|
Elyv posted:Could triremes even sail the Channel? I know they were created for the calmer waters of the Mediterranean. On a good day you can see one side of the Channel from the other. Its not exactly the Pacific.
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 21:34
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 00:31 |
|
|
Running shallow draft ships across the channel is a big risk though, since the waters are a lot choppier than the Med. Julius Caesar lost a significant part of his first invasion fleet to bad weather that his ships were not equipped to deal with when he tried to invade Britain, due to using shallow draft ships to try to cross the channel.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 22:03
|
|
|
Triremes are pretty purpose built coastal warships, like you may notice if you look at a diagram that they don't carry supplies. Their operational range is functionally "one day." Which is not to say that the Romans/Greeks would be incapable of making a boat that could operate further afield, but triremes were pretty built specifically to "deliver a giant metal ram right into another boat right next to you as quickly as possible." Not troop transportation or commerce or even colonial naval patrols.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 22:42
|
|
|
CrypticFox posted:Running shallow draft ships across the channel is a big risk though, since the waters are a lot choppier than the Med. Julius Caesar lost a significant part of his first invasion fleet to bad weather that his ships were not equipped to deal with when he tried to invade Britain, due to using shallow draft ships to try to cross the channel. Might depend a lot on the shallow draft vessel? Vikings seemed to manage the North Sea, Channel, Irish Sea, and pretty much every other body of water between Reykjavik and Riga pretty well with vessels that were notoriously shallow enough draft to go way the hell up rivers as well. Maybe it has more to do with the sailors? I could well imagine someone who's spent their life dealing with those ships in those waters being a bit better at it than someone who's spent their whole live in the Med before getting dragged up by an adventuring general.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 22:43
|
|
|
Tulip posted:Triremes are pretty purpose built coastal warships, like you may notice if you look at a diagram that they don't carry supplies. Their operational range is functionally "one day." What was the cargo vessel of the Roman era? I asked this once some years ago in the milhist thread, I don't think anyone had an answer, but we see sailing technology progress to bigger and faster ships until steam made them obsolete, but was there some technology or know-how deficit that prevented development of tall ships during earlier? Or: why didn't the Romans build HMS Victory
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 22:47
|
|
|
zoux posted:What was the cargo vessel of the Roman era?
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 22:49
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Might depend a lot on the shallow draft vessel? Vikings seemed to manage the North Sea, Channel, Irish Sea, and pretty much every other body of water between Reykjavik and Riga pretty well with vessels that were notoriously shallow enough draft to go way the hell up rivers as well. That is true, shallow draft is not the best descriptor. What I more meant was unstable ships. Longboats are much better designed for stability than Ancient Mediterranean galleys were. As Tulip said, those ram-based galleys like triremes were designed for one thing, and everything else was compromised to make them good at that. I think ram-based galleys are a lot more top heavy than a Viking longboat is, since a ram-based longboat needs an absurd crew-to-mass ratio in order to be able to maneuver and ram at high speeds, and there are probably other factors that make them less stable as well. In general, ram-based galleys were not very stable ships, the Punic Wars are full of stories of Mediterranean storms wiping out fleets of galleys.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 22:52
|
|
|
The Viking Knarr (longships are a different thing which was more of a coastal or river ship as though it's very long it doesn't go very deep) was pretty revolutionary in it's time as a boat that worked well for long voyages over open ocean far from coasts. A knarr (plural knörr) was much wider and shorter than a longship and thus went deeper into the water and was what they used for transatlantic voyages. FreudianSlippers fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Mar 9, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 22:57
|
|
|
The way triremes/polyremes were constructed has a big part in this, too. I don't remember the exact details, but they're much more fragile than ships built later. It's part of why ramming was such a successful tactic at the time, ships built with later technology wouldn't explode the same way Hellenistic warships did when you rammed them. Viking ships are even more advanced, their construction is insane and they were incredibly tough and stable. I think it's pretty accepted that ships that were used in the North Sea were quite different from the ones in the Mediterranean: you might get lucky one day and be able to sail your triremes across the channel, but that is a very, very expensive risk to take.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 23:06
|
|
|
