Amazing work from Bret as usual, but very sad that this kind of popular/actually useful history is completely unrewarded in academia. This is far more valuable than whatever top university press book most historians write.
I think as categories, popular education material and more scholarly work are equally important (just look at Bret's citations...).
I think it is fair to say that the marginal value of one extra ACOUP sized blogpost of high quality popular education material is probably higher than one extra book, but that comes down to the relatively lack of high quality popular education material.
It’s entertainment. Academia shouldn’t be entertainment, at least that is my opinion. I’ve seen more than a few erstwhile respected professors turn into talking heads without much substance by sudden media fame. One of the better stories was the one that started bringing in his own newspaper clippings to the universities media department in order to rank higher on the yearly media ranking. After that he rented an apartment near Harvard and bought Harvard professors lunch to publish the photos.
I think Bret rightfully treats it as a secondary career and that his patrons are very right to support him.
Complete disagreement here. Informative writing may serve as entertainment, but if it's done well, that's not all it is. It helps people understand the world, which can provide all kinds of benefits beyond keeping them from being bored for a few minutes.
In fact, this type of work is precisely how people learn almost everything, right up to grad school, which means it's the way the overwhelming majority of education is conducted. Most people going through that aren't doing it for entertainment. Hell, Spivak's Calculus is more on this level—presenting findings to non-experts—than it is an academic endeavor, and no one dismisses that as just being entertainment.
It may not be valuable to people who are already experts in a field, so may not be properly "academic", but this categorization of acoup (and anything like this work) as simply entertainment is going way too far.
This is much more than entertainment. These posts have citations and the same academic rigor as a typical academic publication. They're just packaged in a more approachable and accessible format.
However, these posts are not doing original research which does distinguish them from the main activity of academics. They're essentially brief survey papers (works that summarize the existing publications on a given topic). This is not a knock against ACoUP. These posts are excellent and I enjoy them immensely. They're just not setting out to accomplish the objectives that most academics are trying to achieve.
Academia has a serious problem with snobbery. Few other workplaces in the world have denser concentrations of people who think really highly of themselves, even though they wouldn't admit it openly and their preferred way of war is tons and tons of plausibly deniable passive aggression.
This snobbery problem opens a bigger chasm between the academics and the general public that would otherwise be necessary, and the political consequences down the line might be serious; if academics are perceived as out of touch, aloof and intentionally incomprehensible, the backlash won't be just anti-snobbish, but anti-intellectual, with possible dire consequences for the viability and vibrancy of Western civilization.
But the fact that popularizers like Bret Devereaux reap so much open disdain indicates that few activities are as unpopular among the gatekeepeers as building bridges across said chasm. A True Intellectual Must Be Dour At All Costs.
The tl;dr is basically that part of an academic's job is to educate not just the professionals but also the lay public. By using fantasy and other pop culture works, he's introducing pretty important military history and theory concepts to those who wouldn't otherwise attempt to wade into it--and if they enjoy it, they might come back for some more pressing and serious can't-sugarcoat-this topics such as the implications of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
In general, I would say that academics all too commonly forget the need to engage with people outside of their narrow disciplines, and in doing so, you can cede the field to engaging writers who are way out of their depths and horribly wrong about what they are writing (e.g., Jared Diamond).
> In general, I would say that academics all too commonly forget the need to engage with people outside of their narrow disciplines, and in doing so, you can cede the field to engaging writers who are way out of their depths and horribly wrong about what they are writing (e.g., Jared Diamond).
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the Diamond example here, but I think of him as precisely a cautionary tale for academics, of what can go wrong when they try to go too far in the pop-science, big-picture, broad-audience direction. Diamond is solidly an academic, not some kind of outsider... he's held a professorship at UCLA for 50+ years. But later in his career decided he wanted to write "big history" interdisciplinary synthesis for a popular audience.
I suppose one could try to write for a popular audience without going that far outside your own discipline/expertise though.
Diamond is pretty well regarded even in among academic historians. I strongly suspect believe that /r/anthropology is responsible for this perspective that Diamond is poorly regarded among historians. Almost any serious historian agrees with his thesis: larger arable land coupled with crops and animals more suitable for domestication led to greater population levels and social development in Eurasia than in the Americas, which is the main reason why the Columbian exchange was so one-sided. Diamonds ideas laid the foundations of many serious and well regarded historians, like Ian Morris.
I'm also seriously baffled by people who try to portray his views as racist of eurocentric. His preface explicitly spells out that Europe was a backwater until the early modern period. In fact, a large part of the motivation behind Guns, Germs, and steel was to debunk the idea of wester cultural or racial superiority, and provide a compelling counter narrative to those explanations of Eurasian-American divergence.
This sort-of goes too far. The Roman empire at its height was very much not a backwater. What is pretty unique about Europe is the subsequent enormous loss of civilizational complexity in the Early Middle Ages combined with the fact that it could, albeit 1000 years later, drag itself out of the hole again.
