Excellent article, there is always need for some unpleasant facts to remind people how big miracle was the Industrial Revolution, an how delusionary are all "trad" dreams about old times, regardless whether from "left" or "right".
Fact that industrial and technological development and life of unlimited freedoom of wild tribal rider/raider are two great tastes, that, unfortunately, do not go well together.
industrial and technological development and life of unlimited freedoom of wild tribal rider/raider are two great tastes, that, unfortunately, do not go well together
You are wrong sir, they in fact are extremely related. As cowboys and indians, as sailors and pirates, as zulu and tommy. The man of the frontier is the man of the frontier. An unrivaled pragmatist who will use the most advanced technology in the pursuit of his primal unconstrained ends. And thus, Freedom™.
He is a tragic figure destined to be tamed and ultimately destroyed by society and civilization, through his own work, but it is slander to say that primal raider and sophisticated technologist don't go together when art and history are brimming with examples of the paradoxical merger between these two.
Who was creating these top of the line designs? People standing behind machines 12+ hours/day, doing exactly what they were told to the tiniest detail, watched by boss and foremen all the time - life that people like Geronimo would see as much worse than death.
John Moses Browning, whom I'm not sure I'd call so detached from the frontier given he was raised in Utah and spent years as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
I do take your point, the frontier only exists because it's being propped up by civilization and its surplus. Though I do not see that as a contradiction.
Freedom in itself, as Burnham's Machiavellians point out, is a transitory state we only occupy when the inevitable lust of power for more of itself hasn't yet been satiated. A state that is always fated to come back as power saps itself in a doomed bid for control.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
Where does the intense effort people historically put into cleanliness fit in?
An example in living (and loving) memory: my grandfather shined his shoes thrice every week, right up until the end of his life. He said he was lazy, his father (my great grandfather, who emigrated) polished his boots every day. Before work at the cement factory, for twenty five years (I still wear the gold watch he received on special occasions). AFAIK I'm the only one of my (much wealthier) friends/classmates/colleagues who ever polishes his own shoes and boots after conditioning the leather, and I do it perhaps quarterly?
Shoeshine stands used to be a constant of every sidewalk in every town and city, I think there's still a few in Major midtown NYC subway stations but I don't know anywhere else outside a cobbler I could have someone do it. Hell last time I needed cordovan wax the only physical place that sold it was the cobbler. Those same historical sources you talk about talk about having a servant shine your shoes daily.
I'm reading Caro's bio of Lyndon Johnson right now, he talks about Johnson's neighbors growing up in a dirt poor Texas farming town being shocked to see the Johnson kids wore dirty clothes, and that the Johnson house was the only one where they ever saw dirty dishes in the sink. This in a town where cotton farm labor was a family affair, where dinner was frequently cornbread fried in lard for some calories during hard times. Yet the farm wife was expected to scrub floors, iron sheets, dust tables, do all kinds of cleaning tasks that no bourgeois family of my generation engages in.
My great grandmother would be horrified to see my home, with no ironing done, little dusting, the floors polished and waxed once a year rather than fortnightly. Cleanliness used to be a class marker, not of immense wealth, but simply of avoiding the implication of utter poverty and degradation. Various labor saving technologies, from vacuums and dishwashers to non-iron shirts to automobile paint that doesn't peel if it isn't waxed weekly, have made keeping fairly clean easy. But that in turn had a knock on effect, that my generation doesn't value Cleanliness as a class signifier in the same way that prior generations did.
Now, maybe that's an industrial revolution tradition that doesn't stretch back, I'm not that familiar. But for non-peasants before the mid 20th century servants were also the norm! As Agatha Christie said "I never thought in my life we would be so rich as to have an automobile or so poor as to not have servants." And you better believe that before the 20th century a caning was how you dealt with a servant who didn't clean your boots before you woke up. It's quite likely the kings squires were going over his armor every single day on campaign, and if they didn't get it perfect they could expect punishment. And they better keep themselves clean too, the king can't have dirty attendants. Soldiers above the poverty line weren't filthy.
Tldr: evidence indicates that cleanliness was a significant non-poverty class indicator before about 1980, or to put it in Python: of course he's a king he doesn't have shit all over him.
This paper (I have seen the same theory in other places, but don't know how many independent sources it has) suggests that Northern European houseproud culture is a lingering effect of home-produced dairy products being sold outside the home in the Early Modern Age - dairying required the highest hygiene standards of any farm activity.
The obvious test is whether olive oil people and their descendants are less houseproud than butter people and their descendants. I wouldn't know how to test this given the obvious issues with the accuracy of intra-European racial stereotypes. This theory is of course perfectly consistent with the idea that Medieval peasants lived in filth - it predicts that Northern Europeans didn't become houseproud until semi-commercial dairying became a thing.
No but their clothes didn't look new, and they certainly weren't able to get all the residue out... think of the stains that stay in ordinary bright clothes, the impossibility of getting fruit or vegetable stains out of brightly colored clothes even today.
That's what your eye will expect to see when they see clothes that are supposed to have been exposed to hard use... and if it doesn't it will break the reality of the film.
Even though people put incredible effort into cleanliness in the past it couldn't keep things looking new, and before the era if machine washing and chemical cleaners "not new" looked very distinctively different form lawrence olivier
There were some ways around this. One example that comes to mind is the previous use of detachable shirt collars and dark three piece suits. The latter didn’t show stains as well and the former allowed men to wear the same shirt multiple days in a row while only having to swap/clean their collar.
Read Caro's book. Johnson City circa 1920 had no running water, no electricity, no appliances, the farmers there were dirt poor on the edge of slipping under altogether. It was described as remarkable and extraordinary that Johnson's mother did not maintain cleanliness.
A big part of that is definitely a sense of middle class pride, and servants are something important to think about, but pride and servants were very common throughout history for anyone above absolute poverty. One would invest in a maid long before more clothes or better tools.
In their hospitality, their hovel is described in great detail. They put much effort into cleaning for their guests, varnishing with wax their old wooden cups, leveling their broken table, offering water to wash their guest's feet and hands. Uniform filth this is not. Destitution totally foreign to a modern American, yes, but not a total lack of pride and cleanliness as is complained about in grimdark brown and grey color palettes of tv shows.
Sorry, I don't credit this whole 'everyone before 1950 was a toothless withered crone with 800 diseases by the age of 22 and wore nothing but filthy rags' narrative. Because that's just not how people live.
If you look at totally primitive hunter gatherer tribes on remote islands, guess what. They have colour and culture and ornament. Even when they need to go to extreme lengths to make and maintain those things. They find a way, because people always find a way to express themselves, even in poverty. Would dirt-poor medieval peasants really be willing to spend what would have been a very large amount of money on dyed and colored clothes according to the fashions of the period and location, even knowing their clothes would just be grey rags in two months? I doubt it.
I've read that medieval workers averaged 1600 hours annually, while modern people work 1900 hours, and industrial revolution-era workers put in 3000+ (https://tudorscribe.medium.com/do-you-work-longer-hours-than-a-medieval-peasant-17a9efe92a20). The horror stories about the wretched condition of peoples teeth and health in premodern times I've come across also seem to mostly come from the industrial age. I suspect that Malthusianism is partly to blame for declining standards, but also the power that capitalists and landowners gained over the commonfolk. Medieval economic systems were chaotic and inefficient, but they served to protect the peasantry against the ruling class through their illegibility. As the economy became more streamlined and efficient, it also gave the powerful greater leverage over the common people. The maximization of profitability for those at the top led to the sacrifice of complex arrangements that satisfied a broader array of needs for those at the bottom.
