Charles Freeman

Karma: 14

Charles Freeman 18 Jan 2021 16:35 UTC
1 point
in reply to: nels.in.newmexico@gmail.com’s comment on: Book review: WEIRDest People
Thanks for your comment, nels. Sorry I did not see them earlier. The chart on p. 315 is chronological. so while the cities of Roman Europe (including the Iberian peninsula) were lively politically, they were in decay by the fifth century- but there has to be some sort of ‘plus’ representative government in Roman areas before then (e.g. search ‘Pompeii politics’). So after the Roman collapse the main urban areas are the Arab cities and it is only slowly that urban life in Europe revives. (The shortlived (770-843 AD) Carolingian empire was not urban- rather the centres of power were the court and monasteries.) Chris Wickham sees the first representative governments in northern Italy as c.1100. It is hard to know how Schulz choose his cities (I am longing to get to a university library to check his sources!) but he seems to assume that once a city is marked as having a town council it remains in the chart as a representative government from then on (so a steady line UPWARDS as new cities come in). Yet we know that many of the most prosperous Italian cities fell under one family rule after c.1300 so his chart should then start going DOWNWARDS as representative governments are lost for this prosperous region.
After the banning of pagan cults in the 390s by the Roman emperor Theodosius, the Catholic church was the only institutional religion in town and it is still with us so ANY development in European society correlates with its existence (as do cold winters). Henrich’ error is to suggest that the Church caused these developments when there are perfectly good historical reasons (mostly economic) for the revival of European cities in the Middle Ages.At the very least he should have challenged conventional historical explanations to sustain his thesis but I wonder if he is even aware of them.
One day he will be challenged for his view that the church broke up kinship groups as, being unaware of the Roman ban on cousin marriages and their individual landholdings, he does not realise that intensive kinship had been broken up centuries before his start date of 400 AD. I am amazed that it has not been already done.

Charles Freeman 5 Dec 2020 15:05 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Charles Freeman’s comment on: Book review: WEIRDest People
Rewriting Henrich’s chart on p.315.
In his recent acclaimed book The Life and Death of Ancient Cities, Greg Woolf writes that ‘the Roman urban apogee was located sometime in the early third century.’ (This was also the moment when one there is a genuine Roman collective brain as the cities were all part of the same peaceful empire, same architectural features, and well connected with roads.) While we know from Pompeii that local politics was very vibrant in AD 79, we don’t know how vibrant they were in 250 AD when Henrich’s chart begins. Certainly more than zero. I would guess that forty per cent of the cities still had some kind of representative government. So let’s start the left hand side of the chart with that figure.
There was a steady decline into the collapse of Roman towns in the fifth/sixth centuries. So probably no or very few urban areas had ‘representative government’ from then to the emergence of commune government in northern Italy in 1100. So a long period of zero representation.
We would then have a period of ‘representative (communal) governments’ for say two hundred years but gradually these governments would be supplanted by the signori, one family rule, so after 1300 there were be a steady decline of representative governments on the chart until 1500- and if the chart had gone further the decline would have become steeper.
This is only for the Roman west and then just northern Italy. The chart might be more complicated if the cities of northern Europe had been included.

Charles Freeman 4 Dec 2020 12:13 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Charles Freeman’s comment on: Book review: WEIRDest People
′ From J. SCHULZ (2019) ‘Kin networks and Institutional development’ ( the article cited for the chart). ′ This analysis supports the hypothesis that the Church’s incest legislation fostered the formation of communes. Areas in which bishops were active in incest legislation are associated with a higher probability of cities being communes.”
This is a complete disregard of sophisticated study of why the communes emerged. These cities became wealthy as a result of trade and loot. (There is an inscription on Pisa’s cathedral saying that it was loot from raids on Arabs that financed it.) One reason why Pisa was able to develop communal government in 1100 was because the bishop had gone off on the First Crusade (1099 sees the taking of Jerusalem) and so was not in the city to stop them. There is no problem about Schulz putting the two together but surely, before going into print (with Henrich following him), he should have asked whether there was any literature about the rise of communes. My bible on this is Philip Jones’ The Italian City- State , From Commune to Signoria, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997 - Jones deals at exhaustive length with the economic factors- so Schulz/Henrich needs to be conversant with this work so that they are at least aware they are challenging decades of sophisticated scholarship on the rise of communes- but, sadly, there is no sign that they are even aware of it. (And Henrich has all the expertise on his Harvard doorstep!)

