see the true birth of that most quintessential of all German institutions, the state civil service. If you want to stick a pin on a timeline and say "here there be modern Germany, for better or for worse" this is probably where you need to do it. From tax collection to the establishment of public schools to the organization of the military, everything gets shaken down into something that a modern German would absolutely recognize from their day to day lives as opposed to being the tattered remnants of medieval and early modern institutions. Admittedly this is a highly compressed and essentialized narrative of a much more complex issue and series of processes, but as a snap shot it works passably well. After that, everything just kind of flows downhill from there, and you can skim Wikipedia for the rest. The Prussians fight a series of wars with their German neighbors that has the net effect of kicking the Austrians (and, oh so conveniently, the Hungarians, Serbs, Bosnians, Czechs, Slovaks, and all the rest of the SE European Habsburg goulash) out of the new German state out while tying the lesser German powers to them. This creates a German-speaking nation with a single center of strong political power - Berlin - that then proceeds to get the last of the hold outs on board by goading a particularly idiotic French government into a war which rapidly coalesces into a Germanic military coalition under the Prussian banner and culminates in the declaration of a German Empire mere miles from Paris, at Versailles. Throw in a few decades of political consolidation, some industrialization, and you have the general map of Europe on the eve of WW1. Après, le déluge. Note that this is all a sketch. There are huge bits missing. I totally skipped over the 1848 Revolution, for example, and not talking about the Frankfurt Parliament is probably a criminal offense. This is all a laughably brief compression of enormously complex and important multi-century processes into something shorter than your average wikipedia recounting of a single season of Naruto. That said, this is already turning into a bit of a block of text, so I'll save all that for any questions the three people who read this far have. edit: I realize how out of place that "briefly" looks standing in front of 2200 words of stream of consciousness text dumping, but goddamnit I stand by it. This is the tl;dr version of this issue. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Jun 20, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 20:29
|
|
|
Fragrag posted:I remember a goon posted his father's Vietnam War memoirs way back, around 2006-2007. Does anyone remember that? Here you go. By the way, it looks like Garry got the book published.If you liked it, you can buy it and help support a fellow goon 
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 21:10
|
|
|
Radio Talmudist posted:So I'm reading about the Spanish Civil War (primarily Orwell's memoir about it) and I've got a few questions: 1. Pretty much to the same degree that everyone in the Spanish Civil War was committing atrocities on everyone else. They really, really weren't fans of the Church, for example, and burned a poo poo load of convents and abbeys in the early stages of things. Anyone who tries to tell you that their side came out of the Spanish Civil War clean is full of horseshit - the whole mess was a cluster gently caress of shifting allegiances and political and cultural score settling over grievances that in some cases went back nearly to the goddamned Reconquista. Trying to frame a set of "good guys" in that mess is like trying to write a heroic narrative of the Yugoslavian Civil Wars: at best you're buffing out the defects in the guys you happen to like. 2. No. First off don't believe any anarchist who points to some theoretical time and place in the past when a utopian anarchist state existed. Those people are almost uniformly full of poo poo and don't have a good grasp on what they're talking about. I say almost because I'm sure there are exceptions, but seriously most of the big moments they point to are times when the "anarchists" just happened to be in charge for once and got to enjoy loving somebody else for a change. In the specific case of the Catalonian quasi-state (which was frankly more Socialist than Anarchist . . . but whatever) in the mid-30s, it was a period of rampant forced collectivisation, plummeting industrial output due largely to the fact that anarchist industrial workers don't really make great factory managers, and the violent repression of outspoken Catholics and anyone they thought was sympathetic to the Nationalists. It was a "anarcho syndicalist paradise" in about the same way that China during the Great Leap Forward was a socialist worker's and peasant's paradise. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Jun 20, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 21:17
|
|
|
CoolCab posted:You know speaking of, working for the enemy either openly or through espionage in my mind was always associated with a death sentence. Is my assumption correct, and if so, has that always been the case? I understand during the Cold War there were prisoner transfers, and these days lots of places these days frown on capital punishment but were there other examples? Well, the threat of death for spies and traitors is pretty omnipresent for all periods that I'm familiar with, but there are tons and tons of examples of people weaseling out of the actual death sentence. Usually it's because someone who is willing - for whatever reason - to spy on one set of masters usually doesn't take too much violent prodding to get them to spy on another. The utility of the double-agent has been understood for centuries, and there are hundreds of examples littered throughout history of moments where enemy agents have been turned to either directly report on their previous masters or to feed bad information to them. For a relatively recent example of the latter, look at the extremely efficient penetration of Nazi spy rings in England during WW2. The Germans thought they were getting great data from those guys and kept sending more men and resources, who were promptly captured and themselves turned because essentially the whole network was working for the Brits. The allies fed the Germans a LOOOT of horseshit via that route during the war, most famously a bunch of "confirmations" of activity that indicated a certain cross-Channel event happening at Pas de Calais rather than Normandy.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 21:31
|
|
|
Oh, 1848. Yes, yes, we missed something. Black-red-gold. No way that genie would go back into the bottle.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 21:49
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:edit: I realize how out of place that "briefly" looks standing in front of 2200 words of stream of consciousness text dumping, but goddamnit I stand by it. This is the tl;dr version of this issue. Thanks for this, I don't think anyone here has a problem with length. I'm midway through Clark's Iron Kingdom right now, would you consider it an okay summary of Prussia for the casual reader?
