Hanging with History

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. This is social history in some depth.  We look at the role of preasance a mong  and within social classes.  Presance is identified as a major force limiting collective action that could have allowed for more reform before the Revolution.  Status issues are always complex, and important, but in the ancien regime it goes to 11. There is al...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. We cover the social continuities and the changes in France's  ancien regime that happened under the Louis XIV through Louis XVI before the French Revolution.

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The 2nd Hundred Years War arc continues. Louis XIV's Geo Strategy and and an exploration of the French government's financial system.  A strange combination of topics?  But no, the one explains necessary features and failures of the other. France is remarkably backward in financial matters compared to the Netherlands and Great...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. An intro to France during the reign of Louis XIV.   The focus this episode is the peasantry and the nobility of the sword.  For the peasants, life may not be Mordor, but it is far harder and more exploited than we might assume.  The effort here is to shake the mindset of France as an idyllic setting for the 75% who are peasants.  Materia...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. We cover the campaign to take Gibraltar and hold it 1704-5, including the great sea battle of Malaga.  We cover the war in North America, the breaking of Spanish power and the confused picture in Nova Scotia, where after the peace none of the participants understand the consequences of the peace the same way.   And the introduction of pa...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The war continues with continued victories for Marlborough, but coalition politics and politics in London spell bad news for John Churchill.    A discussion of the strategic realities of seapower leads us to cover Rooke's first expedition in 1702 that ends with the utter destruction of French and Spanish fleets in Vigo Bay. With Cam...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Marlborough's earliest campaigns covered in great detail. There is an analysis of why Marlborough's armies were able to defeat what were previously the greatest armies in the world.  This is a highly controversial topic. With Camie we cover the famous anecdotes, the women dressed as men serving as soldiers, the British tendency...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. We discuss many of the political and financial  issues around the Spanish Succession war.    We introduce the idea of the fiscal military state, and how that relates to the miracle story.   We cover how Isaac Newton helped King William execute his wartime strategy to fund the wars against Louis XIV.   The Duke of Marlborough gets introdu...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. So many names for one war.   We focus on the war at sea and in North America.  The peace of exhaustion and provide an introduction to the War of the Spanish Succession.  The great strategic outcomes of the is war are covered as well.  The financial revolutions that financed these wars is introduced.   Nine Years War, War of the Grand All...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. We take a look at the big themes we will be discussing.  This include Naval Mastery, the Balance of Power, continuity between the wars, the sudden growth of the British empire, the birth of modern politics, and invasion scares. There is also a good deal of review of the mindset ideas from Anglo-Saxon/Viking times through the Middle Ages...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. "It takes but one foe to breed a war," says Faramir in the Lord of the Rings. 1672 was the Disaster Year for the United Provinces, and a life changing trauma for William of Orange.   We cover the cannibalistic crowning event, the Bombing Bishop and the Wild Hunt.  Appeasement as a concept when Louis XIV is in your neighborhood....

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The long promised look at Big History , we lay out 5 themes for the Causes of the Industrial Revolution.   Near the end there is the real answer.  Fish.  1. Cultural, unique features of English culture or values allowing for dignity and hope. 2. Numbers game, When you get a production function where wages are high enough and capital chea...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Completing our Adam Smith arc with the end of the ideology of Calvinism.  Its replacement with the idea that God is good and the happiness of mankind is God’s purpose, allowed Hume and Smith to encode the principles of Christian love into a Newtonian framework.  Safely encased in a Newtonian system, Smith’s ideas could survive the rise o...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Calvinism undermines itself by elevating human reason as the tool for analysis and understanding of God above feeling and love and human action.  We explore Calvinist doctrines in some detail.  Logically they are ironclad and that is their undoing. With Camie we once again bring up the tension between Acts 5:29 and Romans 13:1.  Once rul...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Adam Smith’s systematic approach made reality tractable.  This provided enlightenment thinkers with a framework with which to analyze government policy.  And they loved it!  He launched clear and specific attacks on common government policy, the mercantile system.  Most of these abuses, based on medieval modes of thought were weakly foll...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. How does opulence among nations arise?  Smith describes a Newtonian system of non violent market competition operating through the price mechanism which can generate a life for the working poor that is many steps up from the usual run of human misery that everywhere else prevails.  That process also leads to a peaceful idyllic countrysid...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. So how do you get from a subsistence economy where the great mass lives on the edge of famine and disaster?   Funny you should ask, because Adam Smith desperately wanted this improvement for his native Scotland.  Getting it would be like a miracle.  He knew the mechanisms that led to prosperity and the obstacles that got in the way.  And...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Why do humans behave decently towards each other?   Adam Smith doesn't do evolutionary biology, but his insights, on how we wish to love and be loved and what's more we wish to be lovely are timeless and deep.  The corresponding notions of how we wish to avoid giving offense and how we have a horror of blameworthiness...a horro...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Private Vices are public virtues, so says Mandeville in the Fable of the Bees .  No, David Hume argues, the frame is wrong.  Strong boundaries of vice and virtue cannot be drawn in consumer behavior.   This is our introduction to the problem of leaving medieval morality behind us.  The Church did not place the economic advancement of the...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Adam Smith and his world view.   Emerson said every writer needs a tough chaos deep soil.  What was Adam Smith’s?  We introduce the key elements of that world view and spend a fair amount of time introducing you to the idea that the ferocious Calvinism of the Presbyterian Scots was on the wane and a new God arose in its place.  Far more...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. We go through the history of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  Marlborough defects to William of Orange. It’s a long episode because we spend time with the philosophical question of the Fool.  Is the Fool the only free agent in history?  With Camie I question that perhaps our intuitions about degrees of freedom in our actions are wrong o...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The real lesson is don’t invade Norway. Northern Europe is suffering from state breakdown or the consolidation of absolute monarchy.  This happens in the United Provinces, Denmark, and Sweden.  But the big event is France where Louis XIV continues the work of his father driving central state control down to the local level, justifying th...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Memetic Disaster.  The Bloody Assizes and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, convincingly play into the memes of Catholic cruelty fitting a fact pattern the English are taught very young.   Catholic cruelty and injustice are acted out on the largest possible stage in 1685. The episode takes its name from a poem by John Donne, which I...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. We look at changes brought by the Restoration in social and economic terms.  And we find there was also a lot of continuation from the Commonwealth.   Does that sound boring? There is corruption and bribery and the Cavalier parliament becomes the Pensioner parliament in Whig propaganda.  We have patronage, political parties and defeats,...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The Stuart Restoration.  The landed classes displace the middling sorts of the Cromwellian power structure.  This is the first of three episodes looking at mainly social history of the Stuart Restoration leading to the Glorious Revolution.  The repression of Dissenters with the Clarendon Code, John Bunyan's eleven years in prison, h...