Charles Freeman 4 Dec 2020 11:43 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Charles Freeman’s comment on: Book review: WEIRDest People
And again, Henrich seems to believe that ‘representative government ’ appears quite early (forty per cent of cities by 1100 according to his chart). I refer him to Chris Wickham’s Sleepwalking into a New World, The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (Princeton University press, 2015) p.68. ‘Pisa had one of the earliest established communes of all, together with Genoa, with the years around 1100 being the most likely period for its crystallisation..’
The growth of these city port cities (Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi) were as a result of the reviving trade in the Mediterranean. There is no reason to link them to Catholic marriage policies!

Charles Freeman 4 Dec 2020 10:48 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Charles Freeman’s comment on: Book review: WEIRDest People
To show that the rise of ‘representative government’, in northern Italy at least, was NOT consistent, I am giving you the Encyclopedia Britannica introductory paragraph under: Signoria, (Italian: “lordship”), in the medieval and Renaissance Italian city-states, a government run by a signore (lord, or despot) that replaced republican institutions either by force or by agreement. It was the characteristic form of government in Italy from the middle of the 13th century until the beginning of the 16th century.
So please ignore any of Henrich’s charts, as on p.315, which show a consistent rise in representative government. As further research (Including the full article of the above) will show there were so many political problems in the representative governments of the communes that many cities relapsed into one man rule. This is 101 level history for those of us who have to write about these cities or lead tours to them!

Charles Freeman 4 Dec 2020 9:30 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: Book review: WEIRDest People
Brent Shaw, the classical historian, has done an in-depth survey of this and analysed 33 Roman marriages none of which were between cousins, He makes the good point that rising aristocratic families who needed to secure their position deliberately married into established aristocratic families so that there was a good reason for avoiding cousin marriages. Of course, as with medieval Europe, we don’t know what went on with the mass of sexual relationships. Henrich seems to have assumed that there was some sort of formal marriage under the auspices of the Church. This was not the case as marriages by mutual consent without even a priest in attendance were valid.
The fact that around me in rural East Anglia, there were marriages within the villages, most of whose inhabitants were born and died in the same village, up to the Second World War shows that Henrich’s argument that rural life was split up in the Middle Ages is erroneous. My late father-in-law ,a GP in Norfolk in the 50s had to sort out the medical consequences of inbreeding! Luckily we have extensive evidence of marriage patters from the rich Florentine archives and an analysis of 700 dowry documents from the fifteenth century showed that rural men married rural wives and urban men urban wives and seldom was there a crossover.
As I have already said that as a historian who has been researching these things over the years,I am exasperated by Henrich’s imaginary narrative !

Charles Freeman 4 Dec 2020 9:10 UTC
3 points
in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: Book review: WEIRDest People
Peter. I am happy to agree that Roman land law was highly sophisticated- the Romans were a legally sophisticated civilization (as the northern Italians rejoiced to find when Justinian’s Law Code was rediscovered in the eleventh century just when it was needed!) What is important in assessing Henrich’s assumptions is to look at what actually happened on the ground. So a major problem was what to do with retired legionaries, especially after the civil wars of the first century BC. The pragmatic solution, give them a plot of land in an area where there needed to be a secure base, then they could marry, and would defend their land with fury if attacked. These colonies were accorded elections and assemblies (As noted, Pompeii, which was given the status of a colony, provides a mass of evidence.) Look again at how the land was divided in the rich areas of north Africa and also the many Roman villas with their own estates. (There is one just down the road from me ( I helped in its partial excavation when i was fifteen!) and even today a farm track marks one of its original boundaries,) So the ASSUMPTION ( the more I reread Henrich, the more I realised that he ASSUMES ( I would even say ‘imagines’) something which the historical evidence directly contradicts!!) by Henrich that communal land ownership was still in place in 400 AD is nonsense. He has a better case with the northern Germanic tribes but the centuries of Roman civilization left much more of a mark across more of Europe- even into Britain, and a tradition of individual property rights that the medieval Italian cities were happy to adopt.
If Henrich wanted to produce a theory of individualism in European history, he needed to talk to historians (much more specialist than I -and he would have found world class ones in his own university) before creating a theory which has no backing. So far the reviews suggest that he has got away with it!

