Historical Book Recomendation Thread

[Masada]

I just picked a random page and got this:

WHEN THE ROMANS took over the Phoenician salt fish trade, they discovered how to make their purple dye. A logical byproduct of fish salting, the dye was produced by salting murex, a Mediterranean mollusk whose three-inch shell resembles a dainty whelk.

Aristotle in his History of Animals talks in detail about how tyrian purple is produced. So the cat was out of the bag long before the Romans took over the Phoenicians. The issue for producing it elsewhere wasn't that the recipe was a secret but the lack of the murex needed to produce it.

AFTER THE FALL of Rome in the fifth century, garum was often thought of as just one of the unpleasant hedonistic excesses for which Rome was remembered. Leaving fish organs in the sun to rot was not an idea that endured in less extravagant cultures. Of course when garum was made properly, the salt prevented rotting until the fermentation took hold. But it became increasingly difficult to convince people of this. Anthimus, living in sixth-century Gaul, in a culture that was leaving Rome behind, rejected garum for salt or even brine...

Anthimus' anti-garum sentiments could well have been derived from Roman sources. Seneca called garum that "costly extract of poisonous fish" which "burns up the stomach with its salted putrefaction".

After the fall of Rome, garum vanished from the Mediterranean, the region lost its importance as a salt fish producer, and the purple dye industry faded. But the Roman idea that building saltworks was part of building empires endured.

The Eastern Roman Empire continued to produce and consume garum for sometime after the fall of Rome.

No. Which is my point.

Huh, that's interesting. I guess we better take up the matter with the history police because food history seems to have its own academic journals.

 

[Mouthwash]

Huh, that's interesting. I guess we better take up the matter with the history police because food history seems to have its own academic journals.

Not the kind that's even slightly relevant to me.

 

[Masada]

So it isn't history because it isn't relevant to you?

 

[Mouthwash]

Let's just go with that.

 

[North King]

One day, if you live long enough, you, too, shall discover that political and military history are not the only kinds there are.

 

[Flying Pig]

I mentioned it in the reading thread a while ago, but would like to extend a recommendation to CR Whittaker's Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study. Its central argument is that there weren't fixed lines at which 'Romans' stopped and 'barbarians' began, but rather large areas in which the two identities coexisted and it was difficult to tell who was who.

 

[Louis XXIV]

I think that's fair. Although I do think Guy Halsall has a point that the Limes did mean something to Roman psyche even if, as a practical point, it was hard to tell the difference on the ground.

BTW, I saw two books in a book store the other day. I didn't want to buy either, but they looked interesting. I was wondering if anyone knew anything about them or their authors?

The first was The Reach of Rome by Alberto Angela (translated by Gregory Conti). It essentially surveys the Roman Empire and its daily life by tracing the path of a (possibly fictitious?) coin. The other was After Thermpoylae by Paul Cartledge, which talks about the Battle of Plataea and its aftermath for the Greek world (why we remember the Athenian-led victories but not the Spartan one, the oath that the participants took afterward, and the consequences of it).

Does anyone have any knowledge of any of this and whether it's worth a purchase?

 

[Masada]

I think that's fair. Although I do think Guy Halsall has a point that the Limes did mean something to Roman psyche even if, as a practical point, it was hard to tell the difference on the ground.

Ya. We do much the same when we use the sea as a border. There's clearly an Australian border but it just isn't tied to terrestrial markers and isn't immediately obvious. I'd imagine that the Limes often functioned like that. There were at least some terrestrial markers - in the form of towns and the like - but there wasn't just a big exclusion wall or anything.

 

[Flying Pig]

It's only an assumption that the limes actually did reflect the border - they were checkpoints for traffic and in some cases defensive lines, but that doesn't mean that they were considered the limits of Roman authority. After all, the Athenians, faced with Spartan invasion, retreated to their Long Walls, allowing the Spartans free reign in their territory beyond the walls. It's not unreasonable that the Romans might have planned on doing the same, while still keeping territories beyond the limes which they did not intend to defend in case of a major invasion.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Plus, the idea of a limit on Roman Authority didn't really exist for the Romans. Any border they chose was a matter of convenience for them, not a recognition of sovereignty of anything else.

 

[Flying Pig]

That's my theory, but the problem is that you can't really prove it, because the only evidence for it comes from quite jingoistic media - political speeches and patriotic poetry - which might be expected to use that sort of language anyway. The classic example is Jupiter's imperium sine fine dedi in Aeneid 1 ('I have given them authority without bounds'), but this doesn't actually prove that the Romans saw their law as encompassing the whole world any more than 'Britannia rules the waves' proves that the British claim the entire ocean as their EEZ.

