Category: History
My excellent Conversation with Bob Spitz
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.
Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.
Excerpt:
SPITZ: Mick, from a very early age, was an exercise freak.
As we know from my investigation in the book, Mick’s father was the Jack Lalanne of the United Kingdom. He had a television show, an exercise show like Richard Simmons, and he always had a great person to show off the exercises, young Michael. He would say, Mike, get down, show him 50 pushups. Mike, do 100 chins, and Mick would jump to it and do it. That man still has a 27-inch waist at the age of 83.
Keith, on the other hand, is a medical miracle.
And this:
COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?
SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.
And:
COWEN: How good a cook was Julia Child? That’s another of your biographies. Actually, how good was she?
SPITZ: She was great. She was a wonderful person, but here’s the little secret. Julia was a great cooking teacher, but not a very good cook. There were people who left her house—and John Updike told me this. He was a frequent guest with her. Corby Kummer, who was a wonderful food writer, told me this as well. They’d leave Julia’s house. They’d go to a little park around the corner, and they’d get physically ill. They’d get sick. Julia used too much butter, too much cream. She really had no reins on her when it came to using things like that.
Bob was excellent throughout, and I very much enjoyed his new biography of the Rolling Stones.
Ideas Behind Their Time: Part Two
In 2010 I wrote about Ideas Behind Their Time:
We are all familiar with ideas said to be ahead of their time, Babbage’s analytical engine and da Vinci’s helicopter are classic examples. We are also familiar with ideas “of their time,” ideas that were “in the air” and thus were often simultaneously discovered such as the telephone, calculus, evolution, and color photography. What is less commented on is the third possibility, ideas that could have been discovered much earlier but which were not, ideas behind their time.
I gave experimental economics, random clinical trials and view morphing (“bullet time”) as examples. Jason Crawford has a list discussing the wheel, the steam engine and bicycles among other possibilities. In some cases, further exploration indicates that an idea required precursors and so was not as behind its times as first suspected, in rare cases, however, good ideas really could have been invented much earlier.
Using Claude, Brian Potter has significantly expanded the list by looking systematically across a wide range of inventions and asking could they have been invented earlier? Most could not. Put the other way, most useful technologies tend to be invented quite quickly once they are possible–this is reassuring. The airplane, for example, could not have been invented before a high power-to-weight engine, which happened circa 1880 making the late 1880s the earliest feasible date for powered flight. Thus, the Wright Brothers (1903) were only just behind the earliest feasible date–and that is true for many inventions.
The ideas very far behind their time include the stethoscope, general anesthesia and reinforced concrete and quite far behind are the Jacquard loom and canning. Is there a pattern here?
Addendum: Brian’s Github with the full prompt and output for each invention is here.
William Stanley Jevons as polymath
In the 1860s Jevons built a Logical Abacus, sometimes called a logical piano, a kind of early computer that could perform (some kinds of) logical operations faster than humans could. It is held in the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University, and you can think of its structure and operation as broadly akin to a player piano in music. It was limited in its powers, and geared mainly toward replicating Boolean logic, but extreme in its ultimate ambitions. Jevons understood the potential. In his written presentation of the project, Jevons cites the work of Charles Babbage, and noted that “material machinery is capable, in theory at least, of rivalling the labours of the most practiced mathematicians in all branches of their science. Mind thus seems able to impress some of its highest attributes upon matter, and to create its own rival in the wheels and levers of an insensible machine.” Jevons understood that science would be able to tackle some of the most difficult projects, and he wanted to be on as many of those frontiers as possible. He understood that his own work was a mere beginning, and he wanted to press forward as much as possible.25See Jevons (1870, the quotation from p.498), and also Maas (2005, chapter six). For a general background on Boolean logic, see Hailperin (1986).
Jevons also studied molecular motion in liquids and developed the concept of “pedesis,” a precursor of what we now call Brownian motion. That said, Jevons thought his pedesis was an electrical phenomenon related to osmosis, and so he turned out to be incorrect in his fundamental hypotheses. Nonetheless, this topic, like the others, showed he was an observant mind and obsessed with developing theories to explain anything and everything. He wasn’t just a pedant, rather he made real contribution to a number of scientific fields above and beyond economics.26On Jevons on pedesis and Brownian motion, see Brush (1968).
