Strategy, Geography and Culture in the 16th-17th Century
Strategy, Geography and Culture in the 16th-17th Century
It was all related, and they all mattered...
Like using the button below; only I can see who you are.
If luck in human affairs is the sum of opportunity and preparation, luck in the realm of strategy has other components: geography and culture. Fortune may favor the bold, but strategic/policy success also favors the geographically well-positioned, the agriculturally varied, the industrially imaginative, and the socio-politically flexible. Geography also has a decided influence on the growth of a culture, in its ultimate success and survival, and on its outlook on the rest of the world. If this is the case, then it may well follow that geography climate, weather, and even geologic stability influence culture. The examples here are just a few of the ways this has been so.
Policy and strategy depend on where you are, what you believe, and what you can make with the resources at hand.
Across the Eurasian landmass, the human pageant has played out a litany of conflicts, disasters, immigrations, resource shortages, and ideological differences that formed the framework for the patterns of life. In Atlantic-bound Europe, crowded conditions and resource stress had made most European societies literally armies with countries, ready-made for princes with ambitions or a thirst for conquest. Ever-changing methods of warfare spurred arms races that stretched across the centuries, as France's armored knights were slain by the English longbow, who were then outmoded by Spain's musket and pike tercios, which were destroyed by flexible Swedish battalions. Cultural schisms triggered by growing middle-class resentment of noble privilege cleaved whole new confessions of faith from the Catholic Church, as fear of other religions broke down into "with us or against us" arguments.
Generations of rock/paper/scissors technological developments and either/or ideological choices toughened Europeans into military machines.
In China, strategic thought and need were driven by geographic isolation, limited technological innovation, cultural complacency and fear of a loss of social control. China was paradoxically always on the edge of both famine and overpopulation. Horse-drawn technology could not control her vast borders. Disasters from floods to droughts, earthquakes to invasions challenged what government there was simply to stay alive. Small peasant-based agriculture lacked any central structure for improvement projects such as roads, dams or canals except as they served the elites directly. In defense, peasant families grew huge simply to provide enough manpower for the majority to survive off the land. At the end of a veritable ocean of grass and wilderness inhabited by toughened nomadic cultures that stole what they could not trade for, China grew huge in population and rigid in thought as a matter of survival.
Not so Britain.
The British Isles were tantalizingly close to the European mainland, and had been invaded regularly up to the 11th century. Because of a series of murders and marriages, suicides and storms, invasions and investments, ruling Britain had become a great game played by most of Europe up to the 16th Century. Contenders included Irishmen, Danes, Norwegians, Scots, Normans, Dutchmen, Germans and even Hungarians. All wanted that windswept isle, but not just for bragging rights. Britain's growing season was usually two months longer than the rest of Europe's, and her harbors in the south almost never froze over. One of the more treacherous bodies of water known, a narrow stretch of powerful tides and currents called the English Channel, protected Britain from her rapacious European neighbors. Further, invasion and occupation had made Britain's population a diverse and hardy mix of Pict, Celt, Norse, old Roman, Saxon, Welsh, Norman and Cornish—among others—who loudly demanded a voice in who ruled them, often at the end of a sword or a longbow. Whoever reigned in England also held year-round access to both the Baltic and the Mediterranean, and some of the richest farmland in the world, thanks to the Gulfstream that winds from the Gulf of Mexico to Kola Bay above the Arctic Circle. When Henry VIII bullied the leading contenders for his throne into working together—practically destroying the rest in the process—while simultaneously starting a whole new church, and taking control of his own legal system exclusive of the Roman Church, Europe sat up and took notice.
Except the Mongols.
On the other side of the world, a contentious and fractious problem threatened to spill over into Europe—twice reaching as far as the Bug River in Poland and once the Danube. The river of grass from the Danube to the Pacific was ideal grazing land for sheep and cattle, and an invasion highway for free-ranging predatory tribes collectively known as the Mongols (for the Mongolian steppe where they wintered). China's geography was a confusion of benefits and perils. Mighty rivers that provided transportation and irrigation water also flooded regularly, and made ready invasion routes. Vast and deep forests provided lumber and game and hiding places for bandits and nomadic tribesmen. Vast mountain ranges created barriers from some directions, and sheltering walls from others.
When the Mongols conquered, they took only what they could use.
