Messages

Hi everyone!

The steam cooking fest is on today, so I thought I could make a short video showing off the cooking system.

Here it is!

It's October already? I'm a bit behind in posting my bookbinding experiments.

Here's one I did last month. The first proper hinged book. A little square thing..


I thought I'd do a red/brown kinda look.


Initially, I was planning on having some exposed French links, but when I waxed the red thread with white paraffin wax it kinda turned them pink, and I wasn't loving the look combined with the brown paper I was using. So I ended up going with a cover after the fact.


Adding some glue and pressing it.


Here you can really see how much glue adds to the overall structural strength of a spine. The trick is that you do it in coats. Of course, a full on proper book also has things like support bands and proper mull. Something I've been experimenting with lately, but that's another post.


Making some decorative end-bands using support tape and thicker string + glue.


Going back to an online tutorial (Bitter Melon Bindary), I made sure this time I understood the hinge spacing required. What surprised me was how loose it sits on the book prior to adding the book cloth. I wouldn't have guessed it just by eye-balling, as it looks like a huge gap. But this is actually what we need.


Initially we can use a bit of masking tape just to check the dimensions, make sure it's all fitting snug. Adjustments can be made here. You want a few mm overhang around the text block of course.

Glued on my over-thick jacket fabric "book cloth" (I've got some proper canvas since then but I worked with this for a bit.)

 
And voila. A cute little notebook thing.


This was really where hinges clicked for me. And you can see how with this technique, the spine is free to lift upwards. This lets you open the book wide and flat without issue.


Unfortunately my blade was a bit blunt, and when hand trimming I made a mess. Something I still struggle with, even with a sharper blade, depending on how thick the text block is. A nice industrial strength guillotine would be something. But alas, no space / money for that!


Another glaring mistake I caught after it had dried in the press. Ooops! 


But overall, I was very happy with it as a learning experience in making hard cases. 

Thanks for the explanation! Lots to think about. Now I want to read Das Kapital! It's been gathering dust on the shelf. So much to read, so little time. ><

Thanks so much Jubal! Very enlightening as always!! Particularly appreciate your highlighting of those areas where you think Koenigsberger is out of date / speaking speculatively. 

Your definition of capitalism seems very reasonable to me. Concerning its universality, it seems to me that the "ability to invest" also presupposes a certain kind of social system where "profits" can be returned on "investments". And that this connects with matters such as religious / social structures, debt and money, land ownership, etc. When does "wealth" turn into something that can be freed up from other constraints and used purely to acquire more potential wealth? It seems like something different to, for example, the amassing of land by ancient elites by taking advantage of their wealth and the power it gave them over indebted peasants in a bad harvest year. If we compare the wool merchants of Flanders to, for example, silk merchants in China in a similar period, what differences might exist? I -suspect- that one difference would be the way in which permission to create silk (among many other products) was regulated by the government, a kind of "award" given to certain families that was linked to relations we might somewhat problematically refer to as "feudal" - in other words, non-financial relations of mutual benefit / obligation. 

[The Later Middle Ages]

Woops, and another two weeks pass! I better push ahead on finishing this series before my few remaining impressions have been scattered to the wind.

OK, as per the program I laid out... let's talk The Later Middle Ages (1300-1500s) for a bit.

I think I've already mentioned quite a few things that overlap with this subject. Particularly in the last post on the impact of the black death on speeding up the shift away from feudalism. But also in the discussion about regionalism growing stronger over the earlier internationalism, and the way in which Italy was beginning to transform economically and culturally (we will come back to that when talking about the renaissance of course).

This is a topic that I want to focus on when I get around to final thoughts, but naturally enough the beginning of the "early modern" period is somewhat arbitrary. Or perhaps it is better to say, it is a gray distinction. To say that there is a "modern" and an "early modern", vs a "middle ages" and "late middle ages" is meaningful and useful. But people at the time understood the changes that were happening slowly (some aware sooner than others), and used different framing. Certainly, nobody flipped a switch and changed peoples minds or conditions of living overnight. The later middle ages is a time when already there is much that can strike us as quite modern, or at least, much that is already on the way towards a new form of living and thinking.

