[HN Gopher] Real first world war: A monumental account of the Na...
___________________________________________________________________
Real first world war: A monumental account of the Napoleonic Wars
(2020)
Author : pepys
Score : 40 points
Date : 2021-11-30 04:04 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.the-tls.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.the-tls.co.uk)
| pomian wrote:
| This review, is a great cheat sheet for high school students
| studying the Napoleonic era. Quick - forward it to them before
| finals! This is also just a good book review, too bad it's pay
| walled - thanks for archive link below. (strange to hide an ad,
| high form ad, but still an ad. They should have a switch - free
| for reviews.)
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Saw title, came to comment about the Seven Years War, but saw
| everyone beat me to it.
| wins32767 wrote:
| The Seven Years War was a truly global war with fighting in North
| America, the Caribbean, and India in addition to Europe. It was
| even kicked off by a young George Washington. It definitely gets
| my vote as the first truly global war.
| garmaine wrote:
| Arguably the seven year war, American war of independence, and
| napoleon of wars are all one conflict.
|
| Just like ww1 and ww2 are the same conflict with a 20 year
| ceasefire to raise more cannon fodder.
| gnu8 wrote:
| There is nothing new under the sun.
| pomian wrote:
| Another idea: for those interested even only a little, I highly
| recommend the audiobook series Master and Commander, read by
| Simon Vance. Fantastic journey around the world in Napoleonic
| times. Great for road trips or as nightly sedative. British Point
| of view, but charming, exciting, and informative. About sailing,
| history, team work, good and poor management, and the foundations
| of ecology.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| I'm currently reading the Aubrey-Maturin series, can't
| recommend it enough. I also liked the _Hornblower_ series set
| in the same era by C.S. Forester which is centred around quite
| a different character who plays the role of a naval officer.
| There's a good TV adaptation of it too which I think is
| available on YouTube.
| brnt wrote:
| +1 on Hornblower the TV series. Had no idea it was based on a
| book!
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| If you liked the TV series I think you'll like the books
| too, and they cover a lot more of Hornblower's life which
| is cool.
|
| There's some debate on which order to read the books,
| either the order they were published or the chronological
| order of the story.
| asah wrote:
| Highly recommended:
|
| Master and Commander (2003 film)
| kergonath wrote:
| Why does the article need to apologise that the book does not
| address "questions of gender, race, or generational relations"?
| There's more than one prism through which we can look at the past
| (or the present, for that matter).
|
| Anyway, the article makes a good case. And yes, they know about
| the seven years' war.
|
| Archived here: https://archive.md/GAOgo .
| bobthechef wrote:
| > Why does the article need to apologise that the book does not
| address "questions of gender, race, or generational relations"?
|
| Not surprising. These fetishes are currently in vogue, so the
| author of the article is prostrating himself before them either
| as lip service or because he is a true believer.
| kergonath wrote:
| Sounds like lip service, to be honest, he does not allude to
| it after that sentence. Still, I dislike the fact that he
| felt he needed to write that. It brings nothing to the
| discussion.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The whole sentence is:
|
| "This is history from above, which deals with foreign policy,
| war and some of its domestic ramifications, but not so much, or
| not at all, with questions of gender, race, or generational
| relations. To have included more on these dimensions, of which
| the author is perfectly aware, would have required a different
| and even longer book."
|
| It doesn't really look like an apology to me. The reviewer is
| just telling us which prism the book uses to look at the past.
| jhgb wrote:
| The question is, why those specific things? Surely there's
| hundreds of other issues _not_ being considered in the book,
| so telling you which several issues out of hundreds are _not_
| considered does _not_ provide much information on what prism
| the book _does_ use to look at the past. Only telling which
| ones _are_ considered does that. That 's just Information
| Theory 101.
| obvcrittheory wrote:
| Is it not obvious? It's an apology that the book is not
| written with the lens of Critical Theory. This is necessary
| because the advocates of Critical thought deem any other
| "positionality" other than one that centers "marginalized"
| peoples by adopting that lens to be "problematic."
|
| The author is trying to stave off an online mob generated
| by Critical academics and activists through a preemptive
| apology for choosing a problematic lens
| bee_rider wrote:
| Because they are the currently popular way of doing new
| analyses of history, and people will typically expect new
| scholarship on already well-covered topics like the
| Napoleonic Wars to be performed in the currently popular
| fashion?
