November 22, 2025 • 16 mins
Examines the causes of revolutions and major rebellions in the early modern world, particularly focusing on the English Revolution of 1640 and the French Revolution of 1789. The author challenges Eurocentric explanations, arguing that these crises were part of waves of worldwide state breakdowns that also affected Eastern empires like the Ottoman Empire and Ming China. A central theme is the development of a causal framework linking demographic change, population growth, and consequent inflation to state fiscal crises, intra-elite conflict, and heightened popular unrest, which together constitute a "state breakdown." The author uses this framework to compare state crises in England, France, Germany, China, and the Ottoman Empire, differentiating between "revolutionary" outcomes marked by ideological repudiation of tradition in the West and more conservative state reconstruction in the East.
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You can listen and download our episodes for free on more than 10 different platforms:
https://linktr.ee/book_shelter
Get the Book now from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Rebellion-Early-Modern-World/dp/0520082672?&linkCode=ll1&tag=cvthunderx-20&linkId=941e75cecbc8229ee5293f8c0957b9e1&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl
Produced by:
https://www.podcaistudio.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
July fourteenth, seventeen eighty nine. Picture this, the Duke allancoreps
enters King Louis the sixth bedroom at Versailles. News has arrived,
the best deal has fallen. The king surprisingly asks, so
is it a revolt?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
And Leon Kirk gives that famous reply.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
No, sire, it is a revolution. Those words really capture
a turning point, don't they.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
They absolutely do. It's that critical question what separates, you know,
a big protest or an uprising from something that truly
overturns the entire system? Where's that line?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
And that's exactly the puzzle we're tackling in this deep dive.
You've brought us some really compelling material arguing that we
can't grasp Louis the sixties situation in isolation.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Right. It connects it to state breakdowns happening almost simultaneously
across the globe. Think the English Revolution in sixteen forty,
the Collects of Ming, China around sixteen forty four, even
major crises hitting the Ottoman Empire.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
So the argument is we need to ditch that old
kind of Eurocentric view, the idea that these were just
unique steps in Western progress.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Precisely, the analysis this really pushes us to ask a different,
maybe more fundamental question. Why did these huge state crises
erupt in these distinct waves across Eurasia.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Specifically around sixteen hundred to sixteen sixty and then again
seventeen eighty nine to eighteen forty eight.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, but crucially, why was the century between those periods
relatively stable? Why the specific timing these pulses of crisis.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
That timing is key, and the research suggests the answer
isn't some long slow burn, like say, the rise of.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Capitalism, now points to something more cyclical, a powerful mechanism
often missed, the sheer impact of sustained population growth pressing
down hard on the well the fragile structures of these
early modern states.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
These agrarian bureaucratic states, as a scholars call them.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yes, and it's important to get what that means. We're
talking about societies where almost all power and wealth, especially
the tax base, comes from farming, and it's managed by
a relatively small, often pretty inefficient administration.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
So when the population surges, it strains that rigid foundation does.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
But maybe not in the way we first think, like
the old Malthusian idea of just mass starvation.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Ah, right, let's dig into that, the post Malthusian angle,
because it seems vital. The data indicates population shifts then
were often driven by changes in death rates like epidemics
coming and going, not purely by food running out.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Correct, So the main political impact wasn't necessarily millions dying
of hunger, though that happened too. It was the intense
distributional effects.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Distributional effects, yeah, meaning how society kind of tears itself apart,
trying to.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Adjust exactly how society struggled as more and more people
competed for relatively fewer resources, land, jobs, status, you name it.
As population grew, that ratio of people to everything valuable
just got worse and worse.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
And the theory suggests that when enough of these distributional
pressures line up at the same time, that's when you
reach the tipping point for revolution.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
That's the core idea. The research introduces this concept, the
SI function or SI as a way to measure this
total combined and pressure pushing towards state breakdown.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
State breakdown meaning the point of no return, widespread conflict,
elite revolts, popular uprisings, all happening, yes.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
And it argues this happens when four specific, interconnected problems
hit simultaneously. That's what sidetracks.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Okay, let's break down those four pillars of instability. What's
the first one pillar?
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Number one state physical distress. Remember these are agrarian states.