On a similar note, I've come to believe that medieval peasants weren't necessarily super different from tribalists in their economic engagement, and also that the distinction between hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, etc. is somewhat misleading, since most societies derived their nourishment from a motley of sources. Medieval people fished, foraged, hunted, etc., too, and many hunter-gatherers I've read about seem to have engaged in some amount of cultivation, so the categories aren't entirely discrete. In Seeing Like A State, it seems to be indicated that primitive peoples, including medieval peasants, had a complex arrangement of nutrient sources, which depended on access to farms, forests, and streams, but as society became streamlined and living spaces monopolized, they were forced into factories and workshops and fed mono-diets of grain. From there, various vitamin deficiencies and rapid tooth decay ensued.
I've read that medieval workers averaged 1600 hours annually, while modern people work 1900 hours, and industrial revolution-era workers put in 3000+
While I'm generally in the camp of 'medieval life was horribly awful but not that horribly awful' I tend to object to these comparisons because they're almost always apples-to-oranges. Medieval subsistence farming is not really directly comparable with modern employees for a number of reasons, one of the more prominent reasons being that there is no clear distinction between work for your 'job' and work you do as part of personal/household maintenance (whereas for almost everyone today, the work we do for our jobs is clearly separate from the work we do for our household). A peasant might get the winter "off" because you can't really do any farming, but there's still all sorts of chores that need doing and they're generally quite a lot more labor intensive than their modern counterparts (for example: I spend exactly 0% of my time getting fuel for warmth and cooking).
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
Skibboleth 1yr ago
With the Lord's Day off, 1600 amounts to five hours a day. Sounds low to me. My rural great-grandmother would easily spend four hours a day working outside in the middle of summer, and she didn't need to plant or harvest or thresh or winnow her wheat or rye, nor did she have animals to feed and take care of; a truck brought her coal for fuel and a tractor plowed her half-acre of potatoes.
On the other hand presumably your great-grandmother was producing proportionally much more for the market than a medieval farmer could have done. Those trucks and tractors and all the new goods that could be bought provided an incentive and the ability to work far beyond what was needed for survival.
She produced exactly zero surplus goods, as she was a retired collective farm serf worker. She used her pension to buy coal, cooking gas, bread, eggs, dairy, salt and sugar (and vodka for the tractor guy if she hadn't been a respected pious old lady who would read over your corpse).
A medieval spinster would have kept her own chicken at least and would've had to spin a lot of thread to buy firewood, flour, dairy, salt and honey (and some help to plough her patch of swedes in spring).
The late medieval French peasant had a decent gig if you don't mind bone crushing material poverty. As in, "the-roof-can-be-lifted-to-eavesdrop-outside" poverty. "Manure-on-the-floor-because-livestock-sleeps-with-you-in-winter" poverty. "Your-second-son-will-be-homeless-vagrant-shepherd" poverty.
It would be nice if Keynes had been right, and we could have collectively said "okay, let's stop the hedonic treadmill there and just chill more going forward", but that's not the way status competition works. The peasants weren't industrious because medieval society wasn't wired to reward productivity with status; ours is.
Apparently it was pretty bad in Poland too. The following is about XVIII, so it's not even medieval period...
The British traveler and historian traveled half of Europe. In the course of his many voyages, he also ended up in Vistula. The description that came out from his pen is considered extremely valuable, as you can hardly accuse him of bias. Coxe depicted what he saw and had no interest in embellishing Polish reality. In addition, he was able to relate the appearance of Polish peasants to how the landowners in other parts of the continent presented themselves. He wrote:
I could never project in my mind an area so sad and empty. (...) For 45 miles we met only 2 carriages and 12 wagons (...) The sight of the miserable villages matched completely with the miserable surroundings that surrounded them.
The villagers in this country are poorer and gloomier than in others we visited. Wherever we stopped, beggars came to us in groups and asked for handouts with the basest intrusiveness. Compared to Swiss peasants, who are polite but also demand politeness, Polish peasants are slavishly submissive: they bow to the ground having taken off their hats, holding them in their hands until the man is out of their sight.
The Polish peasant has a wild appearance, a burnt, dark, almost black face, lean cheeks, sunken eyes, short stature; he moves slowly, his general apathy making him incapable of feeling either great joy or suffering. n winter in a simple sheepskin coat, in summer in a shirt and pants made of ragged canvas, barefoot, he drags himself lazily behind his skinny, shaggy horse, pulling a socha with which he tears up a weedy field to harvest winter supplies from it, insufficient to feed his family and possessions.
(...) The villagers, whose number they count to six million, called peasants, constituted two-thirds of the nation. Hardly different from cattle, they have no property, live from day to day, rotting in filth and misery. In the absence of light and means of subsistence, half of their offspring are lost, which would have increased the population (...). It must be said that whatever fate awaits Poland, their condition cannot get worse.
"They feel little and think little"
That the above comments were not at all far from reality is also evidenced by the words of Stanislaw Staszic. In Cautions, the famous Enlightenment activist and Catholic priest wrote with bitterness:
Five parts of the Polish nation stand before my eyes. I see millions of creatures, some of whom walk half naked, others covered with skin or rough coats; all of them dried out, shriveled, swollen, grubby; having their eyes sunken deep into their heads, breathless, and ceaselessly working.
Gloomy and stupid, they feel little and think little - this is their greatest happiness. One can barely see a rational soul in them. Their superficial form at first sight bears more resemblance to an animal than to a human being.
Wouldn't a realistic production have some people who go to extreme lengths to keep their clothes clean and in a good shape and others who dress in patchy washed dregs, kind of like what we can see in the streets now when we go on a walk and observe other people?
A medieval or early modern girl would look nice and fresh in her bright colors for maybe a month after getting a new dress… and if someone didn’t propose marriage to her in that time, or she fell in the mud day one and ruined the glamour of the new dress… it’d be a tragedy, her family would resent the wasted investment, would probably beat her, and it’d probably ruin her life and maybe lead to her dying at 30 from syphilis after poverty and lack of prospects forced her into a life of prostitution.
I feel this is a slight exaggeration. Yes, ruining an expensive new set of clothes would be a hardship, but not to the extent of forcing someone to become a whore. As for "harsh and corrosive lye based soaps", ever heard of a beetle? Some people would go down to the river and literally beat the washing against a flat rock to get the dirt out. You wouldn't be using too much soap. Certainly colours would fade over time, but if it's expensive, then people do their best to keep the clothing in wearable condition for as long as possible.
Modern Printed T-Shirts don’t maintain their colors after a few dozen washes when you’ve worn them maybe once or twice per wash, and you’re using gentle detergents with built in fabric brighteners.
Modern fabrics such as T-shirts are cheap disposable shit, and the fabric brighteners etc. are every bit as corrosive as the lye. This is why there is gentle soap for hand washing woollens and delicates.
TV shows and movies were dressing everyone in leather before HD, because they did think it looked cooler than the bright costumes, which reminded the makers of cheesy 50s movies.
And the armour probably wouldn't have been shining in the first place, but blued or coloured or treated in some fashion. The notion of shiny steel plate is 19th century and a result of a lot of 'cleaning up' by curators and restorers.
It’s actually a myth that medieval women who didn’t marry by the end of their teens had to resort to prostitution to survive- in core Europe women tended to marry in their early twenties anyways, and medieval women had economic options other than prostitution which could at least keep them alive, and enough charity available that these kinds of economic setbacks were survivable.
This was when GDP of the Uk was close to 3000-4000 per person, or poorer than modern Ukraine... this was post industrial revolution after London had entered what we'd now say is middle income status...