zoux posted:What was the cargo vessel of the Roman era? Stuff like corbita and oneraria. Large bottom craft that were sail driven rather than oar driven. The logic of relying primarily on sails for cargo rather than oars I think should be obvious. They'd have some rowers but rowers cost money so the emphasis and reliance on them would be lower. And of course efficiency and reliability is more important than short-distance speed or maneuverability. https://www.worldhistory.org/image/3925/roman-mosaic-showing-the-transport-of-an-elephant/ There's a cool mosaic of what one of those boats looked like. https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/roman-cargo-ship-0016510 This article is about a nearly intact roman cargo ship. One of the kind of obvious things about it compared to Roman warships: its oval rather than straight. Totally different layout, totally different priority. As for why the tech didn't get to where it hypothetically could have earlier: I have no idea. I can say that there's a huge interruption where ships of the size that romans made were not made for centuries because there were just so many economic obstacles to shipping in the way the romans did during the middle ages, but i can't speak to like what sort of specific techniques lead to x y or z, cuz tbh I just don't know very much about shipbuilding and it seems like kind of a tough question.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 23:08
|
|
|
Tulip posted:As for why the tech didn't get to where it hypothetically could have earlier: I have no idea. I can say that there's a huge interruption where ships of the size that romans made were not made for centuries because there were just so many economic obstacles to shipping in the way the romans did during the middle ages, but i can't speak to like what sort of specific techniques lead to x y or z, cuz tbh I just don't know very much about shipbuilding and it seems like kind of a tough question. My uneducated guess would be that sailing conditions are very different in the Med than the Atlantic, but I don't actually know what the med is like in that regard!  loving rules "Stop pulling!" "No you guys stop pulling, it's our elephant"
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 23:10
|
|
|
FishFood posted:The way triremes/polyremes were constructed has a big part in this, too. I don't remember the exact details, but they're much more fragile than ships built later. It's part of why ramming was such a successful tactic at the time, ships built with later technology wouldn't explode the same way Hellenistic warships did when you rammed them. Going to contradict my thing about saying I don't know anything about shipbuilding: mediterranean boats were built "mortice and tenon," a diagram may help more than me trying to describe it (  ), while the nordic shipbuilding was "clinker," where the planks themselves overlap each other and are nailed/screwed through the overlap. Clinker has some advantages and fell off because there's an upper limit on how big you can get a ship clinker built as opposed to carvel built.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 23:14
|
|
|
There's a work by Lucian from the 2nd century AD describing a Roman cargo ship carrying grain from Egypt as being 180 feet long and 45 or more feet wide, which is a pretty substantially sized ship. Although how Lucian got those measurements I don't know, he may have pulled them out of his rear end.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 23:21
|
|
|
I've never been in a boat in the Mediterranean but I've been in one in the Atlantic and even in summer it gets pretty rocky. I imagine the Mediterranean is a bit like the Baltic, basically an oversized lake in terms of waves.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 23:21
|
|
|
CrypticFox posted:There's a work by Lucian from the 2nd century AD describing a Roman cargo ship carrying grain from Egypt as being 180 feet long and 45 or more feet wide, which is a pretty substantially sized ship. Although how Lucian got those measurements I don't know, he may have pulled them out of his rear end. The Lake Nemi ships were even bigger than that so it's not impossible, although Caligula's orgy boats don't need to be as seaworthy as a grain hauler.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2023 23:29
|
|
|
zoux posted:I asked this once some years ago in the milhist thread, I don't think anyone had an answer, but we see sailing technology progress to bigger and faster ships until steam made them obsolete, but was there some technology or know-how deficit that prevented development of tall ships during earlier? Or: why didn't the Romans build HMS Victory I feel like the biggest obstacle is probably more the fact that a lot of reliable navigation techniques hadn't been developed yet. Compasses weren't in use yet and wind and ocean currents weren't that understood yet. You're not gonna build big ships to go far away from land until you're more sure that you'll be able to get back. Nessus posted:Who would they sail such ships against? They had no cannon either, though I’m sure they would have been happy to have them. You don't really need a tall ship for combat, you need it to go far and see new things. Which I guess Roman Emperors were busy enough with the stupid huge amount of land under their control, but it's still believable private Romans might've wanted to try? Either to go deep sea fishing or to sail around the Sahara. Although I'm not sure sub-saharan west africa would've both developed an economy producing a lot of stuff for Romans to buy or if they had much of a coastal presence for Roman explorers to find them by sea? I remember there was something weird about early African groups not being on the coast.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2023 00:02
|
|
|
