History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VII

[JohannaK]

Secession? What secession?

 

[jackelgull]

I meant War of Spanish Succession. Please forgive me for my spelling error.

 

[Tee Kay]

If I thought people would listen I could put together something similar on the Congo Crisis, the secession of Katanga, and the CAF. Everyone has their specialties they are really good at.

Please do. We haven't had a good old-fashioned CFC-WH history article in a long while. Besides, I have a morbid fascination with the Congo Crisis (I blame Adam Curtis for this). Bonus points if you include the Rwandan and Burundian revolutions.

 

[JohannaK]

I meant War of Spanish Succession. Please forgive me for my spelling error.

Nah, I know what you meant, but this is one of the usual misspellings that trigger me, along "Caucus" instead of "Caucas" and others.

 

[jackelgull]

I've been meaning to start a topic on the first four Caliphs and the first fitna. I left out a lot in my earlier post like the inherent instability within the Caliphate's succession system, as well as actual policy analysis of the various Caliphs (this would be a complicated proposal since its a mixed bag. Umar,the second Caliph for example, was the gentlemen who established the 80 lashes penalty for drinking alcohol and vigorously enforced it. He also established a functioning highly effective court system. Before executive power and judicial power were one and the same). And the first fitna is really complicated. It's basically the power imbalances and grudges of the Muslim community exploding out into the open.

The only thing stopping me is that as I've mentioned, it is really complicated, and most of my information is coming from Shiite sources who have this rabid unrelenting hatred for the first three caliphs. I get it, they usurped power from your precious Ali. Don't let that prevent you from acknowledging that these people managed to keep an empire together for as long as they have. Yes, they made mistakes and were sometimes their own enemies. They also weren't the incompetent buffoons you keep trying to make tem out to be.

Sorry about that rant, I just read a particularly egregious Shiite source.

 

[JohannaK]

I'm eager to read both.

 

[Dachs]

Interesting little discussion on artillery: I admit to not having much high-level training on artillery, but as far as I've ever been on the sharp end of doctrine it has been something called in by commanders as low as platoon level, rather than simply being directed by huge formations like armies. I suspect part of this is due to the scale on which military operations happen these days - a company today might take up the physical space occupied by a regiment or brigade in the 1870s - but it's interesting to see totally different ideas about how broadly the same sort of weapon should be employed.

Yeah, platoon-level fires are a very recent development.

For most of early modern history, the regiment was the fundamental building block of armies. Regimental guns were a relative innovation during the Thirty Years' War (usually ascribed to the Swedish military); by the 1640s, both the Imperialists and their opponents employed them. This was mostly important because later in the war, formations spread out a lot more as the proportion of trained pikemen in armies declined. Without solid blocks of pikemen for shock attacks and defense, artillery was meant to replace them - but only to an extent. Most commanders of the 1640s viewed cannon and musketry as an inferior option to trained pikemen, because the relatively slow attrition of fire effects meant that battles lasted longer and were harder to resolve. To some extent, this was ameliorated by employing larger proportions of cavalry in armies as well, for shock purposes, but this only went so far.

Regimental guns were about as low as it got, with few exceptions; most commanders for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries viewed large gun lines as a superior option. For one thing, they were easier to control. For another, they applied the principle of concentration of force: with all the guns in one place, all their fires could be massed in the same place as well, for decisive effect, instead of spreading them out everywhere pointlessly. Black-powder artillery was effective enough, but it wasn't that effective. The advent of canister shot meant that individual batteries posted on the defense in specific locations to support outnumbered infantry could be effective, but for assault purposes you'd need a long gun line firing solid shot and primitive shells.

High explosives changed all of that, quite dramatically. Fire effects were much greater, by several orders of magnitude, than they had been for black-powder artillery. Greater fire effect meant that artillery had to be dispersed, to protect it from counterbattery fires, and often concealed, for the same purposes. By the 1890s, most artillery theorists agreed that gun lines were a thing of the past. Instead, as the German general Heinrich Rohne pointed out in his The Development of Modern Field Artillery, the optimal solution would be to disperse guns while using modern communications technology to concentrate their fires, creating a "mass effect" that imitated the result that one got when employing a gun line.

