I recently finished reading "The Gunpowder Age" by Tonio Andrade. It's a book about the history of gunpowder as used in warfare in China (with bits about its use in Europe, provided mainly for context and comparison).

It's also a book about the racist, colonialist myth that guns are A European Thing, that China may have invented gunpowder but never used it in warfare, or that China may have invented guns but they never actually went very far with them and their gun tech was always hopelessly outmatched by superior Western guns. Andrade doesn't call these myths out as the racist/colonialist garbage that they are... but he does demolish them quite thoroughly, by going to both Chinese and European primary sources (and making it clear that secondary sources have long been and continue to be woefully poor when it comes to the history of gun technology. Even some Chinese historians have bought into the myth). In other words, by way of looking at gun tech, Andrade is attacking the orientalist idea of China being "stagnant," "decadent," or otherwise somehow innately inferior to Europe/backwards compared to Europe.

Andrade counters this myth with a counter-narrative that Chinese stagnation happened only during periods of (relative) peace and unity. The land that is populated by Chinese speaking people has sometimes been completely unified and at peace, but at other times (especially during dynastic succession, but also during dynasties that failed to achieve hegemony) it splintered into smaller but still quite powerful states, each more-or-less seriously interested in conquering the others. He argues that the existential threat of conquest drove R&D for new weapons, whereas periods of unity and peace led to military complacency and a significant slowdown of military research. Europe, in contrast, never had *any* periods of peace, so, once gun-having Europeans arrived in East Asia during the era of colonial expansion, from time to time China would lag behind Europe in gun technology, only to catch up once a new period of heightened warfare began.

The colonialist meme that China was decadent and weak solidified in the 19th century, during one of those long periods of peace and stability within China. When the threat from Europe began to prod China to resume military investment in the 19th century, they found themselves behind not just in the realm of weapons, but in a vast array of interlocking realms due to Europe's burgeoning industrial revolution. The Self-Strengthening Movement and the Tongzhi Restoration were able to bring China up to par with Europe and Japan for a time, but they did so only through the action of individual ministers, rather than a systematic, long-term government program - when the ministers died or ceased to be in favour, China began to fall behind again, and at a time when military technology was advancing faster than ever.

This was a good book, and I will now go on at some length into the details that I found most interesting. ( Read more... )

Another thinky post. This one will be short. First, a shout-out to conuly who kindly drew attention to my error in the last post about food insecurity, and also gave me an invaluable new vocabulary term: "Food Collecting Peoples" instead of "Hunter Gatherers" does away with the "hunter" label that brings up sexist and inaccurate ideas about how those people lived.

I made a mistake in the first "extra stuff" note I put in the comments to the last thinky post about the invention of agriculture and whether inequality and war are necessarily linked to "civilization."

It's a very common assumption that food collecting peoples live a more precarious and food insecure existence than farmers - that they are more in danger of starving to death. This has generated not just harmless mistakes like my footnote but scads of bad science based on this assumption, such as the harmful "Thrifty Genotype" hypothesis among dieticians which assumes that gaining weight gain happens because humans are adapted to survive alternating waves of feast and famine, and thus self-starvation through dieting is the only proper way to address obesity (the more I learn about diet and obesity science the more I learn just how wrongheaded and discriminatory the entire discipline is).

In fact, food collecting peoples were *not* more prone to suffer food insecurity than farming peoples. Three separate analyses using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (TIL that there is a standardized data set for making cross cultural analyses, which is tailored to eliminate similarities due to cultural borrowing by limiting itself to cultures that are widely separated in space/time) found that this is in fact not the case. Comparing across all cultures in the sample, there's no difference in food insecurity between farmers and food collectors. If you control for climate (because arctic food collectors like the Inuit *are* more food insecure and in danger of starvation), then food collectors are *less* likely to be food insecure than farmers. Farmers are tied to their land and at the mercy of whatever happens to their crops, but food collectors can pick up and move to a different area, or simply switch to a different food source that was not impacted by the drought/flood/whatever (here is the only open access article of the three. It's the most recent and footnotes 19 and 20 link to the other two articles. CW: the article's discussion centres the obesity research angle).

