History for Writers

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.

The Case of the Missing Roman Railroads

Erik

150824AeliopileThe Roman empire had a problem. It was just too big. When a crisis developed on one frontier, it could take weeks for the emperor to hear about it, then months or even years to move troops and supplies into position to deal with it. The large frontier army consumed supplies which had to be delivered at great expense from the agricultural heartlands. The roads built by the Roman army helped make all this travel faster and easier, but if the Romans had built railroads they could have made it much easier still. A Roman empire with railroads might not have fallen apart in the fifth century CE. So why didn’t the Romans build them?

The obvious answer is that they didn’t have the technology of steam power, nor the resources of coal and iron needed to build a functioning railroad. It’s a good answer, but like many such obvious answers it’s missing something.

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The Billion-Dollar Pyramid

Erik4 Comments

150817PyramidWe all know that the pyramids of Egypt were tombs for the pharaohs. (Yes, yes, and landing pads for Goa’uld spaceships; you can put your hands down now.) Thinking about what it took to build them, though, gives us an idea of what else they were.

The construction of the pyramids is a perpetual favorite subject of cranks and crackpots (Lost technologies of Atlantis! Sound waves!). Even among the more reality-bound, there is no end of theories ranging from the mundane (ramps and sledges) to the reasonably plausible (pulleys and levers) to the unlikely but not impossible (poured concrete). No matter what technique we imagine, however, one thing was definitely required: massive amounts of labor.

What most armchair pyramidologists miss about the problem of megalithic construction is that the physics of moving large stones are very simple. Apply enough force to a mass and it will move. Some things can make the application of force easier: ramps, pulleys, rollers, whatever you’ve got, but in the end it’s just a matter of force versus inertia. No matter how you go about building a pyramid, what you need in the end is the same: muscle power and time. With enough muscle power and time you can build pretty much anything, but labor is expensive. The real problem that would-be pyramid builders have to solve isn’t technological, it’s economic. The real question isn’t “How did they build the pyramids?” but “How did they afford the pyramids?”

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Labor

Erik

150810oxcartThe majority of the stuff that needs to get done in an agrarian society is basic manual labor: primarily farm work, but also things like construction, building and road maintenance, mining, carrying, housework, etc. Any functioning pre-industrial society needs lots of workers to do all that work, but there are many different kinds of workers, some of which are not so familiar to us today. Some of these kinds of workers had it much better than others.

Here’s a list of possibilities, by no means exhaustive, arranged roughly in order from worst to best conditions.

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35 Isn’t Old and Everyone’s a Royal

Erik

150703FamilyI suppose that title’s a little more interesting than “Pre-modern Demography.”

You’ve probably heard the statistic that the average lifespan in the European middle ages was 35. I remember learning that when I was young. Most of my students have heard it, too, and just like I used to, they imagine that it means that when medieval people got to thirty-two or thirty-three it was time to start looking around for a cemetery plot and a good gravedigger, and that anyone who made it to forty must have been a revered elder, if not a terrifying freak on nature. The truth is much more interesting.

Data about births and deaths is hard to come by for periods before the rise of modern bureaucracies. In a few localities there are church records going back into the late middle ages. Legal documents like wills, deeds, and contracts occasionally offer information about peoples’ births, ages, and deaths, but such documents come from only a very restricted class of people and they may be unreliable because people misrepresented the truth when it suited their political and economic purposes. Archaeological studies of burials can be very useful, although determining age from skeletal remains is imprecise, and we are at the mercy of biases in burial customs and survival of remains. All of these sources of information are partial and biased, but pulling them together gives us a rough sense of how people lived and died in earlier ages.

There are broad patterns that can be discerned from the evidence, but as with most such broad patterns we should always be alert to local variations. Another caution: I’m working from the evidence that I happen to be familiar with, which is mostly European and Mediterranean. Many of the same forces that were at work in that region of the world are relevant to others as well, but we must be alert to regional differences.