Jevons also was a “born collector” in the words of Keynes, and an extreme bibliomaniac. He accumulated thousands of books, and he lined the walls of his house and attic with them, and also stored them in piles in the attic, which became a problem for his wife upon his passing.
That is from my recent generative book The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution.
What should I ask Martha Nussbaum?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Most of all focusing on her recent book The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom.
So what should I ask her?
Trade and the End of Antiquity
What was the role of trade, and how did economic activity evolve at the End of Antiquity, when political power shifts away from the Mediterranean towards northern Europe and the Middle East? To answer those questions, we assemble a database of hundreds of thousands of ancient coins from the fourth to the tenth century, estimate a dynamic model of trade and money where coins gradually diffuse along trade routes, and recover granular regional trade and real consumption time series. Our estimates suggest that: Mediterranean trade was disrupted by the newly formed border between Islam and Christianity; economic activity shifts away from the Mediterranean starting in the fifth century; real consumption peaks in the Middle East in the eighth century; and by the end of the ninth century, Atlantic regions from Islamic Spain to Frankish northwestern Europe have become the wealthiest regions of the ancient western world.
That is from a new NBER working paper by .
The Southern Poverty Law Center Indictment
The excellent Patrick McKenzie has a very long Bits About Money post on the the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) indictment. It is filled with details about bank operating procedures. I’m going to summarize. The post is divided into what I think of as two parts. First, did the SPLC commit bank fraud? Second, what is the backstory behind the indictment?
The first part is simple, McKenzie argues that yes the SPLC committed bank fraud, more specifically false statements to a federally insured bank under 18 U.S.C. §1014–the main reason why this is not a hard call is that almost any false statement made to influence a bank, no matter how small, is illegal and can get you 30 years. Moreover, the banks are essentially an investigatory arm of the state and they collect data for decades, any piece of which can generate an indictment. The main way in which the SPLC committed bank fraud is that they set up fake businesses to pay secret informants. Neither of these things, as far as I know, are per se illegal but lying to your bank about the ownership, control and purposes of accounts opened in fictitious business names is illegal.
When Bank-1 investigated, an SPLC employee asked the bank to close several of the accounts and transfer the remaining balances to an SPLC account. Later, SPLC’s president/CEO and board chair confirmed in writing that the accounts were opened for SPLC operations and operated under SPLC authority. As Patrick writes, the letter is “a succinct confession to bank fraud.” Thus, the case that the SPLC paid informants through bank accounts opened under fictitious business names appears strong.
But the government had long been aware of SPLC’s informant work, indeed the existence of the informant program has been public knowledge for decades. It’s hard to see how to run a secret network to pay informants without hiding some information–could the SPLC simply have told the bank what they were doing? It seems to me that the punishment for false statements to a bank ought to depend on the motive and intention of the false statements but the law isn’t written that way. Another administration, however, would certainly look away. Which brings us to the second part of the story.
The SPLC itself was embedded in banking and private-sector decision making. Suppose Acme Inc., a large business, wanted to offer its employees matching grants for charitable donations. Acme, however, doesn’t want newspaper headlines like “Acme donated to the KKK!” So Acme contracts with a firm that vets charitable donations, and that firm uses a blacklist created by the SPLC. This was routine. Amazon used the SPLC list for AmazonSmile; workplace-giving vendors used or advertised SPLC screening; all of this gave the SPLC and the broader Change the Terms coalition power to pressure social media, tech, and financial infrastructure firms over speech, blacklisting, and payments because they were already in the door and embedded in their systems.
