I'll throw in a curveball here. There was a paper from Voigtländer and Voth back in 2013, "The Gifts of Mars: Warfare and Europe's Early Rise to Riches". They make the argument that Europe was a hard place to conquer and pacify, so it was in a constant state of warfare and that wars and the diseases associated with warfare killed enough people to keep Europe from reaching its Malthusian limit. Food might get scarcer as population grew, but odds are a war would wipe out enough people to prevent the kind of starvation found in more peaceful areas. <sarcasm>Oh, happy day! Thank you God of War.</sarcasm>
I can't say I'm convinced, but there is something to the argument. People often wonder how Europe got so wealthy. Could it have been all those horrible wars? Could it have been diseases carried by soldiers as they moved from strategic post to strategic post? Wars might be bad news, but the Black Death had a major positive impact on the economics and politics of the continent.
The wealthy Shunamite woman would not be at subsistence levels of income. Her husband presumably had land to inherit, and perhaps dynastic ambitions.
Is it thus not partially story about bronze age Shunamite inheritance customs? If she was, say, in Tokugawa Japan her husband could just adopt a son. If she was in Medieval Europe, she could donate to and retire at a nice monastery. If I recall, in the bronze age Levant, couldn't she pressure her husband's brother to marry her if she was widowed?
Is it not also a story about survival of the most dominating and exploitive? Those too malnourished to ovulate might have no alternative retirement plan to children or charity. But they might be discouraged to marry by expectations to start a neolocal household, by dowries, by bride prices, by pressure towards infanticide. Meanwhile, if we're talking bronze age Levant, we have stories like Abraham and Hagar. Sons are power under patriarchy, and power is concentrated.
A more minor note, but you'd also have to consider the control variable for the son optimization model. Is it just age at marriage, with natural fertility within marriage like in much of Early Modern Europe? Is it infanticide like in Antiquity or Early Modern East Asia? Cultural norms matter here too.
How is it that, notwithstanding the Devil Malthus, high culture continued to evolve at an apparently high rate throughout the period in question? Without wishing to characterize any culture as “superior to” or “more complex than” any other, it does seem fair to say that Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the 16th century is not the same thing as one of his remote ancestors painting a cave wall 10,000 or 20,000 years before.
Is it that elites were able over the millennia to appropriate, consistently, an increasingly larger share of whatever surplus existed for the purposes of their elucidation or entertainment, such that a permanent class of artists/artisans and intellectuals could be maintained?
For one example, take jewelry production. Whatever their differences, it would be fair to say that, notwithstanding the ups and downs of empires, every “Western” culture from the Sumerians and Egyptians down through the Greco-Romans, Celts, Anglo-Saxons and medieval and Renaissance Europeans produced jewelry of a quality and technical complexity that rivals or surpasses our own.
I suppose that it would be more difficult to establish a “rate” of cultural development–or even to agree that “culture” does “develop”–than one of economic and technical development, but if Malthus held the latter in a vise, why not the former? By the time the Renaissance came along, why were we not still limited to painting on the walls of caves?
I am way, way out of my lawyerly lane here, but this did strike me as an interesting question.
General technology and knowledge advanced a lot over -3000 to 1500: Perhaps 30-fold, or more. Did cultural production and knowledge advance faster? Maybe, maybe not: the key, I think, is that resource scarcity from higher population offset the benefits of better technology in terms of living standards for hoi polloi, but had no dragging effect on cultural achievements...
I read recently in a newish history of late-antique and early medieval England that there is increasing archaeological evidence that, even in the comparative anarchy of post-Roman Britain, whatever elites there were–scarcely more than leaders of tribal bands–made the effort to maintain some level of Romanitas for centuries after the legions departed. The inference is that they knew what elite status was supposed to look like, so they tried to model it as long as possible.
Gerrard, The Ruin Of Roman Britain: An Archaeological Perspective (Cambridge 2013)
Crabtree, Early Medieval Britain: The Rebirth Of Towns In The Post-Roman West (Cambridge 2018)
Oosthuizen, The Emergence Of The English (Arc Humanities Press 2019)
Particularly the first of these.
Much of this has to do with the ongoing broader debate in Late Antiquity studies over how the “end” of the Roman Empire is best characterized. Two things that come up in one or more of these books are (1) the persistence of Roman military ornaments and badges of rank, e.g., crossbow brooches, and (2) evidence that importation of luxury goods from the Mediterranean into post-Roman Britain continued in significantly greater volume and longer in duration than traditionally thought.
This last goes in particular to the point that elites have an incentive to keep elite arts and manufactures going to some extent, no matter what is going on in the wider world, because being elite implies looking and acting elite.
