nebris: (A Proper General)
"The forty-year period on which this book focuses, from 1490 to 1530, saw greater and greater influxes of capital through this framework of economic institutions. Any one of these processes was a major development in its own right: Scholars have spent decades, centuries even, writing and arguing about them. There are good reasons for this. The emergence of the printing press, for example, can best be understood as a full-blown revolution in information distribution. The cobbling together of a truly global world that for the first time in human history included the Americas was not a minor blip. All of these processes collided in the short decades on either side of 1500. That was not a coincidence; the availability of capital had supercharged all of them.

Each process was intensely disruptive. The quick-as-lightning spread of Martin Luther’s ideas, carrying the Reformation to the fringes of Europe within a few years, owed much to the new popularity of the printing press. War was ubiquitous: No fewer than thirty-two large-scale massacres of Italian civilians, some of which involved many thousands of victims, took place between the beginning of the Italian Wars in 1494 and the year 1528, just after the Sack of Rome. And Italy was only one theater of conflict—the New World empires of the Aztec and Inca fell within a generation of Columbus’s departure in 1492, pouring the treasures of the Americas into European circulation and murdering vast numbers of people in the process.

Any one of these developments was enough to upend the established order of the world, and they were all happening simultaneously, within a very concentrated period. They were not separate phenomena, but mutually reinforcing processes driven by the same underlying mechanisms. These processes then collided with a series of contingent, unforeseen events—accidents of birth and death, the timing of a decision, and so on—to produce an unprecedented global reaction.

That reaction was an age of transition, a time of extraordinary shifts in European life and society with far-reaching implications for the future of the world. We can call it a critical juncture, a decades-long crisis in which those various shifts converged to fundamentally alter the subsequent course of events. This critical juncture created path dependence: The future in which Europe came to dominate the world, while still a long way off, became imaginable only after this period of intense change. Increasing returns accompanied the enormous increase in scale that defined this forty-year period. Of course, there were plenty of critical junctures in the following three centuries that would eventually lead to the Industrial Revolution, but all of them depended on this first, foundational series of contemporaneous shifts.

That is why this forty-year period matters in the grand scheme of history. But it is only half of the story. The other half is what a bewildering, unsettling, and eventful era this was to live through. Real people felt the Atlantic wind howling in their faces, heard the raucous chaos of a bustling port, and smelled the odor of burning gunpowder amid the madness of the battlefield. They fought, suffered, loved, bought, sold, plowed, spun, succeeded, and failed as the world around them changed irrevocably.

Momentous, world-altering events such as these can seem impersonal if not woven into the fabric of everyday life. To that end, I’ve selected nine individuals to serve as windows into this story, real people who embodied the major themes of capital, state, warfare, and print in their daily lives, who both actively drove and passively experienced them. Some, such as Christopher Columbus, Queen Isabella of Castile, and the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, are well-known figures. Others, like the one-armed German nobleman Götz von Berlichingen or the hard-nosed English wool trader John Heritage, are less so. All of them help us better understand this era—what was at stake, what was lost, and what was gained.

It is easy to cast these changes as positive ones, as momentous climaxes in a larger heroic narrative. After all, they led directly to the Industrial Revolution and therefore our own, present world. It is always tempting to believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds, or at least a pretty good one, but grounding these shifts in the lives of real people, great and small, makes it clear that they were not necessarily—or even mostly—beneficial, at least not for the moment. Voyages of exploration led to mass enslavement,genocidal conquests, and the pillaging of entire continents. Rising states squeezed their subjects for taxes to pay for longer and more destructive wars, which in turn immiserated countless others. Printing fomented an information revolution, but the Reformation it helped create led to generations of vicious religious conflict and untold numbers of deaths as a result. Even if we accept that some degree of creative destruction is necessary for innovation and progress, it is destruction nonetheless.

Those costs cannot be forgotten. Balance sheets include both assets and liabilities. So too should the reckoning of this essential period of world history, which laid the groundwork in so many ways, both positive and negative, for where we find ourselves at present."


The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World 1490-1530
by Patrick Wyman
nebris: (A Proper General)
THE RAIN HAD fallen all night, a steady, miserable rain; and when at last the light grew to the point that he could see his troops, George Washington realized that seven of them were lost in the forest, God knew where. For hours he had blundered through the dripping dark, time and again leading the little column off the trail, sometimes taking a quarter hour just to grope his way back to the track. Confused, untrained, and wretched, the forty soldiers who had somehow held together through the night were hardly prepared to fight any enemy, let alone one experienced in forest warfare. Nonetheless the tall Virginian led them on, following the Indian warrior who had come to warn them of their peril.