A lot of their income is fixed, maybe customs duty
set long ago, or land taxes that don't change.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Often got it fixed income.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
But when population grows, there's more economic activity, money changes
hands faster, and you can inflation, often chronic inflation.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
And that inflation just chews away at the real value
of the state's fixed income.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Precisely, the crown gets poorer in real terms year after year,
even in peacetime.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
That sounds like a classic trap. If you can't raise
money the normal way, you have to resort to well
dodgy methods expedience.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
The text calls them exactly. Look at Charles the First
in England before the Civil War. His government basically went
broke trying to fight a fairly minor war against the Scots.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Why not because the war itself was impossibly expensive.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
No, it was because his credit was shot and the
political elites, the gentry and nobility simply refused to approve
new taxes.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
To fund him because they were fed up with those expedients,
things like forced loans or selling off monopoly rights.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Yes, those measures directly antagonize the very elites the crown
relied on for political support and legitimacy, which brings us
neatly to pillar number two, acute elite mobility and competition.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
This isn't just about people moving up the social ladder,
is it.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
No, It's actually more about two specific kinds of friction.
One is turnover. That's downward mobility, where established older elite
families feel threatened like they might lose their status or wealth.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Okay, fear of falling. What's the other friction.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Displacement or crowding out. This is where new wealthy groups
may be successful merchants, the rising bourgeois, or even just
the surplus suns of the gentry find they can't get
into the positions they feeled their wealth or education entitles them.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Too, like high government office titles, the usual markers of
elite status.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Exactly, the doors feel closed, and you can actually see
this pressure cooker effect in believe it or not, university enrollments.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Really, how so in.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Places like seventeenth century England and later in France. You
see these sudden booms in university attendance. Elites were desperately
trying to get the credentials needed for the few top jobs.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Available because there were way more qualified people than there
were prestigious positions to figure right, and.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
That sense of being blocked of unfairness is rocket fuel
for elite factionalism. They start blaming the king's ministers or
the system itself and fighting amongst themselves.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Okay, so we have a broke state and squabbling elites.
Now add pressure from below.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
That's Pillar three. Heightened mass mobilization potential or MMP. Simple
population growth often meant misery in the countryside, more people
than land, driving down wages.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
So people fled into the cities looking for work.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yes, leading to overcrowded towns and falling real wages for
ordinary people. The example from England between fifteen hundred and
sixteen forty is stark grain prices shot up over six
hundred percent, wow, six hundred but wages they only rose
about two hundred percent, So the average worker's ability to
actually buy food just plummeted.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
That creates incredible.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Stress, it does, and add to that you often have
a youth bulge, a larger proportion of young people in
the population. Young men especially are historically more likely to
get involved in protests and opposition movements.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Makes the whole populace much more volatile, a tinderbox, as
you said exactly.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
And in England the flashpoints weren't necessarily the traditional farmers,
but more these groups on the margins, rural squatters, urban artisans,
these masterless men as they were sometimes called.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Okay broke state, divided elites, angry masses. What's the final piece?
Speaker 2 (07:00):
The number four increased salience of heterodox ideology. When the
state looks weak, elites are fighting and people are suffering,
the shared beliefs holding society together start to fray.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
People lose faith in the system and the official.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Way of thinking right, and that vacuum gets filled. This
is when you see religious or radical political ideas really
take off and gain traction.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
So disitent elites, maybe angry artisans, they get drawn into
these movements.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yes, think of radical Puritanism in England which became intensely political,
or in China, movements like the Dongl Academy. These groups
provide organization, leadership and crucially a moral justification, a story
for channeling all that discontent directly against the state. They
give the anger a target and a purpose.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
It's quite a framework, and the analysis argues these four
factors really peak together in the mid sixteen hundreds right
across Eurasia.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Astonishingly so look at England around sixteen forty, the PSI
curve measuring that combined stress hits a maximum.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
You have the.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Fiscal collapse, intense elite infighting, major popular uprisings, especially in London,
and Puritanism, providing the ideological framework boom civil war.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
But then things calmed down after sixteen forty, leading to
the restoration of sixteen sixty. How does the theory explain
that because.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
The pressures eased off, the underlying drivers changed. Population growth
leveled off, even declined a bit. Social mobility actually decreased,
partly due to higher death rates among the gentry. During
the turmoil, real wages started to.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Recover, so the system could kind of breathe again.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
The load lighten exactly, the structural stress reduced, which allowed
for that revival of traditional monarchic, aristocratic and high church prestige.
