Empires are not about economic exploitation of periphery by the core

I recently discovered a fun blog "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry", and it's been very enjoyable reading, but one of the posts is so wrong I need to write a rebuttal.

The author in Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? comes up with the following thesis:

An empire is a state where the core ruling population exercises control and extracts resources from a periphery which is composed of people other than the core group (linguistically/culturally/ethnically/religiously distinct). So an empire is a state where one set of people (the core) extract resources (typically by force) from another set of people (the periphery).

And so...

And that's how we know that "United States" is really a Puerto Rican Empire, as Puerto Rico is sure sucking up vastly greater flow of resources than it's ever getting back. The ruling Puerto Rican elite is literally not even paying income tax like those exploited mainlanders!

The so called "Russia" is really Great Chechen Empire, they sneakily conquered it by losing the war.

The so called "China" is really Greater Tibetan Empire.

The "United Kingdom" is really Scottish Empire, just look at all the money they're extracting from England!

And the earlier so called "British" Empire was really ran by the Americans - the exploited Brits were paying 10x as much in tax per capita than the ruling Americans.

And during Scramble for Africa, Africans managed to colonize Europe, as sure as hell average European was paying for all that elite map painting, and didn't benefit in any way whatsoever.

And so on.

This is all nonsense

If you look at any actual empires, especially recently, the overwhelming pattern is that burden of maintaining the empire - in terms of both money and manpower - falls disproportionately on core population, and peripheral populations are mostly expected to not cause trouble, and are otherwise net economic drain.

Exceptions happen, and occasionally core areas find some place extremely exploitable, but they're just that - rare exceptions. Like in 1700s' French colonial empire, tiny Guadeloupe was somehow economically worth far more than a quarter of North American continent.

Most of the time, those peripheral taxes are far less than core population pays, and far less than costs of holding those places in the Empire.

Foreign elites

There's a distinct and far more common situation where foreigners conquer some place, displace local elite, and rule as a dynasty or nobility over far more numerous locals.

This would actually fit in the original definition, except as a general rule the conquerors move to their conquered lands, so it feels a bit silly to talk about "Norman Empire" which lost Normandy rather quicky, or "Manchu Empire", which was absolutely ruled from within China, and is generally labelled "China" in history books, or such.

Exceptions proving the rule

Perhaps if one keeps looking, it's possible to find some "empires" where core successfully and sustainably extracts resources from periphery, especially in more ancient times.

Roman Empire is actually halfway there, as it managed to exploit places like Greece and Egypt pretty damn well, but even Romans admitted that their periphery like Britain were a net drain. Eventually the ruling center of Roman Empire moved to its richest province, and the usual pattern was restored.

In any case, such exceptional cases cannot possibly be used as definition of an empire.

Brief history of human diet

Previously in series: The myth of 5 a day - people never ate that much fruit and veg, Dietary consequences.

I've been listening to an audiobook about history of potato cultivation, which I purchased legitimately, and then proceeded to strip DRM of it in spite of Audible insisting in its FAQ that it's impossible. Are you getting WTF overload already?

Anyway... for people who are puzzled by the recent obesity/diabetes/metabolic syndrome clusterfuck, here's a quick reminder of history of human diet:

• Humans did a lot of hunting and gathering with diet composition being highly varied depending on local circumstances. Normally hunting would bring most high quality protein, while gathering would bring most calories, and diversity of food sources would ensure good dietary balance and protect against bad seasons.
• Then humans switched to agriculture. This happened at least 7 times, independently, almost at once, after millions of years during which it could have happened and didn't. Amount of evidence we have is just ridiculously high compared to all other human evolutionary transitions (like language, behavioral modernity, industrial revolution, and scientific revolution - all happening just once) that it's a shame that we don't have any convincing theories explaining why it happened when and where it happened.
• Invariably, this switch resulted in severe health problems. Calories were more plentiful, but reliance on a small number of food sources virtually ensured micronutrient deficiencies, and regular famines due to bad weather. Farmers were shorter, died earlier, and generally suffered. This is well documented everywhere transition to agriculture happened.
• Gradually, people figured out how to diversify their food sources, and in time farmers got as healthy as hunter-gatherers before them. There were more kinds of food, better agricultural practices, better preservation methods, better cooking methods, varieties of food grown got changed, and to a small extent even human biochemistry changed to adapt to agriculture.
• There was still one huge problem - people were spending insane amount of time on food preparation. According to some statistics, even as recently as a century ago, average wife spent 45 hours a week on activities related to food preparation. Stay-at-home mums were not a cultural quirk - they were a necessity (unless you could afford servants).
• A new revolution in food production happened in the last century. There was quantitative increase in productivity, but most interesting part of it was switch from highly home-labour-intensive food which required rigid gender role separation to semi-prepared food which freed women into general labour force.

Yes, it was not feminist nonsense which brought equality, or birth control, or anything like that - it was primarily food processing industry. You might protest that you don't eat that much processed food - but you're fooling yourself. How many of you have milked your own cows, churned your own butter, baked your own bread (milling flour has been industrialized ages ago - but at first it was also done at home), made your own pasta etc.? We have gone so far up the food processing ladder than we forgot how much processing goes into all those seemingly simple foods that form bulk of our diets. Actually, I do bake my own bread sometimes, but with a bread machine, so it hardly counts, and mostly because British bread is atrocious spongy shit.


