which period of history are you obsessed by today?

[discokermit]

today for me it has been the birth of capitalism in britain, the birth of capitalism in venice, babylon around the time of hammurabi, particularly around debt law.
by obsessed you can take it how you like but for me it means idly wiki'ing something, and then spending the day daydreaming about what it might be like spending your day idly getting drunk all day with your pig in a life of rural idiocy hundreds of years ago or whatever.
tomorrow will be different but certain things keep recurring.
anyways, anybody else do this sort of shit?

 

[yield]

babylon around the time of hammurabi, particularly around debt law.

I was reading an article by Michael Hudson last month about that you might find interesting.
The Land Belongs to God | Michael Hudson

When I began to study Sumer and Babylonia in the 1980s, there wasn’t any economic history of the ancient Near East. There were histories of the ancient Near East, but I had to go through every volume with general history, look in the index, and sometimes I would find debt, but more often there wasn’t. 

I had to go through the whole literature, and I realized that assyriologists didn’t want anything to do with economists. There was a very good reason for that.

Since the 1920s there was an idea of what was called “Babylonianism”: The idea that everything came from Babylon. In practice this meant that everybody would project their own belief about how civilization began in the ancient Near East and the Neolithic.

It was like a Rorschach test. The Vatican, who had Sumerian translators, thought that it was a temple state and temples ruled everything. Socialists thought that it was all communal. The free enterprise boys – the Austrians and other liberals –just ignored the palaces and the temples, and thought that markets and individuals traded, and that was that.

 

[Orang Utan]

17th-19th century New England whaling communities

 

[editor]

1870s, Victorian engineering.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

.

 

[wiskey]

The Sogdian traders along the silk road around Samarkand 5-8th century.

I was reading about the silk road and fell down a wiki-hole.

 

[dessiato]

Spanish civil war. So recent, but so little talked about here that I seem to know more than many of my students. I can understand that with the teens and younger, but the adults, and especially the teachers, seem to know so little.

 

[Wolveryeti]

Aztec civilisation at the time Cortes arrived. How it must have felt on both sides - the moral triangulations needed to justify enslavement and genocide for the benefit of 'saving souls' and the sense of apocalypse the natives must have felt.

 

[bi0boy]

1870s, Victorian engineering.

1870s, British education reform

 

[bimble]

1910 republican revolution in Portugal . Not obsessed exactly but very interesting .

 

[DotCommunist]

got a book on the borgisas on download. Became interested after seeing Jeremy Irons play the Borgia pope.

 

[stuff_it]

Next week

 

[Orang Utan]

Next week

that's not history, is it?

 

[Spandex]

The sixteenth century.

When I was at school there were only two things to know about the 1500s: Henry VIII had some relationship issues; and Drake interrupted a game of bowls to defeat the Spanish Armada. But it turns out some other stuff was happening too.

Portuguese were piratically destroying the world of Sinbad the Sailor in the Indian Ocean; Spaniards were genocidally plundering the new world, leaving up to 80% of the population dead; the Barbarossa brothers were on jihad inspired slave raids taking thousands of people at a time and depopulating the southern Spanish and Italian coasts; 40,000 people died in four hours in the huge sea battle at Lepanto; Suleiman the Magnificent was being magnificent; Ivan the Terrible was being terrible; Akbar the Great was being great.

It all makes the doings of a small rainy island on the edge of Europe look kind of insignificant.

 

[twentythreedom]

Eighteenth century, specifically the Navy

 

[Orang Utan]

The sixteenth century.

When I was at school there were only two things to know about the 1500s: Henry VIII had some relationship issues; and Drake interrupted a game of bowls to defeat the Spanish Armada. But it turns out some other stuff was happening too.

Portuguese were piratically destroying the world of Sinbad the Sailor in the Indian Ocean; Spaniards were genocidally plundering the new world, leaving up to 80% of the population dead; the Barbarossa brothers were on jihad inspired slave raids taking thousands of people at a time and depopulating the southern Spanish and Italian coasts; 40,000 people died in four hours in the huge sea battle at Lepanto; Suleiman the Magnificent was being magnificent; Ivan the Terrible was being terrible; Akbar the Great was being great.

It all makes the doings of a small rainy island on the edge of Europe look kind of insignificant.

Have you read Peter Frankopan's A New History Of The World?
It's sitting on my To Read shelves, intimidating me with its girth

 

[twentythreedom]

I bet his penis is massive too

 

[Orang Utan]

It's a book

And it's intimidating me.

 

[Spandex]

Have you read Peter Frankopan's A New History Of The World?
It's sitting on my To Read shelves, intimidating me with its girth

Yes.

Don't be intimidated, it's not that long and it's a good read

 

[Orang Utan]

Yes.

Don't be intimidated, it's not that long and it's a good read

I shall read it soon. What books would you recommend for the history you describe in your post? Sounds fascinating, esp the Barbarossa piracy.

 

[twentythreedom]

And it's intimidating me.

Dammit you replied before my hilarious edit

I'm sure it will be a satisfying read when you get round to it

 

[twentythreedom]

Fwiw I'm reading N A M Rodger's 'The Wooden World'

 

[Red Sky]

The Pelopponesian War.

 

[Orang Utan]

Fwiw I'm reading N A M Rodger's 'The Wooden World'

And I am reading Philip Hoare's Leviathan, or The Whale.

 

[Orang Utan]

It's about whales.

 

[Orang Utan]

I will never eat another whale

 

[twentythreedom]

Wise man

 

[Spandex]

I shall read it soon. What books would you recommend for the history you describe in your post? Sounds fascinating, esp the Barbarossa piracy.

Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521-1580 by Roger Crowley for the Mediterranean stuff.

I didn't know any of the history when I picked it up - what happened or who did what or who won what, so it was like reading a Games of Thrones style novel with great empires warring, slavers, pirates and make or break battle scenes.

 

[Santino]

I will never eat another whale

Every year Japanese fishermen kill enough whales to cover an area the size of whales.

 

[Orang Utan]

Every year Japanese fishermen kill enough whales to cover an area the size of whales.

Real fact: 'sperm whales eat one hundred million metric tons of fish a year - as much as the annual catch of the entire human marine industry'