Hey, folks, Fireside this week! We’re now well into the Teaching Paradox series on Hearts of Iron, but as you may have noticed, the structure of those posts means they tend to be quite chunky (the first two have both been right around 10,000 words) and longer posts take time. Thus, a fireside this week to balance out, before we move from HoI4‘s purely military layer to its strategic, political and economic layer.
For this week’s musing, I want to talk about a series of videos on ‘realistic’ worldbuilding I’ve seen floating around online from a channel called “The Grainbound.” The channel seems to regularly hit the hundreds of thousands of views on its videos and I’ve seen them floating around among friends and in other contexts which makes me think they’re getting pretty wide distribution in the fantasy-worldbuilding space. They are, after all, decently well-produced and authoritative sounding, which is why it is such a problem that they’re not quite right.
I’m going to pick two of the most popular videos to discuss, to give a sense of what I think is the problem here, one on how the logistics of grain transport supposedly shapes maps (really, the distribution of large settlements on maps) and another on the role of sea trade in food supply to cities. And at first, you might be surprised that I am going to take issue with this, because “food production fundamentally determines the shape of pre-modern societies” is very much my brand. And so it is good to try to reason from historical examples to understand how societies – real and fictional – are structured.
The problem, of course, is that the devil is in the details: how accurate is your understanding of historical societies and how effective is your reasoning from them? When i started listening to these videos, it was a strange sort of experience – some of the principles were right, or at least right-ish, but the whole thing was just a touch off, punctuated by moments of sharp dissonance where I detected a real ‘howler.’
Perhaps the sharpest of these howlers – which made me immediately suspicious about the historical knowledge foundation at work – came in the second video on seaborne trade. The overall point – sea transit is highly dependent on wind patterns, which are sometimes seasonal – is good. He neglects, however, coastal winds (sea breezes and offshore breezes) which tend to be more localized and time-of-day dependent than prevailing winds and more variable, which is part of why a lot of pre-modern shipping is cabotage (literally ‘coasting,’ mixed-cargo, small-load, short-distance coastal routes), a type of shipping his model entirely neglects.
But the point at which I realized this fellow’s knowledge foundation is deeply cracked (and probably very thin) was the claim – at about six minutes in – that “the capital [Rome] was in the wrong place for its own food and rather than move the capital, they spent about a century of moving the harbor towards it.” What he has in mind was the construction of Portus, a large artificial harbor complex built under the emperor Claudius in the mid-first century AD. What he is unaware of is that this wasn’t the first port of Rome: that was Ostia Antica, sitting directly on the mouth of the Tiber (today the site is inland but in antiquity, it was coastal), which construction at Portus expanded. A lot of trade into and out of Latium also went through Puteoli, which the video mentions, but Rome had a port at the mouth of its river and trade-reliant imperial capitals sited inland (often for security reasons) but with dedicated port cities are not rare: Athens and its Piraeus, Antioch and its Seleucia in Pieria, for instance.
Moreover, he was treating the fact that most of the calorie content of Rome arrived in two short bursts as a unique product of the sailing season, when it is in fact an iron law of societies based on cereal cultivation: you eat all year, but the crop only comes in once. For any city pulling from the whole of the Mediterranean – and thus pulling from both spring wheat and winter wheat farming regions – the harvest comes in twice. The boats merely deliver that farming-based timetable on a short delay.
But there’s a deeper problem here, which becomes more visible in his most popular video, “The Ox That’s Breaking You Fantasy Map” where he tries to outline a typology of settlements based on their interaction with grain transport. And the core problem here is a the map is not the territory problem: he is focused on building maps for fantasy worlds and so he is beginning as a map-maker begins: with terrain and then with major settlements and political structures. He thus defines his major settlements as different kinds of ‘Lords’ (really, political regimes): the ‘Chokepoint Lord’ (who controls a trade chokepoint like a mountain pass), the ‘Surplus Lord’ and so on.
The problem is that urban centers and their connected polities don’t emerge this way, springing into existence ex nihilo to respond to fully developed long-distance trade patterns. Instead, they emerge bottom-up. Some clever chap (chaps, really, over many generations) invent farming, enabling sedentary settlements (villages) a greater population density. Those villages get too big (because farmers need to be able to walk to their fields in the morning) and fission, creating new villages (and pushing other less-population-dense communities out of the way, violently, as they do so), as farming communities ‘fill in’ geographic spaces suitable for farming. Lands marginal to farming end up with lower population density strategies (pastoralism, hunting and gathering), often deeply interconnected with the farmers next door.
