History questions not worth their own thread III

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So what was the deal with John J. McCloy? Was he an Axis sympathizer or something?
 
May be a tough one, but what was the world economy like in A.D.1500? (In terms of leading countries in nominal GDP, GDP per capita, etc.) I don't expect any answers to be accurate, but I would like to know.
 
Why is Czechia about the only country on the map that Americans call "Czech Republic" and not a more informal name? You almost never hear "French Republic" or even "Republic of China" where it actually matters.

Because after the break up of the federation, we faced problem how to call Czechia in Czech. Slovakia have its own name - "Slovensko" for quite a long time then, but Bohemia, Moravia and Selisia had common name only as Lands of Bohemian crown - "země Koruny české" - And you can't use this in a republic. We sidestepped this problem after break up of dual monarchy by creating Czechoslovakia "Československo" label, but that was unusable after 1993. And Bohemia "Čechy" was one of the historical lands of Czechia and Moravians disagreed with that name. And because everyone here is a goddamned expert on linguistic, there was a wave of discontent with the proposal of experts of using Czechia "Česko", so we had to settle on Czech Republic" as the only name. But using of Czechia and of "Česko" is gaining support, so hopefully we could start label oureselves "Czechia" soon.


I still refer to it as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

:dubious: Do you still refer to Germany as Trizonia?
 
How much outdated is Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?
 
:dubious: Do you still refer to Germany as Trizonia?
Missed the point.
How much outdated is Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?
Very. But it depends on what you're looking for.

In many cases - not all - Gibbon more or less faithfully reproduces the information found in older, period sources. His list of sources is far from exhaustive - some narrative histories and chronologies have come to light in the two and a half centuries since he wrote - but more importantly, he does not discuss archaeological source material nearly at all (for obvious reasons) and his use of alternative sources, e.g. letters and poetry, is not particularly good either. But at the same time, by virtue of the work's length, there is scarcely a more exhaustive work out there. (Only one, Bury's History of the Later Roman Empire, can even begin to lay claim to such a mantle, and even then its chronological scope is rather dramatically limited compared to Gibbon's.)

So if you're looking for a pure infodump, or for learning about the historiography of the Later Roman Empire, you could do worse than Gibbon. The problem is that a) a pure infodump is virtually useless, especially in the volume Gibbon presents, unless you are particularly interested in the topic to the point of being a scholar in the field, b) pretty much all of that material can be found elsewhere and in more modern contexts without Gibbon's analysis and editorializing (and added to a great deal more information, e.g. archaeological sources, that supersedes Gibbon), and c) Gibbon's analysis and editorializing are everywhere, and they're kind of crap.

There are much better, modern works that can serve as introductions to the scholarly consensus, insofar as it exists, on the later Roman Empire. They are also significantly shorter and easier to understand. My standard recommendation is Guy Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568: it is more correct than most of the others out there, and unlike some of the others, it actually has large segments on historiography and discussing the merits and pitfalls of other modern historians' works that don't involve hyperbole and the historian's equivalent of flaming. Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire suffers from the last of these problems, in addition to being sort of wrong and to treating the reader as though she were a student in one of his lectures (notably describing one Roman propagandist's turn of phrase as "of the yah-boo-sucks variety" - can hardly get more Poxbridge than that); having said that, he's still an obvious upgrade over Gibbon, and does a good job of making some of his points reasonably well. Other efforts, such as Adrian Goldsworthy's How Rome Fell, Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, and James O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire, suffer from either a too-limited scope, an overly-broad scope, an overly narrative structure (which focuses over-much on certain elements to the obvious detriment of others), and simply "not being as right". Some of those authors, especially Heather and Ward-Perkins, also seem intent on tacitly providing an intellectual framework for British Tory attacks on immigration in the modern day, something that's difficult to disentangle from their analysis itself.

The modern equivalent of Gibbon in terms of scope and exhaustiveness, but with a much greater attention to alternative sources and a good deal less crap analysis, would be the aforementioned J. B. Bury's History of the Later Roman Empire, but it's awfully long and involved, and not exactly perfect, either.