One example of the above point would be the rise of representative government. A subject which Koenigsberger spends a bit of time discussing. I am going to skip this topic. It's important I grant, but fairly complex. I'll simply note that, as feudal relations changed, so did means of gathering money (see above black death subject). Kings sought to enlist the aid of legislative bodies to tax people in new ways. And once these bodies were granted the status and autonomy to do so, they "took on a life of their own". The ways in which representative government was established, and the extent to which it wrested power from the monarchies, would vary in country to country.

What I want to focus on instead is technology. Something that had a decisive impact in shifting the conditions of peoples lives, as well as their access to information (and from this, their understanding of politics, religion and the world).

Here are the big ones:

- The Carrack (lanteen sails integrated with square sails). Lanteen sails are those triangular shaped ones that can tack against the wind. In the classic big ships of the Napoleonic era we see them at the front and back of the rigging, although sometimes they can also be rigged up high.) They apparently work more in the form of an airplane wing, with the airflow "pulling" at the sail. Apparently lanteen sails were developed by the byzantines, who drew on the techniques used in Arab dhows (and Koenigsberger  suggests that these in turn were probably inspired by Chinese junks. I wonder if this has been demonstrated clearly in the decades since publication.). Although I studied sailing (with a decent amount of actual practice) in high school, I had forgotten this term (or never properly learned it!)

Forward facing square sails, meanwhile, are those where the wind simply "pushes" at the sail. These are more powerful, but also more restrictive. Best when you have the wind at your back (think, the sails of the Romans, the Greeks, and the Vikings).

In the 1200s, the carrack was born. This was a ship that combined lanteen sails and square sails. A precursor to the great ocean going Spanish and Portuguese caravels of the age of exploration. This was a ship that could travel more efficiently than any previously made. All that it needed now was a means of navigation...

- The magnetic compass.

Here comes another decisive Chinese invention (if we grant that the inspiration for lanteen sails were also originally from Chinese junks). Apparently it dates back to Han dynasty China (2000 years ago), where a kind of "lodestone" was used for land navigation. Over time this was refined to a magnetised needle (1000 years ago), with use in maritime navigation mentioned by the 12th century. A hundred years or so later they began to be adopted in Europe.

Combined with the carrack, the Europeans now had the means with which to travel around the entire world.

- Gunpowder

Yet another Chinese invention. Although the military applications were apparently refined in the Arab world. Naturally the military applications are what we can readily imagine. Canons gradually (and then quite suddenly) changed the face of warfare, and the usefulness (and shape / form / function) of things like castles / forts. Yet what I didn't appreciate was the manner in which this new technology helped to usher in changes in the making of metals and chemicals. Sophisticated "mechanisms, cogwheels, gears, suction pumps" etc were all spurred on by this development. Downstream of it we find the power-driven bellows (around 1400), which allowed for iron to be fully melted for the first time (instead of reducing it to blooms that had to be beaten into shape I think). This laid the path for cheap, mass produced iron. Truly a society-transforming development. That said, iron continued to remain relatively scarce and expensive for centuries.

- Paper. Eyeglasses. Printing.

Koenigsberger treats these three together, due to their interrelated nature. With paper, we have yet another Chinese invention. Eyeglasses, an Italian one. Printing? Of course, first invented in China. Yet its separate re-invention in 15th Germany seems to have been unrelated. With these three inventions, it now became possible to mass produce books. An event Koenigsberger refers to as: "...the greatest advance in human communications since the invention of writing."

Again I certainly learned something here. For while of course one impact of this development was the availability of texts, which is obvious enough, something somewhat less obvious that I did not appreciate was how it helped to standardize the texts themselves. This meant that "for the first time" readers could feel that they were actually reading what the author had written, and not the cribbed, 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand, annotated or misunderstood version of a thing. This meant that: "International dialogue on religious, philosophical, scientific and literary topics underwent a 'quantum leap' in volume and intensity."

So, initially in the European early middle ages we had an internationalism, born of necessity, where itinerant intellectuals would converse in Latin. A small community sustained by the whole (western) continent. Then, in the high middle ages, we see the rise of regionalism, and separate regions become capable (intellectually and economically) of sustaining their own "centers of gravity". Then, in the late middle ages, internationalism makes a come back, via the printing press, and the capacity for everybody to have access to the same books.

Another impact of this development was the accessibility of literature (in pamphlet form) for "the common man", concerning religious topics, or political topics. We can readily imagine the way that this helped spur the protestant reformation of the 16th century.


The impact of China...