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 23:01
|
|
|
CoolCab posted:You know speaking of, working for the enemy either openly or through espionage in my mind was always associated with a death sentence. Is my assumption correct, and if so, has that always been the case? I understand during the Cold War there were prisoner transfers, and these days lots of places these days frown on capital punishment but were there other examples? It also depends what you're doing for them. In the Thirty Years War I think it was pretty common for defeated mercenaries to be pressed into service with the army that just defeated them.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 23:09
|
|
Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
|
P-Mack posted:Thanks for this, I don't think anyone here has a problem with length. Yeah. There is a bunch of stuff you can nitpick at like with any big, ambitious work like that, but on the whole it's pretty solid.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 23:20
|
|
|
PittTheElder posted:It also depends what you're doing for them. In the Thirty Years War I think it was pretty common for defeated mercenaries to be pressed into service with the army that just defeated them. "Pressed into service" is a bit much. They were offered a new contract as, you know, mercenaries.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 23:34
|
|
|
They were, but I got the impression from Peter Wilson's book that there was usually a not-so-subtle coercive threat going along with that too.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 23:49
|
|
|
Nuclear Pizza posted:Here you go. Thanks, that was the one I was looking for! You don't get stuff like that on SA anymore. Killing For Peace is on Amazon, I might actually buy it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2014 23:52
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:To start with, it's important to recognize that there really isn't a time when Central Europe wasn't a major factor in European politics or European power structures. I should also say from the outset that a lot of the very latest scholarship is really challenging the old notion that it primarily existed as a vacuum, an absence on the geo-political map of Europe, between the fall of the Carolingian empires and the rise of a politically powerful Prussia. There is a lot of work going on right now that's re-evaluating just how important the Holy Roman Empire was and how much real power they wielded, especially compared to traditional estimations of medieval/early modern France and Britain which might have somewhat over-emphasized how centralized and focused they really were. Mack Walker in German Home Towns looks at this issue from the perspective of towns and small localities in the Holy Roman Empire, and he makes some interesting arguments. Traditionally the test of whether a political unit was successful in a historical sense is to determine how much rear end they kicked in wars, but Walker sort of says, hang on, why is that the only measure of success? What if the purpose of the HRE from 1648 on wasn't to fight wars, which by then they'd probably had enough of, but rather the purpose of the HRE was exactly the opposite. It was supposed to avert wars, stymie ambitious princes, and protect local traditions and self-rule from the overweening nobility. Ordinarily a historian looks at these things as roadblocks to progress because they basically consist of stopping the state from doing stuff (the HRE as power vacuum), but as far as most people were concerned the stuff that the early modern state wanted to do was a lovely deal all around.
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 00:33
|
|
|
That sort of makes sense!
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 01:16
|
|
|
Fragrag posted:Thanks, that was the one I was looking for! You don't get stuff like that on SA anymore. Do it, it was a drat good read.
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 01:33
|
|
|
EvanSchenck posted:Mack Walker in German Home Towns looks at this issue from the perspective of towns and small localities in the Holy Roman Empire, and he makes some interesting arguments. Traditionally the test of whether a political unit was successful in a historical sense is to determine how much rear end they kicked in wars, but Walker sort of says, hang on, why is that the only measure of success? What if the purpose of the HRE from 1648 on wasn't to fight wars, which by then they'd probably had enough of, but rather the purpose of the HRE was exactly the opposite. It was supposed to avert wars, stymie ambitious princes, and protect local traditions and self-rule from the overweening nobility. Ordinarily a historian looks at these things as roadblocks to progress because they basically consist of stopping the state from doing stuff (the HRE as power vacuum), but as far as most people were concerned the stuff that the early modern state wanted to do was a lovely deal all around. Walkers book is amazing and should be read by anyone who wants to wrap their skull around what the gently caress the HRE was. It's also a great example of a historian reading the available evidence from a different angle to challenge preexisting assumptions and narratives.