Unfortunately food is a complex matter, and this transition went not without causing some serious problems, just like the original switch to agriculture. If you think about it - these problems aren't terribly severe. Yes - untreated obesity is live-threatening, and we haven't found good cure for it, but we have been really good at treating the symptoms. There are drugs for diabetes and hypertension, cars have replaced the need to even as much as walk longer distances, and loss of physical attractiveness can be largely covered by learning the art of myspace shots. People still live longer each year, and don't seem that terribly distressed.


Moreover, it seems that obesity rates have plateaued in States in the last decade - at a ridiculously high rate, but it's not unlikely that the worse is already over, and they'll only go down from there.

If the rates start indeed falling, then perhaps the transition to the new kind of food will have went surprisingly smoothly, compared to all such past transitions.

Case study - USA

Let's take a look at how eating patterns changed in one of the worst affected countries - USA. It is so commonly repeated that people eat more sugar, fat and animal products that it gets on my nerves. Here's the definite table of all major food groups (at least 1% share at either date), based on FAO data, as percentage of caloric intake, ordered by relative change. I'd love to have data for 1900, as 1961 was midway the shift from unprocessed to processed food, but we have to do with the data we have, instead of despairing for the data we wished to have.

Product	1961	2005
Rice	0.93%	2.46%
Poultry Meat	2.23%	5.48%
Cheese	1.67%	3.94%
Vegetable Oils	9.58%	18.58%
Groundnuts	1.1%	1.55%
Maize	2.05%	2.52%
Vegetal Products	64.93%	72.77%
Fruits - Excluding Wine	2.77%	3.03%
Beer	2.36%	2.57%
Meat	11.63%	12.0%
Alcoholic Beverages	3.77%	3.84%
Cereals - Excluding Beer	21.76%	21.44%
Sugar & Sweeteners	17.89%	16.92%
Pulses	1.25%	1.14%
Potatoes	2.69%	2.43%
Wheat	17.5%	15.5%
Vegetables	2.22%	1.93%
Starchy Roots	3.14%	2.57%
Animal Products	35.07%	27.23%
Other Alcoholic Beverages	1.19%	0.92%
Pigmeat	4.41%	3.36%
Milk - Excluding Butter	13.29%	9.9%
Beans	1.13%	0.79%
Bovine Meat	4.36%	3.02%
Eggs	2.33%	1.45%
Butter, Ghee	2.26%	1.05%
Animal Fats	6.92%	2.91%

That is:

• Americans eat more vegetal, and less animal products - and within this category there's shift towards leaner meats
• Americans eat about as much sugar & HFCS
• Americans eat absolutely insane amounts of vegetable oil

And these are the biggest losers. I will slap around with a large healthy trout everyone who dares to suggest that HFCS is responsible for obesity. HFCS is damn sugar - statistics say it's vegetable oil you eat too much of.

"HFCS causes obesity" is the new "vaccines cause autism"

Case study - Germany

For a second case study, I took a less drastically affected country - Germany. Germany is taking the transition somewhat better than States, and your guess is as good as mine if this is a genuine success, or the worst is simply still ahead of them.

I wished to simply have EU15 average or something like that, but FAO lacks good aggregate data, so here's the next best thing.

Product	1961	2005
Maize	0.4%	2.44%
Rice	0.53%	1.34%
Poultry Meat	0.66%	1.53%
Wine	0.61%	1.32%
Nuts	0.55%	1.1%
Cheese	1.93%	3.76%
Other Alcoholic Beverages	0.81%	1.39%
Vegetables	1.08%	1.8%
Fish, Seafood	0.77%	1.17%
Vegetable Oils	8.81%	11.4%
Wheat	14.5%	18.41%
Sugar & Sweeteners	11.71%	14.22%
Alcoholic Beverages	5.71%	6.63%
Pigmeat	6.25%	6.96%
Milk - Excluding Butter	8.09%	8.89%
Meat	9.15%	9.79%
Vegetal Products	67.45%	69.96%
Cereals - Excluding Beer	24.94%	25.47%
Animal Products	32.55%	30.04%
Beer	4.3%	3.91%
Fruits - Excluding Wine	3.75%	3.28%
Stimulants	1.07%	0.91%
Eggs	1.7%	1.31%
Animal Fats	12.43%	8.76%
Butter, Ghee	6.56%	3.6%
Bovine Meat	1.99%	1.02%
Potatoes	8.81%	4.06%
Rye	8.2%	2.39%

Interesting points:

• Changes are much less drastic than in States.
• There's big shift away from local rye and potatoes to more international wheat, maize, and rice.
• Just like in States, there's shift from butter to vegetable oil, and from fatter to leaner meat - but it's less significant.
• Other than that, German food preferences are remarkably stable over such a long period of time, and such drastic changes in actual agricultural practice.

Case study - Japan

And finally the country which takes transition remarkably well - they are essentially free of Western metabolic syndrome troubles. You'd think they sticked to their traditional food? No such luck.