Caesar's battles against Veneti were interesting in this regard. While the the battles against sea faring Veneti happened mostly in Bay of Biscay rather than English Channel, the seafaring proved difficult to Romans. They were using Roman galleys to fight against an opponent who not only knew the tides and rough currents of the area, Veneti also had bigger sail ships that were resistant to ramming, making the use of typical Mediterranean tactics difficult. Veneti ships' higher gunwale made it very easy for them to shower the Roman galleys with missile weapons and gave them an edge in boarding actions. But in typical Roman fashion, they analyzed the situation and adapted by giving sailors and marines very long poles with hooks and they used them to cut the oarless Veneti ships' rigging and sails making them impossible to maneuver and thus easy targets for Roman galleys.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2023 00:30
|
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:I've never been in a boat in the Mediterranean but I've been in one in the Atlantic and even in summer it gets pretty rocky. I lived on the Mediterranean for a full year and while the wave action was never as severe as the pAcific it can and does pickup pretty violently. It’s just that there’s barely any tide.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2023 02:07
|
|
|
the romans could and did lose ships to the weather in the med. it's pretty close to an ideal sea to have stuck in the middle of your empire, but it's not perfect
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2023 02:23
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:I feel like the biggest obstacle is probably more the fact that a lot of reliable navigation techniques hadn't been developed yet. Compasses weren't in use yet and wind and ocean currents weren't that understood yet. You're not gonna build big ships to go far away from land until you're more sure that you'll be able to get back. I dunno about that, I think you're underestimating people's ability to navigate prior to tools like compasses. Just look at the sort of distances polynesian sailors were able to travel across the pacific.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2023 11:06
|
|
|
Radical 90s Wizard posted:I dunno about that, I think you're underestimating people's ability to navigate prior to tools like compasses. Just look at the sort of distances polynesian sailors were able to travel across the pacific. On the other hand, would the Romans have developed such techniques? Working out complex celestial navigational systems makes sense when you're living on a flyspeck island out in the middle of nowhere and are trying to get to another flyspeck island in the middle of nowhere. It might not pay off quite so well when you're never more than a few days at best from land, almost all of which is inhabited and which provides a variety of geographical features you can use to navigate by. Why bother with reading the stars when you can just follow the coasts? Worst come to worst, even if you get lost just point in one direction until you hit land and then figure out where to go from there. I'll also add that not having to deal with tide REALLY cuts down on the complexity of navigation - if you have a chart, you can just point where you want to go and keep driving that way and barring slight issues with the wind shoving you from side to side you'll get there. Once tides are in play you have to plot courses that specifically counteract what the tide is doing, which changes from hour to hour and is of course different from place to place. There are some points around the Channel Islands for instance where trying to sail against the tide will leave the average sailing ship actually moving backwards until the tide changes. A good course across the Channel usually has the ship pointed off at an angle from where they're trying to go, splitting the difference between tidal changes over time to work out the direction to point at based on how long it's estimated it'll take to get across (since the alternative of adjusting your course every single hour is considered by most to be too much work). I could see someone being used to navigating in the Med being completely unprepared for navigating in the Atlantic and North Sea. SlothfulCobra posted:You don't really need a tall ship for combat, you need it to go far and see new things. So regarding pre-gunpowder naval combat, I actually wrote something up in the Military History thread about this. That being said it focused on developments on English medieval combat so I'm not sure how much of this is applicable to Roman naval combat which I know less about, but some of the general principles are likely still true. In particular, it's difficult for two fleets of sailing ships to assemble and intercept each other, and even when they do they need to wait until conditions are perfect (i.e. mostly calm) before engaging because otherwise the odds of them smashing each other to pieces in the waves while trying to board is pretty high. If two sailing ships did lock themselves into combat the bigger ship with higher sides and more crew generally has t he advantage since it's basically the high ground advantage when boarding. Galleys are also important for their strategic mobility - not having to wait for wind and tide and being able to set out on a moment's notice means that any galley force is basically a bunch of boats full of armed, angry men you could land on a foreign shore to gently caress poo poo up whenever you feel like it. That being said, medieval galleys apparently mostly dropped ramming as a tactic - possibly, though this is speculation, because shipbuilding techniques had advanced to the point where a galley actually capable of ramming a ship to death would have been unfeasibly large to move by oar? zoux posted:What was the cargo vessel of the Roman era? I don't have a definite answer but I suspect a large part of it would be "Why did they need to?" One of the things about sailing the Med is that they have relatively reliable and predictable wind patterns. The chief advantage of something like an East Indiaman over a Roman grain ship is that it's better able to deal with varied weather patterns and conditions, but if all they're doing is plodding down a super stable trade route with a steady trade wind in the same conditions over the course of decades they aren't that much better than a Roman vessel other than being much bigger and maybe being a bit handier to bring into a harbor.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2023 13:18
