I'm putting a post-it note here for myself:
Hopefully I remember this next time.
Notes
Random thoughts and links.
I just now learned that Canada had feudalism until 1940.
England officially abolished feudalism in 1660. France abolished feudalism with the revolution in 1789. But Quebec slipped through the cracks, having been ceded by the French to the English two decades earlier, in 1763. Even though Great Britain had abolished feudalism a century prior, the English left the system intact in their new Quebec colony, wanting to avoid social disturbance.
Up to 80% of Quebec lived under feudalism. The government abolished some aspects of Quebecois feudalism in 1854, but the basic relationship between lord and tenant remained in place. In 1928, 60,000 families still lived on feudal estates. In 1935, the government set about to purchase all of the feudal estates, which concluded in 1940.
For context, feudalism is generally associated with Eurasian societies, and the "end of feudalism" is generally placed in the 1800s.
Josh Comeau is an amazing educational writer, and each blog post he releases generates crazy buzz on Twitter. He's great and choosing sticky concepts and explaining them so they feel intuitive.
Josh just released a new post about JavaScript promises, which (I hope) made them click for me. I now understand how and why this:
async function addNums(a, b) {
return a + b;
}Is equivalent to this:
function addNums(a, b) {
return new Promise((resolve) => {
resolve(a + b);
});
}
As the glaciers of the last ice age receded 12,000 years ago, a wave of illness swept the globe. The cause was the shift from a relatively healthy foraging lifestyle to a more dense and sendentary agricultural lifestyle.
Before then, human infections tended to be mild and chronic in nature.. full-time agrarian living brought the kinds of acute and virulent infections we're familiar with today.
This was the first of three major epidemiological shifts in human history. The cause was not farming, but the lack of dietary diversity, the density of human and animal habitation, and the increase in social inequality and poverty.
These changes reversed in the 19th and 20th century, but — surprisingly — before the discovery of antibiotics.
Health improvements were mainly due to nonmedicinal factors such as better farming and food distribution methods, major sanitation projects and housing reforms in poor areas.
This is known as the "Mckeown Thesis," and it remains hotly debated today. (This adds further interest to the idea that the Industrial Revolution was primarily driven by natural climate change.)
Social changes alleviated the crowding and poverty caused by the Neolitic Revolution in the first place. This was "a significant but only partial reversal of the changes that first began in the Neolithic period."
At the same time, heart disease and cancer increased, and many of the health problems persisted in less developed countries, anticipating the third shift: the emergence of a "global disease environment."
The Lucy Letby story is revealing so much about society; firstly, the state of censorship in the UK.
Letby is an English nurse who was convicted of murdering seven babies last year. But she was convicted in the public eye long before her trial started. A sensationalistic tabloid press had leapt at the opportunity to create a baby-killing monster. By the time a jury was convened, everyone in the UK already hated Letby.
When the trial commenced, the judge instituted a ban on reporting, to avoid prejudicing the already-prejudiced jury. As the trial proceeded, observers noticed serious problems in the evidence (or lack thereof), but were barred from speaking out. In the end, Letby was convicted.
When I read the story of the conviction, I was completely baffled. How could someone be so evil? But there was no explanation — no motive. It didn't make sense.
The New Yorker article suggests that perhaps it doesn't make sense because Letby is completely innocent. Letby (who was ostensibly taking care of each of the babies who died) was convicted due to our inability to accept the inexplicable.
We throw around the word "witch hunt" too freely, but the New Yorker article paints a realistic image of what a medieval witch hunt might look like today: a woman scapegoated for the deaths of infants, her emotional distress weaponized as evidence of her guilt, with self-proclaimed experts using bunk science to rile up an angry mob.
Today I learned that the earliest recognizable form of capitalism — the medieval English wool market — was basically created by Cistercian monks. The monks founded their order around 1100 and grew at breakneck speed. In the 1130s, they founded 76 new monasteries. By the end of the 1200s, when the European economy went into widespread recession, there were 500 Cistercian monasteries across Europe, Britain, and Ireland. As Bruce Campbell writes, the Cistercians were exceptionally "centralized, hierarchical, and successful... with a system of administration and communication that transcended national and ecclesiastical boundaries."