This ‘carpet’ of farmers isn’t focused on moving grain long distances, these are mostly self-sufficient villages. Now ‘how do towns form’ is a contested question, but there are basically two main schools of thought: towns form when wealthy landholding aristocrats (Big Men) begin centralizing resources (mostly for warfare), or towns form when temples and their priests (Big Men with Fancy Hats) begin centralizing resources (mostly for religious activity, but also for warfare) in the largest, densest villages. In practice, when we look at early settlement formation, both factors appear to be at play. But once the Big Man or the Big Temple have extracted surplus, they’re using it to employ specialists (craftsmen, priests, bureaucrats, domestics and oh so many thugs), which creates a local (still not dealing with long-distance yet) nexus of economic activity, which creates local market-centers. And of course it now makes sense for merchants to stop by those local market-centers (rather than try their luck in random villages) and for the villagers to find artisans or buyers for their crops there.
While our maps generally show just the largest handful of Really Big Market Towns, the territory is a tightly woven carpet of smaller farming villages (interlinked with non-farmers where relevant), so ubiquitous we don’t put them on our maps. I think Tolkien – with his Middle Earth being a world depopulated by catastrophes and thus having large stretches with minimal settlement – is in part to blame here, but folks often don’t seem to quite grasp some times how dense the tapestry of settlement gets in agrarian societies where transit is slow. Here, for instance, via Stanford’s POLIS is a map of the Greek poleis in the broader Aegean:
And of course the ’empty’ spaces here aren’t in most cases really empty: some of them are unsuited for farming and so have low population density, but a lot of them (particularly in Anatolia) are just inhabited by non-Greeks whose communities were thus not captured by the Inventory of Archaid and Classical Poleis (2004) on which the project relies.
Now, human beings are not stupid and so they will recognize key geographic spots and intentionally put centers of control on them, but they do not need to do so. Byzantium and Vienna should both be classic examples of Graindbound’s ‘chokepoint Lord’ but neither was a hugely important place until the Romans chose to make them so – Constantine putting his shiny new capital on top of Byzantium and the Romans building a major military base on the Wienfluss in 97 AD, though Vienna really only becomes an important place because successive German dynasties (the Babenbergs and then the Habsburgs) choose to live there. They could have chosen to live somewhere else! The role these cities served was not the product of some immutable law of long-distance trade, but rather a direct and intentional choice by specific human actors.
In short, everything I’ve seen from the channel is pockmarked with the scars of autodidactism.
Given all of that, it is not a huge surprise that the fellow behind Grainbound has a background in software development, rather than history, archaeology or anthropology. Coming from software development, it is perhaps not surprising that his effort is explicitly to “systematize worldbuilding,” but the result is reducing the complexity of the real historical world to the simple maxims and rules of thumb we use to describe it. My description above of how towns form is more faithful to our evidence for what the development of early states and urbanism looks like, but it is every bit as simplified because actual historical demographics are complicated and highly contingent.
I worry that the popularity of channels like this serve to mislead audiences but also to reinforce the false perception that history is a skill which doesn’t require any specific training or knowledge beyond a collection of historical ‘facts.’ But as we’ve discussed, doing history (or anthropology, or archaeology) well does require trained skills – a lot of them, in fact.
Mostly though, what the success of this channel brings home is that there’s clearly a strong market for this sort of thing and that we professional historians are mostly not reaching it, in part I suspect because of the perception in the field that writing this sort of thing would be ‘beneath us,’ rather than what it is: a valuable opportunity for an exercise in public education. As a corollary to that, it is also increasingly clear that the place to go for the audience here is YouTube, especially with the decline of the micro-blogging (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) ecosystem. I’ve had plans to put together a space for recording video in my home office for a while now (delayed by annoying repair work we’re having to have done on the basement where that is) and while I expect to remain primarily a ‘written word’ guy, everything I see suggests that I need to give serious thought about branching into video, even if it is just the form of “person speaks into camera for 10 minutes.”
On to Recommendations!
Speaking of YouTube, I ran across an interesting channel mostly focused on film criticism and social media, but branching out to a range of topics, The Morbid Zoo, run by University of Illinois Urbana-Campaign PhD candidate Mariana Colin. Of particular relevance to our interests here, she has a really good three-part video series on monsters in Lord of the Rings, covering Orcs, Ents and the Nazgul. I also thought the recent video essay ostensibly about Brand New Day but really about the place of The Punisher in Marvels’ moral universe to be really neat and frankly on point for our current moment.
