So initially shipment of manufactured goods to the new world was a means of distraction against privateers and pirates? That's definitely a bit of economic history I would not have expected. Or did I misunderstand?
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Central America falls to the superior technology of the Europeans. Will they, however, survive as in OTL.
Can we get a look at the world map next update?
Can we get a look at the world map next update?
Blood, God, and Gold + Guns, Germs, and Steel!
I'm sure it wasn't done in vain and that there were plans of utilizing such goods as they arrived. But, historically, many Spanish ships containing manufactured goods were, initially, intended as distractions for pirates and privateers instead of the the silver and gold ships. Fun facts, I know.
We'll revisit the America's in more depth in the Second Book. Which, if you don't mind, is when I plan to have something akin to a world map or a large Europe map. We'll be hitting the Reformation so I intend to have such a map with its religious dynamic incorporated. Probably a few updates away as we wrap up with the Renaissance and this section dealing with economics and empire.
We'll revisit the America's in more depth in the Second Book. Which, if you don't mind, is when I plan to have something akin to a world map or a large Europe map. We'll be hitting the Reformation so I intend to have such a map with its religious dynamic incorporated. Probably a few updates away as we wrap up with the Renaissance and this section dealing with economics and empire.
Can't wait, sounds great!
And now on an entirely unrelated note, if you ever plan to make a Modern United Kingdom AAR , will you also give mention to Wallace and Gromit, I always thought that show really described British habits in an unbiased way :laughs:
:laughs:
And now on an entirely unrelated note, if you ever plan to make a Modern United Kingdom AAR , will you also give mention to Wallace and Gromit, I always thought that show really described British habits in an unbiased way
Ha! I was introduced to W&G through the 2005 film; I'm a great lover of animation of all stripes. I would love to do something with the Mother Country, though I will actually be studying there come the fall if all my documentation goes through. Alas, God only knows how long this adventure of an AAR will take. I even limited myself to only doing through a particular ruler (Louis-Joseph) because I know how long I can take in slugging through an AAR (though making a number of references to events beyond his reign). There is a certain satisfaction having the persona of the historian come out, in subtle, or not so subtle, ways! Thanks for dropping in @J66185!
Cheers!
BOOK I: THE RENAISSANCE
PART THREE: THE WHEELS OF COMMERCE
V
The Agricultural and Maritime Revolution in France
PART THREE: THE WHEELS OF COMMERCE
V
The Agricultural and Maritime Revolution in France
The sixteenth century produced a significant agricultural and maritime revolution in France, both rooted in New World expansion and general expansion of trade lanes back in Europe and the Mediterranean. Lyon become the center of French international trade and banking as Mediterranean goods traveling from France converged to Lyon before heading to the Mediterranean ports controlled by the Angevins. While silk production had been introduced to Tours in the late fifteenth century, it was subsequently introduced in Lyon in the sixteenth.
France’s economy was diverse, though agrarian based. Wine, olive oil, artichokes and lettuce were mainstays and agricultural products were divided between the north and south. After the discovery of the New World, French explorers sent back to France New World crops were began to populate the French countryside. Coupled with open trade with various Italian states as the Angevins pressed into Italy for geopolitical expansion and prestige, the French economy was booming as the Renaissance was at its height and the Reformation was getting under way.
The monastery system that dotted the French countryside was one of the main instruments of French agricultural production and power. The monks who tended the fields grew an assortment of various crops, including experimentation with New World gifts. The agricultural revolution in France that swept through the country in the sixteenth century would have far reaching consequences over the political and social structures of the French nation. First, it entrenched the aristocracy and the Roman Catholic Church who became the main beneficiaries and instruments of the agricultural revolution. Second, the internal improvement of trade logistics that united Paris with Lyon and with Toulon, ensured that regional barons and aristocrats who dominated these regions had greater political clout; the Angevins, controlling the important Mediterranean port of Toulon, therefore grew in their de facto independence from their royal parents in Paris for having a monopoly on Mediterranean trade and control of the southern economic markets. In fact, it is without argue that this economic revolution in France ensured the Angevin succession to the French throne in 1637. Third, the Angevin aristocracy entrenched itself in North Africa as new goods were exported serve as the economic foundation of the North African conquests. As a result North Africa was restored to its historical Catholic roots after nearly a millennium of Islamic dominance; the powerful Catholic aristocracy and resurgent church in the region only strengthened itself through privileged under the table trade in the Western Mediterranean.
