"Comparative historians like Spengler, Pareto, and Toynbee realized that history did not merely happen but had some kind of pattern." (p. 188)
Asimov's Foundation series is based on Gibbon;
Blish's Cities in Flight is based on Spengler;
Anderson's Technic History is based on Hord.
Dalgetty's cover story is that he is from Tau Ceti. (p. 190), a popular sf venue (see here).
"'Read Voltaire's Micromegas.'" (p. 190)
In fact, read the Wikipedia article summary of Micromegas. It's amazing.
11 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
What I'm most skeptical about is how Hari Seldon and then Valti claimed to have used MATHEMATICS to predict the twists and turns of human history. I agree certain philosophers like Spengler, Toynbee, and Hord can give us insights on how human civilizations can rise and for. But I don't agree such developments can be magically perdicted using Psychohistory.
Sean
I've never been too impressed by the cyclical pattern theories of historical development; they seem overly schematic to me.
When you look at history in close detail, the patterns often dissolve into contingency and individual agency -- sensitive dependence on very slight and often random causes.
Most of them are based on the history of the Roman Empire, and on rather obsolete studies of that phenomenon at that.
(The current historiographic consensus is that the Empire wasn't nearly as badly off, even in the West, as was commonly thought until recently.)
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I actually agree! But, I still think certain broad patterns can be found in human history and behavior. For example, decentralized political systems like feudalism often arises when a hitherto centralized government breaks down.
Interesting, many historians today arguing the Western Empire was not as badly off as hitherto thought. But then they have to explain why the Western Empire disintegrated in the 80 years after the death of Theodosius I in 395. And Poul Anderson went into massive detail explaining the problems of the Empire in his four volume novel (co-authored with Mrs. Amderson) THE KING OF YS.
Sean
Sean: Yes, there are patterns, but they're not tied together as tightly as Toynbee and Hord thought. I think the patterns they found looking at Rome and the post-Roman world deceived them into thinking other situations had more, and more particular, resemblances. Human beings are prone to finding patterns and purpose where none exist.
As to Rome, there's a lot more data than there used to be.
In particular, archaeological evidence shows that the rural areas of the Western Empire (where most people lived) had with some exceptions bounced back nicely from the 3rd-century crisis by the mid-4th century.
The towns had done less well, but that was partly because of economic decentralization.
(The eastern half of the Empire was flourishing in all respects and continued to do so until the Justinian plague and the terrible Romano-Persian wars of the 7th century that opened the way for Islam.)
The collapse of the western Empire was a -political- phenomenon, in other words -- the result of political events and individual decisions, just as the survival of the Eastern Empire was.
But the political events had a lot of knock-on consequences, irreversible ones.
The structure of the Roman state had allowed, and encouraged, a degree of market-based economic development, long-distance bulk trade and population growth that wasn't equalled again until the 18th century, or even later in some places.
The barbarians who overran the empire mostly didn't want to smash things up, but they didn't know how to keep them going and in any case the system had depended on continent-wide political and financial unity. A series of catastrophic "chain reactions" destroyed the Classical economic system and the property relations it was based on as markets ceased to exist, the currency stopped flowing, and the long-distance exchange dried up to a trickle.
Without those, the whole system crashed down to a much lower level, and populations and trade went with it.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
While I'm willing to think Toynbee focused too much on Rome, I'm not sure that can be said of Hord. After all, he looked at the Chinese case as well, esp. the era of Contending States which broke out during the decline of the Chou Dynasty.
I still think Hord's theories of the rise and fall of civilizations has some merit in them. And at least he made no pretensions of being an Asimovian psychohistorian!
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Hmmmm, as far as POPULATION went, the common view is that had recovered in the Western Empire by the late fourth century. Granted, with one caveat. I have seen mention of wide lands being abandoned and the Emperors being so anxious to get them back into productive use that that they would settle barbarians on them. Isn't that a contradiction?
I agree about how, until the Plague of Justinian I's later years, the Eastern Empire was flourishing.
Yes, the disastrous wars waged by Chosroes II of Persia in his attempt to conquer the Eastern Empire not only exhausted both powers, but opened the way to Islam bursting of the Arabian Peninsula in jihads going all the way to the Atlantic in the west to Indian in the east. An Easter Empire and Persia which had not been exhausted by Chosroes' wars might have strangled Islam in its infancy.