After sixteen sixty the earthquake subsided so they could rebuild
the house more or less on the old foundations, and.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
That stable period roughly sixteen sixty to seventeen fifty is
actually evidence for the theory, because the pressures measured by
SIGH were lower than precisely.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
But what happens when the pressures start building again, like
a second seismic wave France in the later eighteenth.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Century leading up to seventeen eighty nine, you.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
See an almost textbook recurrence of the same four factors.
Louis the four Thief had built this incredible palace at Versailles,
this image of absolute power, but on top of the
same shaky fiscal foundations the monarchy had struggled with back
during its own mid seventeenth century crisis, the Frond.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
They never really fixed the underlying money problem.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Not fundamentally. So when the next big wave of population
growth hit from the mid eighteenth century onwards, it stressed
all the same points. The monarchy drowned in debt, inflation
took off again after the seventeen sixties and didn't really
come back.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Down, and the elites were the feeling displaced again acutely.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
So you had wealthy commoners, the bourgeoisie feeling shut out.
You even had poorer nobles struggling to get the top
jobs because the highest ranks had become more closed off,
more hereditary. This fueled incredible factionalism which basically blew up
the Estates general in seventeen eighty nine.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
And the popular pressure mass mobilization pol.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Through the roof widespread rural us, more landless peasants, falling
wages again led to huge unrest across the countryside, that
famous Great Fear.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
So the French state basically crumbled because this new demographic
wave hit those same old weak foundations.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
That's the argument. It wasn't just Louis the sixth fault.
The structure itself was vulnerable to this recurring pressure.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
And to show this isn't just a European story, the
comparison with Ming China.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Is striking absolutely. The Ming dynasty collapsed in sixteen forty four.
Why the analysis points the exact same convergence. State finances
crippled by inflation and corruption, intense factionalism among the scholar officials,
massive peasant rebellions fueled by population pressure and rising prices.
Since the fifteen hundreds, even the rebels had radical ideas
about leveling society.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
And the Ottomans. They had a crisis too.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
A major one in the seventeenth century, the Salali Rebellions.
They survived unlike the Ming partly because they had a
kind of geographical safety valve.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
What do you mean, They could.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Draw resources in manpower from their Balkan territories, which weren't
it is, stressed demographically at that point. This gave a
series of capable viziers that krippulis the breathing room needed
to restore central authority and military discipline after sixteen fifty six.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
So the underlying mechanism of crisis population pressure hitting state
structures seems universal across these different empires.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
That's the core finding.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Okay, So the SI function explains the why and the
when of state breakdown, but it doesn't fully explain the outcome,
does it. Why did England and France end up with
radical revolutions creating new kinds of societies while China and
the Autumn Empire essentially got conservative restorations.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Ah. That's where culture, specifically the prevailing view of history
and time becomes absolutely critical in shaping what happens after
the breakdown.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Wait, really, you're saying the difference between say the French
Revolution's outcome and the king dynasty replacing the Maing wasn't
primarily about economics, but about how they thought about time.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
That's a key part of the argument. Yes, Western cultures,
deeply influenced by the Judeo Christian tradition, tended to have
what's called an eschathological view of history.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Meaning linear moving towards some kind of endpoint, like a
judgment day.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Sort of linear, yes, but also with the idea that
history moves towards a destruction of the old corrupt world
out of which a new, fundamentally better order can be born,
a transformation. Okay, I see This mindset allowed revolutionary leaders
like the Puritans in England or the Jacobins in France
to feel justified in completely rejecting tradition. They could create
(12:33):
entirely new symbols, think of the French Revolutionary calendar or
calling everyone citizen. They were aiming to build a new world,
a new Jerusalem in.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Some sense, whereas Asian societies like Ming, China or the
Ottoman Empire operated more with cyclical ideas of time, history
moving in phases of order, decay, and renewal.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Exactly purity, corruption, restoration, that was the dominant pattern.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
So when they faced a major crisis, the response wasn't
to build something brand new, but to restore the old
system precisely.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
The crisis was typically blamed on deviating from established orthodoxy,
maybe correct officials or lax morals, but not the fundamental
system itself. So the new regimes, like the king who
took over from the Ming or the restored Ottoman state
under the Kurp Releuse, aimed to purify and reaffirm traditional institutions,
often making them even more rigid than before.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
That's a fascinating distinction, and it explains the very different
paths taken after the initial crises. England and France, even
after their restorations or counter revolutions, kept this kind of
dynamic tension between tradition and these new anti traditional ideas.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yes, and the argument is that this ongoing tension actually
spurred innovation and ultimately economic dynamism later on, whereas the
purely tradition reinforcing reconstructions in China and the Ottoman Empire,
by trying to stamp out deviation, may have inadvertently stifled
future adaptation and change.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
You can see that playing out later too in the
nineteenth century, France and Germany faced another round of major
crises leading up to eighteen.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Forty eight, right while England interestingly managed to avoid a
full blown revolution in that period, especially after the Reform
Act of eighteen thirty two.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
And the reason comes back to economics and population again.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
It seems so England's industrial revolution was earlier and stronger.