Looking at the above, it seems as though the impact of Chinese technology on European history at this time is really quite profound. It lead to the expansion of the external frontiers of the ocean, and the internal frontiers of the mind via written communication. It also helped transform material conditions via metallurgy and chemistry, with the development of clockwork mechanisms, iron smelting, and so on.

Of course, these developments in turn also helped bring Chinese thinking to Europe. With their new sailing technology, the Jesuits could reach the "far east", and began to bring back and translate intellectual works. These ideas then could be disseminated via paper, beginning to reach the intellectuals of Europe in the 17th century. It's a funny thing to think that the technologies of China, running ahead, then in turn became a vehicle by which the thinking of China could be disseminated.

Incidentally, here's a book I'd like to read at some point looking at the impact of Chinese thinking on Leibniz. Now of course as you know, the binary system itself, which I am using right now to type these words on a computer (or you, to read them - if anybody is reading this haha) was invented by Leibniz. But this binary logic was arguably inspired by his reading of the I Ching.

But that is another topic! Onwards.

[The Black Death]

Huzzah, huzzah. I have at last completed my read of Koenigsberger. I think it took two and a half months to work through a little under 400 pages, but given the newborn baby and also returning to work (and time spent learning book binding) I think that's not too bad a pace at all.

I don't think I can finish all my thoughts up in one post, and I feel I have skipped over much and can't (shan't!) really try to provide a comprehensive summary. But let's see what I can still dredge up from the past few sections, going over The Black Death first, and then The Later Middle Ages, before discussing the final chapter on the Italian Renaissance. I might then close with some Final Thoughts or something. So that's four more posts including this one! Onwards.


The Black Death

So, the great plague (1348-50) apparently wiped out 30%-60% of all Europe? It seems this number has not been significantly revised since Koenigsberger's book came out. Globally 50 million or so died. Which is quite shocking indeed.

Here's some things Koenigsberger has to say on it:

- Spread into Europe from the Asian continental interior via eastern trade routes.

- The growth of the cities (and their unsanitary conditions) helped hasten the spread.

- Of course, this had a huge psychological / cultural impact. He does not expand upon this too much, beyond mentioning a few quotes from the time, the flagellants, and (if I recall) how it is reflected in art and writing. There's an online article that looks at this in a little detail here.

The trauma of the Black Death gave rise to the most popular artistic channel for the representation of death, the Dance of Death. There are indications that first the dance macabre was performed, then poetized, and finally painted. Before the15^th century, the Dance Macabre was traced on walls of churches and charnel houses across Europe, gathering in its train rich and poor and young and old, exemplified by the fresco of Eure-et-Loir. In Europe every victim was danced off to hell no matter what: sudden death was escalated to sudden damnation (Binion, 2004). The dance macabre, based on folk superstition represented by the skeletons themselves, or accompanied with the living had a second social and spiritual lesson, that death is always coupled with the living. In the dance of the death, the corpses often tug or draw the living to death (Cohen, 1982) (Fig. 5).

The Triumph of Death" (Dutch: "De triomf van de Doods"). By Dutch artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569 CE). Oil on panel. Made c. 1562 CE.

- Many villages were altogether wiped out. Hundreds in total it seems. Cities also grew smaller and poorer. Overall the population took centuries to recover to where it was prior to the great plague (although population growth had been stalling prior to it, with Europe already seemingly hitting the limits of what could be secured from the land with the technology / techniques available at that time. There was also a great famine prior to the black death.)

- Economically / politically / socially, the drop in labour supply increased its value, decreased the value of land, and also helped to decrease the cost of things like clothing. So while this was a catastrophe for people, there was also a positive legacy with respects to the material conditions of the common people and their descendents.

- The above shift in turn helped to hasten the demise of feudalistic relations. The increased value of labour meant it was easier for serfs to find better conditions (and free or very cheap land) in other regions. The lords / land owners were incentivised to compete for labour, hastening a shift towards (if I understand rightly) the end of serfdom in general. Peasants increasingly came to have "permanent, inheritable tenures" or temporary yet "usually long-term" leases. Koenigsberger emphasises that this development was already underway, with the plague simply hastening it.