Product	1961	2005
Maize	0.16%	2.74%
Poultry Meat	0.18%	2.03%
Pigmeat	0.36%	3.37%
Meat	1.07%	6.38%
Vegetable Oils	3.26%	12.21%
Milk - Excluding Butter	1.42%	3.78%
Animal Products	9.64%	20.58%
Eggs	1.45%	2.75%
Beer	0.74%	1.3%
Other Alcoholic Beverages	1.51%	2.54%
Demersal Fish	1.19%	1.83%
Fruits - Excluding Wine	1.36%	2.0%
Sugar & Sweeteners	7.01%	10.01%
Wheat	9.73%	13.32%
Animal Fats	1.05%	1.38%
Fish, Seafood	4.52%	5.93%
Alcoholic Beverages	3.56%	4.65%
Vegetables	2.4%	2.82%
Pelagic Fish	2.5%	2.21%
Vegetal Products	90.36%	79.42%
Soyabeans	4.29%	3.52%
Potatoes	2.09%	1.5%
Cereals - Excluding Beer	60.34%	38.68%
Fermented Beverages	1.3%	0.68%
Rice	46.6%	22.09%
Beans	1.24%	0.54%
Starchy Roots	5.87%	2.45%
Pulses	1.44%	0.6%
Sweet Potatoes	3.31%	0.64%
Barley	3.6%	0.17%

Or:

• Changes are even more drastic than in other case studies.
• There has been huge reduction in consumption of rice, barley, sweet potatoes.
• There has been huge increase in consumption of animal products, and vegetable oil, and big increase in consumption of sugar.
• Japanese drink far more milk than they used to - and fuck lactose intolerance.

So to sum it up... I makes little sense. There's no going back. Stay-at-home mums are as much a thing of the past as bands of hunters chasing mammoths across tundra. You have to switch. The question remains - what to switch to.


The optimistic answer to this is simply follow the crowd, and hope they'll eventually figure out what works. Even if it ends up as badly as the idea of replacing animal fats with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and simple sugars (yes, these were the original "healthy foods") - someone will come with a pretty good drugs for diabetes by the time you need them. Maybe we'll even stem-cell diabetes away entirely?

The pessimistic answer is to just copy the Japanese.

Enjoy your whale sushi.

The myth of 5 a day - people never ate that much fruit and veg

NHS (to American readers - it's the British socialized medicine destroying UK, and coming to destroy your country too now) strongly promotes the idea of eating "5 servings of fruit and vegetables" a day, with which I disagree on so many levels.

Here's a quick summary of the alleged benefits, straight from their website:

• They're packed with vitamins and minerals.
• They can help you to maintain a healthy weight.
• They're an excellent source of fibre and antioxidants.
• They help reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke and some cancers.
• They taste delicious and there's so much variety to choose from.

That's all nonsense.

• You are extremely unlikely to have vitamin and mineral deficiency, and if you suspect some (or want to get pregnant, have symptoms of anemia etc.), get real multivitamin pills, or supplements of the right kind. Most fruit and vegetables are fairly unimpressive as for their vitamin contents anyway - for all practical purposes most fruits are just water and sugar, and have been selected this way by farmers, as larger and sweeter fruit sells better, and vitamins don't have taste.
  
• There's absolutely no evidence linking fruit and vegetable consumption to weight - you get stable weight when number of calories taken balances number of calories expended, what's possible on any kind of diet, including a really delicious one based on loads of meat and cheese and chocolate that NHS would not approve of. I'll get back to this point later.
  
• Fibre doesn't do anything - it just passes through your digestive system and goes right into the toilet. "Antioxidants" are one of those terms that make me rage, as they've been stripped from their original scientific meaning, and turned into pure value judgment, and not even of the right value. Your cells know how to deal with oxidative stress already. That's what they're evolved to do over the last 1.7 billion years. They have plenty of ways to do so. And increasing amount of antioxidants will not help your cells. Meta-analysis of all available data shows clearly that eating more of them doesn't do anything for you, and can even be harmful.
• There's been no proper long term trials of that kind. There's very few proper long term trials of anything related to diet, and those that are performed invariably show that simple diet advice (eat this, don't eat this) doesn't work - and unless your diet is spectacularly wrong you'll be fine as long as you have adequate exercise, decent portion control, and don't smoke.
  
• As any kid will tell you, fruit and vegetables taste awful - if they were delicious people wouldn't need NHS's bothering about them. Do chocolate and ice cream need NHS campaigns? Obviously not. That's because chocolate and ice cream are tasty, while fruit and vegetables are not, at least not in those ridiculously large amounts.
  

So it's wrong on all counts. Anyway, that's not what I wanted to post about - I just get distracted easily. Oh, something shiny. Oh, funny cat. I go for all distractions. Now back on track.

What I wanted to talk about was the myth that people used to eat enormous amounts of fruit and vegetables - 5 servings a day or more as NHS advices, and that's it's something modern that they do not do so now. Let's look at FAO data, annual consumption per capita of fruit and vegetables, as far back as it goes (that's unfortunately not that far back). I included some particularly fat countries (USA, Mexico), a particularly healthy country (Japan), random countries from Europe (France, Germany, Poland, UK), and totals for Europe and World. For interest of science I'll say I selected countries and criteria before I had a first look at the data, so it's not a biased selection, but feel free to look at others.

Vegetable consumption, 1961 to 2003, increased in all selected countries:

• France - 150kg to 142kg
  
• Germany - 49kg to 90kg
• Japan - 95kg to 104kg
• Mexico - 25kg to 58kg
  
• Poland - 91kg to 100kg
• UK - 60kg to 91kg
• USA - 93kg to 123kg
  
• Europe - 90kg to 117kg
  
• World - 63kg to 117kg

Fruit consumption (excluding wine), 1961 to 2003, also increased in all selected countries:

• France - 53kg to 95kg
  
• Germany - 79kg to 113kg
• Japan - 29kg to 54kg
• Mexico - 57kg to 120kg
  
• Poland - 18kg to 47kg
• UK - 55kg to 115kg
• USA - 76kg to 113kg
  
• Europe - 65kg to 88kg
  
• World - 38kg to 62kg

Fruit and vegetables together, 1961 to 2003:

