And poverty.
GGG ping to follow.
The Little Ice Age:
How Climate Made History 1300-1850
by Brian M. Fagan
PaperbackFloods, Famines, and Emperors:
El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations
by Brian M. FaganThe Long Summer:
How Climate Changed Civilization
by Brian M. Fagan
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He forgot air pollution.
Modernity began with widespread war and tyranny, with huge long term inflation (related to imports from the Americas but also to domestic misgovernment in economic matters), and with a revolution in domestic institutions that destroyed much of the social structure of the middle ages. The church was looted over half of Europe, the monastaries and poor houses were sacked. Tyrants bent entirely on self promotion waged war on their own disloyal populations. Every sect and creed but the Quakers wanted all the others lynched.
The damning facts about all parties concerned were tracked down by Acton. The economic results are clearly visible in long term real price data collected by economic historians like Gould. The wars themselves are chronicled in detail by military and political historians like Parker.
For a long time, "whig history" presented all of this as some great liberation from an imaginary monolithic "kingdom of darkness" run by Rome. So much so that tyrants like Henry VIII were treated as heros, bloodthirsty sectarians as visionary proponents of religious freedom, etc.
In the 12th and 13th centuries both major sects in European politics - fighting over the issue of secular vs. church power - agreed on appeal to and representation of the people, and limited monarchy under law. Thomas Acquinas did, and so did Marsilius of Padua, a Ghibelline supporter of emperors against popes. Far from a monolith, the church was a political football, with 3 popes simultaneously at times, exile to Avignon, turmoil in Italian politics etc. This was the "High middle ages", the first renaissance, the age of Dante and Acquinas.
Anybody who likes can argue it was "worth it" or "necessary", though actually there is little enough evidence of that. But there is no serious historical dispute, that civilization-wide retrogression and chaos separate the high middle ages from the age of the enlightenment. The middle age to modernity divide was not an instance of "progress" as later experienced in the 19th century.
That was a backward projection, long after the fact. Even the definite advances of the 18th century - which were real and important - were marred at the end by 25 years of great power war from the French revolution to the fall of Napoleon - wars that killed millions. The long peace and accelerating economic progress that showed the real promise of modern democratic government and economic liberalism did not show up in earnest until the 19th century. Before that, it was localized and spotty, checked repeatedly by political turmoil and war.
So called "whig history" consisted in going back to the renaissance and seeing every development on the way to mid 19th century liberal democracy in England as some straight line ascent to all that was right and true. The distance of any institution or position from that endpoint was substituted for any real measure of its effects in its own time. If some development seemed to be tugging toward the institutions of England in 1870, then it was a primary good. If anything was opposed to any aspect of that direction of change, it was bad, and anything attacking it secondarily good.
This procedure results in ahistorical distortions. A tyrant is imagined to be progressive because he loots monasteries, because monasteries are not important institutions in 1870 England. The fact that doing so despoiled the funds that gave charity to the poor, to amass large fortunes in the hands of the tyrant's noble cronies - or were spent on dynastic struggles and foreign wars - is simply not considered important.
19th century liberal England was certainly much better than high middle ages Europe generally, in all sorts of objective measures. But that does not mean every step from one to the other was upward. They weren't. The series is not (remotely) monotonic.
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No way were the peole of centuries ago as tall as this generation. If they were the NBA would have been invented 100's of years earlier.
William Wallace was about 11" taller than Mel Gibson.
This was known many years ago. At least that's what I learned in the 1960s. Of course, popular views of science have not advanced since the Hundred Years War.
Odd little fact: Holland is the nation with world's tallest average people.
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