- And furthermore, this shift in relations helped to further fuel the rise of popular revolts, that would continue to occur throughout Europe until their culmination in the age of the great revolutions in France and Russia. The first big regional revolt hit maritime Flanders between 1323-1328, twenty years prior to the Black Death. But in the years following we see such cases increase. For example, with the peasants revolt in England in 1381. One of the cries of the peasants at this time was for an abolition of serfdom. It might seem strange that the situation could be improving for the peasants, and yet this lead to revolts. Yet I suppose psychologically? the expectations for a better lot were now possible, and this was what lead to clashes with the elites. Koenigsberger says that "modern sociologists" refer to this as "disappointment of expectations in a generally improving situation."

- These revolts took on a religious character (or utilised Christian thinking to critique the status quo.)

When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?

(1381 - the England Peasants.)

This was quite alarming for authorities: "Obedience to authority was central to all morality, and rebellion was the fruit of the most deadly of the seven deadly sins, pride."

-  Still, it was not until the 15th-16th centuries that the scale of these revolts really became serious for authorities.
 
- It was not just the relation of liege lord and serf that the plague impacted, but also the relation between lord and vassal. But this was also an acceleration of a trend already present. Here we see the rise of what some historians have called "bastard feudalism", where money was paid in lieu of military service. This was a shift towards a relationship of "patron and client", rather than lord and vassal. This was highly flexible and adaptable, but also more open to corruption.

- The plague struck repeatedly in waves until as late as the early 19th century! Judging purely from this fact, I imagine that (apart from gradual spread of immunity), the improved sanitation of cities by this period helped to put a stop to it. But I'm just guessing.

[mistake number 1]

Another update in my adventures in book binding. Until this point, all my work had been glue-free. Just card, paper and thread. But I was itching to push on into hard covers and glue. 

I also had some small offcuts from my re-binding of my innkeep journal, so I thought I'd make some mini books to learn the basics of hard cases! Mistakes were made. Many mistakes! But it was very instructive.


After making a lot of small signatures, I started binding them with the same kind of French link binding that I used for my previous notebook. Only with 1 central place for these links instead of 2, because of how small the book is.


Here's the finished thing! And mistake number 1: My signatures were using quite thick paper (from a sketch pad). Given the size of the book as well, this made "the swell" around the spine pretty big. Less paper per signature would have been a good idea (and a bit of time pressing them before stitching.)


I then applied some glue to create a "text block". And here was mistake number 2: Really, I should have set up some kind of press, even if just out of basic supplies, to hold the signatures closer together. I also should have applied 1 coat, waited a while, then done a second coat. This can let the glue form a much better connection (something I've figured out since then).


Still, our cute little text block was holding together. I used some old ribbon as the "mull" (extra spine support that you glue on), and that seemed to work fine. Something a bit more gauzy would be better but I didn't have anything like that.


I tried my hand then at making a book cover. I applied some cloth just directly to some hard board, and in this case it turned out ok. It's better to use an interfacing material that you iron on (which I got cheaply at a nearby shop since then). But it was OK. However I made mistake number 3 here, in not having large enough hinge gaps. You need pretty big ones (1cm even). Once I stuck everything together, it was clearly not able to open properly, so I had to just remove the spine entirely to get around it.


Luckily, that kinda worked. And you can open the book just fine. Haha. Looks ugly, but still.


And there we have it. My first hard-cover book, mini though it is. I learned quite a bit from this one. And I must say even now I'm very happy with it, warts and all. There's something amazing about being able to turn a bunch of old paper, some cardboard, thread, and bit of scrap cloth into a little pretty thing like this. Out of raw materials, a bit of beauty. I find the smallness of the thing quite endearing too. It's by my computer atm and I can just kinda fidget with it quite happily.  :-) Could be a good thing to stick some poems in. Or maybe tiny pictures or sketches.

Until next time!

Thank you! I've proceeded to make a miniature cased book as a practice run too. I just need to find time to upload the pictures of the process.

Recently I tried my hand at French link stitching. This is quite a flexible, basic kind of stitching where you kind of link together your signatures as you go. It can be used for making "book blocks" (where the stitched together signatures then receive glue and spine support before being given a hard cover) or for simple exposed spine notebooks. I'm making an exposed spine notebook here, as it's very simple. I just wanted a general purpose book where I write down words and mini bio info on famous people, aphorisms, thoughts, that kind of thing.



I started off with just some signatures from standard folded A4 printer paper, and some black card. I did go pretty ambitious and make 9 signatures.