And, of course, there's an avalanche of excellent modern literature that doesn't go over the entire demise of the Western Roman state, but still contains immensely invaluable information, such as Michael Kulikowski's Late Roman Spain and its Cities, or the iconoclastic Walter Goffart's Barbarian Tides.
 
Very. But it depends on what you're looking for.

*snip*
Thanks for the recommendations, but could I ask what are the most glaring examples of his outdatedness?

And this probably should go to the other thread, but when we are at it, what would you recommend me as introduction into cultural history of East Roman Empire? There should be good Russian books on this subject as I've been told, but my Russian is not good enough for reading academics texts.
 
Thanks for the recommendations, but could I ask what are the most glaring examples of his outdatedness?
Other than the decidedly one-sided source list? The fact that he didn't have anything about archaeology or epigraphical material means that he pretty much cleanly missed the entire modern understanding of the late Roman economy. (Especially the understanding of its overall improvement in the fourth century; increased diversification and areas under cultivation, as discovered especially under Tchalenko in Syria and under the auspices of various groups in North Africa, would argue strongly against the notion of some sort of long decline that one might potentially get from a - skewed - view of Roman high politics during the same period.) Insofar as he got a picture of it, he viewed things from the perspective solely of high politics and with a decent dosage of cultural/religious information, but he lacked enough context to understand how representative his sources were. (His personal bias also showed through, there.)

For instance, he claimed that the explosion of Christian monasticism and asceticism reduced the pool of aristocrats who could serve in the imperial bureaucracy and military, because "so many" of them were giving up their possessions and retiring to monasteries or to the wilderness; this effectively meant that a) the ones that did serve tended to be worse at their jobs than their predecessors and b) the Empire had to make up the difference with "barbarians". These barbarians insidiously ruined the Empire from the inside out, such that their brethren across the frontier could move in and conquer the lot. But there is no actual evidence that a) happened in the sort of volume that would make a difference to the number of competent aristocrats in the government (and a few good reasons to doubt that it did), and even if it did happen, there is no obvious impact that we can discern on Roman decision-making and so forth during the relevant period. Indeed, Gibbon's understanding of the Roman Empire's government being beholden to the Church in its various forms - a legacy, ostensibly, of the confrontation between Bishop Ambrosius and Emperor Theodosius I over the sack of Thessalonike - has been dramatically rewritten as a world in which the Emperors pulled more weight in the Christian hierarchy than the other way around.

That's pretty much the most egregious flaw, but there are others. For instance, Gibbon fetishized basically everything having to do with the earlier period of the Roman Empire, and asserted that getting back to the way things were under Traianus and Hadrianus was a Good Thing, regardless of actual context. So a writer like Vegetius, who was either a troll or simply deluded, who proposed nonsensical recommendations for the reform of the Roman military based on earlier lines, was lauded. (Vegetius' writings, idiotic in his own time, ended up being key military texts for medieval and early modern European officers, hilariously, but at least they did not slavishly reproduce all of his dicta, merely using them as an influence on their own ideas.) Unfortunately, I can't really call something like that "outdated", because the aforementioned Goldsworthy says the exact same things in How Rome Fell, released in 2009 - this is what happens when a historian ventures outside of his area of expertise.

Gibbon reproduced, but was not the originator of, myths such as the idea that the later Roman army sucked and lost most of its battles against the "barbarians" and the notion that the "barbarians" were some sort of elemental Germanic hive mind bent on destroying Rome at all costs, and ultimately succeeding and plunging Europe into an era when life sucked (although, to be fair, Gibbon does state that life under the later Roman state sucked too, but that's part of his fetishization of the early Roman Empire). Neither of these claims is as outdated as they should be, because people seem to believe in them as fact (see the most recent late Roman threads on this very forum), but they hold no water among modern scholars.

As to your question on Eastern Roman cultural history, I'm sorry to say that I'm kind of garbage on it; the most recent books that have anything to do with it that I've read were written in the late nineties, and they only go over it fairly cursorily.
 