By the eighteen thirties, industrial growth was starting to provide
a crucial safety valve. How so it began raising real
wages for workers and critically absorbing the huge population increases
into new kinds of employment. This effectively diffused the kind
of intense demographic pressure that had triggered crises earlier. England
(14:38):
basically got ahead of the curve, maybe a generation before
continental Europe.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
While in France the old agrarian economy kept recreating those
same Althusian pressures and elite conflicts right up to eighteen
forty eight.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
That appears to be the case. So the overarching conclusion
from this research is pretty bold. Yeah, state breakdown in
the early modern world wasn't primarily driven by the rise
of capitalism or some inherent class struggle, as older theories
might suggest. Instead, it was driven by this powerful recurring
cyclic force population growth pushing against the limits of these rigid, agrarian,
(15:11):
bureaucratic states, and this mechanism operated in remarkably similar ways
whether you were in London, Paris, Stunbull or Beijing.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
It gives us this powerful, almost predictive tool, that SI function,
which helps explain not just when revolutions or major breakdowns
were likely when all four pressures peaked, but also why
there were periods of relative calm like that century from
sixteen sixty to seventeen fifty.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Exactly. The timing wasn't just bad luck or one incompetent ruler.
It was the result of deep structural stresses reaching a
measurable breaking point across multiple dimensions simultaneously, which.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Definitely leaves us with a provocative thought for today, doesn't it.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
I think so In our current world, facing perhaps new
kinds of demographic pressures, mass migrations, maybe even information overload
acting as a sort of new heterodox ideology, which historical
path our modern states leaning towards. Are they finding ways
to absorb change, maintaining that dynamic tension, like post revolutionary
England or France, fostering tolerance and adaptation or are they
(16:12):
leaning towards a more conservative reconstruction, trying to suppress ideological
and economic pluralism to maintain stability, perhaps like the King
or autumn As tried to do.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
That is definitely something to mull over as we look
at global stability today. I think this has been an
absolutely fascinating deep dive into some really thought provoking material
July fourteenth, seventeen eighty nine. Picture this, the Duke allancoreps
enters King Louis the sixth bedroom at Versailles. News has arrived,
the best deal has fallen. The king surprisingly asks, so
is it a revolt?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
And Leon Kirk gives that famous reply.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
No, sire, it is a revolution. Those words really capture
a turning point, don't they.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
They absolutely do. It's that critical question what separates, you know,
a big protest or an uprising from something that truly
overturns the entire system? Where's that line?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
And that's exactly the puzzle we're tackling in this deep dive.
You've brought us some really compelling material arguing that we
can't grasp Louis the sixties situation in isolation.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Right. It connects it to state breakdowns happening almost simultaneously
across the globe. Think the English Revolution in sixteen forty,
the Collects of Ming, China around sixteen forty four, even
major crises hitting the Ottoman Empire.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
So the argument is we need to ditch that old
kind of Eurocentric view, the idea that these were just
unique steps in Western progress.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Precisely, the analysis this really pushes us to ask a different,
maybe more fundamental question. Why did these huge state crises
erupt in these distinct waves across Eurasia.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Specifically around sixteen hundred to sixteen sixty and then again
seventeen eighty nine to eighteen forty eight.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, but crucially, why was the century between those periods
relatively stable? Why the specific timing these pulses of crisis.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
That timing is key, and the research suggests the answer
isn't some long slow burn, like say, the rise of.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Capitalism, now points to something more cyclical, a powerful mechanism
often missed, the sheer impact of sustained population growth pressing
down hard on the well the fragile structures of these
early modern states.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
These agrarian bureaucratic states, as a scholars call them.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yes, and it's important to get what that means. We're
talking about societies where almost all power and wealth, especially
the tax base, comes from farming, and it's managed by
a relatively small, often pretty inefficient administration.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
So when the population surges, it strains that rigid foundation does.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
But maybe not in the way we first think, like
the old Malthusian idea of just mass starvation.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Ah, right, let's dig into that, the post Malthusian angle,
because it seems vital. The data indicates population shifts then
were often driven by changes in death rates like epidemics
coming and going, not purely by food running out.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Correct, So the main political impact wasn't necessarily millions dying
of hunger, though that happened too. It was the intense
distributional effects.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Distributional effects, yeah, meaning how society kind of tears itself apart,
trying to.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Adjust exactly how society struggled as more and more people
competed for relatively fewer resources, land, jobs, status, you name it.