The myth of food collectors' food insecurity is mostly born of prejudice (the assumption that life "in the state of nature" was "nasty brutish and short" dates back at least to the 17th century). Some of it is due to selective noticing of the data: famine and food insecurity was at least sometimes an issue for both food collectors and farmers. And some of it traces back to the artificially created food insecurity of people under colonialism and post-colonialism, which the colonizers always blamed on the victims rather than admitting their role. (having your land arbitrarily chopped into blocks that you're not allowed to go onto is not good for food collectors, even before we add the colonizers actively murdering them). Even today, most google hits for "hunter gatherer food insecurity" are papers and articles about how *former* food collecting cultures are suffering food insecurity now that they have largely ceased their own collecting practices and come to rely on food distribution by the nations in which they live. And, finally, at least in my case, some of the myth is due to wrongfully applying the special case of arctic peoples (the one climate where agriculture is impossible and food collectors do suffer from increased food insecurity) too broadly - I remembered reading about how Nanook (of the 20's documentary Nanook of the North) starved to death a few years after the film was made, which was explained as not unusual among the Inuit, and I took that as confirmation that I could accept the received myth and didn't have to google yet another fact.

So, with that myth debunked, why, exactly, did food collecting people switch to farming over most of the world? Farming is measurably worse by almost every metric: more work for the same or greater food insecurity, with more disease, worse nutrition (from a less varied diet), shorter lifespans, shorter adult stature, etc.

That farming made you more susceptible to disease was not evident to premodern people lacking tools to make statistical analyses, but at least some of the consequences of farmers' ill health *were* visible. An example off the top of my head (from the book 1491 by Charles Mann): early European accounts of First Nations people mentioned how healthy, tall, robust, and handsome Indians were compared to the malnourished, disease ridden Europeans. Most of the Indians in question were farmers themselves, but they had a broader, more nutritionally complete set of crops and, without domesticated animals, they were relatively disease-free. If the bigoted Europeans noticed and commented on the difference between better-nourished, disease free First Nations farmers and themselves, then food collectors must have noticed differences in health between themselves and the farmers whose technology they adopted.

First, in some places, food collectors didn't switch so much as get assimilated by farmers who moved into the area - genetic analysis of human remains from central Europe shows that the switch from food collecting to farming involved a genetic change, with an influx of people showing some degree of Anatolian ancestry moving in with their farming technology and mating with the local food collectors. But in other areas that genetic shift does not occur (the food collectors of the Baltic states, for instance, adopted the agricultural technology but did not interbreed with the people that brought it to them).

Second, depending on how violent that assimilation process was, people like those Baltic food collectors might have adopted farming in self-defence, regardless of the downsides.

Elsewhere, for instance in North America, there's clear evidence of agricultural technology diffusing without attendant migration, so: no assimilation or threat of assimilation. Why switch to a food system that required more work, had visible negative effects on the people who adopted it, and provided no real improvement in food security?

One common answer is that they were forced to by population pressure. (eg, Jared Diamond) This is Malthusian bullshit (another thinky post about Malthus being completely wrong will happen someday). Humans have always had the ability to limit their family sizes. Population only increased when technological change made it possible to reduce the land area per person. Look at the times between those technological shifts, and population remains extremely stable with little to no growth for vast stretches of time. There was no Malthusian pressure on food collectors to increase their food supply. Population increases happened after they changed their technology, not before.

Another answer I've seen mooted is that agriculturalists live settled lives and that enables them to accumulate more belongings and become richer than nomads. This overlooks the vast number of settled food collecting societies, where rich natural food sources meant people could live in one place permanently and own lots of things, without becoming farmers. It also overlooks that nomadic food collectors had a home range with which they were deeply familiar, and a limited number of home camps that they visited at more or less set times, depending on the season and what food sources were due to become collectable where. They could cache belongings at those camps and not have to limit themselves to what they could carry. So they weren't necessarily as poor and bereft of possessions as the popular conception of them would have.

A lot of the links I get when googling for reasons that food collectors switched to farming focus on the *invention* of farming, and provide the suggestion that this was done because settled food collectors in naturally rich areas (like the parts of the fertile crescent where wheat farming was invented) had to either become unsettled or invent new ways to get food when the place they had been living became less rich, whether due to climate change or over-exploitation. Which is not at all in accord with what we know about the actual time lines of plant domestication, extending as they do back to the height of the last glacial period, so that the food collectors were perfecting agriculture while the climate was improving and the richness of their homeland was increasing (see my previous thinky, linked above).

To restate the question: of the food collectors who had the choice to adopt already-invented farming technology (many desert/steppe dwellers and all arctic people did not have that choice, nor did those who adopted it under the threat of assimilation), some did not adopt the new tech, or resisted doing so until colonialism/invasion took away their choice (maybe because they saw evidence of the many downsides of farming). Others accepted the choice, despite those visible downsides: why? I still haven't found a reason proposed that sits well with me. But I do have a crackpot theory of my own.