This was my first time to also practice the "kettle stitch", one of the basic book binding stitches. I did it incorrectly (which I realised later), but still it turned out OK. It serves also to help (flexibly) bind together the signatures (with my previous multi-signature journal in leather, the case itself was where you kind of had large kettle-stitch type loops. Here it's simply done around the internal links between the signatures itself.


Here we can see the French links. Given the black card cover, the white pages, and the exposed spine, a nice thick red thread would have looked good here, but I don't have any! Next time. If you look carefully you can see I made a mistake with the orientation of the French link early on, messing up the uniformity. But it's hard to notice if you're not looking. All part of the learning process.


One of the benefits to this style of exposed spine + French links is that you can open it flat easily.


To give the black cover a little point of interest I pasted on this picture of an ancient Chess piece carved in the shape of a Viking Berserker (I recycled it from an old children's book on Vikings that I got at a thrift store.) Aint he cute?

Hmm.. Maybe we could do something similar by getting DNA off manuscripts made with human skin? 

[Since the medieval period, Russia has been more autocratic than western Europe.]

OK, baby is asleep! Another history post before I go back to work.

Let's talk Russia, as that's fresh on my mind. I wonder if Jubal might have some thoughts on this one too given the historical link between Russia and Byzantium.

Koenigsberger goes into some detail in a few sections on how Russia's social / political structure came to differ fairly markedly from what we see in the west. More specifically, he is offering a kind of explanation of how Russia came to be particularly dominated by autocratic government. I'll list his points below. But by all means I am also keen to hear any counterfactuals or qualifications. I wonder to what extent his analysis holds up today, and how much it may be coloured by the politics of the time in which the book was written (still prior to the fall of the Berlin wall).

But, assuming for now the premise: "Since the medieval period, Russia has been more autocratic than western Europe." Why does Koenigsberger think so? (And again here, we are initially speaking also of 'Russia' before 'Russia' even really exists, so there's an ambiguity here.)

First, early on, there is the form that Christianity took. Koenigsberger mentions Cyril and Methodius, two Byzantine Christian theologians and missionaries who went to spread Christianity to the Slavic peoples. For the purpose of translating the bible, they devised a new script known as Glagolitic. This was a precursor to Cyrillic, which incorporated some Glagolitic elements. Koenigsberger point out that Christianity in Slavic regions at this time was received through this filter of what was translated, and what was translated was very scarce. There was lack of access to the kinds of pagan literature or theological commentaries that helped lend more ambiguity or nuance to Latin Christianity. This contributed to Slavic Christianity being relatively more dogmatic or conservative.

Second, the impact of the Mongols. The Mongols were able to dominate Russian territory for quite a long time (I think for some 200 years). Koenigsberger does not develop an argument about any general cultural impact of this (although he notes a few things that the Russian princes learned through collaborating and/or fighting with them, such as the importance of information networks). But something he did point out that I thought was interesting was the significant migration of peasants it caused. For a long time, Moscow was not a particularly developed area. It is remote. It is cold. People were living further down on the plains around the big rivers. But with the coming of the Mongols, many moved further north into regions that were only rarely attacked by Mongol raiding parties. Moscow was once such place. This is not the only reason it turned into a great capital - this was also a political achievement - but it was an important element. However, while these peasants were welcomed into the region, they weren't integrated into the kinds of reciprocal duty / obligation relationships you often see in feudal Europe. They were more or less at the mercy of the Princes.

Third, the lack of separate city-based power units. Something I learned early on this book was how in the west larger cities came to operate under different rules to the rest of a kingdom. Quite early on, cities developed a degree of autonomy, and people living there understood their relationship to each other separately to their relationship as a vassal to their lord. Yet Koenigsberger claims that this kind of 'civic identity' and political / legal independence didn't get a chance to take root in Russia. Novgorod did hold its own for a while, but was eventually conquered and subjugated underneath the rulers in Moscow. Koenigsberger also contrasts how, while houses in western European cities would front on to the street, houses in Russian cities would face inwards towards their own courtyard, and often be surrounded by fences. He suggests this was reflective of that lack of 'civic' mindedness.

