History | Alessandro Perilli

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peris — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 17:55:51 +0000

Describing history as a “chain of events” is a terrible metaphor

peris — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 17:46:08 +0000

Describing history as a “chain of events” is a terrible metaphor. It’s more like the vast roots of a big tree, where numerous causes come together to shape an event and countless consequences branch out. Single-cause explanations for events in history are more akin to conspiracy theories than actual science.

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The first clear evidence for organised warfare appears only 13,000 years ago

peris — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 08:41:54 +0000

At the heart of the Ukraine crisis lies a fundamental question about the nature of history and the nature of humanity: is change possible? Can humans change the way they behave, or does history repeat itself endlessly, with humans forever condemned to re-enact past tragedies without changing anything except the décor?

One school of thought firmly denies the possibility of change. It argues that the world is a jungle, that the strong prey upon the weak and that the only thing preventing one country from wolfing down another is military force. This is how it always was, and this is how it always will be. Those who don’t believe in the law of the jungle are not just deluding themselves, but are putting their very existence at risk. They will not survive long.

Another school of thought argues that the so-called law of the jungle isn’t a natural law at all. Humans made it, and humans can change it. Contrary to popular misconceptions, the first clear evidence for organised warfare appears in the archaeological record only 13,000 years ago. Even after that date there have been many periods devoid of archaeological evidence for war. Unlike gravity, war isn’t a fundamental force of nature. Its intensity and existence depend on underlying technological, economic and cultural factors. As these factors change, so does war.

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About half of all attempted coups d’état fail

peris — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 11:23:14 +0000

though coups against autocrats have sometimes led to democratization, more often they install a new set of autocratic elites and expose citizens to higher levels of repression.
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The data, again from Powell and Thyne (2011), show that about half of all attempted coups fail. The likelihood of failure varies with time period: 48% of attempted coups failed during the Cold War and 63% after it. In any case, regime change rarely follows failed coups: 6% of failed coups were followed by democratization and 3% by the establishment of a new dictatorship. In summary, coups fail frequently, and when they do, regime change rarely follows.
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From 1950 to 1989, 14% of successful coups against dictatorships led to democracy within two years, while 40% did so from 1990 to 2015.

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Fiat money —mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the US insisted that they should be

peris — Mon, 17 Jan 2022 13:31:42 +0000

On August 15, 1971, United States President Richard Nixon announced that foreign-held U.S. dollars would no longer be convertible into gold—thus stripping away the last vestige of the international gold standard.

This was the end of a policy that had been effective since 1931, and confirmed by the Bretton Woods accords at the end of World War II: that while United States citizens might no longer be allowed to cash in their dollars for gold, all U.S. currency held outside the country was to be redeemable at the rate of $ 35 an ounce.

By doing so, Nixon initiated the regime of free-floating currencies that continues to this day.

The consensus among historians is that Nixon had little choice. His hand was forced by the rising costs of the Vietnam War—one that, like all capitalist wars, had been financed by deficit spending.

The United States was in possession of a large proportion of the world’s gold reserves in its vaults in Fort Knox (though increasingly less in the late 1960s, as other governments, most famously Charles de Gaulle’s France, began demanding gold for their dollars); most poorer countries, in contrast, kept their reserves in dollars.

The immediate effect of Nixon’s unpegging the dollar was to cause the price of gold to skyrocket; it hit a peak of $ 600 an ounce in 1980. This of course had the effect of causing U.S. gold reserves to increase dramatically in value.

The value of the dollar, as denominated in gold, plummeted. The result was a massive net transfer of wealth from poor countries, which lacked gold reserves, to rich ones, like the United States and Great Britain, that maintained them.
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Nixon floated the dollar in order to pay for the cost of a war in which, during the period of 1970–1972 alone, he ordered more than four million tons of explosives and incendiaries dropped on cities and villages across Indochina—causing one senator to dub him “the greatest bomber of all time.”

The debt crisis was a direct result of the need to pay for the bombs, or, to be more precise, the vast military infrastructure required to deliver them. This was what was causing such an enormous strain on the U.S. gold reserves.

Many hold that by floating the dollar, Nixon converted the U.S. currency into pure “fiat money”—mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the United States government insisted that they should be.