In the Medieval period when real GDP was $300-600 per person per year it would have been vastly worse and the poverty vastly more pressing.
Seriously. the catholic church was running brothels with ~1000 prostitutes in London in the 1100s... when London's total population was 18,000-40,000... and that was just the one Burough where they owned the brothels... there were plenty of private brothels, speak-easy brothels, and women not affiliated with a brothel working as prostitutes as well.
.
Edit: sorry to pick on you but there's this revisionism I got everywhere I've posted this essay that somehow prostitution wasn't common, people weren't poor in the past, and everything that was expansively written about by contemporaries in early modern novels was just fiction and obviously Feilding, Defoe, Richardson, John Ford, Thomas Middleton, and every other writer about the lower classes from 1500-1900 ever wrote about was just sensationalist fiction to be completely ignored.
Prostitution existed in the Middle Ages. It was legal and common. That does not mean that unmarried women had no other recourse; the word spinster meaning what it does is evidence that the default unmarried woman supported herself through something other than prostitution.
London did not represent all of England, nor is extrapolating backward a good idea. People, women included, headed to London because they were desperate and couldn't find work elsewhere. 1887 is also a time where women would get paid far less for factory work than men, and so prostitution is what you resort to not to starve.
Likewise, lower GDP in medieval times can just as easily be read as people not having the actual funds to pay anyone for prostitution. It isn't a metric that'll reveal much either.
And finally: you're sure we should just take contemporary authors at their word? I wouldn't do that today, lest I believe the modern world is irrevocably sexist, racist, evil, and bound for climate death juuuust a couple decades hence. Our ancestors were no more honest than we are, and I'll read into what they say with as much credulity as I'll read contemporary writing.
Contemporary accounts from 400 years of history 1500-1900 (Dickens, Tolstoy, Hardy, and many others wrote extensively on this in the 19th).
Historical records of the Lancet Medical journal from the 19th century ...
And the Historical records of the catholic church from the 12th century.
and the historical GDP which shows this is very much in line with what we find in modern poor societies at these GDP levels like El Salvador, Haiti, and Somalia...
There is no scarcity of women, lower gdp figures don't limit how much is available like iron or timber. or food ...GDP just determines the price of their labour and the poverty that will push them to trade that labour.
and your response amounts to: "Nuh Ugh"
Seriously every single piece of evidence we have says that 1100-1900 a single digit percentage of women were employed in prostitution and maybe a very low double digit percentage had engaged in it at some point in their lives. (And yes how people manage to feed themselves and keep themselves alive absolutely seems like the kind of matter of material necessity than can be extrapolated backwards)
We have bawdy authors from the 16th century painting this picture, senitmental authors from the 17th, moral reformer authors form the 19th, quite impressive records from all these eras including very early records from the 11th century...
and what I consistently find is people just deny it because they don't want to believe it.
Seriously every single piece of evidence we have says that 1100-1900 a single digit percentage of women were employed in prostitution and maybe a very low double digit percentage had engaged in it at some point in their lives. (And yes how people manage to feed themselves and keep themselves alive absolutely seems like the kind of matter of material necessity than can be extrapolated backwards)
A single digit percentage of the total population or a single digit percentage of the urban population? Big difference in a 80+% rural society.
I'm not convinced learned city-dwellers' (or soldiers') writings are representative of the rest of the population. I think if you don't live in a city and you have the resources to spare to get yourself a woman to fuck who you don't want to have kids with, you buy (or otherwise obtain) yourself a slave, and have her spinning cloth or do chores around the farm or be otherwise productive the rest of the time. At least she won't necessarily by definition be completely negatively productive for you, the way going to a prostitute is. Prostitutes are for people who are either rich enough that paying one doesn't affect them, or so broken-down that they don't care about tomorrow.
Historical records aren't great at keeping count of most any numbers. This isn't their failure at all - it was impossible, given the technology at the time, but using them as if they were reliable is folly. Using them to pretend statistics are on your side while other people must just not want to believe Fax and Lodjik is as rude as it's wrong.
Thankfully, you mention modern societies that exist in today's day and age - a time where statistics are much easier to keep and much better kept in general. We have NGO's doing their best to figure out how many sex workers there are in any given place[1]. Judging by what they imply about the three countries you mention..
El Salvador would have prostitution prevalent at 0.3% of the population, or +-0.6% of women. Haiti has it twice as prevalent, at 0.6% of Haitians, or +-1.2% of its women. Somalia is Islamic and it shows: estimates are a prevalence of 0.06%, or +-0.12% of its women.
Note how the above numbers assume there are zero men and boys prostituting themselves, which is tragically optimistic. Note how even the place with the biggest numbers - Haiti - doesn't even have half the prevalence London would have, if your sources are correct. It's not even a fourth!
To reiterate: this is still a lot of people either way. It also concerned many people in the past. There is no shortage of authors writing cheerily about the whores they'd be banging just to throw money around. I'm not at all in doubt that prostitution is ahistorically uncommon in the modern era, perhaps only trending upward slightly with how easy (and safe!) the internet really makes it.
But implying that it was so prevalent that a normal young woman might be one ruined outfit away from being forced into prostitution is, certainly, taking things too far. Women could, and did, do other work. They could and did support themselves if they were lucky and skilled enough. And yes, those women pushed into cities by the spectre of Robert Malthus driving them there certainly ended up whoring themselves out quite often. This is still a thoroughly far cry from implying that it was the fate of any woman who didn't luck out or get married immediately, and I'd rather not pretend my view is one born out of thin air either.
Indeed, the etymology of the word spinster implies that an absolute majority of unmarried women, historically, supported themselves by working wool. Domestic service seems to me more likely to be the next-largest source of employment than prostitution.
While I agree that the OP was a florid Kulakism, the idea of impoverished women having only a single vocation to support themselves is probably anachronistic. It's not spinner OR full time prostitute, it's probably more like spinner that also takes cash for sex from a couple men to make ends meet.
This is only tangential, but I recently stumbled upon The 1815 Diary of a Nova Scotia Farm Girl: Louisa Collins, of Colin Grove, Dartmouth. It’s a hyperlinked text-imported diary of — well, it’s in the title. You see how much labor was expected of the eldest children. The diary is written by the 2nd eldest daughter and much of her time is spent on farm work and spinning. It’s a peek inside a lost world, with a young girl quoting various poets in her diary, talking about neighborly visitations and the occasional mention of current events, like rumors of Napoleon’s demise (greatly exaggerated).
I found this serendipitously. Coincidentally, I was reading a blogger specializing in Napoleon, who mentioned that Napoleon loved to badly sing the works of Rousseau to his friends. Yes, the philosopher Rousseau wrote music, and some of it is good. Napoleon’s favorite work was Le devin du village, and I concluded that what he loved to sing was certainly “Dans ma cabane obscure”, as he related to the figure of Colin singing with love about his wife. Anyway, the figure of Colin is a European symbol of the pastoralist hero in pastoral works, introduced by Edmund Spenser. It’s likely that “Colin’s Grove”, the home of this farm girl, was named in the same pastoralist tradition. And so while this young girl wrote about Napoleon in her diary in Colin’s Grove, Napoleon was singing a song of the pastoral hero Colin. I love the intricate connections of Western Europe you come across from burrowing into history!
