(Part 2) Top products from r/paradoxplaza

Invaluable web sites:

• Dickinson College Commentaries — Select classical texts with vocabulary and very helpful commentary.
  
• Perseus Digital Library — If you have trouble locating a word in the dictionary, enter it into the Word Study Tool to identify it.
  
  Some helpful Latin schoolbooks on Google Books and the Internet Archive (with many more to be found, especially if you read the publishers' advertisements):
  
  
• Gildersleeve's Latin Grammar — If you can't find the information you need in Allen & Greenough, look in this book.
  
• Fabulae Faciles by Frank Ritchie — Four very easy retellings of Greek myths.
  
• Eutropius, edited by J. C. Hazzard — Eutropius' history of Rome is easier to read than any Classical author, and his style is remarkably close to the Golden Age.
  
• Cornelius Nepos, edited by Thomas Bond Lindsay — The easiest Classical author. His surviving works are a book of Lives of the Outstanding Generals of Foreign Nations, and portions of Kings of Foreign Nations and Roman Historians.
  
• Caesar's Gallic War, edited by Arthur Tappan Walker — Traditionally the first book of real Latin read by students because of its combination of simplicity of style, purity of style, and intrinsic literary interest. The received text of the Gallic War is in eight books, but this edition lacks the eighth because it was not written by Caesar.
  
• Select Orations of Cicero, edited by J. B. Greenough and G. L. Kittredge — "The Citizenship of Archias" is not too difficult.
  
  A few helpful books you can buy:
  
  
• Vergil's Aeneid, edited by Clyde Pharr — With vocabulary and notes on the same page as the text in a similar format to Walker's Gallic War. This book only contains the first half of the Aeneid, and nobody has done a complete corresponding edition of the second half, but by the time you're through with this, you shouldn't need quite that depth of annotation.
  
• Scribblers, Sculptors, and Scribes by Richard A. LaFleur — A collection of easy unaltered sentences drawn from ancient Roman graffiti, inscriptions, and various literary sources.

I recommend reading this:

https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492224969&sr=8-1&keywords=1493

if you are interested in a counter-argument. Europe got a massive leg up from exploiting the Americas' natural resources - it gave them a huge advantage sometimes inadvertently (like flooding China with silver, which demolished the Chinese economy) and sometimes unexpected ways (the potato and many other plants from the Americas made Europe's nutrition much better than the rest of the world, or access to rubber, etc.)

With the victory of the Grancius River, Alexander's Macedonians were in bouyant moods, yet the cities of Asia Minor stood in their way and soon the Great King himself was looking to respond.


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Sources for the Episode.
By the Spear: Philip II, Alexander the Great, and the Rise and Fall of the Macedonian Empire (Ancient Warfare and Civilization) By Ian Worthington
A Companion to Ancient Macedonia by Joseph Roisman and Ian Worthington
A History of Macedonia by R. Malcolm Errington
Alexander the Great by R. Lane Fox

Absolutely. There are a couple of things going on. The first thing I'd like to link about this is the letter sent back to the UK in 1793 when they tried to set up trading relations. My favorite bit is

>Our dynasty's majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures.

The thing is.. at the time, the Emperor wasn't just being a douche. He was absolutely right. China already had muskets as good as 1790s muskets. China had mass silk production, which was way nicer than the mass linen production that was kicking into gear in Europe. They already had porcelain that was much nicer than European ceramics. So on and so forth.

The only reason the opium trade kicks off is because there is literally nothing the British traders can bring that the Chinese want. Before the British start bringing it, they're literally just paying for all of the things I listed above (that are in very high demand in Europe) with straight silver.

Here's where the trouble starts. The Qing dynasty's taxes and treasury were all based on silver. However, silver was suddenly being pumped into the economy at very high rates. This caused pretty severe inflation--since there were more taels of silver around, each one was worth less as prices of goods and services rose, and the flat tax assessments that had been established centuries ago suddenly generated much less real income for the state. The Qing were too slow to respond to this and when they eventually tried to raise taxes to compensate, it caused widespread unrest. This was happening at the same time as a population explosion. The reasons for it are somewhat undecided, but which may have been in part influenced by the West in the form of the humble sweet potato, which had arrived in the early 1700s and (similar to regular potatoes in Europe) unlocked the farming of tons of semi-arable land and drastically increased available calories.

