the pre-WWII consensus on warfare in europe seems insane. everybody was willing to kill every human being alive in order to seize a river valley four miles into their neighbor which would increase their country's GDP by 9%.
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there was also, like, six different kinds of royal incest and bizarre familial alliances and feuds going on, right?
apr 22, 2025, 7:30 am • 9 1 • view
this is kind of selecting on the dv, but because of how borders get established, i think it's also right? like in western europe and foreign-office-related colonies, the level of specificity in defining a portion of border do sort of be proportional to the known value of the stuff near that border.
apr 22, 2025, 7:47 am • 4 0 • view
100%. "The Border" as a knowable boundary grows from state legibility of border-adjacent things (tax revenue, war materiel on the + side) (raids, smuggling, etc on the - side).
apr 23, 2025, 5:39 am • 0 0 • view
This is one of the perks of "neoliberalism" that I think people might be glossing over; opening boundaries to movement of goods, capital and people really took a sledgehammer to the "conquering Silesia" premium.
apr 22, 2025, 11:51 am • 51 2 • view
Look, I play Victoria 3 and 9% of GDP is a massive number I’m not saying it’s a GOOD idea but I’d be tempted…
apr 22, 2025, 12:40 pm • 1 0 • view
it has an ironworks and coal deposits. I’ll lay down my uncle’s life to keep it out of the hands of the treacherous Belgian.
apr 22, 2025, 7:27 am • 28 0 • view
It "helped" that war represented one of the relatively few chances in many societies for significant personal social mobility and/or a chance to get rich through loot and pillage.
apr 22, 2025, 10:17 am • 8 0 • view
Prior to the industrial revolution, the most cost effective way to grow your economy was to conquer more land. Polities that conquered more land tended to survive better, so militaristic ideals had a strong selection pressure.
apr 22, 2025, 7:48 am • 4 0 • view
Before WWI, that was often a decent way to grow your economy as long as you won. Societies based mostly on subsistence agriculture had a very low ceiling on development, and the quickest way around it was to conquer some new taxpayers. Industrialization changed that, but people are slow learners.
apr 22, 2025, 7:32 am • 62 2 • view
You could also just be dutch
apr 22, 2025, 7:34 am • 7 1 • view
It didn't really matter where you lived. If your economy is based on subsistence farming, your poor farmers are too busy trying to stay alive to produce very much surplus. They were, however, very good at surviving and usually bounced back from wars pretty quickly.
apr 22, 2025, 7:41 am • 19 0 • view
Once you start building factories and things, though, the calculation reverses because a factory can produce absolute shit tons of surplus if you let it work in peace, but starting a war to conquer more factories will usually disrupt production for years to decades. It's not worth it anymore.
apr 22, 2025, 7:41 am • 33 3 • view
And at the same time factories start becoming commonplace, you start getting high explosive artillery shells, which are a massive increase in lethality and damage.
apr 22, 2025, 7:51 am • 2 0 • view
Absolutely! Which is great for fighting people who haven't started building factories yet, but makes things worse when you try to conquer territory from other industrialized nations.
apr 22, 2025, 7:53 am • 0 0 • view
I just meant trading vs. War in general (also Venice)
apr 22, 2025, 7:42 am • 2 0 • view
(Or trading vs. Farming I guess)
apr 22, 2025, 7:42 am • 1 0 • view
Trade is linked to production; a mercantile power like Holland or Venice is still competing for the same limited pool of surplus production, even if they didn't produce much themselves. Hence why those two countries were so cutthroat with rival mercantile powers.
apr 22, 2025, 7:45 am • 4 0 • view
yeah this is why the hypothetical future war over taiwan is so wild to me. cost/benefit analysis totally out the window.
apr 22, 2025, 7:47 am • 25 0 • view
The war on Taiwan for China is really to settle some scores. It is a matter of honour for China. Any economic or territorial gain after is a bonus.
apr 22, 2025, 10:51 am • 8 0 • view
Yeah, and that kind of speaks to war in the industrial world more broadly; we don't usually fight for material gain anymore! Rather, modern war is usually a tool to promote a political agenda or to prevent a loss.
apr 22, 2025, 10:53 am • 8 0 • view
Yeah. It's also a good reminder that structural forces aren't everything; it made no economic sense for Russia to invade Ukraine either but here we are.
apr 22, 2025, 7:49 am • 35 1 • view
I think this underestimates the precedent value of a victory. The victor don't just gain some territory, but also evidence that they can pull this off (and could again). This improves their power far beyond the specifics of the victory.
apr 22, 2025, 8:17 am • 4 0 • view
Conversely, that China cannot (yet?) easily take over Taiwan, influences power relations all over East Asia, beyond Taiwan alone. The same applies to wars that are seemingly fought over minor issues, like personal slights. That one can or cannot respond to minor issues, also affects major issues.
apr 22, 2025, 8:17 am • 2 0 • view
And similar, Russia was not just attempting to gain a few provinces, but to set the precedent that it can control Ukraine (and others) That failed and risked the opposite: a precedent that Nato support could stop Russia at its own borders even without direct Nato forces.
apr 22, 2025, 8:29 am • 5 0 • view
Having a bigger country benefits the ruler, but it doesn't make the subjects any per capita wealthier
apr 22, 2025, 11:47 am • 11 0 • view
well yeah but the ruler’s the one making the decisions, and it also benefits the soldiers who get to plunder and pillage the land
apr 22, 2025, 1:30 pm • 6 0 • view
My impression is that a lot of pre-modern war/conquest was politically motivated by rulers who wanted to hand out favors to their underlings to assure loyalty. That's part of why liberalism is preferable to the alternatives from a pacifism standpoint: nobody to hand out favors to but the people.
