Martin's Booklog

Medieval Military Technology — Kelly DeVries & Robert Douglas Smith

Published on July 2, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Medieval Military Technology

Medieval Military Technology
Kelly DeVries & Robert Douglas Smith
356 pages including notes and index
published in 2013

Medieval Military Technology is an attempt to provide an overview of all aspects of Medieval weaponry and other technology in one book, as you might’ve suspected from the title. When this was originally published it was the first of its kind for the Middle Ages; this is the second edition. Trying to cover such a huge period like this is rather a challenge of course and that this books tries to cover all aspects of warfare means it can’t really go into too much detail on each individual aspect. Nevertheless an single volume overview like this was exactly what I was looking for, having gotten interested in the topic through watching too many medievaloid fantasy anime…

To be honest, this was a bit of a disappointment. DeVries and Smith turned out to be not very engaging as writers and the end result was a much more stodgy book than it could’ve been. Medieval Military Technology methodologically goes through first personal weaponry and armour, followed by siege weapons, fortifications and finally warships. Each separate part starts with an introduction that tries to sum of the history of its subject up to the Early Middle Ages before going into more detail in separate chapters on its various sub topics. Especially in the first part of the book this approach, detailing each and every possible Medieval weapon and bit of armour, is a bit dry. This is not helped by a lack of illustrations. A few more technical drawings, especially for all the various armour types would have been appreciated. The same lack of illustrations also hamper the other parts, but on the whole I found those to be easier to follow and less dull.

What I found also lacking was how all this technology was used in practise, how it evolved tactically and strategically, how the various bits worked together. Again, the first part is the worst for this because it has so many diverse types of weapons and armour to handle, few of which get more than a few pages to themselves. The only time when the impact of a specific technology is discussed is in chapter 3, about the invention of the stirrup and how it made mounted shock combat possible. Without a stirrup a knight could not brace himself for the shock of running somebody through with his spear or lance; with it he could. This invention arguably led to the invention of feudalism, as rulers had to depend on subjects rich enough to be able to afford to keep horses, therefore needing to grant them lands to be able to do so. DeVries and Smith go into detail on the merits of this thesis, summarising the arguments of supporters and opponents. It’s a strangely argumentative chapter in what’s otherwise a more encyclopedic work.

On the whole then, this was a decent enough overview but it’s not good enough for me to buy a copy for myself. You’d get much of the same value from reading the relevant pages on Wikipedia.

The 4% Universe — Richard Panek

Published on July 2, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of The 4% Universe

The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality
Richard Panek
297 pages including notes and index
published in 2011

As a child reading Carl Sagan’s Cosmos it all seemed so simple. Some 13-14 billion years ago the Big Bang started the universe, which has been expanding ever since. In due time as it cooled off the first stars and galaxies appeared, formed from primordial hydrogen & helium gases through the power of gravitational attractions. The novas and supernovas from those first generations of stars would create the heavier elements needed for life to arise and ultimately the Solar System would form with the Earth being just right for us to evolve on. As Sagan explained, what would happen next depended very much on the total mass of the universe. If big enough, gravity would slow down its expansion and cause it to collapse, maybe triggering a new Big Bang. If small enough, the expansion could not be stopped and first galaxies, then stars would drift further and further apart until we were alone. If just right, expansion would stop but the collapse would be prevented. Knowing the mass of the universe therefore is important.

And this is where the problems arise: if you count up the mass of all the galaxies, stars, quasars, pulsars, etc, everything you can see with the electromagnetic spectrum, the amount of observable mass of the universe is just four percent of what it actually is according to all our other measurements. There has to be something else therefore that makes up the difference and it’s this something else is what is driving the fate of the universe. It’s the quest to discover what this might be that is the topic of The 4% Universe.

Panek starts this quest in 1964, just before the discover of the cosmic microwave background, following the story until he reaches the present consensus on what the universe looks like and what its likely fate is. Since this was published in 2011 the state of the art has moved on in the almost decade and a half since this was written, but that isn’t a major problem. Much of the The 4% Universe is about the journey of discovery and the people involved, how the then current consensus was reached, which is still interesting even if it has moved on since. Following a roughly chronological order, Panek divides the story in roughly four parts, looking at the different aspects of the problem of the universe’s missing mass. This turns out to be not just a problem for astronomers looking at stars and galaxies and finding too few, but also for cosmologists whose mathematical theories about the universe are directly impacted by this missing mass and particle scientists, whose models might hold the key to solving the problem.

As Panek puts the building blocks together, the picture that emerges is roughly that which you can read at the Wikipedia page on the Universe. That simple history Sagan showed me turned to be much more complicated. What you see in the night sky is not the entire universe and the largest parts of it cannot be seen at all: dark matter, some 23 percent of the universe and dark energy, the remaining 63 percent. And some of the things that we could see if we were close enough are forever out of our reach as they lay beyond the observable parts of the universe, expanding away from us too quickly to be reached by our light.