Fourth, the later subjugation of the Church under the government. Koenigsberger claims that secular / religious tension in Latin Europe - or to put it differently, the power struggles between the Catholic Church and the different kingdoms - was a source of 'dynamism' that worked against autocratic tendencies / mentalities. Meanwhile, Russia followed the lead of Byzantium, in linking Church and state much closer together. Later, they gained increased independence from the Patriarch of Constantinople, and understood themselves as an independent centre of Orthodox Christianity, like a kind of 'new Byzantium'. Then in the 18th century the Russian government formally took over the Russian Orthodox Church, such that it was like a branch of the state.

So to sum up, we have...

1. An early tendency towards dogmatic interpretations of Christianity.
2. Migrations away from the mongols enhancing the power of the princes vis the peasants.
3. A lack of independent cities.
4. Subjugation of the Church under the government.

I think for Koenigsberger these factors set the scene for what would come later with the empire and then the Soviets.

[Internationalism vs Regionalism.]

OK, an quick entry focusing on just one element: something I didn't cover earlier when I spoke about the transition to the high middle ages: Internationalism vs Regionalism.

This has been another really interesting part of learning about medieval Europe. In the early middle ages, there was a strong tendency towards internationalism for a small section of the population.

For example, specialised craftspeople (such as stone masons) often needed to be itinerant, because there was only so much work for them in any given region given the relatively small size of the economies (particularly in the western and northern kingdoms). Once a cathedral was completed, for example, you'd move on to the next place where a project needed more help. And that next place could be in an entirely different part of Europe.

The literate class in the west (scribes, priests, merchants, and such) also shared a common language in Latin, which they not only wrote, but spoke. In part they were simply inheriting the literary culture of the empire. In part, it was also a result of the internationalism and of the Catholic church. But also, this internationalism again here reflected the underdeveloped nature of the regions. Regional populations and economies were still too small for them to really function as intellectual or artistic hubs in and of themselves.

In other words, the loss of the urban centres in the west - which only very gradually built up to having populations in the tens of thousands - the smallness of the regional economies, these conditions fostered a certain internationalism among artistic and literate people out of necessity. This internationalism contributed to the development of a kind of post-Roman, pan-European culture. For example, a 12th century cathedral built in France and a 12 century cathedral built in Germany could look very similar.

Yet as we move into the high middle ages, regionalism begins to gain dominance. Not to the exclusion of internationalism, but it is now a countering force. As regions began to increase in population, as they grew wealthier, they developed their own kind of gravity, as it were. More craftspeople and intellectuals could work within the borders of a given place. More books were written in regional languages. More intellectuals could find learned company to collaborate with or study under without having to head to Italy or Paris.

This regionalism also had political implications. In the early middle ages, the 'universalist' claims of the imperial title or the Church were dominant. And the Church worked hard to secure its power as something standing above that of empire, working within that framework. Yet as kingdoms grew in power, they could more easily assert their own independence vis. the universalist claims of the Church. This lead in one instance to the French crown squaring off against the Papacy at the opening of the 14th century, with agents of the French king actually capturing and mistreating the then pope such that he died. The Papacy was subsequently moved to Avignon for nearly 70 years, with all 7 popes of that period being French! (Although that I understand that doesn't mean the Papacy was rendered entirely subservient to the French crown, and that Avignon / southern France at that time was a relatively independent region politically and culturally.) This is for Koenigsberger quite symbolic of the growing power (economic / political / intellectual) of the regions.

Some of my own general thoughts on the above phenomena:

In my own mind, I realised I tended to think of 'internationalism' in an overly simplistic way, whereby regional economic development leads to greater specialisation, which leads to greater trade between regions, and in turn fosters an interchange of people and ideas. From this perspective, Europe should be more 'international' as we move into the middle ages, not less. While this may have been true in terms of trade, intellectually and culturally it was (in certain respects if not entirely so) the opposite! And this is really instructive. The viability if you will, of a place to stand on its own feet, culturally, artistically, intellectually, can mean it can afford to be less connected, less international in outlook. (Naturally, this is a complex subject, and there are countervailing tendencies at work. With the printing press, for example, we see an enhancement of internationalism thanks to the ability of people to more easily read what those in other places are writing.)