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 01:36
|
|
|
WRT to the precious metals causing inflation thing, you have to be careful not to frame it in a modern setting too much. Yes in a modern economy with fiat currency, suddenly increasing the money supply will cause inflation, but that's based on the assumption that a) the economy in general is sophisticated enough that people start to have expectations about the future, i.e. if the government is printing money now, they will probably continue to do so in the future, and thus paper money will be worth less and less, but this isn't necessarily something you would also expect in the case of say a sudden big strike in the gold mines, and b)the money supply was starting out from a position of being sufficient. A large factor in the economic conflicts that arose in much of the world starting from the 19th century was basically the inability of an economy based on precious metals to actually deal with rapid industrialization and economic growth. If your economy uses gold as a monetary base, and your economy grew faster than the relatively fixed growth in the gold supply, then you are de facto dealing with deflation. In a deflationary enviroment all kinds of things start happening e.g. people who already own lots of gold(i.e. nobles, upper class, government) become relatively richer because everything else priced in gold(i.e. poo poo that the workers and peasants and small artisans actually produce with their labour) starts becoming cheaper, debtors (i.e. workers and peasants and small artisans) become poorer while debt holders (the rich/nobility) start getting richer. If all the Europe is based on the same lovely gold standard, and one country suddenly finds itself with an expanded gold supply, then that country will surge ahead economically because it's the only country that can actually do modern monetary policy (i.e. facilitate a mild inflationary enviroment like modern central banks do ) while all the of other countries are still stuck in the 1400s. It's something that isn't really a problem anyone living today will have any experience of since fiat currency has been a thing for a long time and no modern economy has ever had to deal with any sort of real deflation, but a real issue 200 years ago. Just as an example, there is a significant body of scholarship exploring how the relative prosperity of Qing China in the 18th century was related to the sudden and massive increase in silver inflows from Latin America at the same time, and how the decline in the 19th century coincided with an equally rapid silver outflow due to the opium trade and the exhaustion of those Latin American silver mines. Or you could look up Milton Friedman's somewhat famous paper on how FDR's silver purchase act of 1934 effectively sent the Republic of China into an economic depression just prior to WW2. Throatwarbler fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Jun 21, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 02:23
|
|
|
Yep, prior to the industrial revolution, the economy in peacetime would grow at an absolutely glacial pace by modern standards, so it wouldn't take all that much specie to keep up. Around 1800 2% annual growth (as an incredibly rough estimate) became the new normal, so we get bank crises and depressions every decade until well into the 20th century. I do question the assumption that deflation would automatically benefit the nobility- I'd expect many of them would have a lot of their wealth tied up in land as opposed to gold, and many would have huge debts of their own. But in any case, government backed fiat money is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 03:21
|
|
|
P-Mack posted:I do question the assumption that deflation would automatically benefit the nobility- I'd expect many of them would have a lot of their wealth tied up in land as opposed to gold, and many would have huge debts of their own. Well since the 18th century nobility weren't packaging their land holdings into CDOs, having huge debts of their own just meant that someone else who did have a lot of gold was holding those huge debts, and it probably wasn't the proletariat, so in aggregate it's the same thing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 03:38
|
|
|
So why are we talking about deflation, when the gold and silver that Spanish brought into the system expanded the monetary base without expanding the material base?
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 06:01
|
|
|
All the money in the world won't do you any good if none of your investments pay out. Spain lost control of too much of its possessions, lost too many wars, and it didn't help that the bloodline they had been trying to put in control of all of Europe eventually went bad. They had a good run while it lasted, but trying to focus the bulk of European power into a single bloodline through marriages and force is like trying to balance a pyramid on its tip. Spain didn't all go down at once, it slowly crumbled away until Charlie 2 there couldn't provide a sufficient heir and the War of Spanish Succession took away most of Spain's holdings in Europe, and even after that, Spain limped along until the US put an end to its colonies.
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 07:15
|
|
|
JaucheCharly posted:So why are we talking about deflation, when the gold and silver that Spanish brought into the system expanded the monetary base without expanding the material base? We went off topic.
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 14:45
|
|
|
Eh not really. Military history doesn't exist in a vacuum and sometimes other poo poo is going to have important military consequences.
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 15:14
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Eh not really. Military history doesn't exist in a vacuum and sometimes other poo poo is going to have important military consequences. I think the issue was more that we were talking about deflation when the topic was inflation.
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 15:30
|
|
|
The discussion is legit, I just wonder why we talk about a deflationary situation? Wasn't this an inflationary situation?
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 15:42
|
|
|
Throatwarbler was positing that the inflation caused by the injection of specie from the New World might not have been such a bad thing, because it may have ended a long period of deflation. That deflation would have been caused not by the shrinking of the money supply, but by the economy growing faster than the money supply. And deflation tends to be a lot worse for the economy that inflation, because it just encourages hoarding. I don't have any of the expertise to say if any of that is correct or not in the case of pre-Columbian Europe, but that's why we're talking about deflation.
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 16:22
|
|
|
Fragrag posted:Thanks, that was the one I was looking for! You don't get stuff like that on SA anymore. Killing for Peace is what motivated me to buy an account here back in 2007. Nice to see it come ups every now and then
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 16:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 18:39 |
|
|
How effective was privateering at intercepting Spanish shipments?
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2014 17:18
|
|
