A review over at ScienceBlogs of a new paper, Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies. I'm going to comment more in the near future, as I think this an give us insight into historical dynamics. An interesting find is that pastoralists and settled agriculturalists exhibit the same levels of heritability of material wealth (as well as the same values on material wealth). Hunter-gatherers and slash & burn agriculturalists seem to be at the other end of the spectrum.

Labels: History

Steve points me to this Jason Richwine piece, Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?. Richwine states:

Religion would seem to be the clear choice of smart people in this hypothetical example, but there would still be a positive correlation between IQ and atheism. The correlation exists not because smart people have necessarily rejected religion, but because religion is the "default" position for most of our society.

This same principle works in places where the default and iconoclastic beliefs are reversed. Japan, for example, has no tradition of monotheistic religion, but the few Japanese Christians tend to be much more educated than non-Christians in Japan. By the logic of someone who wants to read a lot into the Stankov study, Christianity must be the wave of the future, perhaps even the one true faith! But, of course, the vast majority of educated Japanese are not Christians. Just as with atheism in the West, the correctness of Christianity cannot be inferred from the traits of the minority who subscribe to it in Japan.

On the specific issue Richwine is right, Christianity is associated with higher socioeconomic status vis-a-vis non-Christianity across much of East Asia. You can go look in the WVS or Statistics Singapore. Though I do have to note that only in South Korea does there seem to be a positive correlation between theism and socioeconomic status (e.g., in Singapore those with no religion and Christians both have high SES and tend to be concentrated among young professional class Chinese, those with lower SES tend to be Muslims [Malays] and followers of Chinese folk religions). Additionally, in Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore it seems that Buddhism has reworked itself to mimic the aspects of Christianity which made it more appealing to middle-class professionals. This is a classic case of a new equilibrium being attained after the initial outside cultural "shock" of Christianity. Finally, in Japan Christians are basically a rounding error (a few percent at most), so the example of Korea, where they are 1/3 of the population is of more relevance.

But I was struck by a general implication from Richwine's model. Two premises:

1) Elites, cognitive or otherwise, tend to deviate from the "default" norms of society for various reasons (it could be signalling costly behavior to show that they are "above" conventional considerations and such).

2) Eventually, the masses often emulate in the elites in subsequent generations.

The inference would be that cultural cycles should exhibit a pattern where the masses serve as lagging indicators of elite sensibilities. Once the masses start attempting to "catch up," of course the elites have moved on. Empirically implausible? I'll let readers dissect it.

Labels: History

One of the trends which L. L. Cavalli-Sforza pointed to years ago is that linguistic and genetic cladograms exhibit a great deal of similarity. More recently geneticists such as Marcus Feldman have suggested that the reason behind this is that people tend to marry those who they can communicate with. Once the genetic data becomes more granular in Europe it will be interesting to see if this works on the national level. Though it is true that languages such as French or German are relatively new standards within the boundaries of their nation state, it is also true that people from village to village were intelligible with each other, until presumably they hit upon a major linguistic boundary such as between Romance and Germanic languages (though presumably here bilingualism would have been common).

But one of the problems which crops up now and then trying to think of the past, especially with all the new results coming out of historical genetics, is that we project the linguistic homogeneity of the present back. For example, in ancient Mesopotamia there were two languages which are linguistic isolates to the best of our knowledge, Sumerian and Elamite. If we didn't have extant written records, or, more accurately if writing hadn't arrived in Mesopotamia so early, we'd have no idea that there were non-Semitic languages in that region today. Not only that, but the ancient records from that period in Mesopotamia hint at other language groups which were not literate and so left no record. In the Roman Empire the vast majority of our extant records are in Greek and Latin. We know the existence of other languages, such as Celtic dialects, Punic, and such, but there are also indications of the flourishing of local lingua franca such as "Iberian" in southern Spain which have left only a marginal literary impact. The emergence of large polities led to linguistic homogenization; I have read that the dominance of Quechua, the language of the Incas of Cuzco and its environs, actually dates to the Spanish colonial period. In the chaos after the fall of the Inca Empire the language of the Incas gave the local peoples are a sort of solidity.

I'm thinking about this because I am corresponding with some people about the David Reich paper on Indian genetics, and people are asking questions such as "did the ancestral South Indians speak Dravidian languages?" I doubt it, but I also doubt that the language families of ancient India were as cleanly sorted out as they are today. Even the languages of the Andaman Islanders may not be one family! Over the past 10,000 years, and especially the last 2,000 years, much of the World Island has seen cultural positive feedback loops which have resulted in linguistic homogeneity. The rise of nation-states, literate elites, class stratification, etc., are I think part of the whole package which has given rise to this dynamic. Some of these are general phenomenon which presumably apply to H. sapiens 30,000 years ago, but I suspect the powerful magnitude is a new feature.

Labels: History

Peter Turchin is at it again, Coin hoards speak of population declines in Ancient Rome (ungated version):

In times of violence, people tend to hide their valuables, which are later recovered unless the owners had been killed or driven away. Thus, the temporal distribution of unrecovered coin hoards is an excellent proxy for the intensity of internal warfare. We use this relationship to resolve a long-standing controversy in Roman history. Depending on who was counted in the early Imperial censuses (adult males or the entire citizenry including women and minors), the Roman citizen population of Italy either declined, or more than doubled, during the first century BCE. This period was characterized by a series of civil wars, and historical evidence indicates that high levels of sociopolitical instability are associated with demographic contractions. We fitted a simple model quantifying the effect of instability (proxied by hoard frequency) on population dynamics to the data before 100 BCE. The model predicts declining population after 100 BCE. This suggests that the vigorous growth scenario is highly implausible.

The figure to the left shows the reasoning. A simple model which related population size (dependent) to coin hordes (independent) was fitted before 100 BCE. The correlation between coin hordes to population size and political stability are well attested for many polities. In any case, using the model and projecting outward with the coin hordes known for the early imperial period a theory which suggests that multiplicative increases in census size during the Julio-Claudian age were a function of a shift in the accounting method (instead of simply males, including the whole household) was supported. The high count was already implausible on other grounds (e.g., if true, that means that Italy never attained the early Roman imperial population size until the mid-19th century), but that the model fits so well with the lower projections previously offered by other scholars is very suggestive. Contra extreme subjectivists some models of the past are probably right, and some are probably wrong.

Labels: Cliodynamics, History

Reading Sumer & the Sumerians to see if there are any new facts known about these people and period since I was a kid. Unfortunately, as noted in the preface, after 1991 and until the mid-2000s (when the book was published) archaeology in Iraq wasn't feasible. So not so much. But, the author does note and reiterate an old dynamic: the slow but persistent decline in the proportion of those for whom Sumerian is a native language in the cities of Mesopotamia. Semitic speakers (e.g., Akkadians) were a presence in the earliest extant cuneiform tablets ~3000, and were likely dominant in the north of Mesopotamia. Earlier and more speculative works in fact have suggested that the Sumerians, whose language seems an isolate (unrelated to any other in the world), were outsiders who arrived from the south. So the Semitic speaking peoples may in fact have been indigenes who were temporarily dispossessed.

In any case, the text makes it clear that it seems two types of rural nomads moved into the cities of Sumer. Very wealthy individuals who experienced diminishing marginal returns as their herds expanded in size, and who found in cities more opportunities for efficient allocation of their capital. And secondly, very poor nomads who simply no longer had herds which were numerous enough for them to subsist. For the whole period of Sumerian cultural ascendancy, from 3000 to 2000 BCE, one presumes that the nomadic population reserves were stocked then with the "middle class" which hovered around the margins of subsistence. From what can be gathered by the textual evidence the nomads were invariably populations which were Semitic. The Sumerians were city-dwellers, though no doubt they also formed the peasantry around the canals and irrigation works during much of this period. Somehow we know that gradually between 3000 and 2000 the Sumerians went from being the majority in the cities of Sumer, to being a likely minority (though still culturally and to some extent politically dominant). By 1800 BCE it is likely that Sumerian was a dead language (one can't dismiss the possibility of Sumerian speaking communities here and there, but they're gone from the written record).

So what happened? The gradualism is of particular interest to me, and the likely concentration of Sumerians in the cities. It seems plausible that because the Sumerians were the first to settle in the cities, and concentrate disproportionately within them, natural increase would have been reduced for them relative to less urban populations. The slow replacement by Semitic speakers may have been due to the fact that Semitic speakers had a demographic reservoir which the Sumerians did not. There is of course a way to balance this out, and that is cultural assimilation. It seems likely that this did occur, but for some reason this was not a powerful enough effect so as to prevent the Semitic takeover. Or was it? 1,000 years is a long time. For all we know the Sumerians may have arrived as a small minority form the outside, and their lasting 1,000 years, as well as leaving a cultural impact which redounded down the generations, was a rather good show. That being said, I do wonder if the edifice of cultural complexes were more primitive during the time of Sumer than they became later, as the long road of cultural evolution of written & institutional civilization was only beginning.

Labels: History

Taliban targets descendants of Alexander the Great.* In this case, we're talking about the Kalash of Pakistan, a non-Muslim cultural relict in the mountains of northwest Pakistan. The Kalash are like the Mari of Russia, a relatively isolated group who managed to maintain their explicit pagan religious traditions down to the modern era, at which point a legal framework allowed for them to practice their customs in the face of hostility from the world religion which had come to dominate their region. In the case of the Kalash, that authority and legal framework was that of the British. On the other side of the border in Afghanistan the more numerous cultural kin of the Kafir Kalash were forcibly converted to Islam in 1896

Though there are plenty of supply-side theories of religion which posit individual ("rational") choice as the driver of change, historically this has not been so useful. I've noted before that in Reformation Europe Protestantism was initially very successful in converting much of the population across broad swaths of Austria, Bohemia and into Poland. Not only that, but Protestantism's initial strength was almost always in what might be termed the "upper middle classes" (literate urbanites) and the lower nobility. But if the Protestants failed to secure political power, which usually meant the monarchy, generally there was a swing back toward Roman Catholicism. Both the Huguenots and Dutch Protestants started out as a small, motivated, and well organized minority (today around 20-30% of the population of the Netherlands is Roman Catholic, but I've read that during the height of the Protestant revolt against Spanish Catholic rule in fact only 10% of the population was Protestant, but these included much of the elite as well as very motivated refugees from Antwerp). But the Dutch Protestants managed to take control of the political machinery of the Netherlands and achieve independence from the distant Catholic rulers; the Huguenots did not.

A more explicit analogy with the Kafir Kalash is what occurred with the population of ancient Haran. In the 6th century Justinian the Great was getting around to imposing religious uniformity on on the East Roman Empire. The Empire had been Christian for a long time, but there were still large minorities of pagans, Jews, Samaritans, etc. Missionaries were sent to Anatolia to convert rustic populations who remained pagan, and persecutions of Jews & Samaritans triggered revolts in Palestine. A force was sent to Baalbek to stamp out the pagan enclave there, the Academy in Athens, a redoubt of Neoplatonism, was scattered, and the last active center of ancient Egyptian paganism at Philae was shuttered. But Haran was spared from conversion because of an accident of geopolitics; it was too close to the Sassanid Empire, and Khosrau I fancied himself a patron of culture, which including the dispersed members of the Athenian Academy. Some members of the Academy reputedly settled in Haran, with its pagan population, and Khosrau secured religious freedom for this area under a treaty with the Byzantines. The proximity of the Persian forces meant that it was reasonable for the Byzantines to grant this concession. Haran's peculiar religious mix persisted down into the Islamic era, when they became the Sabians, and were instrumental in the translation of Greek works into Arabic under the Abbasids.


As for the Kalash, their persistence is only due to a combination of historical accidents (the Durand Line), their isolation, as well as their backwardness. The importance of the last fact is that they have been underdeveloped enough to maintain very high fertility rate, compensating somewhat for the high rate of conversion to Islam. As I have noted before, paganism tends to cede before higher religions at a particular level of social complexity. With modern communication and transportation the ability of the Kalash to be protected by isolation is diminished. One way that the Kalash could preserve their identity would be to align with another higher religion. This is a common occurrence in Southeast Asia, where ethnic minorities resist converting to the majority religion because it connotes assimilation to the majority ethnicity. Instead, many minorities in Burma, Thailand, etc., convert to Christianity, acquiring the ideological and institutional armamentarium which might serve as a check on conversion. In Indonesia pagan groups often redefine themselves as Hindu, and so enter into a relationship with the institutional structures of Balinese Hinduism.

This is not feasible in Pakistan. Religious minorities are under extreme pressure. The Kalash have no cultural future, extinction is their lot. It is a matter of 10 years or 30 years. No more. After that point they'll be photographs in National Geographic. This is frankly the lot of non-Muslims in many Muslim nations (the best option is to escape abroad, as a substantial minority of Mandaens have, and the Church of the East did in the 20th century. Or, remain segregated and isolated and numerous enough in your own geographic enclaves, such as the Yazidis).**

* They're a genetic isolate, probably not derived from Alexander's sojourn in the east.

** The main exceptions to the grim record of religious minorities under Islamic majorities is in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. In both these regions conversion to Christianity from Islam is known and accepted. In Nigeria Islam has barely increased as a proportion of the population, while Christianity has nearly doubled to parity. In Indonesia there has been a marginal decrease in the proportion of Muslims since the 1960s, probably because of the conversion of nominal Javanese Muslims to Christianity and Hinduism (Hinduism is considered by many Javanese to be their ancestral religion, and there remain Hindu Javanese minorities).

Labels: History, Islam, Religion

One question which I have touched upon repeatedly is why is it that in some regions languages of elites replace those of the populace, and in other regions the inverse occurs? This is one reason why I'm very interested in genetic studies of populations, they add a new dimension to the large set of often confusing, contradictory and cloudy "facts" we have on hand. Among Anatolian Turks for example there is still a noticeable imprint of East Eurasian ancestry, though by & large it seems that Anatolian Turks are the descendants of those acculturated to a Turkish identity from a Greek, Armenian or Kurdish past (the main qualification is that I have read, though am not sure as to the veracity of the claims, that large numbers of Orthodox Christian Turkish speakers who switched language, but not religion, have been totally Hellenized after the exchange of populations). In contrast it is difficult to find any genetic evidence that the Magyars actually settled among the peoples of what is today Hungary (Pannonia), even though their origin was likely from the Volga region (some of the difference might simply be that it is harder to detect deviations from expectation if the Magyars were more similar to the peoples of Pannonia than the Turks were to the natives of Anatolia, as is likely the case).

In the lands of the former Roman Empire most of the Latin domains quickly assimilated the Germanic military elites to the native culture, in both religion & language. There are two glaring exceptions to this: Britain & the Balkans. Several years ago I read The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe, and I began thinking of the processes described in this book when reading the chapter on post-Roman Britain in The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000. To my mild pleasure I then came upon this passage:

This model for the Anglo-Saxon settlements, which I broadly accept, thus has the invaders settling in the very small groups, initially covering ahandful of local communities for the mostpart, which could as in Wales, be called tribal. Political leadership would have been very simple and informal, though of course necessarily military, for a fragmented conquest is still a conquest. THis picture further fits with the archaeolgy of early Anglo-Saxon settlements and cemeteries, which shows a very simple material culture, far simpler in every respect than that found anywhere in the ex-Roman Continent outside the Balkans.

My pleasure was not due to excitement about the collapse of Roman civilization. Rather, it was that I had anticipated an analogy which the author later spotlighted, suggesting to me that the correspondence is striking enough to be obvious to independent observers. What occurred by and large in the Balkans, and to an even greater extent in Britain, is that the complex of literate Roman city-centered society yielded to decentralized village-based societies, and barbarism seems to assimilated the peasants left behind after the withdrawal of the Imperial forces. Though one can find some evidence of exogenous genetic input indicating non-trivial population movements, especially in Britain, it does not seem that the native substrate was replaced in the majority across these regions (see the links here). In Britain the old models of pots-not-peoples seems falsified by suggestive gradients of alleles of Germanic provenance from East Anglia, the Dark Age "Saxon Shore." But, in terms of total genome content the English as a whole seem to resemble the other peoples of the British Isles more than they do the populations of northern Germany (though again, there are regional variations within England, with East Anglia and the former "Danelaw" showing signs of the more recent gene flow). In the Balkans genetic relationships between populations seem to follow geography more than language; the Bulgarians resemble Romanians, not the Czechs, who are close to the Hungarians.

And yet despite the genes there was a massive cultural discontinuity between Roman Britain and the Balkans, and what came after. It is now fashionable to assert that the Roman world "transformed," and did not "fall," after 476. This view seems least defensible in the case of these two regions. Not only did Romanitas disappear, but the physical character of these societies as evident from the archaeology show rupture and regression. The fall of Roman Britain can be pegged to a specific date, 410, when the legions were recalled to the continent. This did not mean that the barbarian hordes struck immediately, rather, in the decades after political fragmentation and a reassertion of the native Celtic tribal traditions seem to have occurred. In The Inheritance of Rome the author suggests that the political prominence of what were once marginal regions, Wales and southern Scotland, is a reflection of the fact that these areas held the deepest stores of Celtic tribal cultural capital which might fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Latin civilization. To battle a militarized society one requires a militarized society, and the peoples of the Celtic marchlands fit that bill. It is here that there is a contrast between Britain and the Balkans: Britain was far less Latinized than the Balkans. Latinization had proceeded in Spain, Gaul (France) and the Balkans to the point that ib these regions the natives were initially termed "Romans" by barbarian conquerors. The persistence of Latin-derived languages in the Balkans into the modern era is also witness to the thoroughness of Latinization. Romanian, the persistence of the Vlachs, as well as the recently extinct language of Dalmatian can not be ignored. Of course Greece and the region around Constantinople were presumably Greek speaking. And there were obviously regions where the ancestor of Albanian was spoken. But it seems likely that Latin was the dominant language among the peasants across much of the Balkans, most certainly above the Jirecek Line. Justinian the Great, the last East Roman (Byzantine) Emperor who spoke Latin as a first language, was born near Skopje, the capital of modern day Macedonia. In Britain the working assumption is that the peasantry spoke a Celtic language related to modern Welsh, though the elite used Latin frequently, and Latin was the dominant written language. Though the Celtic inhabitants of Britain had adopted many Roman customs, they remained Britons, while the Thracians, Illyarians, Dacians, etc., of the Balkans had adopted Roman ways to the point where they termed themselves Roman.

There was also another difference between the British and Balkan case, in the former instance Roman influence disappeared for centuries (only to reappear via the Franks in the early 7th century), while in the latter the lines of Imperial control washed over barbarized regions many times over the centuries. In The Fall of the Roman Empire Peter Heather contends that the northern Balkans were effectively lost in the early 5th century to barbarians as a sort of "No Man's Land" where city-based civilization simply was untenable. But by the late 5th to 6th centuries it seems that the Empire reasserted its control and pushed secure boundaries out toward the Danube. By the year 600 almost the whole of the Balkan interior excepting Greece itself was lost to the Avars (see A History of Byzantine State & Society). The period between the collapse of Roman control of the interior and the later medieval emergence of nations which we would recognize such as the Serbs and Bulgarians is unclear and to a great extent lost to history. There were indications and references of massive Slavic migrations, though these groups were usually under the hegemony of non-Slavic groups such as the Avars and Bulgars. But as I pointed out above, the primary predictive variable of genetic change in the Balkans is geography, not language (this does not mean that language has no effect, I am simply suggesting that outsiders do not seem to have totally replaced the local population in toto).

With this general sketch in place, let's move to the similarities. Britain, in particular the regions which became England, and the Balkans were barbarized and descended into a "Dark Age" in a classic sense (obviously I exclude the persistent arc of city-based culture which clung to the coasts and exhibited some depth in Greece in the case of the Balkans). Writing disappears. The local language is replaced (though with important exceptions in the Balkans). And Christianity also fades. The replacement of Celtic language with Anglo-Saxon dialects was so total, with so little borrowing, that the model of replacement does not seem totally implausible. Archaeologists have also uncovered extreme discontinuities in more prosaic aspects of culture such as how farmsteads are laid out. But as I said above from what I can tell the genetic data point to Anglo-Saxon input of only a minority, if a substantial one at that with local concentrations, across England. We are then faced with the possibility that the local Romano-British elites, along with the more thoroughly Celtic peasants, assimilated into the Anglo-Saxon culture (there are textual indications of the persistence of British subjects of Anglo-Saxon rulers in England into the era of the Venerable Bede, see Norman Davies' The Isles). The genetic data indicate the same in the Balkans, though here I am less familiar with the research, and it seems much thinner than in reference to the British for social and political reasons (i.e., British people are interested in their genetic history and can fund that interest).

In The Early Slavs the author argues that the natives simply went barbarian. Though Roman civilization was predominantly peasant-based, and caught in a Malthusian trap, it was still quantitatively different in terms of its economic and social complexity from those of societies beyond the limes (see The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization). The cultural toolkit of Slavic tribes pushing into the Balkans in the wake of the collapse of Roman rule was far simpler than that which had been dominant prior to their arrival. In a localized world shorn of Roman networks of trade it may be that peasants saw in the barbarian culture something more adaptable and appropriate in light of the new structural conditions of their lives. On the margins of subsistence perhaps those who shed affiliation with what was now a distant political power fared best. The same may have been true for the Celtic peasants who lived under Anglo-Saxon rulers, and tilled the soil with Anglo-Saxon immigrants (the weregild for Celts in Anglo-Saxon Britain was less than for Anglo-Saxons, so the incentives were strong to switch if possible). We have copious data in the case of local elites who assimilate to the norms and values of their barbarian conquerors in the post-Roman states of the West (e.g., Romans of senatorial background like Cyprian, rival of Boethius, raising sons with a strongly Gothic cultural orientation), as well as the Visigothic elites conquered by Muslim Arabs & Berbers (who were at that point barbarians). But that is a function of the fact that the elites are literate, or employ those who are literate, and leave hallmarks of cultural shifts in their correspondences or actions.

This brings me to the title of the post. It is classic chestnut of wisdom that the Christian Church was the vessel which preserved elements of classical civilization for posterity through the Dark Ages. This model is tendentious, in large part because partisan Christians and anti-Christians wish to come to different conclusions, select their data, and cull their analysis, until they arrive at the inferences which they prefer. It is a dodge to admit that the issue is complex, but dodge I will. Rather, let us note that religion, and religious institutions, have been powerful forces across history. It seems rather obvious that "higher religions" have a strong cultural fitness advantage in any complex civilization. By higher religion, I refer to religious systems which combine primal religious sentiment with philosophical content as well as robust institutional organizations. Over the long term only higher religions can resist the spread of other higher religions. There are cases where non-higher religions can arrest or suspend the expansion of higher religions, but these are always temporary setbacks. Lithuania, Japan and Tibet are detailed case studies of temporary setbacks which only delayed the dominance of higher religions. Often higher religions imported from the outside stimulate the emergence of a complex literary society because of the need of a class of text oriented religious professionals to interpret the scriptures and commentaries which justify the existence of such institutions. In theory the Bible, the Koran, the Palin Canon, are causally prior to the variegated religious institutions which accumulate around them. In the model that the Roman Christian Church preserved Roman civilization the institution which arose due to the Christian scriptures as a side effect also served to maintain and perpetuate aspects of Roman culture which were not necessarily related to Christian religiosity (though naturally justifications were often presented as to why secular works were spiritually edifying or useful).

So why the inversion in my title? One cynical and obviously irreligious perspective contends that the specific belief content of higher religions is actually co-opted as a post facto rationale for organically emerging institutions which are products of complex societies. This can be approached from a religious perspective; many early Christian thinkers offered that a singular and unified political order was the ideal seedbed for a singular religion which expressed the fullness of truth (there are analogs to this sort of thinking among Buddhists when a potential chakravartin appears on the scene). The point is that higher religions seem to coexist with higher civilizations. In some cases they bring higher civilization to a lower one, and in other cases they are the products of higher civilizations (e.g., Christianity in the Greco-Roman world, Zoroastrianism in the Persian Empire, Buddhism in the early phase of Indo-Aryan literate states in the Indian subcontinent).