EDIT: There is at least one case of them making a treaty ceding specific territories to Persia, which could be taken as the recognition of a legal boundary. Or it could be the recognition that they no longer had the firepower to occupy those territories. We really don't know what was going on in their heads.

 

[Traitorfish]

Plus, the idea of a limit on Roman Authority didn't really exist for the Romans. Any border they chose was a matter of convenience for them, not a recognition of sovereignty of anything else.

It's sort of a pity that we don't get universal empires any more. The sort of intellectual acrobatics those things produced could be a lot of fun.

 

[ParkCungHee]

That's my theory, but the problem is that you can't really prove it, because the only evidence for it comes from quite jingoistic media - political speeches and patriotic poetry - which might be expected to use that sort of language anyway. The classic example is Jupiter's imperium sine fine dedi in Aeneid 1 ('I have given them authority without bounds'), but this doesn't actually prove that the Romans saw their law as encompassing the whole world any more than 'Britannia rules the waves' proves that the British claim the entire ocean as their EEZ.

EDIT: There is at least one case of them making a treaty ceding specific territories to Persia, which could be taken as the recognition of a legal boundary. Or it could be the recognition that they no longer had the firepower to occupy those territories. We really don't know what was going on in their heads.

I don't think it's necessary for the Romans to believe their law encompassed the whole world for the Romans to have recognized their borders as only a practical limit. In fact, it'd take quite a bit of evidence for me to be convinced otherwise, because that sort of thinking doesn't emerge until much, much later, AFAIK.

So I'm not entirely certain the concept of a border in the modern sense can be imposed backwards on to the era.

It's sort of a pity that we don't get universal empires any more. The sort of intellectual acrobatics those things produced could be a lot of fun.

Honestly, it probably produces a lot less intellectual acrobatics then the modern state.

 

[Oruc]

The other was After Thermpoylae by Paul Cartledge, which talks about the Battle of Plataea and its aftermath for the Greek world (why we remember the Athenian-led victories but not the Spartan one, the oath that the participants took afterward, and the consequences of it).

Does anyone have any knowledge of any of this and whether it's worth a purchase?

I've had this book since Christmas and I gave up on it. It was too dry for me or perhaps it required a deeper knowledge of Greece then I possess.

 

[Flying Pig]

I don't think it's necessary for the Romans to believe their law encompassed the whole world for the Romans to have recognized their borders as only a practical limit.

Yes, that's the 'weak version', if you like, of the conjecture, which is almost impossible to deny. As I said, my inclination is that they believed the whole world to actually be Roman territory, and that the 'empire' to be only that which they directly administered, but that's more difficult to prove.

 

[Algeroth]

Has anyone here any opinion about John Darwin's After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000?

 

[Phrossack]

Has anyone here any opinion about John Darwin's After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000?

I've read it twice, but it's been a while and I can't remember most of it. That said, it made me aware of a lot of interesting things, and I do recall that Darwin argued that China failed to industrialize like Europe because of a shortage of coal and timber, and that the European dominance of the world was growing stronger until Europe destroyed itself in WWI. I liked it, but I'm sure the rest of WH will eviscerate it.

 

[Joecoolyo]

I read that about 3 years ago and I liked it. Unlike other global history books where it's basically European History, he does a good job spending equal amounts of time on each of the regions he outlines.

 

[cybrxkhan]

Does anyone here have any good recommendations for something that deals with slave masters and their opinions and attitudes towards slavery? My impression was that the literature dealing with slavery tends to focus more so on the slaves themselves, but I'm interested in seeing how the slave owners viewed the whole thing, as well as comparing the differences between slave owners - it's easy to stereotype them all as inhuman, cruel bastards, but I assume the reality would be more complex.

Obviously I guess much of the literature on this would be dealing with the transatlantic African slave trade, but anything dealing with slavery outside of that context (for example, in the pre-modern Middle East or classical antiquity, for instance), would be preferable.


Also, on a related note, anybody know any good books on the harem systems of the Middle East and Asia?

 

[sophie]

Does anyone here have any good recommendations for something that deals with slave masters and their opinions and attitudes towards slavery? My impression was that the literature dealing with slavery tends to focus more so on the slaves themselves, but I'm interested in seeing how the slave owners viewed the whole thing, as well as comparing the differences between slave owners - it's easy to stereotype them all as inhuman, cruel bastards, but I assume the reality would be more complex.

Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market is an excellent place to start.