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
Great post - it is far too easy for us moderns to underestimate the cost and importance of textiles pre-Industrial revolution. Textile production (fibre preparation, spinning, weaving, and sewing, but mostly spinning) was the main work of pre-modern women and was far more labour-intensive than what we now see as housewifery. I first learnt about this from Lisa Jardine's Worldly Goods which spends about half the book talking about how increased Mediterranean trade during the Renaissance gave the urban middle class access to dyes (including the most brilliant colours, and also the fast colours which could survive washing) which had previously only been affordable to the aristocracy - thinking about this in the context of your article makes me wonder if kings and lords losing the uniqueness of their vivid colours could cause social change all by itself.
One quibble - you say that a peasant girl might get a new outfit every several years. I don't know if that was intended as a creative exaggeration, but Brett Devereaux (a Roman historian in his day job, but primarily famous for blogging about the historical accuracy of Paradox games) says in this series of posts that a single full-time semi-skilled textile worker could produce 5-6 outfits a year with Roman technology (spinning wheels, which reach Europe around 1300, double this) with most of the work being spinning, which is easy to multitask with childcare or basic animal husbandry. So one outfit a year per family member was a perfectly attainable goal for an ordinary peasant family (unless they were poor enough that they needed to sell the spun yarn to commercial weavers for additional food, or oppressed enough that they needed to sell it to pay taxes), and a family with an unmarried teenage daughter would be doing better than that - if she did ruin her first date dress she would be able to make another one.
[Raw wool/flax and basic vegetable dyes were cheap - unless you were after Worldly Goods level colour the cost of clothes was dominated by the labour involved in the production process]
His ‘how do they make it’ post serieses heavily imply and sometimes outright state that an average family would be selling some portion of the yarn produced by its female members, up to the majority if there was a bad harvest.
So the analogy I used elsewhere was to just adjust it for purchasing power.
A skilled worker made 6-8d a day according to a redditor... which I analogized to 60-75k a year. A linen shirt required 3 els of linen at 12d each, and 2d worth of labour from a tailor... so it'd take a week or week and a half's labour from the skilled worker to buy a linen shirt... if he deadicated 100% of his income to it.
So it comes out to 1000-2000 dollars for a linen shirt, which admittedly is high end, kings would wear linen.
But you multiply that out and a full outfit pants, boots, socks, sweater, jacket, hat ( and you need all these you're walking everywhere in all weather) comes to 10-30 thousand dollars depending on quality.... and user you can buy used or skip and get it down to 5k or maybe even 2k at the bare minimum... maybe cloth a child for 1k with used babyclothes...
But a full outfit for an adult to actually go out and do things in the world is looking like the investment we make for a car or vehicle.
I bought a motorcycle for 5k a few years back, believe me I wanted it to last 5-10 years. I consider its loss a personal tragedy.
And you example likewise points to this: A team of mother and daughters working year round in a more leisurely cottage industry, with other responsibilities, we'd expect to kick out 15-30k a year... maybe 40-60 if they were in the top 5-10% ... so divide that out and those low end homemade outfits destined for women and children are 2k to 5k each.
.
Then you get into MILITARY outfits that have to survive a ton, do all the work you might possibly do on campaign, have armour, maybe have heraldry...
that's like a 40-60k investment for a low end footsoldier, and getting up into the hundreds of thousands for knights and a king's custom armour and everything might be into the millions ppp.
You just really aren't going to have multiples or if you do you aren't going to take your spare set on campaign with you and leave it with some squire-boy who could easily be beaten up and have it stolen from him
That was fun, and didn't go in the direction I was expecting. The real friends were the textiles we made along the way.
I do have to object to a certain WWI metaphor. For all the horror of trench warfare, it lacked various essential qualities of the Holocaust, such as capability to shoot back.
Other than that, the Western Front point was well-made. Netflix's sequence is a perverse counterpart of the famous bullet opening from Lord of War. Rather than the life story of a disposable bullet, it is the durable jacket which witnesses disposable humans.
They couldn't shoot back at the commanding officers and military police forcing them to the front.
Indeed All's Quiet on the Western Front depicts what happened to soldiers who refused to go into battle on nov 11th after the armistice had been signed but before 11am when it went into effect.
They couldn't shoot back at the commanding officers and military police forcing them to the front.
I mean... we really think 'fragging' wasn't a thing in WW1? Who's gonna do a forensic investigation when during the night an unpopular officer dies to a hand grenade:
Its not Germans, its all conscripts across all nations.
Their were mutinies in the French, British, and German armies including the german navy... I think that's a pretty dramatic statement that they didn't want to be there
In addition to the fact the conscription was neccessary to begin with. There wasn't an all volunteer army on any side of WW1
There wasn't an all volunteer army on any side of WW1
Notably, this is not true for the Australian Imperial Force, which was entirely volunteer - the split over conscription (a referendum which narrowly failed) ended up splitting the Australian Labor Party and ultimately shaped the modern Liberal and Labor Parties.
Then the goalposts are receding faster than the Maginot line twenty years later.
I think claiming German suffering in WWI was a Holocaust 1.0 is in poor taste. Going further to suggest
“Was Hitler’s crime simply doing what the civilized nations of the world… the French Republic, the British Empire, the German Nation… had done to him when he was young?”
That’s rather bold apologetics, and it’s also laughably inaccurate. Hitler, at least, was a red-blooded volunteer, and conflating him with downtrodden conscripts is buying into the laziest of Weimar-era Nazi propaganda.
Boys 14-25 are the most discriminated against group in human history. Full stop.
No group has suffered such violence so Deeply in the moment, vastly across nations, and consistently across time.
The bloodiest day of the holocaust it was calculated 15,000 people were killed.
Bloodiest day of WW1 20,000 British! boys were killed (not counting all the other powers)
.
And notably this is a holocaust that never ended
The world screamed never again after the holocaust... but even our "humane" "modern" "progressive" welfare states reserve the right to drag teenagers from their home and massacre them by the million.
Indeed both Ukraine and Russia are doing this now without a fucking mummer of protest
Actually if you cut out the mra-djacent whining about the sin of conscription I think it actually cashes out as a fourth grade essay question level of analysis of Hitler:
Hitler was really bad because he treated people who weren't soldiers like soldiers. Everyone knows it's ok to kill soldiers in a war, but you can't kill people who aren't soldiers.
I'll also point out that, per prior comparisons to slavery and the Holocaust, 8-14% of WWI soldiers died in the war. 80% of Auschwitz inmates died there. American Black slaves died in slavery better than 80% of the time.
So if you took the question at the time of conscription, the vast majority of young men would choose the trenches. I doubt the option of "take up anti conscription terrorism" has better odds, outside the Vietnam era.
Sure, if you ask them as they go over the top at the Somme you might get more takers, but that's just letting people cash out their bet mid game. At the time of conscription, materially, getting drafted is a better pick.
Indeed All's Quiet on the Western Front depicts what happened to soldiers who refused to go into battle on nov 11th after the armistice had been signed but before 11am when it went into effect.
That's of course a complete fabrication of the film though, and to the detriment of the book's ending (and themes). At that point the German Revolution was already starting; the High Seas Fleet famously mutinied rather than carry out a final attack.
In the last days of the war it was the Entente who were still launching attacks, either out of general eagerness (the Americans) or the belief that Germany either wouldn't surrender, or would need to be completely defeated to avoid a repeat.
The fabrication of the film was moving events that happened in various armies around to make a statement about the war... the filmmakers have said the commander who ordered the 11th of Nov attack was explicitly based on a British General known for being a butcher
Yes that struck me as well. Another point to consider is that at the time of the Armistice the Germans had actually gained territory. Along much of the front, the lines of contact were in what had been Entente territory. The ceding of land that German soldiers had spent years fighting and dying for was a significant element in the birth the whole "great betrayal" narrative.