Seems to me reasonable that what drove the olive tree shortage was the increasing scale of warfare. The neolithic transition enabled small villages to produce and store the year’s nutrition in a (more or less) fixed location. Soon farmsteads become sufficiently numerous to support an alternate career of banditry, appropriating some or all of that store, as in Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven. The villagers really have no defense against professional raiders, who prevent them from accumulating above a subsistence level. Eventually the wiser bandits move in and establish themselves by force as elites, a more direct method of controlling the appropriateable surplus, keeping the primary producers at a subsistence level. Soon those elites have no raiding opportunities except against each other, and the warfare era is in full swing and here we are. Economic development is limited in the first place by diversion of surplus away from investing in production and non-military technology development, and further and more importantly by destruction of infrastructure (olive trees), civil governing structures, and of course the sedentary populations as armies march against armies.
Regarding these surviving sons. Exactly how much did they benefit their mother once these men reached adulthood? Weren't a lot of these guys drafted or volunteered for the army to march off with Alexander, Caesar, various Crusader kings? So a lot of these men were gone for years and were of no benefit to their mother or their village. A a lot of them got killed too and never came back.
Also, if I may, when you say "heights," do mention to the audience that you're comparing the central tendencies of height distributions. The average or median of that distribution was to the left of the modern one. When we talk of trends in average heights, we mean the whole distributions moving up or down. It could also include the possibility that the well-off back then could also be shorter than the average person today.
"..That means substantial malnutrition during life: immune systems so compromised as to be unable to fight off even small infections, .."
And the infections they suffered were the big, brutal ones. Little or no chance to make it through. Not to mention the lack of knowledge of how a contagion works, or even what is its source, before the germ theory. Meanwhile, the non-communicable diseases likely appeared at a much earlier age than today. On adult heights, there is also the income distribution issue. We likely solved that partly through public health.
There was a blog called Done With Mirrors. I'm not sure who wrote for it, but there was an excellent post there, The Past is Another Country, that covered something that the author was not going to mention in his book review of A Team of Rivals, a book about various leaders of the Republican party through Lincoln's presidency and the Civil War. It was about how common the death of a child was due to disease in the era, how often women died in childbirth. I'll quote him on Salmon Chase, the man on the $100,000 bill:
"Salmon Chase lost his first wife after 18 months of marriage from complications in childbirth. She was only 23. The daughter she bore died of scarlet fever at age 5. Chase fell in love with and married a friend of his wife, but their daughter also died, and tuberculosis felled the mother at age 25. Chase married a third time, to a society belle in Cincinnati, but of their two daughters only one lived past a year and the mother soon died as well. By 44, he had buried three wives and three daughters. He never remarried, and the sole surviving child, Kitty, was his brilliant 'first lady' throughout his political career."
It was a rather interesting piece, and I wish the blog had been archived somewhere. Life into the 20th century sounded pretty harrowing.
We know how high the mortality rates were from homicides, diseases, and once incurable conditions. We forget that cholera was devastating. We forget the huge improvements in medicine and healthcare from vaccines, sanitation, anesthesia, drugs instead of surgery, etc, etc. Despite this, lack of access to quality healthcare still means women die in childbirth, and is apparently higher amongst non-whites. In another century, immune approaches to dealing with cancers will make this era seem as primitive as applying leeches. [I have a 1898 pharmacopeia that is full of just awful "treatments" that were foisted on the population.] We have the benefit of good healthcare, albeit unevenly applied, but just imagine what the situation is in poor countries.
Yes, it was horrible. I, too, have studied data on England and Wales over the past two centuries. The account you mention sounds typical to that era. The well-off might have had some advantages, but they probably, too, fared worse than the average person later in the 20th century.
I can't speak for Brad but you might want to check Merriam Webster, definition 3. I'm afraid that ship has sailed, in spite of your specious (i.e., attractive, if we go by the Latin) objection. It is a bit unsettling when words evolve to the point of having more or less opposite meanings available ("cleave," "scan").
Yes, well, this is an extract from an email that gave me brief pause: "The text is juicy. I resent it to the co-authors of ..." Meaning is negotiable. Though not every passage is.
I'll throw in a curveball here. There was a paper from Voigtländer and Voth back in 2013, "The Gifts of Mars: Warfare and Europe's Early Rise to Riches". They make the argument that Europe was a hard place to conquer and pacify, so it was in a constant state of warfare and that wars and the diseases associated with warfare killed enough people to keep Europe from reaching its Malthusian limit. Food might get scarcer as population grew, but odds are a war would wipe out enough people to prevent the kind of starvation found in more peaceful areas. <sarcasm>Oh, happy day! Thank you God of War.</sarcasm>
I can't say I'm convinced, but there is something to the argument. People often wonder how Europe got so wealthy. Could it have been all those horrible wars? Could it have been diseases carried by soldiers as they moved from strategic post to strategic post? Wars might be bad news, but the Black Death had a major positive impact on the economics and politics of the continent.