|
| I don't think Information Theory is typically covered at
| the 100 level, but if it were, I'm sure they would include
| things like conditional and relative entropy.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| The first sentence says what is considered
|
| >This is history from above, which deals with foreign
| policy, war and some of its domestic ramifications
|
| as far as saying gender, race and generational relations
| were not considered I guess we know the reason, because
| there are people who consider these issues of overriding
| importance and are bound to question why they were not
| included in anything they read. Perhaps the author has
| already had these questions asked by people who reviewed
| the book and they decided to forestall further questions by
| saying there was insufficient space to address the issues.
| jhgb wrote:
| Well, to be fair, even the "positive" information here
| seems quite a bit broader than the "negative"
| information. Like, "war" is a very broad topic on its
| own. You can describe the events (battles and such), you
| can describe the technological issues of war (there's
| lots of books specifically dealing with history of
| military technology), the logistical issues (which is
| basically a specific branch of economic history if you
| think about it -- how do you supply an army on the move
| has always been critical), etc. etc.
|
| So even if to some extent the scope was mentioned, saying
| that a book about Napoleonic Wars is (surprisingly!) a
| book about war (which is essentially what "foreign
| policy, war and some of its domestic ramifications"
| basically boils down to) isn't quite what I'd expect as
| new specific information on what a book about Napoleonic
| wars might tackle. Subtracting a few very specific
| aspects doesn't help here.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Well, to be fair, even the "positive" information here
| seems quite a bit broader than the "negative"
| information. Like, "war" is a very broad topic on its
| own.
|
| war is broader than gender? Everyone has the latter.
|
| I don't think I would agree that war is a broader issue
| than generational issues, since generational issues might
| be different from generation to generation but war tends
| to be a pretty well known subject.
|
| Hey this show is about war, ok I know what that is, and
| this show is about generational issues - ok what's that
| about then? In short, I do not agree that war is a
| broader issue than at least two of the mentioned issues.
| Not sure about race but if I were to guess I'd say war is
| probably broader - given that race is not a real thing
| and thus dealing with race must in fact be dealing with
| racism.
| jhgb wrote:
| > war is broader than gender? Everyone has the latter.
|
| Everyone has a species, and yet we share most genes with
| other mammals. So when you're describing some fundamental
| topic like the role of glucose in a mammal cell, the fact
| that everyone has a species suddenly becomes much less
| relevant.
|
| Furthermore, your question probably should have been "war
| is broader than gender aspects of war?", since it's quite
| obvious that there is a vast space of gender topics
| outside of war and merely "gender" covers those (hence
| the broad topic), but they're also irrelevant here. Ditto
| generational issues, etc.
| pasabagi wrote:
| I guess the point is that gender is the most salient
| social structure/feature of the napoleonic world, and
| this is a panoptic, 'monumental' history, so it's a
| notable omission.
| jhgb wrote:
| > gender is the most salient social structure/feature of
| the napoleonic world
|
| I don't even know what that means. To me that's like
| saying that net wealth is a social structure. Or that
| nationality is a social structure. I mean, in a war of
| nation states, nationality of an individual for example
| would be obviously of prime importance, but I still don't
| know how it is a social structure in a war.
| pasabagi wrote:
| > I don't even know what that means.
|
| I just mean if you were an alien anthropologist, and you
| were trying to understand napoleonic europe by looking at
| paintings or time-travel-photographs or whatever, you'd
| almost certainly notice gender divisions before you
| noticed anything else.
|
| Nationality is obviously a social structure. That's a
| large part of what the napoleonic wars were about: the
| birth of nationalism.
| jhgb wrote:
| You would also notice that all people in the paintings
| have two legs, two arms, and two eyes, and yet this
| knowledge would not help you understand Napoleonic Wars,
| or to predict the outcome of the war from the initial
| conditions, or anything like that. So the knowledge that
| people in the paintings have two legs, two arms, two eyes
| and two genders doesn't necessarily have to be vital for
| understanding Napoleonic Wars unless you find some strong
| evidence that it is.
| pasabagi wrote:
| > all people
|
| All people. That's the point. All the people have two
| arms[0], legs, and eyes. Half the people are wearing big
| dresses, the other half are wearing funny-shaped hats and
| tight white trousers. The alien anthropologist would
| assume, rightly, that the first sentence is just how
| people look, and the second is marking some important
| social distinction.
|
| Since wars are fought over social distinctions, and their
| conduct is largely guided by social distinctions (who
| fights, etc), the most obvious distinctions would seem to
| be relevant.
|
| [0]: except Nelson.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| hey, that guy with the one arm must be pretty important!
| vkou wrote:
| > The question is, why those specific things?
|
| Because for how important they have been over the course of
| history, a lot of historical analysis has closed its eyes
| to them.
