Thread by @BretDevereaux

You know, I point to some good refutations of Carnage and Culture (2001) in this thread, but you know, let's go for it.

Here is a not-even-close-to-exhaustive list of serious defects w/ VDH's famous(ly damaging) book, which you shouldn't read (both this thread and the book). 1/

https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1803188148752523267

1) VDH asserts that the Greek way of war, fighting as close-order infantry with a relatively high degree of discipline, is unique to Greece and thus the West.

Both claims are easily refuted. For the first, the Greeks don't even have a monopoly on heavy infantry *in Europe.* 2/

When VDH s̵t̵o̵p̵p̵e̵d̵ ̵p̵a̵y̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵a̵t̵t̵e̵n̵t̵i̵o̵n̵ ̵t̵o̵ ̵s̵c̵h̵o̵l̵a̵r̵s̵h̵i̵p̵ wrote his book, it was still common to argue that close-order fighting in Italy derived from Greece (harder, but not impossible now), but *Gallic and Spanish* fighting surely doesn't. 3/

The La Tene material culture kit isn't meaningfully influenced by Greek kit pretty much anywhere and was clearly used for close-order, disciplined fighting, a fact obscured only slightly by the bigotry of Greek sources (but not the Romans, who knew better). 4/

But the argument can fail even more profoundly, because the Warring States in China and the subsequent Han Dynasty are employing dense, disciplined, close-order armored infantry at the same time the Romans are.

Early modern Japan has an independent pike tradition! 5/

2) Hanson also credits Greece (and Rome) with "politics apart from religion" and I have no idea how he manages to say this with a straight face. There was no established church in Greece or Rome, but religion was an enormous part of war and politics. 6/

These are states that checked the oracles before founding colonies and sacrifices before going to battle. Nicias famously delays - to his disaster - a key military maneuver due to an eclipse for religious reasons. 7/

3) VDH asserts that the West has always, since its outset, enjoyed military advantages. This would, of course, be news to basically anyone between c. 500 and 1500 AD, when the 'West' often didn't maintain parity with its neighbors (but sometimes did) and was never dominant. 8/

4) The book asserts Greek military success as a result of 'freedom,' which runs into problems given that 1) Greece was, on average, likely *more* enslaved than Persia and 2) Greek eleutheria is not liberty (or even libertas); he's conflating concepts which do not match. 9/

Greek polis government was in no way limited: the polis citizen (the πολίτης, pl. πολῖται) had no rights that the community as a whole was bound to respect, which is why Socrates could be executed for speech and Athenian politicians exiled (ostracized) for being unpopular. 10/

For the first green-shoots of *liberty* - the idea that the individual has rights the rest of society must observe - you wait until Rome, but honestly even then libertas doesn't become liberty until the enlightenment (and was mostly a creature of the Roman elite anyway). 11/

5) 'Landed infantry' - VDH loves his citizen-farmer-soldiers and insists this is a western trait, but many of the armies *he features* are dominated by salaried professionals or unlanded peasants. Romans post 31BC? Unlanded professionals. 12/

Early modern European armies - VDH focuses on Lepanto and Cortez' conquests - those are a mix of aristocrats and a lot of unlanded salaried military professionals (and enslaved rowers, something the ancient world largely lacked, by the by). 13/

Also, the idea that the professional soldiers of early modern Europe - subject to extreme regimentation and often brutal discipline administered by their aristocratic 'betters' who held their positions only by birth - embodied democracy and freedom is deeply silly. 14/

6) VDH's grasp on the Roman military system ('Cannae') is also weak, focused on civic militarism like this is an overgrown polis army when over half of every 3rd-and-2nd century Roman army were non-citizen socii, drawn from communities explicitly outside of the Roman civic. 15/

He falls straight and unthinkingly into the rhetorical trap Polybius has laid for him, imagining citizen Romans fighting 'mercenary' Carthaginians, but actually what you have are the subordinate-allies of one imperial overlord fighting the same of another. 16/

Hannibal's army at Cannae, after all, had a core of recruits from Carthage's African territories, supplemented by a mass of recruits drawn from the retinues of allied aristocrats in Numidia, Spain and Gaul. Not so different from Rome's subjugated socii. 17/

There are important differences here, ways in which the Roman system better aligned the socii with the Roman state, ways the Carthaginian system was crueler and more exploitative, but VDH misses all of them because he never gets past 'citizens vs. mercenaries.' 18/

7) VDH insists that mass production of firearms was unique to Europe. Europe did, in fact, perfect firearms - but they were mass produced *earlier* in China as well as in Sengoku era Japan. Both cultures developed disciplined volley fire, China before Europe! 19/

As an aside, if you want the far better version of "Why Europe?" when it comes to guns, the book you need to read is T. Andrade, The Gunpowder Age (2016). Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (2003) is also good, but Andrade's argument is more complete. 20/

And we haven't even gotten to nitpicking the battles.

I lost my copy of the book (in my last move, I was not distressed), so let me just put it as:

7) I think I have never met a subject-matter-expert military historian who thought VDH's treatment of 'their' battle was good. 21/

I'm sure such historians exist (although you wouldn't know it to see most academic reviews C&C got) but there's a reason they're not very common.

VDH makes a lot of mistakes - from memory his numbers for Salamis are made up and his timeline for Midway is flatly wrong. 22/

(On the latter, read Parshal and Tully, Shattered Sword, instead)

Now you may well ask, "why do you sound so angry?"

The answer is this was a bad book with consequences, a book whose arguments were in the hands of the men who made big policy mistakes 2001-2008, e.g. Iraq. 23/

Some of those mistakes were made based on the false assurances VDH's confident-seeming but actually baseless arguments made.

More to the point, I'm angry because that book was also in the hands of a younger me, too easily beguiled because I didn't yet know any better. 24/

And there's the problem: Carnage and Culture is a book designed to dazzle and fool those who do not yet have enough knowledge to recognize how profound its errors are, or how dangerous the folly of its argument is. /end

Post-script: Others have, of course, refuted this book more completely than I. For more discussions of its (many) failures, I recommend: S.J. Willett, “History from the Clouds,” Arion 10.1 (2002) and the first chapter of J.A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (2004)

Post-Post-Script: The sad irony of having to immolate this damn book is that I am almost always arguing for *more* impact from antiquity (esp. Rome) to the military and political systems of early modern Europe and today.

It's just also important to be *correct* about it.