As population grew, that ratio of people to everything valuable
just got worse and worse.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
And the theory suggests that when enough of these distributional
pressures line up at the same time, that's when you
reach the tipping point for revolution.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
That's the core idea. The research introduces this concept, the
SI function or SI as a way to measure this
total combined and pressure pushing towards state breakdown.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
State breakdown meaning the point of no return, widespread conflict,
elite revolts, popular uprisings, all happening, yes.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
And it argues this happens when four specific, interconnected problems
hit simultaneously. That's what sidetracks.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Okay, let's break down those four pillars of instability. What's
the first one pillar?
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Number one state physical distress. Remember these are agrarian states.
A lot of their income is fixed, maybe customs duty
set long ago, or land taxes that don't change.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Often got it fixed income.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
But when population grows, there's more economic activity, money changes
hands faster, and you can inflation, often chronic inflation.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
And that inflation just chews away at the real value
of the state's fixed income.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Precisely, the crown gets poorer in real terms year after year,
even in peacetime.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
That sounds like a classic trap. If you can't raise
money the normal way, you have to resort to well
dodgy methods expedience.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
The text calls them exactly. Look at Charles the First
in England before the Civil War. His government basically went
broke trying to fight a fairly minor war against the Scots.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Why not because the war itself was impossibly expensive.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
No, it was because his credit was shot and the
political elites, the gentry and nobility simply refused to approve
new taxes.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
To fund him because they were fed up with those expedients,
things like forced loans or selling off monopoly rights.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Yes, those measures directly antagonize the very elites the crown
relied on for political support and legitimacy, which brings us
neatly to pillar number two, acute elite mobility and competition.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
This isn't just about people moving up the social ladder,
is it.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
No, It's actually more about two specific kinds of friction.
One is turnover. That's downward mobility, where established older elite
families feel threatened like they might lose their status or wealth.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Okay, fear of falling. What's the other friction.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Displacement or crowding out. This is where new wealthy groups
may be successful merchants, the rising bourgeois, or even just
the surplus suns of the gentry find they can't get
into the positions they feeled their wealth or education entitles them.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Too, like high government office titles, the usual markers of
elite status.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Exactly, the doors feel closed, and you can actually see
this pressure cooker effect in believe it or not, university enrollments.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Really, how so in.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Places like seventeenth century England and later in France. You
see these sudden booms in university attendance. Elites were desperately
trying to get the credentials needed for the few top jobs.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Available because there were way more qualified people than there
were prestigious positions to figure right, and.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
That sense of being blocked of unfairness is rocket fuel
for elite factionalism. They start blaming the king's ministers or
the system itself and fighting amongst themselves.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Okay, so we have a broke state and squabbling elites.
Now add pressure from below.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
That's Pillar three. Heightened mass mobilization potential or MMP. Simple
population growth often meant misery in the countryside, more people
than land, driving down wages.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
So people fled into the cities looking for work.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yes, leading to overcrowded towns and falling real wages for
ordinary people. The example from England between fifteen hundred and
sixteen forty is stark grain prices shot up over six
hundred percent, wow, six hundred but wages they only rose
about two hundred percent, So the average worker's ability to
actually buy food just plummeted.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
That creates incredible.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Stress, it does, and add to that you often have
a youth bulge, a larger proportion of young people in
the population. Young men especially are historically more likely to
get involved in protests and opposition movements.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Makes the whole populace much more volatile, a tinderbox, as
you said exactly.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
And in England the flashpoints weren't necessarily the traditional farmers,
but more these groups on the margins, rural squatters, urban artisans,
these masterless men as they were sometimes called.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Okay broke state, divided elites, angry masses. What's the final piece?