When the SPLC was mostly identifying nearly universally despised organizations like the KKK, all of this was more or less accepted by everyone in the know, except perhaps for a few hard core civil-libertarians. But in the woke era the SPLC overplayed their hand. The SPLC and related organizations began to take on conservative, Trump affiliated organizations with widespread support. Through a massive PR and outreach campaign they pressured social media organizations, tech firms, and finance firms to follow along–and this was not just a media campaign, the Change the Terms coalition had hundreds of meetings with top level staff. The partisan nature made it legally questionable but when your allies are in power. these things can be overlooked. In perhaps the most remarkable part of the document, Patrick quotes a donor fundraising letter from Free Press and Free Press Action (not the SPLC but part of the larger coalition):
Our efforts have yielded numerous concrete changes. After years of pressure from Free Press and our allies, Twitter finally banned Trump[.]
…Facebook initially suspended Trump “indefinitely” and later changed his suspension to a two-year ban. We’re now pushing the company to permanently ban Trump and to close a loophole that’s allowing a Trump PAC to fundraise and organize on his behalf.
…FUND THE FIGHT. Your generosity makes our work possible. Please give what you can today to make sure we have the resources we need to keep fighting for equitable media policies that improve people’s lives.
As Patrick notes, the fund raising letter closed with the following deadpan disclaimer:
Free Press and Free Press Action are nonpartisan organizations….Free Press and Free Press Action do not support or oppose any candidate for public office.
Trump won. Many people will say the indictment is the result. That may well be true but that doesn’t make the indictment legally weak.
Read the whole thing for a lesson in how SPLC’s list and coalition work became embedded in private-sector decisioning systems and more generally for a behind the scenes look at how institutional power actually works.
The ‘Ordinary Men’ of the Nazi Party
We digitize and analyze the near-universe of National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) membership records and link them to population and industrial censuses. Four findings emerge. First, as the party expanded, its membership came to resemble the broader population more closely in occupational, demographic, and religious terms. Second, SS members’ characteristics remained different: younger, more educated, and more fanatical, as measured by the display of Nazi insignia in membership portraits. Third, within communities, coworkers, and families, early membership generated hysteresis, with subsequent entrants drawn from the same groups. Finally, local increases in party membership are associated with subsequent deportations of Germany’s Jews.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Capitalism and Modernity
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, one of the few economists in the world equally at home solving stochastic dynamic optimization problems as with sociological theory and history, has an excellent series of twitter posts on capitalism and modernity.
JFV: I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of social theory.
What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria.
I teach the economic history of the Soviet Union and socialist China, and all the pathologies (pollution, reliance on fossil fuels, inequality, depersonalization, consumerism, alienation, you name it) that you can find in a poor neighborhood of 2026 Philadelphia appeared in the same way, or even more, in a factory in Leningrad in 1970 or on a collective farm in Jiangsu in 1978.
Critics seem to lack a vocabulary (or, if you prefer, a cognitive framework) for distinguishing “capitalism” from modernity. For example, people everywhere tend to link personal relationships to displays of consumption. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this. De Beers did not invent spending a lot of money on a useless engagement ring: it rode a pre-existing disposition into a particular form of consumption. Couples in Leipzig in 1982 were as interested in conspicuous consumption as those in Chicago in 2026. Talking about “Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” misses the point completely.
Of course, you can try, as some of the more perceptive Trotskyists did, to argue that the Soviet Union or China were not truly socialist countries, but this is just a lazy application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, and, consequently, their complaints failed to gain much traction outside some departments of cultural studies.
But this is not just a matter of poor analytic skills, as bad as those are. More importantly, it means that 99% of the policy proposals activists put on the table to correct the problems of “capitalism” are doomed to fail because they do not understand where the root cause of the phenomena they complain about lies.
I see this at the university. Do you think the corporation you deal with is self-serving and incompetent? Wait until you need to deal with the Graduate School at a private Ivy League university. The incentive problems (asymmetric information, career concerns, lack of timely feedback, pressure toward conformity) that cause dysfunction in the former are even more pronounced in the latter because of the absence of a profit motive, the sharpest disciplinary mechanism.
At a very fundamental level, Marx got modernity wrong; Weber got it right. Time to spend much less time with Marx and much, much more time with Weber.
Here’s the second post:
Many readers yesterday asked for more concrete examples of what I have in mind regarding the distinctions between features inherent to modernity and those inherent to “capitalism.”