In that case, one could well argue that U.S. military power was now the only thing backing up the currency. In a certain sense this is true, but the notion of “fiat money” assumes that money really “was” gold in the first place.

Really we are dealing with another variation of credit money.

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It turns out that the first SPAC was conceived in 1710

peris — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 17:20:50 +0000

Charles MacKay has left us some immortal descriptions of the first of these, the famous “South Sea Bubble” of 1710.

Actually, the South Sea Company itself (which grew so large that at one point it bought up most of the national debt) was just the anchor for what happened, a giant corporation, its stock constantly ballooning in value, that seemed, to put it in contemporary terms, “too big to fail.”

It soon became the model for hundreds of new start-up offerings: Innumerable joint-stock companies started up everywhere. They soon received the name Bubbles, the most appropriate imagination could devise … Some of them lasted a week or a fortnight, and were no more heard of, while others could not even live out that span of existence.

Every evening produced new schemes, and every morning new projects. The highest of the aristocracy were as eager in this hot pursuit of gain as the most plodding jobber in Cornhill.

The author lists, as arbitrary examples, eighty-six schemes, ranging from the manufacture of soap or sailcloth, the provision of insurance for horses, to a method to “make deal-boards out of sawdust.”

Each issued stock; each issue would appear, then be scooped up and avidly traded back and forth in taverns, coffee-houses, alleys, and haberdasheries across the city. In every case, their price was quickly bid through the ceiling—each new buyer betting, effectively, that he or she could unload them on some even more gullible sucker before the inevitable collapse.

Sometimes people bid on cards and coupons that would allow them no more than the right to bid on other shares later. Thousands grew rich. Thousands more were ruined.

The most absurd and preposterous of all, and which shewed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one started by an unknown adventurer, entitled “A company for the carrying on of an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”

The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of 100l. each, deposit 2l. per share.
Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to 100l. per annum per share.

How this immense profit was to be obtained, he would not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised that in a month the full particulars would be duly announced, and call made for the remaining 98l. of the subscription.

Next morning, at nine o’clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds beset his door, and when he shut up at three o’clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid.

He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off that same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again.

If one is to believe MacKay, the entire population of London conceived the simultaneous delusion, not that money could really be manufactured out of nothing, but that other people were foolish enough to believe that it could—and that, for that very reason, they actually could make money out of nothing after all.

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The history of paper money in Europe starts with the Venetian government levying a compulsory loan to pay for war

peris — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 15:50:48 +0000

The history of modern financial instruments, and the ultimate origins of paper money, really begin with the issuing of municipal bonds—a practice begun by the Venetian government in the twelfth century when, needing a quick infusion of income for military purposes, it levied a compulsory loan on its taxpaying citizens, for which it promised each of them five percent annual interest, and allowed the “bonds” or contracts to become negotiable, thus creating a market in government debt.

The Venetians tended to be quite meticulous about interest payments, but since the bonds had no specific date of maturity, their market prices often fluctuated wildly with the city’s political and military fortunes, and so did resulting assessments of the likelihood that they would be able to be repaid.

Similar practices quickly spread to the other Italian states and to northern European merchant enclaves as well: the United Provinces of Holland financed their long war of independence against the Hapsburgs (1568–1648) largely through a series of forced loans, though they floated numerous voluntary bond issues as well.
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It was only with the creation of the Bank of England in 1694 that one can speak of genuine paper money, since its banknotes were in no sense bonds.

They were rooted, like all the others, in the king’s war debts.

This can’t be emphasized enough.

The fact that money was no longer a debt owed to the king, but a debt owed by the king, made it very different than what it had been before. In many ways, it had become a mirror image of older forms of money.

The reader will recall that the Bank of England was created when a consortium of forty London and Edinburgh merchants—mostly already creditors to the crown—offered King William III a £1.2 million loan to help finance his war against France.

In doing so, they also convinced him to allow them in return to form a corporation with a monopoly on the issuance of banknotes—which were, in effect, promissory notes for the money the king now owed them.

This was the first independent national central bank, and it became the clearinghouse for debts owed between smaller banks; the notes soon developed into the first European national paper currency.

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While debt among each other was normal for English villagers, it was associated with criminality in government and commerce circles

peris — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 13:26:58 +0000

Cold cash was employed largely between strangers, or when paying rents, tithes, and taxes to landlords, bailiffs, priests, and other superiors. The landed gentry and wealthy merchants, who eschewed handshake deals, would often use cash with one another, especially to pay off bills of exchange drawn on London markets.