Speaker 2 (07:00):
The number four increased salience of heterodox ideology. When the
state looks weak, elites are fighting and people are suffering,
the shared beliefs holding society together start to fray.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
People lose faith in the system and the official.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Way of thinking right, and that vacuum gets filled. This
is when you see religious or radical political ideas really
take off and gain traction.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
So disitent elites, maybe angry artisans, they get drawn into
these movements.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yes, think of radical Puritanism in England which became intensely political,
or in China, movements like the Dongl Academy. These groups
provide organization, leadership and crucially a moral justification, a story
for channeling all that discontent directly against the state. They
give the anger a target and a purpose.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
It's quite a framework, and the analysis argues these four
factors really peak together in the mid sixteen hundreds right
across Eurasia.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Astonishingly so look at England around sixteen forty, the PSI
curve measuring that combined stress hits a maximum.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
You have the.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Fiscal collapse, intense elite infighting, major popular uprisings, especially in London,
and Puritanism, providing the ideological framework boom civil war.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
But then things calmed down after sixteen forty, leading to
the restoration of sixteen sixty. How does the theory explain
that because.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
The pressures eased off, the underlying drivers changed. Population growth
leveled off, even declined a bit. Social mobility actually decreased,
partly due to higher death rates among the gentry. During
the turmoil, real wages started to.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Recover, so the system could kind of breathe again.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
The load lighten exactly, the structural stress reduced, which allowed
for that revival of traditional monarchic, aristocratic and high church prestige.
After sixteen sixty the earthquake subsided so they could rebuild
the house more or less on the old foundations, and.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
That stable period roughly sixteen sixty to seventeen fifty is
actually evidence for the theory, because the pressures measured by
SIGH were lower than precisely.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
But what happens when the pressures start building again, like
a second seismic wave France in the later eighteenth.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Century leading up to seventeen eighty nine, you.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
See an almost textbook recurrence of the same four factors.
Louis the four Thief had built this incredible palace at Versailles,
this image of absolute power, but on top of the
same shaky fiscal foundations the monarchy had struggled with back
during its own mid seventeenth century crisis, the Frond.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
They never really fixed the underlying money problem.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Not fundamentally. So when the next big wave of population
growth hit from the mid eighteenth century onwards, it stressed
all the same points. The monarchy drowned in debt, inflation
took off again after the seventeen sixties and didn't really
come back.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Down, and the elites were the feeling displaced again acutely.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
So you had wealthy commoners, the bourgeoisie feeling shut out.
You even had poorer nobles struggling to get the top
jobs because the highest ranks had become more closed off,
more hereditary. This fueled incredible factionalism which basically blew up
the Estates general in seventeen eighty nine.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
And the popular pressure mass mobilization pol.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Through the roof widespread rural us, more landless peasants, falling
wages again led to huge unrest across the countryside, that
famous Great Fear.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
So the French state basically crumbled because this new demographic
wave hit those same old weak foundations.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
That's the argument. It wasn't just Louis the sixth fault.
The structure itself was vulnerable to this recurring pressure.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
And to show this isn't just a European story, the
comparison with Ming China.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Is striking absolutely. The Ming dynasty collapsed in sixteen forty four.
Why the analysis points the exact same convergence. State finances
crippled by inflation and corruption, intense factionalism among the scholar officials,
massive peasant rebellions fueled by population pressure and rising prices.
Since the fifteen hundreds, even the rebels had radical ideas
about leveling society.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
And the Ottomans. They had a crisis too.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
A major one in the seventeenth century, the Salali Rebellions.