• France - 203kg to 237kg (+17%)
  
• Germany - 128kg to 203kg (+59%)
  
• Japan - 124kg to 158kg (+27%)
  
• Mexico - 82kg to 178kg (+117%)
  
• Poland - 109kg to 147kg (+35%)
  
• UK - 115kg to 205kg (+79%)
  
• USA - 169kg to 236kg (+40%)
  
• Europe - 155kg to 205kg (+32%)
  
• World - 101kg to 179kg (+77%)
  

So consumption of fruit and veg in the last four decades drastically increased - and so did obesity, heart disease and so on. Increase in UK and Mexico were particularly large - and these are some of the fattest countries in the world, something that was not true in 1961. In increased least in Japan - by far the healthiest of developed countries. NHS was really successful at making Brits eat 5 servings a day - making 63.8% of them overweight in process. So much for fruit and veg consumption helping fight obesity? Here's the list of selected countries ordered by fruit and veg consumption and percentages of overweight people in them:

• France - 237kg - 40.1%
• USA - 236kg - 74.1%
• UK - 205kg - 63.8%
• Germany - 203kg - 60.1%
• Mexico - 178kg - 68.1%
• Japan - 158kg - 22.6%
• Poland - 147kg - 47.5%

Is it just me, or do countries that eat more fruit and veg tend to be fatter, not thinner? The answer is probably a lot more like this instead:
And it's not like 1961's fruit and vegetable consumptions were unusually low - they were in fact unusually high by historical standards - normally it was impossible to eat any other than those that grew in your region, in harvest time, what all amounted to very very little compared to what people eat now with globalized industrial agriculture.

The take home message: Ignore NHS; eat chocolate, ice cream, beef, cheese, or whatever else you find delicious. In reasonable amounts.

Why Malthusianism refuses to die

It's astonishing how popular Malthusian catastrophism is, in spite of such spectacular evidence to the contrary. As disaster keeps failing to come, its details are changed, but the core prediction that we're all doomed doesn't budge. In this post I'd like to explore some evidence against Malthusian ideology - as with so much evidence to the contrary, it like creationism long ceased to be anything else than ideological view.

Classical Malthusianism

But first, let's say what I'm criticizing. Malthus' idea was that population growth is exponential, while food production growth is arithmetic, therefore we're all going to fall back into extreme poverty due to overpopulation, until we're poor enough to be dying in sufficient numbers to counteract that.

The second part is, and I'm not making this up - "therefore, we should starve and abuse people who lost their jobs in a recession to lower taxes on the rich". That's a forerunner of the Real Business Cycle theory if there ever was one. The predictable result of being tough on the poor was that the working poor were starved to the point of eating pig fertilizer, beaten, and sexually abused.

But that's not the worst of Malthus-inspired politicians - they decided to starve one million poor people in Ireland. During the alleged "famine", Ireland was a major exporter of food, with its food production even at lowest point estimated to be enough to sustain population twice as high as it had. And there was well known solution to such famines already tried in 1782–83 of temporarily stopping food exports, but those good Malthusians would rather have a bit of a genocide than to stand in ways of profits.

Anyway, I'm not here to criticize consequences of Malthus' ideology, just its factual basis. It's been 211 years since Malthus' infamous essay, how far behind are we in food production?

Oh wait, actually food production looks pretty exponential on this graph, while population growth looks rather linear. It's not even that - according to virtually all projections population growth is slower than linear, and world populations are due to stabilize fairly soon, here's Wikipedia:
Unfortunately I haven't found any useful food production statistics going all the way back to 18th century, but by now it should be very clear that these relationships do not hold.

Yet, Malthusianism refuses to die. The most popular mid 20th century's neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in 1968:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...

Or more specifically - "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971" and "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."

That was in the middle of yield increases so spectacular they caused major difficulties to even harvest it all (High yields led to a shortage of various utilities — labor to harvest the crops, bullock carts to haul it to the threshing floor, jute bags, trucks, rail cars, and grain storage facilities. Some local governments were forced to close school buildings temporarily to use them for grain storage. as Wikipedia says). India became net exporter of cereals by 1978.
You'd think that after two centuries of predictive failures people would have given up, but no. The latest neo-Malthusian fad just a few years ago was "peak oil". It sort of fizzled since, but in case you forgot, here's an awesome YouTube video describing peakoilnik ideology while dancing:



"There won't be much food anyway, as oil is used to make fertilizers and pesticides. Up to two thirds of the world population may not make it. Four billion people may not survive."

Because as they say, we're basically "eating oil" as the meme says. It doesn't bother them much that oil is used at no step of fertilizer production - it's all natural gas, and entire 3-5% of world natural gas (1-2% of world energy use) is spent on fertilizer production (not even as energy source, more as convenient hydrogen source easier than electrolysis of water), but alternatives based on coal, and hydroelectricity are well known and used depending on local availability. China already produces most of its fertilizer with coal. The first commercial hydroelectricity-based fertilizer plant was opened in 1905, over a century ago, and in case you're wondering use of electric plowing equipment dates to late 19th century.

Pesticide production is so ridiculously low, by some back of an envelope estimates takes about 0.06% of world's oil, and is trivially replaceable by coal if need be (I know of no serious estimates, as it's too small to bother anyone with a clue).

What a Malthusian world would look like

So why so many people believe in Malthusian-inspired catastrophism? I have a two-fold hypothesis. First, some people just enjoy beliefs that we're all going to die. It seems that virtually every disaster scenario, no matter how plausible or not - attracts countless believers.