The monasteries were effectively property of the Vatican, and functioned like modern-day franchise businesses. While monasteries were traditionally places of study, worship, and theology, the Cistercians would enlist lower-class locals for agricultural work — primarily raising sheep. The monasteries were the main employer in many regions.
The monasteries helped reclaim huge tracts of fenland, marshland, highland, and woodland for pasture. This was during an era when the European climate was warming, opening huge regions of arable land and creating massive wealth through growing crop yields.
The monasteries — the largest landholder in the region — were the primary beneficiary of this windfall, especially the Cistercians, who became pioneers of English sheep husbandry, effectively creating an international market for wool that was supplied first and foremost by British monasteries. In Sacred Trust, Robert Ekelund writes that the Cistercians "provided the original impetus to extensive sheep farming."
The market was so robust, the monks sold futures contracts for their wool up to twenty years in advance, anticipating the futures markets that would arise in the Netherlands some centuries later. The monasteries were also technological innovators, adopting new technologies like watermills and windmills.
The monasteries acquired land through bequest and trade. The new international wool market created competition for land, which quickly dried up — since land is not a renewable resource. For the first time in English history, there was a shortage of land. Landlords raised rents. Peasants relocated to find cheaper land or — if there was none available — employment.
We can coarsely divide the history of Western civilization into three periods: antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity. The boundary between antiquity and the Middle Ages is marked by the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the "dark ages." However, we can also mark it with a singular climate event: a "little ice age" in the 500s.
In 535, a volcanic eruption caused the entire planet to cool dramatically, creating famine and poverty around the world. A few years later, the first Black Plague Pandemic kill tens of millions of people. The plague would recur eight centuries later, also precipitated by a period of cooling and economic decline.
It looks like historians have taken up the link between climate and the dark ages in recent years, with papers (2)(3) and books on the subject.
We already attribute the rise of the Holocene Period to the end of the last big ice age. Now, with the explosion of climatology in the last few decades, historians have started to attribute major events like the fall of the Roman Empire and the Industrial Revolution to climate.
I've been quiet on the blog lately while I've been tearing through history books. I've now amassed a small backlog of book summaries to type up and publish.
As my posts of the last six months indicate, I've been fascinated with the "rise of the West," and I've already published six reviews on books related to capitalism and medieval history, but I've got many more in the hopper:
A few months ago, I finished Bruce Campbell's epic book The Great Transition, which describes the transition from the High Middle Ages (1100s) through to the Age of Sail (1400s), climaxing with the Black Plague (1300s). That story is surprisingly coherent. I just finished organizing my highlights from the book — 45,000 words, a novella in itself. I'm going to try to briskly summarize those notes.
I also read How the West Came to Rule, a great post-colonial history of the "rise of the West," and Robert Ekelund's Economic Origins of Roman Christianity, the first in Ekelund's three-part economic history of Christianity. I also read a large chunk of Nancy Folbre's Who Pays for the Kids, which includes a very interesting feminist read on Medieval English history.
My biggest outstanding book report is on David Graeber and David Wengrow's epic The Dawn of Everything, which lays out a theory of history based on three types of freedom and three types of domination.
At the same time, I've been working on the framework that renders this website, which I'd like to publish publicly soon. That's all to say: watch this space.
Poor Things was the real Barbenheimer all along.
A woman treated as a doll with no autonomy going on an adventure to discover the world.
A mad scientist experimenting with human lives.
Men who can only define themselves in relation to the women in their lives.
Philosophical questions about whether people are fundamentally cruel.
Kitchsy yet beautiful anachronistic set design.
A throwback to another era that feels pressingly relevant today.
A tiny fairy godmother character who extols the virtue of sexualizing young women.
A protagonist who has an existential crisis upon encountering the brutality of the real world.
A treatise on the importance and danger of curiosity and discovery.
This is such an incredible Nova Scotia ghost ship story, I really can't believe I had never heard it before.
In December 1735, a ship with decks covered in blood sailed into Chebogue, in present-day Yarmouth County, N.S., and dropped anchor.
It was the brigantine Baltimore and the story of what happened on board remains shrouded in mystery to this day.