On medieval economics

My light reading for about a month has been An economic history of medieval Europe, by N.J.G. Pounds.  I recommend it half-heartedly.

What do we know about medieval economics?  Frustratingly little, it turns out.  Every few pages Pounds has to remind us that there just isn’t much data.  He goes over what we have, but it’s really impossible to build up the sort of overall statistics that we take for granted today.  It’s almost impossible to get estimates of production of goods, or even to definitively answer questions like when the moldboard plow was actually adopted, or whether the 1400s were a period of depression or a time of productive improvement.

The book is from 1974, so it’s possible that nearly 30 years have produced a slightly clearer picture.  E.g. I don’t quite buy his statements that medieval technology was stagnant, not after reading Jean Gimpel’s The Medieval Machine.  Pounds even mentions some of the same inventions, such as the blossoming of mill technology and the later focus on mining.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is in the first few chapters, on the late Roman Empire.  We have a picture of a flourishing, sophisticated, rich urban civilization, but in many ways this is an illusion.  Most of the Empire was at a barely subsistent level; the western half was “an uninhabited wilderness, broken by islands of cultivation”; trade was minimal; large-scale enterprises were undertaken only by the state; Rome itself basically produced nothing.  The East was of course richer and more urbanized.

The book also emphasizes that the lot of the peasant, from Roman times till well into the modern age, frankly sucked.  At the subsistence level, the peasant couldn’t afford much in the way of urban wares, so the cities remained small and trade was largely in luxury goods.  The empty spaces on the map filled in, and new towns appeared, but that just meant there were more and more peasants and on more marginal land.  The only real improvement in living conditions were a) in colonizing new lands, especially in Eastern Europe; and b) after the Black Death, when depopulation temporarily created a labor shortage.

And as Eastern Europe filled up, the feudal lords exerted more and more control and turned most of the peasants into serfs.  In Western Europe the tendency was for the king to rein in the nobles, which was a little better for the peasants.

There’s a discussion of the guilds; Pounds seems to think that they never amounted to much.  They always tried for monopoly power, which in theory could restrain the economy; but in most places it was the merchants, not the craftsmen, who really ran the economy.  (Often they supplied the raw materials and even the tools.)  In any case, when the urban cloth workers grew too expensive, the merchants simply outsourced the work to the rural areas.

One surprising assertion is that the cities had trouble feeding themselves– the northern Italian cities had to import grain from as far as Sicily.  This seems a bit odd when none of them exceeded 50,000 residents.  But perhaps the surplus of the European farmer really was that low– or perhaps the situation illustrates the price differential of wagons vs. ships.

There’s quite a bit about how the early fairs developed into permanent commercial markets, and how the early traders operated.  Currency was scarce, so things were arranged such that little money had to actually change hands.  You’d bring your alum to Bruges, take home a shipment of woolens, and payments were mostly handled by moving numbers within the bankers’ ledgers.  (The last few days of a fair were devoted to the settling of accounts.)  At first the big merchants actually traveled across the continent; later on they simply employed local agents.

Kings and other lords were constantly interfering in the market.  Landowners, including the king, were generally able stewards of their own estates.  Their powers of enforcement over the rest of society were limited, which led to interesting compromises.  Close control was impossible, but on the other hand focusses of wealth could be seized.  Thus cities were given a large measure of autonomy, but were also easily taxed.   In many countries the king had the right to all mineral resources– but as he could hardly mine everywhere, what this came down to was that anyone could mine, but owed a tax to the king.  Most states were highly in debt to the banks, but didn’t scruple at confiscating a local bank or defaulting to a foreign one.

Another lesson is just how miscellaneous Europe was.  Generalizations at the national level are almost useless; you have to look at each region and even each town.  The Elder Scrolls continent of Tamriel, with its ragged multiplicity of races and regions, is actually not a bad model, certainly much better than the usual fantasy expedient of one uniform country with perhaps one exotic neighbor.

 

Inequality is bad: more whys

A couple more pages relevant to my page on why plutocracy sucks.