But what if a higher civilization regresses to the state of a lower one? To some extent the collapse of the social and economic order in the Post-Roman world fits the bill, and Christianity remained a robust presence. But so did the Latin language in what became France, Spain and Italy. It is in these regions that the term "transformation" as opposed to "fall" apply the most. There was a shift away from direct taxation and toward what became feudalism, and an evolution from a civilian aristocracy into a military caste. Literacy became less prominent a feature of the cultural landscape, though it did not disappear (e.g., Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville and Boethius & Cassiodorus, the province of specialists rather than elites as a whole). But the contrast with the total collapse in what became England and the sharp reordering of the cultural landscape in the Balkans is obvious. The decline of Christianity (to the point of near total extinction in England) and the need for missionary efforts centuries after the collapse suggest to me that higher religion is not robust when higher civilization disappears.

I discount the suggestion that concerted persecution led to de-Christianization. Pagan societies and states did persecute Christians (or adherents of higher religions with foreign connections in general, such as the case with Buddhism in late Tang China), but on the whole they were more systematically tolerant of religious pluralism than civilizations where higher religions were dominant. Pagan Lithuania remained pagan for a relatively long time in part because it lay between Catholic Poland and Orthodox Russia, and conversion to either religion would have aligned it with one of the states irrevocably (Lithuania eventually became Catholic and was absorbed into the Polish political and cultural orbit). But during the period when this state remained officially pagan large numbers of Christians were under Lithuanian rule, and at the height of the state the majority of the population was no doubt Christian, as were large numbers of Lithuanian nobles. There are many other examples which illustrate the trend whereby pagan persecution of adherents of higher religions is sporadic and situational, and not persistent, structural and systematic, so I won't belabor the point.

What I am positing then is that the process of barbarization led not just to the discarding of language, but also of Christian religion, in both England the Balkans. In France, Spain and Italy the pagan or heretic (Arian) rulers of predominantly Catholic populations acceded to the religious sentiments of the ruled. In the Balkans and England it seems that the rulers had no such inclination, and the institutional framework of the Christian Church simply withered without the proper structural preconditions. There are cases where even Christian rulers can be paganized by their population, as seems to have occurred with Samo. Protestant critics of the depth of Catholic Christianization of illiterate peasants in Medieval Europe have already assembled a large amount of scholarship which allows us to comprehend how nominal Christians might shift their identity to that of identified pagans. The Christian priesthood was also often illiterate and quite ignorant of the details of their religion during this period (though sometimes the deviation was from the other end, an archbishop of Toulouse in the 18th century was a materialist and atheist, see The Pursuit of Glory). Here is a quote from The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914:

...While roughly a third of village schools were run by the Orthodox Church, the priests had little influence on their flock. They were themselves hardly more than peasants and were deeply ignorant; studying theology and doctrine were the domain of the robed 'black clergy' in the monasteries, who fulfilled no pastoral duties. Knowledge of the Christian doctrine was therefore minimal, as Maksim Gorky heard from a Kazan peasant, who said that God 'cannot be everywhere at once, too many men hae been born fro that., But he will succeed, you see. But I can't understand Christ at all! He serves no purpose as far as I'm concerned. There is no God and that's enough. But there's another! The son, they say. So what if he's God's son. God isn't dead, not that I know of'

This describes late 19th century Russia, but I have read similar accounts from Prussian peasants of the 18th century who were left without a pastor for a generation because of a bureaucratic problem. These peasants' worldviews were only recorded because there was an inquisition into their beliefs after the burial of a bull which occurred in the locality to ensure a good harvest (the peasants' rationale was quite inchoate, but the burial of bulls was actually a custom of the Baltic peoples of that region, so I suspect the reemergence of the practice reflected folktales which had preserved fragments of the old religion). Books such as Theological Incorrectness report data that illustrate the reality that cross-culturally most lay persons exhibit religious sentiments and intuitions which are roughly the same. A tendency to "default" toward animism when philosophical religion disappears because of a lack of institutional support shouldn't be too surprising.

With all that said, it is understandable then why higher religion goes extinct with a regression to barbarism, just as literacy, civilized arts and economies of scale go into decline. What I am contending then is that the suggestion that Christianity was responsible for the perpetuation of classical high culture is incoherent, the same level of civilizational complexity which would allow for the perpetuation of classical high culture in some form may also be necessary for the perpetuation of Christianity! What if Constantine had lost at Milvian Bridge? If you are familiar with Rodney Stark's oeuvre then you will respond that this was irrelevant, and perhaps even counterproductive, as Christianity was a bottom-up movement with a better religious product which was inevitably going to become dominant. Looking from the year 300 I think that this is a defensible position. But years ago I read an alternative history short story which posits that Europe would be dominated by illiterate savages if Maxentius had defeated Constantine. This is fictionalization, but lays out the extreme case that but for Christianity Rome & Greece would have been lost forever. As it is, I think that this is likely wrong. Chinese civilization persisted after the collapse of the Han even though that polity did not have an organized religion like Christianity (in fact, Buddhism as a foreign religion spread after the fall of the Han and influenced indigenous religious traditions such as Daoism into competitive imitation). As a point of fact, it was the pagan Sabians of Haran who were heavily overrepresented in the translation of Greek classics in the service of the Abbasid Caliphs because the Sabians revered ancient pagan works. Haran's paganism was a historical accident, as they were protected by the Persian Shahs from forced conversion by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. If Christianity had not become the dominant religion of the Roman world I suspect some other religious system would have become the vessel for classical culture. Higher civilization begets higher religion, or adopts higher religion.

Simple models of causality in the social or historical realm assume the unproblematic teasing apart of variables. Many anti-religionists assert that all evil done in the name of religion is necessarily contingent upon religion. Many religionists assert that all good done in the name of religion is necessarily contingent upon religion. I think both views are probably wrong. Religion may be the root of some evil and the root of some good, but I doubt it is the root of all good or evil, and I believe we tend to overestimate how much of a root it is in any specific behavior. Religious suicide bombing seems very comprehensible today, but the atheist anarchist movement of 19th century Russia also engaged in a great deal of suicidal terrorism.

The historical data I survey above tell me that there is a very easy way to destroy organized religion: destroy organization. That is what I believe occurred in Britain and the Balkans. Without scale, complexity and organization the Christian Church could not flourish. Even the bottom-up "Primitive Church" of the early Empire was likely dependent upon the structure which the Roman Empire provided. The Christianization of much of Europe after the fall of Empire was concomitant with the rise of complex polities which wished to integrate themselves into the Christian commonwealth of states, as well as the ambitions of kings who were eager to justify centralization of power into one individual with the ideology of one true religion. If globalization is here to the stay, then the global religions are here to stay. Additionally, the vast majority of the world religions all emerged in the period between 600 BC and 600 AD. We're probably at some sort of competitive equilibrium, and without some major exogenous shock it looks like the market is saturated.

Labels: History, Religion

Just wanted to put some concrete data from China's Cosmopolitan Empire out there. Most people know that the Tang Dynasty witness the rise of South China, defined as the Yantgze river valley and on south, as the economic and demographic engines of China (though arguably the plains around the Yellow river remained the cultural and political heart of China). There were several censuses across Chinese history.

- Between the census of 742 and 1080 the population of North China rose by ~25%. The population of South China rose by ~325%. The reasons for this are many, but one of the primary ones was the introduction and improvement upon of Champa rice (the pre-Champa strains dominant at the beginning of the Tang died out by the Song Dynasty).

- The transformation of South China from isolated cities and a few densely populated pockets of cultivation,(e.g, around lake Tai) to a region where Han agriculture was omnipresent witnessed a shift from using animals (oxen, buffalo, etc.) to human labor.

Labels: China, History

The Tang Dynasty is to a great extent a contemporary favorite because of the norms of the modern day West. It was a notionally native dynasty which was also open to outside influences and was strengthened by its cosmopolitan tenor. The merit-based industry of the Song lacks scale and romantic glamor. The Ming withdrew from the world after the the voyages of Zheng He. And the Manchus were outsiders and so were more exotic than cosmopolitan. During the ancient Han Dynasty the Chinese were the world for all practical purposes.

This tendency of co-opting the Tang for modern needs, a case-study of China as a cosmopolitan empire, not only is flat and lacks nuance, but ignores other aspects of this period in Chinese history which Western moderns may find unappealing. The Tang were characterized by the dominance of aristocratic values, a cabal of elite noble lineages in the capital who for all practical purposes monopolized the bureaucracy. Its foreign conquests were often done via native proxies, and divide and conquer (sound familiar?). During the second half of the Tang period the dynasty was in decline, and was given to bouts of persecution of disfavored foreign religions (all except for Daoism), and massacres of foreigners. All this is not to say that the Tang were "bad." Or frankly "good." It seems that such judgments bear less fruit than a genuine descriptive examination of the history and culture of this distinctive period in Chinese history. That is what China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty does, even if the title naturally catches the attention of the typical Western reader.

I come to this with some knowledge of this region and period, having read works such as T'ang China: The Rise of the East in World History. A more accurate title for China's Cosmopolitan Empire might have been "China's Last Empire," insofar as I have pointed out before that the Manchu administered areas outside China proper differently from China for most of that dynasty's history. Of course the claim that the Tang are native, while the Manchu are foreign, is to some extent a matter of art. The Li family of the Tang dynasty likely emerged out of the milieu of partly barbarized borderland warlords who dominated north China after the fall of the Han. Likely they had Turk and Xianbei ancestors, and they maintained many of the customs and outlooks of these non-Han peoples. Emperor Taizong fought like a nomad when necessary with native skill. The early Tang developed symbiotic relationships with nomadic federations such as that of the Uyghurs to buttress their Empire and guard their borders, relationships cemented by the fact that the early Tang emperors could move with ease among the barbarians because of shared experiences, values and background. When Taizong broke the Turks he took upon himself a barbarian title in addition to his role as emperor of China, subsuming within himself what had previously been rival opposites. It is notable the early Tang apparently also practiced the horse sacrifice on occasion, a common feature of Central Eurasian societies.


Of course unlike the Manchu and the Yuan (Mongol) the Tang were not alien overlords despite their partial Central Eurasian provenance. The Li family claimed descent from Laozi, patronized Chinese high culture on a grand scale, and the emperors themselves were civilized aesthetes who produced original poetry. Unlike the Yuan and Manchu the non-Han populations which settled in China proper during the early generations of the Tang dynasty were not given a superior status to the natives, and on the contrary like the Li family themselves many of these individuals assimilated to a Han identity and constructed false genealogies to elide the fact of their foreign provenance. It would be wrong to suggest I think that the Tang produced a hybrid culture, rather, they fostered a cosmpolitanism with Chinese characteristics.

If you are reading this now likely you will have read my review of Empires of the Silk Road. It was fascinating to read China's Cosmopolitan Empire in the wake of that work because the intersection of concepts, facts and trends were palpable. The Tang dynasty was a period when China was a Central Eurasian power, operating in a three-way game with the Turks to the north and the Tibetans to the south. The scope of the Tang's reach is evident when one considers that in 751 Chinese proxy forces (there were very few Han in the notional Chinese force) were defeated by outriders of the Abbasid Caliphate along with their Tibetan allies at the river Talas. Up to this point Chinese and Muslim political and culture influence vied in the Fergana valley, which today spans parts of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is likely that the battle itself is important only in hindsight, but it marks a convenient turning point when Central Asia irrevocably shifted its focus west to the world of Islam, and lost its ancient connections to the east and China.

Those connections were not, and are not, trivial. The few generations of the Tang were at the tail end of what sometimes is termed the "Buddhist Age." During this period Buddhism served as a common cultural connection across much of Asia to the east of Persia. Though the city states of Central Asia were multireligious, it is arguable that Buddhism was the most prominent of those religions. It was from Central Asia that Buddhism arrived in China, and flourished in the centuries after the fall of Han. Though Buddhism was likely in decline relative to what we now term Hinduism in South Asia, it was still a relatively vital cultural force, and far more prevalent in what are today Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as in the east in Bengal. In Empires of the Silk Road Christopher Beckwith argues that many Indian concepts and institutions which came to shape Islamic culture during the Abbasid Caliphate were actually transmitted via Buddhism (it is clear that there were Buddhists in Sindh when the Arab armies conquered it). The Barmakid family which was extremely powerful during the early years of the Abbasids was of course from the Buddhist priesthood of Balkh. And just as ideas flowed west from Buddhist northwest India, so they flowed east from Buddhist Central Asia. Indian Buddhist eminences also took the route through Central Asia to China to spread their teachings or aid in translations. During these early centuries Buddhism was an exotic foreign religion in China, not indigenized, and the Silk Road was the vector via which came a stream of foreign sacred objects and texts from India. To the east the Silla kingdom of Korea and the Fujiwaras of Japan patronized Buddhism as part of their imperialistic project, resulting in several decades in which Buddhistmonks could take advantage of an international network which flowed uninterrupted from South Asia to Japan.

Of course very few Indian or Central Asia monks went to Japan. Rather, much more likely was that Indian, Central Asian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese Buddhists would meet in Chang'an, the capital of the Tang which also lay at the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. Though India was the Jerusalem of Buddhism, China quickly became its Rome and Constantinople. The process of indigenization of Buddhism in China was lent a helping hand by the armies of the caliphs, as the 7th century progressed the Muslims pushed into Afghanistan and the marches of South Asia, and conquered the Buddhist and Hindu kings who patronized the great monasteries. Prominent Buddhists, such as the Barmakid family, no doubt converted to Islam. With the Tang withdrawal from Central Asia after 750 Islam totally absorbed the former Buddhist city-states. The international was broken, and China had to rely on its own resources. It is an odd parallelism that to a great extent the eruption of Islam, and its absorption of the lands from with Europe and China were evangelized in their respective dominant institutional religions, led to the rise of a self-conscious Christian West and Buddhist East. Europe was the faith, and the faith was Europe, because Islam and swallowed whole the domains of eastern Christianity. Similarly, as the centuries progressed the holy sites of Buddhism were to fall under the sway of Islamicized Turkish warlords (this dynamic was unfortunately on display with the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan).

But the resources of Buddhism in China were many. The Tang era is generally thought to be the period when Buddhism was most powerful and esteemed as an institutional religion across the Chinese class structure. The anti-Buddhist Confucian Han Yu was speaking from a position of weakness in relative comparison to the disdain or contempt which later Confucian scholars would exhibit toward Buddhism. It must also be noted that Buddhism was not officially the most favored religion during this period, Daoism was. One of the ways in which the Tang ruling family emphasized their Chinese character was their descent from Laozi, and they tacitly tolerated attacks upon Buddhism as a debased foreign religion which was inappropriate for the Chinese by prominent Daoists. This is a contrast to what occurred during the reign of Khubilai Khan, who favored the Buddhists and forced the Daoists to cease their attacks. Nevertheless, this is a case where the Tang did not eat their own dog food; Buddhism was patronized extensively, given favor, and the monasteries accumulated great wealth. The similarities to medieval Catholic Christianity are manifold, as bequests by wealthy individuals were often a form of operational tax evasion, and Tang armies marched with the blessing of Buddhist abbots. Buddhist ideas spread across China, and stories were told of how ignorant individuals were sent to hell for sacrificing animals to native gods. The monasteries became so powerful that during the later years of the dynasty there was a great persecution which ultimately destroyed Buddhism's status as an elite religion, and reserved for it the role of the opium of the masses. When the first Jesuits arrived in China they dressed as Buddhist priests to assimilate, but found they received no hearing from the powers that be. They were dismissed due to their low status as clerics in a popular religion. That is, Buddhism (in later years the Catholic missionaries tried very hard to make their religion distinctive from Pure Land Buddhism).

By the end of the Tang Buddhism was no longer a foreign religion which held some glamor for the elite. Rather, it was an indigenized popular cult. Tang cosmpolitanism seemed to exhibit a tendency whereby the foreign transmuted and became native. Whereas earlier rebellions relied on Daoism, institutional Buddhism became a new avenue for secret societies and organizations of sedition. In fact, during the 18th and 19th century Hui Islamic revivalists had to use terms derived from Pure Land Buddhism in the course of fomenting revolt because symbolism from that sect had percolated into the consciousness of the general Chinese population to the extent of it becoming common semantic currency. One aspect of the later Tang that led to the emergence of the Song which might be of foreign provenance was the rise of military bands cemented by bonds of fictive kinship. This is not a novel idea, as it as occurred in several societies, but in light of the central role of real kinship in the Confucian order, and the strong Turkic influence on the Tang, one has to wonder if this is the Central Eurasian comitatus emerging in a Chinese context, totally extracted and now assimilated. But one must not make too much of this, even if the Song Dynasty arose in part propelled by traditions and customs which the Tang imported from the steppe, it became the civilian Chinese dynasty par excellence.

This deeper texture often renders characterizations of cosmopolitan or xenophobic trite. A simple narrative of the Tang is that the period between 600 and 750 was one of cosmopolitan expansionism, while that after 750 was one of slow long xenophobic decline. Descriptively this is not false, but it is not as if China was insulated from the rest of the world, and moved along an endogenous track. The Buddhist Age, in which Tang China was the preeminent state, gave way after 750 to what was operationally an Islamic Age, when the Abbasid Caliphs were for one century near a world empire, from the borders of China to the margins of the Atlantic. The inward focus of the Tang was partially a function of a collapse of a greater world order which had nourished them and against which they had tested their mettle. The trade routes which allowed for the Sogdians to flourish frayed, with the arc of the Caliphate expanding outward and cutting the ties which bound the older civilized centers together. Though I am cautious about a hydraulic metaphor, it seems not too much a stretch that the rise of Islam and the decline of the Tang operated in concert.

Obviously I've just skimmed some interesting points in this book. I haven't discussed literature, city planning, rural life or the nature of the mercantile cities of the lower Yangtze. It's all in there and all worthy of note, but, I want to get back to the point about cosmpolitanism. There were many foreigners in China during this period. Tang Guangzhou was a city dominated by foreigners, with Arabs being especially prominent. In much of northern China Uyghurs dominated money-lending. There are many physical depictions of people of western Eurasian appearance in artifacts from the Tang period. Where are these people's genes? I pointed out that one problem with an Indo-European origin for ancient Chinese in Empires of the Silk Road is that the genetic data seem clear that the Han people are very distinct from those to the west. And, that groups like Uyghurs are recent hybridization events between two distinct gene pools from western and eastern Eurasia. There are isolated cases of prominent generals in ancient China who were of reputed western origin who turn out to have genes which indicate that they were western. But the modern data from China show very little (if any) western ancestry.

One immediately wonders about the adequacies of the samples we have now. The HapMap had 45 unrelated Chinese from Beijing. The overseas samples are mostly from people whose families are derived from Fujian or Guangdong. But what about Guangdong? Where did the foreigners in Guangzhou go? The easiest explanation is that they were all massacred as is described in the histories. But could all foreigners in China have been massacred? Were they all recognizably foreign? As it happens Chinese speaking Muslims carry a significant western quanta of ancestry, even if it is the minority. The origin stories for this group all derive from men who arrived from western Asia, so this stands to reason. And, it shows that western ancestry does exist in some Chinese populations in China proper. So is there another reason that it is not evident among the Han? I will give a reason that Greg Cochran gave years ago for why the area around Rome is not dominated by Greek genes: the foreigners lived in cities, and the cities were demographic sinks. The cultural cosmpolitanism of Tang China had important long term historical consequences. But its genetic cosmpolitanism was less significant because the locus of that cosmpolitanism was centered around evolutionary dead-ends. The cities of yore live on in faded memory, but their blood has long gone extinct.

Labels: China, History

Dienekes posted a bunch of abstracts from the 2009 American Society of Human Genetics meeting. This one is of interest in light of recent posts on this weblog:

Some Y-chromosomal haplotypes have been found at unusually high frequencies in Asian and European human populations. The massive spreadof these lineages has been explained by the impact of social selection i.e.the high reproductive success of some males and their relative/descendants due to their high social status. The most well-known examples are the "Khan haplotype" and the "Manchou haplotype" in Asia, and the U’Neill haplotype in Ireland. But are these frequent haplotypes always associated with recentevents of social selection, or could they be linked to much older processes? To address this question, we have surveyed ~ 3500 males in 97 populationsfrom Turkey to Japan. We have focused on the 12 most frequently represented haplotypes in Eurasia and tested whether their expansions are linked to a specific factor such as language or subsistence methods. Our results show that both recent and ancient processes are responsible for the expansions of these lineages. The recent expansions (2000-3000 years) likely to be linked to social selection are prevalent in Altaic-speaking and pastora lpopulations. This might indicate a recent cultural change in the social organizationof these populations. The ancient expansions (8000-10000 years) are over-represented in Indo-European speaking and sedentary farmer populations,and are likely to be the result of the Neolithic transition.

Asymmetries between male and female lineages are always of interest. For example, diversity of Y and mtDNA correlates well with patrilocality vs. matrilocality. The idea of "super-male" lineages was mooted by Bryan Sykes several years ago in the wake of the "Genghis Khan haplotype", though it benefited from particular preconceptions many have about the nature of male genetic reproductive fitness. But it is likely that these dynamics vary by population due to ecological and/or social parameters. The time window for the expansion of Y lineages among Altaic speakers is very suggestive in light of historical records and archaeological data. It seems that early on (i.e., before 500 BCE) horse-based nomadism was dominated by Indo-Europeans, predominantly Iranians, in Eurasia. In the few centuries before Christ the populations of the eastern steppe, the precursors of Altaic language families, adopted this lifestyle, and to a great extent superseded the Iranian populations across the length and breadth of the non-sedentary zone over the next 1,500 years (the fact that the Ossetians are now a people who reside in the Caucasus is illustrative of the great retreat of Iranian peoples on the steppe). I have suggested that there is a winner-take-all dynamic in regards to steppe polities, and I suspect this will be reflected in the genetics of male lineages as well.

* It is notable that Ireland was to a great extent a pastoralist society during the period of domination by the Ui Neill .

Labels: Genetics, History

If there is one word that is applicable to Empires of the Silk Road, Christopher I. Beckwith's magnum opus, it would be dense. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language is a complement of similar density and topical intersection (they do not quite overlap, and The Horse, the Wheel, and Language is missing from the bibliography of Empires of the Silk Road). A quick perusal of Beckwith's ouvre shows that he writes history from the center. What we might term the Ecumene he calls the "periphery." Page after page he defends the "barbarians" of the Heartland against the slander of peripheral scribblers. Though in the introduction the author takes a stand against both the Whiggishness of much of Modernism and the vacuous relativism of Post-Modernism, this work is clearly written as something of a corrective, not an objective treatment where all scales are balanced with care, caution and precision.

One of the themes of Empires of the Silk Road which distinguishes it from most pre-modern history is its mobility, scope and breadth, of space. A history of ancient Egypt or the Roman Empire spans centuries, and even millennia. But their geographic expanse is limited. Roman expeditions to eastern Germany shock and surprise, but the Roman Empire was fundamentally a polity of the western periphery of Eurasia. In contrast Beckwith's subject matter naturally pushes the boundaries to a far greater extent. For example, the flight of the Avars, who dominated what is today Hungary for several centuries, covers from what is today Mongolia to the Danubian plain in less than 10 years! It is a common assert that before the modern era a typical human would be born, live and die with a 10 mile radius. The exact number of miles is irrelevant, the moral is that one wishes to project a sense of incredible spatial stasis which we modern people could not comprehend. Similarly, the fashion in archaeology to assert that a shift in culture as evident through artifact is never through migration, but always through communication, internalizes this assumption. But the reality is that this assumption is only valid for the vast peasantry of peripheral societies (if even there), not for hunter-gatherers, nomads and those who practice mixed-lifestyles. In other words, not for the peoples of the Eurasian Heartland which is the subject of Empires of the Silk Road. The very high likelihood that much of what we today call Xinjiang was inhabited by peoples of Western provenance is one of those "mysteries of the ancient world" which surprises us, but that's because we're the descendants of peasants who are conditioned to assume that pre-moderns were immobile! Conversely, the descriptions of some of the more exotic nomadic groups which arrived on the Central European plain after the collapse of the Roman Empire strongly hint at an East Eurasian provenance for an element of these hordes (the physical characterizations of the Huns and Avars seem qualitativey different from that of Scythians and Samartians).

