The Scholar's Stage

Geography and Chinese History – The Fractured Land Hypothesis

04 June, 2013Climate, Geography, History, The Middle Kingdom

Occasionally I come across attempts to explain the broad course of Chinese history in reference to China’s geography. These arguments tend to focus on the unified empires of Chinese history. Always contrasting Chinese history with the European experience, they suggest that China’s political unity and Europe’s perpetual disunity are reflections of the unbroken terrain of […]

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Do The Great Books Have a Place in the 21st Century?

27 May, 2013Books and Literature, Culture, Education, On Humanity, Possessions For All Time

A selection of the 60 volume Great Books of the Western World.Image source. A “proper education” changes with its times. In the days of America’s founding a true education was a classical education. An educated man was not simply expected to be familiar with the great works of Greek and Roman civilization; the study of […]

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Quick Hits: Life Before the Plow

22 May, 2013Complex Systems, History

No time for substantive commentary tonight, but I wanted to point my readers to four articles worth their time. All concern life before the Neolithic Revolution – that is, human society before the advent of agriculture and the civilizations built upon it. There are many common misconceptions about hunter-gather societies. This is partly because there […]

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America Torn Apart: Panel Discussion With Charles Murray and Robert Putnam

21 May, 2013Community, Culture, Demographics, Video of the Day, Wealth

This video is worth your time. It is long. But it is worth your time. Murray & Putnam: Is Class Division Tearing U.S. Apart? from The Aspen Institute 2012e– and The Atlantic on FORA.tv A longer post on similar themes is in the works. Until that post is completed this is an excellent place to […]

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Asian Great Power Politics: Spring 2013

19 May, 2013Bargaining and Balancing, Bharat, History, Japan, Korea, Narrative, The Middle Kingdom

Image Credit: Washington Post, Interesting things happen in Asia. Over the last few months a lot of interesting things have happened. Yet as 2013 rolls forward I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with the standard explanations American commentators rely on to explain Asia’s great power politicking. This post presents a few themes neglected by many analysts […]

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Notes From All Over (14/5/2013) – Historical Linguistics, Guanxi, and Scary Government Data Bases

15 May, 2013Climate, Culture, Geopolitics, Military Affairs, Near East, Notes From All Over, Oligarchy, The Middle Kingdom, Tyranny

A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit.This one is a bit smaller than normal; there are a few other posts or essays that deserve to go here, but I hope to devote entire posts to them at a later date. TOP BILLING:“An Introduction to Historical Linguistics’ – Terry Crowley and Claire Bowern. Part […]

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What Happens When Wall Street Goes Up Against the CIA?

02 May, 2013Mexico, Monied Interests, Stealth Conflicts

Drug war related deaths by state, 2007-2009. Image Source: Sean Connely et. al. “Mexico Under Siege.” Los Angles Times interactive feature. This week The Washington Post published an investigative report on the role U.S. intelligence agencies have played in Mexico’s ongoing campaign against the drug cartels. This is their introduction to the topic: For the […]

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On Survivalism

02 May, 2013Books and Literature, Community, Complex Systems

This post was originally published in December 2010. A comment thread at Zenpundit’s place has inspired me to resurrect it. I recently read a book by survivalist blogger James Wesley Rawles, How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It. This reading has prompted a few thoughts on the aims and validity of […]

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Striking It Rich in Ancient Times: An Example From the Song Dynasty

26 April, 2013Dogs of War, History, The Middle Kingdom, Wealth

In “Notes on the Dynamics of Human Civilization: the Growth Revolution” and “A Flawed Comparison: Inequality, Ancient and Modern” I contended that the process through which premodern societies and individuals acquired their riches is fundamentally different from the way fortunes are created and acquired today. An interesting example is provided by the Song Dynasty and […]

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Global Temperature, 0-2000 AD

23 April, 2013Climate, History

This week a 78-man team of international researchers organized as the PAGES (Past Global Changes) 2k Network published a report for Nature Geoscience reconstructing Earth’s climate for the past 2,000 years. The report is the most comprehensive of its type yet published, and its focus on detailing regional (vs. hemispheric or global) temperatures is unique. Each […]

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