Imagine we have a functioning socialist commonwealth. For simplicity, I will call it the SC.
Imagine also that this SC aims to provide state-of-the-art medical care to its citizens. This is not about superfluous consumption. It is about the desire to provide good preventive care, adequate treatment, palliative care, and so on.
Soon, you realize that you need the scientific-technological complex that develops advanced mRNA vaccines and, even more importantly, the industrial capacity to produce tens of millions of doses at short notice when a new virus arrives or an old one mutates. These are sophisticated processes that involve coordinating millions of individuals with diverse knowledge, skills, and personalities.
But it does not stop there. You will need to produce thousands of MRIs, scanners, FLASH radiotherapy machines, and all the bewildering array of equipment you find in a top hospital.
And I insist: wanting to be treated with the latest oncological equipment if you get cancer is not frivolity. It is a deep human desire that a good society (any society, really) should attempt to provide.
How are you going to accomplish all this? An SC does not want to use private property, so it relies on some form of public property. But public ownership is not the main issue. The real issue is that the SC would need to organize large bureaucratic organizations. Without them, it cannot develop and deploy vaccines, MRIs, scanners, and the rest. The need to scale is the key mechanism at play, not who owns the property.
And, because of their scale, these large bureaucratic organizations will suffer the type of problems that critics of “capitalism” attribute to “capitalism.” The organization will be impersonal and alienating, and inefficient due to career concerns, asymmetric information, conformity effects, and internal politics.
Moreover, because resource constraints hold in every human endeavor, some claims for medical treatment will be denied. The SC will not have enough resources to satisfy every medical demand (and medical demands are, for all practical purposes, unlimited), every demand for education, every demand for the environment, and every demand for this or that worthwhile cause. Sorry, yes, scarcity will always be with us, with or without AI.
Patients whose requests for medical treatment are denied will be particularly annoyed because the SC is built on the idea that such events cannot happen. At least in a “capitalist” society there is someone to blame (the “capitalist”).
Those who deny the need for large bureaucratic organizations are living in a fantasy world. I am pretty sure the day they are told they have prostate cancer, they will run to their closest large bureaucratic organization for treatment.
Those who deny the problems of large bureaucratic organizations, and how deeply irresoluble those problems are, have not seen how not-for-profits work. I have never seen more acrimonious fights than within not-for-profit organizations, where some shared sense of the common good unites members. The fights are fierce precisely because profits play no role.
I have been reading about these issues for nearly 40 years, and I have seen plenty of proposals to address the problems of large bureaucratic organizations. A favorite among many is “participation” or “more democracy” within the organization. No, sorry, more “participation” or “more democracy” only makes things worse. Yugoslavia taught us that you cannot run a large bureaucratic organization based on democratic participation (well, you only need to know some basic economics; Arrow’s impossibility theorem, anyone?).
Large bureaucratic organizations are essential to modern life, and they are full of problems, with or without “capitalism.”
This is what Weber understood and what Marx, who had an incredibly naïve view of the future, never grasped. Weber saw that bureaucracy is not a feature of “capitalism” but the institutional form modern society uses to coordinate large-scale tasks under rational, impersonal rules. Hospitals, ministries, armies, universities, and, yes, corporations all converge on the same form because it works at scale. The iron cage is not capitalist. It is modernity.
The third excellent post on whether capitalism created modernity which criticizes Quine and the analytic-synthetic distinction (!) is here.
talkie: an LM from 1930
Here is the link, with explanation.
HUD Says Realtors Can Now Speak the Truth
HUD: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to real estate professionals clarifying they are not violating the Fair Housing Act when they share information with prospective homebuyers about neighborhood crime rates and school quality data.
“Buying a home is one on the most significant decisions a family will ever make,” said Secretary Scott Turner. “Americans should not be left in the dark about vital facts like neighborhood safety or school quality. HUD is making clear that real estate professionals can openly and lawfully provide this information in an equal and consistent manner to American families.”