But in China the tumens (a tactical unit of about ten thousand men) of horsemen left behind many women, a few men—and millions of babies born of Mongol rapes. The genetic mixing of Chinese fertility and Mongol hardiness during the Mongol (Yuan) dynasty of about a century, before the more resourceful Ming overcame them, made for a population explosion the like of which no society has ever seen. With roughly a million children reaching adulthood every year for over a century, the Chinese population reached 100 million before Europe reached 50,000,000 by the end of the 15th century, and doubled two hundred years later. One in three humans alive today can be genetically traced to a Mongolian ancestor. All of this created an almost unbelievable population pressure on both ends of Eurasia. Now, factor in the effect of two aggressive, evangelical Abrahamic faiths (Christianity and Islam) competing for dominance of the center of Eurasia—what we now call the Middle East—and the arsenal of the Old World was bound to explode.
Discovering the New and Changing the Old World
After Columbus returned, nearly nothing in the eastern hemisphere was the same. While China was largely isolated from the rest of the world, Europeans with stern post rudders, deep rock mining and joint stock corporations (the keys to success in the Age of Exploration) exploited the riches of the New World for their own uses. Hapsburg Spain, especially, pillaged her Latin American possessions of every ounce of specie they could extract. Loaded with silver, Spanish ships crossed the Pacific to China, trading for the precious shellac, silks, tea and whatever else would bring a profit.
Spain grew rich on a global trade without parallel for three generations.
From the time of the unification of Aragon and Castile, Spanish policy had been to hold on to the Iberian Peninsula. As the Defender of the True Church, Spain was also obligated to root out heresy and apostasy, which, by 1550, classified about half of Europe and England as their enemies. Using the execution of Mary Stuart in February 1587 as a causus belli, Spain went to war with the leading heretic, Tudor England. While Spain was wealthy enough to fight for the Spanish Netherlands on land, invading England required the most capital-intensive weapons then known: ships of war, and Spain just didn't have enough.
England had in its arsenal several "secret" weapons.
One of which was the shellac that Spain brought from far Cathay because of a market quirk: the value of silver. Latin American silver usually went to the Orient because the products obtained in trade there were simply worth more in Europe than the silver, whereas gold could come directly across and make it worth the crossing. Silver, a much harder material than gold, could be worked into more practical objects than could gold, making it more desirable as a trade good for the Mongol nomads of the north—an important consideration for Ming China.
That shellac…
The shellac comprised as much as a third of some cargoes. It was valuable not just for creating fine furniture and jewelry , but also for metal manufacturing. Coating casting patterns with shellac makes them dimensionally stable, a practice developed in Britain and the Netherlands by 1600 that didn't catch on in the rest of Europe until the 19th Century. As a result, English and Dutch cannonballs fit their guns more closely with less hand work, resulting in more accurate gunnery. Also, English compasses could use polished steel rather than scraped iron for their bearings, making them more easily slewed and accurate. From axle pins to musket works to clocks, shellac made the Anglo-Dutch that much harder to defeat.
How was it that England used shellac so successfully, while Europe did not (and China didn't even think of it)?
Shellac requires alcohol to liquefy, and while the distillation of grains into alcohol had been well understood since time out of mind, not all alcohol is the same. The chemical properties of oat-derived alcohol common in England and Holland neutralized the tannic acid present in the leather containers used for importing the shellac flakes. Other alcohols, chiefly those distilled from wheat or barley in Europe, do not neutralize the tannins, resulting in a thicker product.
The issue, technically, is viscosity.
In shellac it’s a matter of tensile strength and hardness when dry. Wheat and barley alcohols couldn’t neutralize the tannic acid from the containers, and thus could not make what modern woodworkers call the highly flowable “one-pound cut” lacquer (one pound of shellac flakes to a gallon of alcohol) with the qualities of hardness and durability needed for pattern-making. Wood alcohol can, but its preparation requires a great deal more labor-intensive pulping of coarse wood material.
Only Britain and the Dutch Republic grew enough oats to support alcohol production.
This was because European oats were regarded as unfit for human consumption and were fed to livestock. Both Europe and China had grass in abundance to graze their animals, while Britain and the Netherlands did not. Oats carry more roughage and nutrition into a horse’s system than grass or cut hay, thus requiring less fodder for the same work. Grazed horses need a day to recover from a day’s work; oat-fed horses need about six hours. The mainland’s abundance of grazing grass blinded them to the simple wonders of the humble oat.