First, this fascinating NYT article about Venice, one of the first capitalist states.  The basics, in case you’re run down your free NYT quota: Venice created the biggest trade network in the medieval Mediterranean.  The trading expeditions were handled by colleganze, essentially one-off joint-stock enterprises.  They were open to anyone who had the money to invest.

Until 1315, when Venice’s upper class– its 1%– instituted a change known as La Serrata, the closing.  Desiring to preserve their privileges, they created a formal list of who was in the oligarchy and banned new additions.  The power monopoly was soon extended to economic matters; the colleganze were banned.

The result was economic decline.  By 1500 the city was smaller than it had been in 1330, and it continued to shrink.  Meanwhile other cities overtook it in economic influence.  What the 1% think is good for them is usually a lousy idea for the general population, and ultimately even for themselves.

The other article is David Stockman’s devastating takedown of Mitt Romney’s “business experience”.

Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better.

That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a regime of crony capitalism—where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance….

In truth, LBOs are capitalism’s natural undertakers—vulture investors who feed on failing businesses. Due to bad policy, however, they have now become monsters of the financial midway that strip-mine cash from healthy businesses and recycle it mostly to the top 1 percent.

I wonder how the Randians convince themselves that Romney’s way of making money– mining companies, firing workers, leaving them highly indebted and letting them go bankrupt– is “making” rather than “taking”.

 

How socialism is thriving

My liberalism page has generated some good feedback, including interesting stuff to read.  I’ll highlight some of these, starting with this essay by James Livingston: “How the Left has Won.”  Also see this exchange between Livingston and Tim Barker in which the idea is clarified.

His basic idea: capitalism was a 400-year-long transition which had highlights (and setbacks), but no coordinating committee, no mass movement, no cabal or group behind it.  It was a messy, long, organic process, and kept going largely because it was a more efficient way of doing things.  Events had a capitalistic bias, you could say.

And, he says, socialism works the same way.  It doesn’t need a socialist party, or a revolution.  It isn’t incompatible with capitalism– it’ll be thoroughly mixed up with it just as capitalism coexisted with aristocracy.  It doesn’t disappear when socialist parties or countries have a setback.  Any socialization of a society or economy or institution is part of socialism.  (He has some provocative paragraphs on how the US Army is a bastion of socialist practice amid a capitalist landscape.)

Now, I think some of you are going to be just infuriated by the piece.  Maybe especially his targets– socialists who lament the lack of a proper socialist party in the US.  You can picture him as the smug, calm, extremely smart guy at the cocktail party where you can’t decide if he’s pulling your leg or talking bullshit or being brilliant.

But, well, people often say they want to hear new ideas, and this is what new ideas feel like.  The right mindset is that this is a really interesting way of looking at things.  I feel like my mind is expanded… I don’t know if he’s right, and I’m sure he’s wrong on some of it (psychoanalysis, ugh).  But I’m glad I read it, and I think there’s something to his broader perspective.

 

 

 

Since Yesterday

Since Yesterday is Frederick Lewis Allen’s sequel to Only Yesterday, and deals with the ’30s in the same way. 

It’s a better and a worse book, due to its subject matter.  The first book had a lightness of tone (even when dealing with scandals and gangsters) that had to be abandoned facing the enormity of the Depression.  A quarter to a third of the population out of work, the farms of the Great Plains blown away as dust, heads of corporations bewildered as to what to do next, fascism marching in Europe– it wasn’t a cheery time.  The events give the book greater depth than its predecessor; but then they refuse to provide a nice coda.  He concludes with Britain’s declaration of war; the problem is that his story is only half told. 

This is clearer on a chart.  Here’s US industrial production from the height of the stock boom (September 1929) to the end of the war (August 1945):

Allen ends at the red line.  No wonder things still looked bleak!  Though the overall trend was up, immediate memory was dominated by the 1937 recession, which had gobbled up 2/3 of the gain since the New Deal.  Production was barely at the 1929 level again; it was hard to imagine that in a few years it would double that number.  (And keep rising; the current value of the index is over 1200.)