Interesting post, I am reminded of a story on the HFY (humanity fuck yeah) subreddit about humans and aliens. The humans become surprisingly advanced compared to the rest of the galaxy. Every other civilization gets gifted nanobots to help them with tech after they stall for too long. Humans never stalled for very long, but all the places where civilization normally stalled are places where human textile improvements drove innovation. The other alien civilizations were all naked.
One of the other underestimated aspects of textiles in the medieval era is the importance of textile armor, the gamberson. It doesn't survive in the archeological record, but all the other evidence we have points to it being very common and very important. In a society based around agriculture the primary layer of defense was grown in the fields, not mined in the mountains.
The tradition of cloth armor continues with modern Kevlar, but Kevlar comes from oil production, because of course the most important thing to fight over is also used in producing armor.
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Notes -
Excellent article, there is always need for some unpleasant facts to remind people how big miracle was the Industrial Revolution, an how delusionary are all "trad" dreams about old times, regardless whether from "left" or "right".
And there is another fact unpleasant to OP and his ideology - fact that Industrial Revolution began, after people like OP were massacred, hanged, beheaded, burned alive in their huts and deported to West Indies to die.
Fact that industrial and technological development and life of unlimited freedoom of wild tribal rider/raider are two great tastes, that, unfortunately, do not go well together.
You are wrong sir, they in fact are extremely related. As cowboys and indians, as sailors and pirates, as zulu and tommy. The man of the frontier is the man of the frontier. An unrivaled pragmatist who will use the most advanced technology in the pursuit of his primal unconstrained ends. And thus, Freedom™.
He is a tragic figure destined to be tamed and ultimately destroyed by society and civilization, through his own work, but it is slander to say that primal raider and sophisticated technologist don't go together when art and history are brimming with examples of the paradoxical merger between these two.
Geronimo used top of the line Browning designs.
Exactly my point. Using, not creating.
Who was creating these top of the line designs? People standing behind machines 12+ hours/day, doing exactly what they were told to the tiniest detail, watched by boss and foremen all the time - life that people like Geronimo would see as much worse than death.
John Moses Browning, whom I'm not sure I'd call so detached from the frontier given he was raised in Utah and spent years as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
I do take your point, the frontier only exists because it's being propped up by civilization and its surplus. Though I do not see that as a contradiction.
Freedom in itself, as Burnham's Machiavellians point out, is a transitory state we only occupy when the inevitable lust of power for more of itself hasn't yet been satiated. A state that is always fated to come back as power saps itself in a doomed bid for control.
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Where does the intense effort people historically put into cleanliness fit in?
An example in living (and loving) memory: my grandfather shined his shoes thrice every week, right up until the end of his life. He said he was lazy, his father (my great grandfather, who emigrated) polished his boots every day. Before work at the cement factory, for twenty five years (I still wear the gold watch he received on special occasions). AFAIK I'm the only one of my (much wealthier) friends/classmates/colleagues who ever polishes his own shoes and boots after conditioning the leather, and I do it perhaps quarterly?
Shoeshine stands used to be a constant of every sidewalk in every town and city, I think there's still a few in Major midtown NYC subway stations but I don't know anywhere else outside a cobbler I could have someone do it. Hell last time I needed cordovan wax the only physical place that sold it was the cobbler. Those same historical sources you talk about talk about having a servant shine your shoes daily.
I'm reading Caro's bio of Lyndon Johnson right now, he talks about Johnson's neighbors growing up in a dirt poor Texas farming town being shocked to see the Johnson kids wore dirty clothes, and that the Johnson house was the only one where they ever saw dirty dishes in the sink. This in a town where cotton farm labor was a family affair, where dinner was frequently cornbread fried in lard for some calories during hard times. Yet the farm wife was expected to scrub floors, iron sheets, dust tables, do all kinds of cleaning tasks that no bourgeois family of my generation engages in.
My great grandmother would be horrified to see my home, with no ironing done, little dusting, the floors polished and waxed once a year rather than fortnightly. Cleanliness used to be a class marker, not of immense wealth, but simply of avoiding the implication of utter poverty and degradation. Various labor saving technologies, from vacuums and dishwashers to non-iron shirts to automobile paint that doesn't peel if it isn't waxed weekly, have made keeping fairly clean easy. But that in turn had a knock on effect, that my generation doesn't value Cleanliness as a class signifier in the same way that prior generations did.
Now, maybe that's an industrial revolution tradition that doesn't stretch back, I'm not that familiar. But for non-peasants before the mid 20th century servants were also the norm! As Agatha Christie said "I never thought in my life we would be so rich as to have an automobile or so poor as to not have servants." And you better believe that before the 20th century a caning was how you dealt with a servant who didn't clean your boots before you woke up. It's quite likely the kings squires were going over his armor every single day on campaign, and if they didn't get it perfect they could expect punishment. And they better keep themselves clean too, the king can't have dirty attendants. Soldiers above the poverty line weren't filthy.
Tldr: evidence indicates that cleanliness was a significant non-poverty class indicator before about 1980, or to put it in Python: of course he's a king he doesn't have shit all over him.
Also: happy you're upping output!
This paper (I have seen the same theory in other places, but don't know how many independent sources it has) suggests that Northern European houseproud culture is a lingering effect of home-produced dairy products being sold outside the home in the Early Modern Age - dairying required the highest hygiene standards of any farm activity.
The obvious test is whether olive oil people and their descendants are less houseproud than butter people and their descendants. I wouldn't know how to test this given the obvious issues with the accuracy of intra-European racial stereotypes. This theory is of course perfectly consistent with the idea that Medieval peasants lived in filth - it predicts that Northern Europeans didn't become houseproud until semi-commercial dairying became a thing.
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No but their clothes didn't look new, and they certainly weren't able to get all the residue out... think of the stains that stay in ordinary bright clothes, the impossibility of getting fruit or vegetable stains out of brightly colored clothes even today.
That's what your eye will expect to see when they see clothes that are supposed to have been exposed to hard use... and if it doesn't it will break the reality of the film.
Even though people put incredible effort into cleanliness in the past it couldn't keep things looking new, and before the era if machine washing and chemical cleaners "not new" looked very distinctively different form lawrence olivier
There were some ways around this. One example that comes to mind is the previous use of detachable shirt collars and dark three piece suits. The latter didn’t show stains as well and the former allowed men to wear the same shirt multiple days in a row while only having to swap/clean their collar.
Yes exacly... thus you'd either look faded or show obvious visible wear and aging of your clothes.... or you'd wear dark colors.
Filmmakers struggle to age clothes appropriately... so they put them in dark colors
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Read Caro's book. Johnson City circa 1920 had no running water, no electricity, no appliances, the farmers there were dirt poor on the edge of slipping under altogether. It was described as remarkable and extraordinary that Johnson's mother did not maintain cleanliness.
A big part of that is definitely a sense of middle class pride, and servants are something important to think about, but pride and servants were very common throughout history for anyone above absolute poverty. One would invest in a maid long before more clothes or better tools.
See also Ovid's tale of Baucis and Philemon.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26073/26073-h/Met_VIII-XI.html#bookVIII_fableVI
In their hospitality, their hovel is described in great detail. They put much effort into cleaning for their guests, varnishing with wax their old wooden cups, leveling their broken table, offering water to wash their guest's feet and hands. Uniform filth this is not. Destitution totally foreign to a modern American, yes, but not a total lack of pride and cleanliness as is complained about in grimdark brown and grey color palettes of tv shows.
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Sorry, I don't credit this whole 'everyone before 1950 was a toothless withered crone with 800 diseases by the age of 22 and wore nothing but filthy rags' narrative. Because that's just not how people live.