Charles Freeman 4 Dec 2020 8:46 UTC
1 point
in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: Book review: WEIRDest People
The chart on p. 315 shows a steady rise in so-called representative governments to ninety per cent and then a small dropping off to 80 per cent by 1500. Generally after 1500 city life in northern Italy became stagnant and most cities came under foreign rule, e.g. Milan under Spanish rule. The word commune is used of the governments in the Italian city states which emerged in the eleventh century. The cities gradually eased out the power of the Church so that commune governments were largely secular, with magistrates and the communal buildings being built apart from the Church (an excellent example is Siena). Certainly one can equate representative government with secularism, not with the continuing influence of the Church. The cities were mutually antagonistic so Henrich’s idea of a ‘collective brain’ extending between cities is imaginary. Many cities fell under one person rule so there was generally, with some exceptions, a decline in representative government after 1350, nothing like the line shown on the chart on p,315. Of course one cannot evaluate Henrich’s argument when he does not provide a definition of ‘representative government’. Each in northern Italy evolved its own- in Venice participation in government was confined to those of noble birth- is this a representative government or not?
Generally, I cannot find any evidence that Henrich knows of the history of individual city-states. If he had, he could not have generalised in the way he did.
As you can imagine as a historian who leads tours round these very cities, I get annoyed when someone does not know anything about their history but makes grand generalised and misleading statements about it!!

Charles Freeman 3 Dec 2020 9:11 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: Book review: WEIRDest People
I agree, Peter, that in many ways the western nations have been more individualistic than others. I have explored this in my recent book The Awakening, A History of the Western Mind AD500-1700, published in the UK with a US edition coming from Knopf under the title The Reopening of the Western Mind. This is precisely why i bought Henrich’s book when it came out in the UK! As my title suggests I am concerned with the rise of the individual mind. I would argue that it lies in the relationship between an intellectual elite and the classical sources- so from 1400 onwards. This is why I like Mokyr’s approach (see another of my comments) which links a cultural elite to influencing the Industrial Revolution.
I was immensely disappointed by The Weirdest People. The first time i read it I was mildly interested and kept on going, the second time I got very irritated by the poor editing, the imprecise terminology and above all, his complete ignorance of European history (which was obvious from the first reading). Because it is so poorly organised (did he not have an editor?) it is hard to see the weaknesses, but I now realise that he did not know that the Roman empire existed and that many of the changes he attributes to the Church (the break-up of cousin marriages and communal landholdings) had already been in effect during the long centuries of Roman rule. There is very little evidence that anyone took much notice of the consanguinity rules anyway. ( I have searched for this but can only find one article on the nobles of the tenth to eleventh century where there was some acquiescence but unlike the mass of the population they were mobile and so could marry out.) While one can see a transmission of culture across the European elite (using Latin as a common language) over time, there is no evidence that it extended beyond this elite. It is true that the Protestant areas of Europe ( I wonder whether Henrich knew of the persistence of Catholicism over much of Europe- France, Spain, Italy, Bavaria,etc. as he seems to attribute much of WEIRDness to Protestantism but this would only have affected part of Europe) encouraged the reading of the Bible but this hardly compares with those who had access to the rich resources of the classical world.
We shall see whether the whole argument on which this book depends unravels as better historians than I come in contact with it. It certainly does not deserve to be seen as a major academic work.

Charles Freeman 2 Dec 2020 16:42 UTC
5 points
in reply to: ryan_b’s comment on: Book review: WEIRDest People
If you access ‘Pompeii and politics’ you will find a vast amount of evidence of the vitality of representative government in a typical Roman town. So when Henrich on page 315 writes ‘Before the Church arrives, the estimated probability of developing ANY [ my emphasis] form of representative government is zero- making pre-Christian Europe just like everywhere else in the world’ one can only gasp. He cannot use ANY if he ignores the Roman republic but even ignoring that one can look at local Roman politics in the cities which had their own constitutions.
What Henrich has done in the accompanying chart is to ASSUME that the growth of representative governments in urban areas of Europe correlates with the existence of the Church. The chart shows a steady rise of representative government so that ninety per cent of urban areas have ‘representative government’ by 1200 (forty per cent by 1000 when cities hardly exist and secular government only emerges in Italy c. 1100). He does not provide any evidence for this and he does not even offer a definition of representative government (which was lost in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries anyway as many Italian towns fell under single family rule). But Henrich appears to assume that the growth of representative government is linear and progressive and then takes the line back to the moment when representative government on the chart becomes zero ( and one assumes from his sentence that it remains zero throughout the previous Roman centuries).
As he is a professor at Harvard, he has one of the best classics departments in the world on his doorstep. so they could have told him all about representative governments in the coloniae and municipia of Rome cities. Henrich’s is an extraordinary way of presenting an academic argument. I can’t understand why, if he wants to chart ‘representative governments’, he does not start with some basic texts on Roman and medieval urban life and he can see the rise and collapse of different forms of government over the centuries. Urbanisation in European history is very complex and certainly not a story of linear progress!