As a history of the New Deal, I prefer Wiliam Leuchtenberg’s Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, which goes into more detail and with more historical perspective.  Still, it’s an amazing period and there’s always something new to learn about it.  I hadn’t realized, for instance, that on the day Roosevelt took office, the banking system had ceased to function.  To prevent bank runs, governors were declaring bank holidays, and that day the rot reached the biggest banks, in Illinois and New York.

On the other hand, perhaps the lack of hindsight isn’t a vice, as Allen can convey the full frustration felt at the time.  Allen thinks the economy had a structural problem: industrialization was reducing the need for workers on farms and in factories even as unemployment soared; at the same time, the concentration of industries into megacorporations made it hard to start up new enterprises.  (He points out that the banks were sitting on plenty of credit; there just didn’t seem to be much to lend to.  The megacorporations could fund their own research and expansion.)  There’s some truth to the idea of restructuring– e.g. the share of the population engaged in agriculture went from 21.5% to 16% from 1930-1945.  But the structure hypothesis doesn’t explain why the preceding and following periods were prosperous.  It looks much more like a demand crunch.  (Moral: don’t listen to businessmen about how to end a recession.  They have no idea, and their vague notions about “confidence” and “deficits” are plumb wrong.)

Again, one of the lessons of Allen’s books is how little has changed in America’s political structure.  Hoover was not as inactive as one might think– he had some small-scale stimulus going– but the business class had about the same program as today: prop up the banks, then just wait for things to get better, forever if necessary.  There was a good deal of horror over Roosevelt going off the gold standard, establishing relief programs, dividing commercial and investment banking, supporting unions, raising taxes on the rich, and above all regulating business.  On the other hand, when Roosevelt moved toward them in 1937– scaling back the New Deal and trying to balance the budget– he was rewarded with a resounding recession.  As Allen points out, of all the things Roosevelt tried, the only things that arguably worked were stimulus spending and devaluation. 

The most striking difference in our times is the near-absence of a radical left.  Roosevelt had to deal with substantial movements (Huey Long, the Townsendites, the unions, the socialists) who thought he was moving way too slowly and actually coddling business.  Not that this prevented his critics from calling him a dictator or a communist.  In general the middle and upper classes disliked him– but the country as a whole was all for the New Deal; he won re-election in the midst of of the Depression by a 61% landslide (with broad coattails: Congress was 3/4 Democratic). 

Also striking is the regional difference: the South was then a Democratic stronghold, and Republicans were strongest in the Northeast.  (It’s also worth noting that this was well before the Civil Rights era.  Though there were some victories for blacks, they’re all symbolic– e.g. Marian Anderson singing at FDR’s inauguration, Jesse Owens winning medals in Berlin.)

Everyone knows that the war ended the Depression; people often seem to think this was some kind of fluke with no contemporary application.  But economically, what the war did was make it politically acceptable to greatly multiply the size of government stimulus.  Roosevelt’s ’30s-era stimulus was too small, and had the same effect as Obama’s: improvement but no end to the economic doldrums. 

Allen once refers to Roosevelt as a “cripple”; I had thought his handicap wasn’t general knowledge.  But some Googling tells me I was wrong; it was well known that Roosevelt had polio and used a wheelchair, but the extent of it was downplayed.

Allen does his best to indicate the temper of the times, and makes a case that the ’30s in general were more sober (though not in the literal sense: we finally got rid of Prohibition) and that the mere rebelliousness and hedonism of the ’20s was largely gone– though there was no return to Puritanism.  (He quotes a survey that found that something like 70% of couples had sex before marriage.)  The intellectuals of the day did their best to focus attention on social problems– even as Hollywood pretended that there were none.  In wider histories of art, this makes the ’30s look like a strange blip: modernism was called off for a decade!

A sobering thought for bloggers: many of the cultural figures Allen names are still known… except for the opinion columns.  You can have a whole nation hanging on your analysis of politics, but no one will want to re-read them in fifty years.

 

Only Yesterday

My friend Linkless Bob recommended this book by Frederick Lewis Allen, and it’s a good read.    Somewhat cheekily, Allen decided to write a history of the ’20s in 1931.  (He also did one of the ’30s called Since Yesterday, which I’ve just started.)