There are two great pulses, Volkerwanderung, which loom large in Beckwith's narrative, that of the Indo-Europeans and of the Turks. The former is always much more difficult than the latter because in the case of the Turks we have copious records from other groups as to their appearance on the margins of major civilized states. In contrast, when the Indo-Europeans were on the march there was very little widespread literacy, and what there was was often devoted to the kind tedious accounting which dominate the Linear B tablets. The model in Empires of the Silk Road seems to lean strongly on Robert Drews' The Coming of the Greeks, chariot riding martial elites swooping down on the settled peripheral civilizations from the Eurasian Heartland, and rapidly generating synthetic creole cultures in a matter of centuries if not decades. In Beckwith's telling the Indo-Europeans mastered the horse and chariot, and used these technological advances to take over civilized states, though he suggests that instead of full-frontal attack the norm would much more likely be that warbands were invited or their services purchased by the settled elites. Only after this period service would the Indo-European warriors rebel and take over the reigns of power (think the takeover of Britain by Anglo-Saxons after their having been brought over as mercenaries by native warlords). This specific model of servitude is assumed to be an instantiation of a general dynamic which characterizes the ethos of the Heartland, fealty of the comitatus to a leader who they will follow 'till death. We are familiar with this in its classical form among the Mongols or the Japanese samurai, but Beckwith suggests that Islamicized Turks and Christianized Franks continued to express some of the values of this ethos even after repudiation of its more extreme aspect of collective suicide in case of the death of the leader. This sort of non-kin based group cohesion can often be very powerful, and even if it is the exception historically in many societies, these exceptional periods can sometimes serve as hinges which determine the course of nations. The Arabs are a kin-based society, but the presence of non-kin among the Muhajirun, and the obvious non-kin status of the Ansar, is notable as it was they who helped Muhammad rise to power. Though the early Muslim movement was co-opted by the Umayyad clan, it nevertheless relied on an esprit de corps which was not kin-based in its early decades (though it was to a great extent ethnically based, see The Great Arab Conquests).

Though the effect of the chariot in the short term, and Indo-European languages in the long term, are not dismissed, one of the interesting suggestions made in Empires of the Silk Road is that perhaps more critical is the role that Indo-European nomads, and perhaps in particular North Iranians, played as facilitators, communicators and even originators, of ideas and technologies across Eurasia. It is not an exaggeration to note that sometimes Beckwith seems to see Indo-Europeans everywhere. The most controversial and perhaps tendentious claim (which he admits is not the scholarly consensus) is that Indo-Europeans may have played an essential formative role in the emergence of Shang & Zhou China. In particular, it is known that some elements of the culture of the Shang elite is of western origin, in particular the style of chariot warfare. It is also known that the Zhou were a semi-barbarian group from western China, and Beckwith makes a philological argument that the maternal lineage of the Zhou are not Tibetan barbarians, but Indo-European ones. He even goes so far as to offer that perhaps the original Chinese language was Indo-European, now overlain by the indigenous substrate so as to be unrecognizable. I find this last to be rather implausible, but then I know little philology so I can't critique it technically. Nevertheless, the fact remains that we know that Indo-Europeans were a presence in ~2000 BCE in what is today western China, and some aspects of technology were transmitted from them. My skepticism is partly due to the fact that the Han populations of China are genetically very distinct from those of West and Central Eurasia. The Europoid remains from Xinjiang have had enough of their DNA extracted so as that we know that on many genes where Europeans and Chinese are disjoint in frequency, so were they. Additionally, some historical remains of individuals who were claimed to be of western origin have been analyzed, and yes, they were West Eurasian. The thinness of distinctive West Eurasian genes in China proper, genes which are found in abundance among the Uighurs, shows that there were limits to the genetic admixture in this case, to the point where the indigenous substrate totally absorbed and marginalized the exogenous input. This may explain why even if Indo-European warbands had a critical role to play as a cultural stimulus among the elites of the North China plain they seem to have left a rather marginal biological impact.

The contrast with India is illustrative, as there are candidates for genes which the Indo-Europeans brought. Not only that, but the sex asymmetry in terms of genome content is very striking in South Asia, exactly in the direction which Beckwith would argue insofar as they are roving bands of males who engage in societal takeover. India naturally does seem to have a highly creolized culture, most manifest in the Indo-Aryan languages of northern India which show many hallmarks of being the synthetic product of local dialects and an intrusive language. The author barely even manages to conceal his contempt for South Asian nationalists who make arguments to the effect that Aryans were indigenous to South Asia. I think that though the tone could have been a bit more scholarly, anyone who looks as the total range of data from all Indo-European traditions can not escape the conclusion that the probability that Indo-Europeans originated in South Asia is very low, to the point of triviality. He exhibits the same attitude toward those who argue for a deep history of Indo-Europeans in Greece or Anatolia, sentiments with which I sympathize and am in general agreement, but, I would have liked the arguments sketched out in more detail rather than asserted blithely (the footnotes on this topic often don't satisfy since Beckwith cites his future work!).

One interesting facet of the story in Empires of the Silk Road seems to be the winner-take-all and positive-feedback-loop dynamic which reoccurs. The spread of the Indo-European languages is rather amazing, and invites more scholarly interest, but that is not where the story stops. Beckwith notes that for much of antiquity the heart of Asia was dominated by one group of Indo-Europeans, the Northern Iranians. The term "Iranian" here is something of a misnomer, as groups such as Scythians, Samartians and Alans may have had little to do with the contemporary Iran. Rather, the peoples of modern Iran speak a language which is related to the dialects of the Scythians. Up until fall of Rome the Northern Iranian nomads drove all others before them. There is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that the Iranians displaced the Indo-Aryans from the plateau of what later became Persia, and Herodotus seems to describe peoples under Scythian hegemony who would later become Slavs and Balts.

This winner-take-all dynamic repeats with the Turks, who swept the Iranians from the plains of Central Eurasia after marginalizing other groups such as the Avars in their climb to the top. What was so special about the Turks? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps to some extent this is a stochastic process which is characterized by positive-feedback-loops, someone has to win, and winners become even more powerful over the course of time. Eventually these great confederations which have eaten dozens of other smaller confederations expand until they lap up against the margins of peripheral civilizations, at which point the scribes of the settled marvel as to the savage superhuman nature of the nomads at the gates. In Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World the author clearly implies that Temujin's personal qualities were essential in allowing for the mobilization of the whole Mongol nation. He notes in particular his rejection of kin-based favoritism and elevation of his comitatus (he does not use that word, but same difference) as critical ingredients in scaling up the Mongol war-machine. But do note that the Mongols had risen before, under Genghis Khan's great-grandfather Khabul Khan, and been crushed by the Tatars. Perhaps Khabul Khan had all the necessary personal qualities, but the fates did not smile upon him, and now he is simply a footnote in history. The domain of the Goturks in the 6th century was nearly was expansive as that of Genghis Khan in his lifetime, but most readers of this weblog are likely unaware of the Goturks. Why? Some of this is simply that the Goturks crested at a lower maximum of territory, but some of it is simply that in the mid-500s much of peripheral civilization was in low ebb and so the Goturks did not come into conflict with the lettered lands (in fact, the Turks were often used sought out as allies against the true barbarians at the gates).

What I'm trying to say about the importance of positive-feedback-loops is not going to shock and surprise anyone. The larger the Roman or Persian Empire got, the more resources were at their disposal. So the more likely victory against other powers became (though at a certain point holding territory becomes more difficult due to diminishing returns on force projection with more numbers). But the parameters are somewhat different in the center. Rome took centuries to reach its "climax" configuration under Augustus (with only changes at the margins under Trajan, etc.). In contrast, most of the area of the Mongol Empire was conquered within 20 years. 30 years after the death of Genghis Khan Baghdad was sacked, and 50 years later all of China was finally conquered. It is understandable why the rate of conquest slowed as the Mongols pushed into the periphery; capture of the territory of nomads by nomads is far different from the taking and holding of cities, or the pacification of mountains. But winner-take-all dynamics on the plains of Eurasia did result in a series of polities which had the numbers and expertise to learn the game of peripheral states, and beat them at it, repeatedly. The Mongols famously learned siege warfare in in the process of conquering China, while the Ottomans hired European gunners, and the Huns made recourse to infantry in forested regions. But the size of their forces due to winner-take-all dynamics, and the cohesion of the comitatus, served them in good stead until the natural decay of soft civilization set in.

About which, Christopher Beckwith has serious objections to the characterizations which posit dichotomies between the soft sedentary and barbarian hardy nomads. He correctly points out that most "nomads" were not pure nomads, but lived a mixed lifestyle (hunting, herding and farming). Additionally, there's plenty of evidence that disgruntled peasants could turn roving brigand when authority was disrupted. So the boundaries between the two are not so clear cut (also, whole populations seem to have switched between settled farming and nomadic animal husbandry several times). The idea of the nomad as the born warrior is also exaggerated, and Beckwith points out the widespread literary evidence which attest to the love of luxury and laziness of the nomad populations (they're humans). And as evidence of the hardiness of peasants, he offers the examples of the citizen soldiers of Republican Rome (before Marius' reforms) and the Greek hoplites who formed the famous phalanx. Good points all, but Beckwith protests too much. He asserts repeatedly that the peoples of Central Eurasia tended to be larger and more well fed than the peasants of the periphery. Why? In a pre-modern society the population would push up against the Malthusian limit, so why were the nomads larger? To some extent this was a function of their higher quality diet in regards to meat and milk, but one might suppose that another issue was that there were greater ecological fluctuations which culled the nomad populations in a manner which was more extreme than among peasants. I bring this hypothesis up because in Empires of the Silk Road this particular problem, starvation due to theft of livestock of their deaths (disease?) is introduced as one issue which made the life of the nomad more uncertain than that of the peasant. But another factor may simply be interpersonal violence on the plains. If the peasant toiled on the margins under the boot of their sedentary nobles, they were often shielded from the sort of violence we read about in the raids common among herders. These facts lead me to contend that that Beckwith overemphasizes the symmetry between nomad and peasant when it comes to their viability as fighters. Finally, I think the body of evidence implies that nomadic populations did mobilize a greater fraction of their able bodied males in organized violence than peasant-based societies (consider Imperial Rome with its professionalized army). This would naturally give the average nomadic male more martial skills simply through experience.

Before I go to the most explosive contentions of Empires of the Silk Road, let me address a peculiar set of chapters near the end of the book. These chapters throw repeated polemical salvos at "Modernism." They attack populism, democracy, and the overall degeneracy of contemporary "high culture." Though they make the factual observation that the old architecture and traditions of Central Eurasia have been totally decimated by Modernist ideology, specifically Communism, the bigger issue here seems to be that Christopher Beckwith objects vociferously to the general slant of the Modernist era in culture. Though I have some sympathy with this, these sections of the book read rather uncomfortably next to the great mass of erudite, if assertive, scholarship which is the majority of the narrative. It is clear that Beckwith believes that Modernism is a base expression of human preferences, and that our better nature has its origins in the genius of the Heartland.

About that genius, the proposition is forwarded by Beckwith that the philosophical production of the Axial Age may have something to due to the facilitative or even original contributions of the peoples of Central Eurasia. As noted above these were peoples who could span great distances in short periods of time, so in some ways it is plausible that they would be the "Pony Express" of their age. Beckwith notes that at least one philosopher who resettled in Greece was Scythian, so the peoples of the Steppe may have been familiar with philosophy. Some of the ideas originated by the Greeks, Indians and Chinese seem eerily similar, while the religious genius of the Jews and ancient Iranians was also operative during this period. Zoroaster is likely a figure of Central Eurasia, not the sedentary world of Fars.

The simultaneous aspect of the Axial Age is rather peculiar. If you are a theist who believes in an active God this is one historical epoch which would seem a likely candidate for divine intervention. Barring that, though I am not convinced by Beckwith's hypothesis, I think a less ambitious model which posits the Central Eurasians not as drivers but as enablers of the spread of ideas is plausible. The civilized areas of the periphery were expanding during this period so they would be in more intimate contact with the Heartland than before, and also naturally more culturally productive because of gains of efficiency due to scale. There are cases later in history where the trade routes and peoples of Central Eurasia were critical in the spread of ideas: Buddhism became a religion of East Asia almost certainly through the cities of Central Eurasia. Islam also spread through the same trade routes, from the Crimean Tatars in the west to the Uighurs in the east. Finally, as Arnold Toynbee observed Far Eastern Christianity spread along these routes, during the time of Genghis Khan most of the tribes of western Mongolia was nominally of Nestorian Orthodox Christian affiliation.

In keeping with Beckwith's thesis that in the period between 2000-1000 BCE a series of cultures arose as syntheses between Indo-Europeans and the sedentary polities of distant antiquity he concludes that Central Eurasians are the spiritual ancestors of modern people, and not the Sumerians, or Egyptians, or the people of the Indus Valley civilization. This is naturally a contentious point. It is for example often noted that of the gods of ancient Greece only Zeus is of undisputed Indo-European origin, even the Mycenaean Greeks may mostly have been culturally indigenized! (or barely Indo-Europeanized if you invert it) Buddhism, arguably India's most impacting cultural export, has been argued by many scholars to be one example of a reemergence of some of South Asia's indigenous religious strands after a period of Vedic Indo-Aryan cultural domination. And so on. I can grant that the ethos of the Heartland was powerful, the expanse of the Indo-European and Turkic languages are manifest evidence of this, but I am not eager to abandon one biased narrative from another. The nature of modern civilization, and its antecedents, are complex. Empires of the Silk Road is admirable at exploring one particular neglected strand, but I'd rather not turn that tree into the forest just yet.

Note: I want to emphasize that did not touch upon many aspects of Christopher Beckwith's argument. When I say that the book is dense, I mean it is dense.

Labels: History

I'm now reading Empires of the Silk Road. I'm about 2/3 of the way through the main text, and being slowed down by the fact that I keep reading the footnotes on almost every page. Additionally, there are 40 pages or so of endnotes which I haven't gotten to yet, but each one reads like a very interesting blog post (I do not refer to it as such to cast aspersions but praise!). I'll probably have my full thoughts up in a few days. It has a little less ecology and archaeology than I'd like so far, but the density of fact is pretty awesome (The Ruin of the Roman Empire is a book where the opposite is the case, it could have been about half as long due to its repeated exposition of the same series of facts with a slight twist). There are some issues where genetics might offer a slightly different perspective than the author, and I'll definitely mention that....

Labels: History

John Hawks has a long post on ancient lifespans. It seems likely that the range has not shifted much, though the shape of the distribution naturally has. Child mortality has obviously declined, but it seems likely that death at any given age in adulthood has probably decreased as well. But for what it's worth, several of the Roman Emperors from aristocratic backgrounds whose ages are probably reliable and died natural deaths expired at an advanced age. Augustus at 76, Tiberius at 77, Claudius 63 (there is debate whether he died a natural death), Vespasian 69, Nerva 67, Trajan 63, Hadrian 62, Antinuous Pius 74 and Marcus Aurelius 58. As most of you probably know, hell broke loose after Aurelius at many Emperors did not die of natural causes until the late 3rd century after his reign. Note that some of these Emperors, such as Nerva or Vespasian, were already at very advanced ages when they came to power, so there is probably some selection effect at work in terms of age at death. Vespasian's son Titus died of fever at the age of 41.

H/T Dienekes.

Labels: History

Until the overthrow of the Manchus in the early 20th century the Chinese political-cultural system had exhibited an incredible amount of continuity for over 2,000 years, from the Qin and Han dynasties on. It seems a defensible position that just as the Mycenaean Greeks of 3,200 years ago were cultural aliens to Western elites in a way that the Classical Greeks of 2,500 years ago were not, so the Chinese bureaucrats could see themselves in the lettered gentry of 500 B.C.E, but not among the warlords of 1200 B.C.E, thanks to the crystallization of the canon during this critical axial age.

But the Greeks of the Classical period did not emerge out of a historical vacuum, and neither did the Chinese of the Spring and Autumn period. In hindsight the Duke of Zhou has been characterized in some ways as both the Lycurgus and Solon of ancient China, but one assumes that later commentators shaved off his harder edges and refashioned him in their own image, just as the Iliad which purports to tell a Bronze Age tale clearly reflects much of a Dark Age society.

Because of the thinness of the ancient textual evidence (if it exists at all), archaeology is often the only game in town. The new issue of Science has a series of articles putting a spotlight on the ancient physical history of what became China.

Labels: History

I've decided to read up on the World Wars recently. I don't know much about World War I & II aside from what I've seen on The History Channel and some books I read in elementary school. I've read The Pity Of War: Explaining World War I and The First World War, and am almost finished with A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. I'm struck by the fact though I've learned many details of interest about World War I, almost everything I've read about World War II so far in A World at Arms (which is ~1,000 pages) is totally unsurprising. To me that emphasizes how much World War II still looms in our popular culture, while the Great War is an ignored prologue. Some of this is surely time, there are fewer than 10 World War I veterans alive today. But another factor is that you couldn't invent evil on the scale of the German regime plausibly. The banal barbarity of the Second Reich pales in comparison. If one could find someone totally unfamiliar with World War II and lay out the course of events and the nature of the insane dictators (Hitler and Stalin), I suspect their initial response would be that it was implausible science fiction or alternative history, and you need to go to a writer's workshop to brush up on the craft. In contrast the First World War I exhibited a human-scaled level of folly and hubris.

Labels: History

Steve points us to a brief review by Steven Pinker on the decline in war and violence. Focusing just on homicide rates, what exactly does that mean -- a decline in violence during modern times? It is impossible to have a solid feel for the observation Pinker wants to explain without seeing time series data on homicide rates (one of which he includes in his TED talk on the same subject). The pictures come from Manuel Eisner's review article in the British Journal of Criminology.

This is required reading (only 20 pages) for anyone who wants to understand crime, and especially changes in crime -- changes in the overall rate, differences across regions in the decline, differences in the decline across social classes, etc. If you don't have access to it, it's one of those rare articles that is worth the one-time price of $28 -- or just request it from one of your friends or colleagues who does have university access.

Below the fold, I've included the pictures for all countries that Eisner found data for, along with a brief remark on the trend for each country. The vertical axis is homicides per 100,000 population and is on a logarithmic scale (so that the visible changes are by orders of magnitude). Also note that the recent decline in crime since the early-mid 1990s may not be easily visible in these pictures, given that Eisner's article came out in 2001 -- not very long for the reversal to jump out of the graphs.

First, England:


Increases during the High Middle Ages, decreases sometime starting in the Late Middle Ages or Early Modern period.

Netherlands and Belgium:


Decreases starting in Early Modern period.

Scandinavia:


Decreases starts as late as the 17th C -- Scandinavia being one of the last parts of Western Europe to become civilized.

Germany:


Apparent increase during High Middle Ages, decreases starting in Late Middle Ages or Early Modern period.

Italy:


Barely visible change during 18th C, while steady decline only starts in 19th C -- Italy having lacked a strong central state until then. Article says that Northern Italy shows a much earlier decline than Southern Italy (no surprise).

Also notice the presence of cycles about the overall trend. Just because there were recurring crime waves and abatements of crime waves during the 19th and 20th centuries -- see here for the US, or see the Scandinavian graph above -- should not distract us from the clear downward trend going only a few centuries farther back. Any account of rises or declines must deal with all of these patterns, making it impossible to generalize the narrow hypotheses for the 1990s decline in crime -- there were no cell phones before then, the trend since 1500 has been toward less corporal punishment and harsh sentencing rather than more, and so on.

What we would do is write down a system of differential equations that claimed how two or more groups of people interacted with each other -- say, "criminals," "law-abiders," and "police" -- and fool around with them until they produced a solution that would show cycles or oscillations around an overall downward trend. The interactions between these groups of people are what real historical causes are made of -- not the sudden introduction of some technology or law (or sudden disappearance of some technology or repealing of a law).

I'm up for a math modeling jam session if anyone else is. I remember seeing ODE models from ecology where one species replaces another, although the values oscillate around the upward trend of the winner, as well as around the downward trend of the loser.

Labels: crime, History

Aziz pointed me to this article in Forbes, The New Great Game, which highlights the imperial aspect of the contemporary Chinese regime. It is important to emphasize that there is a striking disjunction between the manner in which the present spatial expanse of the Chinese state emerged, and the fiction which the modern Chinese state promotes to its citizens and abroad. The acquisitions which pushed China to the furthest extent in its history were achieved under the Qinq Dynasty in the 18th century. The Qing are also know as the Manchu dynasty, a pointer to the fact that they were outsiders. The Manchu elite took over the administrative apparatus of the previous Ming dynasty by the 17th century, but they were never wholly Chinese. The reality was that for much of the Qing dynasty China was part of the Manchu Empire. Though exemplary students of Chinese forms in their roles as Emperors of China, the Manchu rulers also remained warlords of the Manchu people, and it is in this capacity (albeit leveraging the resources of China proper) that they conquered the western territories, or pushed beyond Amur river to the north of Manchuria.

To the left is an image which shows the geographical expanses of the major Chinese dynasties over time (earliest to left, the last bottom right). Only one dynasty rivals the Manchus in terms of the territory which they controlled, the Yuan, the Mongol dynasty. Like the Manchus the Mongols ruled China as part of a greater set of domains. Of the remaining the dynasties only the Tang had a robust and wide presence in Central Asia, but this hegemony evaporated by the second half of the Tang.

Turkestan, Tibet and the lands to the north of the Amur (which were later extracted from the Manchu Empire by the Czars) were acquired due to the Manchu's greater cultural and geographic horizons than the Chinese (or, more accurately, a syngery between the enterprise of the nomad and the economic base of the Han Chinese). Like the Mongols the Manchus had a relatively good relationship with the lamas of Tibetan Buddhism, and the acquisition of Tibet occurred by way of their conflicts with the western Mongols (Oirat). The conquest of Xinjiang occurred as a byproduct of the Manchu involvement in intra-Mongol politics, as the Muslims of the Tarim Basin were chafing under the hegemony of the Dzungar Mongol confederacy. The drive to the north of the Amur would be a natural necessity to buffer the Manchu homeland against the expansion of the Russians into Siberia. Native Chinese dynasties, such as the Ming and Han, were hampered in their forays out of China proper due to their inability to maintain supply lines indefinitely and inflict any final defeat on nomadic populations which coul take advantage of the strategic depth offered by their vast ranges. It is notable that the Chinese dynasty which rivaled, though did not equal, the Manchu achievement in Central Asia were the Tang, of partial nomad background.

The fact that China was part of a Manchu Empire mattered in concrete terms because many of the domains outside of China were administered separately (though later in the 19th century there was a trend toward more thorough integration as part of a modernization drive). The Turks of Xinjiang naturally would not consider themselves Chinese, since China was simply a subcomponent of a set of territories of which also included the city-states of the Tarim Basin. Similarly, the integration of Tibet into the Manchu Empire was cemented by the personal relationship between the lamas and the ruling Manchu, as well as religious affinities between the two peoples. China was a third party actor.

All this makes more sense if you keep in mind the personal aspect of rule of hereditary kingdoms before the rise of the nation-state. George III, the king against who the American colonies revolted, was king of England, Wales and Scotland, Great Britain, as well as Ireland, the United Kingdom. Additionally, he was the Elector of Hanover. The fact that Hanover and the United Kingdom had the same ruler did not mean that these two administrative units were fused, on the contrary one of the concerns of the bureaucratic and aristocratic classes of both domains was that they not become excessively entangled in the international or domestic concerns of the other (the creation of Great Britain was favored by Scotland's ruling classes because they were excluded from many of the English colonies!). In 1837 Hanover's personal union with the United Kingdom ended because of the Salian law of inheritance of the throne. Now the connection between these two regions is simply a historical coincidence.

