BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-06-27 Mo: At the worm’s-eye level, history is one damn thing happening after another, and possible history's branch and branch and branch, with large and substantial difference between the possibilities: “a war postponed might have been a war avoided. Alternatively, a war fought two years later over a different issue might… have ended in German victory…” At the God’s-eye level, history gathers possibilities back into a bundle of likelihood. Something like a major industrial war of national military and economic mobilization among the great powers in a context of defensive trench-warfare tactical superiority was very likely to happen in Europe sometime after 1900, and it was likely to massively destabilize all ancien régimes, and to substantially destabilize all others. And at the intermediate level, there are transmission belts: how the structures influence the conceptual universes within which the deciders make their decisions, and then how those decisions carry and miscarry as they run up against technological-material-social realities. This worm-intermediate-God framework overlaps with causally “thin” and “thick” history in ways I do not fully and properuy understand.
Uii! The Empire really had bad luck with the son that did outlive Marcus Aurelius. At least the Byzantines allowed Empresses. And Henry tried with Matilda.
Uii! The Empire really had bad luck with the son that did outlive Marcus Aurelius. At least the Byzantines allowed Empresses. And Henry tried with Matilda.