Charles Freeman 1 Dec 2020 11:28 UTC
4 points
in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: Book review: WEIRDest People
Joel Mokyr does argue convincingly in his Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Princeton UP, 2017)that the contribution of an intellectual elite was crucial for the IR. He dates this as important from about 1660. (Mokyr has chapters on Newton and Francis Bacon.) But Henrich seems to assume that WEIRD psychology developed much earlier than this and for the population as a whole.
Whatever, as E.P. Thompson showed in his classic THE Making of the English Working Class, the regimentation of work in the cotton mills and and the dangers of working in the coal mines destroyed the independence and variety of tasks some had experienced as labourers in the open air of the fields. Western individualism (and I would argue that it was partly dependent on the rediscovery of the rich and various texts of the classical authors) certainly was only possible for a small elite. This is so obvious for anyone who knows something of European history and culture which is why I astonished when I began reading my copy of the Weirdest People.

Charles Freeman 1 Dec 2020 11:16 UTC
4 points
in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: Book review: WEIRDest People
But individual landownership was the key feature of Roman farming, villas, small farms, tenant farmers,etc. This lasted for centuries for much of Europe and gave reasonable standards of living. (I once took part in a field survey around Rome to assess how far Roman farmholdings followed from earlier Etruscan sites post 300BC, and there was a good correlation.) Henrich seems to know nothing about the impact of Roman law and society. (For a start the Romans banned cousin marriage to the fourth degree of consanguinity and a study by the classicist Brent Shaw of 33 recorded marriages showed that none of them were to cousins.) Chris Wickham (q.v.) ,the authority of such things, sees what he calls ‘a caging of the peasantry’ in the ninth -tenth centuries. We do then have some evidence of farming yields improving, more land being taken into cultivation and a slow rise of population allowing the cities of northern Italy, Venice, Pisa and Genoa, to expand as the trading routes opened up again in the Mediterranean.
If you read this book carefully ,it soon unravels. So page 315 attempts to correlate ‘representative government’ in urban areas with exposure to the Church. As ‘representative government ’ is nowhere defined there is an immediate problem. As someone who has studied the cities of northern Italy, they went through phases of representative and non-representative government and usually hostility with their neighbours. (Florence had wars with Pisa, Milan, Siena and the papacy.) The rise of secular representative government in the cities, such as it was, involved lessening the power of the Church. Florence had no problem in declaring war on the Church in 1378.
Bizarrely, p. 315, ‘Before the Church arrives, the estimated probability of developing any form of representative government is zero-making pre-Christian Europe just like everywhere else in the world.’ LOL. How can you work on ‘estimated probabilities’ when we have all the evidence of Roman republicanism, Athenian democracy and the constitutions of elected magistrates in the Roman municipia? One of the discoveries in Pompeii is election graffiti. This sentence highlights the possibility that Henrich thinks: ‘I have this idea that urban society arises (in the eleventh century when the first recorded magistrates are found in Pisa) as the Church becomes more powerful. So the break-up of kinship groups by the Church CAUSES urbanisation (not trade or surplus population as most historians think- I know better than they do). As I have decided that representative government in cities can only take place as a result of the Church, then before Christianity there CANNOT have been representative governments in urban areas. ’ You can see where the logic fails.
I don’t see why he ever needed to go back to the Middle Ages, especially when Henrich clearly knows nothing of the history of Europe, medieval or Roman. I am a mere generalist historian but a first year course in medieval and Roman history would have helped him, I think.