This small business in downtown Victoria has diversified to selling pizza and wine. But that would not protect it if a tsunami washes away the city or the next government decides that anyone who owns an ethnic restaurant is un-Canadian and should have their business confiscated and sold at auction
(The following is outside my usual topics but its an area of my expertise that I have not found anyone else talking about).
Wise investors use diversification to reduce risk. Any one investment might fail for many different reasons, but many different investments are unlikely to fail together. Additionally, what causes one investment to do poorly often causes others to do well. Rising energy prices hurt manufacturing (which buys energy) but not energy companies (which sell it). Rising wages hurt employers with many low-wage employers, but benefit businesses who sell to consumers. Classically, bonds and stocks tend to move in opposite directions under a given type of pressure, so almost all long-term investors will benefit from holding some of both. For most of history opportunities for diversification were limited, and a prudent investor might buy several plots of land, invest in a ship’s cargo, and make some loans to neighbours. In the 20th century, mutual funds allowed small investors to own dozens of different assets for low but significant costs. Today anyone with a bank account in Canada can buy an index fund that holds thousands of different assets around the world for around 0.25% of their investments per year. However, most of these funds lack one important type of diversification.
After an email exchange, I have learned that some prominent people want to believe that the population of the Americas in 1492 is known closely. Here is why I say it is debated within a factor of 20.
Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones have the following to say in their 1978 Atlas of World Population History:1
The estimate of 1m Amerindians north of the Rio Grande- which breaks down into 0.2m in Canada, 0.05m in Alaska, and 0.75m in the rest of the Continental USA- goes back at least as far as J. Mooney (Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 80.7 (1928)); it seems to be generally accepted, though the California school of revisionists has issued a trial balloon in favour of 20m (sic). The present population of 0.6m represents a recovery from the all-time low of 0.5m reached in 1925. … The size of the population of Mexico in 1492 has lately become the subject of much academic argument. … The point at issue is this: was the population of Mexico in 1492 no more than 5m (Rosenblat) or was it more than 30m (Cook and Borah)? Comparisons with other parts of the world at comparable levels of culture leads us to throw in our lot with Rosenblat.
So McEvedy and Jones acknowledge disputes about the pre-Columbian population of the USA and Canada within a factor of 20, and disputes about the population of Mexico within a factor of 6. Their arguments for one end of the range are no more sophisticated than “it seems to be generally accepted” and that if the population of Mexico had been as high as 30 million, then the rate of decline which this implies would be an “improbability.” Most of their numbers for the period 1 to 1500 CE were copied by Angus Maddison whose numbers are very widely used today. But 1978 is a long time ago, so if you prefer you can check a more recent survey.
A very foolish and ignorant man has made a decision. Unlike some people with a PhD, I won’t claim I can predict the future. If you want that, I recommend you find a haruspex and slaughter an ox. What he sees when the steaming liver gleams like a mirror may be true or plausible lies, but at least you will get a summer barbecue for your trouble. But I can describe the structure of the situation as I see it, just like I did in The Iron Horse in Ukraine.
Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, offers 20 scholarships of at least CAD $40,000/year for four years to doctoral students whose offers from top U.S. schools have been rescinded or who are reconsidering their acceptance to a US school for the 2025/26 academic year. The application is straightforward: find someone willing to supervise you, show your... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Queen’s University Special U.S. Doctoral Recruitment Initiative
Marlowe could not see these ancient Roman gamblers at a pub because they were still buried with the Pompeiians, but we can. The caption reads EXSI (“I’m out!”) and NON TRIA DUAS EST (“Its not three, but two!”) In the next scene they start to shove each other around. Note the dice-box and the lack of legs for the table where they play. Its possible that the gambler in yellow has just bet his tunic. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_painting_-_scenes_around_the_pub_-_Pompeii_(VI_14_35-36)_-_Napoli_MAN_111482_-_04.jpg
Christopher Marlowe has not yet departed that that little, little span the dead are borne in mind. We remember that he wrote Dr. Faustus and Tamburlane the Great and died in a drunken quarrel over a bar bill (and perhaps because he was part of the long tradition of English writers working as spies to pay the bills). Unlike Shakespeare he had a good formal education, not just grammar-school Latin but a Master of Arts from Cambridge, and unlike Shakespeare he could not keep his subversion in the mouth of fools and madmen. His life of Tamurlane was what J.J. Abrams would have done at an early modern theatre, with overblown rhetoric, battles, love affairs, and special effects. There was even a disappointing sequel driven by crass commercialism. Its full of ancient Greek flavour because Marlowe knew much more about ancient Greeks than modern Persians (emissaries of the English East India Company would reach Shah Abbas by 1614 after Marlowe’s timely death, and Robert Shirley arrived in Iran in 1598 a decade after the play was written). Several times Marlowe’s characters accuse Tamburlane of being a shepherd which sounds like a way to get a tower of skulls with your name on it.