If you are more interested in cosmology than the history of our understanding of it The 4% Universe is the wrong book for you, as its understanding of it is outdated and its view of it rather high level; reading Wikipedia might be more useful. For me however it did a good job of showing that history and it was the first book to made me realise that doubts about that simple Big Bang model and questions about the mass of visible Galaxies were much older than I knew. It was also the first book for me that clearly spelled out that the cosmic inflation of the early universe happened at faster than light speeds. Obvious, you would think but I never quite got that the universe itself can expand faster than the speed of light and that its limit as the fastest speed possible only applies to objects within it.

Walcheren to Waterloo — Andrew Limm

Published on July 1, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Walcheren to Waterloo

Walcheren to Waterloo: The British Army in the Low Countries during the Napoleonic Wars 1793-1815
Andrew Limm
237 pages including notes and index
published in 2018

Back in the nineties, in order to pay my study fees, I used to work the Summers in a chips shop in Veere which was owned by the same people who owned the Campveerse Toren restaurant and hotel, which was the headquarters of the English expeditionary force to Walcheren in 1809. This has little relevance to the actual book to be discussed here, but if I cannot indulge myself in pointless anecdotes in my own booklog, where else? At the very least, this personal history is part of why this title grabbed my eye.

Alliterative as it is, Walcheren to Waterloo is a bit misleading however as Waterloo is barely discussed here, nor does the story start with that failed expedition to Walcheren. Instead, it’s a more general overview of the four different campaigns British forces fought int he Low Countries during the Napoleonic Wars. Those in order being the campaign to occupy Dunkirk in 1793 and the following retreat through the Netherlands in 1795/95, the expedition to Northern Holland in 1799, the aforementioned campaign in Walcheren and finally the failed assault on Bergen Op Zoom in 1813-1814. You’ll note that none of these campaigns were at all successful, all ending in failure and British withdrawal from the Low Countries. This may explain why, as Limm shows in his introduction, these campaigns have received relatively little attention compared to Wellington’s campaigns in Portugal and Spain, let alone Waterloo. For Limm they are a good tool to attack the idea that the British Army had transformed itself between 1798 and 1809, by providing a counterexample to the successful British campaigns of the Peninsular War. As he attempts to show, each campaign, whether it took place before, during or after this supposed transformation, suffered from the same flaws, leading to their ultimate failure. This should not happen if the British Army, smarting from its defeats in the American Revolutionary War and their early interventions in the French Revolutionary Wars, was indeed transformed by the reforms enacting by the Duke of York during this period.

As Limm goes through each campaign in order, it does become clear that the same errors were made over and over again. Each campaign was marred by opportunism, the desire for a quick win overriding any other consideration. Planning for each was abysmal and had to be done in a hurry because each campaign was decided on at the spur of the moment. Intelligence about both the country to be fought in as the enemy forces to fight was always lacking, nor seemed to be a priority for the planners. Because of bad, hurried planning and lack of reliable intelligence, the logistics for each campaign were a shamble as well. The lack of cooperation and coordination between the army and navy, something that is somewhat important for an amphibious operation, did not help here either. The execution of each campaign is not inspiring either, with the nadir being the Walcheren campaign, which saw a large part of the expeditionary force fell ill with the Walcheren flu, which ended up killing thousands. Because clear objectives were lacking due to the rushed planning, each campaign ended up spinning their wheels in search of one. While individual battles were won, strategically each was a failure.

The same pattern repeats time and again. The English manage to land with some difficulty, win their early battles and maybe reach some of the objectives before the lack of planning lets them down. Making the problem worse is the preference each commander seems to have had for over complicating his attack plans, needlessly splitting up his forces instead of concentrating them, as best shown in the campaign in North Holland. There it meant that part of the allied Anglo Russian forces had secured their objectives, but were now too far away to influence of the battles elsewhere, leading to piecemeal defeats there. Though not fatal, these defeats means that the French and Dutch forces opposing them get the space to reorganise and be reinforced, leading to a loss of momentum and ultimately a retreat when the expedition’s nominal goals can no longer be achieved.