As a result, the Qing dynasty was already facing huge issues. It was at this point that Europe, for the first time in world history, began to surpass China's sphere of influence in production, population, and practical military power. (This is something I think a lot of people forget.. they just assume western hegemony and technological superiority is an eternal given, when it was a very recent development). The Opium war happens and China just gets clowned. This makes the people even more pissed than they were at the tax increases, the vastly increased number of people competing for static government jobs and only suppressed by a static army.

Now the Qing is in a super precarious position. Remember, the leaders aren't actually ethnic Han Chinese--they're Manchus whose ancestors had claimed the throne 150 years previous, when the Ming government was experiencing its own internal strife and thought they could invite the Manchus in to work for them (this backfired). As a result, nativist sentiment had already been simmering under the surface, especially among the landed, educated gentry that formed the backbone of the Chinese government's administration. Reform efforts by the Qing were seen as foreign meddling, and the educated landowners would often stir up the peasants to resist all foreign ideas as more Qing-invented nonsense created to destroy the greatest culture on earth. Telegraph lines were cut, railway lines would be sabotaged. People echoed what has always been conservative sentiment.. "Why can't it just be like it was before?" Most people in China had no real conception of how or why Westernizing was practical or desirable and merely saw it as an assault on their way of life.

The Qing (specifically, the Dowager Empress; there were factions that wanted to go full-Western, including her son who was technically supposed to be in charge, but she and the Eunuchs shut that down pretty hard) essentially had to play both sides against the middle; the only way to survive themselves was to redirect the nativist anger against the REAL foreigners from the West, rather than the foreigners in the palace. Unfortunately, this makes it a lot harder to implement reforms or spread technology that is visibly from the people you're saying are ruining the country. In the end, the Qing failed to play either side; they were completely dominated by the West and their practical rule of the countryside broke down until it was entirely in the hands of warlords, setting the stage for a period of disunity and unrest that wouldn't be resolved until Mao wins the civil war nearly a century later.

So, uh, yes.

For sources: Hsu; Rise of Modern China

Hucker: China’s Imperial Past: An Introduction to Chinese history and Culture

Clunis: Superfluous things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China

Earlier this week I just finished up Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution & McLynn's Napoleon: A Biography, both of which I highly recommend if you're at all interested in the French Revolution.

i'm not sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Cotton

"By 1860, Southern plantations supplied 75% of the world's cotton"

I did some reading on this topic several years ago, and if memory serves correctly, there were differences in the products being exported at that time. I believe India in particular grew less-valuable short staple varieties of cotton, which was woven by hand into textiles before exporting. The U.S. was exporting raw extra-long staple cotton, ginned and ideal for British textile mills.

idk about China, but it wasn't until the 20th century that India started large-scale plantings of the types of cotton grown in the U.S. south.

Hunt and Murray's History of Business in Medieval Europe

Jan Morris's Venetian Empire

Roger Crowley's City of Fortune

Graeber makes a passing mention to it in Debt that has his usual detailed citations and further reading. There are others whose titles escape me, and it turns out I didn't have these listed in my Amazon wishlist or Goodreads after all.

Hell, it's even on the wikipedia page:

>The crucial problem with sugar production was that it was highly labour-intensive in both growing and processing. Because of the huge weight and bulk of the raw cane it was very costly to transport, especially by land, and therefore each estate had to have its own factory. There the cane had to be crushed to extract the juices, which were boiled to concentrate them, in a series of backbreaking and intensive operations lasting many hours. However, once it had been processed and concentrated, the sugar had a very high value for its bulk and could be traded over long distances by ship at a considerable profit. The [European sugar] industry only began on a major scale after the loss of the Levant to a resurgent Islam and the shift of production to Cyprus under a mixture of Crusader aristocrats and Venetian merchants. The local population on Cyprus spent most of their time growing their own food and few would work on the sugar estates. The owners therefore brought in slaves from the Black Sea area (and a few from Africa) to do most of the work. The level of demand and production was low and therefore so was the trade in slaves — no more than about a thousand people a year. It was little greater when sugar production began in Sicily.

>In the Atlantic ocean [the Canaries, Madeira, and the Cape Verde Islands], once the initial exploitation of the timber and raw materials was over, it rapidly became clear that sugar production would be the most profitable way of using the new territories. The problem was the heavy labour involved — the Europeans refused to work as more than supervisors. The solution was to bring in slaves from Africa. The crucial developments in this trade began in the 1440s...