The background is that The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin (and via later amendments) familial status, and disability. Discrimination included “steering” buyers toward or away from neighborhoods based on protected characteristics. The Biden administration ramped this up with a directive and Executive Order that essentially said the Fair Housing Act must be interpreted not just to prohibit discrimination but to redress and undo past discrimination:
This is not only a mandate to refrain from discrimination but a mandate to take actions that undo historic patterns of segregation and other types of discrimination and that afford access to long-denied opportunities.
…the [HUD] Secretary shall take any necessary steps,…to implement the Fair Housing Act’s requirements that HUD administer its programs in a manner that affirmatively furthers fair housing and HUD’s overall duty to administer the Act (42 U.S.C. 3608(a)) including by preventing practices with an unjustified discriminatory effect.
The “discriminatory effect” language reinforced that so-called disparate impact, not just intentional discrimination counted as discriminatory—and it contributed to a legal and reputational environment in which platforms and agents had strong incentives to avoid anything that could be characterized as steering. As a result, by the end of the year, Realtor.com had removed its crime map from all search results, as did Trulia, Redfin announced it would not add crime data to its platform and since Zillow already didn’t include such data, by early 2022 all the major portals had dropped crime information. Similarly, the National Association of Realtors published material instructing agents not to directly answer client questions about neighborhood safety. One article in “The Safety Series” was titled “‘Is This a Safe Neighborhood?’ Don’t Answer That” and by “Safety Series” they meant safety for the realtor not the client.
So without explicitly making such information illegal, the government created a legal and reputational climate that chilled its provision. Portals removed crime maps and realtors became reluctant to answer ordinary buyer questions about neighborhood safety and school quality. That is a degradation of service, not a civil-rights victory. The pretext was that crime information might not be accurate but the real fear was that it would accurately suggest neighborhoods with high percentages of black residents had more crime. Withholding information about crime and schools, however, does not change the facts; it just shifts the informational advantage toward buyers who are wealthy, well-connected, or sophisticated enough to find the data themselves. Moreover, it should go without saying that black homebuyers also want information about neighborhood crime rates–don’t these buyers count? Suppressing truthful information is rarely a good way to improve outcomes. As with Ban the Box, blocking direct access to relevant information encourages worse proxy-based decision-making.
Trump’s HUD is correct: fair housing law should prohibit discrimination, not prevent realtors from telling the truth.
More on Sir Thomas Gresham (from my email)
…Double-entry book-keeping – John and I believe, with some evidence, that he may well have been the person to bring double-entry book-keeping to the UK from the Low Countries. In turn an Italian invention of the 13th century…
Business exchanges rather than markets – Gresham certainly brought the idea of an exchange or bourse from Antwerp (in turn from Ghent) to England. It really was a radical idea. No phone directory, no advertising, no internet – we used to block of Cornhill with chains so merchants could meet at regular times in the mud and rain to establish ventures, principally voyages, and fund them. The Exchange became more and more populated as the Low Countries fought with Spain. People don’t bring money to a war zone (or a cybersecurity hazard). Thus, it was the vessel into which poured the extensive wealth of the Low Countries and turned London from an outback sheep town of 30,000 at the beginning of the 1500’s to a city of over 200,000 by 1600. Markets for cattle, sheep, produce, chickens, all existed – but a market for intangible things?
1st English Shopping Mall? – Gresham also brought the idea of a shopping mall to England. We have many examples of similar complexes and galleria from ancient times, but not in England. At the time it was the upper floor of his Exchange. The concept of shops not adhering to a physical locality – Bread Street, Milk Street, Boot street, etc. – was more radical than it sounds to modern ears. Amusing then to have England referred to in later centuries as “a nation of shop keepers”.
From Michael Mainelli, here is my original post on Gresham.
That was then, this is now
Around Hormuz, however, the Portuguese always had to be on guard. Many naturally protected sandy coves (khors in Arabic) practically invited “pirates.” The Nakhilu, or Banu Hula, were Sunni arabic speakers on the Gulf coast of Persia whose descendants still inhabit the Gulf coast of Iran. For decades they set up upocket ports in the many hidden bandars and byways of the mountainous shore and created an underground economy that rivaled Hormuz’s. These “pirates” were a major drain on Portuguese revenue, regularly attacking ships that paid the feed for the cartaz, and docked at Hormuz.