Now imagine if England made a claim on Hanover based on the century of personal union between the two polities. This would be ludicrous. But in The New Chinese Empire the author recounts that several times during diplomatic visits by Russians Deng Xiaoping referred to the territories beyond the Amur which were lost in the 19th century as if they naturally belonged to the modern Chinese state. The reality of course is that these were conquests by the Manchus, and they were losses by the Manchus (though by the latter period the Manchus were far more Sinicized than they had been in the 17th century). For nationalistic and ideological reasons the Communist regime simply pretends as if the era of the Manchus was one where their domains were conceived of as a nation-state. Because the Chinese Empire entered onto the world stage in the 19th century in the post-Westphalian context the qualitatively non-Chinese aspects of rule in Xinjiang, Tibet or Manchuria were elided in terms of their relations with other states.

Most Uighurs naturally are ignorant of these details of history. But these details of history have no doubt shaped the attitudes of ethnic minorities like Uighurs and Tibetans, for their integration into the Chinese state is naturally a thin veneer because it is a novel and new aspect to their experience. China proper emerged in its present form in larg part because of 2,000 years of institutional governance modeled on the precedents set forth in the Han dynasty; most of the Manchu acquisitions naturally lacked this background. The attempt to centralize the Manchu adminstrative apparatus in the 19th century was stillborn because of the death spiral of the dynasty. Only with the rise of the Communists did the Far West became an integral part of the nation.

Note: China is a geographically diverse, but an ethnically homogeneous, "empire." In the Soviet Union Russians were only ~50% of the population, while in China the Han are ~90%.

Labels: China, History

Mathematical models of contagious diseases usually look at how people flow between three categories: Susceptible, Infected, and Recovered. In some of these models, the immunity of the Recovered class may become lost over time, putting them back into the Susceptible class. This means that if an epidemic flares up and dies down, it may do so again. If we treat irrational exuberance as contagious, then we can have something like a recurring exuberant-then-gloomy cycle within people's minds. That is, people start out not having strong opinions either way, they get pumped up by hype, then they panic when they figure out that the hype had no solid basis -- but over time, they might forget that lesson and become ripe for infection once more.

I'm in the middle of Stan Liebowitz's excellent post-mortem of the dot-com crash, Re-thinking the Network Economy, and in Chapter 3 he reviews the "first mover wins" craze during the tech bubble. According to this idea, largely transplanted into the business world from economists who'd already spread the myth of QWERTY, the prospect of lock-in was so likely -- even if newcomers had a superior product -- that it paid to rush your product to the market first in order to get the snowball inevitably rolling, no matter its quality.

The idea was bogus, of course, as everyone learned afterward. (There were plenty of examples available during the bubble, but the exuberance prevents people from seeing them -- Betamax was before VHS, WordPerfect was before Microsoft Word, Sega Genesis was before Super Nintendo, etc. And there were first-movers who won, if their products were highly rated. So, when you enter doesn't matter, although quality of product does.) But when I looked up data on how much the media bought into this idea, I was surprised (though not shocked) to see that it was resurrected during the recent housing bubble, although it has been declining since the start of the bust phase. Below the fold are graphs as well as some good representative quotes over the years.

First, here are two graphs showing the popularity of the idea in the mainstream media. The first is from the NYT and controls for the overall number of articles in a given year. (I excluded a few articles that use "first mover" in reference to the Prime Mover god concept in theology.) I don't have the total number of articles for the WSJ, so those are raw counts. Still, the pattern is exactly the same for both, and it very suggestively reflects the two recent bubbles:



The first epidemic is easy enough to understand -- after languishing in academia during the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, the ideas of path dependence, lock-in, and first-mover advantage caught on among the business world with the surge of the tech bubble. When it became apparent that the dot-coms weren't as solid as was believed (to put it lightly), everyone realized how phony the theory supporting the bubble had been. Here's a typical remark from 2001:

WHEN they were not promoting the now-laughable myth of ''first mover advantage,'' early e-commerce proponents proffered the idea that self-service Web sites could essentially run themselves, with little or no overhead.

But clear-headedness eventually wears off, and when another bubble comes along, we can't help but feel exuberant again and take another swig of the stuff that made us feel all tingly inside before. Here's a nugget of wisdom from 2006:

Media chieftains may be kicking themselves a few years from now because they didn't step up to pay whatever it took to own the emergent first mover in online video.

And a similar non-derogatory, non-ironic use of the phrase from 2007:

For the current generation of Internet applications, sometimes referred to as "Web 2.0," the data collected from users is the true source of competitive advantage. And the first movers, the companies that understand and apply this insight, have services that get better fast enough that their competition never catches up.

Thankfully we've been hearing less and less of this stupid idea ever since the housing bubble peaked, and at least the most recent peak was lower than the first one, but we can still expect to hear something like this during whatever the next bubble is. Note that the first-mover-wins idea wasn't even being applied primarily to real estate during the housing bubble -- the exuberance in one domain carried over into a completely unrelated domain where it had flourished before. So, if you're at all involved in the tech industry, be very wary during the next bubble of claims that "first mover wins" -- it wasn't true then (or then, or then), and it won't be true now.

Labels: Economics, History, Technology

Rod Dreher has a post about the The problem of pornography. My question: how is porn fundamentally different from fantasizing? Is it because of the shift toward bizarre fetish porn which rescales your perceptions of normal? I'm generally skeptical of anecdotal arguments about how porn is "changing everything." Because of my interest in Transhumanism and the Singularity I have run into people whose sexual outlets are skewed toward the virtual as opposed to the physical, and all seem to prefer the latter over the former. I won't even get into the issues of causality when it comes to all the bizarre things which known serial killers engage in.

Also, Rod makes a reference to "Late-Roman" culture. The allusion is common among many Christian conservatives, and I think I know what he's suggesting, that our society is becoming decadent, amoral, lacking spiritual values (he's made the allusion multiple times). Here's my problem: this doesn't comport at all with even a cursory reading of Roman history that you could gain from Wikipedia. The Late Roman period was one of the Chrisitanization of the Empire, and a resurgence of moralism among both pagans and Christians. Much of the Western Empire shifted more toward primary production and the modest economies of scale, and the specialization which allowed for the long distance trade of basic consumer and luxury goods diminished. In the East the Empire did not fall, but became progressively more Christian in its identity, as evidenced by the Christian moral ethical influence on the codification of Roman law during the reign of Justinian. The secular intellectual pursuits of the elite gave way to an emphasis on religious piety, study and endowment of monasteries and churches (see the life of Cassiodorus).

In fact the revisionists who followed in the wake of Peter Brown and have reinterpreted the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a Transformation of the Roman World point to the importance of Late Antiquity in setting the groundwork for the Christian civilization of Medieval Europe. "Late-Rome" was the time of the flourishing of Augustine and Ambrose in the West, the Cappadocian Fathers in the East who are so important in the Greek Christian tradition. In general the revisionists might not deny the decline in material standards, in median affluence, but they emphasize the richness of cultural production, particularly religious cultural production.

Were public morals at the peak of the Empire such a high watermark? Augustus' own family was wracked with debauchery to the point where he banished his own daughter. Though there were rumors about Tiberius, the perversions of Caligula and Nero are famous, and even the relatively innocuous Claudius married his niece. For those of you not up on your emperors, this is within the first century of the Empire. The Antonine Emperors were known to be moderate and virtuous in comparison to the prurience of the Julio-Claudians or the tyranny of Domitian, but Hadrian was certainly a pederast, and there are rumors about Trajan as well. Commodus of course made Andrew Johnson seem a model of sobriety and gravitas (this is the second century of the Empire).

At its peak the the Roman Empire was pagan, pluralist in religion and philosophy, and many of the autocrats flaunted personal morals which were in sharp contradiction to Christian virtue. It was relatively affluent (though we're talking percentages on the margin of median wealth I suspect, not multiplicative) and militarily robust. In the later phase the Empire imposed religious homogeneity on the elites in the form of Christianity, and the sort of public virtue which Augustus or Marcus Aurelius might have smiled upon became baked-into-the-cake of the ideology of the proto-monarchs which the emperors had become (although women such as Pulcharia and Theodora were generally the enforcers). Bread & circuses might have persisted in Rome up until the Gothic Wars, across much of the Empire there was a shift toward self-suffuciency and primary production. Dare I say, the Empire was becoming more "crunchy"?

As I said, the analogy to the Late Roman Empire has rhetorical force. Everyone knows what the allusion is meant to indicate. The problem emerges when people think that they can then start looking to Late Antiquity as an analogical model to make predictions about the future because of tight correspondences of conditions. Since those correspondences actually don't exist, rather, if there were material and moral variations across the span of the time of the Roman Empire they go in an inverse direction from the rhetoric, all you do is mess up your model of how the world works. Since Rod Dreher converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church he has no excuse of being ahistorical and fixated on abstract concepts of primitive salvation. The Late Roman Empire was the midwife for the greatest revolution in the history of the world from the perspective of a Catholic or Orthodox Christian,* so perhaps he should reconsider his sloppy use of the analogy. In the short term these rhetorical tactics are useful, but in the long term truth matters and errors which propagate through the chain of reasoning can be hard to filter out.

Note: If you want some evidence of the decline in material affluence as a function of time, see The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization and Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800. A narrative of the cultural genius of the Late Roman period can be found in The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000.

* Some Protestant radicals are skeptical of the influence of Late Antiquity because they believe that the Church took a wrong turn in its institutionalization and association with temporal powers.

Labels: History, porn

In 1990, Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis wrote an article detailing the history of the now standard QWERTY keyboard layout vs. its main competitor, the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. (Read it here for free, and read through the rest of Liebowitz's articles at his homepage.) In brief, the greatest results in favor of the DSK came from a study that was never officially published and that was headed by none other than Dvorak himself. Later, when researchers tried to devise more controlled experiments, the supposed superiority of the DSK mostly evaporated.

Professional typists may have enjoyed about a 5% faster rate, or maybe not -- despite the conviction of the claims you hear, this isn't a well established body of evidence, such as "smarter people have faster reaction times." Moreover, most keyboard users aren't professional typists, and the vast bulk of their lost time is due to thinking about what they want to say. Therefore, the standardization of the QWERTY layout is not an example of our being locked in to an inferior technology. Which isn't to say that the QWERTY layout is the best imaginable -- but certainly not a clearly inferior layout compared to the DSK.

While Liebowitz and Margolis may have hoped that their examination of the evidence would have thrown some cold water on the "lock-in to inferior standards" craze that had gotten going in the mid 1980s, with QWERTY as the proponents favorite example, the idea appears too appealing to academics to die. (Read this 1995 article for a similar debunking of Betamax's alleged superiority over the VHS format.) Liebowitz appeared on a podcast show just this May having to reiterate again that the standard story of QWERTY is bogus.

To investigate, I did an advance search of JSTOR's economics journals for "QWERTY" and divided this count by the total number of articles. This was done for five four-year periods because it's not incredibly popular in any year, and that creates more noise in a year-by-year picture. I excluded the post-2004 period since there's typically a 5-year lag between publication and archiving in JSTOR. This doesn't show what the author's take is -- only how in-the-air the topic is. With the two major examples having been shown to not be examples of inferior lock-in at all, you'd think the pattern would be a flaring up and then dying down as economists were made aware of the evidence, and everyone can just leave it at that. But nope:


Note that the articles here aren't the broad class discussing various types of path dependence or network effects, but specifically the kind that lead to inferior lock-in -- as signalled by the mention of QWERTY. I attribute the locking in of this inferior idea to the fact that academia is not incentivized in a way that rewards truth, at least in the social sciences. Look at how long psychoanalysis and Marxism were taken seriously before they started to die off in the 1990s.

Shielded from the dynamics of survival-of-the-fittest, all manner of silly ideas can catch on and become endemic. In this case, the enduring popularity of the idea is accounted for by the Microsoft-hating religion of most academics and of geeks outside the universities. For them, Microsoft is not a company that introduced the best word processors and spreadsheets to date, and that is largely responsible for driving down software prices, but instead a folk devil upon which the cult projects whatever evil forces it can dream up. Psychologically, though, it's pretty tough to just make shit up like that. It's easier to give it the veneer of science -- and that's just what the ideas behind the QWERTY and Betamax examples were able to give them.

Overall, Liebowitz's work seems pretty insightful. There's very little abstract theorizing, which modeling nerds like me may miss, but someone's got to take a hard-nosed look at what all the evidence says in support of one model or some other. He and Margolis recognized how empirically unmoored the inferior lock-in literature was early on, and they also saw how dangerous it had become when it was used against Microsoft in the antitrust case. [1] He also foresaw how irrational the tech bubble was, losing much money by shorting the tech stocks far too early in the bubble, and he co-wrote an article in the late 1990s that predicted The Homeownership Society would backfire on the poor and minorities it was supposed to help. (Read his recent article on the mortgage meltdown, Anatomy of a Train Wreck.) Finally, one of his more recent articles looks at how file sharing has hurt CD sales. Basically, he details everything that a Linux penguin shirt-wearer doesn't want to hear.

[1] Their book Winners, Losers, and Microsoft and their collection of essays The Economics of QWERTY attack the idea from another direction -- showing how the supposed conditions for lock-in or market tipping were met, and yet time and again there was turnover rather than lock-in, with each successive winner having received the highest praise.

Labels: culture, Economics, History, Technology

There's a post on porn and rape that's making the rounds (among the blogs I read, at Half Sigma and Roissy so far). The author claims to show that a greater availability of pornography is associated with lower rape rates. But it is not -- nor are the two directly related. They simply appear unrelated altogether.

First, the original post's author is not an idiot; he just made an honest mistake in getting his crime data. (And he is right in his side-point about how moronic feminists are when they suggest that rape has little to do with meeting the guy's sexual urges.) But let's focus on what the crime data say.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics website has a page of summary statistics that includes the graph in his post that shows what looks like a decline in the rape rate from the early-mid 1970s until today. Those data appear to be from the National Crime Victimization Survey, and one drawback here is that minors are often questioned in the presence of their parents or guardians. They're much less likely to report something embarrassing and painful as rape when the adults are there, especially if it was a family member or acquaintance of the family, as is typical. And young females are the most at risk. The definition of rape there seems too broad also, including attempted rape and psychological intimidation -- what people really have in mind when they hear "rape" is someone using physical force to gain sexual access to another person.

Luckily, though, the BJS also has data on the forcible rape rate ("real" rape), and this series goes back even further than the NCVS data -- back to 1960. What do these data say? If you're a regular reader, you already know because I've reviewed the change in violent crime and forcible rape rates before. Go to that post to see the graph and get the details. In brief, there was a sharp rise from about 1964 through 1992 and a decline thereafter.

What was the change in porn availability from 1960 to 2006? I've reviewed that topic too. Again, go there for the graphs and details. Looking just at Playboy to stand in for pornography generally, its circulation in 1960 was about 1 million and shot up to 7.2 million at its peak in 1972, dropping to 3 million by 1987, where it has stayed since. Population size isn't the main factor here since the US population did not multiply by 7 between 1960 and 1972. There was an explosion in Playboy circulation, and even through the 1980s it was still 3 times as high as in 1960. Therefore, from 1960 to 1972, there was a surge in porn availability and a surge in the forcible rape rate. This much of the data contradicts the "more porn, less rape" idea.

But Playboy circulation dropped sharply from 1973 to 1987, and that didn't cause the rape rate to drop. Its circulation has remained pretty steady since 1987, while the rape rate has steadily fallen since 1992. There are other data in the above post from the General Social Survey on what percent of men have watched an X-rated movie in the past year. Again there are no clear patterns that suggest an association with the forcible rape rate. If anything, the availability of porn has increased since the mid-late 1990s with the adoption of the internet. That suggests the "more porn, less rape" idea since rape was falling -- but it had peaked in 1992, about a half-decade before most guys had easy access to internet porn.

Putting all of the data together, it doesn't look like there's a relationship at all between availability of porn and the forcible rape rate. It's trivial to choose a time period in which your preferred hypothesis pans out, but looking at the big picture is always more revealing. In this case, we discover a big let-down -- neither side is right, and rape has little to do with porn. Debates like "porn and rape" or "poverty and crime" serve mostly as a full employment plan for gasbags. What if the two things aren't related in the first place? Well, that's a pretty boring debate -- way to rain on our parade.

Labels: crime, History, porn

I was listening to Marketplace the other day and Kevin Hassett delivered a commentary combining economics with a revisionist evaluation of the American Revolution. Hassett's argument seems to be that the Revolution, which was notionally predicated on taxation without representation, will in the long run be a historical blip of no consequence as the United States converges upon the same tax and spend structure as the United Kingdom. From this convergence of tax and expenditure structures Hassett infers an eventual closing of the $10,000 GDP per capita gap between the United States and the United Kingdom. What therefore was the point of breaking away if 200 years later the USA is going to be so similar to the United Kingdom?

There are many ways to critique this sort of analysis, but there are two major issues that I jumped out for me. First, 200 years is not a trivial interval of time, especially when taking into account the large numbers of Americans who lived between then and now. To view economic history as convergence toward equilibria as a few parameters are modulated at some point in the future seems worthless, just as pointing out that the Sun will go nova, or that the universe may be doomed to heat death. There is a big difference between asserting that the GDP per capita gap will close within 10 years, and within 100 years. Tractable and elegant macroeconomic models may be mostly junk over the short term, but I'm pretty sure that they're total junk over the long term. Inferences from stylized facts may provoke, but spare me the assumption that that the error bars of projections aren't so huge as to make them useless even for government work. Second, it isn't as if the only things that separate the United States and the United Kingdom are institutional frameworks. Even within the United States there is quite a bit of regional variation in culture. Perhaps Hassett would say that specific variation in the instantiation of human capital is totally irrelevant, but most people wouldn't assume that as a given. Secondarily there is a sense here that historical contingency doesn't exist, that there is no path dependence in economic development. So the 200 year interval whereby the American Revolution served as an exogenous shock which tore the thirteen colonies out of the British Empire had no significant effect by shifting initial parameters in a manner which might "lock in" a bias toward some developmental paths as opposed to others. But evaluated over a long enough interval all historical events can be marginalized as futile acts against the trendline, whatever it is.

Instead of using an abstract framework riddled with assumptions that many people would find laughable, why not go the route of pointing to the nature of the British settler colonies which did not revolt, but eventually became independent? Obviously Australia, Canada and New Zealand are different in myriad ways from the United States, but are the comparisons more strained than the model that Hassett posits?

Labels: Economics, History

A few weeks ago I noticed that the Wikipedia entry for Cape Coloureds has little fleshed out information on their genetics. As a mixed population it seems that people would be interested, but has always been hard to find anything from Google Scholar on this topic. But the recent Tishkoff paper, The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans, has some data. You can find a full post at my other weblog, but it seems that not only are the Cape Coloureds substantially European, Khoisan and Bantu, but likely they're also substantially Indian, and there is a definite East Asian element, no doubt from slaves brought from Maritime Southeast Asia by the VOC. There's also a lot of variance in this particular sample of Cape Coloureds. Assuming this is representative I would offer that the main reason is that the Coloured population has historically had many people entering it from other groups, and, many leaving to other groups.

Labels: Genetics, History

Updated

This may be old hat for some readers, but it's worth reviewing and providing some good new data for. The motivation is the idea that monopoly-haters have that when some company comes to dominate the market, they will have no incentive to change things -- after all, they've already captured most of the audience. The response is that industries where invention is part of the companies' raison d'etre attract dynamic people, including the executives.

And such people do not rest on their laurels once they're free from competition -- on the contrary, they exclaim, "FINALLY, we can breathe free and get around to all those weird projects we'd thought of, and not have to pander to the lowest common denominator just to stay afloat!" Of course, only some of those high-risk projects will become the next big thing, but a large number of trials is required to find highly improbable things. When companies are fighting each other tooth-and-nail, a single bad decision could sink them for good, which makes companies in highly competitive situations much more risk-averse. Conversely, when you control the market, you can make all sorts of investments that go nowhere and still survive -- and it is this large number of attempts that boosts the expected number of successes.

With that said, let's review just a little bit of history impressionistically, and then turn to a new dataset that confirms the qualitative picture.

Taking only a whirlwind tour through the pre-Information Age time period, we'll just note that most major inventions could not have been born if the inventor had not been protected from competitive market forces -- usually from protection by a monopolistic and rich political entity. Royal patronage is one example. And before the education bubble, there weren't very many large research universitities in your country where you could carry out research -- for example, Oxford, Cambridge, and... well, that's about it, stretching back 900 years. They don't call it "the Ivory Tower" for nothing.

Looking a bit more at recent history, which is most relevant to any present debate we may have about the pros and cons of monopolies, just check out the Wikipedia article on Bell Labs, the research giant of AT&T that many considered the true Ivory Tower during its hey-day from roughly the 1940s through the early 1980s. From theoretical milestones such as the invention of information theory and cryptography, to concrete things like transistors, lasers, and cell phones, they invented the bulk of all the really cool shit since WWII. They were sued for antitrust violations in 1974, lost in 1982, and were broken up by 1984 or '85. Notice that since then, not much has come out -- not just from Bell Labs, but at all.

The same holds true for the Department of Defense, which invented the modern airliner and the internet, although they made large theoretical contributions too. For instance, the groundwork for information criteria -- one of the biggest ideas to arise in modern statistics, which tries to measure the discrepancy between our scientific models and reality -- was laid by two mathematicians working for the National Security Agency (Kullback and Leibler). And despite all the crowing you hear about the Military-Industrial Complex, only a pathetic amount actually goes to defense (which includes R&D) -- most goes to human resources, AKA bureaucracy. Moreover, this trend goes back at least to the late 1960s. Here is a graph of how much of the defense outlays go to defense vs. human resources (from here, Table 3.1; 2008 and beyond are estimates):


There are artificial peaks during WWII and the Korean War, although it doesn't decay very much during the 1950s and '60s, the height of the Cold War and Vietnam War. Since roughly 1968, though, the chunk going to actual defense has plummeted pretty steadily. This downsizing of the state began long before Thatcher and Reagan were elected -- apparently, they were jumping on a bandwagon that had already gained plenty of momentum. The key point is that the state began to give up its quasi-monopolistic role in doling out R&D dollars.

Update: I forgot! There is a finer-grained category called "General science, space, and technology," which is probably the R&D that we care most about for the present purposes. Here is a graph of the percent of all Defense outlays that went to this category:


This picture is even clearer than that of overall defense spending. There's a surge from the late 1950s up to 1966, a sharp drop until 1975, and a fairly steady level from then until now. This doesn't alter the picture much, but removes some of the non-science-related noise from the signal. [End of update]

Putting together these two major sources of innovation -- Bell Labs and the U.S. Defense Department -- if our hypothesis is right, we should expect lots of major inventions during the 1950s and '60s, even a decent amount during the 1940s and the 1970s, but virtually squat from the mid-1980s to the present. This reflects the time periods when they were more monopolistic vs. heavily downsized. What data can we use to test this?

Popular Mechanics just released a neat little book called Big Ideas: 100 Modern Inventions That Have Changed Our World. They include roughly 10 items in each of 10 categories: computers, leisure, communication, biology, convenience, medicine, transportation, building / manufacturing, household, and scientific research. They were arrived at by a group of around 20 people working at museums and universities. You can always quibble with these lists, but the really obvious entries are unlikely to get left out. There is no larger commentary in the book -- just a narrow description of how each invention came to be -- so it was not conceived with any particular hypothesis about invention in mind. They begin with the transistor in 1947 and go up to the present.

