BIO 358 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Gunpowder Artillery In The Middle Ages, Matchlock, Arquebus
14 Jun 2018
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Topic 22: Gunpowder and the emergence of the modern state
Notes:
1) Where are we and what do we predict?
a) Next in the staircase:
b) Early modern state
i) Driven by gunpowder artillery
c) Democratization of modern state
i) Driven by reliable inexpensive gunpowder handguns
d) How did this allow majority to sieze back control?
e) Archaic state road (roman) compared to American road
i) Comparing transportation
ii) These emerge explosively with the democratization of the state
1) Cycling in the archaic state—etrehed poer ad stailit
a) Elites manage everyone as if they were domesticated animals
b) Problems between COI between elites
i) Gunpowder artillery solves this problem
c) Conquest frontier grows linearly
d) Occupied territory grows exponentially
e) Changes in LOCAL logic for archais state elites over time: as empires get really large and populations
boom
i) Less conquest wealth per capita coming back from the frontier
ii) Fewer per capita conquest opportunities of ambitious young elite members
iii) Lower return per unit polices within the existing state
iv) Returns on elite-elite coercion become too low to sustain the state
f) Small state→ wealthy→ expands→ blossoms→fragments and collapses
g) Mayans
i) Video on Mayan collapse
(1) Violence destroyed the mayans
(2) All collapses of archaic states are social phenomenon, not external
h) Roman colesium/empire
i) Starting to collapse, we see that they are heavily defended
ii) Elites ere usig their ta oe the epire started to rule to uild hoe defeses istead
(1) We must be able to solve this problem →
(a) Gunpowder artillery
(i) First modern states emerged in the wake of these weapons
i) Solved COI problem between stabilizing archaic states
i) Does not change economic performance of hierarchal structure, just stabilizes it
2) Idk
3) The modern democratic state is an adaptive revolution
a) Early modern states were like archaic states in how they were still dominated by elite warriors, except
that the’re stale
i) We can change this once commoners get a coercive threat weapon AKA gunpowder handgun →
modern democratic state
(1) Beliefs serve majority consensual interests now
b) In the Malthusian box, pop inc wealth decrease (adaptive stasis)
i) Once there was democratization of the state (aka gunpowder handgun) we get a + exponential
relationship (adaptive revolution)
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