That is from Allen James Fromherz, The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present. From this same book I learned that Milton refers to the Straits in Paradise Lost, but under the name of Ormus:
High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind[ia],
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showrs on her Kings barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d
To that bad eminence
Thomas Gresham is underrated
While northern professions in 1600 did not require lengthy training in mathematics or science, there was popular interest in these topics. England’s first chair in mathematics was endowed by Thomas Gresham,61 who had founded London’s Royal Exchange and pledged the rents from that institution to fund seven professorships, who would not train student but would rather give two public lectures (in Latin and English) each week. As Gresham also gave chairs in astronomy and “physik,” this produced a cluster of scientifically minded individuals, who would later play an outsized role in the founding of the Royal Society. Robert Hooke was the Gresham Professor of Geometry, William Petty the Gresham Professor of Music, and Christopher Wren the Gresham Professor of Astronomy.
Perhaps because of Gresham’s public lectures, interest in mathematics grew. More professorships followed, including the mid-17th century Lucasian Chair in Mathematics (after William Lucas, member of parliament for Cambridge), for which Isaac Newton would be the second occupant (Clark, 1904). The popular interest in science also meant that teachers at urban universities could fill public lecture halls by teaching about chemistry, and even performing public chemistry experiments.
That is from a new NBER working paper by David M. Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser, “How Have Universities Survived for Nearly a Millennium?” Has any single individual funded three equally prestigious chairs or anything close to that?
The Luddites Were the First to Attack AI
Everyone knows the Luddites smashed looms. What is less appreciated is that the loom was the first serious programmable device — the direct ancestor of the computer. Thus, the Luddites weren’t just the first to resist automation. They were in some ways the first to attack AI.
The Jacquard loom, introduced in France circa 1805, used a chain of punched cards to control which threads were raised for each pass of the shuttle. The ability to change the pattern of the loom’s weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor to computer programming. Babbage borrowed the idea directly for the Analytical Engine in the 1830s.
The Luddites lost–they were violently suppressed by the UK military–but more generally they lost because programmable looms brought patterned clothes to the masses.
Prior to its invention, the creation of complex patterns required skilled and labour-intensive manual labour, often involving large teams of weavers. With the Jacquard loom, a single operator could control the machine and produce intricate designs with relative ease.
This innovation greatly increased the speed and efficiency of textile production. It also opened up new possibilities for creativity and design, as the loom enabled the production of intricate patterns that were previously unattainable. The Jacquard loom contributed to the democratization of textile manufacturing, making intricate fabrics accessible to a wider audience
By the time Jacquard died in 1834, thousands of his looms were operating in Manchester, an epi-center of the Luddites riots. Moreover, just over 100 years later, Manchester birthed the Manchester Baby and the Manchester Mark 1, the first electronic stored-program computer. And who was hired to program the latter? None other than Alan Turing.
Ada Lovelace had foretold it all beautifully: “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
Addendum: I thank Claude for assistance on this post.
That was then, this is now
At the advent of a more aggressive Persian Gulf policy on the part of Iran during the interwar years, the resilience of these symbols was watched like a kind of barometer that attested to Britain’s levell of commitment to the maintenance of security in the Persian Gulf. Britainäs abstention from the use of force against Iran, dictated by its will to protect its interests in Iran, was at times perceived as weakness by the shaykhs and merchants of the Arabian littoral. During the period of heightened tension that accompanied Reza Shah’s rise, a perpetual cause of excitement among the Arabs inhabiting the southern littoral was the persistence of rumors that Iran would soon effect the complete withdrawal of the British from the area of the Persian Gulf waterway.
That is from the very useful The Origins of the Arab-Iranian Conflict: Nationalism and Sovereignty in the Gulf between the World Wars, by Chelsi Mueller.
By the way, on the eve of WWI, the population of Dubai was about 2,075 people, and about 500 of them were Iranian merchants.