Pooling inventions across all categories, here is a graph of when these 100 big ideas were invented (using 5-year intervals):


What do you know? It's exactly what we'd expected. The only outliers are the late-1990s data-points. But most of these seemed to be to reflect the authors' grasping at straws to find anything in the past quarter-century worth mentioning. For example, they already included Sony's Walkman (1979), but they also included the MP3 player (late 1990s) -- leaving out Sony's Discman (1984), an earlier portable player of digitally stored music. And remember, each category only gets about 10 entries to cover 60 years. Also, portable e-mail gets an entry, even though they already include "regular" e-mail. And I don't know what Prozac (1995) is doing in the list of breakthroughs in medicine. Plus they included the hybrid electric car (1997) -- it's not even fully electric!

Still, some of the recent ones are deserved, such as cloning a sheep and sequencing the human genome. Overall, though, the pattern is pretty clear -- we haven't invented jackshit for the past 30 years. With the two main monopolistic Ivory Towers torn down -- one private and one public -- it's no surprise to see innovation at a historic low. Indeed, the last entries in the building / manufacturing and household categories date back to 1969 and 1974, respectively.

On the plus side, Microsoft and Google are pretty monopolistic, and they've been delivering cool new stuff at low cost (often for free -- and good free, not "home brew" free). But they're nowhere near as large as Bell Labs or the DoD was back in the good ol' days. I'm sure that once our elected leaders reflect on the reality of invention, they'll do the right thing and pump more funds into ballooning the state, as well as encouraging Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to merge into the next incarnation of monopoly-era AT&T.

Maybe then we'll get those fly-to-the-moon cars that we've been expecting for so long. I mean goddamn, it's almost 2015 and we still don't have a hoverboard.

Labels: Economics, History, politics, Technology

To Protect an Ancient City, China Moves to Raze It. The city is Kashgar, in the far west of China. I have read that Kashgar is the large city furthest from oceans on all directions. It's a typical story of developers wanting to develop. You read articles like this about Beijing all the time (or did, I assume that most of the developing to be done has been done). One issue that I'm curious about though, my understanding is that China (and East Asia in general) has fewer buildings of great antiquity than in the West because so much of the monumental architecture was in wood. This results in ancient cities being viewed as relatively ephemeral, with the elements (especially fire) taking what humans don't eventually tear down and reprocess. So there is very little of the earlier dynasties in the old imperial capital of Xi'an because the complexes of the imperial family and aristocrats were made of wood. Perhaps some of the reporting of how heartless Chinese bureaucrats are in regards to historic buildings suffers from a cultural gap whereby societies which materials like stone assume more permanence to architecture than those which rely in less durable medium such as wood.

Labels: Central Asia, culture, History

David Frum has a very interesting review of How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower. In it he touches upon two other works which address the same topic, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization & The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. I've read them both, and they are excellent histories, though as Frum notes they take different tacks. The former taking a materialist perspective, and the latter a more classical narrative of politics and government. I also agree that to some extent modern multiculturalism has fed into the revisionism which suggests that there was no decline from Classical to Late Antiquity. In From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents conservative historian David Gress actually shows how pre-multiculturalist liberal intellectuals, such as Will Durant, privileged pre-Christian antiquity, in particular Greece, and excised the entire period after the fall of Rome and before the rise of the Enlightenment (with a nod to the Renaissance) as making any substantive contribution to the liberal democratic consensus


Where you stand matters in making these sorts of judgements. For obvious reasons Catholic Christian intellectuals of what we term the medieval period did not view the ancient world as superior to their own, because whatever its material or intellectual merits, it was a fundamentally pagan one at its roots. Though the modern West is still predominantly Christian in religion, that religion no longer serves as quite the core anchor that it once did,* and material considerations as well as abstractions such as "democracy" and the "republic" are given greater weight than they once were. I believe that David Gress is right to suggest that attempts by secular liberal historians to deny the essential role of Christendom, the period between antiquity and the age of the nation-state, was driven more by politics than reality. The founders of the American republic were obviously classical educated and that influenced their outlook, as evidenced by their writings as well concrete aspects of culture such as architecture. But they were also heirs to a tradition which defended the customary rights of Englishmen, rights which go back ultimately to Anglo-Saxon tribal law. It is simply laughable to imagine that Greek democracy slept for 2,000 years and reemerged in the late 18th century in the form of the American democratic republic. But, the very same historical factors which make Western civilization what it is today also result in a set of normative presuppositions that does naturally marginalize or diminish the glory of medieval civilization set next to its classical predecessor.

Also, one minor point. Frum says:

...Some scholars have speculated that the empire was depopulated by plague after 200. (William McNeill wrote a fascinating history of the global effects of disease, Plagues and Peoples, that argues for disease as a principal cause of Roman decline.

This could well be true. On the other hand, of the emperors and would-be emperors who contested power in the turbulent 3rd century, only one Claudius II Gothicus, died of plague. At least 17 were assassinated or executed, and four more died under unknown circumstances. Four died in battle, one in captivity after battle - but only two of those five met their end at the hands of foreign enemies. The other three died fighting Roman rivals.

In regards to the hypothesis of demographic decline due to plague, the fact that only Claudius II Gothicus died of this cause is likely a weaker point than one might think. Only one monarch died of the Black Plague, which most historians assume killed 1/4 to 1/3 of Europeans. This is probably most easily interpreted in light of the reality that the elites are relatively well fed, and might therefore have been less susceptible to disease than the populace as a whole. The connection between poor nutrition and a relatively anemic immune response to disease has been offered as one reason why deadly pandemics were much more common in the pre-modern period, when a far higher proportion of the population was nutritionally stressed.

H/T Conor Friedersdorf

* I think the Islamic world is a better model of how medieval Christians might view their classical pagan cultural forebears. Egyptians take pride in the antiquity of their society, but what was before Islam was jahaliya. The preservation of Greek knowledge by the Arab Muslims during the first few centuries of Islam exhibited a strong selection bias toward works of abstract philosophy. Ancient Greece's cultural production in the arts held no great interest, so it is only thanks to the Byzantines that many of those works were preserved.

Labels: culture, History, intellectual history

From page 17 of Neo-Confucianism in History:

...Already by the 1050s southerners accounted for the majority of the literary men; within a century southerners would tower over intellectual culture, as they would continue to do for centuries to come. By the 1070s officials from the south had come to dominate policy-making offices. Literati knew this, but in the latter half of the eleventh century they were divided over the solution. Some called on the court to institute regional quotas for the civil service examinations but defended a system that would favor talent above regional representation....

This describes the period of the Northern Song. Though militarily and politically the Song were a subpar dynasty, in terms of cultural and economic production they were exceptional. In fact it is common for historians to wonder why the Song efflorescence did not lead to a Chinese industrial revolution and Great Divergence. In any case, I am struck by the aspects of geographic determinism evident during the Song period, and the analogies one can draw to the Germanic-speaking world in the 17th and 18th centuries as recounted in Tim Blanning's The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815. While the Rhineland, the Netherlands and north German ports saw the emergence of robust proto-capitalist commercial cities facilitated by cheap water transport, the cities of the Central European Austrian domains still remained primarily centers of royal pomp and bureaucratic administration. The same contrast is clear during the Song dynasty between the inland northern cities, and those urban areas with access to water transport, particularly in the south.

Labels: China, History

Quantitative ecologist Peter Turchin's Secular Cycles is not available for purchase, but you can get a final draft copy online. His previous books, War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations & Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall, prefigure many of the arguments that are fleshed out in Secular Cycles. Turchin's aim is audacious. The last paragraph of Secular Cycles lays out the vision:

Our concluding thoughts are these. We believe that we showed that it is possible to obtain quantitative empirical estimates for many variables that are needed to test theories of historical dynamics. Furthermore, our models, and the demographic-structural theory in particular, have matured to the point where they can make quantitative and testable predictions. Many of these predictions are supported by the data; others failed, but often in interesting ways that suggest further development of the theory. The historical process is very complex, we have to live with severe data limitations, but nevertheless it is possible to apply the standard scientific approach to the study of history. We are optimistic about the future prospects of History as Science.

If history is any guide Turchin's optimism is misplaced, and a general theory of historical dynamics will elude us. But the nature of science is that it is exhibits a strong ahistorical* bent and the past can be a weak guide to the future.  If cliodynamics emerges as a respectable field we would expect it to overturn precedent. As someone trained in the former Soviet Union it should be  no surprise I suppose that Turchin would be the one making an attempt to resurrect theoretical history in the English speaking world. An intellectual who was shaped by a Marxist Zeitgeist would be more easily inclined to consider the possibility that history could be formalized so as to produce systems of non-trivial inferential power.

So what makes this latest effort different from the speculations of Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler? First, as a biological scientist Turchin comes the table with a methodological toolkit which is far superior in precision to that available to historians of the early 20th century. From game theory to systems ecology there are many new formal frameworks which can be brought to bear upon human historical dynamics which were not extant in earlier epochs. Secondly, the data sets are far more extensive than they once were due to the prominence of cliometrics, as well as the greater power of traditional fields such as archaeology due to improvements in method. Finally, Turchin's ambition is constrained to the pre-modern era when Malthusian parameters were ascendant. This is not to say that I do not think that some of his inferences and conjectures have no contemporary salience, but there is no overarching lesson or ideological implication to be derived from his models (in contrast to Marxism).

Nevertheless, I am obviously somewhat intrigued by Turchin's attempt to add some quant juice to qual questions & observations. I recently read Niall Ferguson's The House of Rothschild: Volume 1: Money's Prophets: 1798-1848. Because of the fact that the House of Rothschild was incomprehensibly wealthy at its peak via its involvement in public bond markets there was naturally a whole genre which emerged exposing their power and malice as conspirators at the center of a vast web of influence (see the Age of Metternich). Ferguson does emphasize that the financial interests of the Rothschild's, public debt, compelled them to attempt to block conflicts between major European powers. But another reality which has nothing to do with the Rothschild's is that Europe during the early years of the family's rise was recovering from the Napoleonic Wars, and nations and elites which have experienced sustained and strenuous conflict tend to be wary of future conflicts. In Turchin's data sets he present evidence that these qualitative cycles are evident in clear generational terms throughout the historical record for regions where we have good records. He also presents a causal motive force behind the explosions of violence which tend to prune military aristocracies. Ultimately one would also want to explore the neurological basis of memory and its effect on how humans make decisions and weight risks, and how long traumatic events can effect behavior, but the gross patterns and the expected period of the recession of violence are also of interest. The point being that despite their wealth even the House of Rothschild might have been accidental players in broader macrosocial dynamics.

* Though operationally it is historical because of the weakness of human cognitive powers.

Labels: Cliodynamics, History, Peter Turchin

Coat Color Variation at the Beginning of Horse Domestication:

The transformation of wild animals into domestic ones available for human nutrition was a key prerequisite for modern human societies. However, no other domestic species has had such a substantial impact on the warfare, transportation, and communication capabilities of human societies as the horse. Here, we show that the analysis of ancient DNA targeting nuclear genes responsible for coat coloration allows us to shed light on the timing and place of horse domestication.We conclude that it is unlikely that horse domestication substantially predates the occurrence of coat color variation, which was found to begin around the third millennium before the common era.

Also see ScienceDaily.

Related: Horse genetics & color, White horses and blonde humans: a genetic connection?, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World and Earliest domestication of horse?

Labels: Genetics, History

Who I Am Depends on How I Feel: The Role of Affect in the Expression of Culture:

We present a novel role of affect in the expression of culture. Four experiments tested whether individuals' affective states moderate the expression of culturally normative cognitions and behaviors. We consistently found that value expressions, self-construals, and behaviors were less consistent with cultural norms when individuals were experiencing positive rather than negative affect. Positive affect allowed individuals to explore novel thoughts and behaviors that departed from cultural constraints, whereas negative affect bound people to cultural norms. As a result, when Westerners experienced positive rather than negative affect, they valued self-expression less, showed a greater preference for objects that reflected conformity, viewed the self in more interdependent terms, and sat closer to other people. East Asians showed the reverse pattern for each of these measures, valuing and expressing individuality and independence more when experiencing positive than when experiencing negative affect. The results suggest that affect serves an important functional purpose of attuning individuals more or less closely to their cultural heritage.

More in ScienceDaily:

... And elevated mood even shaped behavior, allowing volunteers to act "out of character." These findings suggest that people in an upbeat mood are more exploratory and daring in attitude — and therefore more apt to break from cultural stereotype. That is, Asians act more independently than usual, and Europeans are more cooperative. Feeling bad did the opposite: It reinforced traditional cultural stereotypes and constrained both Western and Eastern thinking about the world.

I think these data are interesting in light of the sort of argument presented in works such as The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. The standard model here is that cultural openness correlates with economic growth, while stagnation results in retrenchment.

Labels: History, politics, Psychology

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World is a work of economic history focused on trade. It suffers like many in this genre due to a sloppy grasp of the historical record (the numerous trivial errors are a good sign of a very thin grasp of secondary sources).* But when it comes to the details of trade networks it is relatively informative (though do check the notes!). One of the more interestings aspects of A Splendid Exchange is the deep treatment given to the Indian ocean trade network from antiquity down to the early modern period (also see Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium fora more scholarly take on this topic). The standard model from the extant sources suggest that the trade from Egypt to China had a hinge at Sri Lanka, so that Western and Eastern traders went no further than this point. But there are references by Portuguese soldiers and missionaries to "Roman colonies" in the trading cities of the Malay archipelago in the 16th century, strongly suggesting that the Italian's networks extended very far to the east. Additionally, during this period the Acehnese of northern Sumatra were a notable presence in the western Indian ocean, as evidenced today by the Malay features of some individuals in the Hadhramaut in southern Yemen. Finally, there is circumstantial evidence that the mercentile elite of Cairo during the phase of Mamluk ascendancy was of Indian provenance, specifically Tamil.

When I say "secret" I mostly mean that though the trade network was well known to the principals, because of minimal documentation our knowledge of it is thin. And when we do not see records of something, it does not exist. The copious amounts of gold & silver coins in 1st century from the Malabar Coast in India are witness to both luxury and non-luxury good consumption by the Roman world (gold = luxury, silver = non-luxury) of Asian products, while the shift to gold in the 2nd century suggests a decline in the non-luxury sector. Of course these inferences can be made only because of the durable nature of coinage and its known exchange rates with goods & services.

These data and the hints of wider patterns which we can discern make some paradoxes more comprehensible. Consider the fact that the origin or transit of the Malagasy language from southern Borneo is highly likely. Settlement of Madagascar by a people who speak and Austronesian language seems exceedingly peculiar. By analogy some have suggested it was as if Cuba had been settled by the Norwegians in the 10th century. Interestingly the linguistic relationship to Borneo is supported by the genetic data. The fact that the Malagasy has loan words from Swahili, Arabic and Sanskrit indicates a deep integration with the Indian ocean network. A bigger point is that unfortunately when it comes to modeling human history we don't tend to take into account what we don't know (naturally) as much as what we know. The Indian ocean network's outlines are detectable because of its scope, but it is almost certainly the tip of the iceberg in terms of these patterns in human history.

*Though to be fair this is not a scholarly work.

Labels: History, Trade

You probably know that lions were native to Greece 2,000 years ago (ergo, the Lion Gate). But more importantly I just realized today how important it might be that the rats we know of as rats are relative newcomers to Western Eurasia (above & beyond their specific relevance to plague). The black rat for example seems to have arrived in the Mediterranean just as lions were going extinct, during the days of the Roman Empire. But today the black rat is rare in Europe (generally found in port cities) and has been replaced by the brown rat, which only arrived in the early modern period (e.g., 18th century in Britain). So check out Rats, Communications, and Plague: Toward an Ecological History.

Labels: History

One of the most frustrating things about modern American models of ethnicity is that they are so focused on the racial aspect, and to a lesser extent on the white ethnics who arrived after 1840. Albion's Seed is great because it elucidates in such detail the different British strains which settled the Americas, but unfortunately it doesn't push the story beyond the colonial period. Other works of history hint at the fissures in Anglo-America, but few explore the divisions explicitly. The political ramifications of race, or the arrival of the Irish, are relatively prominent in the public consciousness, but I think it is arguable that the differences between the Puritans and Scots-Irish have had a more important effect on the trajectory of the American republic and our history. From page 50 of Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War:

Northern-born settlers (and more particulary New Englanders) and Southern-born migrants had distinct work habits and their own approaches to entrepenurial activities. Michael Chevalier, a French official who came to America in the 1830s to study pblic works, remarked upon the differences: "In a village in Missouri, by the side of a house with broken windows, dirty in its outward appearance, around the door of which a parcel of ragged children are quarreling and fighting, you may see another, freshly painted, surrounded by a simle, but neat and nicely whitewashed fence, with a dozen of carefully trimmed trees about it, and through the windows in a small room shining with cleanliness you may espy some nicely combed little boys and some young girls dressed in almost the last Paris fashion. Both houses belong to farmers, but one of them is from North Carolina and the other from New England."

This vignette is simply an illustration of scattered quantitative data you see in some of these works. In short New Englanders were wealthier, more well educated and more fertile than immigrants to the West from the South. Because of easier movement up the Mississippi-Ohio valley the original settlers in much of the Midwest were of Southern origin; but with the opening of the Erie canal and the rise of the Great Lakes economy fertile and industrious Yankees added much of the northern Midwest to Greater New England. Much of American history can easily be modeled as a clash of civilizations.

Labels: culture, History

When I was a clueless sophomore and junior in college, 2000 - 2001, the cool thing that was sweeping through campuses was anti-globalization. It was more than just that, but this was the core. (There was also the Nader campaign, the Florida vote fiasco, Enron, and 9/11.) At the time I was incredibly far left (left anarchist) but drifted away from the movement around the spring of 2003, the last big protest being against the invasion of Iraq. I didn't have anything to do with it after that, and my views have moved to the center-right.

As this list of anti-globalization protests confirms, I wasn't unusual. The really large protests took place in 2000 and especially 2001, they were on the decline by 2003, and from 2004 through 2006, they were non-existent within the First World (aside from ritualistic May Day protests). There's a slight uptick in 2007, and now The Telegraph reports that London is preparing for the biggest protest in a decade. The umbrella group organizing the protest is G20 Meltdown.

Maybe it's not surprising, but it looks like these things flare up during recessions and abate during booms. The first round took place during the dot-com crash, and by 2004, college students and 20-somethings were too busy applying their dopey open minds to the topics of metrosexual facial moisturizers, which regional real estate bubble they would exuberantly contribute to, and the crunk and post-punk revival music that was out -- way cooler than that Blink182 bullshit that was popular from about 1997 to 2002. But now that young people sense bad things ahead, we may be in for another deluge of protesting professors, fliers for International Socialist Organization meetings, and low-status young males lobbing rocks to impress the one cute anarchist chick at the protest.

Labels: Economics, History, politics

Via Dienekes, The Earliest Horse Harnessing and Milking:

Horse domestication revolutionized transport, communications, and warfare in prehistory, yet the identification of early domestication processes has been problematic. Here, we present three independent lines of evidence demonstrating domestication in the Eneolithic Botai Culture of Kazakhstan, dating to about 3500 B.C.E. Metrical analysis of horse metacarpals shows that Botai horses resemble Bronze Age domestic horses rather than Paleolithic wild horses from the same region. Pathological characteristics indicate that some Botai horses were bridled, perhaps ridden. Organic residue analysis, using 13C and D values of fatty acids, reveals processing of mare's milk and carcass products in ceramics, indicating a developed domestic economy encompassing secondary products.

Related: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World and lactase persistence.

Labels: Genetics, History

Arnold Kling comments about my assertion that until recently cities were genetic black holes:

Today,. we think of cities as places where people come to thrive. Wealth is higher in cities than in small towns and rural areas. Richard Florida tells us that the creative class is to be found in cities.

...

I wonder: who came to cities? Was it people without land? Were cities like an awful lottery that people would play when they had no other choice? A bunch of landless people gathered together to prey on one another, with the winners thriving (moving to the country as soon as they could afford it) and the losers enduring a Hobbesian existence, where life was nasty, brutish and short?

My comment was a contention in relation to reproductive fitness; not quality of life or satisfaction (H/T to Greg Cochran for the observation). In the comments I cite a paper which suggests that city and rural divide in mortality favored the rural until around 1900 in the United States. The divide does not exist in large part due to proactive public health measures. Needless to say, though there were variations (e.g., compare 18th century London to Tokyo/Edo), in the pre-modern context public health was much more primitive.

So why move to the city? I think it is likely correct that city air makes one free. We can see this today as social change is occurring in Developing World megalopolises. In the ancient cities there were clear benefits for the poor, Rome and Constantinople had doles for the urban proletariat (though these doles were of course simply viable due to rents derived from their Empire). After the wars of the middle to late republic many impoverished peasants migrated to Rome to escape famine (the famine was exacerbated by the fact that many men were called up as soldiers to serve in foreign wars, and so their labor was missing). On the other hand, despite the dole there was often no regular employment. From the data I have seen modern urban-life worldwide tends to correlate with a lower fertility; and I see no reason this would not be so in the pre-modern world (I assume that the marginal return on "extra hands" provided by more children would likely be lower for a sporadically employed urban laborer than a farmer). But the main difference I suspect is disease load over time. Plagues regularly killed on the order of 50% of the population of ancient cities. After the population declines the cities would bounce back, but not through natural increase, but further waves of rural migrants. Rome's population declined to tens of thousands in the medieval period, from on an order of 1 million in antiquity. I am skeptical of the idea that most modern Romans are descended from a demographic expansion of the medieval deme as opposed to migrants from the hinterland.

All the population genetic negatives are not to deny that civilization and the city are to a large extent identical (Sumer). Who says that cultural creativity or innovation has to track Darwinian fitness? Look at our own modern societies, the least successful by accepted measures are often the most "fit" in Darwinian terms.

Addendum: A shorthand way of thinking what I'm asserting, imagine two brothers who are farmers. One moves to the city to get on the bread dole, while the other attempts to make do on the margins. The former might have a higher chance of surviving, but because of the greater power of disease in the urban context the city brother is likely to have far fewer descendants than the country brother as periodically all of his descendants come under threat of dying in a plague (again, I also believe that fertility will be lower for urban descendants).

Labels: History

Some of you may know that California is in a budget crisis. A significant portion of the proposed stimulus package is going to go to the states which are in a financial crunch because of tax shortfalls. But did you know that the in the 19th century several American state went into default to European bankers? Below the fold for the list....

Arkansas (never paid in full)
Indiana (eventually paid)
Illinois (eventually paid)
Michigan (never paid in full)
Louisiana (never paid in full)
Mississipi (repudiated debt, never paid)
Florida (repudiated debt, never paid)
Maryland (eventually paid)
Pennsylvania (eventually paid)

(cite)

One of the justifiers of the repudiation of the debt in Mississipi was Jefferson Davis. This caused some issues when the Confederacy went looking for financing from those Europeans who Davis had argued a decade before should be stiffed.

Labels: History

The McCain Belt:

So, why did McCain do best, relative to George W. Bush in 2004, in states like #1. Tennessee, #3. Arkansas, #5 Oklahoma, #7 West Virginia, #9 Kentucky, and #10 Alabama?

Here's a map by counties, with counties where McCain improved relative to GWB in 2004 the most shown in reddest red.

Before reading onward, can you figure out why this pattern exists?

Until recently I'll be honest and admit that I had very little interest in American history beyond what I learned in high school (in contrast to my interest in the Classical period or China, etc.). It seemed rather boring because we live in America, the history is all around us, and I could watch documentaries, etc. At least that was my logic, and it's not totally faulty. The problem is that our knowledge of American history which we obtain through direct experience as Americans is implicit, and we tend to lack clarity which would allow us to discern predictable dynamics. My ignorance combined with a lack of formal paradigm meant I simply wouldn't have noted the reemergence of familiar dynamics several times within the past few years.