|
|
|
zoux posted:Or: why didn't the Romans build HMS Victory I think this is akin to asking why they didn't build steam engines, or more precisely a steam train network. There's a LOT of technology of varying kinds that went into building age-of-sail tall ships; they were a kind of technological marvel, despite being made mostly of rope and wood and cloth. You have to have the right kinds of rope and the right kinds of wood and the right kinds of cloth arrayed in the right ways and built and managed by the right people with the right skills (which may take hundreds of years to develop in your population), and even if you have those things, it has to be economically and politically desireable to do so and so forth. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Mar 10, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2023 14:43
|
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:The Viking Knarr (longships are a different thing which was more of a coastal or river ship as though it's very long it doesn't go very deep) was pretty revolutionary in it's time as a boat that worked well for long voyages over open ocean far from coasts.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2023 19:49
|
|
|
Lead out in cuffs posted:Is there commentary about horrible regional accents in ancient Rome? The empire was pretty big, and I can't imagine everyone spoke even fully mutually intelligible Latin. There is a Catullus poem (84) where he mocks another of his girlfriend’s suitors for his dumb accent. I don’t think we know where in Roman territory it the other suitor was from.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2023 20:05
|
|
|
Radical 90s Wizard posted:I dunno about that, I think you're underestimating people's ability to navigate prior to tools like compasses. Just look at the sort of distances polynesian sailors were able to travel across the pacific. Yeah, using techniques that I don't think Romans could've even imagined. There are techniques that could be used for deep sea navigation without a compass, also there are ways to create a compass or other forms of later naval technology with what resources the Romans had access to, but the point is that Romans didn't know any of that, and they probably didn't even know that these things could be known. It's kind of hard to figure how technological/academic development happens, often it's easier to dissect things in terms of the physically existing technology and industrial capacity, but there's a lot of things that boil down to people either knowing or not knowing. A number of aspects of naval navigation don't even use something as simple as one technological gizmo to do the navigation, but often tables of data to crosscheck against that I don't even really know how you develop from scratch, much less figure out that what you really need for a given situation is a table of numbers. If you look at the absolute mess of islands out in the pacific, starting from the big ones in Indonesia and the Philippines and trailing out into all the little tiny islands, it's not hard to imagine how polynesian explorers might've developed a confidence that there were a bunch of islands out there and also the techniques to tell what islands are where by measuring ocean currents with their scrotum, but even then a lot of places it still took a very long time for Polynesians to find and settle. Even if like a Greek could figure out ocean currents from their little mess of islands, it wouldn't really help them with the vast emptiness of the Atlantic or even most of the Mediterranean or the Black Sea that aren't speckled with little islands.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2023 21:17
|
|
|
It's also an issue of motivation. The Romans had no interest in oceanic exploration, so they never bothered to learn to do it. They probably could have if they had worked at it long and hard enough, but mastering the Mediterranean was enough. The industrial revolution happened in Britain in the 18th century for a reason (or a confluence of multiple reasons). They didn't develop steam technology because it seemed like a fun thing to try - they pretty much had to in order to survive.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2023 21:23
|
|
|
From his post it seemed like he was speaking in general, not in terms of Romans specifically, which is why I found it weird 
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2023 22:04
|
|
|
Deteriorata posted:It's also an issue of motivation. The Romans had no interest in oceanic exploration, so they never bothered to learn to do it. They probably could have if they had worked at it long and hard enough, but mastering the Mediterranean was enough. So my only source for this is the excellent and dead far far too soon History of Exploration podcast https://historyofexploration.net/author/historyofexploration/ But a thing that I found really interesting and to the point about all of this is that the Carthaginians seemingly did do these kind of oceanic explorations that the Romans didn't. So the Romans really did not lack the capabilities in a basic, hard sense: they had a peer power who had done so, and had the Punic Wars gone differently, up to and including "the Romans capture but do not burn Carthage, thus taking its knowledge more intact," we might have seen them do things differently. But they didn't. There's a scifi conceit, that in my more bitter moments I say that neoclassical economists believe, that if something can be done somebody will do so in short order. I think this is quite silly and silly in some very obvious ways. We could go to the moon: we've done so before, several