But there are people smarter than that who still believe in Malthusianism. Here's the second part of my hypothesis. When people look at history, to see if it matches some theory, they just look at things that would be observable if theory was true, and see if there are present. They don't do proper Bayesian updating.

Here's a simple example - let's say you have a theory which says that clash of civilization causes warfare. Then the naive thing to do would be to look at history, note a few wars between civilizations, and take it as evidence for the theory. It would also be wrong, as far more numerous wars were fought within civilizations, and proper Bayesian thinking must look at both.

So let's take a look at evidence for Malthusian worldview against the null hypothesis that food production is just like any other commodity, and not any more connected to population than production of clothes, bricks, or paper.

If Malthusianism was true, food production per capita would be pretty much constant - because any increase in food production would result in increase in population, and decrease in food production would cause mass starvation, and adjust population accordingly. But if Malthusianism was false, food production per capita would also be pretty much constant, because what would be the point of growing more food if there was nobody to eat it? So there's no evidence either way.

If Malthusianism was true, everyone would be poor. Not only is this ridiculously false, now, historical estimates of life expectancies vary wildly from 18 to 60 for the same time period.

Malthusianism predicts almost all food production would be in whatever generates highest number of calories per hectare. Non-Malthusianism predicts food production would be much more varied - and it is so. Just the fact that we're keeping farm animals, which by their nature only destroy and not produce nutrients, proves Malthusianism wrong. There might be exceptions, but most grazing lands would produce more calories when cultivated, not to mention Malthusian ridiculousness of feeding animals human food as we do.

If Malthusianism was true, any sudden decrease in population, due to wars, famines and such, would result in rapid rebound, as agricultural capacity existed to support much larger populations, proven by its previous existence. If Malthusianism was false, population would have no particular reason to rebound. Here the evidence is very clear - there are numerous example of major population loses which were not recovered for centuries. Two best examples affect entire Europe, which used to have high populations at height of Roman empire, then fell to very low levels and didn't recover until 12-13th centuries, almost a millennium later. Second fall was due to Black Death, recovery from which wasn't complete even two centuries later.

Malthusianism predicts that it would be extremely unlikely for vast amount of spare arable land to exist - yet this was exactly the situation for centuries in early Medieval Europe, with vast tracks of unused lands.

Malthusianism predicts that famines would happen during times of higher population a lot, while almost never happening during time of low population. But even a brief look at Wikipedia's List of famines shows plenty of major famines both during population lows of early middle ages (5th century famines in Western Europe, 750's famine in Spain, 809 famine in Frankish Empire, 963-964 in Ireland, 1005 in England, 1016 all Europe, 1030-1032 France, 1066 England again, 1097 France again). There were supposedly 95 famines on British Isles alone during Middle Ages. In spite of very low population levels, we can see plenty of them, and we'd probably know about more if it wasn't for horrible Medieval record keeping. Notice that during all that time there was plenty of undeveloped arable land!

During second period of low populations after Black Death, there are major famines 1390 in England, 1481-1483 in France, 1504 in Spain, 1518 in Venice and so on. I'm not even going to mention that modern periods of European population explosion had fewer famines than any other time in history.

Non-Malthusian view correctly predicts that famines and population levels are completely uncorrelated. Famines are caused not by the mythical "overpopulation", but commonly by wars, government action (like in Ireland, and 1930s' Ukraine, notice how democratic governments have virtually spotless track record of no famines, in spite of plenty of agricultural disasters), and most of all - simply by major delay between increase in agricultural inputs and outputs. It doesn't matter that there's plenty of unused land around, developing it would take years, and plenty of labour, capital, seed, and farm animal input, before any food was grown on it - all of which being in short supply during famine anyway. By the time food was growing the famine would be long over. To give you some indications of time scales involved, settlers in new developments were freed from any taxation for up to 24 years. During that time net effect on food production would be negative.

Most of all, current overwhelming explosion of wealth is completely and utterly incompatible with Malthusianism. Even the second worst country in the world - Angola - has life expectancies far greater than world had 100 years ago (one tiny country which doesn't has 26.1% HIV infection rates, and is too poor to afford HIV drugs - hardly a Malthusian reason). In spite, or maybe even due to, population explonion, world's average life expectancy is 66.57 now. This is level not reached by even the richest countries before 1930, and by most developed countries well into 1940s an 1950s.

However hard I try, I cannot find any evidence for even very broadly constructed Malthusianism that cannot be explained as well or better by treating food as a normal commodity. So worry not - we're not doomed.

In search for Just Wars

I know people don't really read my political posts. If I wanted to be read, I'd be writing angry rants about video games, programming, and Harry Potter fan-fiction.

Here's a quick post about politics, namely about just wars, and other violence. Right wing nuts are generally pro-war, no matter who's fighting whom. What's surprising is that even left wing nuts are pro-war. Here's some Chomsky, it doesn't get much left-wing-nuttier than that:

ROBERT B. SILVERS: ... Under what conditions, if any, can violent action be said to be "legitimate"? ...

NOAM CHOMSKY: My general feeling is that this kind of question can't be answered in a meaningful way when it's abstracted from the context of particular historical concrete circumstances. Any rational person would agree that violence is not legitimate unless the consequences of such action are to eliminate a still greater evil. Now there are people of course who go much further and say that one must oppose violence in general, quite apart from any possible consequences. I think that such a person is asserting one of two things. Either he's saying that the resort to violence is illegitimate even if the consequences are to eliminate a greater evil; or he's saying that under no conceivable circumstances will the consequences ever be such as to eliminate a greater evil. The second of these is a factual assumption and it's almost certainly false. One can easily imagine and find circumstances in which violence does eliminate a greater evil. As to the first, it's a kind of irreducible moral judgment that one should not resort to violence even if it would eliminate a greater evil. And these judgments are very hard to argue. I can only say that to me it seems like an immoral judgment.