David Hackett Fisher's Four Folkways aren't perfect, there's a lot you can quarrel with. But it adds a lot of value as a framework which you can use to understand the flows and patterns of American history; dynamics which we ourselves are seeing as a snapshot currently. Since most pundits are ignorant of course they'll miss the big picture. I don't know enough myself to really hazard much which would add value to anyone's understanding aside from what they might get from reading Albion's Seed or The Age of Lincoln. But...though I'm not being original, I think it is important to emphasize that much of the arc of American political history can be conceived of as a set of cyclical dynamics which are the product of alliances across the Four Folkways (the demographic weights of the Four Folkways in American society at a given time are obviously crucial). As an example, during the 1930s and in the early 19th century New England stood alone against the dominant American political configuration, steadfastly adhering to a minority party. In contrast, the 1850s and the current period seem to be witnessing a more equitable division as the two northern and southern folkways align with each other in a "50:50" nation.

I also think that it is important to emphasize that much of popular history which focuses on individuals and wars might not help you generate a good model of the past which has any utility for comprehending the present. The framework above would be implicit within a narrative, humans are embedded in a sociocultural matrix, but you might fail to discern any systematic pattern if you're focusing on the personalities. This is I think a problem with a lot of "pop history" in documentary form; "boring" cultural and economic parameters take a back seat (or are mentioned in passing) to interesting, but structurally trivial, personal epiphenoma (e.g., Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the 4th of July).

Note: An important issue to emphasize about the Four Folkways is that they may evolve so that the way in which they relate to each other changes over time. In 1800 New England was arguably the most socially conservative and evangelical Protestant part of the United States, while the lowland South was at the other end of the spectrum. It was no surprise at the time that the architects of American church-state separation were low country Virginia planters, while explicit state support and preference for a particular church lasted longest in New England. Obviously things have changed, but the point is that New England and the lowland South evolved as roughly discrete units over time due to local dynamics as well as parameters which effected the United States broadly. Even though the distribution of "New England" and the "South" in parameter space has changed as a function of time, they are still discernable discrete distributions.

Labels: culture, History

From Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered:

Measurements taken on skeletal remains in cemeteries in southwestern Germany indicate that the average height for men was about five feet eight inches, for women about five feet four inches, statures well above those of late medieval and early modern times. Measurements taken on skeletons in other regions are comparable. In Denmark, for example, the average height for men was about five feet nine inches-just above those for southwestern Germany-and for women about five feet four inches. These average heights were not achieved again until the twentieth century. Compared with earlier and later populations in the same regions, these average measurements show that most people had adequate nutrition during most of their lives and their living conditions were generally good

This is in line with the charts I posted below. With the introduction of the three-field system, mouldboard plow and horse collar northwest Europe, in particular the regions of northern France, the Low Countries and the Rhineland, surpassed the Mediterranean as the population center of the continent (at least its western half). During the expansionary phase, i.e., 500-800, the span covered by Barbarians to Angels, the Malthusian pressures would have been relatively modest. The screws would have been tightened up to the medieval demographic peak before 1300.

In any case, remember my focus on morbidity vs. mortality? It might be apropos in this case. The uncertainty and political instabilities due to the collapse of the Pax Romana could plausibly have increased mortality as peasants were exposed to the erratic depredations of barbarian warrior bands. But as depopulation occurred, in part because of withdrawal from the frontiers in places like Gaul (France) an western Germany of most farmers, those who opted to remain and take on the risks would be relieved of some Malthusian pressures. I think the chart of European heights does point to this as well, you can discern a slight upward trend after the Black Death due to a radical population reduction. I've reedited one of the charts for clarity:



As for Barbarians to Angels, the author doesn't really make me reconsider. I've talked about my skepticism of the idea of revisionism in regards to the decline of Rome. The author argues that technological advances occurred during the Dark Ages, and that many cities remained active nodes in trade networks. But the author's treatment is highly qualitative where he had concrete examples of how complex society persisted after the collapse of the Pax Romana, and he repeatedly scolds the readers to not judge Dark Age societies by modern standards which would tend to align more with the priorities of Roman civilization (e.g., reading, writing, arithmetic, public architecture, basically what we might term civilization). If the author wants to strip the term "civilization" of any normative biases brought to bear due to the prejudice of moderns, the argument is won, amassing a large collection of ornate weapons with which one might be buried is just as Cultured as writing letters to your friends laced with literary references. A good cup of mead is at the same level as a Falernian.

Labels: anthropology, height, History

A few days ago I ran across Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance at a used book store. As suggested by the title the author focuses a great deal on mercantile happenings during this period. I read this book 10 years ago on a train ride. As I picked it up again I remembered that much of the narrative centered on the Fuggers, a prominent banking family which prefigured the role that the Rothchilds would play more recently in international affairs. Flipping through the chapters I refamiliarized myself with the contents, much of it was vaguely familiar to me. On the one hand if you had asked me to repeat anything from Worldly Goods I would have offered a general point about the importance of the Fugger financial network in the geopolitics of Central Europe during the 16th century. And yet I think there are many other facts and structures of facts which I retain implicitly in my mind. A great deal of cognition emerges out of these thickets of implicit data; networks which are essential in giving one a mental map of the world. Though I might not be able to explicitly recall in detail facts and arguments from a specific book when asked to do such a thing, in the course of a conversation or thought which might relate to the topicality of a given work I often experience data bubbling up from what might be termed the "subconscious."

I recount this because a few years ago a friend expressed an interest in the Middle Ages. I told him that Christopher Tyerman's God's War: A New History of the Crusdades might be worth his time. Later I asked if my friend had looked into Tyerman's book, and he told me had, but it was just too long (~1000 pages) and there was extraneous material he didn't find interesting. All fair enough, but then he proceeded to explain that felt he had little recall of anything he read and that he didn't know if there was any point. At that time something struck me as very strange about this claim. Now I feel I can elucidate more fully what I think my friend was missing: very few people have explicit on the spot recall of very much of a given work. So the contention that one does not retain much is plausible when viewed purely reflectively. But, the sum totality of data ingested does leave a mark on the implicit mind, sketching out structures and analytic sieves which can constrain and guide how one processes information and generates inferences.* You may not remember what happened to you on Janary 20th of 1999, but you have a sense of the general arc of that year in your life.

* More pointedly, many people assert rather dumb things because they are too ignorant to know any better. In fact, all people do. Some ignorant people are smart enough to assert very little, and some are not so smart.

Labels: History

Slate has some very interesting excerpts from The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters posted today. The reality that a great deal of the illness in today's world is caused by fecal contamination is well known. The proximate cause of many minor illnesses is mild food poisoning, but food poisoning itself is ultimately generally caused by poor hygiene.  It seems straightforward to imagine that poor sanitation can be a significant drain on economic productivity. But on this weblog we've also addressed the possibility of pathogens playing a role in changing personalities and temperaments. In Farewell to Alms Greg Clark made the case that the greater mortality due to poor hygiene shifted the death schedule and so relieved Malthusian pressure. In contrast, East Asia was notable for having a rather efficient system of human waste disposal and reuse, and the concomitant lower death rate resulted in more Malthusian pressures and lower per capita wealth. One of the positive developments in the historical disciplines has been the a shift away from narrative annals describing political and social happenings on the elite level, to a more thorough quantitative analysis of the state of mass culture and material condition. Both perspectives are important; in War and Peace and War Peter Turchin reports military historical research which suggests that the presence of Napoleon at a battle was the equivalent of the French having 30% more troops! This suggests that to some extent Great Men do matter, but one must remember that the emergence of parvenu such as Napoleon was conditioned upon the Malthusian economic and social stresses of late 18th century France.

But the Slate piece also puts the spotlight on the particular nature of human psychology and its relation to feces:

Reuse works better when it involves camouflage. This technique is used, appropriately for a militarized country, in Israel. During a presentation at a London wastewater conference, a beautiful woman from Israel's Mekorot wastewater treatment utility, who stood out in a room full of gray suits, explained that they fed the effluent into an aquifer, withdrew it, then used it as potable water. "It is psychologically very important," she told the rapt audience, "for people to know that the water is coming from the aquifer." This is a clever way of getting around fecal aversion. Not having wastewater-and not wasting water-would be better still.

I'm sure this is not surprising to most readers, especially if you have read something like Paul Bloom's Descartes' Baby. One can posit pretty straightforward adaptive reasons for why humans tend to have an aversion to feces and rot; but whatever the ultimate root of these instincts they're pretty universal. Of course, like eating spicy peppers humans seem able to get around these hardwired instincts, or leverage them in some way so as to invert their effect. For example, the application of feces upon wounds had a long history in pre-modern medicine, all the way back to the Egyptians. The detailed inferences can sometimes be surprising, but the point is that though most humans reflectively accept the atomic and molecular understanding of the world, reflexively they are Aristotelians. Intuitions can be overcome or unlearned to a great extent, but if one wishes to reform the human outlook one needs to take into account its a priori biases. The human mind is not amorphous clay which one can mold into any shape in an infinite manner of ways, rather, it is a collection of blocks and units which likely have innumerable combinatorial possibilities, but certainly a finite number subject to various constraints and conditions.

The cultural variation in attitudes which is overlain on human universals illustrates the reality that despite innate tendencies human minds are elastic. Consider:

Sanitation professionals sometimes divide the world into fecal-phobic and fecal-philiac cultures. India is the former (though only when the dung is not from cows); China is definitely and blithely the latter. Nor is the place of excrement confined to the fields. It has featured prominently in Chinese public life and literature for at least a thousand years.

The recycling of "night soil" mentioned in the Slate piece was also highly developed in Tokugawa Japan. Not only did the practice increase crop yields so that a large population was feasible with pre-modern agricultural techniques, but it had a byproduct effect of fostering public hygiene and reducing the disease burden (noted above). As far as the Chinese go, the attitude toward utilization of human waste, as well as other cultural traits such as minimal food taboos, illustrate the deep strain of pragmatic rationalism which many early or proto-Enlightenment philosophers so admired. As for the South Asia tendency to extend and elaborate on human intuitions and tendencies as opposed to channeling toward material ends, if you have nothing good to say, say nothing at all....

Labels: Evolutionary Psychology, History, Psychology

If Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World grated on you because of the transparent lack of scholarly objectivity, I recommend Timothy May's The Mongol Art of War. May usually attempts to present "both sides" in any given scholarly debate, but he also tells you which side is the majority and which the minority. And there's good quantitative data, like the fact that Mongol light cavalry had a range of up to 300 meters in terms of their bows. The Mongol Art of War makes it pretty obvious that courage is sometimes overrated as an ingredient of conquest, the Mongols rarely engaged in pitched battles because they weren't exceptional hand-to-hand fighters. Rather, when battling an enemy on open field they simply barraged their opponents with missile fire until attrition wore them down. Their reputedly high accuracy from long distances meant that they could stay out of danger while simultaneously inflicting casualties on the opposition. Not to be trite but it sounds like a precursor to "shock & awe" via air power medieval style.

It seems understandable that chivalry might emerge in societies where martial elites have incentives to formalize & codify and so minimize the risks inherent in the art of war, which is after all their primary profession. In contrast, the Mongol war machine which emerged in the early 13th century was notable for its relatively exceptional social egalitarianism. The Mongol army did not consist of an elite professional war-band, but rather was drawn from vast swaths of the adult male tribal population of Mongolia (on the order of perhaps 1/2 of the adult males served in the mobile armies during the initial years). Like the Roman legions before 100 BCE this was a nation of soldiers on the march, not the soldiers of a nation. Genghis Khan's light cavalry simply leveraged the typical skills of a nomad on a horse with bow in hand. The rapid expansion from the Yellow to the Black seas was due less to the calculated glory seeking of status seeking aristocrats than the random-walk rapaciousness of nomads whose lives had been characterized by existence on the margins of subsistence supplemented by raiding of surplus producing sedentary farmers. To some extent the emergence of the Mongol Empire was a series of raids writ-large.

Addendum: One thing I found interesting was the suggestion that one of the major reasons that Mongol expansion into the Middle East ran out of steam was lack of pasture for their horses. Each Mongol warrior might have had 5-15 horses. In South China the Mongols under Kublai Khan had to reinvent themselves because light cavalry did not offer any comparative advantage in the local ecology. And later Mongol attempts to expand into Southeast and Maritime Asia generally failed more often than not. In many parts of Eurasia the Mongols were defeated, but like the Romans before them they kept coming and eventually overcame resistance. This makes me wonder about true historical significance of the Mamluk defeat of the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut, as in many accounts this is a great historical turning point. The implication is that if the Mongols had not been defeated in this battle they would have gone on to conquer all of North Africa. But as I alluded to above in Russia there were defeats but the Mongols bounced back. In contrast they were defeated several times by the Mamluks after Ain Jalut. This to me points to ecological constraints on the comparative advantage of the Mongol-way-of-war. Of course it is also quite plausible that empires have natural limits to their size contingent upon the scalability of communication lines as well as the diminishing returns on additional increments of territory.

Labels: History

Many readers of this weblog are familiar with Robert Putnam's research showing that communitarianism may be inversely correlated with diversity. In the American context we're likely to view this through the prism of race and ethnicity. But Peter Turchin in his work tends to focus on religion and other ideologies as the group identities around which humans coalesce. Humans obviously have a need for conformity and solidarity; I recall as a child a Steelers fan getting into a fight with a Browns fan. So it should not be hard to observe the problems which ideological diversity produce even in an ethnically and racially homogeneous nation such as South Korea.

Last week there were mass demonstrations of Buddhists in South Korea against the religious parochialism of the current president, a Presbyterian elder. The president is already unpopular for other reasons, so I don't personally believe that this unrest is a necessary outcome of religious tension. Rather, as documented in books such as The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, a social context where individuals feel under stress and insecure will often produce intergroup conflict. In an age of plenty there is elbow room between factions because of the growing pie, but when we smell the Malthusian trap in the air group level affinities come to the fore as you don't want to become isolated as an individual without communal capital which you can leverage.

South Korea is I suspect a case where these dynamics might become more important in the coming years because of its religious diversity. Additionally, religious tension is not a new feature of the culture. It isn't too hard to find instances of fundamentalist Christians attacking Buddhism. This is similar to cases in Brazil where evangelicals have destroyed statues of the Virgin Mary. There several recent incidents associated with the current head of state which precipitated the present crisis, but note this:

But tension has been building up since December, when newly elected president Lee began filling his first cabinet with Christians. At least a half of his new ministers were people professing to be Christians, with the prime minister, Han Seung Soo, said to be a Roman Catholic. Not a single cabinet minister professed to be Buddhist.

or

Of the 15 members of Lee's Cabinet, 12 are Christian and one is Buddhist while the affiliation of two others was not immediately available.

So obviously there's some disagreement, but one can assume here that though Christians are 1/3 of the population they are the substantial majority of the cabinet. Is this prejudice? Discrimination? Do Buddhists have grounds to be angry? As I have noted before in South Korea Christianity has a strong correlation with higher socioeconomic status. If one assumes that cabinet level positions sample from the social and educational elites, then they will naturally tend to preponderantly be Christians! Of course since the president is a zealous Christian one can always be suspicious of his motive and method, so as a precautionary principle one could argue that there should have been an affirmative action to reach out to Buddhists so that the cabinet "looked like the nation."

In the United States we're so hung up on racial and ethnic factions that we often don't notice that the disparate representations of different religious groups in government. Check the religious affiliations of Congress and Governors. Thank God we live well below the Malthusian limit!

Labels: culture, History, Religion

Variation is interesting. Why are there species, for example? Why do identical twins vary in life outcomes at all? How, and why, do the two antipodal maritime temperate regions of Eurasia, China and Europe, differ? The answers one comes up with vary by discipline and scope. In Farewell to Alms the economic historian Gregory Clark explains the genetic outcome of differences in lactase persistence (LP) as a function of variation in wealth; Europeans were wealthier so they could invest in the expensive production of milk and meat. I suspect most natural scientists would look to environmental constraints as the largest effect variables; LP arises in environments where cattle culture is more productive on a per area unit basis than grain culture. And then there is of course the fact that human lifestyles do not exist in a social and historical vacuum. There is evidence that wide swaths of the north China plain were abandoned by farmers during periods of political disorder due to their vulnerability to the depredations of nomadic groups (Genghis Khan's plan to depopulate the Yellow River plain and turn it into pasture was not as bizarre as one might think). When political stability returned there would be a shift in the boundary between nomad and farmer. If Peter Turchin is right then the variables effecting these changes are endogenous to a model of historical dynamics which are characterized by cycles (Turchin's case study of the expansion of Slavs and farming along the Ukrainian Cossack frontier is a classical case where politics rather than ecology served as the limiting reagent).

But for a moment I want to zoom the scale. In The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China, there is a chapter, The Riddle of Longevity: Why Zunhua?:

People lived longer in the late-imperial department Zunhua in the mountains along the old Ming northern frontier...The expectation of life at birth for a woman was in the high forties, twice as long as in Jiaxing....

...The latest gazetteer from imperial times...has no record of epidemics of infectious disease....This was in marked contrast with the coastal province in which Jiaxing was located, namely Zhejiang. In Zheijang people were gripped by a fear of epidemics....

Jiaxing is highlighted because another chapter focuses on the taming of this region and its transition from being a marginal territory on the periphery of Chinese civilization to a rationally managed agricultural heartland. A case in point supporting the thesis of hydraulic despotism. The author notes a few points to contrast Zunhua and Jiaxing:

1) Climate. Zunhua was much colder in winter, with temperatures generally falling below zero. This surely dampened the local pathogen load.

2) Ecological differences. Zunhua is relatively mountainous, while Jiaxing is a coastal wetland region tamed into an expanse of intensive rice production. Irrigation is common in Jiaxing, but there were ecological constraints on its utilization in Zunhua (the soil is very sandy and so there are major issues with drainage which reduced the efficiency of canals).

3) Differences in diet. Zunhua's populace had a relatively diverse diet, where dry land agriculture was balanced with animal husbandry and hunting and gathering. In contrast, Jiaxing was a classic climax rice monoculture where almost all calories were from grain.

4) There were differences in ethnicity. The local historical identity of non-Han peoples was far stronger in Zunhua than in Jiaxing. The process of Sinicization had proceeded to completion in Jiaxing, which now lay along the axis of the economic heartland of China. In contrast, Zunhua was for nearly 3,000 years on the northeast boundary of Han habitation. It was known to the ancient Chinese, and Han populations were generally extant within its territory, but it was often dominated culturally by non-Han groups who would play a large role without Chinese history, culminating in the Manchus.

The author also notes that there was a large difference in the extent of female labor in Jiaxing and Zunhua. It was a prominent feature of the life of peasants in Jiaxing, but not so of Zunhua. Additionally, one bureaucrat observed that unlike many other parts of China it was not typical for very poor women in Zunhua to supplement their income with de facto prostitution (random "walks" in the fields). The inhabitants of Zunhua were consumers of a fair amount of meat, but interesting they were also milk drinkers, atypical for China.

The Census data from 1820 to 1910 suggests that Zunhua was relatively underpopulated (the author's focus here is on observations hinged around the late Imperial Manchu dynasty). This probably explains the relative wealth of a the typical peasant in Zunhua vis-a-vis one in Jiaxing (as well as lack of epidemics). But why was Zunhua so underpopulated in the first place? Are the data from the late Imperial period just a transient which captures a snapshot before the region is caught in a Malthusian Trap? To some extent I suspect so, but, I wanted to note specifically that Zunhua was on the radar of Chinese annalists nearly 3,000 years ago. Unlike vast regions of far southern inland China it was not new to Sinicization, rather, Sinicization simply never completed itself over the ensuing centuries. In fact, the region was for long periods under barbarian rule and outside of China proper.

First, I want to repeat one of the major obvious insights of The Retreat of the Elephants, the process of Sinicization was inevitable, a matter of time, across much of what is today China. The millet and rice based agricultural systems associated with Han Chinese swept away competing lifestyles before them like a deterministic physical system. A proactive program of cutting down forests and clearing land, as well as channeling and controlling the flow of running water across the landscape, was part and parcel of the expansion of the Chinese state and Han identity. Some of the increase in the numbers of the latter is surely a matter of demographics, as Chinese settlers push into cleared land. On the other hand, there is extensive documentary evidence that those non-Chinese tribes which adhered to lifestyles which were at variance with that of the Han on many occasions adopted the intensive farming lifestyle when their territories were impinged upon. Eventually they saw themselves as Han. In the Christian and Islamic world it was common to assert that war against those outside of the bounds of their religious civilization was by nature just because they were infidels, and that enslavement of unbelievers was acceptable. Some of the material in this book highlights a similar ideology on the part of the the Han Chinese through their perception that those who were not Han were fundamentally not human or subhuman. But, just as with Christianity or Islam, tribes and peoples could become Han. This process was one less of ideology, though certainly elites adopted Confucian ethics and the Chinese classics, as opposed to one characterized by a way of life in terms of the optimal mode of resource extraction and utilization. To be Han the commoners farmed like the Han, and the rulers ruled like the Han.

The Han way of life was eminently successful in terms of extracting more productivity per unit are of land, as evidenced by the fact that China is now well over 90% Han, and, its historically high population density. It was not a rigid orthodoxy, the original millet based farming system which arose around the Yellow River plain gave way to the dominance of rice agriculture, likely originally a feature of the culture of non-Han populations of central and south China. The Han way of life was one of maximal resource extraction and mass mobilization of populations under the aegis of a central governing unit. The transition from Han to non-Han seems to have been partly due to demic and cultural diffusion as a bottom-up process, but, as documented in The Retreat of the Elephants, it was also a function of the greater robusticity of the war machines of Han states. Not only could they mobilize more men, but they could they could organize and coordinate their actions because of the central nature of their polities. Local peoples had an advantage in terms of their knowledge of regional conditions and could wage a persistent rearguard action over the centuries by disrupting the social and agriculture systems (e.g., canals, bridges, bureaucrats, etc.) which Han society depended upon, but over the long haul Sinicization marched on. The machine could be broken, but never utterly destroyed.

So why did Zunhua resist Sinicization so long? I suspect that the prevalence of animal husbandry indicates that the Han agricultural complex was simply not as well suited to this region. In areas too dry for agriculture irrigation is an option, but as noted above it was not an ideal one in Zunhua because of the characteristics of the terrain and soils. During the Former Han dynasty the emperor Wu engaged in a series of wars with the nomadic Xiongnu, but a serious problem with defeating these peoples was that a Chinese victory did not result in cultural assimilation. There were instances where the nomads could not win, but they could never truly lose. In areas too dry, cold and rugged for Han agricultural techniques nomadic life simply was more economically more efficient, or, more accurately the only option aside from hunting and gathering. The final Chinese "victory" over the Xiongnu occurred via co-option from their within by dividing their elite and brandishing the allure of civilized luxury goods. To some extent there was little difference in the material conditions of the Xiongnu elite, instead of engaging in raids to obtain wealth they were bribed or paid by the Chinese polity. In terms of efficiency this reduced the uncertainty on the part of the Chinese and so was economically a good decision as it allowed for a shift toward lower time preference.

Reading the chapter in question here, I got the feeling that the economic and social conditions in Zunhua mimicked the contrasts which one might draw between pre-modern Europe and China. Europeans had a more mixed diet than the Asian peasant, and their agricultural complex relied to a far greater extent on animal husbandry and cattle (or, differently stated, more inputs of capital than labor to increase marginal returns). The average European peasants was arguably wealthier than the average Chinese peasant. In Farewell to Alms Greg Clark points to better hygiene in East Asia leading to a different death schedule, so that the Chinese would be pushing against the Malthusian limit to a greater extent (fewer mouths dividing up a finite pie in Europe vs. China at any given time). On the other hand, economic historians such as Raymond Crotty have emphasized the peculiar ecology of Northern Europe, and the incentives that existed toward raising of cattle stock as opposed to cereal agriculture. From what I have read it seems clear that in places such as Scandinavia traditional cereal agriculture gave a relatively low in yield. After all, wheat is a crop of the Mediterranean. Oats were a better bet, but are relatively unpalatable to humans, so they were more effectively grown as fodder for cattle.

