What I'm Reading...
Sep. 18th, 2021 05:28 pm"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
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