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feedmegin posted:I'm not sure that skilled labour is generally classified as middle class, though. Right, so before we can define the early modern period, we need to define middle class. I'll clear my schedule.
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Jan 23, 2018 17:45
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feedmegin posted:I'm not sure that skilled labour is generally classified as middle class, though. You should be sure though? Middle class for most of history means "not a noble, but also not poor". And it's merchants, skilled labor, and educated professionals that usually meet that definition.
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Jan 23, 2018 17:47
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There is no general definition of middle class that is always true or accurate .
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Jan 23, 2018 17:48
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paragon1 posted:You should be sure though? Middle class for most of history means "not a noble, but also not poor". And it's merchants, skilled labor, and educated professionals that usually meet that definition. This is not something that everyone agrees on, though. In general, artisans with skills, your barrel makers and carpenters and so on who are making money using their physical efforts, tend to be counted somewhere at the top of the working class - but you can ask 5 different historians what 'middle class' means and get 5 subtly different answers. Cf white collar versus blue collar today - a skilled welder or whatever is not traditionally considered middle class. (Of course, this also tends to vary by which modern day country/culture you were brought up in, as well)
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Jan 23, 2018 17:59
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to me, the distinct feature of the early modern "rise of the merchants" compared to previous such processes is that they didn't rise into the aristocracy so much as they effectively supplanted it on a wide scale over the course of the period. this happened in individual localities at different times and, of course, some places like some of the italian city states were already dominated by commercial interests beforehand. skilled labor seems ancillary to the question - the driving force of the early modern is the gradually accelerating power of capital to strangle traditional aristocratic dominance. japan is really an illustrative model here - the lesser aristocracy was gradually weakened over the course of the shogunate, with the very mechanism used to weaken them, being forced to alternate residence between their province and the capital, strengthening the merchant class immensely as massive amounts of aristocratic wealth were spent on the trips to and from edo. the story is less cleanly cut elsewhere and putting firm year boundaries on this process within a country, let alone an entire continent, is probably a fool's errand Jazerus fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Jan 23, 2018 |
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Jan 23, 2018 18:01
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I guess the central thing I was thinking was that, back in those days, especially among the sort of societies that left clear written records, most of the people would've thought of wealth coming from the land, like with farming. The technology wasn't really there for people to think of labor as the wealth-creation component.. So far as I know, craftsmen were fairly insular and you'd probably need the rise of cities to hit the big time as one anyways. One of the key things about the early modern was that all of a sudden the sources of wealth changed enough that raw land ownership wasn't enough anymore, so all of a sudden old feudal land ownership wasn't enough to maintain status on its own. Gold rushes are the peak of people thinking they can get some kind of wealth for mostly nothing. I figured even in the ancient or medieval eras, people could pan or swing pickaxes, but I also figured if the idea of wealth was tied to land and farming (or cows), that sort of thing wouldn't really occur. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Jan 23, 2018 |
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Jan 23, 2018 18:05
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Jazerus posted:to me, the distinct feature of the early modern "rise of the merchants" compared to previous such processes is that they didn't rise into the aristocracy so much as they effectively supplanted it on a wide scale over the course of the period. this happened in individual localities at different times and, of course, some places like some of the italian city states were already dominated by commercial interests beforehand. Usually we have a pretty firm idea of when the process ends though 
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Jan 23, 2018 18:11
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feedmegin posted:This is not something that everyone agrees on, though. In general, artisans with skills, your barrel makers and carpenters and so on who are making money using their physical efforts, tend to be counted somewhere at the top of the working class - but you can ask 5 different historians what 'middle class' means and get 5 subtly different answers. The sort of production I'm particularly referring to are skilled artisans who run small workshops, consisting of themselves, family members, and the odd apprentice or employee. They probably own their tool and equipment, but not necessarily the buildings they work in. If they have adult employees, they pay them a salary, but they perform the bulk of the most difficult handiwork themselves. It's from this network of small workshops that the guns and printed matter which define the early modern period emerge.
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Jan 23, 2018 18:12
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There's no such thing as the middle class, hth
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Jan 23, 2018 18:42
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Mr Enderby posted:Another version is to see how early you can place the start of the eighteenth century. I'm with Hobsbawm on this one. 1789 to 1914 is 19th century and 1914 to 1991 is 20th century. Though I suppose you could argue that the 21st century truly began with 9/11.
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Jan 23, 2018 21:04
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FreudianSlippers posted:I'm with Hobsbawm on this one. 1789 to 1914 is 19th century and 1914 to 1991 is 20th century. Though I suppose you could argue that the 21st century truly began with 9/11. what century-defining thing happened in 1992
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Jan 23, 2018 21:07
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cheetah7071 posted:what century-defining thing happened in 1992 quote:On August 6, 1991,[18] Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, inviting collaborators.[19] This date is sometimes confused with the public availability of the first web servers, which had occurred months earlier.
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Jan 23, 2018 21:09
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When I was in university I did some project where I was writing about Hobsbawm and I jokingly added, in footnote of course, some bit about him being ancient enough to remember everything he has ever written about. Then just after I handed it I found out that he had died a few weeks earlier which meant my joke about him being a immortal lich of some sort was in pretty bad taste.
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Jan 23, 2018 21:12
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SlothfulCobra posted:Gold rushes are the peak of people thinking they can get some kind of wealth for mostly nothing. I figured even in the ancient or medieval eras, people could pan or swing pickaxes, but I also figured if the idea of wealth was tied to land and farming (or cows), that sort of thing wouldn't really occur. Well one of the questions is whether the powers that be would allow random people to go out and start digging gold. If all that land the gold is believed to be on is owned by some aristocrat who wants to monopolize said gold for his own purposes, you can't really flock to it. The gold rushes you see in the Americas are different because from the colonial point of view that land was unowned, and so could be given away by the state freely, since the only alternative was 'no production'.