A quick look at a world map will show that Europe is far to the north of China. Because of the disparate impact of Westerlies the different sides of continents at the same latitude may experience climatic regimes which vary a great deal. Northern California and New Jersey are an example. Distance from oceans also matter, southern Nebraska has a more "continental" climate than either New Jersey or northern California despite similar latitudes. It seems to me that on reason China and Europe took such radically different paths in terms of agriculture styles, in particular northern Europe and China, were differences in their ecological parameters. Europe is a very high latitude temperate zone characterized by moderation in its climate and relative regularity in its precipitation. China is a relatively low latitude temperate zone because of its exposure to the winter air of central Asia, as well as being subject to the reversal monsoonal flow during the summer, which is the season of greatest precipitation. The region of Europe at the similar latitude as north China, the Mediterranean zone, is characterized by much milder temperatures in winter as well as an inverted precipitation regime from Asia, with a maximum during the cold season of least sunlight.

But in the case of Zunhua ecology is probably not the only constraint. Its local population in the ancient phase included many "friendly" Xiongnu, suggesting its proximity to the steppe heartland. The period which The Retreat of the Elephants surveys is one of relative peace when Zunhua was not on a political frontier, the Manchu dynasty had subjugated Mongolia, and pushed the north boundaries of the Chinese Empire past the Amur river. For much of Chinese history in contrast Zunhua was a borderland, often not under Chinese hegemony. It seems plausible that therefore Zunhua was often a "No Man's Land," and so not subject to economic exploitation because of the risks inherent. I suspect an analogy to arable regions of Ukraine which were long occupied by nomads may be made. Up until the expansion of the Czarist state during the 17th century farmers that lived in central and eastern Ukraine would be subject to brutal exploitation by nomadic peoples, a dynamic one can glean as far back as the Scythians. Only with the rise of the Gunpowder Empires were the nomads on the marchlands finally defeated and extinguished as a threatening wild card which dissuaded farmers from settling vast swaths of Inner Eurasia. To some extent this might be interpreted simply as a variant of Greg Clark's point about shifting the death schedule; during periods when Zunhua was on the borders only those who were willing to risk life and limb would settle there, and periodic wars would "clean out" the region demographically.

Ultimately though I am curious as to why agriculture developed the way it did in China, being so focused on human labor. In The Great Divergence it is pointed out that China was more densely populated than India, and that land was more plentiful in South Asia. In Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches it is argued that cattle reverence in India is a function of the fact that bulls are an essential draft animal (the author notes that a disproportionate number of feral cattle are cows). In When Histories Collide Raymond Crotty argues that cattle reverence in India is due to the fact that killing calves would be counterproductive in terms of milk production. I have already provided some general rationales for why animal husbandry was relatively rational in Europe. In China, the primary animal was the pig. In terms of domesticates it seems that the pig is nearly feral, generally subsisting on offal. The pig can not produce milk, nor can it serve as a work animal. Various regions of Eurasia developed "critical mass" as complex literate societies during the pre-modern era, but gross features of their modes of production still differed. Why? Some ideas.

Going off William H. McNeill's arguments in Plagues and Peoples, I suggest that South Asia had a higher pathogen load than East Asia, and so there was always downward pressure on the population so that it did not "push" against the Malthusian Trap to the same extent. This also freed up more land so that successful farmers might get a relatively larger marginal return from the utilization of cattle as draft animals.

In Europe the variables were not disease related, but structural differences in climatic regimes. Northern Europe was well watered, but extremely cool and moist. It was not suited to the arid adapted grains from the temperate zone because of the latter parameter, but also not appropriate for rice agricultural because of the former (the Po river valley has rice now due to advanced irrigation techniques). Mediterranean Europe is subject to the peculiarities of its winter maxima precipitation regime. This allows for the cultivation of olives and other specialty crops, but, it also results in a situation where most of the rain falls during the season of least sunlight.

The ecological differences between Europe and China had an agricultural/economic implication: the Chinese could maximize caloric output per unit area of land through pure cereal cultivation. In contrast, the Europeans could not maximize calorie output through cereal cultivation but had to engage in "mixed" agriculture. The caloric total extractable out of the land per unit area was lower when summing the complements which were produced in European agriculture, but, the balance of nutritional intakes (protein, vitamins, etc.) was superior. This resulted in naturally greater physiological fitness for Europeans than Chinese as well as a lower final population density, and also natural evolutionary changes such as LP to deal with specific nutritional intakes.

Finally, I want to touch upon the general manner in which farming spread. It is quite clear that over the long term in China the Han way of life resulted in reduced lifetime physiological fitness. Nevertheless, it was above the threshold of fitness necessary for viability so that an individual could reproduce. Additionally during the transient when it was expanding into regions where land was in surplus it might actually have been a lifestyle that lead to relative affluence. The main problem is that this affluence was temporary as the population reached the local Malthusian limit. At this point the exhaustion of the local ecological base which might have supplemented the grain monoculture was beyond a point of no return and the society was "boxed in" to a lifestyle predicated on surviving through the next harvest. Additionally, judging by the fact that Han elites had surplus which they could use to bribe barbarian warlords the quantitative rise in the subjects from which to extract rents was sufficient to more than cancel out the qualitative decline in the character of the tax extracted. The Han way of life might have been misery for the peasantry, but there was a reasonable case that the Confucian bureaucratic fixation on a free peasant base as the ideal subject population was self-interested. Underfed farmers made quiescent subordinates. In contrast, nomads were notoriously factious, and their periodic organized eruptions were contingent upon coalescence around a particularly charismatic figure, or, more often the collapse of the Chinese political order and the opportunity for unparalleled plunder. Nevertheless, the fact that nomads were presences along the northern edge of Chinese civilization implies that there were ecological constraints on the spread of the Han lifestyle. Beyond the reach of dryland farming and irrigation there was no possibility of settlement. While nomads could always turn arable land into pasturage, the Han could not always turn pasturage into arable land.

Labels: China, Economics, History

Tectonic environments of ancient civilizations in the eastern hemisphere:

The map distribution of ancient civilizations shows a remarkable correspondence with tectonic boundaries related to the southern margin of the Eurasian plate. Quantification of this observation shows that the association is indeed significant, and both historical records and archaeoseismological work show that these civilizations commonly suffered earthquake damage. Close association of ancient civilizations with tectonic activity seems to be a pattern of some kind. In the hope that dividing the civilizations into subsets might clarify the meaning of this relation, primary and derivative civilizations were compared. Derivative civilizations prove to be far more closely related to the tectonic boundaries. Similarly, the civilizations that endured the longest (and that have been described as most static) are systematically the farthest from plate boundaries. It is still unclear how the relation actually worked in ancient cultures, i.e., what aspects of tectonism promoted complexity. Linkages to water and other resources, trade (broadly construed), and societal response seem likely. Volcanism appears not to be involved.

ScienceNow, Did Rumbling Give Rise to Rome? has a nice map. Exogenous shocks playing a critical role in cultural creativity? Remember that earthquakes were often interpreted as negative divine omens and elicited a drive toward soul searching....

Labels: civilization, History

Debin Ma of the London School of Economics has spent time in the archives and has come to conclusions quite different from Pomeranz's.

Ma's recent papers (especially this one and this one) make archive-driven comparisons of European and East Asian living standards around the start of the industrial revolution. Both papers have coauthors, but I focus on Ma because he speaks and reads both Japanese and Chinese, something lamentably rare among economic historians at English-speaking universities.

One quote from the abstract of the first-linked paper:

Matching caloric and protein contents in our Japanese consumption baskets with those in European baskets, we compare Japanese and European urban real wages. Real wage rates in Kyoto and later Tokyo are about a third London wages but comparable to wages in major Southern and Central European cities for the 1700-1900 [period].

From the abstract of the second-linked paper:

In the eighteenth century, the real income of building workers in Asia was similar to that of workers in the backward parts of Europe and far behind that of workers in the leading economies in northwestern Europe. Industrialization led to rising real wages in Europe and Japan. Real wages declined in China in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries....

A lot of Ma's work is Japan v. China, not Asia v. Europe, so both lines of his agenda are likely of interest to GNXP readers. Given the overfishing in the pool of English-language economic history documents, Ma should be able to just throw his net overboard and pull in the big hauls for at least another decade.

Labels: Economics, History

Most of you have heard about the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation (which, more accurately should probably be termed the Catholic Reformation). But after posting earlier on the parameters which affect the shape and constraints of religious change, I thought it was important to mention something: in the second half the 16th century Catholicism was very close to becoming purely a Mediterranean sect of Christianity. In other words, Catholicism seemed on the verge of disappearing from Germany to the same extent that it did from England by and large. In East Central Europe, the precursors to the modern states of the Czech and Slovak Republics, Poland and Hungary, it was also being marginalized by Lutheranism, the Reformed Churches as well as even more extreme groups such as Unitarians. France had a large Huguenot minority which was represented disproportionately among the gentry and nobility. If you want to read about the extent of the rollback in the face of Protestantism check out The Thirty Years' War, The Reformation and Divided by Faith. All of them explore the massive penetration and domination of Protestantism among the Polish and Austrian nobility and the near collapse of Catholic parishes in regions which we today view as staunchly Roman Catholic.

But a Catholic world dominated by the peninsular Mediterranean never became. Today we have a German Pope, and the previous Pontif was Polish. Vast swaths of southern and western Germany remain Catholic, while the Protestant minority in France was expelled in the later 17th century (aside from mountainous redoubts such as Cevannes). What happened? The short answer is that the Hapsburgs happened. The Church operated in concert with the Holy Roman Emperor and other monarchs to reinvigorate the institutional framework of Roman Catholicism. The Jesuits were famously instrumental in this process of reform. But this was not a pure program of persuasion; Protestants who were not noble were often given the choice of emigration or conversion to the Catholic faith. Whole districts in Austria where Catholic parishes were no longer a feature of the landscape were re-Catholicized in a few years simply through imperial fiat. The mostly Protestant nobility could not be forced to convert, but they were blocked from patronage and access to the offices which brought glory upon their houses and maintained their fortunes. Additionally, though their private worship was given some latitude on their estates initially a step-by-step process of removal of these privileges also occurred over several generations. The result was that noble lineages who remained in the re-Catholicized regions of the Hapsburg Empire converted to the established religion, while those who would not give up their Protestant faith emigrated to regions where they could practice freely.

There are two domains of the former Hapsburg Empire which retain a large Protestant population; Hungary and Transylvania. And they illustrate the power of imperial fiat in driving religious change, because for much of the early modern period Transylvania was under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. Hungary was divided by a western Hapsburg domain and an eastern Ottoman portion. Not surprisingly, it is in the east that Protestant populations are most numerous because it is in the east that the re-Catholicization program was operative for the shortest period since these regions were under Turkish rule for most of the 17th century. The moral of the story here is that the diplomatic history of Europe between 1600 and 1800 can very accurately predict the religious configuration that we see today. Mass social movements simply could not succeed without the support of the elite, and the potentate had wide powers with which he or she could reshape that elite.

Labels: History, Religion

Peter Turchin's Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall showed up a little sooner than I'd thought it would, and it was an even quicker read than War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires (see review). There isn't really anything new verbal in the more technical treatment, but the book is about half the length because so much of the text was condensed into simple differential equations and figures which displayed the results of simulations. The figure to the left was one that I found particularly interesting, the differential equations which this is based on are:

dA/dt = c₀AS(1 - A/h) - a

dS/dt = r₀(1 - A/[2b])S(1 - S)

Where A = area, c = state's resources translated into geopolitical power, r is the growth rate, h is the spatial scale of power project, a is the geopolitical pressure from the hinterland and S is average polity-wide level of collective solidarity. You can find the elucidation of the details of the simulation in the appendix of Historical Dynamics.

Turchin was obviously pleased with how similar the dynamics of area of polity vs. time were in the simulation to what the empirical data showed. Of course, because of the sensitivity to initial parameters there isn't going to be a real prediction of the trajectory of state rise and fall, as opposed to inferences about the likely patterns. For example, in the comments to the previous post Italy was focused in on as a weakness in many of the generalizations, and Turchin actually spends a fair amount of time admitting that he has no real answer for why Italy turned out the way it did and admits that his model can explain a lot, but not all. He's happy with an r-squared of 0.75.

The above was just a taste, I'm not going to go much deeper since you can get the book yourself. Mathematically oriented works are pretty straightforward and you can reject it or accept it (or not understand it). In any case, I want to focus on another issue which is emphasized in Historical Dynamics, the autocatalytic model of religious conversion. The idea here is simple; the rate of conversion is proportional to the number of converts, and the result is a logistic curve over time. Turchin draws strongly upon Rodney Stark & co's work on the importance of transmission through social networks, and uses textual data to suggest that the growth of Christianity during the Roman Empire, and Islam in both Spain and Iran, seem to map well onto a logistic growth function.

In The Rise of Christianity Rodney Stark comes close to asserting that the conversion of Constantine, and the progression in the 4th century of Christianity becoming a state-identified cult, actually slowed the spread of the religion! Stark's thesis is obviously derived in large part from the American experience of cult, sect and denominational rise and fall. Historically minded readers might wonder as to the generalizable nature of a supply side rational choice model for the ancient world. In The Barbarian Conversion the difference between the Roman and early medieval periods in terms of the spread of Christianity is rather clear and distinct, what was plausibly a "bottom up" dynamic quickly turned into a "trickle down" and fiat process (also see Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity).

A comparison to the Islamic case is perhaps a good analogy for what happened across much of Europe after the fall of Rome. When the elites in the German frontier, or Lithuania, or Russia, converted to Christianity, their nations were considered Christianized. That is, full members of Christendom. But the persistence of pagan practices among the populace was common, and even the newly Christian nobility often exhibited dual religious identities (e.g., public and international practice of Christianity combined with cryptic or local adherence to pagan seasonal rituals and sacrifices). I suspect that here you have a situation where autocatalytic models for the population might be appropriate to describing the dynamics of initially nominally Christian states. In Iran or Al-Andalus the elites were Muslim, and the population as a whole, who were ethnically different, lagged. From an "orthodox" Muslim perspective any state which is ruled by Muslims is by definition part of the domain of Islam (this is the rational for reconquering Spain and India by jihadists, as these lands remain Muslim in perpetuity). To some extent the Christian hierarchy seems to have taken a similar viewpoint, though there were attempts to stamp out open paganism among the peasantry, to a large extent de facto syncretism was tolerated so long as the monopoly of Christianity as the elite public religion was maintained and forms were adhered to during ritual occasions.

As I observed above, the autocatalytic model as elucidated by Rodney Stark comes close to asserting that spread of religions such as Christianity is inevitable. In One True God Stark makes this explicit. Turchin emphasizes the importance of exclusionary religions which also can assimilate outsiders in allowing for the coalescence of identity on metaethnic frontiers. In Darwin's Cathedral David Sloan Wilson promotes the idea that religious belief can serve functional ends in producing higher than individual left units of interest and action. Many cognitive psychologists have observed that universal religions often result in fictive kinship. Note here that the important point is not the propensity toward supernatural belief; that's modal human cognition. Rather, it is the specific theological and institutional character of a religious organization which allows them to successfully compete with other "firms," and if the autocatalytic dynamics are dominant these will result in the extinction of "weaker" religious organizations in the face of "stronger" ones over time via the choice of individual actors along the filaments of a social network.

A classic case study is the rise of Christianity and the late Roman Empire referred to above. It seems likely that around the year 300 about 10% of the Roman Empire's population was Christian. Rodney Stark would hold that the conversion of Constantine and the subsequent sponsorship of the new religion by the emperors was only illustrative of the general trend at best, and possibly even detrimental. On the face of it this seems likely a ridiculous contention. Could it be that paganism was actually strengthened by state sponsorship of Christianity? That Theodosius' forcible suppression of pagan cults around 395 was only the outcome of the relative weakness of Christianity because of its association with the Roman state? Could the fact that as the 4th century proceeded customary subsidies to pagan cults were shifted to the Christian Church have actually taken some of the thunder out of the triumph of Christianity?

Stark and company point to the anemic nature of state sponsored Christianity in Europe as compared to the free market of American religious firms. Their model is to some extent an economical one, and they hold that state enforced subsidies and monopolies do nothing but sap the vigor of any corporate entity, which the early Christian Church was to a great extent. This particular critique is not new, even if the language borrows a bit from modern economic thinking. Early Protestant radicals viewed the Roman Catholic Church as a corrupt corporation, and some of them even looked explicitly back to the "primitive" Church before Constantine as the model for how true religion should organize. The descendants of this sort of outlook are numerous in American Protestantism, though the most direct heirs are the Amish who reject the contention that the world as a whole can be saved. They are the most extreme of the Protestants who turned their backs on the concept of the Church Universal which sanctifies and saves the whole society.

But hypotheses need to be teased apart and tested. The state sponsorship of Christianity manifested in a "soft" form between 320 and 390, and in more explicit and exclusive form after 390. The subsequent identity of the Roman Empire and Christianity adds a rather large confound into the autocatalytic model. After all, though to a large extent unenforceable, the emperor Theodosius I issued edicts which banned private practice of pagan religion. There were also state approved destruction of pagan temples, as well as tacit elite approval of the vigilante violence on the part of radical priests. A good analogy for those of you who aren't versed in this era of history would be the way Christians are treated in the Middle East, they are not forced to convert through direct violence, but there is certainly a general lack of tolerance for religious pluralism and moderate levels of intimidation directed at Christian practice on a day to day basis. The ultimate result is of course emigration and conversion in the face of strong disincentives at practice of the Christian religion. This does not show that Islam is necessarily a better "firm," rather, state subsidy and dominant support have only expanded its operational religious monopoly. At the end of the day state support might result in such a weakened Islam that a new religion supersedes it, but that process might not come to fruition for centuries. Until then....

There are two cases I can think of which do not suffer from this direct confound of state sponsorship and subsidy. The first is Ireland, where Christianity came to dominance via diffusion across the nobility in a decentralized manner. While Ireland was being Christianized, the Roman frontier right across the Irish Sea was seeing the extinction of Romano-British Christianity aside from in enclaves in Wales. The eventual flourishing of Ireland as a center of Christian civilization in the early medieval period is well known, so I won't belabor the point. Though no doubt prominent Irish Christians favored their own religion on their own lands, it remains that this was a decentralized society so unitary fiat could not enforce Christianity from above. In the Irish case I think it is plausible that the strengths of Christianity as a Roman religion, with the attendant associations with Romanitas, was attractive for barbarian warlords who wished to integrate themselves into the international luxury goods trade, or encourage the spread of literacy so as to rationalize their economic arrangements. These warlords likely did load the die for the Christian religion so that the consumer element might be relatively muted from a modern American perspective. But nevertheless, here you have a case where neither direct exogenous Christian force (e.g., the Germans threatening to invade Denmark unless the king converted to Christianity), nor a endogenous compulsion from the center, were operative.

The second case is more obscure, and perhaps less tenable because of the fewer facts known, but to me far more interesting. And that is Mesopotamia. Though there were some periods when what is today Iraq was part of the Roman Empire, by and large Mesopotamia was an extension of Persia before the rise of Islam. The summer capital of the Parthian and Sassanid dynasties, Ctesiphon, was a successor to Babylon and Seleucia, the predecessor of Baghdad. Nevertheless, Mesopotamia was not culturally Persian, it was Semitic. Prior to the Arabicization of what became Iraq the dominant dialects were affiliated with Aramaic, though there were Arab, Persian and Greek speaking minorities. But more importantly as Peter Brown notes in The Rise of Western Christendom, Mesopotamia was a mostly Christian region (with a large Jewish minority, especially in the south). There were no Zoroastrian Fire Temples in Ctesiphon.

In the Sassanid Empire the Zoroastrian religion was very much the ethnic cult of the Persians. Though some non-Persians might espouse this religion (there are attested cases of Zoroastrian Turks, and other converts), this was not a program sponsored by the ruling caste in a proactive manner. The attempts to force Armenian nobles to convert to Zoroastrianism was the exception that proved the rule; the Armenian elite were culturally very similar to the Persian nobles with whom they fought in the armies of the Sassanids, and the Armenian ruling dynasty was even originally a cadet branch of the Parthian Arascids. Proselytising of Armenians was simply part of the project to homogenize the martial elite of the Persian Empire under the same religious ideology. In contrast, the Aramaic speaking peasantry were left to their own devices.

The relatively laissez faire attitude of the Sassanids toward the religious identity of their subjects in Mesopatamia had the expected result in terms of pluralism. Modern Haran was usually within the orbit of the Roman Empire, but it was the only area to persist with organized paganism down into the Islamic area, and it seems likely that the Sabians of the early Muslim period emerged from this milieu (they were by the way extremely overrepresented among those involved in the preservation and transmission of classical learning). Why did they not convert to Christianity? One reason is that they were given religious tolerance because they were explicitly protected by the Shah of Persia, who could have easily intervened because of the geographic proximity of Haran to his domains. In contrast during the mid-6th century the last vestiges of institutional paganism in places like Egypt and Lebanon were blotted out under the order of the Emperor Justinian. Across the border in Sassanid Mesopotamia the majority of the population became Christians in all likelihood, but the extant presence (at least until recently) of heterodox cults such as Mandaeism and Yezidism in this region today are I believe echoes of the diversity which was the norm during late antiquity.

All that being said, it seems likely that when the Arabs conquered Iraq in the mid-600s most of the populace were Christian. It is important to note that they were Christians which the Roman Empire based in Constantinople would perceive as heretical. They were Monophysite or Nestorian in inclination, not only theologically deviant, but institutionally hostile to the Christian Church organized within the Roman Empire (those Christians in the Fertile Crescent who adhered to Roman Church were termed Melkite, which means Imperial, an allusion to their loyalties). The Nestorian Christians are often identified as the Persian Church because of that group's almost total exclusion from the Roman Empire and prominence among ethnic Persians.

I've put the spotlight on Mesopotamian Christianity as it was around 600 as the dominant religion to ask this question: whatever happened to Babylonian paganism? As I said above, Roman hegemony over Mesopotamia only occurred under the religiously tolerant pagan period. The Persian rulers were interested in the religion of their Mesopotamian subjects only insofar as it had political ramifications; obviously they would encourage the anti-Roman Nestorian faction, discourage pro-Roman Melkites, and deal with the Monophysites who spanned both the Persian and Roman Empire on a case by case basis as circumstances dictated (the Persians tended to suppress socially disruptive Mazdakites and Manichaeans because these groups drew from Zoroastrianism). The case of the Sabians and the Persian protection of this pagan-descended cult against the religious cleansing which was a characteristic of Justinian's reign in the mid-6th century also suggests that there was no hostility to polytheistic paganism as such. In fact, many scholars of Zoroastrianism contend that that religion is more monotheistic in its presentation today for two reasons. First, the period of Muslim rule of course incentivized Zoroastrians to present the most acceptable, i.e., monotheistic, face of their religion to the majority. In India the Parsis generally escaped this, but during the period of British rule again they were faced with a monotheistically oriented group to whom they had to bend a knee, so again, an emphasis on similarities with the Abrahamic religions.