As I said, this is a curveball.
Ian Morris made a similar argument in his book "War, What is it Goof For?"
This is brilliant, even by your standards, Brad.
Thanks much! Brad
The wealthy Shunamite woman would not be at subsistence levels of income. Her husband presumably had land to inherit, and perhaps dynastic ambitions.
Is it thus not partially story about bronze age Shunamite inheritance customs? If she was, say, in Tokugawa Japan her husband could just adopt a son. If she was in Medieval Europe, she could donate to and retire at a nice monastery. If I recall, in the bronze age Levant, couldn't she pressure her husband's brother to marry her if she was widowed?
Is it not also a story about survival of the most dominating and exploitive? Those too malnourished to ovulate might have no alternative retirement plan to children or charity. But they might be discouraged to marry by expectations to start a neolocal household, by dowries, by bride prices, by pressure towards infanticide. Meanwhile, if we're talking bronze age Levant, we have stories like Abraham and Hagar. Sons are power under patriarchy, and power is concentrated.
A more minor note, but you'd also have to consider the control variable for the son optimization model. Is it just age at marriage, with natural fertility within marriage like in much of Early Modern Europe? Is it infanticide like in Antiquity or Early Modern East Asia? Cultural norms matter here too.
How is it that, notwithstanding the Devil Malthus, high culture continued to evolve at an apparently high rate throughout the period in question? Without wishing to characterize any culture as “superior to” or “more complex than” any other, it does seem fair to say that Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the 16th century is not the same thing as one of his remote ancestors painting a cave wall 10,000 or 20,000 years before.
Is it that elites were able over the millennia to appropriate, consistently, an increasingly larger share of whatever surplus existed for the purposes of their elucidation or entertainment, such that a permanent class of artists/artisans and intellectuals could be maintained?
For one example, take jewelry production. Whatever their differences, it would be fair to say that, notwithstanding the ups and downs of empires, every “Western” culture from the Sumerians and Egyptians down through the Greco-Romans, Celts, Anglo-Saxons and medieval and Renaissance Europeans produced jewelry of a quality and technical complexity that rivals or surpasses our own.
I suppose that it would be more difficult to establish a “rate” of cultural development–or even to agree that “culture” does “develop”–than one of economic and technical development, but if Malthus held the latter in a vise, why not the former? By the time the Renaissance came along, why were we not still limited to painting on the walls of caves?
I am way, way out of my lawyerly lane here, but this did strike me as an interesting question.
General technology and knowledge advanced a lot over -3000 to 1500: Perhaps 30-fold, or more. Did cultural production and knowledge advance faster? Maybe, maybe not: the key, I think, is that resource scarcity from higher population offset the benefits of better technology in terms of living standards for hoi polloi, but had no dragging effect on cultural achievements...
I read recently in a newish history of late-antique and early medieval England that there is increasing archaeological evidence that, even in the comparative anarchy of post-Roman Britain, whatever elites there were–scarcely more than leaders of tribal bands–made the effort to maintain some level of Romanitas for centuries after the legions departed. The inference is that they knew what elite status was supposed to look like, so they tried to model it as long as possible.
Interesting! References? Brad
Gerrard, The Ruin Of Roman Britain: An Archaeological Perspective (Cambridge 2013)
Crabtree, Early Medieval Britain: The Rebirth Of Towns In The Post-Roman West (Cambridge 2018)
Oosthuizen, The Emergence Of The English (Arc Humanities Press 2019)
Particularly the first of these.
Much of this has to do with the ongoing broader debate in Late Antiquity studies over how the “end” of the Roman Empire is best characterized. Two things that come up in one or more of these books are (1) the persistence of Roman military ornaments and badges of rank, e.g., crossbow brooches, and (2) evidence that importation of luxury goods from the Mediterranean into post-Roman Britain continued in significantly greater volume and longer in duration than traditionally thought.
This last goes in particular to the point that elites have an incentive to keep elite arts and manufactures going to some extent, no matter what is going on in the wider world, because being elite implies looking and acting elite.