And indeed, if you look at the world today, you see plenty of examples of this. The Dutch, for example, are famously good at speaking English. And well they should be, given they are a small country. They cannot expect to get far speaking Dutch outside of the Netherlands. Similarly their large companies are very international. I doubt you would be getting a job at one if you spoke no English! In France though it's a different matter. You can get along pretty nicely culturally and economically (and even travelling to quite a few places, like ex-colonies) speaking just French. You could also contrast the international, export-oriented nature of South Korea's music industry to the domestic consumption-oriented music industry of Japan, which has twice the population. Or consider how China's cultural exports in the form of film and music largely remain restricted to their own cultural / linguistic sphere. In part because they can afford for this to be the case. China is big enough. There's no need to sell movies to Americans.

[working capital]

Oops, and over a week went by. I'm still reading, but I'm finding it hard to get any time to write about. Still, that's unlikely to change in the near future. So I'll try and write a bit more tonight.

Looking still at around the 12-13 centuries...

Something I found interesting that Koenigsberger draws attention to is how early we see the origins of capitalistic enterprise. Even at this early point, when looking for example at the wool trade, we find people in Flanders (I think is one location) doing things like buying fine wool from England in bulk, then paying people to card and spin it within their own homes, then taking that and having it woven by someone else, then taking that and selling it. A kind of 'vertical integration', where they had control over the workers to the extent that they were in cases forbidden from taking on jobs from others. Similarly something like this occurred in Italy (I think Florence) with 'wool guilds'. We have a kind of 'proletariat', but without any factories.

My original understanding of guilds was of a fellowship of craftsmen, who provided communal aid to each other and their community, and controlled things such as who got to be recognised as a 'master', what prices people could charge, and so on. And this is something that becomes more prominent as we move further along. But guilds could also be effectively cartels of a sort, run by wealthy people to stitch up markets and control labour. So it was apparently with some of the wool guilds.

Yes, this kind of 'proto-capitalism' impacted only a very small percentage of the working population. This is the age of the agrarian economy. But still the fact that it is very much visible this stage was interesting. And we can see it already beginning to spread into other areas that required a significant amount of money, such as mining, or ship building.

Italy in particular was perhaps the most important hub of such activities, because of its dominance in trading (and recall previously that the Italians received a boost here in facilitating movement of people and goods for the crusades). But the reason the Italians defeated their rivals for securing this trade, according to Koenigsberger, was because they had the

most sophisticated commercial techniques; different forms of partnership which allowed them to raise the large amounts of working capital needed for the ships, provisions, goods and wages in overseas ventures that might last many months.

With these partnerships, it was important that merchants be able to ensure each partner could receive the profits or carry the losses of a venture. And so, here we see the origins of 'double entry book keeping'. There is a book specifically about this apparently. Apparently the inventor (called the founder of accounting and book keeping) was one Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan monk, and a mathematician who taught mathematics to Leonardo Da Vinci of all people.

I want to quote another particularly interesting part here:

With the development of the new commercial techniques there developed also new attitudes of mind. Rational calculation of economic enterprise, a numerical, mathematical, assessment of possibilities; and rational mathematical, commercial methods came to be seen as the recipe for success.

We can draw a link between the coming intellectual renaissance, and the growing rational frame of mind among the intellectuals, and the commercial activities, accounting and banking that was taking place. Following from this, you could make the argument (although Koenigsberger does not say in so many words) that indirectly, the blood spilled by the crusades contributed down the line to the development of rationalist philosophy.

A closing thought: I am reminded of something Koenigsberger does say later in the book about a different case: "The achievements and the tragedies of European and human history cannot be easily separated." (p 279) How true.

On the one hand, if we look to anything we consider "good", and we find great harm. Yet also strangely, when we look at many terrible things (the crusades, or the black death), we can find some positive outcome down the road. There is no point at which we can really draw neat lines and isolate these elements entirely. Instead we see good and evil feeding into each other in a kind of dialectic of unintended and unknowable consequences.

It's like that Treehouse of horrors short in the Simpsons.

Shopkeeper: Ah, perhaps this will please the gentleman. [picks a Krusty the Clown doll] Take this object, but beware it carries a terrible curse.
Homer: [worried] Ooooh, that's bad.
Shopkeeper: But it comes with a free frogurt.
Homer: [relieved] That's good.
Shopkeeper: The frogurt is also cursed.
Homer: [worried] That's bad.
Shopkeeper: But you get your choice of topping.
Homer: [relieved] That's good.
Shopkeeper: The toppings contain potassium benzoate. [Homer stares] That's bad.
Homer: Can I go now?

That's a cool idea! 

Hello and welcome fellow dev!