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Jan 23, 2018 21:25
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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SlothfulCobra posted:
I think you mean bitcoin.
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Jan 24, 2018 03:04
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Mr Enderby posted:Fun game: you draw two random dates, and then you have to construct an argument for why they are the logical start and end of the early modern period. Another version is to see how early you can place the start of the eighteenth century. Some people reckon 1660 is the limit, but I reckon that if I really put my mind to it I could get back as far as 1603. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 03:14
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feedmegin posted:For extra fun, this also tends to depend on which country you're talking about.
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Jan 24, 2018 03:16
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Panning for cows in a stream is highly inefficient. Digging cows out of the rock though mining is more work but much more effective.
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Jan 24, 2018 03:17
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Jazerus posted:the driving force of the early modern is the gradually accelerating power of capital to strangle traditional aristocratic dominance. and more in the early seventeenth than in the mid seventeenth if capital strangled traditional aristocratic dominance in the military, it relaxed its grip quite a bit come the 1690s
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Jan 24, 2018 03:20
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FreudianSlippers posted:I'm with Hobsbawm on this one. 1789 to 1914 is 19th century and 1914 to 1991 is 20th century. Though I suppose you could argue that the 21st century truly began with 9/11.
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Jan 24, 2018 03:32
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HEY GUNS posted:The 20th century ended in 1991, but the 21st century began on 9/11. I call the stuff in between "the end of history," jokingly. No. Logically, this means that the 22nd century began on 9/11.
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Jan 24, 2018 03:40
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The 21st century ended on 9/11 and everything after that will be known to historians only as "The Post-9/11 World" 
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Jan 24, 2018 03:52
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HEY GUNS posted:counterpoint: there are more nobles in the officer corps in the 18th and 19th centuries than in the 17th unsurprising because military service became more fundamental to the identity of the aristocracy as they lost sway in other spheres. well into the modern period, the aristocracy retained a cultural affinity for the military that was self-perpetuating - still lots of lord whatsits getting killed in WW1. of course many members of the aristocracy adapted to capital's takeover of the economy, too, and retained their relative wealth by playing by capital's rules. it was never a linear process or anything tho, more of a complicated decentralized global class struggle that ebbed and flowed Jazerus fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 05:06
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Jazerus posted:class struggle
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Jan 24, 2018 05:12
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HEY GUNS posted:please don't bring that poo poo here it's a descriptive term for what happened i'm not about to go on a ten page rant about marxist theory or anything i was agreeing with you with that statement, even
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Jan 24, 2018 05:16
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HEY GUNS posted:please don't bring that poo poo here I mean if you're talking about history of hitherto existing society then you sort of need to address it... 
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Jan 24, 2018 05:32
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bunch of Jupiter-damned populare scum itt
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Jan 24, 2018 06:48
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I am pretty sure once you factor in phantom time the 18th century started with the Fall of Constantinople.
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Jan 24, 2018 07:18
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Jack2142 posted:I am pretty sure once you factor in phantom time the 18th century started with the Fall of Constantinople. rome fell last week and no-one even noticed https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-18/mortal-again-christie-blocked-at-vip-entrance-to-newark-airport
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Jan 24, 2018 07:20
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Jack2142 posted:I am pretty sure once you factor in phantom time the 18th century started with the Fall of Constantinople. With phantom time wouldn't it be the 12th century
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Jan 24, 2018 07:20
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Jazerus posted:well into the modern period, the aristocracy retained a cultural affinity for the military that was self-perpetuating Still true today, really. Prince Harry flew Apaches in Afghanistan. Prince Andrew fought in the Falklands war. It's a thing.
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Jan 24, 2018 11:54
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HEY GUNS posted:please don't bring that poo poo here I thought you were a historian
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Jan 24, 2018 12:44
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fantastic in plastic posted:bunch of Jupiter-damned populare scum itt look at this loving optimate jerkoff over here good luck defending Rome with the landowners when there are like 20 of you total
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Jan 24, 2018 15:57
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I mean you don't "gotta hand it to them" on things like slavery but when the plebs called a strike they straight up abandoned the city and told the patricians to make their own bread.
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Jan 24, 2018 16:19
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Mr Enderby posted:The sort of production I'm particularly referring to are skilled artisans who run small workshops, consisting of themselves, family members, and the odd apprentice or employee. They probably own their tool and equipment, but not necessarily the buildings they work in. If they have adult employees, they pay them a salary, but they perform the bulk of the most difficult handiwork themselves. It's from this network of small workshops that the guns and printed matter which define the early modern period emerge.
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Jan 24, 2018 16:24
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Only low-born hoi polloi proles think the ancient world had class struggle.
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Jan 24, 2018 16:47
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Class struggle is a useful heuristic devise even if it has some practical flaws. Like how biologists can talk about species competing with one another, even if formally they know selection occurs on the individual level. Although I believe a Weberian method is necessary to understand historical processes we often want to refer to their implications for broad swaths of the population, and class struggle is a simple and comprehensible way of doing so that in many circumstances won’t differ much from the Weberian model
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Jan 24, 2018 16:57
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There's class struggle in any organised society, it's just a traditional Marxist model is going to look like total nonsense when applied to pre-modern societies
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Jan 24, 2018 17:03
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The local magistrate has been alerted that there's a band of bagaudae posting in this thread.
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Jan 24, 2018 17:59
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I was reading a book about early church history and it asserted that we know that early Christianity was popular among the downtrodden because early Christians used Greek, the language of the lower classes in AD 50-250 Rome. I was under the impression that Greek was like an educated language?
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Jan 24, 2018 18:13
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