FIGURE 1: A French fort and Benedictine Abbey near Oran. The stratification and French consolidation over North Africa was consummated by two constructions to display French power in the region: Forts and Catholic monasteries, cathedrals, and other buildings of worship.
The agricultural revolution also had the unintended, but inevitable, consequence of a population boom in the 1500s. Rapid population growth had a twofold effect on the country. On one hand it ensured France’s primary position as Europe’s greatest power. French manpower was unrivaled on the whole of the continent. Second, the population explosion of the sixteenth century brought about wage stagnation and social stratification of the economic system. Increased demand for agricultural goods meant the rootedness of the peasant populations to their agrarian communes and manors. The next generation, which was larger than the previous, did not have the luxury of free roaming but was tied to the land in order to provide for the population’s growing demands. More people meant more mouths to feed. And more mouths to feed meant more Frenchmen and Frenchwomen were stuck within the agricultural political economy.
Furthermore, the agricultural revolution brought forth the rise of what Karl Marx would later call the petite bourgeoisie. Some wealthier peasants who flourished because of the agricultural trade were able to invest in the growing agrarian economy. They travelled from town to town. This geographic mobility was tied directly to the transformation of the French economy. While not nobles, these first class peasants were the equivalent of the petite bourgeoisie; a still exploited class of individuals who nevertheless saw their freedom and livelihood tied to the existing economic system which would cause them to become conservative defenders of a system which, while really exploiting them (in Marxist lenses) promised them mobility and freedom unlike seen or experienced before. This temptation would overwhelm the petite bourgeoisie.
The establishment, then, of what could be could a proto-middleclass in France was still tied to agriculture rather than trade or other commercial interests. In fact, the emphasis on agriculture rather than trade, as in Holland or England, meant France was less commercially focused as its eventual northern rivals. While commercial trade did flourish in northwest coastal regions, and the southern coast controlled by the Angevins, it was not as widespread as the agricultural revolution. The maritime revolution was real, but it did not have the equivalent consequential affects upon French society as the agricultural revolution.
Additionally, part of the growth of the Atlantic trade was to facilitate the agrarian trade. French agricultural goods were sent to the growing colonies in Mexico and La Plata. The maritime trading network established from the New World back to France also facilitated the agricultural revolution by shipping New World crops back to France which were introduced to the French soil as already mentioned. While this should not underscore the gold and silver trade, unlike in Spain where material exploitation, gold and silver reigned supreme, the French trade weighed slightly more toward agricultural goods and products than gold and silver.
FIGURE 2: A French agrarian monastery. The French countryside remains dotted with reflections of the importance of agriculture to the French economy. There was a particularly close relationship between French Catholicism and agrarianism. Some scholars assert the agrarian reality of the French church helped to develop a deeply agricultural, rural, and rooted Catholic identity. Catholicism and the earth became blurred. This would have consequences come the Reformation in France with the forces of agrarian labor being seen as synonymous with “true” Catholicism and the commercialism of the Calvinists being synonymous with sin. This produced within the French Christian psyche a shunning of materialism as inherently greedy and the nobility of labor and work as something dignified and holy. French Catholicism, in ironic ways, ensured a deep rooted socialism come the nineteenth century. These cultural French Catholic socialists, like Henri Saint-Simon, and De La Mennais (himself a clergyman), while criticizing the institutionalism of the French Catholic Church, were nevertheless deeply influenced by the Catholic vision of man and dignity of labor. It is unsurprising that it was in France where the marriage of work, God, and earth came together so uniquely, would inspire an anti-institutional socialism from among its own children.
