History questions not worth their own thread III

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Persecute the Irish and claim that the French forced your hand. Two birds with one stone.
 
Visibility. Makes it easier to identify your own side through all that smoke.





:vomit:
Everyone knows Protestants work over 9000 times as hard as Papists hence why the Netherlands industrialized and Belgium stayed a primitive unindustrialized hellhole
I would say persecute Irish, but that is the default response by just about all Brits and English to just about anything.
The evil French forced our hand,
If we denounce them all as Papists we've completed the Holy Trinity of English-gasms.
:yup:
 
Persecute the Irish and claim that the French forced your hand. Two birds with one stone.

The French forced their hand by disrupting the balance of power, m i rite?
 
it would take real serious blind faith in r16 nonsense , but ı am not confusing anything . De Gaulle would have all the numbers he would have needed but for the faster than expected German advance , Stukas that interdicted good enough etc etc .
 
That question is subjective, and also relative, and also uselessly non-descript. I like the music though.
 
That question is subjective, and also relative, and also uselessly non-descript. I like the music though.

I like the music too, so I thought a correlation might be interesting between the period of the music and the period of the time.

Ok, to restate:

Could the Baroque period be described, in general categories (standard of living, level of technological advancement, number of major wars, international relations, cultural advancement) as a high mark in human development, relative to other periods of history, before, and also after?

For example, might the period be described as a local maxima (calculus term) in the power curve of human advancement versus time?
For example, in trying to answer this question, I unraveled that England began importing metal forks for use when eating meat. +1!
 
Isn't that totally dependent on what metrics you use to measure "advancement", and then what metrics you use are totally dependent on your personal system of valuation? And even then, what if you want to measure "advancement" in unmeasurable ways? In arbitrary ways? In the number of cool skull pyramids?
 
standard of living, level of technological advancement, number of major wars, international relations, cultural advancement
First you need to define what "good" is in each category. They are broad and subjective to varying degress.
 
I can't even hope to address that on a global scale, but I will say that in my area of speciality, that marks a particularly distressing low point beginning with the nine years, following that with the flight of the earls, the war of the confederacy, the Cromwellian Invasion, The Cromwellian land settlement, the enactment of the penal laws, and the Great Famine of the 18th century.
So basically the worst period of warfare, political and religious repression, plus terrible famine on a scale not topped until the 19th century.
 
How much contact was their between the people of the various Polynesian island chains before the arrival of Westerners? I know that within any given set of islands- Hawaii, Tonga, the Cook Islands, etc.- there was frequent trade and communication between the populations of different islands, but how far and to what extent was this the case between archipelagos? And, following up on that, was the any known contact between the Maori population of New Zealand and the people of other Polynesian or Melanesian islands?
 
Traitorfish said:
How much contact was their between the people of the various Polynesian island chains before the arrival of Westerners?

Depends: some chains did talk, some did intermarry, some visited, some raided and some traded. Most did some combination of the above at least with the closest islands. Strangely, some traded but didn't marry: some raided and didn't trade and still others just visited and talked. Quite why is hard to say. I tend to lean in most cases towards non-objective reasons: tied to tapu, mana, etc - rather than 'objective' measures like not having complementary trade goods etc. Objective measures hold for some, the real danger thinking they hold for all.

Traitorfish said:
? I know that within any given set of islands- Hawaii, Tonga, the Cook Islands, etc.- there was frequent trade and communication between the populations of different islands, but how far and to what extent was this the case between archipelagos?

Trade was pretty active across Bougainville, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Niue and the Cook Islands. (That is across an archipelago: strictly speaking, I think, four). I'm no scholar of Hawaii but there was some trade between Hawaii and the former trade chain. However, to paraphrase J.C van Luer: trade was but a golden gossimer thread, that linked the regions together; it wasn't that large, for the most part, and it tended to focus on niches that other islands could not fill. However this had started to change in between Samoa/Tonga trade was moving towards bulk exchange.

Traitorfish said:
And, following up on that, was the any known contact between the Maori population of New Zealand and the people of other Polynesian or Melanesian islands?

There was some although the evidence often contrary and difficult to parse, while the matter itself is subject to not a small amount of academic debate still. What we do know is that there is some archaeological evidence that supports trade: whether or not that is evidence of continued trade, over the long term, is hard to say; but there is evidence of some exchange after the initial colonisation, perhaps lasting for potentially a couple of hundred years after settlement. This is supported by a number of things that have origins outside New Zealand - precise origins are open to debate - that have turned up in archaeological digs, at variance with the 'accepted' (1200AD) colonisation date. The problem being that most of these objects are stone or bone - i.e. those objects that would be expected to survive - but which are also hard to date, definitively. It might be the case that they were being used long after they had been introduced to New Zealand and that they were lost some centuries after arriving. There's no real agreement on the matter: I tend to lean towards the notion that some trade occurred, but perhaps as a function of later subsequent groups arriving. Then again, what we know of Maori DNA suggests that this is unlikely, although frankly while DNA is an objective thing so far as these go, interpretation is manifestly not (and the calibre of interpretation of Maori DNA has always left me rather cold). Moreover, the 'flows' of genes into the pool are usually distributed over generations - which in lay terms: usually implies up to and perhaps more than a hundred years, hardly super accurate. Maori oral tradition is a little bit weird on the matter, there's some support: but it's hard to form a strong opinion either way.

tl;dr: Hard to say, but most probably and as a function of subsequent waves of migration (hypothetically). The really interesting question is at what point it stopped, population inflows ceased, people forgot about New Zealand - as a tangible thing - and why.
 
I like the music too, so I thought a correlation might be interesting between the period of the music and the period of the time.

Ok, to restate:

Could the Baroque period be described, in general categories (standard of living, level of technological advancement, number of major wars, international relations, cultural advancement) as a high mark in human development, relative to other periods of history, before, and also after?

For example, might the period be described as a local maxima (calculus term) in the power curve of human advancement versus time?
For example, in trying to answer this question, I unraveled that England began importing metal forks for use when eating meat. +1!

My impression is that the era in question was pretty grim compared to what came both before and after, but this is a largely subjective one.

It was a particularly bad time to be a woman - I have seen the seventeenth century described as one of the most misogynistic periods in history. The witch hunts, which occurred during this period and that immediately before, were the greatest persecution of one sex by the other in history. It was also a time of great religious and nationalistic bigotry and violence, containing as it did the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
 
don't forget the outrageously bloody Ming-Qing transition period from about 1610 to the 1680s
 
I reckon the 17th and 18th centuries were a good time to be an aristocrat, which could easily be reflected in the music given that music was mostly the preserve of the aristocracy anyway.
 
I dunno, I've never heard is used outside of music, art, and architecture, but apparently it's now supposed to encompass warfare and the Average Person's Life too? I imagine all bets are off at that point
 
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