As I think more about what to teach in my courses next fall, I find myself contracting my aspirations for what I can cover of the pre-1870 world. Right now I am thinking: 1/4 pre-1870; 1/4 1870...
I don't get it. The Greece of Aristotle and the England of [today?] are aristocratic societies, where those at the top despise production and commerce. (Finance may be something else, at least for England.) I'm not sure that the rulers of either polity respected what they enabled, except for Margaret Thatcher, who respected nothing else. I suppose that the conclusion is that commerce grows organically, in the interstices of social order.
I recommend a functional rather than chronological resume. However much research I've done, the earlier the standard innovations of today's institutions seem to get. I gave up about 15 years ago when it emerged that money, in the form of shell strings, was prevalent 100 thousand years ago. Truck and barter indeed, though other habits such as settlements, fire, spears, and arrows are two or three times as old. I also review biology, starting with bacterial tactics, the origin of the brain's language segment 300 million years ago, pheromones (shaded by shared dinners)((fruit fies)), and game theory in the form of two gentlemen competing for a chance at dinner with a lady. They go hunting with a chance of getting hurt if acting alone, cooperate, and fruitlessly share. The origin of repeated games, the impulse to work, etc.
So that doesn't take long to teach, the next step being towns (tho also practiced by Neanderthals), metals, slavery, wages, welfare.
Bevel-bowls of Susa daily ration, Hammurabi, and the adoption of religion to balance secular power. That only a little later than the first steppe people starting up in Greece after 4 times earlier interface between hunter-gatherers and cultivators.
Again, not so much time but covers a lot of ordinary behavior people forget about,. Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Harappa, where rich people had big houses and poor people lived near the sewer,
One has to skip, so I describe the tri-metallic, modern banking system of the Roman empire, skip forward to Venice from 1200 to 1554 setting a proper central financial market, basically most modern government institutions, and the Arsenal, not the first, but records of contracts and unions for workers.
After that, who cares? Myself I would put Netherlands, England, France, Denmark, Russia on the map and end with the panic of 1857, evolutions of industry beginning with the US civil war, and ending with WWII, technical accelerations with war, mechanization of transport, electricity,
I envy those who get you as a teacher.
:-)
Pedant alert. Typo: it is the “fens” not “fins” of Norfolk near Cambridge.
Nice catch!
I don't get it. The Greece of Aristotle and the England of [today?] are aristocratic societies, where those at the top despise production and commerce. (Finance may be something else, at least for England.) I'm not sure that the rulers of either polity respected what they enabled, except for Margaret Thatcher, who respected nothing else. I suppose that the conclusion is that commerce grows organically, in the interstices of social order.
Plato and Aristotle are loud in Classical Athens, but they are not as powerful in shaping ideas as the Classics discipline has maintained.
Consider Posidonius of Rhodes: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/day-6-lecture-notes-24-slow-pace>
Hi Brad,
I recommend a functional rather than chronological resume. However much research I've done, the earlier the standard innovations of today's institutions seem to get. I gave up about 15 years ago when it emerged that money, in the form of shell strings, was prevalent 100 thousand years ago. Truck and barter indeed, though other habits such as settlements, fire, spears, and arrows are two or three times as old. I also review biology, starting with bacterial tactics, the origin of the brain's language segment 300 million years ago, pheromones (shaded by shared dinners)((fruit fies)), and game theory in the form of two gentlemen competing for a chance at dinner with a lady. They go hunting with a chance of getting hurt if acting alone, cooperate, and fruitlessly share. The origin of repeated games, the impulse to work, etc.
So that doesn't take long to teach, the next step being towns (tho also practiced by Neanderthals), metals, slavery, wages, welfare.
Bevel-bowls of Susa daily ration, Hammurabi, and the adoption of religion to balance secular power. That only a little later than the first steppe people starting up in Greece after 4 times earlier interface between hunter-gatherers and cultivators.
Again, not so much time but covers a lot of ordinary behavior people forget about,. Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Harappa, where rich people had big houses and poor people lived near the sewer,
One has to skip, so I describe the tri-metallic, modern banking system of the Roman empire, skip forward to Venice from 1200 to 1554 setting a proper central financial market, basically most modern government institutions, and the Arsenal, not the first, but records of contracts and unions for workers.
After that, who cares? Myself I would put Netherlands, England, France, Denmark, Russia on the map and end with the panic of 1857, evolutions of industry beginning with the US civil war, and ending with WWII, technical accelerations with war, mechanization of transport, electricity,
The last third would start then, I guess.