I agree with what you said about the barbarians, some were actually friendly and admiring of Rome, bu they simply didn't know how to run such a vast and complex system. What you said about the chain reaction of catastrophes causing the whole thing to crash reminded of Roan Tom saying very similar things at the beginning of "A Tragedy Of Errors."
Sean
There's also evidence that when an area was incorporated in the Roman Empire, its population began to grow, usually reaching the maximum pre-modern level in a century or two, and off course urbanization was introduced into areas where cities and literacy hadn't existed at all.
For example, in Roman Britannia (pretty much England and Wales), the population seems to have reached around 4 million by the mid 300's. That wasn't equalled again until the early 1300's, when it crashed again in the Black Death and subsequently, not reaching the Roman figure again until the mid-1600's... whereupon it declined (slightly) again until the modern increase began in the 1730's.
And in Roman Britain, the degree of urbanization was also greater than it was again until Tudor times; so was literacy, with even ordinary urban artisans and workmen writing graffiti (in Latin).
The economy was thoroughly monetized, with small coins appearing everywhere, even in remote rural areas. Commodities like cloth, building stone and consumer goods like pottery and garum (fish sauce) were imported in bulk. Domestic production was quite large-scale, with potteries mass-producing ordinary household goods.
By way of contrast, by the time of Domesday Book in 1085 the population was -still- less than half that of Britannia, and after the Roman withdrawal money and towns seem to have disappeared almost completely -- people stopped making and using even the crudest home-made pottery for some time.
That's an extreme case, but similar things happened all over.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Brutal and ruthless tho the Romans were, they were more than simply thugs. Simply by imposing peace on large territories ENABLED the population to grow and develop a very advanced economy. We see that happening with Norman Arminger's Portland Protective Association in your Emberverse books.
I had some idea of how advanced the economy and finances of the Empire and even its remoter provinces in Britannia were. I'm amazed by the wide variety of goods IMPORTED by Roman Britannia, for example. But not of how large a population Britannia had in the AD 300s.
Yes, all this crashed after the Roman withdrawal. It was centuries before the Anglo Saxons even started minting their own coins. And their silver "pennies" were high value coins not really suitable for every day life.
Sean
One of the basic mechanisms was the way the Roman tax system functioned.
It more or less forced all agriculturalists to aim at producing a -consistent- surplus over subsistence needs, something you can't count on in a "natural" economy, which usually has a lot of "underemployed" resources and labor. It's in the nature of farming that output can't be precisely planned, especially given the technology available then.
So the surplus aimed at was subsistence+taxes+margin of safety; and of course a lot of the taxes had to be paid in cash, so crops had to be sold anyway.
That in turn encouraged specialization -- the surplus margin could be effectively traded for goods no longer produced in the village or locally via barter.
This tightened up the resource use efficiency of the entire economy by opening up new opportunities for specialist producers and middlemen.
It also made it possible to employ resources a more localized economy couldn't use at all -- for example, growing selected crops on land not suited for basic grain farming and then selling them to buy basic foodstuffs shipped from somewhere better suited for it.
Eventually large areas grew things like wine grapes or olives or dyestuffs, and bought their grain. This had happened before, but it was risky. One reason Athens lost the war with Sparta was that Athens depended on grain imports, paying for them with oil and wine exports and silver. That made her very vulnerable to any interruption of shipping.
Under the Empire, everyone could specialize with relatively small risks.
Eg., the huge extension of farming into the arid zone in North Africa was largely based on olive farming -- olives will grow on very sandy or rocky soils, they don't need much water and they produce something that is worth many times more than the same area in wheat or barley.
The Roman peace also freed up a lot of time and effort previously put into attacking/defending against immediate neighbors, of course, and having a common legal system (Roman commercial law was fairly uniform throughout the Empire) massively reduced economic risk. So did the rapid spread of information, and then there were the roads and harbor works and suppression of piracy and so forth.
These are mostly "positive externalities". The tax system was intended to raise revenue, not promote monetization and specialization; the road and courier systems were intended for military and government use, and so forth. But they all had knock-on effects.
The Roman Empire's economy represented something far closer to a maximum-intensity use of the environment with the available technology than anything which had existed before; and while the Romans weren't great innovators, they did effectively -spread- technologies, so that "best practice" became much more widespread.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Many thanks for your very interesting and informative remarks. I had not realized how the Roman tax system had so many beneficial, "knock on" results.
Sean
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