Above all, gold and silver were used by the government to purchase arms and pay soldiers, and amongst the criminal classes themselves.

This meant that coins were most likely to be used both by the sort of people who ran the legal system—the magistrates, constables, and justices of the peace—and by those violent elements of society they saw it as their business to control.

Over time, this led to an increasing disjuncture of moral universes.

For most, who tried to avoid entanglement in the legal system just as much as they tried to avoid the affairs of soldiers and criminals, debt remained the very fabric of sociability. But those who spent their working lives within the halls of government and great commercial houses gradually began to develop a very different perspective, whereby cash exchange was normal and it was debt that came to be seen as tinged with criminality.
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English villagers in Elizabethan or Stuart times did not like to appeal to the justice system, even when the law was in their favor—partly on the principle that neighbors should work things out with one another, but mainly, because the law was so extraordinarily harsh.

Under Elizabeth, for example, the punishment for vagrancy (unemployment) was, for first offense, to have one’s ears nailed to a pillory; for repeat offenders, death.60 The same was true of debt law, especially since debts could often, if the creditor was sufficiently vindictive, be treated as a crime.

In Chelsea around 1660, Margaret Sharples was prosecuted for stealing cloth, “which she had converted into a petticoat for her own wearing,” from Richard Bennett’s shop.

Her defense was that she had bargained with Bennett’s servant for the cloth, “but having not money sufficient in her purse to pay for it, took it away with purpose to pay for it so soon as she could: and that she afterwards agreed with Mr Bennett of a price for it.”

Bennett confirmed that this was so: after agreeing to pay him 22 shillings, Margaret “delivered a hamper with goods in it as a pawn for security of the money, and four shillings ninepence in money.” But “soon after he disliked upon better consideration to hold agreement with her: and delivered the hamper and goods back,” and commenced formal legal proceedings against her.

As a result, Margaret Sharples was hanged.

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The Church had always been uncompromisingly against usury as a matter of moral rivalry

peris — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 11:44:40 +0000

All of this helps explain why the Church had been so uncompromising in its attitude toward usury. It was not just a philosophical question; it was a matter of moral rivalry. Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand and it can quickly become a morality so ... Read more

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The real origin of the Middle Ages’ romantic knight

peris — Sat, 15 Jan 2022 17:59:57 +0000

It would be instructive, I think, to pause a moment to think about this term, “merchant adventurer.” Originally, it just meant a merchant who operated outside of his own country. It was around this same time, however, at the height of the fairs of Champagne and the Italian merchant empires, between 1160 and 1172, that the term “adventure” began to take on its contemporary meaning.

The man most responsible for it was the French poet Chretien de Troyes, author of the famous Arthurian romances—most famous, perhaps, for being the first to tell the story of Sir Percival and the Holy Grail. The romances were a new sort of literature featuring a new sort of hero, the “knight-errant,” a warrior who roamed the world in search of, precisely, “adventure”—in the contemporary sense of the word: perilous challenges, love, treasure, and renown.

Stories of knightly adventure quickly became enormously popular, Chretein was followed by innumerable imitators, and the central characters in the stories—Arthur and Guinevere, Lancelot, Gawain, Percival, and the rest—became known to everyone, as they are still. This courtly ideal of the gallant knight, the quest, the joust, romance and adventure, remains central to our image of the Middle Ages.

The curious thing is that it bears almost no relation to reality. Nothing remotely like a real “knight-errant” ever existed.
“Knights” had originally been a term for freelance warriors, drawn from the younger or, often, bastard sons of the minor nobility.

Unable to inherit, they were often forced to band together to seek their fortunes. Many of these bands became little more than roving gangs of thugs, in an endless pursuit of plunder—precisely the sort of people who made merchants’ lives so dangerous.

Culminating in the twelfth century, there was a concerted effort to bring this dangerous population under the control of the civil authorities: not only the code of chivalry, but the tournament, the joust—all these were more than anything else ways of keeping them out of trouble, as it were, in part by setting knights against each other, in part by turning their entire existence into a kind of stylized game.

The ideal of the lone wandering knight, in search of some gallant adventure, on the other hand, seems to have come out of nowhere.

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