The illegible Carolingian army

The title of this post is inspired by the work of James C. Scott, whose book Against the Grain I’ve recently finished. One of Scott’s repeated themes is that states, including ancient ones, are always trying to make their subjects and their lands “legible”. They want complete and standardized descriptions of all the areas and individuals they control for planning purposes. Early states, in particular, wanted to be able to assess resources and people so they could raise tax and levy armies.

It’s at this point that the Carolingianist starts to point out anomalies in which seems overall like a sensible argument. Carolingian rulers didn’t have centralised land-based taxes as part of their revenue. But they did raise considerable armies. So how did they do that when they didn’t have ways in which to make their large territory legible?

The price of good history

I want to discuss a couple of examples I’ve seen recently of the problems of making good-quality history available to the general public. The first comes from the announcement of a special issue (44-1, 2018) of the journal Historical Reflections. The senior editor, Linda E. Mitchell, explains that the special issue:

is devoted to a wide-ranging and erudite critique of the claims of evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker that (a) the modern world is less violent than the premodern world, and (b) historians are not treating the period of the seventeenth and eighteenth century known as the “Enlightenment” with the respect it deserves. As the pages of this journal have demonstrated over and over, these statements are not just problematic and controversial, they are patently tendentious. Pinker—who is not a historian—belongs to a group of people, often our colleagues, who believe that writing history is easy and that anyone can do it. We know that what makes a good historian is training in the theories, methodologies, and materials of historical study. We know that history is not merely a narrative. Historical writing is labor intensive, often requiring hundreds of hours of sifting through archival materials in many languages and many forms. It also requires a clear understanding of and sensitivity to the contexts of historical inquiry. The 12 articles in this issue demonstrate the best kinds of historical writing in critiquing the methodology and conclusions of Pinker’s best-selling pseudohistorical study.