HEY GAL posted:

If you're interested at all in actions which are the most hilarious thing you've read that day and, at the same time and for the same reason, a breathtaking tale of human misery and at least one easily-preventable fuckup, you need to study this period.

HEY GAL posted:

If you're just starting out, read Peter Wilson (newest work on the subject, but avoids the war in Italy as well as--I think--anything to do with Muscovy, which is a bummer. Does not avoid the stuff with the Ottomans, which is a plus) or CV Wedgewood (a better writer than Wilson, but kinda out of date now).

HEY GAL posted:

Oh yeah--also, it's out of date in that we're all fine with the Empire now. Nobody is going to castigate it any more for not being "like a real state," whatever that means, and we are newly appreciative of its variety and its stability. It is what it is. Deal with it.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

Austria hungry was a multi-ethnic state in the same way that pre-1865civil rights movement America was a multi-ethnic state. If you're Austrian you're dandy, Hungarian less so but still okay and everyone else could go get hosed.

E: thinking about it I was way too generous with years for the US on that

sullat posted:

Didn't one of the French kings successfully land an invasion on Albion's shores in the 1200s? My vague recollection is that he was trying to install his own claimant, but was bought off while besieging London.

JaucheCharly posted:

That sounds....odd. What's the line of argumentation here? Everything was kinda ok, because there wasn't a civil war or a genocide?

HEY GAL posted:

Secondly, while the Battle of Rocroi frequently used to be called the death knell of Spanish tactics,

HEY GAL posted:

Edit: They weren't "shelled into compliance," either, they received unusually generous terms when they surrendered, the same that would have been given to a surrendering fortress, which I think meant that their opponents respected what they had done. Drums beating, flags flying, music playing, and musketeers with lit match and with a bullet in each man's mouth, to say "We can still fight if we please, we simply choose not to."

Pharmaskittle posted:

I'm just a history amateur (if even that) and lurker on this thread and I know you guys don't like to get into alternate history too deeply, but would the Soviets have a shot at winning WW2 if the US had never entered the war? I mean, say they keep helping in a proxy way, but not going all in with troops.

wdarkk posted:

Wasn't there also a part where they dropped the value of gold and silver to the point where they were screwing themselves over?

EvanSchenck posted:

Not exactly. What you're talking about here is a simplified narrative that tends to be pushed forward at a pop-history or maybe high school level. So it hasn't been replaced by a more nuanced understand, exactly. The more nuanced understanding has been around a long time at a higher grade level, so to speak.

In order:

(1) The popular image of Spain getting rich off mountains of New World gold and silver is not exactly correct. It did contribute to Spain's wealth but in addition to being the basis of currencies at the time, precious metals are a commodity like anything else, so introducing a vast new supply will mean a part of the gains are lost through inflation. Also, that's money coming into Spain, sure, but what do you do with money? You buy poo poo. The income that Spain derived from mining precious metals in the New World became part of the broader European economy--through trade it wound up in the Netherlands, France, Italy, etc. It was good for a Spain but it also had a stimulative effect on everybody Spain traded with.

Another part of it is that ships laden with precious metals are an easily understood symbol of money coming in, but taxes and duties on trade are just as if not more important. Spain's wealth exploded partly because of the New World colonies but perhaps more significantly because the King of Spain inherited a bunch of very wealthy territories. Cliff's Notes version, as a result of intermarriage and fortuitous circumstances, one man named Charles Habsburg inherited half of Europe including Spain right around the time that "Spain" began its ascendancy in the New World and in Europe. There's a real opportunity to get lost in the weeds on this topic because Charles V is one of the most important white guys of the past 1000 years if not longer, but I'll skip it for now. For one lifetime Spain was actually part of an enormous inherited empire that included a lot of Europe, including most of the best bits like the Netherlands and so on. In the modern period where we look at states as entities people look back on Spain at this time as a powerful country, but really it's part of a collection of titles.