And it wasn’t only grains that mattered.
Hardwood husbandry was an English royal concern from the Norman Conquest to the coronation of Elizabeth II. Crown foresters managed stands of oak, maple, walnut, and ash; cutting an oak down in Britain without warrant or permission was a capital offense until 1882, when it became a simple felony until 1955.
Other states had unique ag products.
In Scandinavia, flax, the humble weed-like crop that grows year-round, was carefully measured, its yield taxed with permits issued for non-Scandinavian buyers...except the favored Dutch. They devised a way to blend flax fibers with English wool to make the strongest sailcloth known until the development of nylon in the 20th century: a recipe that was a state secret until the American Revolution. France led the world in onion, garlic and turnip production, and their coarse greens made the first worthwhile sand-mulling sieves (that cleans casting sand after the metal pour) in about 1550. Spain had access to the finest rope-making hemp in the world in the Philippines, but only their Italian Hapsburg lands developed production techniques that took advantage of the long and strong fibers.
So did Asia.
Chinese metal casting quality (though not quantity) was far behind Europe's because the hardwood needed to make coke (from coal) or hard charcoal was in short supply in China. The more abundant softer woods yield an inferior coke, but a fair charcoal, the use of which produces a softer steel, but an acceptable iron. Japan, ironically, had more than adequate stocks of hardwood (again, a geographic accident), and thus could make the tough mid-grade steel used in their well-understood twist-welded swords. The same geographic accident led to the development of the twist-welded Toledo blades (by the Moors) that opposed the one-piece and brittle English and French steel on the Continent.
The result of the Spanish attempt to invade England in 1588 was not inevitable, but it was foreseeable.
Spain's strategic vision was to conquer England for the glory of God; England's was to trade with anyone so inclined, and fight off the rest. Other European states largely settled for any edge they could get, while far-off China coveted the bonanza of silver that they traded with the smelly barbarians from across the sea for what they had in abundance. Geographic accidents provided them all with the tools they needed to get as far as their vision could take them.
“Enlightenment” Europe: when towns burned by night.
17th century Europe fought a succession of rapacious internecine conflicts (from which Germany has yet to recover) that culminated in the Nine Year's War in 1697, where the Anglo-Dutch virtually dictated the peace to the rest of the world, and the Hapsburg Empire began a centuries-long decline. China fought off and assimilated the Mongols (eventually) and the Japanese (handily) but could not protect her borders from the aggressive (and hardwood and coal-rich) Manchurians, nor her shores from vicious corsairs that sapped her strength even further. While England and Europe fulfilled their visions, both Spain and China ultimately failed in theirs, in part because of their cultural heritage, and in part because of accidents of geography that favored their enemies.
Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study In Miscalculation and Folly
Now, Japan’s geography and culture had a great deal to do with her history, like everywhere else. But Japan got left behind in the technological race in part because their samurai culture didn’t need trade.
Why The Samurai Lost Japan is a study in cultural as well as military failure. The gap between Perry’s “opening” of Japan in 1854 and Japan’s surrender in Tokyo Bay is only 91 years, but in that time Japan went from a medieval society and government dominated by a medieval warrior mindset to a more modern society and government dominated by a medieval warrior mindset. Their geography, their culture, and the resources available to them all had a role in what happened to Japan. Available from your favorite booksellers or from me if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
The Insurance Industry in Wartime
The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan
And Finally…
On 17 February:
1864: Hunley sinks Housatonic in Charleston Harbor using a spar torpedo (explosive charge at the end of a pole). Often touted as the first time a submersible vessel sank a surface ship, Hunley vanished after the sinking, only to be found again in 1995.
1972: VW Beetle overtakes Ford Model T as world’s most-produced car model. Though neither Ford nor Volkswagen made a great deal of noise about it when Beetle number 15,007,034 rolled off the production line in Wolfsburg (Nixon visited China the same day, and Great Britain voted to enter the EU), both made more of it later. Because model changes are much faster since then, most commentators believe no automaker will ever surpass that record.
And today is NATIONAL RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS DAY. Today we should do something that maybe no one else does, like shovel a neighbor’s walk, or pay for the person’s order behind you in line. Maybe if enough people do something kind at random, it won’t seem so random after a while.