|
| It's like writing an analysis of bovines without any
| mention of the fact that they are domesticated. It doesn't
| mean that it's a _bad_ analysis, it 's a broad field, and
| anyone working in it can freely choose which particular
| subset of it to cover. But it is a notable omission.
| jhgb wrote:
| Again, there's like a hundred topics that have been
| omitted from history books, and saying which three of
| those your book doesn't cover isn't helpful if you're
| trying to promote a book. If I were to write a book about
| Ancient Egypt, I wouldn't say "I'd like to present to you
| my new book about Ancient Egypt. The book is NOT involved
| with Middle Kingdom metalworking or the lives of lower
| rank scribes. Thank you for your attention." or anything
| like that, since you'd still have no idea of what it _is_
| about. Your uncertainty about the content would have
| decreased very little compared to some other things I
| could have told you in about the same volume of text --
| for example that the book was actually about the
| estimated quantitative economic history of Egyptian
| agriculture (crop yields, taxes, etc.) from Old Kingdom
| to Roman Egypt or something like that.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _As the author shows, the reason for this imperial expansion
| was not primarily economic greed, important though that was,
| but the geopolitical desire to pre-empt European rivals._ "
|
| This statement is a false dichotomy. One does not pre-empt
| one's enemies from doing something unless one fears they will
| gain power from their use of the thing.
| lkrubner wrote:
| Your question amounts to "Why does an article about history
| have to address what is currently seen as the cutting edge of
| historiography?" Presumably a historian is interested in the
| interests of their own profession, and therefore is aware of
| what has been, for the last 50 years, the changing focus of
| historiography.
|
| That a professional should be aware of what is happening in
| their own profession is not a surprising idea, nor is it
| surprising that a reviewer would also want to give
| acknowledgement to those professional concerns.
| Bayart wrote:
| >"Why does an article about history have to address what is
| currently seen as the cutting edge of historiography?"
|
| Identity politics is the << cutting edge of historiography >>
| ?! It looks like the butt-end of it to me. At least I can't
| say I've seen it ever being taken seriously by proper
| historians in the periods I'm concerned with. Of course you
| could make the case that it's just conservatism and
| intellectual stiffness, and that it'll percolate eventually.
| You could also make the case that's it's not a very fruitful
| research field. The bulk of the work in social history and
| the history of mentalities has been done, as far as I'm
| aware, especially in regards to the Modern period. Historical
| materialism and its descent have ran their course, more or
| less. If anything the cutting edge of historiography is
| reassessing traditional narratives that predate it, as well
| as feeding on the progress in other disciplines that use a
| lot of computer modelling (genetics, linguistics).
| lkrubner wrote:
| You are equating historiography's increasing focus on
| "questions of gender, race, or generational relations" to
| "identity politics". That is quite a leap. One can, and
| should, draw political conclusions from history, but that
| doesn't mean that professional historians are being overtly
| political merely for expanding the focus of their research.
|
| I'll point out that the expanding focus of history has been
| constant at least since the mid-1800s. The historian
| Fernand Braudel once quoted the historian Jules Michelet,
| who had boasted in 1862, "Only in the modern age have we
| discovered truly universal history." Braudel remarked "Even
| since then historian's have been looking over their
| shoulder."
|
| The point is, Michelet felt he had invented universal
| history because he had expanded the focus of history to
| include some economic realities, yet his focus still seemed
| limited compared to the work that Braudel and the Annales
| School were doing in the early and mid 20th Century. And so
| Braudel wondered, would his own work seem limited to people
| living in the mid 21st Century? And of course, the answer
| is yes. The concerns of history, and the methods of
| historiography, continue to expand, constantly.
| panzagl wrote:
| I'd still argue for the Seven Years War as a better candidate-
| it actually addressed global issues (the fate of N America and
| India), whereas the Napoleonic Wars were very much about
| Britain trying to maintain a status quo antebellum in Europe.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| I suggest you read the book, because Britain cared about
| keeping France from completely dominating Europe and from
| having ports on La Manche a great deal, but the status quo
| antebellum not at all.
| a3w wrote:
| WW0. Indexing starts at zero.
| kergonath wrote:
| Was the seven years' war WW-1, then?
| lordleft wrote:
| Everyone knows WW0 was when the Sea Peoples ravished Bronze
| Age societies
| krylon wrote:
| Well, in between those, Genghis Khan was tearing down
| empires all across Asia, the Middle East, and eastern
| Europe. Certainly global in scope for the time.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Most of the way through the book right now and it is indeed
| living up to its promise. I had become aware of a lot of holes in
| my understanding of events around, e.g., British consolidation in
| India during this period or the broader diplomatic context of
| South American independence movements and the book is doing a
| good job of filling them in.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-30 23:02 UTC)