That this happened during the early campaigns at Dunkirk and Den Helder is one thing, but that this was repeated at Walcheren and Bergen op Zoom indicates that nothing was learned from these earlier failures even when some of the same people were involved. This is one of Limm’s key points, that the Napoleonic Era British Army did not have any sort of institutional memory nor did its leaders have any desire to examine and learn from those failures. The British also had a nasty habit of blaming their allies for their own failures, as with the Russians in the North Holland campaign. The conclusion he reaches is that it took the exceptional talents and dedication of a Wellington to achieve any semblance of this, but that this was limited to him and his direct staff and commanders. Because it was Wellington driving the campaigns in Spain and at Waterloo they were successful; with any other commander this may not have been the case.

an interesting read if with a slightly misleading title. One thing I did struggle with was that Limm’s command of Dutch geography and place names is not always the greatest. Texel is not a river (it’s an island) and Den Helder is not at the mouth of it. Limm also has a habit of making the armies march in a northern or southern direction when would be more fitting to speak of a easterly or westerly one. It took some getting used to and some squinting at maps to make things clear. It would also have been appreciated if the maps had been located in their respective chapters, rather than clustered in the front of the book. Small quibbles for what was an enlightening look at a military period I knew little about.

Slavernij en Beschaving — Karwan Fatah-Black

Published on April 29, 2024Leave a comment

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Slavernij en Beschaving: Geschiedenis van een Paradox
Slavery and Civilisation: History of a Paradox
Karwan Fatah-Black
192 pages including notes and index
published in 2021

Thanks partially to the Black Lives Matter movement, the slavery debate has erupted once again in the Netherlands. For years and decades those descended from enslaved people have been lobbying for recognition from the Dutch government for the injustices done to their ancestors. While in the past decade both governments and public opinion have been increasingly prepared to indeed acknowledge these, there’s also still a large minority resistant and hostile to any such recognition. Partially this is the usual far right suspects of course, but there are also certain ‘respectable’ historians allergic to anything that looks like an apology for slavery. There is a tendency within the Netherlands to want to have our glorious past as a Great Power without acknowledging the human costs that came with building our empire and wealth. Anything that even hints at the fact that the prosperity of the Netherlands during our Golden Age and beyond was built upon murder, rape, genocide and slavery is immediately rejected. Despite this resistance though the interest in coming to terms with our past has grown, in no small part thanks to the efforts of those whose ancestors were the victims of Dutch greed. Official acknowledgment on all levels of involvement in the slave trade has been growing, with the Dutch government formally apologising for the slave trade not long ago.

Despite this, the question remains why there was and is still so much resistance to this acknowledgement of simple historic facts. Everybody agrees slavery is bad, it has been abolished since 1863, it’s been explicitly named as a crime against humanity by the UN since its foundation, so why this hesitance? That’s the question which led Karwan Fatah-Black to write this book. For him, this resistance flows from the Narrative that has been created about slavery in the West, a narrative that minimises and absolves Europeans from their responsibilities for slavery. Anything challenging this narrative feels like an attack not just on our history, but ourselves for having profited from its existence, no matter how indirectly. If we want to come to grips with our history of slavery therefore, this narrative first needs to be dismantled before the reality of slavery can be made clear: this is the goal of this book.

To do so, Fatah-Black first establishes what this narrative about slavery is. It starts with the idea that slavery was an inevitable and uncontroversial part of all ancient civilisations, particularly those that form the cradle of Western civilisation: Greece and Rome. Slavery as an universal concept every society participated in and which was the same in every civilisation that had it. Building on that, the idea is that the existence of slavery taught the West how important freedom is, while the rise of Christianity meant the abolishment of slavery in Europe, with Europe therefore leading the way towards a higher civilisation. Sadly however, as European nations started exploring the world, they came into contact with lesser civilised countries, where slavery still existed and had no choice but to accept it and use it themselves. However, thanks to the Enlightenment they were also the first to voluntarily abolish first the slave trade and then slavery itself, again leading the world.

It;s a very self serving narrative of course, as if we introduced slavery only to be able to abolish it later. But it is something that is still adhered to by many people, including historians. It ties in with the idea of slave owners as good patriarchs protecting people who were just not capable of leading themselves, who needed a firm hand to kep them fed and content. Nasty but seductive, Fatah-Black attempts to dismantle this story by first looking at historical slavery and then extending this history by looking at the voices of actual enslaved people themselves. In that first part, Fatah-Black goes from ancient Greece and Rome, to slavery in the Islamic World, to Atlantic slavery and in each period examines the idea that slavery was indeed natural and uncontroversial. In the second part, the idea that slavery was abolished voluntarily purely though the good will of the western powers is demolished.

To start with the latter, Fatah-Black goes into the history of slave rebellions, focusing in on Haiti and how this was the first country to abolish slavery and did this entirely through the efforts of the enslaved population. Inspired by the ideals of the French revolution the enslaved freed themselves, while France betrayed its own ideals with its attempts to re-enslave them. Of course Haiti was not the only revolt against slavery and Fatah-Black also looks at other examples. The intention is to show that even without the abolition movements in England and elsewhere, there was resistance against slavery and that this resistance sooner or later forced the abolition of slavery. He also provides the example of Tunesia, which abolished slavery in 1846, well before the Netherlands or the US did, to show abolition was not dependent on being a ‘western’ or christian society.