times. We don't have a lot of reason to go to the moon. In theory somebody could create an economic situation where going to the moon is highly profitable, and if that happens in the future they may look back at us, and go "what the gently caress was wrong with 21st century people that they didn't take the Saturn program and turn it into a regular commute?" From where we stand this is kind of an absurd question: we do not currently have the economic or technological context where going to the moon serves much purpose other than curiosity and national prestige - and now that its been done several times, the national prestige element is rather reduced. In any event, there's a lot of things the Romans could do but didn't and I think most of the time its because the things they were already doing worked well enough. Things like steam engines and transatlantic voyages I think is going too romantic, I think its better to talk about a much simpler and much more obviously useful technology: windmills. There's really very little standing between things the Romans were already using (watermills in particular) and building windmills. And they have very obvious uses for them: watermills are potent but they are limited to areas of flowing water, and if you build mills further inland you power them with animals or people (this last one was a common thing in Rome, and is probably the second or third worst common Roman job I can think of, along with salt miner and fuller). In bread eating regions, access to mills is a significant economic bottleneck, and often lack of mills or restrictions around use of mills is a substantial economic drag (see: Pentiment). Windmills would have considerably enriched Rome, and again would not require exotic advances in materials science like building practical steam engines would. But they didn't do it. I think there's a bigger discussion to have about why they didn't do it, but it was definitely within their reach.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2023 23:07
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:Yeah, using techniques that I don't think Romans could've even imagined. There are techniques that could be used for deep sea navigation without a compass, also there are ways to create a compass or other forms of later naval technology with what resources the Romans had access to, but the point is that Romans didn't know any of that, and they probably didn't even know that these things could be known. Actual boat technology was very different in the Pacific as well. Outrigger canoes may look pretty flimsy, but they are remarkably stable boats. The trouble with Mediterranean cultures looking towards the Atlantic is that they already had very sophisticated nautical technologies, just ones that were not well adapted to the open ocean. If you are a Roman sailor, you are the heir to around thousand years of Iron Age Mediterranean nautical tradition that had focused around broadly similar looking boats built with broadly similar methods. Navigating the open ocean would require throwing all that out and replacing it with a fundamentally different approach to sailing. Technological and cultural inertia is a powerful thing, especially with something like sailing that creates an entrenched professional class of specialists. What possible incentive does a Roman shipwright or sailor have to abandon the only way anyone has ever known how to approach boats and replace it with something entirely different? CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Mar 10, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2023 23:41
|
|
|
Tulip posted:
Were milling restrictions a big drag on the roman economy? My limited understanding is that adding windmills to it wouldn't have bootstrapped into much more economic activity than it already had.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2023 01:46
|
|
|
Carillon posted:Were milling restrictions a big drag on the roman economy? My limited understanding is that adding windmills to it wouldn't have bootstrapped into much more economic activity than it already had. They weren't really. But, the Romans did use waterwheels for more efficient milling systems. There are several literary references to this practice, and there is a fairly well preserved Roman mill complex in Southern France with 16 waterwheels that were fed by an aqueduct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills. This mill complex milled around 4.5 tons of flour per day, and operated for at least a century. It's almost certainly not unique either, since we have written sources talking about this practice. The Romans were really good at hydraulic engineering, so they utilized that for mechanized mills instead of windmills. If you have aqueduct capacity to spare (and the Romans did), there is no real reason to prefer windmills over watermills. Also, conventional mills in the Roman world were usually operated by slaves, which the Romans had no shortage of. The thing with milling though is that its not a game changer if you can do it better, even if you can do it a lot better. Watermills fed by aqueducts were great, but they didn't change the paradigm of the grain to flour to bread supply chain. The vast majority of the labor still happened in the process of growing the grain. During the industrial revolution, the entire process of textile manufacturing was upended by the combination of mechanized spinning and weaving, which fundamentally changed the nature of textile production, because the two most time/labor intensive parts of the process could be done by machines. By contrast, Roman watermills didn't alter the fact that vast amounts of human labor were needed to produce the grain fed into the watermills. Rome (like almost all pre-modern sedentary societies) was a fundamentally agrarian society, and the labor needed for agriculture was the dominant sector of the economy. CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Mar 11, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2023 02:29