Oh, really? So, could you please point me to some examples of wars that successfully eliminated greater evils? The criteria are, you can agree that they are sane:

1. Without the war, very large number of people would have died or otherwise suffered.
2. There was no other plausible way of saving them, and all alternatives have been tried.
3. Thanks to the war, most of those people were saved.
4. Few people died or otherwise suffered in the war, especially civilians, but also participants. Some suffering is allowed, but only if it's vastly overwhelmed by suffering prevented.
5. It must have been possible to predict it advance that this success was very likely. Lucky wins don't count. And of course, it must have worked. Failed good intentions don't count.
   

I have really difficult time finding out wars that fit these criteria, even with very liberal grading.

The latest war in Iraq

The latest war in Iraq is easily not anywhere close to a just war. Saddam wasn't a nice guy, but amount of suffering he was causing recently was quite insignificant as for third world dictator standards, so it fails on count one, and automatically two and three.

According to Lancet estimates there were 1.3 million excess deaths due to it. Many other Iraqis suffered in other ways. So fail on count four.

Only fools would have expected an easy win, and being greeted with flowers, it's the Middle East after all. All claims about WMD, Saddam's connections to Al-Qaeda and so on don't count, as they were known lies, and even if Bush believed them, they would fail by count five.

Score: 0/5

The latest war in Afghanistan

This war is slightly better, as number of casualties on all sides is closer to 60 thousand, not counting another 10 thousands or so in the spill-off to Pakistan, what's most likely an underestimate in a poorly researched place like Afghanistan, but still much lower than Iraq's. And Bin Laden was in Afghanistan.

Still, it fails on all counts. There were people who died in Al-Qaeda terrorism, but other than a single well-known case, repetition of which was fairly easy to prevent, their numbers were really low. Even with 9/11 much lower than number of people who could be expected to die in the war, so count one fails.

There were plenty of plausible alternatives for getting or killing Bin Laden, and dealing with terrorism, so fail at criterion two. See IRA and ETA for good examples. Or even Clinton-style targeted killings.

Terrorism increased greatly after the war, so it fails criterion three. Count four doesn't fail that badly, assuming figures are not overly underestimated (they usually are, counting only direct deaths), but it's still pretty large number just to catch one guy. Let's be generous and count it as a point.

Anyone who expected an easy win in Afghanistan must have slept through history classes. And Afghanistan is still in chaos, terrorists still terrorize, and Bin Laden was never caught or killed, so criterion five spectacularly fails.

Score: 1/5

The Second World War

Let's move back in time to World War II, widely proclaimed to be the most just war in history, without any basis in fact.

So first, suffering. This is very likely - if everyone just gave Hitler what he wanted (mostly Central Europe to share with Stalin), millions of people would be reduced to status of second class citizens, and depending on how it would go, hundreds of thousands or even millions would die. It's not certain if large scale death camps would be implemented without the war - it seems Nazis were fine with Jews and everyone else they didn't like just getting out of their country (500,000 or so emigrated from Germany before the war, also see the famous Madagascar Plan), but let's assume they really wanted to perform massive genocide. In any case, the first criterion is quite plausible, so full point.

The second criterion fails. The obvious plausible alternative of letting people persecuted by Nazis emigrate to other countries, most were not terribly happy about letting them in, even through Nazis were quite glad about just kicking them out (first confiscating most of their property). Forced resettlement would suck, but it still beats getting gassed.

Now, the third one fails miserably - Nazis killed pretty much everyone they wanted to kill. Most people who would have suffered living under Nazi dictatorship, were instead forced to live under Soviet dictatorship. Approximately 70 million people have died, most of them outside territories that Nazis would have if the world decided against going to war with them. So it's spectacular failure on the counts three and four.

There could be no expectation of an easy victory - spectacular fall of France might have been unexpected, but World War I style trench warfare with millions of casualties was the primary alternative. It's not even obvious if Allies really cared about defeating Nazis - if they were serious about winning, going after them in September 1939 while they were busy in Poland seemed like the best moment, but they didn't do anything until they were attacked.

Score: 1/5

American Civil War

Here's another "glorious" war - American Civil War. It's really historically inaccurate, but let's grant the common myth that the cause of war was abolition of slavery. There were four million slaves in USA in 1860, to be freed. So a somewhat mythical point, but granted.

As for alternatives being untried, most of the world abolished already or soon after 1860, without getting into any major wars. Even countries highly dependent on slave labour, which quite smoothly transitioned into poor waged labour, with or without compensations for former slave owners. There's no reason why it wouldn't work in United States, sooner or later. No points here.

As for point three, yes, all slaves were freed, so entire point here. Sure, there was a century of discrimination ahead, but let's not get too nitpicking.

Point four utterly fails. 620 thousand soldiers were killed, plus some unspecified number of civilians. It was quite clean as far as wars go, so I wouldn't expect a huge value for civilian excess deaths. Still, that's only 6 slaves freed for one death. I'm sure most abolitionist activists had far better than this number - by collecting money, and buying off slaves' freedom, or by nagging slave-owners' conscience until they agreed to free slaves one person could surely free far more than 6 slaves with lifetime's effort.