This Chinese scroll from the Ming Dynasty shows the Prophet Mani. Mani’s teachings survived in China and central Asia after their followers were persecuted out of the Persian empire and the Roman empire and the House of Islam. Photo from Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Icon_of_Mani_2.jpg
Victor Davis Hanson can be a scholar when he wants to be, although since 2004 that has just been a hobby while he focused on punditry. Many people who have read his books and articles on antiquity are confused at the positions he takes, where Spartans can be admirable defenders of Freedom in the pass at Thermopylae, but despicable slave-holders at Leuctra (and there were helots at Thermopylae, and Hanson was not one of the radicals who teach that the Sparta we think we know emerged after the death of Leonidas). I know a bit about ancient Persian religion so this was always easy for me to understand. This week I have written up the way I explain it when it comes up in conversation ever since a much younger self was reading one of his trade books at the Greater Victoria Public Library Central Branch.
Crowds entering the Royal Theatre in Victoria, BC (est. 1913: not seen, the Dread Pirate Roberta)
there is a kind of revision of history, widely practiced today, that arises not from the opportunities but from the needs- or the passions- of our time. Basically, all research means putting questions, and historical research means putting questions to the past, preferably without torture, and trying to find answers there. The questions we put are necessarily those suggested to us by our own times and preoccupations, and these differ from generation to generation and from group to group. It is inevitable and legitimate that this should be so. What is neither legitimate nor inevitable is that not only the questions we put to the past but also the answers we find there should be determined by our present concerns and needs. This can lead, particularly under authoritarian regimes, but also in free societies under pressures of various kinds, to the falsification of the past, in order to serve some present purposes.
Bernard Lewis, “In Defense of History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 143, no. 4 (December 1999) pp. 585-586 (573-587)
One of the builders of Stonehenge as imagined for the Royal BC Museum Stonehenge exhibit in 2024
This post was scheduled late partly because I was late in writing up all the books and partially because I wanted to finish some which I left half-finished in 2024! The usual caveats about writing one of these when I read like a scholar and not like a fan of romance novels apply. John Ting calls the way academics read reading like a mongrel (picking out useful morsels and then moving on, not working all the way through). My reading was disrupted when my Tolino eReader failed in late summer. And one novel which I wanted to read did not arrive until the new year!
Most grand narratives are neither wrong nor right. They violently simplify reality, or say things which are so vague that nobody can agree what would make them true or false (not quite the same as cold reading but related). They leave out alternative points of view, such as whether the Korean War was driven by international Communism or just one phase in an internal Korean conflict between nationalists and communists. But you can still check some of the facts that are used to support the big statements. Is anything in this book by economist Brad Delong flat out wrong?
One of the paths outside the University of Victoria’s McPherson Library
It has been more than ten years since I blogged about how I research history and archaeology and philology. The world has changed since. Some events in November and December gave me a story to share with my gentle readers again.
For my project on linen armour I am reading all the dictionaries of the Romance and Germanic languages in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE (there was scale armour backed with six layers of linen in the twelfth century BCE, but that is a different story). In November I got around to Joan Coromines‘ dictionaries of Castilian (dominant Spanish) and Catalan (other than Portugese, the Romance language which was best able to resist being assimilated into Castilian, possibly because it was similar to Occitan and people traveled back and forth along the coast between cities which used the King of France’s coins and cities which used the King of Spain’s coins). Coromines (he/him) was a philologist who spent his time in exile from Franco writing dictionaries, like Marc Bloch spent his time on the run from the Gestapo writing an Apologie pour l’histoire. Many historical dictionaries have been converted to databases and hooked up to websites, but his dictionaries have not. Somewhere in one of his works I found a reference to an inventory from 1307 in what I thought was the Revue des Linguistique Romane. And thus began an adventure!
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