Cal Coolidge

As such it’s very journalistic– it seems pretty clear that his primary research tool is the magazines and daily newspapers.  He rarely gets into very deep analysis, but on the plus side he’s lively and full of detail, and the method probably gives a good idea of what people were thinking and talking about. 

Bob noted, and I agree, that the story has an unexpected contemporary ring.  The laissez-faire libertarianism of the Republican Party turns out not to be an invention of Goldwater or Ayn Rand; it’s their default mode.  The belief in the benignity of business it there, and the feeling that government is there to serve business and for little else… except for repressing people when they complain.  Coolidge won national reknown, after all, for suppressing a police strike.  The late ’20s stock bubble was a lot like the housing bubble of the ’00s.  And the Republican response to the Crash was pretty much what the elites are agreed on now: do nothing, except perhaps make it worse with government austerity programs. 

(One partial exception: Republicans back then loved tariffs, which are now out of fashion– but that’s largely because we no longer fear foreign rival manufacturers.)

Allen does have a thesis: the postwar decade was dominated by a rebellion against prewar mores.  The country was tired of wartime sacrifice and had no intention of going back to Victorianism.  Women got the vote but mostly wanted to discard encumbrances, from unnecessary layers of clothing to hard domestic labor.   The literati were disgusted with everything except for sex and Freud.  The country was transformed by railroads, scientific management, the automobile, and radio.  (I find it fascinating that the dominant force in broadcasting, RCA, was known in financial contexts simply as “Radio”.)

It’s kind of curioius to read about the Florida land boom, in that all the locations mentioned as Future Metropoles are now, in fact, part of the metropolis of Miami.  As with many bubbles, the problem wasn’t that the development was unreasonable, but that it was premature.

From a later perspective, the ’20s can be seen as a preview– interrupted by the Depression– of prosperous midcentury America.  The mass media, the labor-saving devices, the exaltation of technology and manufacturing, the weak interest in progressivism, were all there. 

I think he’s pretty perceptive at finding what in contemporary life would be of permanent interest.  A few of the references aren’t explained… someone should put out an edition with hyperlinks.  I also wouldn’t trust him too far with cultural analysis.  I think he’s a bit simplistic on the hedonism and nihilism of ’20s intellectuals, for instance.  It was clear when he was writing what they were rejecting, not so clear perhaps what they were trying to build in its place.

(I also wouldn’t take his brief explanations of the Crash too seriously.  He may not be wrong, but in 1931 there was not really enough distance for real understanding.  Galbraith’s The Great Crash: 1929 is more informative on the economics.)

 

Quick quiz

When was this written, and of what dance?

The music is sensuous, the embracing of partners– the female is only half dressed– is absolutely indecent; and the motions– they are such as may not be described, with any respect for propriety,  in a family newspaper.

(Answer: 1921; of the foxtrot.)

 

Sounds like a good book!

This posting is all over the place, but this comment in it is fascinating:

So why invent police? What are they for? In “The Institutional Revolution,” the economic historian Douglas W. Allen theorizes that their purpose was to preserve manufactured goods from theft. Before the nineteenth century, Allen writes, theft was easy to detect. If your transport was a horse, you could recognize it. (For that matter, it could recognize you.) Not only was your coat hand sewn, but a tailor looking at its fabric could probably tell who had woven it. If any of these items were stolen, they were easy to reclaim if they could be found. With the advent of the industrial revolution, handmade goods gave way to standardized commodities, which all look alike, and it ceased to be possible to know an object’s provenance just by looking at it. The phrase “possession is nine-tenths of the law” came into vogue, and it was made illegal to hold stolen goods. After all, once goods became untraceable, they were all too easy to fence.

The point about premodern goods being easy to trace is really neat, a great reminder that the past is a foreign country.  The original book sounds quite interesting as well:

The Institutional Revolution traces the dramatic shift from premodern institutions based on patronage, purchase, and personal ties toward modern institutions based on standardization, merit, and wage labor—a shift which was crucial to the explosive economic growth of the Industrial Revolution.