Economic revolutions have far-reaching ramifications. This was certainly the case in France. Trade expansion served commercial interests, that much is true. But it also served, to a much greater extent than trade in Holland, England, or even Spain, to advance agricultural interests. The emergence of a class of mobile agricultural peasants established an agricultural and laboring middleclass; a middleclass whose wealth and freedom was not necessarily tied to commercial interests. The monopolization of trade and trading routes in various regions of the French countryside strengthened the old aristocracy that had been somewhat subdued during the Wars of the Public Weal, and strengthened the position of the Angevins to the extent that the economic revolution of the 1500s ensured that they would come to inherit the throne in the 1600s.
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I think the agricultural developments are a critically under-known and misunderstood influence on history, in this instance but all other instances as well, including the modern day.
Out of curiosity, are you ever going to mention Charles C. Mann's work 1493 and 1491 at some point in your work about the Americas?
I agree, and I thought this post tied back well with my earlier post on agrarianism and urbanism which touched on similar themes more abstractly, now with this post focusing more specifically on France. Why? Well, we have a pro-French historian of course! And since this is probably the last of the updates for this section on the Renaissance and economics (I'm unsure if I want to focus and bash on England
), I hope you can see the relationality being developed as we (slowly) progress through the AAR! I will have Mann as Suggested Reading when the time comes when I delve into the New World and international economics in the late sixteenth century; I'm a big promoter of ecological and geographic histories and scholarship, in part, because my own philosophical disposition and work has deep geopolitical ties. Good to know that others apparently have read Mann and taken in his work. Mann, in conjuncture with Diamond, are essential readings.
Thanks, it's good to know a scholar that I can discuss for the first time ever! I was quite taken by its description of Brazil's initial rubber economy boom and the unbelievably over-the-top decadence in rubber towns.
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Indeed. Both for supporting more people and for empowering or disenfranchising people depending on the situation at the time. It can be immensely important for the wheels of history.
Yes, and very well and extensively commented on. But good you brought up, rule of thumb is asides with historical people are allusions are more explicitly meant to tie the game’s timeline with ours.
BOOK II: THE REFORMATION
PREFACE
PREFACE
The Reformation is considered one of the most important, if not the most important, event of modernity. The disintegration of Christian unity and the plunging of Christendom into sectarian strife coincided with the general push toward disenchantment – in large part because of the hermeneutics of the Protestant revolution. Many scholars have written on the unintended consequences of the Reformation and what it unleashed: modernity, disenchantment, nationalism, secularism (in the principle of separation of ecclesiastical and political powers), capitalism, and more.[1]
Several of these theses are simplified and can be discarded not because they are necessarily wrong, but because these authors don’t take into consideration the debt of Catholicism to nationalism and the Salamanca School’s discovery of praxeology and market economics. Thus we are left with three theses that deserve our attention. That Protestantism unleashed modernity, that Protestantism brought about the disenchantment of the world, and contingent to both, that Protestantism, paradoxically, is the root of modern Western secularity.[2] The argument that Protestantism is a major driver of modernity is perhaps the most valid—if we understand modernity as the relativization of value that comes with the individualization of hermeneutical interpretation that necessarily functionally exhausts into the “each man his own church” motto. The link between Protestantism and individualism is almost undisputed in historical, philosophical, and sociological literature.
