Category: History
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.
That was then, this is not now?
The 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion destroyed Reza Shah — but not the Pahlavi state. The two Allies — joined by the United States in December 1941 — realized that the Iranian state could be useful in achieving the two goals for which they had invaded the country: physical control over oil — the British nightmare in World War II, even more so than in World War I, was loss of these vital supplies: and a land “corridor” to the Soviet Union…To facilitate the flow of both oil to Britain and supplies to the Soviet Union, the Allies found it expedient to remove Reza Shah but to preserve his state…the Allies kept his state but engineered his removal in part to curry much-needed favor among Iranians. “The Persians,” he wrote, “expect that we should at least save them from the Shah’s tyranny as compensation for invading their country.”
That is from Ervand Abrahamian’s A History of Modern Iran.
Reading bleg
What is the best and most sophisticated defense of architectural modernism, both from an aesthetic and a social point of view?
I thank you all in advance for your wisdom.
That was then, this is now
From 1857:
The Persians were great sticklers for ceremony, it turned out, and now that the treaty was ratified, they expected an exchange of gifts to mark the important occasion. At Spence’s [a leading diplomat of the time] insistence, the United States spent $10,000 (close to $1 million in today’s money) on diamond-studded snuffboxes and weapons for the shah. The State Department protested bitterly, as it was not in the habit of spending such outrageous sums, but Spence put his foot down, knowing that these gifts paled in comparison with what Persia had received from Napoleon and others. Spence’s brother Charles was dispatched to Tehran to deliver the gifts in person — a gesture the shah appreciated so much that he decorates the young man with the Order of the Lion and the Sun, the country’s highest honor.
That is from John Ghazvinian America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present, a very good book.
My excellent Conversation with Kim Bowes
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, Tyler calls perhaps his favorite economics book of 2025. By sifting through the material remains of Roman life — shoes, bricks, ceramics, and the like — she uncovers a picture of ordinary Romans who could evidently afford to buy multiple sets of colorful clothes, use gold coins for daily transactions, and eat peppercorns sourced from thousands of miles away. This vast web of commerce, she argues, both bound the empire together and provided the tax base that kept it running — and when it unraveled, Rome unraveled with it.
Tyler and Kim discuss what would surprise a modern visitor to a Roman elite home, what early Roman Christianity actually looked like on the ground, why Romans never developed formal economic reasoning, what decentralized money-lending reveals about the Roman state, whether there were anything like forward markets, why Romans continued to use coins even as the empire debased them, the economics of Roman slavery, whether Roman recipes taste any good, the Romans as hyper-scalers rather than inventors, what Rome made of China and Egypt, why Kim’s not a fan of the Vesuvius challenge, the practicalities of landscape archaeology, how a vast belt of factories along the Tiber Valley went undiscovered until twenty years ago, where to go on a three-week tour of the Roman Empire, what she thinks is ultimately behind Rome’s unraveling, and much more.
Here is an excerpt with some economics:
COWEN: Say, when the government is clipping the silver coins and lowering their silver content, as we now know in economic theory, this will imply at least some inflationary pressure. Are there Roman writers who understood that and laid it out, or they’re just vague public complaints about government clipping the coins?
BOWES: They’re not so much clipping them as they are minting them with less silver, which amounts to the same thing. It’s just a little bit classier and harder to detect. Absolutely, people know that they’re doing this. What I think is most interesting and what we’re all still wrestling with is, from even before Nero onwards, Roman emperors recognized the advantage to the fisc to basically producing coins with less silver.
Then they start to have silver problems, and they start really pulling the silver out of their coins, and nobody cares. That is to say, people care, and they notice, but the convenience of the Roman coin of the realm, the denarius, which is made with silver, outweighs—that’s a little bit of a pun—the actual silver content of that coin, and so people are willing to just suck it up and deal, and they keep using it.
There is inflation, and inflation, we can now tell, thanks to some great papyri from Egypt, trends upwards very slowly over the first century, the second century, the third century, but it’s not proportional to the amount of silver that’s being pulled out of the coins. People basically still have trust in their coinage, which really shows the degree to which the state has convinced people, simply by supporting ordinary people’s coin use, that the coins work and that they’re going to back their coins, even though they’re slightly pulling the silver out.
COWEN: Why was there so much decentralized money lending? You would think that banks would have economies of scale, offer better terms, just like I wouldn’t borrow money from my friends, I would go to the bank. Why doesn’t the Roman Empire evolve that way?
BOWES: The Roman Empire confuses us, I think, because on the one hand, it looks like a really big state that ought to do things that big states do. The Roman big state is really a mask for an empire of friends and family. You borrow money from friends and family. Banks, such as they exist, are really nothing more than friends and family, so even when you have actual banks, they tend to be largely constituted by a single family.