In any case, in Mesopotamia outside forces can not account from the shift from institutional polytheism to monotheistic universalist religion. Polytheistic paganism seems to have naturally withered. A quick survey of the situation in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire seems to also show a pattern where paganism was simply not institutionally robust enough to hold off Christianization. A repeated pattern in is one where rulers who wish to cultivate ties to the civilized Roman Christian Commonwealth convert and encourage conversion among their populace, but so invite a backlash. This occurred in Scandinavia and the Slavic lands, as well among the Magyars in Hungary and the Bulgars in Bulgaria. But, the backlash generally is only a short-term correction which only delays the inevitable. In the west Slav lands bordering Germany and in Lithuania a very robust and persistent form of paganism arose which did seem to keep Christianity at bay for several centuries, as opposed to a few generations at most as was the case above. Looking more closely one can see very specific contingent conditions which gave rise to these dynamics. The Christian assault on the Wends (ancestors of the modern Sorbs) was very much also an ethnic German one. The Christian god was identified as a German god, and the German drive to the east was one of of total ethnic and religious assimilation at best and extermination at worst. It is then no surprise that west Slavic paganism was particularly robust in terms of generating an institutional framework around which to rally against the Christian-German invasion; they were fighting total extermination as a people (if not as individuals). In contrast, the Polish who were further from the front used Christianity to buttress their independence from the expanding Germans, cultivate ties to other Christian powers, while the duke, who became a king, used the One True God and One True Church to justify his centralizing drive as the One True King. This was a rational maneuver because of their greater distance from the wave front of German expansion; Christianity was not necessarily a German religion (the Bohemians to their south of course had contact with Byzantium as well as German Christianity). The case of Lithuania is even more explicable in terms of particular geopolitical and historical conditions: with the decline of European states and the Mongol hordes the Lithuanian polity forged against the German drive to the east under the banner of the Sword Brothers and Teutonic Knights expanded to fill the vacuum. By the mid-14th century Lithuania included most of modern Ukraine, White Russia as well as the Baltic lands and parts of Poland. The majority of the subjects of the pagan Lithuanian warrior elite were Christian. Either Western Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. A conversion to Christianity would of course entail that the Lithuanian elite pick a side, Catholic or Orthodox, while persisting in their paganism allowed them to play off the two groups against each other. A substantial number of Lithuanians did convert to Orthodoxy or Catholicism, but the commanding heights remained pagan due to the geopolitical circumstances. In the late 14th century Lithuanians converted to Catholicism, cementing their alliance with Poland, naturally resulting in Lithuania becoming the marcher state aginst Orthodox Muscovy and the last frontier of the West (after the 16th century the Lithuanian nobility was totally Polonized).

The autocatalytic model does work, but I believe social and political incentives also matter. Aside from Ireland every instance of Christianity spreading and absorbing a culture in Europe after the fall of Rome was initiated from the top and down. Though most of these states had small Christian minorities, sometimes of influence, the majority of the logistic growth curve occurred while Christianity was the official religion. Many Protestants even contend that Christianization of the European peasantry was not completed until after the Reformation. But there were strong incentives to become a pious Christian in Europe after 1000, when Christianity and civilization and elite status went hand in hand, and paganism was tatamount to barbarism.

A quick trip back to late antiquity highlights the importance of the incentives and framing social structures in terms of how it affects the trajectory of religious change. According to the data that Turchin and Stark accept, the Empire was over half Christian by around 360. By the 400s it was overwhelmingly Christian. Nevertheless, in 529 Justinian closed the Academy in Athens which was still the locus of pagan philosophical thought. The Diaspora of Neoplatonic pagans remained active until the Islamic period in Alexandria, and likely influenced the Sabians of Haran. By the time of Justinian these pagans could only draw from a small subset of the Empire's population, those whose families remained loyal to the old religion, or, those of other minority religions such as Judaism or Samaritanism. The similiarities to dhimmis under Islam is again rather clear. But the point I want to make here is that despite the presumed autocatalytic dynamics operative through the Christian Empire, philosophers still remained pagan! There were particular incentives within the philosophical culture which fostered adherence to a pagan religious outlook. The autocatalytic process does not operate across the full sample space to the same extent. While most of the Empire was being immersed in a religion which was a synthesis of Roman institutions, Greek philosophy and Hebrew theism, a subset of the population of philosophical inclination was being drawn into a religious system descended from Hellenistic paganism. This quasi-philosophical world-view was the one that drew the pagan convert Julian to the Apostate. It is notable that Julian, a self-conscious Hellenist in his fashions, was relatively well-educated and manor-born in comparison to the military populists who were dominant between 280 and 400. Though the first illiterate Roman Emperor did not come onto the scene until the early 6th century, there was a wide range of cultural sensibilities, from philosopher-kings and scholars such as Marcus Aurelius and Claudius, to military tryants and autocrats such as Decius and Diocletian.

This "different world" was not operative only among philosophers. The Frankish general Arbogast was the son of a Romanized German, and yet he is known to have been a pagan of classical Roman sensibilities. Arbogast led a pagan senetorial rebellion against Theodosius the Great, and was defeated. Because history has minimal interest in losers we do not truly understand with any clarity how it was that a barbarian by ancestry was acculturated to the world-view of the pagan Roman elite at this late date (Roman society had become far more xenophobic and prejudiced against barbarians than it had been earlier by the 4th century). But books such as The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire draw upon a wide range of textual evidence on the late Roman senatorial elite of the West to imply that they did not make the final turn to Christianity until after 400. Additionally, a deeper analysis of the shape of religious variation smokes out intriguing patterns. Roman senators of the 4th century who were Christian were much more likely to be new men, parvenus dependent upon imperial patronage. They were more likely to have risen through the military or civil service, as opposed to having inherited their status. Additionally, Christian senators were also more likely to come from Gaul and other provinces on the frontier, while the pagans were more likely from the old imperial core, Italy and North Africa, two regions relatively insulated from the disturbances of the 3rd and 4th centuries.

Within the status hierarchies of the old senatorial elite paganism and its attendant familial cults had a strong attraction. Even in the mid-5th century, high status nobles such as the general Marcellinus, were devout pagans. Another locus of pagan power in the army is rather clearly illustrated by a revocation of the expulsion of non-Christians from the officer corps by Theodosius II early in the 5th century; so many officers, including generals, protested and offered to resign that it was judged to be impractical in implementation. There were enough crypto-pagans on the ground that as late as the reign of the Emperor Zeno in 474 there were hopes that paganism would be restored as the official religion. In any case, that wasn't to be, at some point the cause of paganism during late antiquity was as futile as that of Roman Catholicism in England by the 17th century. But, with hindsight I think we need to not forget that inevitable dynamics didn't seem so inevitable back then, and different incentives and social networks intersected across the same time and space. Similarly, an autocatalytic process might have been operative in terms of conversion to Islam in the Levant, but even in 1900 around 10-20% of Palestinian Arabs were Christian, and across the coastal mountain ranges of Syria-Lebanon Christians and heretical Muslims (Druze, Alawites) were more numerous than Sunni Muslims (emigration in this case was so strongly biased toward Christian Arabs that the proportions would have changed a great deal even without the differential birthrates which came to the fore in the 20th century).

Despite the specific twists and conditonalities, I do think that the null model of the autocatalytic expansion of particular religious groups is useful. In Persia I believe we have an excellent case study in Mesopotamia which suggests that ethnic polytheism naturally tends to cede ground over time to universal monotheism. As I have outlined I think the likelihood that there was an exogenous confound is sharply dampened in this one scenario. Obviously there isn't the issue of Christian blackmail (i.e., monotheistic states after the fall of Roman had a cheery habit of threatening to invade unbelievers because of the fact that they were unbelievers), nor sponsorship by Christian elites. Granted, like Ireland the Christianization of Mesopatamia might have been facilitated by the mediating role of local notables wishing to integrate themselves into the transnational luxury trade. It seems that Semitic ethnicity was a bar to conversion to Zoroastrianism, and the Arab federates of the Sassanids, the Lakhimids, were not surprisingly Christians (one could argue that the incentives of the pagan piligrimage trade were one of the reasons that the nobles of Mecca did not align themselves with a world religion). But in a pre-modern society there simply wasn't as much individual choice, and patrons followed their clients, whether those patrons were an individual or a corporate entity like a guild or village council.

But the Sassanid Empire also expanded east, into Central Asia and the Punjab. These were regions where Zoroastrianism was simply not much of an option for those non-assimilated to Persian ethnicity or identity. And not surprisingly, Nestorian Christianity was influential along the trade routes. Arnold Toynbee alluded to a stillborn Nestorian civilization, and it was thanks to the reach of the Zoroastrian Sassinid Empire that Nestorianism spread so far and wide. In the 8th century Nestorians were a prominent power not just in Central Asia, but also in China. It seems that the Christians of Kerala were originally affiliated with the Nestorian Church of Mesopotamia. And, it is well known that Nestorians were still extant among the Turco-Mongol peoples swept up in the expansion of the armies of Genghis Khan; the mother of Kubilai Khan was a Nestorian Christian.

And yet, what happened here? Shouldn't the autocatalytic process have increased the frequency of Nestorianism so that it dominated all these regions? In Persia itself Nestorianism declined with the rise of Islam. There are attested conversions, but it seems pretty clear that preponderant ancestry of modern Iraqi Muslims are from Aramaic speaking Christian peasants. In China there was a major suppression of foreign religions in the mid-9th century. This seems to have nearly extirpated Nestorianism, and driven Manichaeanism (which also came from Persia) to such low numbers that it went extinct in a few centuries, and also set Islam back quite a bit (modern Chinese Islam probably owes more to the influx of Central Asians with the Mongol Empire in the 13th and 14th centuries than the original expansion of Islam into China in the 7th and 8th). In India Nestorianism flourished in Kerala, but did not spread to any other region. One would assume that 1,500 years was long enough for autocatalytic dynamics to kick in....but it seems that Kerala's Christians (who are by and large no longer identified as Nestorian, though they retain Syrian affinities) turned into another caste. The modern spread of Christianity in India was spurred by British raj and Western missionaries, though Syrian Christians were often critical conduits.

The case of India is important enough to inspect with greater detail. India is the only civilization which has produced a world religion besides the Middle East. Indians will generally assert that Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism are Dharmic religions set against the Abrahamic religions of of the Middle East. The gap is a real one obviously. Hinduism and Buddhism are very different, but ultimately they deal in the same semantic currency and there are institutional resemblences. In Myanmar the Indians who have remained are by origin either Muslim or Hindu. The latter have been consistently changing their religious identity to that of Buddhism. Muslims have been to a far lesser extent. Though there are tensions between the Chinese and Thai in Thailand, and a religious gap between Chinese Mahayana sects and the Therevada Buddhism of Thailand, the mixing between the communities is rather fluid when compared to the situation in Malaysia, as the relations between Chinese and the Muslim peoples of the Malay archipelago is fraught with more tension. There are orthopraxic gaps which make this comprehensible; the food taboos of Buddhist priests and monks, whether Mahayana or Therevada, are rather intelligible to each other (generally derivations from Indian vegetarianism). In contrast, the Muslim aversion to pork does not generally allow for easy communal meals with Chinese, for whom pork is nearly the obligate meat. I recall that when there were riots in Java in the 1990s against the Chinese many fled to Hindu Bali. Here the proximate dynamic isn't simply reducible to civilizational gaps, after all, both the Balinese and Chinese are outsiders in the mix of the Muslim majority and so a natural empathy might arise (and a substantial number of Chinese Indonesians are Christians, even if only nominally). But on a coarser scale increasing the N I think Turchin's model of a metaethnic border is probably viable and useful, even if it is not likely the avowed rationale given for conflicts, it may lurk in the background as a necessary framing condition, or at least one which increases likelihood.

The East broadly, the Indian and Chinese cultural orbits, are interesting cases when it comes resistence against the expanding orbit of the One True God. On a whole, it's taken some hits. Around 1/3 of South Asians now subscribe to an Abrahamic religion. Island southeast Asia was lost to Islam relatively recently from the Hindu-Buddhist bloc. The Dutch helped along the process in Java because of their rivalry with the Hindu kingdom of Bali (eastern Java was the center of a Hindu kingdom allied with Bali until the 18th century). China has a non-trivial Muslim minority. Myanmar, Thailand and Indochina all non-trivial large Abrahamic minorities. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea have non-trivial and powerful Christian populations. Japan has a small, but influential, Christian minority. On the other end of the balance sheet, in the secularizing West ideas from Dharmic religions are very popular among the elites, and some, such as reinarnation have penetration rates as high as 25%. But the influence is less institutional and organizational than it is a percolation of ideas and assumptions.

Let's look at India first. By India, I'll include the states not currently in the Republic of India, since before 1947 India meant the whole subcontinent, though Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka were often bracketed off because of their Buddhist leanings. About 1/3 of the Indian population, broadly, is Muslim. Islam was present in India from the 8th century. Sindh was conquered by the Ummayads. In the next few centuries military incursions were minimal, but Arab mercenaries and merchants were a prominent force. The large number of Muslims in Kerala is a function of trade much more than the later rise of foreign Islamic dynasties since most of the time Hindu rulers were preeminent in this region (see Vasco da Gama's reports). In the north of India Muslim warlords were dominant after 1000, and exclusive at the top of the totem pole by 1200. This situation persisted for 500 years until 1700, at which point political fragmentation was the dominant dynamic. After 1700 some non-Muslim groups rose to parity, but only after 1800 and British rule was the political supremacy of Muslim elites off the table.

So a 500 hundred year window of near domination, and quite a bit of power (1000-1200 was a long rearguard action on the journey to extinction on the part of Hindu kingdoms in northern India, not one of parity). And yet only 1/3 of the population is Muslim? First, autocatalytic dynamics assume a level of connectedness perhaps inappropriate in South Asia. Though there were no north Indian Hindu kings, many of the great vassals, rajputs, remained Hindu. So there were mediators who continued to foster the production of Hindu religious ritual through their patronage. There were many instances of conversion, but it seems clear from the extant biographical data Hindu warlords did not want to turn their back on their own cultural heritage, as would be an implication by conversion to Islam (they would also remain inferior in status to Muslims from Persia or Central Asia). There is an element of irony in this because it seems likely that some of the rajputs of northern India were themselves immigrants from Central Asia who filled the power vacuum after the collapse of the Gupta dynasty in the 6th century. But like the Tibeto-Burman Ahoms of Assam later, they became defenders of Hindu Indian cultural traditions on the metaethnic frontier. Additionally, Muslim power projected rather raggedly into southern India for much of this period, where the Empire of Vijayanagar flourished. Though Vijayanagar was contested, and eventually conquered, by south Indian Muslim dynasties, it remained a separate locus of patronage for Hindu cultural production during the period of Islamic domination. Finally, it must be remembered that India is a highly segmented society, and many villages were run by Hindu landlords (patels, thakurs, etc.) who served as mediators between the new Muslim overlords and the masses.

With the fall of the Mughul raj and the rise of the British Hindu notables quickly rose up to fill the void and stepped into the shoes of the Muslim ruling classes to administer India. This shows that a reservoir of non-Muslim elite talent always remained extant. Some of these were no doubt patronized by Hindu dynasts such as the Marathas and those of Vijayanagar. Others were patronized by Hindu vassals of the Muslim dynasties, such as the rajputs. And some of them were patronized by the Muslims themselves (e.g., the Kayasthas served the Muslims more than other high caste groups which had a tradition of literacy). The Sunni Muslim elite seems to have taken a role as a rentier caste, opening up niches for enterprising non-Muslims. It is interesting that some of the most economically successful Muslims in the Indian subcontinent are the marginal Ismailis, who were persecuted by the Mughals and forced to convert to Sunni Islam.

Not only are there complex patterns vertically up and down the class ladder, but one must look at the conversion patterns as a function of geography. In modern India it is no surprise that aside from Kerala and centers of Muslim dynasties (e.g., Hyderabad) that Islam is relatively thin on the ground in the south compared to the north. Additionally, in Orrisa there are very few Muslims, and this is an isolated and frankly backward region which was less exposed to outside currents. But, it is important to note that the Muslim heartland around Dehli remained predominantly Hindu across all those centuries. It is no surprise that Muslims are the majority along the western fringe, not only are these regions closer to the demographic sources of Turkic and Persian immigration which buttressed the Islamic dynasties as soldiers and bureaucrats, but the Sindh was under direct Muslim rule far longer than any other region. Yet in Pakistan it is in Sindh which has the largest Hindu minority (likely due to the relative easy of population exchange along the Punjab border as opposed of the Thar boundary to the east of Sindh). Additionally, of course the other locus of Muslim majority in the Indian subcontinent is far to the east, in Bengal. Not only is it in Bengal, but there is a consistent pattern that the further east you go in Bengal the more Muslim the population gets, with the most pious region the southeastern district of Noakhali. When the British census revealed that there were more Muslims than Hindus in Bengal in the late 19th century they were somewhat shocked.

In fact, Bengal has been under Muslim rule only a century or two less than the Punjab, so the difference of duration isn't that great. But, it is notable that prior to the Muslim conquest these two regions were relatively weak in terms of institutional Hinduism, and Bengal was the last region of India to host a flowering of Buddhism. The social and institutional robusticity of Indian religion, the set of beliefs and rituals which became Hinduism, did not characterize the Punjab or Bengal during this period. Polities in these areas were more often aligned with the "losing" cultural faction, and divided within themselves. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 documents the confluence of social and economic conditions which allowed eastern Bengal, what became Bangladesh, to become a mostly Muslim domain while western Bengal, now part of India, remained mostly Hindu. It is important to remember that eastern Bengal was to a large extent not characterized by the Malthusian trap which we see today, rather, for most of the past 1,000 years its the frontier served as a demographic release valve as peasants cleared the forest under the supervision of expanding elites. Those elites were of course mostly Muslim (though the capital input might have been from Hindu moneylenders). A combination of the relative weakness of extant Hindu institutions in eastern Bengal, combined with the emergence of a new non-Hindu elite, and, an expansion into a frontier so that a small number of pioneers might serve as genetic and cultural "founders" makes the fact that Bengal was much more fruitful for Islam than the central Gangetic plain much more comprehensible. Recall that I observed that there is data which suggests that elites on the geographic margins, the frontiers, were more open switching to the Christian religion and abandoning their older customs and traditions during late antiquity. In contrast, the old civilized cores, such as Italy and Greece, were notable for remaining pagan longer than new frontier metropoles such as Constantinople or Antioch. A similar difference might have applied to Iran and Central Asia, where the latter was Islamicized earlier than the former.

Of course, the analogy between paganism and Hinduism is not very strong. The robusticity of Indian socio-religious structures in the face of domination by another socio-religious framework is impressive and makes it very different from Babylonian paganism. Just as elite Roman senators were resistent to attractions of Christianity for a relatively long period, attempts by Christian missionaries to convert Indians have had to focus on the lower castes and maringally Indianized (e.g., the Tibeto-Burman tribal peoples of the northeast). Once the ball starts rolling though that is a sign that there as an institutional vacuum which Christianity can fill; the instances of forced conversions of pagan and Hindu Nagas by Naga fundamentalist Christians illustrates the power of autocatalyic peer "pressure." On the other hand, among higher caste Hindus it seems that the logistic growth curve tends to saturate at a lower level.

A shift to southeast Asia highlights the importance of conditional parameters in these autocatalytic dynamics. Christianity is a minority religion in most of mainland southeast Asia. But, it is an ethnic religion. Specifically, it is a religion which is popular among minorities who have traditionally been at the cultural and economic margins. Lowland southeast Asia has been dominated by powerful kingdoms with a very strong self-conscious identity as vessels for Therevada Buddhism. Buddhist monarchs in southeast Asia even sent aid to those attempting to kickstart the Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka during the period of British rule when the elites were converting to Protestantism (a dynamic which was halted, and reversed). Groups such as the Karens, Hmong and tribes of the Montangnard highlands resisted conversion to Therevada Buddhism for a very simple reason: those who converted became Bamar/Burman, Thai or Vietnamese. The tension across ethnicites was strongly diluted when the religious barrier disappeared. On the other hand, as we have seen above, non-institutional paganism tends to lack robusticity over the long term. Tibet and Japan both manifested the same dynamic which I asserted for pagan Europe during the process of the shift toward a universal world religion. In both these cases the correction was temporary, and the setbacks rolled back as Buddhism eventually embedded itself as the dominant institutional religion of the culture.

The arrival of Christianity changed the game. Groups like the Karens observed correspondences between Christian theology and their own indigenous religion, but, seeing at how similar and convergent supernatural concepts tend to be I don't believe that similarities would be hard to observe (Christianity was repeatedly confused as a form of Buddhism in East Asia). Today a large proportion of Karens are Christian, but not all. A significant number are Therevada Buddhists, and not surprisingly these tend to be much less hostile to the central government, and even complain of persecution at the hands of Christians. About 10 years back I recalled reading about the conversion of the only non-Christian resistance leader among the Karens. It is obvious that the Karen resistance has religious overtones, and the Christian identification operates synergistically with their historical self-conception as a separate people. A similar process occurred in Indonesia after the suppression of the Communist Party. Many Chinese and secular Javanese became Christian because that was an open option available to (one had to affiliate with a religion in Indonesia during Suharto's regime) them. At this point their children are no doubt sincere believers, but one can not ignore the contingent parameters which drove what is now an autocatalytic process within these networks (also, a minority of very nominal Javanese Muslims are making the switch to Hinduism, as they view it as a more authentic expression of their outlooks and identity as Javanese).

In China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan Christianity is a religion with some influence. Christianity is a firmly bourgeois sect in Taiwan and Singapore. Though growing in Singapore, recent data suggests that Buddhism is now rapidly rising in proportion faster by siphoning off Chinese religionists, and many of the college educated cohorts are switching to Buddhism instead of Christianity as would have been the norm one generation ago in the process of upward mobility. In Taiwan Christianity has been stagnant for the past generation, likely going through a contractionary phase. Again, the same dynamic of Taoists and Chinese folk religionists switching to Buddhism is noticeable here. What's going on? I think the key here is that Buddhism is a familiar religion, it simultaneously can play the role of Chinese ethnic religion and world religion. In contrast, it seems that Christianity often opens up a fissure with the family because of its more stark rejection of "pagan" practices which older members might continue out of custom and habit (it seems in Singapore that Christianity drew disproportionately from secular educated segments where these familial concerns would likely loom less).

One important point to emphasize with East Asia is the relatively weak role that institutional religion has played within these set of societies. In China, Japan and South Korea though Buddhism was the most common religion before the arrival of Christianity, it was neither dominant or elite. The Tokugawa demand that Japanese families affiliate with a Buddhist temple in the process of extirpating Christianity was not due to Buddhist piety, in fact, the predecessors of the Tokugawa had gone to great lengths to break the back of institutional Buddhism as an alternative power center in the 16th century. Rather, religion was an instrument of social control and tool for sifting the loyalists from those prone to sedition; in this case, Catholics whom the regime assumed to be supportive of rival southern daimyos and foreign powers. In China and Korea Buddhism was the primary institutional religion above the level of local cults and shamans, but, it was also kept at remove from the centers of power because of the skepticism of the Confucian mandarins toward otherworldly religion. The rise of Christianity in Korea was not truly at the expense of a vibrant Buddhism, it was within a very secular context when it comes to rival institutional structures. South Korean Buddhism to some extent has been prodded by Christianity, going so far as create its own religious television channel. Many would argue that Christianity was the best thing that could have happened to South Korean Buddhism, which had become a moribund mountain cult.

South Korea is an interesting case beause it has the largest Christian population proportionately outside of the Philippines in Asia. But they are only 30% of the population, and many Americans are surprised that around 20% of Koreans are avowed Buddhists and 50% have no affiliation. Again, this is due to the expectation that societies transition from religious monopolies (as in the West) toward a more relaxed regime. In Korea religion was marginalized as a source of authority by the center, and its new power in coalescing individuals is a throwback to the period before 1300 when Buddhism was likely an important cog in the process of "Koreagenesis." Again, I suspect the insight that metaethnic frontiers require ideological cement is important to keep in mind. With the period of Japanese colonialism many patriotic Koreans began to look to Christianity as a source of resistence, and Christians went from 5% to 25% of the population within 2 generations. But from the data I've seen over the last 15 years that rate of growth has slowed radically and the proportion has been only inching upward. Part of the issue might be the correlation between higher levels of education and Christianity, and the lower fertility of these groups. Additionally, it seems that many Korean Christians are now switching across churches, implying that the social networks are becoming tapped out of new low hanging consumers.

These data from various East Asian countries, and the example of Japan as a nation where autocatalytic Abrahamic dynamics seem to simply not operate, suggest that the logistic growth curve for Christianity has limits in penetrating all societies. South Korea was a best-case-scenario for a variety of reasons, but even here it seems that the trajectory has slowed down. The standard model in Christian or Muslim nations is for the logistic growth curve to move up toward an overwhelmingly majority, if not nominal uniformity. But East Asia has long been characterized by pluralism, and even wh