On that last point, what sort of time-frame should you allow yourself when looking for books on a subject? Obviously, fields move at different speeds at different times, and individuals books vary in lifespan, but as a very general guideline? (Obviously, certain books will have usefulness as introductions to certain points of theory or historiography even if they're not exactly up to date; last semester I was assigned Hobsbawm's Age of Revolution and they basically spent two months picking holes in it.)
 
On that last point, what sort of time-frame should you allow yourself when looking for books on a subject? Obviously, fields move at different speeds at different times, and individuals books vary in lifespan, but as a very general guideline? (Obviously, certain books will have usefulness as introductions to certain points of theory or historiography even if they're not exactly up to date; last semester I was assigned Hobsbawm's Age of Revolution and they basically spent two months picking holes in it.)
Depends. There's still plenty of great stuff going back to the sixties and seventies that still has a great deal of merit. The aforementioned Bury published between 1889 and 1923, and his conclusions still hold up reasonably well. The equivalent of Bury for Byzantine history, Aleksandr Vasiliev, published in the 1920s and the 1930s. (Vasiliev emigrated to the United States and his major works can all be found in English.) It's less about the dates per se and more about the conclusions drawn and the evidence used; Goldsworthy's How Rome Fell, despite being a recent publication by a well-known historian who amply backs up his opinions, is garbage compared to the much older History of the Later Roman Empire.

The reason I was chary of recommending anything on cultural history was less because the books I've read were written in the late nineties - still very up to date, especially for Byzantine studies - and more because they aren't focused on cultural history. One of the ones I was thinking of mentioning, Mark Whittow's The Making of Byzantium, 600-1025, even employs a somewhat out-there interpretation of Byzantine culture to make its points. I would check their bibliographies, but I don't have any of the books to hand.
 
I have Whittow on hand :p
 
May be a tough one, but what was the world economy like in A.D.1500? (In terms of leading countries in nominal GDP, GDP per capita, etc.) I don't expect any answers to be accurate, but I would like to know.

Very roughly speaking, the broad regions of Europe, India and China were roughly on par with each other in terms of both economic size and per capita wealth, with Europe slightly ahead in the latter regard.

I got a question myself: how did Chiang Kai-shek ever got to Cairo in 1943, anyway? It sounds like a logistic nightmare of a trip.
 
Very roughly speaking, the broad regions of Europe, India and China were roughly on par with each other in terms of both economic size and per capita wealth, with Europe slightly ahead in the latter regard.

I got a question myself: how did Chiang Kai-shek ever got to Cairo in 1943, anyway? It sounds like a logistic nightmare of a trip.

Are you sure that all of Europe was on par with China/India in GDP?
That seems unlikely.
 
But where they even close?
I read somewhere that India had the world's largest economy (GDP) from the 1st to 18th centuries.
According to the late Angus Maddison's estimates - problematic, but widely accepted as the best we have - total Western and Eastern European GDP was lower than those of either China or India in 1500, but was within about twenty percent of either, which certainly qualifies as "about the same", especially when considering that that's probably smaller than the error involved in making such calculations. :p
 
Very roughly speaking, the broad regions of Europe, India and China were roughly on par with each other in terms of both economic size and per capita wealth, with Europe slightly ahead in the latter regard.

Source?

According to the late Angus Maddison's estimates - problematic, but widely accepted as the best we have - total Western and Eastern European GDP was lower than those of either China or India in 1500, but was within about twenty percent of either, which certainly qualifies as "about the same", especially when considering that that's probably smaller than the error involved in making such calculations.

Is the better answer, considering

It's virtually impossible to measure the GDP of anywhere before roughly the 19th/20th Century.

Because the science of statistics was only developed in the 19th century. That doesn´t mean that data aren´t available, but these can hardly be called comparable. So at best one can give estimates.Such an exact date as GDP is impossible to attain for 1500, other than by extrapolation.

For example Fernand Braudel´s The Mediterranean covers the periode of Philip II of Spain´s reign, making use of any statististical source available (and besides economy also covers geography and politics). However it only covers the Mediterranean and I don´t know of a comparable work for either India or China.
 
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