Anyway, after Charles got sick of being The Man he abdicated and split up his possessions into Spanish and Austrian halves. Spain got Spain (duh), Portugal, the better parts of Italy, and the Netherlands. A big chunk of the revenue for Spain came from the Dutch and Italian possessions.

(2) The above should clue you into why Spain was fighting basically everybody all the time. "Spain" was spread out all over Europe, and had a tangled spiderweb of obligations and interests that needed defending by force of arms. The really interesting thing is not that the Spanish state eventually exhausted itself, went bankrupted, and declined in power, but rather how successful they were and for how long. Spanish armies were all over Europe kicking rear end for 100-150 years. The problem was, it was impossible to beat literally everybody every time they fought, although they definitely made a go of it. But the process of losing these wars were expensive and in some cases led to further loss of revenues through loss of territory--they lost Portugal, they lost the Netherlands, etc.

The English make much of defeating the Spanish Armada and you'll even read them claiming that it was the death knell of Spanish hegemony. In actuality the Spanish turned around and built a new fleet better than the one they'd lost. What really killed them was losing Portugal and the Netherlands, which was very damaging to their income, at the same time that they had to fight repeated, extremely expensive wars against France. It was the wars with France that finally bankrupted Spain.

(3) Further to the above, the different possessions of the Habsburgs fit into the dynastic structure in different ways. The New World, Netherlands, and Italy supplied a lot of revenue, but Spain itself was the hammer. As of the 16th century the Spanish armies were the best in Europe, very likely in the entire world, so Spain did the heavy lifting as far as fighting was concerned--supplying the men, paying the war taxes, etc. Also, nobody in Europe was actually doing anything to deliberately develop "real economies". The concept of state involvement in the economy is a modern one, back then it was just a huge black box. In our kingdom there's a certain number of people and they do something or other for a living, and our tax farmers go out there and come back with some amount of money, and that's our revenue. The English economy didn't become healthier than the Spanish economy because the Tudors were savvy economists. Levying taxes on Castilian farmers to support endless wars didn't help, but it's not like the Spanish monarchy had access to any kind of metrics to measure economic activity or even basic social science theories to explain how things happened.

In addition, there was a general demographic decline across basically the entire planet during the 17th century, and Spain was particularly hard hit. The population decline and concomitant loss of tax base coincided with the further loss of extensive lucrative territories in Portugal and the Netherlands, and continuous expensive wars against France.

In sum, I think people generally want to look at history and be able to pick out particular causes for things that happen, preferably involving human agency. Spain must have declined because somebody hosed up, right? That's not always the case, though. Sometimes underlying conditions come together and other times they come apart. The above is a pretty rough introductory summary thing, if you had questions I could probably go on.

Cyrano4747 posted:

On a tablet so this will be quick but 1493 is a pretty cracked out book with major problems and Spain hosed over their merchant proto middle class pretty hard with the Jewish expulsions plus a lot of awful taxation policy. I'll drop a couple decent books on the development of early mod eons once I can find my old comps notes, that is way out of my normal field. Also it kinda fucks monetary supply and prices up when savings are largely based in Capitol assets and hard currency and then you flood the local Econ with easy cash. Also the Spanish governing class was insanely inefficient and absorbed a lot of that wealth in ways that didn't exactly benefit the state

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.


In most of the world up through the modern, post-French Revolution period or so, governments collected taxes pretty haphazardly. Basically a person with the right connections or a lot of money could beg or buy a position as a tax collector, which made him responsible for going out and collecting a certain amount of money in poll taxes from his designated territory. Pretty much just a tax per person for being alive where the tax farmer could see you. Any extra beyond his estimated obligation, the tax farmer got to keep, which was why people wanted the job. In an emergency it was conceivable to just do a straight confiscation, which is what the Castilian crown did in the Inquisition; they just took the Jews' stuff in the process of expelling them.