They survived unlike the Ming partly because they had a
kind of geographical safety valve.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
What do you mean, They could.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Draw resources in manpower from their Balkan territories, which weren't
it is, stressed demographically at that point. This gave a
series of capable viziers that krippulis the breathing room needed
to restore central authority and military discipline after sixteen fifty six.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
So the underlying mechanism of crisis population pressure hitting state
structures seems universal across these different empires.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
That's the core finding.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Okay, So the SI function explains the why and the
when of state breakdown, but it doesn't fully explain the outcome,
does it. Why did England and France end up with
radical revolutions creating new kinds of societies while China and
the Autumn Empire essentially got conservative restorations.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Ah. That's where culture, specifically the prevailing view of history
and time becomes absolutely critical in shaping what happens after
the breakdown.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Wait, really, you're saying the difference between say the French
Revolution's outcome and the king dynasty replacing the Maing wasn't
primarily about economics, but about how they thought about time.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
That's a key part of the argument. Yes, Western cultures,
deeply influenced by the Judeo Christian tradition, tended to have
what's called an eschathological view of history.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Meaning linear moving towards some kind of endpoint, like a
judgment day.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Sort of linear, yes, but also with the idea that
history moves towards a destruction of the old corrupt world
out of which a new, fundamentally better order can be born,
a transformation. Okay, I see This mindset allowed revolutionary leaders
like the Puritans in England or the Jacobins in France
to feel justified in completely rejecting tradition. They could create
(12:33):
entirely new symbols, think of the French Revolutionary calendar or
calling everyone citizen. They were aiming to build a new world,
a new Jerusalem in.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Some sense, whereas Asian societies like Ming, China or the
Ottoman Empire operated more with cyclical ideas of time, history
moving in phases of order, decay, and renewal.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Exactly purity, corruption, restoration, that was the dominant pattern.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
So when they faced a major crisis, the response wasn't
to build something brand new, but to restore the old
system precisely.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
The crisis was typically blamed on deviating from established orthodoxy,
maybe correct officials or lax morals, but not the fundamental
system itself. So the new regimes, like the king who
took over from the Ming or the restored Ottoman state
under the Kurp Releuse, aimed to purify and reaffirm traditional institutions,
often making them even more rigid than before.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
That's a fascinating distinction, and it explains the very different
paths taken after the initial crises. England and France, even
after their restorations or counter revolutions, kept this kind of
dynamic tension between tradition and these new anti traditional ideas.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yes, and the argument is that this ongoing tension actually
spurred innovation and ultimately economic dynamism later on, whereas the
purely tradition reinforcing reconstructions in China and the Ottoman Empire,
by trying to stamp out deviation, may have inadvertently stifled
future adaptation and change.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
You can see that playing out later too in the
nineteenth century, France and Germany faced another round of major
crises leading up to eighteen.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Forty eight, right while England interestingly managed to avoid a
full blown revolution in that period, especially after the Reform
Act of eighteen thirty two.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
And the reason comes back to economics and population again.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
It seems so England's industrial revolution was earlier and stronger.
By the eighteen thirties, industrial growth was starting to provide
a crucial safety valve. How so it began raising real
wages for workers and critically absorbing the huge population increases
into new kinds of employment. This effectively diffused the kind
of intense demographic pressure that had triggered crises earlier. England
(14:38):
basically got ahead of the curve, maybe a generation before
continental Europe.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
While in France the old agrarian economy kept recreating those
same Althusian pressures and elite conflicts right up to eighteen
forty eight.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
That appears to be the case. So the overarching conclusion
from this research is pretty bold. Yeah, state breakdown in
the early modern world wasn't primarily driven by the rise
of capitalism or some inherent class struggle, as older theories
might suggest. Instead, it was driven by this powerful recurring
cyclic force population growth pushing against the limits of these rigid, agrarian,
(15:11):
bureaucratic states, and this mechanism operated in remarkably similar ways
whether you were in London, Paris, Stunbull or Beijing.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
It gives us this powerful, almost predictive tool, that SI function,
which helps explain not just when revolutions or major breakdowns
were likely when all four pressures peaked, but also why
there were periods of relative calm like that century from
sixteen sixty to seventeen fifty.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Exactly. The timing wasn't just bad luck or one incompetent ruler.
It was the result of deep structural stresses reaching a
measurable breaking point across multiple dimensions simultaneously, which.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Definitely leaves us with a provocative thought for today, doesn't it.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
I think so In our current world, facing perhaps new
kinds of demographic pressures, mass migrations, maybe even information overload
acting as a sort of new heterodox ideology, which historical
path our modern states leaning towards. Are they finding ways
to absorb change, maintaining that dynamic tension, like post revolutionary
England or France, fostering tolerance and adaptation or are they
(16:12):
leaning towards a more conservative reconstruction, trying to suppress ideological
and economic pluralism to maintain stability, perhaps like the King
or autumn As tried to do.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
That is definitely something to mull over as we look
at global stability today. I think this has been an
absolutely fascinating deep dive into some really thought provoking material
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