The difference that you’re making between borrowing from a bank and borrowing from your family is much less clear-cut in a world in which the bank is your family, or the bank is a family that is friends of yours. It’s not that Romans don’t use banks, they do use banks. We can see the most often wealthier Romans using banks. It’s a lot harder to see the 90 percent using banks, and they seem to more often default to the immediate circle of people that they know, which again, it’s not such a huge distinction. In a world in which there’s no FDIC, in which the bank isn’t guaranteed and protected by the state in the way in which our banks are, the distinction between bank and family, bank and friends, is much less clear.
Interesting and engaging throughout, definitely recommended. You can buy Kim’s excellent book here.
Robert Skidelsky, RIP
Here is one appreciation. His three-volume biography of Keynes (better than the one-volume condensation!) is in my opinion one of the very best books ever written, up there with Caro on Moses, etc.
The Raphael show at the NYC Met
This is self-recommending if there ever was such a thing. What I found so striking is how many mini-exhibits were embedded in the broader show. Those include:
1. The early large pieces from Colonna and Castello — how many of you are going to get there to see them in situ?
2. A mini-exhibit of works from Perugino, Raphael’s teacher and mentor, and a wonderful painter in his own right.
3. A small set of knockout Leonardo drawings.
4. Two Roman sculptures that showed some background influences behind Raphael’s work.
5. Three full-size “derivations” based upon the Vatican tapestries, from 16th century Flemish studios.
6. Plenty of light-sensitive drawings, which are not displayed much or are held in very scattered locales.
It is rare to have so much original content in a single exhibit, and of such high quality, and unrelated to previous exhibits one might have seen. This was an event.
The Alba Madonna, in DC’s National Gallery, still strikes me as Raphael’s best creation.
My main beef: the opening panel of explanation for the show was just plain, flat out stupid, and started by referring to Raphael as “One of the most important influencers of all time…”, followed by nothing of any substance.
This exhibit needs no endorsement from me, but ultimately it did not elevate Raphael into the tier of my very very favorite painters. He is at the top for beauty and charm, but very few of his paintings confound me in say the way that a top Leonardo or Velazquez might. Perhaps the Castiglione portrait from the Louvre would qualify there, but the others not. His was nonetheless a remarkable achievement, and this is very likely the best view of it you will get in this lifetime.
It was crowded, but on a Monday not intolerable and I had good views of the art works most of the time.
The Venetian empire and the Mongols (modeling Marco Polo)
In contrast, the Polo brothers who went to Asia, Niccolo the elder and Matteo the elder, amassed wealth both in tangible and intangible assets. It was Marco “the voyager” who benefited most from the family business, both as the heir to substantial portions of the family estate, and as a shrewd and cautious — and perhaps tight-fisted — private investor. His will and inventory of his assets reveal a considerable amount of cash, real estate, and valuables. Marco Polo traveled for business even after he returned to Venice, but not for long. After 1300, although he continued to invest in various enterprises, it appears that Marco stayed in Venice. Perhaps this was due to his advancing age (he turned fifty in 1304), although his energy was most likely taken up by overseeing his interests and local investments, and abo ve all in publicity for his book. He commissioned numerous copies to be distributed to powerful and influential people.
And:
However, Marco had great difficulty leaving the empire. The Polos required the khan’s consent not only to be given official leave, but above all to have adequate protection. As Marco recounts, despite thee riches they had accumulated, they were not free to leave. By then, the khan had also grown old, and they were concerned that he might die, leaving their fate in the hands of his successor, who may not have granted the necessary permits. Marco’s account reveals that the three Polos had a subservient relationship with the khan, as they were in the khan’s service and depended on him. He continually rejected their pleas to return to Venice, as he “loved them too much” and could not accept the idea that they should leave him.
That is all from the new and noteworthy Venice and the Mongols: The Eurasian Exchange that Transformed the Medieval World, by Nicola di Cosmo and Lorenzo Pubblici.
That was then, this is now
But despite the pitiful state into which the country had descended, the major outside powers, Russian and the Ottoman Empire, did not intervene as they had in 1722-1725. It was partly that they were busy elsewhere, and surely also that the outcome of their previous attempts had not encouraged them to repeat the experiment.
That is from Michael Axworthy’s A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, a good general introduction to the history of the country.
My South Africa dialogue with Ann Bernstein
An edited transcript is here.
Struan Moffett on South Africa (from my email)
I think one important point you missed is that South Africa’s recent (and ancient) history has forced the population to work quite aggressively through racial differences at speeds that other developed nations have not. ‘Racial harmony’ would be a stretch, but I would say that most (all?) South African’s have a ‘racial understanding’. South Africa is also very post-racial in the sense that most understand racial differences to actually be cultural differences – for myself, growing up English in Durban, I felt more of a kinship with educated Indians than with the (white) Afrikaners. It would make absolutely no sense from a strictly Western perspective that the English and the Afrikaners (both ‘white’) couldn’t be more different!
Here is my original post.