As to how that system reacted to demographic change, not very well. The apparatus of the modern state as we know it, with stuff like professional officials, statistics, regular censuses, archives, etc. etc. is all pretty new within the past 200-250 years or so. Social sciences like economics can trace their antecedents to about the same time frame. By the renaissance period rulers understood the utility of conducting censuses but they couldn't do it regularly, and record-keeping and information-gathering were inconsistent as well. If you were a king the first you would hear about a problem would probably be news that there was a cholera epidemic and then your tax farmer in the area would say that he couldn't make his nut this year because half the people in his district died.

Revenue flow of a more regular and substantial nature for monarchs usually came from customs duties, excise taxes, royal monopolies, and so forth. For example the king might get a fixed amount of money every time certain goods are sold at market, like he gets a piece of every sack of wool traded in London. Or the king has the exclusive right to sell salt, and he can grant that monopoly to merchants for a percentage of their ongoing profits. That kind of thing. Those sorts of taxes are based on transactions so they're easier to collect and they also scale with economic activity. I think the big example of this was that the King of France held the monopoly on sugar trade out of Haiti, and that alone accounted for some huge percentage of total revenue, like half. Anyway if there was a decline in economic activity, perhaps due to population decline, revenue would decline in kind. Incidentally this is why the Netherlands and Italy were so important to the Spanish Empire; as hotbeds of trade and manufactures they represented a lot of taxable economic activity.

Anyway, you can probably see that one big problem with how this sort of tax system works is that it taxes producers. Clergy and nobility were invariably exempted from poll taxes, and they didn't do much trading so they didn't have to pay duty on anything, so they held most of the wealth, collected income from rents, and paid no taxes. If you were a kingdom that was, say, involved in endless wars against most of the continent, you could very well wind up strangling the people who make the economy work.

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?

Cyrano4747 posted:

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.

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?

Freudian posted:

Is there anyone in this thread who'd like to ramble about the Wars of the Three Kingdoms?

Fangz posted:

Do rulers ever realise that oh, crap, the heir to the throne is an utter ignoramus, and do something about it, or does no one think of their succession in such responsible terms?

xthetenth posted:

How did the economy of getting gunpowder supplies work during the early period of guns equipping a decent fraction of armies? How hard was it to stay in supplies of it, what lengths did rulers go to make sure of a steady supply and how valuable were the skills to make it?

Pimpmust posted:

Cyrano4747 posted:

Um, you do realize why the Japanese follow baseball today, right?

Don Gato posted:

And apparently Burlington is important enough to wipe off the face of the Earth? Never guessed that the Soviets hated hippies that much.

JaucheCharly posted:

SkySteak posted:

Is there any good books or documentaries about the American Civil War. Bonus points, if about Gettysburg.

Karandras posted:

This isn't about tank destroyers so hopefully people still know something about it, but does anyone have any idea what sort of weapon this guy has and why he'd have it?

Only other place I can find it is in German Federal Archives but without a caption.



Any guesses are also fine!

Alchenar posted:

Also bear in mind that that single US division at the start of the Korean war didn't have any heavy equipment with it. The NK Army was rolling around in T34-85's and the US troops didn't have anything that could handle them.

Wikipedia posted:

Cold War II or The New Cold War (February 2014 - Present) is the renewed ongoing tension, hostility and rivalry between the Galactic Republic against the Trade Federation led by Viceroy Nute Gunray. The conflict follows 23 years after the first Cold War ended, which was fought between the Galactic Republic and the Mandalorians and took place throughout the majority of the 20th Century, finally ending in 1991 following the defeat of Mandalore.[1][2][3] As these tensions have gradually escalated, Relations between the Galactic Republic and the Outer Rim are commented to have deteriorated to a point "beyond repair",[4] with the Trade Federation attempting to counterbalance the Galactic Republic through the creation of a new droid army.[5]

brozozo posted:

During the late nineteenth century, how did muzzleloading naval artillery work? At this point, you've got the guns in turrets, so do you just have a whole bunch of men on the deck in front the turret to handle loading and reloading? What are the men inside the turret doing? All in all, the 1860s and 1870s seem like a very strange time in naval history. So much innovation!

HEY GAL posted:

...there's a website for things that carry other things?