All this kind of throws into doubt all the thieves’ guilds of D&D and other fantasies.  It’s not that crime didn’t exist; it’s just unlikely that it was organized in a modern, quasi-corporate fashion. 

 

I should really start making a list of things that appear in fantasy novels that actually never existed in the past…

 

Why you want to be a hunter-gatherer

At some period we were all taught that there was an orderly progression from the amoeba to the amphibian to the anthropoid to the agnostic.  Every stage was better than the last, and life was nasty, brutish and short up till the reign of Victoria, not to mention outside her domain.

This framework started to be questioned at about the same time the “primitives” were studied in detail, by researchers such as Max Muller in linguistics, and Frank Boas in anthropology.  We’ve made great strides in repudiating the racism of the earlier view– the idea that some ethnicities are Just Better– but the chronological snobbery doesn’t look so good these days either.

A lot of people never got the memo, however.  I was rather surprised to get into a discussion recently with someone who was convinced that the life of “savages” was “awful”, to use his terms.  So for conworlding purposes if nothing else, I thought it’d be useful to review the case for the hunter/gatherer lifestyle.  (Also see the Planet Construction Kit, p 92.)

I should add that these are by no means my own cranky observations; they’re pretty much standard among modern anthropologists.  Here’s the way Tim Flannery puts it:

And therein lies a paradox– one which is shared with the ants– that while agricultural societies are powerful, they are composed almost entirely of incompetent individuals.

To gain the meaning of this in full measure, just compare a day in your life with that of a hunter-gatherer such as an Australian Aborigine.  On rising each morning Aborigines must find and catch their own food, make or repair their tools and shelter, and defend and educate their families.  They are thus their own provider, manufacturer and protector.  Put in an Aborigine’s place, we’d be as lost as white rabbits in the wilderness; our tenure in the world most likely counted in days rather than months.

The reverse, however, is not true.  History shows that hunter-gatherers can learn to do any of the jobs our society offers.  I’ve flown in a helicopter piloted by a  New Guinean who was born into a traditional society all but innocent of metal.  And history is replete with examples of acaemically gifted Native Americans and Aborigines– like John Bungaree, who topped the class in mathematics, geography and writing in early-nineteenth-century Sydney.  There are even a few examples of hunter-gatherers giving farming a try.  But regardless of their accomplishments, almost all of these went back to their own culture.  The truth is that hunter-gatherers find the loss of liberty we routinely endure to be insufferable.

Some of the advantages of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle:

• It’s far healhier than farming.  People live longer and eat better than people in any premodern agricultural civilization.
• It’s almost absurdly egalitarian.  Leaders can’t tyrannize people who can easily wander off on their own.  You don’t have social classes, there is generally an ethic of sharing, and the status of women is better than among agriculturalists.
• Women were not overburdened with children.  Agriculturalist women have children every year or two; children are spaced out by about 4 years among hunter-gatherers.
• Most of our most virulent disesases come from our animals, so hunter-gatherers have less disease.
• The work week was short.  Daniel Everett reports that the Piraha work only 15 to 20 hours a week. 
• They enjoyed a physical fitness most of us can only envy, not only because they got plenty of exercise, but because their diet was precisely what we’ve evolved to thrive on.
• Their lifestyle is sustainable over enormous time periods.  We or similar species have been hunting for two million years, without coming near destroying the planet or running out of key resources.  The modern world, with its world wars and oil addiction and global warming, might be a giddy, enormously destructive bubble.
• Civilization may make us dumber.  Maciej Henneberg reports that humans seem to have lost 10% of their brain mass since the Ice Age.

Of course hunter-gatherers don’t have Shakespeare, Team Fortress 2, calculus, candy corn, or the Beatles.   So I’d hate to switch places with them, and probably you would too.  But this preference is largely parochialism.  Of course we’re used to the things we have, the people we know, everything that goes with our lifestyle.  Hunter-gatherers often understand agriculture quite well, but don’t see the point of living like that.