|
|
|
I read a fairly convincing argument once that the big limiter on roman watermills was that, unless you were milling a lot of grain (like in a major city), buying slaves or animals to manually mill was cheaper
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2023 02:31
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:I read a fairly convincing argument once that the big limiter on roman watermills was that, unless you were milling a lot of grain (like in a major city), buying slaves or animals to manually mill was cheaper That seems quite plausible. The capital investment in setting up a place like Barbegal would have been huge, and there aren't that many places that would have supported a market for 4.5 tons of flour per day.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2023 02:33
|
|
|
To reiterate my point about Rome being a fundamentally agrarian society - a large majority of Romans worked in agriculture. That was true almost everywhere where intensive sedentary agriculture was practiced until a few centuries ago. Then this happened: The reasons for this are really complex, and untangling causation for how much industrialization caused this labor shift vs how much this labor shift caused industrialization is difficult. But the shift from farm labor being the dominant form of labor to non-farm labor being the majority was a fundamental paradigm change in the economy. When asking why Rome never did something that later societies did, the answer frequently lies in the fact that their labor force was predominantly farmers and they had no mechanism to move a meaningful number of those farmers into other lines of work permanently, the way that Early Modern European countries did. Mechanized mills made only a small impact on the economy because they didn't do anything to change the structure of the Roman labor force. CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Mar 11, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2023 02:46
|
|
|
Carillon posted:Were milling restrictions a big drag on the roman economy? My limited understanding is that adding windmills to it wouldn't have bootstrapped into much more economic activity than it already had. There's a value judgment inside any answer to this question: who and what is an economy for. From the miller's perspective, milling restrictions and such probably were a net economic boon. If you're in the classes of people who gets enslaved in order to push a millstone, "a system where you enslave people in order to push millstones to keep the miller rich" is probably a net negative for you economically. Seems undeniable to me at least that from a "how many human labor hours have to get expended to produce x quality of life over the economy," that using a massive labor saving device would be an improvement. But it is again me making a value judgment about the purpose and value of an economy, which I can definitely think of people who think I am 180 degrees off from what they value about an economy.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2023 03:52
|
|
|
For Romans, there weren't very many problems that couldn't be solved by throwing more slaves at it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2023 03:54
|
|
|
This is a super fascinating chart, but I'm actually surprised at how low the even late Medieval share was. I'd always assumed it was more like... 90% or even more. Less than 60% in England and the Low Countries even in 1400 -- so 4 in 10 weren't farmers (and it's even including fishermen and such) -- is pretty striking. Really curious to see similar data about other regions too. Is the initial decline because land use was already at its full extent, and so surplus labor went on to do other things, whereas e.g. rice agriculture might use (or have capacity to use) more labor per unit of land and so you'd e.g. have a higher percentage of farmers in rice-dominated economies? Or are ranged like 60-70% actually totally normal. Koramei fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Mar 11, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2023 04:17
|
|
|
Koramei posted:This is a super fascinating chart, but I'm actually surprised at how low the even late Medieval share was. I'd always assumed it was more like... 90% or even more. Less than 60% in England and the Low Countries even in 1400 -- so 4 in 10 weren't farmers (and it's even including fishermen and such) -- is pretty striking. I'm not really sure, I don't know enough about Early Modern Europe to answer that. The two numbers I've seen cited for the percentage of the Roman Empire that worked in agriculture are 80% and 90%, (although those are pretty rough guesses based on archaeological field surveys, Grand Fromage might be able to better speak to that question).
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2023 04:36
|
|
|
CrypticFox posted:What I more meant was unstable ships. Gotta remember past seaman’s intuition stability as a thing you could plan and design is a late late thing. There isn’t a concept of the metacenter until the 1740’s. So anything early is designed by basically replicating what worked before and didn’t sink without any real rigorous understanding of how stability actually worked.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2023 04:51
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 00:31 |
|
|
Koramei posted:This is a super fascinating chart, but I'm actually surprised at how low the even late Medieval share was. I'd always assumed it was more like... 90% or even more. Less than 60% in England and the Low Countries even in 1400 -- so 4 in 10 weren't farmers (and it's even including fishermen and such) -- is pretty striking.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2023 04:59
|
|