If you look at totally primitive hunter gatherer tribes on remote islands, guess what. They have colour and culture and ornament. Even when they need to go to extreme lengths to make and maintain those things. They find a way, because people always find a way to express themselves, even in poverty. Would dirt-poor medieval peasants really be willing to spend what would have been a very large amount of money on dyed and colored clothes according to the fashions of the period and location, even knowing their clothes would just be grey rags in two months? I doubt it.
I've read that medieval workers averaged 1600 hours annually, while modern people work 1900 hours, and industrial revolution-era workers put in 3000+ (https://tudorscribe.medium.com/do-you-work-longer-hours-than-a-medieval-peasant-17a9efe92a20). The horror stories about the wretched condition of peoples teeth and health in premodern times I've come across also seem to mostly come from the industrial age. I suspect that Malthusianism is partly to blame for declining standards, but also the power that capitalists and landowners gained over the commonfolk. Medieval economic systems were chaotic and inefficient, but they served to protect the peasantry against the ruling class through their illegibility. As the economy became more streamlined and efficient, it also gave the powerful greater leverage over the common people. The maximization of profitability for those at the top led to the sacrifice of complex arrangements that satisfied a broader array of needs for those at the bottom.
On a similar note, I've come to believe that medieval peasants weren't necessarily super different from tribalists in their economic engagement, and also that the distinction between hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, etc. is somewhat misleading, since most societies derived their nourishment from a motley of sources. Medieval people fished, foraged, hunted, etc., too, and many hunter-gatherers I've read about seem to have engaged in some amount of cultivation, so the categories aren't entirely discrete. In Seeing Like A State, it seems to be indicated that primitive peoples, including medieval peasants, had a complex arrangement of nutrient sources, which depended on access to farms, forests, and streams, but as society became streamlined and living spaces monopolized, they were forced into factories and workshops and fed mono-diets of grain. From there, various vitamin deficiencies and rapid tooth decay ensued.
While I'm generally in the camp of 'medieval life was horribly awful but not that horribly awful' I tend to object to these comparisons because they're almost always apples-to-oranges. Medieval subsistence farming is not really directly comparable with modern employees for a number of reasons, one of the more prominent reasons being that there is no clear distinction between work for your 'job' and work you do as part of personal/household maintenance (whereas for almost everyone today, the work we do for our jobs is clearly separate from the work we do for our household). A peasant might get the winter "off" because you can't really do any farming, but there's still all sorts of chores that need doing and they're generally quite a lot more labor intensive than their modern counterparts (for example: I spend exactly 0% of my time getting fuel for warmth and cooking).
With the Lord's Day off, 1600 amounts to five hours a day. Sounds low to me. My rural great-grandmother would easily spend four hours a day working outside in the middle of summer, and she didn't need to plant or harvest or thresh or winnow her wheat or rye, nor did she have animals to feed and take care of; a truck brought her coal for fuel and a tractor plowed her half-acre of potatoes.
On the other hand presumably your great-grandmother was producing proportionally much more for the market than a medieval farmer could have done. Those trucks and tractors and all the new goods that could be bought provided an incentive and the ability to work far beyond what was needed for survival.
She produced exactly zero surplus goods, as she was a retired collective farm
serfworker. She used her pension to buy coal, cooking gas, bread, eggs, dairy, salt and sugar (and vodka for the tractor guy if she hadn't been a respected pious old lady who would read over your corpse).A medieval spinster would have kept her own chicken at least and would've had to spin a lot of thread to buy firewood, flour, dairy, salt and honey (and some help to plough her patch of swedes in spring).
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The late medieval French peasant had a decent gig if you don't mind bone crushing material poverty. As in, "the-roof-can-be-lifted-to-eavesdrop-outside" poverty. "Manure-on-the-floor-because-livestock-sleeps-with-you-in-winter" poverty. "Your-second-son-will-be-homeless-vagrant-shepherd" poverty.
It would be nice if Keynes had been right, and we could have collectively said "okay, let's stop the hedonic treadmill there and just chill more going forward", but that's not the way status competition works. The peasants weren't industrious because medieval society wasn't wired to reward productivity with status; ours is.
Apparently it was pretty bad in Poland too. The following is about XVIII, so it's not even medieval period...
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Wouldn't a realistic production have some people who go to extreme lengths to keep their clothes clean and in a good shape and others who dress in patchy washed dregs, kind of like what we can see in the streets now when we go on a walk and observe other people?
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I feel this is a slight exaggeration. Yes, ruining an expensive new set of clothes would be a hardship, but not to the extent of forcing someone to become a whore. As for "harsh and corrosive lye based soaps", ever heard of a beetle? Some people would go down to the river and literally beat the washing against a flat rock to get the dirt out. You wouldn't be using too much soap. Certainly colours would fade over time, but if it's expensive, then people do their best to keep the clothing in wearable condition for as long as possible.
Modern fabrics such as T-shirts are cheap disposable shit, and the fabric brighteners etc. are every bit as corrosive as the lye. This is why there is gentle soap for hand washing woollens and delicates.
TV shows and movies were dressing everyone in leather before HD, because they did think it looked cooler than the bright costumes, which reminded the makers of cheesy 50s movies.
And the armour probably wouldn't have been shining in the first place, but blued or coloured or treated in some fashion. The notion of shiny steel plate is 19th century and a result of a lot of 'cleaning up' by curators and restorers.
It’s actually a myth that medieval women who didn’t marry by the end of their teens had to resort to prostitution to survive- in core Europe women tended to marry in their early twenties anyways, and medieval women had economic options other than prostitution which could at least keep them alive, and enough charity available that these kinds of economic setbacks were survivable.
3% of the victorian population, 6% of the female population, were employed as prostitutes in 1887... in London. One of the most industrialized cities of the day and one that actually had factory work for women.
This was when GDP of the Uk was close to 3000-4000 per person, or poorer than modern Ukraine... this was post industrial revolution after London had entered what we'd now say is middle income status...
In the Medieval period when real GDP was $300-600 per person per year it would have been vastly worse and the poverty vastly more pressing.
Historical GDP source
Hell the Catholic church owned the brothels in many areas because it was just seen as a fact of life and they were trusted to morally absolve and oversee the "sinner"
Seriously. the catholic church was running brothels with ~1000 prostitutes in London in the 1100s... when London's total population was 18,000-40,000... and that was just the one Burough where they owned the brothels... there were plenty of private brothels, speak-easy brothels, and women not affiliated with a brothel working as prostitutes as well.
.
Edit: sorry to pick on you but there's this revisionism I got everywhere I've posted this essay that somehow prostitution wasn't common, people weren't poor in the past, and everything that was expansively written about by contemporaries in early modern novels was just fiction and obviously Feilding, Defoe, Richardson, John Ford, Thomas Middleton, and every other writer about the lower classes from 1500-1900 ever wrote about was just sensationalist fiction to be completely ignored.
Prostitution existed in the Middle Ages. It was legal and common. That does not mean that unmarried women had no other recourse; the word spinster meaning what it does is evidence that the default unmarried woman supported herself through something other than prostitution.
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London did not represent all of England, nor is extrapolating backward a good idea. People, women included, headed to London because they were desperate and couldn't find work elsewhere. 1887 is also a time where women would get paid far less for factory work than men, and so prostitution is what you resort to not to starve.
Likewise, lower GDP in medieval times can just as easily be read as people not having the actual funds to pay anyone for prostitution. It isn't a metric that'll reveal much either.