Maybe, just maybe, it was because while agriculture did not provide any real benefit to settled food collectors, it did give the *appearance* of benefit. It gave the illusion of control: it made the people who did it feel that they were better able to ward off bad times because as a farmer, you were creating your own food, instead of being dependant on the forces of nature to provide food for you. Food collecting meant being at the mercy of countless factors beyond your control or ken. Farming meant being at the mercy of just one: rainfall. It wasn't actually better than food collecting, but it felt better, because *it was less scary*, and that's why it proved so popular.

I was reading about Machu Picchu and Inca stonework last week, and came across the hoary old colonialist talking point that the Incas did not invent the wheel. Being in a "go down internet rabbit holes" mood, I found myself reading various explanations for why precolumbian Americans, despite having wheeled figurines (see: image here and writeup here and early prototype pottery wheels (the kabal/molde, never scaled those figurines up or broadened their application to transport. Very few of the explanations sat well with me.

( Read more... )Central American pottery wheels were still at the "spin the pot relatively slowly while laying coil" stage when the Spanish arrived. Not all the pieces had come together yet, and thanks to the conquest, they never would.

(extra bits that I found while writing this but that didn't fit are in comments)

Blog post 1: The Unmitigated Pedantry blog mentioned in passing today that while in medieval Europe, fortifications were built with thin stone walls which were very easy to destroy with the early, crude cannons of the 1400's. In China, on the other hand, fortresses were built with thick earthen walls lined with a thin layer of bricks, which were immune to early cannons.

Both places had access to the same kind of early artillery technology at roughly the same time, but in China, cannons were seen as a novelty of not much use. In Europe, the earliest, crudest cannons were a game changer, enabling the conquest of forts and cities without long sieges, leading to massive shifts in power as those who could afford cannons conquered their smaller, poorer neighbours, until the only nations left standing a few centuries later were countries that could afford the massive expense not just of cannons, but of building lots of all-new cannon-proof fortifications to defend their territories.

And this military transformation within Europe fed into other interacting factors to transform Western Europe from a poor backwater that was decidedly weaker than the vastly larger, more populous and far richer nations of Central and Eastern Asia, into a colossus of conquest that took over the entire world in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The question that the Pedantry blog did not address was why China built their forts so differently than Europe.

Which brings me to another blog post from last year: The Analog Antiquarian has been posting multpart essays about the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World for a while now. Sadly he is not a historian and sometimes uses old and outdated books as his sources, and I have found his novelistic approach sometimes offputting. But one thing I learned from his series a while back: archaeologists have never been able to find the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, of ancient clickbait fame ("You'll never guess what building is number six on our list of the 7 most awesome structures worth seeing in the world!").

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon seem to have never actually existed in Babylon. Although there are scholars who think something like what was described in the ancient lists did in fact exist in Nineveh. Although this just trades one mystery (where is it) for another (why did so many writers of the ancient world mix up two very distinct cities?)

But in the process of explaining the non-discovery of the Hanging Gardens by modern archaeologists, the Analog Antiquarian highlighted something I had already sort-of known: that ancient Babylon left behind very few ruins, because of its location. In the middle of a vast floodplain, quite far from any hills or mountains, with nothing but silt beneath their feet as far as they could dig, ancient Babylonians built everything, from hovels to palaces, out of mud brick. Which over the millennia, has completely eroded away into subtle mounds on the landscape, plus, sometimes, ceramic tiles that once decorated the outer layers of the walls of more elaborate buildings.

For instance, we have today a reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate. The wood of the gate rotted away, and the mud brick of the walls that flanked it eroded to nothing, leaving only the ceramic tiles which adorned it and made it splendid enough to get on the original lists of World Wonders (until a later revision bumped Babylon's walls and gates to make room for the Lighthouse of Alexandria). German archaeologists dug up the tiles of the gate in the 30's, took them home, and reconstructed the gateway: today you can see it in Berlin's Pergamon Museum (Nazi funding meets colonial archaeology, sigh).

Thinky thoughts produced: China, like Babylon, is a civilization centred on floodplains (the Yellow and Yangtze rivers), where stone has to be imported and the easiest and cheapest way to build fortifications is with earth. And naturally when China's rulers expanded beyond the floodplains, they stuck to known and familiar technology, continuing to build fortifications with thick earthen walls even when stone was available. So they never had the kind of thin masonry walls that primitive cannon were useful against.

Whereas the nations of Europe are mostly not centred on vast floodplains where stone is hard to come by. Stone was the first thing they reached for when they needed to build a fireproof fortification, until cannons made such walls obsolete.