As for point five, it was successful, and due to North massively overwhelming South in industrial capacity, military strength, and population, it could be expected to be an easy win. It wasn't all that easy, but point granted.

Score: 3/5

American War of Independence

American Revolutionary War is another big one, but I really don't see why.

First, suffering - there were some extra taxes white protestant elites weren't terribly fond of. That's zero points, or else Washington, D.C. has as much right to rebel right now.

Second, alternatives. It's automatic fail due to lack of significant suffering, but other countries like Canada successfully got as much autonomy as they wanted without armed rebellion.

Third, prevention of suffering. Also automatic fail, but notice how United States kept slavery long after the rest of British Empire abolished it. It's not at all obvious that it was more representative, or more democratic than other colonies.

Four, casualties. There were about 52 thousand soldiers killed, plus unknown number of civilians (but not too many, as it was one of the rare clean wars). Vast majority of those were from disease, most commonly scurvy, a disease that was already known to be easily preventable. Battle deaths were barely over 10 thousand. That's small by modern standards, but not trivial relative to two million people living in rebelling States back then - just about 2%. I'll grant a point, but it's just being generous.

As for point five, expecting an easy victory against British Empire at peak of its power was foolish. It was a lucky win. No points.

Score: 1/5

Cambodian–Vietnamese War

That covers the usual suspects, which I all mentioned mostly to point out how they fail at being just wars. Now let's look at some obscure wars that might actually succeed.

Cambodian–Vietnamese War is my best candidate. Khmer Rouge killed approximately 1.5 million people out of population of 7.1 million, and weren't stopping. They didn't even limit themselves to their borders, but also raided some towns in Vietnam and massacred civilians there. Overall, spectacular victory at point one.

It's hard to tell what alternatives could be tried, but none are obvious, and due to massive urgent suffering we cannot blame the Vietnamese for not looking too hard. A second point.

Pol Pot was successfully overthrown. Guerrilla lasted for another decade, but it was on much smaller scale. Full point.

Point four is not entirely successful, as China attacked Vietnam to stop their Cambodian operation, with wide variety of estimated, but something of order of 100,000 soldiers and civilians killed. Still, that's far less than number of Khmer Rouge casualties, so point granted.

War could be expected to be easy - huge, well equipped, and experienced Vietnamese army could and did easily overwhelm Khmer army, and it did so successfully. Full point.

Score: 5/5

Most other wars of independence

Cambodian-Vietnamese War proves a just war is possible, even if really rare. Let's go back to other wars for a moment. One very popular kind are all independence/liberation wars, and uprisings against dictatorships.

They usually fail on suffering front - most colonial powers don't engage in massive killing, so the suffering is mostly widespread discrimination, and lack of representative democracy.

They fail on the second front, as countless countries succeeded in getting significant autonomy, or independence, by political action. It worked even against the Soviets, so it doesn't depend on the colonial power being "nice".

As for the third point, most governments that get into power after such wars are dominated by military, or otherwise very far from democratic ideal, and hardly much better than previous colonial powers. You might be lucky sometimes, but I wouldn't count on it.

Fourth - there's usually plenty of civilian casualties. Independence wars, unless the colonial power simply decides to give up early, tend to be really dirty. No points.

Fifth - by balance of power, it's really naive to expect a victory here. Yes, sometimes it happens, not that rarely even, but lucky wins don't count. And there's even lower chance of the new government being much better than the one being replaced. No points.

Related reading: From Dictatorship To Democracy.

Score: usually 0/5, occasionally higher score.

Terrorism

If we go even further from guerrilla uprisings to terrorism, it gets even worse.

Now occasionally like in Palestine the suffering is real, so point granted. In many places like Basque Country it's fairly insignificant.

As for alternatives, political methods not involving violence have been quite successful in countless cases. So zero points.

One interesting thing about terrorism, is that is pretty much always fails. Of very long list of organizations employing terrorism, the only totally successful case is Hezbollah, which kicked Israelis out of Lebanon. Tamil Tigers - who had semi-independent state in North Sri Lanka for quite a long time before being defeated recently, and Hamas and other Palestinian groups, which fought out some very limited autonomy for Palestinians, can be counted as partially successful. Everything else was a spectacular failure. Notice how the successful cases are really guerrillas employing some limited terrorism against mostly military targets as a small side activity, so they shouldn't even count as primarily terrorist organizations. Zero points here.

As for random unrelated casualties, they're present by design. Usually they're not terribly numerous compared to a proper war, so actually we could grant half a point here, but that would be stretching it. And that would only count if it worked, what not a single case of terrorism so far did.

As for chances of success - well, so far they're 0 successes in far too many tries, so no points.

Score: 0/5

Bombing of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Let's look at operations like bombing of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

First, suffering. Over 100,000 people died in the war, about half of them civilians, so it was a pretty good cause. Plus millions displaced, usual looting, rape, and what you usually see in dirty wars. Full point.

Second, alternatives. Some effort was taken, and out of three fighting parties, UN managed to get two to agree to stop. There were also attempts to limit civilian casualties by creating safe zones (openly abused for military advantage, but that's a completely different issues). You could argue about lack of fairness by UN, and if really everything that was possible was tried, but I'll grant the full point. Also military action was quite limited, aimed at getting quick political solution, not full annihilation of Serbian military capacity.

Third, prevention of further suffering - that's an easy point, operation was fully successful.

Fourth, no extra casualties - bombing is estimated to kill over 100 Serbian soldiers, a trivial number, and many more of just Serbian soldiers would have died if the fighting continued. Full point.