Thanks... Brad
I was afraid you were going to ask that! Must find it again
Seems to me reasonable that what drove the olive tree shortage was the increasing scale of warfare. The neolithic transition enabled small villages to produce and store the year’s nutrition in a (more or less) fixed location. Soon farmsteads become sufficiently numerous to support an alternate career of banditry, appropriating some or all of that store, as in Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven. The villagers really have no defense against professional raiders, who prevent them from accumulating above a subsistence level. Eventually the wiser bandits move in and establish themselves by force as elites, a more direct method of controlling the appropriateable surplus, keeping the primary producers at a subsistence level. Soon those elites have no raiding opportunities except against each other, and the warfare era is in full swing and here we are. Economic development is limited in the first place by diversion of surplus away from investing in production and non-military technology development, and further and more importantly by destruction of infrastructure (olive trees), civil governing structures, and of course the sedentary populations as armies march against armies.
Yes... That it is easier, for a certain group at least, to take someone else's vine-&-fig-tree than to grow your owb...
"Ensorcelled by the Devil Malthus" is a fantastic phrase. How the hell can I work it into a conversation?
Regarding these surviving sons. Exactly how much did they benefit their mother once these men reached adulthood? Weren't a lot of these guys drafted or volunteered for the army to march off with Alexander, Caesar, various Crusader kings? So a lot of these men were gone for years and were of no benefit to their mother or their village. A a lot of them got killed too and never came back.
Also, if I may, when you say "heights," do mention to the audience that you're comparing the central tendencies of height distributions. The average or median of that distribution was to the left of the modern one. When we talk of trends in average heights, we mean the whole distributions moving up or down. It could also include the possibility that the well-off back then could also be shorter than the average person today.
"..That means substantial malnutrition during life: immune systems so compromised as to be unable to fight off even small infections, .."
And the infections they suffered were the big, brutal ones. Little or no chance to make it through. Not to mention the lack of knowledge of how a contagion works, or even what is its source, before the germ theory. Meanwhile, the non-communicable diseases likely appeared at a much earlier age than today. On adult heights, there is also the income distribution issue. We likely solved that partly through public health.
There was a blog called Done With Mirrors. I'm not sure who wrote for it, but there was an excellent post there, The Past is Another Country, that covered something that the author was not going to mention in his book review of A Team of Rivals, a book about various leaders of the Republican party through Lincoln's presidency and the Civil War. It was about how common the death of a child was due to disease in the era, how often women died in childbirth. I'll quote him on Salmon Chase, the man on the $100,000 bill:
"Salmon Chase lost his first wife after 18 months of marriage from complications in childbirth. She was only 23. The daughter she bore died of scarlet fever at age 5. Chase fell in love with and married a friend of his wife, but their daughter also died, and tuberculosis felled the mother at age 25. Chase married a third time, to a society belle in Cincinnati, but of their two daughters only one lived past a year and the mother soon died as well. By 44, he had buried three wives and three daughters. He never remarried, and the sole surviving child, Kitty, was his brilliant 'first lady' throughout his political career."
It was a rather interesting piece, and I wish the blog had been archived somewhere. Life into the 20th century sounded pretty harrowing.
We know how high the mortality rates were from homicides, diseases, and once incurable conditions. We forget that cholera was devastating. We forget the huge improvements in medicine and healthcare from vaccines, sanitation, anesthesia, drugs instead of surgery, etc, etc. Despite this, lack of access to quality healthcare still means women die in childbirth, and is apparently higher amongst non-whites. In another century, immune approaches to dealing with cancers will make this era seem as primitive as applying leeches. [I have a 1898 pharmacopeia that is full of just awful "treatments" that were foisted on the population.] We have the benefit of good healthcare, albeit unevenly applied, but just imagine what the situation is in poor countries.
Yes, it was horrible. I, too, have studied data on England and Wales over the past two centuries. The account you mention sounds typical to that era. The well-off might have had some advantages, but they probably, too, fared worse than the average person later in the 20th century.
Abe and Mary fared no better.
They show up in that post as well.
http://kaleberg.com/public/ThePastIsAnotherCountry.txt
I found the URL. The blog is still online at
http://vernondent.blogspot.com/2006/02/team-of-rivals.html
I assume Vernon Dent was the author.
Decimate? Surely you mean “devastate”?
I can't speak for Brad but you might want to check Merriam Webster, definition 3. I'm afraid that ship has sailed, in spite of your specious (i.e., attractive, if we go by the Latin) objection. It is a bit unsettling when words evolve to the point of having more or less opposite meanings available ("cleave," "scan").
"“When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” - Humpty Dumpty, from Alice in Wonderland.
Yes, well, this is an extract from an email that gave me brief pause: "The text is juicy. I resent it to the co-authors of ..." Meaning is negotiable. Though not every passage is.
Also British English and US English has different meanings for things to. e.g. British English "interesting" report = worthless and chuck in bin.