Once agriculture took over, it wasn’t possible to go back– the hunter-gatherer lifestyle can’t support a high-density population.  But the simple truth is that till roughly 1800, the lifestyle of the majority didn’t improve and was measurably worse in many ways than that of the hunter-gatherers.  The nicer bits of preindustrial civilizations were largely restricted to the top 10 or 20%.  (And even the elite lived really unhealthily.  Premodern cities were mortality sinks: more people died in them than were born; they only increased in size because of immigration.)

Now, industrialization changed everything.  Living standards have gone up for everyone, and the benefits of civilization can be widely enjoyed.  We’re almost as healthy as hunter-gatherers, though we have only a fraction of the leisure time.  But to borrow a line from Zhou Enlai, it’s too early to tell if civilization is a good idea.  There’s no technical reason we can’t extend this bubble of prosperity and productivity, but there’s little political will.  “Had a nice run for 300 years, RIP” would be a pathetic epitaph for civilization, and the two million years of hunting/gathering would look pretty good in comparison.

The hunter-gatherer era wasn’t utopia, of course– especially if you import modern standards.  It’s been suggested that there was a lot of violence– though we really don’t have much evidence.  But, well, there’s a lot of violence in agricultural states and their cities; there’s a lot of violence in industrial states; there’s a lot of violence in the animal kingdom.  As Gregory Clark points out, violence was an important check on population growth.  It’s usually a bad idea to take some aspect of a ‘primitive’ lifestyle that offends us and try to eliminate it.  Cultures live in a balance with their environment, and sometimes those offensive bits are key parts of the system. 

Now, what do you do with this information?  Well, for one thing, knowledge is good.  It’s good to learn the facts in place of the smug pieties we learned in school.  For another, getting past our parochialism is also good.  There’s nothing with preferring our own environment, but it’s all too easy to construct ideologies or conworlds that are simply projections of our own surroundings. 

Sometimes we might actually imitate others.  The all-around fitness of the hunter-gatherer is admirable and can inspire athleticism today– parkour is partly inspired by African societies.  Some people try diets inspired by those of hunter-gatherers.  Maybe you just need to walk more.

In my sf future, the Incatena, there are planets which try to incorporate some of the best features of the ancestral environment: small settlements, the use of materials from the ecosphere, a structured reliance on frequent and varied physical exercise.  (Of course, others say the hell with it and adapt their bodies and minds to live in deep space habitats.)

 

 

 

 

How the North Won

I just finished How the North Won, by Archer Jones and Herman Hattaway, an extremely thorough military history of the Civil War.  If you are a little hazy on the difference between strategy and tactics, this book will cure that.

And you’ll learn about logistics.  So much logistics.  One of the major figures of the book is a gentleman I’d never heard of– Henry Halleck, who functioned as the northern chief of staff and, in Jones and Hattaway’s telling, something of the architect of the overall Northern strategy.

Henry Halleck

Mid-19th century warfare (i.e. post-Napoleon, pre-WWI) was transformed by two things: the rifle and the railroad, both of which made an infantry army almost impregnable to a frontal assault. 

The rifle made cavalry virtually obsolete on the battlefield: it was fast and accurate enough that it could decimate an oncoming cavalry charge.  And that in turn meant that soldiers didn’t have to stand to resist the charge with bayonets, but could lay down, or better yet take cover behind improvised earthworks, which protected them from artillery fire, the bane of Napoleonic warfare.

A frontal assault was almost always suicide– e.g. the famous charge by Pickett at Gettysburg, one of Robert E. Lee’s few mistakes.  Commanders had better luck with turning movements– i.e. attempts to go right or left round the enemy’s flank, with hopes of moving against his weaker rear.  But even this often failed; even fairly raw troops could be fairly easily turned around to face the threat.  There were very few routs in the Civil War; if you did manage to turn the enemy, he almost always successfully retreated.  (That might be enough to take a major objective; but the typical progress of a Civil War campaign was a series of battles a dozen miles apart, as the defending army fell back to a new defensive position.)

The fastest and cheapest transport and supply lines were still by sea; but the railroad was almost as good, allowing enormous armies to be moved at unprecedented speeds.  Wagon trains, though they had to be resorted to, were a distant third.  William Sherman once estimated that his advance to Atlanta would have required 36,000 wagons and 220,000 mules without the railroad, a simple impossibility.