That there was this resistance and that this resistance was widespread is of course already an important clue that slavery was never as accepted or natural as its proponents then or apologists now like to claim it was. Even in societies like Ancient Greece or Rome where it was an accepted fact of life, there were still people who refused to and certainly a sense that it was not a good thing to be a slave. The idea that slavery is just a natural phase societies go through that will disappear once it is civilised enough is therefore shown to be wrong. Even in true slaver societies it is clear people knew slavery is wrong.

Remains the question why there is so much resistance against the true history of slavery and the unsavoury role western countries like the Netherlands played in the Atlantic slave trade. Perhaps it’s just not wanting to feel guilty for enjoying a level of wealth that is partially built on this crime. If we pretend slavery is just a normal thing societies go through, that we are actually praiseworthy for ending it voluntarily, no need to feel guilty or make reparations.

Hello America — J. G. Ballard

Published on March 21, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Hello America

Hello America
J. G. Ballard
224 pages
published in 1981

I must’ve last read this sometime in the late eighties, back when I was dependent on my local library for my science fiction and fantasy. Said library had a rule that adult fiction could only be borrowed if you were at least fourteen years old; it also had a rule that you could only borrow four fiction books at a time. I however had found a hack for both rules: foreign language novels didn’t count for either. Which meant that once I could read English, I started reading every English language sci-fi book the library had, including this one. Not sure I finished it at the time, but I was reminded of it through Phil’s review, where he characterises it as “a minor Ballard” and going “completely off the boil” halfway through. That picked my interest enough to want to reread it and you know, he wasn’t wrong. In fact, I would go further and argue it never really got going as a story. There’s little of Ballard’s normal inventiveness or imagery here and it feels tired from the start. It doesn’t help that it was dated even at the time of publication by having Jerry Brown as the last president of the United States…

The core idea of the book, that America was abandoned rather than destroyed, is interesting. The oil crisis of the seventies here continued unabated into the 1980s and 1990s, leading to a de-industrialisation of the USA, with people migrating back to Europe and Asia not long after. By the turn of the millennium America is all but abandoned, a few decades later even the pretense of an American government in exile is also given up. The energy crisis is handled better in the old world, where giantic environmental engineering projects damn the Bering Strait to provide farm land in the Arctic circle, but condemning the American east coast to becoming a desert while the west becomes a jungle. All this is explained in chapter seven of the novel rather than more organically, in one big infodump. It’s a very seventies sort of apocalypse but it also reminds me of some of the paranoid rightwing fantasies of the eighties were America is either betrayed or given up on, without ever being explicitly conquered or destroyed, the fear that the world could continue on even without it. Ballard’s version of course only works if you don’t look at it too hard, which I feel goes for most of Hello America.

The story itself starts roughly a century after America was abandoned, when an expedition from Europe onboard the steamship Apollo (of course) sets foot on American soil for the first time in decades. They’re there to determine the cuase of the radiation leaking out from the continent. Decades old nuclear reactors may be leaking, as may some nuclear weapon storages, but it also looks suspiciously like an actual nuclear detonation. The handpicked crew of teh Apollo needs to answer this question, but Wayne, our protagonist isn’t one of them, as he stowed away, keen to visit the country his ancestors came from and his father disappeared in. Wayne is not, to be honest, a very active protagonist, mostly moved by what’s happening around him, rather than initiating his own actions. Which is not a problem as long as the expedition is on the move, but does mean, as Phil noted, that the second half of the book is much weakened when they reach Las Vegas and just stay there as things happen all around him.

The image of the United States Ballard presents in Hello America is very much rooted in 1950s & 60s pop culture: Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, the Kennedies, “Indian” tribes modeled after Chicago gangsters or stereotypical Divorcees, with the Executives tribe members all having brand names like Heinz or Xerox, etc. The villain of the piece is even called president Manson. Even for 1981 this seems a bit much. The first half of the book, with the expediotion trecking through an endless desert following the ancient highways, from motel oasis to motel oasis has almost an overdose of what you could call stereotypical Ballardian imagery: empty swimming pools, cracked concrete et all. The second half in Vegas, doubles down on the kitsch, with a musical performance by a small army of robot replicas of the various US presidents.

In the end, this was a failure. Entertaining enough on a chapter by chapter basis, it failed to form a coherent whole and its momentum completely disappeared in its second half, which indeed took me twice as long to read as the first. It just became a chore to finish, something you shouldn’t be able to say of any Ballard novel.