Sure, but the British isles, which would eventually become a preeminent colonial power, still was a backwater even during the Roman Empire. France and Spain less so, but most of the Roman Empire's most developed regions were in the eastern Mediterranean. In his preface, he points out that from the span of human civilization from 2500BC to 2000 AD, Western Europe has been dominant for only a few centuries.
The Eastern Mediterranean was rich and civilised long before and after Rome was a backwater. At the earliest Northern Italy, Germany and the Low Countries were at the technological frontier in the 1300s. Pretty long gap, quite a distance. Europe outside the Mediterranean only really became important in a way anyone else noticed with the Age of Exploration.
And he points out how China could have easily been "first" if it weren't for the whim of an emperor. He argues somewhat successfully that the geography of Europe made empires less successful, and therefore executive decisions had smaller "blast radii".
I believe you've misunderstood the parent comment.
Also - generally speaking, I think being able to speak (or write) in a manner that's compelling for audiences across broad backgrounds, rather than just their niche community is a skillset to be admired.
Science does nothing if people do not believe in it, or do not engage with it.
I definitely agree that this does not give academics license to veer entirely outside of their expertise and use their credentials in the field to hide this (eg: Diamond). But I think not trying at all is worse. Far worse.
The biggest issue with Diamond is that he's just wrong a lot of the time. This is especially so in Collapse, where virtually every single case study he talks about is something where consensus opinion is that environmental degradation played at best a minor role.
As for Guns, Germs, and Steel itself, it's not quite as bad as Collapse, but it does have issues. The underlying thesis--of geographical determinism--just doesn't hold up to actual evidence that well: there's not a lot of evidence for Neolithic technology spread in the east-west axis of Eurasia, especially in comparison to the rather prolific spread you see in the Americas. In particular, cereal crops: you see very little spread of cereal domesticants between Mesopotamia/Mediterranean and East Asia, while maize spreads from Mesoamerica well into both North and South America, supplanting indigenous crops in both places.
The deeper issue with GGS, for anthropologists in particular, is that it has an underlying presumption of a unilinear model of civilization--essentially, the idea that something like the tech tree in Civilization games is a good model of how technology works. In anthropology, this model is deeply discredited, as it performs extremely poorly, especially when you look at cultures that straddle chiefdom/state societies.
This has been one of my favourite of his series. I've been thinking about making a game with some of my friends to model the complexity of moving an army around.
units pushed too hard take a few days of, or go ravage the countryside, or decide to assisnate the general... like Rimworld but the units you're trying to control hate you a lot more and are willing to do something about it.
Let the user decimate units for indiscipline and stuff too. or hang cheating officers to win troop loyalty. Could be a real favorite of sadists and masochist.
How would you deal with foraging amd looting in that game? Based on the previous parts, army can not survive without looting surrounding area every few days or without extorting them for food (and valuables).
Have enjoyed this series a lot. His whole blog is great and you can easily spend hours reading through his lengthy, well-researched posts if you have an interest in premodern military history or topics that brush up against it (i.e. strategy video games, fantasy literature, etc).
Absolutely, I was so proud of my Google skills for finding this blog three weeks ago, and now it's on top of Hackernews. The series about the decline of the Roman empire is amazing.
Funny you've never seen it on HN before, his weekly post show up on the front page almost once a month in average for the past few years. (From here[1] I've counted 8 appearance in the front page in the past 5 months)
> What will not work is overland external supply with more wagons; as discussed the animals eat food and so adding more wagons just slows the army down more and increases its food demands; that’s the tyranny of the wagon equation at work – the army cannot wagon its way out of a foraging pit.
I'd love to read something similar about how taxation and the management and securement of (moving or fixed) gold/money reserves worked back then in practice.
Agreed. The author makes a few comments in the second part of the series about how ships of gold were the main way to ferry money around and how if that went wrong it had sweeping consequences, too. Would be a really interesting series fro this author.
Interesting, although having most stuff in miles is not helping me. I don't understand why he keep making "what if we double the size of the army" explorations. Isn't his 20k+ army already big enough ? And if it is just to say we double everything (food, etc), well I can do the maths myself. It is also repetitive.
The fact that there seems to be a hard cap on size of an overland army in pre-railway times is important. After all, various empires of the ancient world had hugely different population sizes; and in modern times, say, 1900, all other being equal, an empire with more people could have sent a much larger army to conquer its neighbors. That is what we expect.
But from Devereaux's studies on logistics, it seems that the premodern empires, after reaching a certain size, were "almost equal" when it came to military capability, and a lot of the (dis)advantages were on the quality side, such as good maneuvering and an ability to join two armies at precisely the same time.
It surely explains why the Romans never managed to crush the Persians, even though the Roman empire had a lot more resources to draw from. The logistics of running a really massive campaign against the East were too daunting.
Bret relies on literature you might not think are important and has conducted similar study on his own. This is significantly more valuable than any top academic press book that most historians produce.