But still, concentrating fires on often-absurdly small sectors was seen as the norm until the First World War. In that conflict, commanders learned two important things. First, the British and Germans found that cheap artillery support gave isolated units a massive force multiplier, and combined it with the insight that high-angle fires were much more useful in trench warfare to resurrect the concept of the siege mortar; the British went further by developing the Stokes mortar, the first modern portable mortar, which gave battalion, company, and even platoon commanders their first indirect fire support. The Stokes mortar was rapidly copied and improved by virtually every participant in the conflict.

Second - and this was a much slower development - it became clear that there was a practical upper limit to the effects of massed artillery on a target. The colossal British preparatory bombardment for the Battle of the Somme lasted five days and employed over 1.5 million shells, and had nugatory effects on target. Most German fortifications were not destroyed; neither the German front lines nor their reserves were seriously affected. Instead, the massive bombardment alerted OHL and the local army commands to the attack sector, forfeited all possibility of surprise, and destroyed the ground in the attack sector, making it extremely difficult to bring up reserves and displace artillery forward to provide offensive fire support. By the end of the war, commanders on both sides increasingly opted for hurricane bombardments that lasted as short as half an hour, but which achieved significantly greater effect on target due to improved accuracy protocols (like the Bruchmüller and Pulkowski methods), innovative mixtures of gas, and well-organized artillery task groups for command and control. This also meant that fires, while concentrated in an individual operational sector, were deliberately dispersed tactically to keep from wasting shells on suppressed targets or empty ground. This, too, meant that in many cases very low-ranking subordinate commanders could call for fire support and potentially receive it, depending on the circumstances.

Since then, artillery technique has only improved, with the development of radio and liaison officers to facilitate air support and indirect fires, and a steady increase in gun accuracy. Bracketing targets at range is a lot easier when a trained observer can relay fire adjustments instantaneously; drones and GPS have made precision targeting second nature; more rapid targeting facilitates not only accuracy but also greater fire rate, meaning fewer tubes are required to do more tasks. In addition, the battlefield has gotten, if anything, even emptier than it was after the firepower revolution in military affairs a century ago. Like you say: a company or platoon might hold a sector now that in 1870 would have required a division or corps. That means they all need individual fire support, especially by NATO doctrine.

Very true, but communication back in the day was done by rider - if a battalion commander can give orders to his company commanders by a man on a horse, he can also call for fire by the same method. Armies are really quite big - we're talking hundreds of thousands of men spread over a tremendously large area. It's quite an unwieldy level on which to be directing fire to soften up a fortified/entrenched enemy position, which is the primary use of such a weapon today.

Yeah. Back when you could plausibly observe 50-60% of a battle from a single vantage point, and troops were packed into 8x8km square killing fields, it made sense for the army and corps commanders to direct fires. By the 1890s, this was completely impossible.

Does anyone have any solid recommendations or knowledge of the era of the first four Caliphs (Ie Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali)?

Unfortunately, I do not. I'm very far from an expert on the field, sadly enough, but I'm aware of it enough to know that the period has horrendous source problems (all sources are late, most of them are extremely late, and all of them are unreliable) and, naturally, the topic is even more fraught because of its religious, cultural, and political relevance.

I have heard that In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire, by Robert Hoyland, is good. He may be the best academic in the world on the subject of the historiography of early Islam, especially from the perspective of non-Muslims. I, however, haven't read it myself, so I can't actually recommend it. And I apologize if you've already heard of or read it yourself.

Anyhow, a question probably worth its own thread but whatever:
During the 18th and early 19th century, how good was the Royal Navy compared to its peers? If it was measurably superior to its peers was it due to any specific thing the RN was doing or just the fact the UK could basically let the land forces rot and spend gobs of money on the navy?