And finally: you're sure we should just take contemporary authors at their word? I wouldn't do that today, lest I believe the modern world is irrevocably sexist, racist, evil, and bound for climate death juuuust a couple decades hence. Our ancestors were no more honest than we are, and I'll read into what they say with as much credulity as I'll read contemporary writing.
I've given you 3 types of evidence:
Contemporary accounts from 400 years of history 1500-1900 (Dickens, Tolstoy, Hardy, and many others wrote extensively on this in the 19th).
Historical records of the Lancet Medical journal from the 19th century ...
And the Historical records of the catholic church from the 12th century.
and the historical GDP which shows this is very much in line with what we find in modern poor societies at these GDP levels like El Salvador, Haiti, and Somalia...
There is no scarcity of women, lower gdp figures don't limit how much is available like iron or timber. or food ...GDP just determines the price of their labour and the poverty that will push them to trade that labour.
and your response amounts to: "Nuh Ugh"
Seriously every single piece of evidence we have says that 1100-1900 a single digit percentage of women were employed in prostitution and maybe a very low double digit percentage had engaged in it at some point in their lives. (And yes how people manage to feed themselves and keep themselves alive absolutely seems like the kind of matter of material necessity than can be extrapolated backwards)
We have bawdy authors from the 16th century painting this picture, senitmental authors from the 17th, moral reformer authors form the 19th, quite impressive records from all these eras including very early records from the 11th century...
and what I consistently find is people just deny it because they don't want to believe it.
A single digit percentage of the total population or a single digit percentage of the urban population? Big difference in a 80+% rural society.
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I'm not convinced learned city-dwellers' (or soldiers') writings are representative of the rest of the population. I think if you don't live in a city and you have the resources to spare to get yourself a woman to fuck who you don't want to have kids with, you buy (or otherwise obtain) yourself a slave, and have her spinning cloth or do chores around the farm or be otherwise productive the rest of the time. At least she won't necessarily by definition be completely negatively productive for you, the way going to a prostitute is. Prostitutes are for people who are either rich enough that paying one doesn't affect them, or so broken-down that they don't care about tomorrow.
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Historical records aren't great at keeping count of most any numbers. This isn't their failure at all - it was impossible, given the technology at the time, but using them as if they were reliable is folly. Using them to pretend statistics are on your side while other people must just not want to believe Fax and Lodjik is as rude as it's wrong.
Thankfully, you mention modern societies that exist in today's day and age - a time where statistics are much easier to keep and much better kept in general. We have NGO's doing their best to figure out how many sex workers there are in any given place[1]. Judging by what they imply about the three countries you mention..
El Salvador would have prostitution prevalent at 0.3% of the population, or +-0.6% of women. Haiti has it twice as prevalent, at 0.6% of Haitians, or +-1.2% of its women. Somalia is Islamic and it shows: estimates are a prevalence of 0.06%, or +-0.12% of its women.
Note how the above numbers assume there are zero men and boys prostituting themselves, which is tragically optimistic. Note how even the place with the biggest numbers - Haiti - doesn't even have half the prevalence London would have, if your sources are correct. It's not even a fourth!
To reiterate: this is still a lot of people either way. It also concerned many people in the past. There is no shortage of authors writing cheerily about the whores they'd be banging just to throw money around. I'm not at all in doubt that prostitution is ahistorically uncommon in the modern era, perhaps only trending upward slightly with how easy (and safe!) the internet really makes it.
But implying that it was so prevalent that a normal young woman might be one ruined outfit away from being forced into prostitution is, certainly, taking things too far. Women could, and did, do other work. They could and did support themselves if they were lucky and skilled enough. And yes, those women pushed into cities by the spectre of Robert Malthus driving them there certainly ended up whoring themselves out quite often. This is still a thoroughly far cry from implying that it was the fate of any woman who didn't luck out or get married immediately, and I'd rather not pretend my view is one born out of thin air either.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190604174922/http://www.aidsinfoonline.org/gam/stock/shared/dv/PivotData_2018_7_22_636678151733621264.htm
EDIT: formatting
Indeed, the etymology of the word spinster implies that an absolute majority of unmarried women, historically, supported themselves by working wool. Domestic service seems to me more likely to be the next-largest source of employment than prostitution.
While I agree that the OP was a florid Kulakism, the idea of impoverished women having only a single vocation to support themselves is probably anachronistic. It's not spinner OR full time prostitute, it's probably more like spinner that also takes cash for sex from a couple men to make ends meet.
Also it could be euphemism. See AccountantTok.
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This is only tangential, but I recently stumbled upon The 1815 Diary of a Nova Scotia Farm Girl: Louisa Collins, of Colin Grove, Dartmouth. It’s a hyperlinked text-imported diary of — well, it’s in the title. You see how much labor was expected of the eldest children. The diary is written by the 2nd eldest daughter and much of her time is spent on farm work and spinning. It’s a peek inside a lost world, with a young girl quoting various poets in her diary, talking about neighborly visitations and the occasional mention of current events, like rumors of Napoleon’s demise (greatly exaggerated).
I found this serendipitously. Coincidentally, I was reading a blogger specializing in Napoleon, who mentioned that Napoleon loved to badly sing the works of Rousseau to his friends. Yes, the philosopher Rousseau wrote music, and some of it is good. Napoleon’s favorite work was Le devin du village, and I concluded that what he loved to sing was certainly “Dans ma cabane obscure”, as he related to the figure of Colin singing with love about his wife. Anyway, the figure of Colin is a European symbol of the pastoralist hero in pastoral works, introduced by Edmund Spenser. It’s likely that “Colin’s Grove”, the home of this farm girl, was named in the same pastoralist tradition. And so while this young girl wrote about Napoleon in her diary in Colin’s Grove, Napoleon was singing a song of the pastoral hero Colin. I love the intricate connections of Western Europe you come across from burrowing into history!
That's an excellent snapshot. of the early 1800s. Thankyou so much for sharing!
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Great post - it is far too easy for us moderns to underestimate the cost and importance of textiles pre-Industrial revolution. Textile production (fibre preparation, spinning, weaving, and sewing, but mostly spinning) was the main work of pre-modern women and was far more labour-intensive than what we now see as housewifery. I first learnt about this from Lisa Jardine's Worldly Goods which spends about half the book talking about how increased Mediterranean trade during the Renaissance gave the urban middle class access to dyes (including the most brilliant colours, and also the fast colours which could survive washing) which had previously only been affordable to the aristocracy - thinking about this in the context of your article makes me wonder if kings and lords losing the uniqueness of their vivid colours could cause social change all by itself.
One quibble - you say that a peasant girl might get a new outfit every several years. I don't know if that was intended as a creative exaggeration, but Brett Devereaux (a Roman historian in his day job, but primarily famous for blogging about the historical accuracy of Paradox games) says in this series of posts that a single full-time semi-skilled textile worker could produce 5-6 outfits a year with Roman technology (spinning wheels, which reach Europe around 1300, double this) with most of the work being spinning, which is easy to multitask with childcare or basic animal husbandry. So one outfit a year per family member was a perfectly attainable goal for an ordinary peasant family (unless they were poor enough that they needed to sell the spun yarn to commercial weavers for additional food, or oppressed enough that they needed to sell it to pay taxes), and a family with an unmarried teenage daughter would be doing better than that - if she did ruin her first date dress she would be able to make another one.
[Raw wool/flax and basic vegetable dyes were cheap - unless you were after Worldly Goods level colour the cost of clothes was dominated by the labour involved in the production process]
His ‘how do they make it’ post serieses heavily imply and sometimes outright state that an average family would be selling some portion of the yarn produced by its female members, up to the majority if there was a bad harvest.