The thesis that Protestantism drove disenchantment is more hazy; it is true that the anti-sacramental theology of Protestantism (sans High Church Anglicans and High Church Lutherans) is unarguably disenchanted, the Transcendental God of the monotheist Greek and Roman philosophers, and the Transcendent God of Abrahamic theology, already eliminates the immanence of the pagan gods who were identical with the forces of nature. In fact, in City of God, St. Augustine critiqued pagan religion on the ground that the gods could be explained away by the forces of nature. As such Christianity, more generally, carries within it a disenchanted worldview. Creation is a sacred sign, to be sure (especially in the more sacramental Christian traditions—especially Catholicism), but the real rupture between Protestantism and its Catholic parent is the Protestant rejection of the Greek and Roman philosophical traditions along with the fideism of Protestantism that rejected the Catholic (or pagan in the Protestant estimation) declaration that Reason was God and, therefore, reason was sufficient to bring men to salvation. More appropriately, we might understand Protestantism as having sped up the process of disenchantment. As the philosopher William Barrett explained, “At first glance, the spirit of Protestantism would seem to have little to do with that of the New Science…In secular matters, however—and particularly in its relation toward nature—Protestantism fitted in very well with the New Science…With Protestantism begins that long modern struggle, which reaches its culmination in the twentieth century, to strip man naked. To be sure, in all of this the aim was progress.”[3]
FIGURE 1: “Luther as the German Hercules,” by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1519. The corpses on the ground include: Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham and Peter Lombard, the implication being that Luther's writings has eviscerated their writings. With Luther begins the German philosophical and national consciousness of struggle. The German Dominican and inquisitor Jacob van Hoogstraten is being strangled and about to be clubbed to death. Protestant opposition to Greek and Roman philosophy was one of the earliest rallying cries of Protestantism. Lutheran reformer Philip Melanchthon retorted that Catholics worshiped Aristotle and Plato instead of Christ.
The final thesis, that Protestantism is a catalyst for secularism, has a multiplicity of meanings. First, the word “secular” comes from the Latin saeculum, meaning “of the age.” Traditional Catholic philosophy is inherently secular by this definition; as Augustine wrote, the age of man after the death of Christ is the eternal age of the temporal realm in which the pilgrim church finds herself in. Etymologically Christianity is secular by fact of existing in the world. The more modern, and debased, understanding of the term seems to me, to imply a rejection of religious belief. I am uninterested in this understanding of secularism as belief qua belief is universal so the claim that secularity is absent of belief is absurd; the more appropriate understanding of this modern notion of secularity would be that people no longer participate in religious rituals and sacraments while still holding cherished myths and beliefs all the same. The third understanding of secularism is what I will be focusing on in this section of my work: that secularism is the contest between church and state. To this end the claim that Protestantism is guilty of unleashing the separation of church and state is untrue. Catholicism always operated under the distinction of church and state. Furthermore, Catholic thinkers prior to Reformation, such as Dante Algieri and Marsilius of Padua, in De Monarchia and Defensor Pacis, both wrote of the separation of temporal political power as belonging to the “secular” monarchy while spiritual authority rested with the Roman Church and the two spheres were not to be blurred. The important French political theorist Jean Bodin, nominally and functionally Catholic, also wrote of the importance of the “secular state” in his Six Books of the Commonwealth. The meaning that Protestantism was a catalyst of secularity, then, has to be understood that the birth of secular political theory—as we understand it today as the separation between church and state—was the byproduct of sectarian strife unleashed by the Protestant Reformation and how theorists, Catholic and Protestant and Atheist alike, sought to restore the modus vivendi not by an actual separation of church and state as moderns understand it, but by the principle: Cuius regio, eius religio which effectively subordinated religion (mostly in Protestant lands) to the dictates of the princely political class.
SCREENSHOT 1: Europe at the height of the Reformation and at the ascension of Louis-Joseph I to the Throne of the Angevins, 1566.
[1] See in particular, a representative of each of these theses: Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World; Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World; Raymond Tumblesome, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660-1745; Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
[2] See Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.
[3] William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, p. 27.
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The Livonian Order is going strong and is that England being pushed back Scotland?
You know, one of the reasons I converted to Catholicism is because I felt Protestantism I grew up with (low Church CofE) insufficiently numinous in its operation. Too much whitewash, as it were.
As I have had many allusions to, and image allusions, there's a massive storm coming over the Turks really being a major, major, threat.
Alas, we wait until Book III to deal with the epic struggle for the soul and heart of Europe, literally.
When we get to Eastern Europe we'll deal with how Poland, well, got to where it ended up. Usually not the case in most games I have -- but then again this game was bizarrely successful!
Livonian Order is allied with Denmark and Lithuania and really took it to Moscow in the 1500s with Danish and Lithuanian support. Eastern Europe will get more interesting...
And yes, Scotland is making England regret having its soldiers stationed elsewhere.
Long live eternal Rome!