For most of the eighteenth century, the Royal Navy's superiority over the fleets of the Gallispan powers - the charming word that crops up in period sources to refer to the Bourbon kingdoms of France and Spain, so often allied under the Family Compacts - was marginal but real. Numerically, the Royal Navy usually had something close to parity with the two Bourbon fleets combined (although it fluctuated, and it wasn't unusual for it to be slightly understrength than both, or slightly overstrength). In terms of fleet quality, the two sides were roughly equivalent for most of that period. Britain truly excelled in its fleet command, which was unified in a way that the Gallispan navies could not match, and in its numbers of trained and able sailors, which dwarfed the sailing manpower reserves of France and Spain. Neither of these advantages was inherently based on cash expended, although it's worth pointing out that Britain consistently outspent France in adjusted terms in the wars that the two countries fought during the eighteenth century, with the sole possible exception of the American rebellion (depending on how you calculate it).

In addition, the British got lucky in important ways. Naval disasters meant a great deal, because ships and trained sailors were much harder to recover than, say, infantry. When the Royal Navy won battles, the strategic effects of these were usually nugatory compared to the psychological effects, but more importantly, the British drained the French and Spanish of trained sailors at a rate that could not be matched. Many coin-flip battles came up with the Union Jack, with only a few notable exceptions; many might-have-been French invasions were stymied by difficulty on land or by poor weather.

This changed dramatically during the French revolutionary wars, which were a watershed in truly introducing the period when British naval supremacy was essentially unchallenged. (Sadly enough for the French, there was a brief window when the Royal Navy was so dramatically weakened that even an understrength fleet could probably have crushed it: the period surrounding the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore. But by the late 1790s, the French fleet was so badly attenuated that such a strike was probably not possible. They had failed to transport General Hoche's expeditionary force to Ireland in 1796 due to poor, untrained seamanship, and in 1798, when the revolution actually broke out, only 1,000 Frenchmen were actually able to reach the rebels and support them.) The combination of key defeats at sea and a state policy that consistently neglected the fleet meant that by the latter half of Napoléon's reign, France was so far behind that most of its naval efforts were harassment and distraction rather than a naval offensive that could plausibly be geared toward seriously challenging British control of the waves. Furthermore, the long Continental blockade without rest severely impaired France's regeneration of naval manpower. For over twenty years, few new Frenchmen learned how to sail because the Royal Navy effectively shut down many French ports. Fishing and trading dramatically declined, as did the skills that men acquired by plying those trades. Few trained sailors meant that although Napoléon often built new fleets, these fleets were of dubious use because their crews were vastly inferior to those of the British.

From there, there was no looking back. Apart from an abortive bid for naval equality following the development of ironclads and steam-propelled vessels under Napoléon III, the French fleet remained clearly inferior to that of the British. Britain could outbuild France, Britain could outspend France, and Britain had a larger pool of naval manpower.

No other powers during the period even came close to presenting a viable threat to the British at sea.

 

[jackelgull]

Unfortunately, I do not. I'm very far from an expert on the field, sadly enough, but I'm aware of it enough to know that the period has horrendous source problems (all sources are late, most of them are extremely late, and all of them are unreliable) and, naturally, the topic is even more fraught because of its religious, cultural, and political relevance.

I have heard that In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire, by Robert Hoyland, is good. He may be the best academic in the world on the subject of the historiography of early Islam, especially from the perspective of non-Muslims. I, however, haven't read it myself, so I can't actually recommend it. And I apologize if you've already heard of or read it yourself.

After reading the reviews, this seems like it will be well worth the read, although there might be somethings I will be skeptical about (like Muhammed's death being later than the traditional reports). Thanks, its nice to have a book that won' try to push some kind of moral judgment on history at the cost of facts.

 

[Ajidica]

Please do. We haven't had a good old-fashioned CFC-WH history article in a long while. Besides, I have a morbid fascination with the Congo Crisis (I blame Adam Curtis for this). Bonus points if you include the Rwandan and Burundian revolutions.

We talking about the "Oh Dearism" Adam Curtis?

Link to video.
(Minor language, but it was on the BBC.)

If yes, where did he talk about the Congo Crisis? I did a brief youtube search but didn't see anything.