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So the analogy I used elsewhere was to just adjust it for purchasing power.
A skilled worker made 6-8d a day according to a redditor... which I analogized to 60-75k a year. A linen shirt required 3 els of linen at 12d each, and 2d worth of labour from a tailor... so it'd take a week or week and a half's labour from the skilled worker to buy a linen shirt... if he deadicated 100% of his income to it.
So it comes out to 1000-2000 dollars for a linen shirt, which admittedly is high end, kings would wear linen.
But you multiply that out and a full outfit pants, boots, socks, sweater, jacket, hat ( and you need all these you're walking everywhere in all weather) comes to 10-30 thousand dollars depending on quality.... and user you can buy used or skip and get it down to 5k or maybe even 2k at the bare minimum... maybe cloth a child for 1k with used babyclothes...
But a full outfit for an adult to actually go out and do things in the world is looking like the investment we make for a car or vehicle.
I bought a motorcycle for 5k a few years back, believe me I wanted it to last 5-10 years. I consider its loss a personal tragedy.
And you example likewise points to this: A team of mother and daughters working year round in a more leisurely cottage industry, with other responsibilities, we'd expect to kick out 15-30k a year... maybe 40-60 if they were in the top 5-10% ... so divide that out and those low end homemade outfits destined for women and children are 2k to 5k each.
.
Then you get into MILITARY outfits that have to survive a ton, do all the work you might possibly do on campaign, have armour, maybe have heraldry...
that's like a 40-60k investment for a low end footsoldier, and getting up into the hundreds of thousands for knights and a king's custom armour and everything might be into the millions ppp.
You just really aren't going to have multiples or if you do you aren't going to take your spare set on campaign with you and leave it with some squire-boy who could easily be beaten up and have it stolen from him
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It's an interesting topic, and you raise some points I enjoy thinking about. Thanks for writing.
But hark! I hereby downvote you! Take that, scoundrel! For your lack of a submission statement, and for all those intolerable ellipses in the text!
Yes! A downvote! Surely that will convince you!
The blow was light, but I fear it has struck true... and like the red vitae fatal flowing forth...I fear I shall not recover.
(But like actually, I can't see my total yet (too soon) you may have sent me negative)
Doubt it; I think most mottizens are more tolerant.
But really, do you intentionally use so many ellipses, or is that just a habit that crept up on you?
Intentionally.
I try to write like I speak, and maintain a conversational tone.
Well your tone of voice changes when you speak, you can't just throw in a coma... because you're not just throwing in a comma.
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In the spirit of the medieval era, perhaps we need to threaten to excommunicate Kulak until he adds a submission statement.
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That was fun, and didn't go in the direction I was expecting. The real friends were the textiles we made along the way.
I do have to object to a certain WWI metaphor. For all the horror of trench warfare, it lacked various essential qualities of the Holocaust, such as capability to shoot back.
Other than that, the Western Front point was well-made. Netflix's sequence is a perverse counterpart of the famous bullet opening from Lord of War. Rather than the life story of a disposable bullet, it is the durable jacket which witnesses disposable humans.
They couldn't shoot back at the commanding officers and military police forcing them to the front.
Indeed All's Quiet on the Western Front depicts what happened to soldiers who refused to go into battle on nov 11th after the armistice had been signed but before 11am when it went into effect.
The filmmakers make a very dramatic case...
I mean... we really think 'fragging' wasn't a thing in WW1? Who's gonna do a forensic investigation when during the night an unpopular officer dies to a hand grenade:
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I’m sure they do.
How many of the Germans would you say were there involuntarily? Hitler, at least, was quite enthusiastic in his enlistment.
Its not Germans, its all conscripts across all nations.
Their were mutinies in the French, British, and German armies including the german navy... I think that's a pretty dramatic statement that they didn't want to be there
In addition to the fact the conscription was neccessary to begin with. There wasn't an all volunteer army on any side of WW1
Notably, this is not true for the Australian Imperial Force, which was entirely volunteer - the split over conscription (a referendum which narrowly failed) ended up splitting the Australian Labor Party and ultimately shaped the modern Liberal and Labor Parties.
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Then the goalposts are receding faster than the Maginot line twenty years later.
I think claiming German suffering in WWI was a Holocaust 1.0 is in poor taste. Going further to suggest
That’s rather bold apologetics, and it’s also laughably inaccurate. Hitler, at least, was a red-blooded volunteer, and conflating him with downtrodden conscripts is buying into the laziest of Weimar-era Nazi propaganda.
I never claimed Germany suffered a holocaust.
Boys suffered a holocaust.
Boys 14-25 are the most discriminated against group in human history. Full stop.
No group has suffered such violence so Deeply in the moment, vastly across nations, and consistently across time.
The bloodiest day of the holocaust it was calculated 15,000 people were killed.
Bloodiest day of WW1 20,000 British! boys were killed (not counting all the other powers)
.
And notably this is a holocaust that never ended
The world screamed never again after the holocaust... but even our "humane" "modern" "progressive" welfare states reserve the right to drag teenagers from their home and massacre them by the million.
Indeed both Ukraine and Russia are doing this now without a fucking mummer of protest
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Actually if you cut out the mra-djacent whining about the sin of conscription I think it actually cashes out as a fourth grade essay question level of analysis of Hitler:
Hitler was really bad because he treated people who weren't soldiers like soldiers. Everyone knows it's ok to kill soldiers in a war, but you can't kill people who aren't soldiers.
I'll also point out that, per prior comparisons to slavery and the Holocaust, 8-14% of WWI soldiers died in the war. 80% of Auschwitz inmates died there. American Black slaves died in slavery better than 80% of the time.
So if you took the question at the time of conscription, the vast majority of young men would choose the trenches. I doubt the option of "take up anti conscription terrorism" has better odds, outside the Vietnam era.
Sure, if you ask them as they go over the top at the Somme you might get more takers, but that's just letting people cash out their bet mid game. At the time of conscription, materially, getting drafted is a better pick.
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That's of course a complete fabrication of the film though, and to the detriment of the book's ending (and themes). At that point the German Revolution was already starting; the High Seas Fleet famously mutinied rather than carry out a final attack.
In the last days of the war it was the Entente who were still launching attacks, either out of general eagerness (the Americans) or the belief that Germany either wouldn't surrender, or would need to be completely defeated to avoid a repeat.
The fabrication of the film was moving events that happened in various armies around to make a statement about the war... the filmmakers have said the commander who ordered the 11th of Nov attack was explicitly based on a British General known for being a butcher
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Yes that struck me as well. Another point to consider is that at the time of the Armistice the Germans had actually gained territory. Along much of the front, the lines of contact were in what had been Entente territory. The ceding of land that German soldiers had spent years fighting and dying for was a significant element in the birth the whole "great betrayal" narrative.
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Interesting post, I am reminded of a story on the HFY (humanity fuck yeah) subreddit about humans and aliens. The humans become surprisingly advanced compared to the rest of the galaxy. Every other civilization gets gifted nanobots to help them with tech after they stall for too long. Humans never stalled for very long, but all the places where civilization normally stalled are places where human textile improvements drove innovation. The other alien civilizations were all naked.
One of the other underestimated aspects of textiles in the medieval era is the importance of textile armor, the gamberson. It doesn't survive in the archeological record, but all the other evidence we have points to it being very common and very important. In a society based around agriculture the primary layer of defense was grown in the fields, not mined in the mountains.
The tradition of cloth armor continues with modern Kevlar, but Kevlar comes from oil production, because of course the most important thing to fight over is also used in producing armor.
You sound like you would enjoy "the Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World" by Virginia Postrel
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