The Crusades introduced sugar to European markets and it was expensive as hell, so merchants were all over it, especially Venice and Genoa. Venice managed to seize Cyprus and Venetians and Cypriot landlords enlisted their Turkish and Greek serfs to work the plantations (and they were plantations in every sense of the New World term). Alongside this, Venice and Genoa made regular adventures to Azov and the Crimea and Black Sea coast, and among the commodities they would return with were slaves. Eventually sugar harvesting proved so labor intensive that they switched to slave labor.

Also during this time, Europeans were trying to grow sugar everywhere they could -- which wasn't very many places. There was some success in Sicily and in Spain, but the real gamechanger was the discovery and settlement of the Atlantic islands. Genovese merchants approached the Portuguese almost immediately about establishing sugar plantations in the usual model, and the proximity to Africa made importing slaves from there instead of across the Mediterranean a logistical sensibility.

This didn't happen overnight, it took a couple hundred years for these interlocking developments to progress, but there you have it.

You gotta have the right teacher. I was lucky enough to have Jon Sumida as a professor in undergrad - this work helped a lot in engaging with On War and Clausewitz's ideas.

Here's a decent book regarding the economic/political/sociological "cultures" of North America. Also seen in this map on /r/imaginarymaps

I can highly recomend "The Complete Roman Army" by Goldsworthy for military related stuff.

here, go read this. it's a very widely used book on game AI.

I don't know if it was a pact as much as Mao betraying Koumintang in an attempt to have Koumintang and the Japanese wear each other out, leaving the communist faction the strongest. It worked, and millions or tens of millions of Chinese civilians were the victims of that power play.

Source can be this book for instance https://www.amazon.co.uk/Second-World-War-Antony-Beevor/dp/0297844970

I don't know what the current Chinese official history says, but most likely not the truth. China is very afraid of any kind of historical facts undermining the legitimacy of the Communist party and their current and previous actions.

I am on the phone so this will be brief, but it rustles my jimmies how common this misunderstanding is.

In most all fields, from military technology, to shipbuilding, Europe had surpassed the rest of the world, including China, well before 1800. Yet in the Paradox community there is this notion that Europe only came in last minute and stole the tinder from the world.

This was a process that took centuries.

https://www.amazon.com/Measure-Reality-Quantification-Western-1250-1600/dp/0521639905/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1428445761&sr=8-1&keywords=measure+of+reality

There is no justification for how countries that hasn't invented metalworking would be able to westernize and be technologically on par with Europe in the span of two decades, if not less.

That's just the first example that came to mind because I recently read this book so I could talk about it in detail. Naturally, the Soviet Union did this on a much larger scale, but I am not personally familiar with the details of those campaigns, so I didn't talk about them.

But thanks, my point was definitely that the Poles were the worst.

It’s actually a really interesting view that is posited by Japanese historians. Racing the Enemy is an amazing Japanese paper on the realities of the final days of the war from the internal view of the Japanese government.

I highly recommend reading the entirety of the work, but the summary goes along the lines of this:

The Japanese knew they were going to lose the war. They knew the Soviets were going to enter the war with the European front at peace. The Japanese government was terrified of what a Soviet-occupied Japan would look like and they preferred an American occupation. The problem was how to surrender while saving face and hopefully keeping the imperial system intact. The Soviets would have established a communist satellite state like they had done in Europe, while the Truman administration was at least amenable to keeping the emperor in place for public peace. The Japanese code of honour meant surrendering at all was problematic, but the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki allowed the Japanese to a) surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could enter the war, and b) save public face amongst the population of Japan by pointing to an apocalyptic bombing and say “we have to surrender”.

Nitpicking - but the struggle for the Baltic by the Teutonic Order was anything but a show of power. It took them many decades to build up a fragile monastic state that trembled at the sleightest tremor. What saved them was that they'd get manpower from elsewhere at a ridiculously low cost thanks to the new troops either being new brothers or crusaders. This ended once they subjugated the native Prussian and Lithuanian tribes and is underlined by their defeat against the combined might of the Polish and Lithuanians. This defeat robbed them of the top of their organisation, drained their manpower and they were without enough horses to project power outside of their territory.


.. the Teutonic struggle is actually damn fascinating and I can suggest Christianson's The Northern Crusaders to anyone interested in either militant church orders, history of the Baltic area or religious warfare in general.