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Recommended Reading: Herodotus, “The Tale of the Clever Thief”

Erik

150727ringWe learn to write by reading, and so I’d like to share with you some of the works of classical literature that have inspired me as a writer. There’s no better place to start than with the Greek historian Herodotus. Herodotus’ Histories is my favorite book of all time. I re-read Herodotus like some people re-read Tolkien. “The Tale of the Clever Thief” (that’s my own name for it; Herodotus didn’t give that particular story a name of its own) is one of the most delightful parts of the work.

Herodotus is popularly known as the Father of History. He is also known as the Father of Lies. Both titles are appropriate. Herodotus was the first (surviving) author in the western tradition to write about the past in terms of human actions and motivations, not the deeds of gods and heroes. He was also a storyteller who enjoyed spinning a good tale, even if he didn’t think it was true (and some of the things he did think were true are pretty outrageous).

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Solid Centers and Fuzzy Edges

Erik1 Comment

150730SapphoThis is not the post I had intended for today. When I started working on this one, it was about some of the different ways of organizing basic labor that have existed in history, from slave gangs to independent peasant farmers. As I kept working on it, I found that I had more to say about slavery, especially in light of the public dialogue that has been happening in the United States lately surrounding symbols of the Confederacy. So I started working on a post specifically about slavery in historical context, but as I tried to write that post, it became clear to me that there is an even more fundamental issue in historical interpretation I needed to talk about, something that applies not just to slavery but to almost every historical phenomenon. It is so universal that we don’t really have a standard vocabulary for talking about it. You could call it variability, or you could call it norms and exceptions, but I prefer to think of it as solid centers and fuzzy edges.

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Some Notes on Gender and Power (Part 2)

Erik1 Comment

Picking up from where we left off last week, here are some more notes on gender and power. First, a refresher on where we started:

1. There is a lot of bad theorizing out there about gender and power relations

Primordial matriarchies, evo-psych patriarchies — all bunk.

2. Patriarchy is not inherent in human societies.

Patriarchy is a historical development, not a biological imperative.

Carrying on now:

3. There are many different kinds of patriarchy

150713VictoriaAs I explained last week, patriarchy is not a universal of human societies but rather a product of specific historical circumstances. As a result, there are as many different varieties of patriarchy as there are cultures that practice it. There is no “the patriarchy” any more than there is “the democracy” or “the music.” Some democracies have parliaments, some have electoral colleges, and some just have town meetings. Some music has violins, some has taiko drums, and some has beatboxing. Patriarchies are just as variable.

Consider, if you will, Victorian Britain and the Roman empire. Both were unquestionably patriarchal, but that doesn’t mean they worked the same way.

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Some Notes on Gender and Power (Part 1)

Erik

150629BoudiccaGender and power are two very big and complicated topics. Put them together and you get something even bigger and complicateder. (Yes, I said “complicateder.” Deal with it.) They are also two topics that have become very important in a lot of contemporary speculative fiction. I’m not going to try to take on the whole subject here, but I would like to offer a few points that can be useful for thinking about gender, power, and how they fit both into the world we live in and into the worlds we write about.

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The Pre-Gunpowder Rock-Paper-Scissors

Erik2 Comments

150629BayeuxGunpowder changed the world. It took a while — the earliest gunpowder arms were too unwieldy and unpredictable to have much of an effect on the ways people fought, but in time the weapons got better and armies adapted their tactics and organization in response. Before firearms, though, the battlefield operated on a basic rock-paper-scissors relationship among three different types of troops: infantry, cavalry, and missile troops.

Before getting into the types of troops, we need to lay out a few things about pre-modern warfare.

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Size Matters

Erik5 Comments

150621NewfaneWe got married in my small home town in New England, population about 3,000. In preparing to go get our license at the town office, we had gathered all the necessary documents to prove that we were who we said we were, that we were old enough, that we weren’t already married, and so on. We were all prepared to fill out paperwork and turn the slow gears of bureaucracy. When we walked into the office, though, the town clerk looked at us and said: “Oh, Erik, I saw your mother the other day and she said you’d be coming in for a marriage license. I’ve got it right here for you.” That’s life in a small town for you.

Small societies and large societies work in different ways. Historians and anthropologists have terms for categorizing different sizes of societies: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. Like all such divisions, it’s a simplification, but it’s a useful one for getting a handle on how cultures of different scales work.

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