 

[jackelgull]

I'd be interested in an account of the Congo Crisis, the secession of Katanga, and the CAF, especially after having read the Poisonwood Bible.

 

[Ajidica]

I'll see about revamping my senior thesis over the weekend (role of ethnicity in the secession of Katanga). I no longer have access to a university library nor most online journal databases so that puts a bit of a damper on things but I should still have pdfs and my notes saved to my laptop though.

 

[Cutlass]

How early in history did people have something like blackboards for showing things to students, or for engineers and scientists to work out problems on? What did they use?

 

[schlaufuchs]

If wikipedia is to be believed, the early explicit attestation of its use dates to 11th century India:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard#Etymology_and_history

The writing slate was in use in Indian schools in the 11th century as mentioned in Alberuni's Indica (Tarikh Al-Hind), written in the early 11th century:–

They use black tablets for the children in the schools, and write upon them along the long side, not the broadside, writing with a white material from the left to the right.[2]

The first classroom uses of large blackboards are difficult to date, but they were used for music education and composition in Europe as far back as the sixteenth century.[3]

 

[Plotinus]

Schoolchildren used wax tablets in antiquity. I would imagine that teachers could also use them to demonstrate things to students.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I watched a math documentary on Netflix where they showed clay tablets used to educate children in Mesopotamia. They have examples of both teacher's copies of text as well as children's homework. It was pretty neat and I guess that takes the basic idea (if not the actual chalk slates) back to whenever Babylon was a thing. (sorry too lazy to look up dates)

 

[Cutlass]

Anyone here know anything about William Howard Taft?

 

[jackelgull]

Does anyone know what effect guilds had on the Industrial Revolution - i.e. Did they oppose it, speed it along etc?

 

[Flying Pig]

The whole idea of the guild was fundamentally opposite to that of the Industrial Revolution - guilds were about high-skilled, low-volume artisans, and only worked because they held a monopoly on their particular trade. The new industrial system was all about reducing the amount of skill in production, and competing through being able to produce goods cheaper. I can only imagine that the guilds didn't take particularly kindly to this, and it's certainly clear that the industrialists didn't like them, partly because they didn't like anything which gave workers collective bargaining power, but also because industrialism brought with it economic ideas about free trade and laissez-faire, neither of which the guild system encouraged.

 

[jackelgull]

The whole idea of the guild was fundamentally opposite to that of the Industrial Revolution - guilds were about high-skilled, low-volume artisans, and only worked because they held a monopoly on their particular trade. The new industrial system was all about reducing the amount of skill in production, and competing through being able to produce goods cheaper. I can only imagine that the guilds didn't take particularly kindly to this, and it's certainly clear that the industrialists didn't like them, partly because they didn't like anything which gave workers collective bargaining power, but also because industrialism brought with it economic ideas about free trade and laissez-faire, neither of which the guild system encouraged.

Why didn't gilds jump on this trend? I mean guild ideology might be opposed to this, but guilds are made up of people with rational motives. Guilds are an institution with a) financial resources built up b) connections to raw material suppliers and c) connections to markets, so why didn't they use their capital to start factories, their connections for suppliers for their factories, and their market connections to sell their goods. It seems like they'd have an advantage in this process, and it isn't like cheap unskilled labor wasn't plentiful in those days.

 

[Flying Pig]

That presupposes that factories moved into cities, so guilds (who were nothing if not city-based) should have simply become the ones building them. Actually, a lot of the time, the opposite happened. Factories went where there was power, and cities often grew up around them. A big reason why electoral reform was such a major issue in the early 19th century in Britain was that huge cities - Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and so on - had grown up essentially out of nothing, where the old electoral map had blank spaces. The existing cities - London, for example - which profited from industry often did so because they were places to trade goods that were manufactured elsewhere. There are very few European capitals, for example, which have also been major industrial centres.

I also suspect that asking 'why didn't guilds start factories?' is a bit like asking 'why don't football teams run burger vans?' A guild is a confederation of artisans; turning it into a board of shareholders would have been fundamentally changing its nature.