The North had a bigger army and a huge edge in industrial production, but it faced a huge predicament: a large enemy army was almost impossible to dislodge.  In particular, as one general after another discovered, taking Richmond– a tempting hundred miles from Washington DC– was almost impossible.  Lee’s army was too strong, the city was too well connected by rail and canal to its supply regions, and Lee made no blunders that created openings.  (The North tended to blame its succession of generals– McClellan, Pope, Burnside, Hooker, Meade, Grant– but it was an inherently difficult problem.)

Things were easier in the West, where initially the North had the great advantage of water transport along the great rivers as well as the Gulf of Mexico.  This allowed the conquest of western Tennessee, New Orleans, and ultimately Vicksburg (July 1863).  And that in turn suggested the better strategy: keep Lee busy in Virginia, but slowly conquer the West.  By careful and strong provisioning the North managed to drive through eastern Tennesee to Chattanooga (Sep. 1863).  The Navy was of course blockading the coast; the overall idea was to strangle the South and roll it up from the West– the “anaconda strategy“.

But further progress stalled.  Conquests had to be protected, and the increasingly long supply routes protected; relatively tiny Confederate raiding forces tied up tens of thousands of Union troops.  (This was the one remaining, and still very effective, use of cavalry.)  And the interior railroad lines of the remaining Confederacy allowed armies to be quickly concentrated to resist any large-scale intrusion.

Ulysses Grant

Grant‘s genius was to turn the Confederate raiding strategy against the South.  Instead of small cavalry forces, he’d send a huge infantry force, which would have the usual protection from direct assault.  It could cause immense destruction– tear up railroads, destroy factories, turn slaves producing for the South into soldiers fighting for the North– and best of all, it didn’t need a supply line to protect.  By moving into new territories it would live off the land, and it could simply fight its way into a place where it could be reprovisioned.

Sherman tested out the idea with a raid from Vicksburg to Meridian, and it worked like a charm.  He then fought his way conventionally from Chattanooga to Atlanta (Sep. 1864, just in time to pave the way to Lincoln’s re-election).  He didn’t bother to occupy Atlanta, but just burned it.  Then he cut his way in a wide swath to Savannah.

Grant tried to use the raiding strategy elsewhere, though he was dogged by a few incompetent generals.  But finally some of them got it, notably Sheridan in northern Virginia.  (A subtheme of the book is that both armies functioned as brutal meritocracies.  By 1864 or so the incompetent generals had almost entirely been eliminated)

Grant meanwhile bludgeoned his way to Petersburg, just south of Richmond.  This part of the campaign didn’t look any better than the earlier generals, but at least his attacks kept Lee’s huge army busy.  (One enormous missed opportunity: a clever mining operation blasted a huge hole in the Confederate lines at Petersburg, in July 1864.  At the last minute a well-trained unit of black soldiers was replaced by some less-ready white troops, who didn’t occupy the breach quickly enough.)

Sherman turned north, marching through the Carolinas and reaching Fayetteville in March 1865.  This completed his work of devastation; the remaining railroad links to Richmond were cut.  An ill-advised attempt by Hood to retake Nashville had devastated the Confederates’ last remaining large army besides Lee’s; nothing would prevent Sherman moving north to join Grant.

The end was anticlimactic; Sheridan joined Grant and turned Lee’s army to its right, forcing Lee to abandon Petersburg and Richmond and retreat westward.  Grant followed and Sheridan moved on ahead, trapping Lee’s army.

Sherman’s March to the Sea was brutal, but Archer and Hattaway show that it was a brilliant and necessary military strategy.  Defeating Lee by assault was impossible, and the slower conquest strategy in the west would have taken many more years.  The only way to counter the advantages of the defense in 19C warfare was to destroy the enemy’s means of production.

The book glances only lightly at the political and social situation, besides mentioning Lincoln‘s basic difficulty: the public, the politicians, and the newspapers did not understand the anaconda strategy, but wanted battles won by direct assault… a type of campaign that just was not going to happen.  Lincoln educated himself on military matters, however, and very effectively mediated between the civil and military points of view. 