Also on YouTube, for those who like naval artillery, Forgotten Weapons got out to the USS New Jersey (BB-62, laid down in 1940) to do a series of videos showcasing the operation of New Jersey’s guns, including the multi-purpose 5 inch Mk 12 and of course the big 16 inch main battery. The video run through the entire loading and firing procedure, which gives a lot of insight into how many sailors it took to fire these weapons in combat and also the remarkably clever and technical pre-microchip mechanical computing used to perform range-finding and generate firing solutions. Forgotten Weapons got to film in a number of places that tourists cannot normally go (and touch things they can’t normally touch), so it really is a neat chance to see the whole process walked through.
Meanwhile, for something to read, over at Tales of Times Forgotten, Spencer McDaniel has a really awesome deep dive into the figure if Persephone: the plausible origins for her as a mythical figure, her apparent role as ruler of the Underworld (more frequently so than her husband, Hades), and the suggestion of the evidence that Persephone as a mythological figure may actually predate Hades in terms of the development of Greek religious belief. There’s so much here – Indo-European etymologies, discussions on the influences of early Greek myth, later presentations of Hades and Persephone – that this summary really doesn’t capture it all, but do give it a read.
Meanwhile we also have a new Pasts Imperfect. The headline essay is a meditation by Joel Christensen (of Sententiae Antiquae) on the way that the Iliad and Odyssey change in the retelling and how these poems have always done so: changed by the oral tradition, by the decisions of translators, by the impact of scholarship, by each new hearing. Also noted is the new research paper from the Itiner-e project on the Roman roads, but what I especially like is the emphasis on how these projects build on each other, reaching back to The Barrington Atlas (2000), through the important work of the Pleiades Project, which provides the data baseline used by all sorts of geographic antiquity projects (like Itiner-e). It’s a good reminder that our discipline isn’t just repeating the same facts over again: we are learning new things about the past all the time, advancing the frontier of human knowledge and at the same time this is a collaborative, iterative project, building on each discovery with new ones.
This week’s book recommendation, somewhat in tune with the theme of our musing, is very much “one for the nerds,” but I thought it might be useful to get a sense of what actual, serious pre-modern (in this case, ancient) demography looks like, so I am going to recommend L. de Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers: Studies in the Demographic History of Roman Italy 225 BC – AD 100 (2015). Immediate caveats are required: this book is, in paperback, mercifully reasonably priced, but whereas most of my book recommendations here are selected for at least some degree of approachability for a non-specialist reader, I am going a bit more technical with this one; this book is first and foremost written for other scholars. It is not the case that Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers is badly written, to be clear – it is quite well written – but it assumes a fair bit of background knowledge about the Late Roman Republic and Early Roman Empire. That said, there isn’t a ‘for beginners’ approach to Roman demography really out there, so this is as good a starting place as any.
Because it is written for other scholars, the true structure of Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers is basically a series of proposed solutions to points of scholarly dispute; it is organized by academic beefs (although de Ligt is too professional to present them quite so bluntly), rather than a straight chronology or a series of lessons. De Ligt, writing for other scholars, assumes you basically know the outlines of the major debates on the topic, though he is generally pretty good in laying out (fairly!) where each ‘side’ stands.
That said, for a non-specialist reader, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers has two major virtues. The first is simply that de Ligt here persuasively addresses most of the major scholarly disputes (with a lot of their subfacets, e.g., what does this mean for the Gracchi? For land settlement? for the enfranchisement of the Italians? etc) concerning Roman demography in this period. As a result the book offers a good overview, of a sort, of the methods we use to try to answer those questions. De Ligt engages in demographic modeling, uses the archaeological evidence, engages in textual close reading and so on. The book thus gives a reader coming from outside a very good sense of what actually rigorous approaches to the core question – how many people lived in Roman Italy – looks like.
And the second great virtue is simply that de Ligt is (for now at least) part of what we might represent as a ‘winning coalition’ in the debate. He is a champion of a revised (upward) version of the ‘low count’ (the lower estimate of Roman population); the revisions carry him and other low-counters very close to to the ‘middle count’ (which arrives at similar numbers by slightly different reasoning), while remaining very far below the ‘high count’ (a much higher estimate of Roman population). And as Walter Scheidel pointed out in his review of this volume, the 2010s saw the low and middle count largely triumphant (largely through the use of more archaeological evidence), narrowing the debate to just between high version of the low count and the middle count, which are quite close together in any event. Consequently, de Ligt, while again a somewhat challenging read for the non-specialist, will also bring them up to speed fully with where the question of the population of Roman Italy is right now.