Toward daybreak the rain stopped, and the remnants of Washington’s patrol reached the Indian camp. There the soldiers dried and loaded their muskets while Washington conferred with the old chief who had summoned him. Tanaghrisson, called the “Half King” by the English who regarded him as an ally, described the tracks he had seen nearby. They led toward a sheltered place he knew; there, he suspected, the French had been bivouacked since the day before. Washington’s soldiers could march to a spot nearby and wait while his own men reconnoitered. Once the warriors knew the enemy’s strength and disposition, they and the Virginians could fall on the camp together. Washington agreed.

He had no choice. However little he cared for Indians, however little he trusted them, he could never have found the Frenchmen’s camp without them. Surely he could not have found it in time to dispose his men in firing positions while the French, groggy with sleep, were just starting to cook breakfast at the foot of a tall rock face. Quietly his men and the Indians stationed themselves above and around the narrow glen, while on its floor Frenchmen still crawled from their bark lean-tos and stretched themselves in the early light.

As always in such affairs, no one knows exactly what happened next. Perhaps, as the French later said, the English fired on them without warning. Or perhaps, as Washington maintained, a Frenchman shouted a warning that sent his comrades flying to their arms and firing up into the woods. All that is certain is that the English fired two volleys down into the hollow while the French returned a few ragged shots and tried to retreat into the shelter of the trees.

But there was no escape. The Half King’s warriors had blocked the path, forcing the thirty-odd Frenchmen back into the clearing, where English fire pinned them down. An officer called for quarter, and Washington ordered his men to cease firing. Perhaps ten minutes had passed since the first shot. It had been a lopsided skirmish. Around the rim of the hollow three of Washington’s troops were wounded, and one lay dead; at its bottom the French had suffered fourteen casualties. One of the wounded, a thirty-five-year-old ensign named Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, identified himself as the detachment’s commander. Through a translator he tried to make it known that he had come in peace, as an emissary with a message summoning the English to withdraw from the possessions of His Most Christian Majesty, Louis XV. The letter he carried would make everything clear. His interpreter would read it.

As the combatants’ adrenaline levels subsided and the wounded men moaned, the translation went badly. The letter had to be read a second time, and Washington turned to take it back to his own translator. As he withdrew, Tanaghrisson stepped up to where Jumonville lay. “Tu n’es pas encore mort, mon père,” he said; Thou art not yet dead, my father. He raised his hatchet and sank it in the ensign’s head, striking until he had shattered the cranium. Then he reached into the skull, pulled out a handful of viscous tissue, and washed his hands in Jumonville’s brain.

The tall Virginian who until that instant had thought himself in command did nothing while the Half King’s warriors, as if on signal, set about killing the wounded. Within moments only one of the Frenchmen who had been hit in the firefight was left alive. Recovering his composure, Washington now salvaged what he could by forming his men around the twenty-one surviving prisoners and hustling them to safety. Behind them, in the bloody hollow, the Half King’s men scalped and stripped the thirteen corpses, decapitating one and impaling its head on a stake. Then they, too, abandoned the glen, and crows flapped noisily down from the trees to begin the feast. Soon wolves would lope in to do their part; eventually maggots and beetles and ants would finish the job in meticulous silence.

By afternoon Washington was back at his own camp, groping for explanations and trying to plan his next move. Since boyhood he had dreamed of battle’s glory. Now he had seen combat but no heroism: only chaos and the slaughter of defenseless men. Why had it happened? What could he tell his superiors? What would happen next? George Washington had none of the answers.


THERE COULD HARDLY be a clearer example of a historical moment when events vastly incommensurate with human intention begin to follow from the efforts of an individual to cope with a situation run out of control than this otherwise ordinary Wednesday morning in May 1754. Nothing could have been further from Washington’s mind, or more alien to the designs of the men who had entrusted him with troops and ordered him to the Ohio Valley, than beginning a war. Neither he nor his masters imagined that they were setting in train events that would destroy the American empire of France. Much less could they have foreseen that a stunning Anglo-American victory would lead to yet another war, one that would destroy Britain’s empire and raise in its ruin the American republic that Washington himself would lead.

So extraordinary indeed were the events that followed from this callow officer’s acts and hesitations that we must begin by shaking off the impression that some awesome destiny shaped occurrences in the Ohio Valley during the 1750s. For in fact the presence of French troops and forts in the region, the determination of Virginia’s colonial governor to remove them, and the decisions of the French and British governments to use military force to back up the maneuverings of colonists deep in the American interior all resulted from the unusually powerful coincidence of some very ordinary human factors: ambition and avarice, fear and misunderstanding, miscalculation and mischance. How such a combination could produce a backwoods massacre is not, perhaps, hard to imagine. How that particular butchery gave rise to the greatest war of the eighteenth century, however, is less easy to explain. To understand it, we must first chart the paths by which the interests of the Iroquois Confederacy, the government of New France, the governor of Virginia, and a group of Anglo-American land speculators all converged, in the spring of 1754, at the spot where the Allegheny joins the Monongahela and the Ohio’s waters begin their long descent through the heart of America to the Mississippi, and the sea.

Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 by Fred Anderson

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