The story is slow-going at times, but that’s part of the point: warfare at this time was achingly slow.  Some generals exacerbated this– Lincoln described several of them, especially McClellan, as having a case of “the slows”– but even the best generals took months to prepare any movement, and with good reason: maintaining a hundred thousand soldiers was an enormous logistical problem.

A particularly neat feature is the extensive maps– large-scale diagrams explaining the river and railroad network and overall strategy, as well as tactical maps, often several per battle.  The authors also extensively quote diaries and letters of the generals, giving a fascinating glimpse into their mindset, as well as into the strange nature of a civil war– the generals usually knew each other and had often studied under the same professors at West Point.

There’s also any number of interesting facts… e.g., did you know the last Monitor class ironclad was retired only in 1937?

 

Empires: What not to do

I just read Adrian Goldsworthy’s How Rome Fell, which is about how Rome fell.  Apparently it’s become a little controversial to say that it did… new studies emphasize the continuity of daily life and institutions and like to talk about “transformation”.  Goldsworthy take the reasonable position that this revisionism has gone too far: Rome’s decline really was a disaster, though a long drawn-out one.

Historians can have these debates at all because there’s so much that we just don’t know about Rome.  We have no economic statistics, so we can’t really say what happened to living standards.  We can’t say what the size of the army was, or what government revenues were, or what size the cities were, or how big the Germanic tribes were.  There are periods for which we have good histories and some where we barely know what was going on.  Archeology helps, but by its nature it’s anecdotal… we can look at particular sites or shipwrecks, but hardly have a picture of the whole empire.

Still, it’s pretty clear that between 200 and 600, western Roman urban civilization collapsed.  Wide-scale trade dried up; cities grew smaller or were abandoned; living standards declined; Roman engineeering was lost.  Europe in 600 was less populated, more rural, poorer, ravaged.  The main caveat is that this process was slow, and particular events such as the fall of Romulus Augustulus in 476 were just landmarks along the way, not sudden catastrophes.  People didn’t forget from one day to the next how to build a watermill or maintain a standing army.  But over the whole period, these skills were indeed lost.

Why did it happen?  Goldsworthy isn’t bold enough to reduce it to a paragraph or two, but I am: the Romans never got the hang of monarchy, and mostly destroyed themselves in civil war.  The height of the empire was the period of the “Five Good Emperors” from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius, from 96 to 180; each emperor was carefully chosen and adopted by the previous one.  It’s not hard to blame Marcus Aurelius for spoiling the pattern by choosing his own son Commodus, who proved to be corrupt and arrogant.  A state can survive one or two such nincompoops, but not a succession of them… see also the later Yuan rulers of China.

The real trouble started later, however– from 217 to the end of the Western empire, there was rarely a period as long as a decade without a civil war.  Many emperors were usurpers, and none got through his reign without facing internal challengers.  Civil wars devastated the country, sapped and corrupted the soldiers, reduced troop strength along the frontiers, and impelled emperors to isolation and paranoia.  The barbarian invasions didn’t show an increased foreign threat so much as the loss of the ability to address it. 

(Some Tea Partiers who fantasize about a coup d’etat would do well to learn this lesson.  Want to destroy America?  That’s the royal road.)

Rome both needed and feared a large standing army.   In its heyday the army was probably hundreds of thousands strong; but armies were increasingly localized, and vitiated by the civil wars and the difficulty of payment.  Emperors learned not to allow rivals access to large forces; but that meant that the entire empire could no longer be run by just one man.  By the late 400s no one in the west could maintain even a few tens of thousands as a standing army– Justinian’s reconquests in the west were won with forces well under 15,000 men.

People love to compare Rome to the current contemporary superpower, but from this and other accounts, the region most similar to the late Western Empire is Africa– a region where power is easily seized by force, where leaders can be completely crazy,  and where officials are so thoroughly, hopelessly corrupt that ‘normal’ economic development is impossible.  (‘Normal’ is in scare quotes because arguably the typical case in history is precisely that endemic corruption, not those fortunate times and periods with honest governments and honest businessmen.)