apr 22, 2025, 11:53 am • 13 0 • view
By the time you get to the late 19th century you’ve got Volkskriegen where you’re invading the state next door because some poet hypothesized a mystical primordial link between your dominant ethnic group with the ethnic group two river valleys over, which is what the post-Soviet states are back to.
apr 22, 2025, 1:47 pm • 5 0 • view
Although on second thought, maybe that isn't preferable. Because there's a good reason why Native Americans sided with the British in the war of 1812. The "favors" to the people are often just as horrible or worse than the favors to the crown.
apr 22, 2025, 11:57 am • 7 0 • view
Yeah, under premodern or early modern conditions the farmers might benefit from annexing land - without people on it
apr 22, 2025, 12:18 pm • 5 0 • view
It strikes me as incredibly naïve that left-wing commentators believe (or believed, for circumstances have sadly changed) that American military involvement around the world has anything close to the same purpose. Military force is not necessary to obtain resources!
apr 22, 2025, 12:30 pm • 5 0 • view
You don't even need to be capitalist, countries will just voluntarily trade for the resources because trade is a mutual benefit. The extractive corporate angle is wildly overstated. But that's just my opinion.
apr 22, 2025, 12:32 pm • 4 0 • view
The World Wars were partly motivated by getting control of resources (especially those needed for war, circular). Restrictions on trade were a factor leading to war.
apr 22, 2025, 12:36 pm • 6 0 • view
Right. The countries aiming to obtain those resources were devoted to an illiberal ideology of national self-sufficiency and conquest. I'm arguing that resource extraction was not a significant war aim for democracies in the 20th century (maybe because it didn't have to be?)
apr 22, 2025, 12:49 pm • 3 0 • view
I suppose it was by no mere coincidence that most of the world's resources ended up directly under French, British, and American control after WW1.
apr 22, 2025, 12:51 pm • 3 0 • view
The British Empire had a protectionist system of Imperial Preferences pre WWI. And FDR, while generally pro free trade, denied resources to the Axis (good)
apr 22, 2025, 1:39 pm • 1 0 • view
That's kind of the point: the amount of wealth was roughly equal to the amount of productive farmland, and the amount of productive farmland was basically fixed. So there was a strong incentive for rulers to control as much of it as possible. Zero sum game.
apr 22, 2025, 3:18 pm • 7 0 • view
It doesn’t automatically but it can facilitate it. Like the fact that the Roman Empire Was Big fascinated a level of economic scale and complexity that meant that fairly average people did get to enjoy a modestly higher standard of living than could be attained otherwise
apr 22, 2025, 5:45 pm • 3 0 • view
(Of course, fat load of good that does for the people alive at the time to be conquered)
apr 22, 2025, 5:46 pm • 2 0 • view
Trade over a large area helped Probably the political class wasn't thinking too much about that
apr 22, 2025, 7:01 pm • 2 0 • view
b-but you don’t understand! The minor city of floppelstein going to cyrlsia instead of our grand fatherland of peidhrhy is the worst thing to ever happen!
apr 22, 2025, 1:47 pm • 3 0 • view
I don't know, 9% is a pretty big number...
apr 22, 2025, 8:09 am • 12 0 • view
The Russians are basically *still* on that page. And the British were willing to sacrifice a good chunk of their Navy to get back some rocks in the South Atlantic as late as the 80s. I feel someone should point this out to the Americans before they start nicking territory that's notionally European
apr 22, 2025, 11:51 am • 14 0 • view
Well the Faklands weren't about GDP at all, but rather the anxieties of an entire nation about their relevancy
apr 22, 2025, 2:12 pm • 11 0 • view
you could also say it was about the falkands islander's right to self-determination
apr 22, 2025, 10:18 pm • 2 0 • view
if we're using "national pride" to include things like "the state has responsibilities to its citizens and must uphold those responsibilities even when doing so is expensive," then I have to conclude that national pride is Good, Actually
apr 23, 2025, 3:50 pm • 1 0 • view
This period is known as Europe’s peaceful past before immigrants brought violence to the continent for the first time.
apr 22, 2025, 8:03 am • 30 0 • view
Tbh 9% is a lot. Probably more like 0.9%.
apr 22, 2025, 2:35 pm • 18 0 • view
can't forget those massive european wars started by some trivial excuse, like somebody gets insulted in a telegram and the whole country of france decides to take that personally
apr 22, 2025, 7:40 am • 25 1 • view
They often did colonialism that way too.
apr 22, 2025, 7:28 am • 6 0 • view
No, you see, they'd ended war. They did a whole war to end it!
apr 23, 2025, 7:40 pm • 1 0 • view
Can’t help but think of Yuval Noah Harai’s book ‘Sapiens’. The endless propagated myths abound. Hence, we are bound to war as we consume these fever dreams. Or is that just testosterone? lol
apr 22, 2025, 8:31 am • 0 0 • view
That's not been the historical norm, seems mostly a WW1 thing.
apr 22, 2025, 7:27 am • 1 0 • view
I mean there's a passage in Hamlet about basically the same thing
apr 22, 2025, 7:30 am • 14 0 • view
If you're willing to accept such things, then you also need to accept some WW2 battles too (Stalingrad, Huertgen Forest..)
apr 22, 2025, 7:49 am • 0 0 • view
Wars of religion period too
apr 22, 2025, 7:34 am • 1 0 • view