As for estimating chances of victory... well, wars are rarely won by just dropping a few bombs, but NATO was overwhelmingly stronger than any of the fighting parties in Bosnia, and it was successful, so full point.

Score: 5/5

Kosovo and other operations

While bombing of Bosnia was really successful, other peace enforcement campaigns like one in Kosovo much less so.

There were around 2000 casualties of the war between Serbian military and police and KLA, but no massive genocide ongoing. The best example of war crimes found was Račak massacre of about 40-45 people, and even that isn't really terribly solid. There was killing due to fighting, and large scale displacement, but that's rather underwhelming, so just half point this time.

Alternatives were under-explored. There was some attempt at negotiating, but it's not really obvious if NATO seriously wanted a solution that would be acceptable to both parties, as opposed to just getting some cover. No pressure was put on KLA, even though they would be fairly easy to press. And during the negotiations all sides issued a joint statement agreeing to "substantial autonomy for Kosovo", and "invited international civilian and military presence in Kosovo", so it's not really obvious what the subsequent fighting was about. No points.

Prevention of suffering was also quite unsuccessful, the war erupted even more strongly after bombing started, with some proper massacres this time. 80% of people killed, and 90% of people displaced happened after the bombing started. 250 thousand Serbian refugees never returned to Kosovo. No points.

Bombing as such didn't kill terribly many people, around 500 civilians, but due to massive increase in fighting on the ground huge number of people died. There was also a later spill-over of fighting into Macedonia, but it wasn't that severe. No points again.

I'm undecided if the last point should be granted or not - previous successes like Bosnia suggested that it would be an easy victory, but it worked only so-so, and large scale ground fighting caused a lot more suffering that was prevented. Half point.

Score: 1/5

Summary

According to criteria of successfully and reliably preventing significant suffering, the only good wars I could find where overwhelming force is used to stop already happening war or other large scale atrocities, and they limit themselves to minimalist goals instead of trying major political restructuring.

All wars where one side is not overwhelming, like WW2, and American Civil War, tend to cause massive suffering, comparable or worse than whatever can be prevented, even if one of the sides is clearly doing a lot of evil.

"Wars to End All Wars" are as old as known history, and include not only WW1, and WW2, but events as ancient as civil wars of late Roman Empire, and probably many before it. Success rate - 0%. Using this argument to support any war is just ridiculous.

All fighting from position of weakness - anywhere from terrorism to full scare insurgency - tend to cause massive suffering, and have even few successes at preventing major suffering.

If you know of any other wars that score very high according to my criteria, or have problems with my rating system (ratings are quite subjective, but it's hard to come up with anything much better), post it in comments.

Chomsky is a total idiot

Which all means that Chomsky is a total idiot, as he is a big fan of the kind of unsuccessful wars from position of weakness like Tamils in Sri Lanka (80 thousand or more people killed with nothing to show for it), and a big critic of successful wars like Bosnia (apparently Srebrenica was "not really a massacre" with only 8,000 or so people killed).

Yes, American government engages in many stupid wars, and causes a lot of suffering. But that doesn't mean that everyone who happens to criticize American government is automatically right and entitled to the high moral ground. Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, as my favourite philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky says.

The ancient art of stabbing people

Here's a blogified version of a talk I gave on BarCamp London 5. Most BarCamp talks tend to be about Internet, computing, startups and the usual topics that everybody's heard about over 9000 times. This one is going to be different because it talks about ancient human history.



London is the stabbing capital of the world. While rests of the world shoots at each other, 29% of our homicides are good old making holes in thy neighbour. But stabbing is older than humanity. Here's a photo of an orangutan getting his food by stabbing some fish.



Our closest relatives chimpanzees also hunt with spears. Here's a chimp sharpening a spear, so it makes good holes.



Chimps use spears to hunt for galagos like the one here, killing them while they sleep. Can you imagine anything more adorable than a monkey stabbing a cute little sleeping galago? What is clear from these examples is that stabbing is an instinctual behavior for hominid primates including humans, and that sense of fair play isn't.



Prehistoric humans obviously used stabbing tools for hunting. It's not really clear at which point we started to use them to stab fellow humans. There's plenty of ancient skeletons with wounds caused by weapons, but some of them might just be hunting accidents. When a group is hunting accidents are very common - lately Dick Cheney shot a 78-old guy in a face while hunting for quail, and when half of humanity hunted daily for whatever they could find it's certain many people died of stab wounds even without any foul play. Or if you didn't like someone you could make it look like a "hunting accident" and the rest of the tribe probably couldn't tell.



At some point people clearly started systematically killing each other. That's a good time to ask the question - why stabbing? When you look at most movies and computer games people almost exclusively slash, shoot, and bludgeon each other, while stabbing is very rare. Historically on the other hand stabbing was the best and most common way to hurt other people through almost entire human history.

The first thing to forget is shooting - unless you're firing at point-blank range there's almost no way an arrow or bullet is going to hit the intended target. Even with modern precisely manufactured and very powerful weapons, if they didn't have insanely high rate of fire you'd be better off with a knife than a gun. For virtually the entire history the way bows, crossbows, guns, slingshots, and all other projectile weapons were used was a large number of people shooting another large group of people. You had a small chance of hitting a particular guy at a distance, but some of you will probably hit some of them. Unfortunately for you the other guys will catch up with you quickly, so very few battles were won by just shooting with small weapons.

The main problem with bludgeoning is its low lethality. Human body can take a very high number of blows before you die. It's going to hurt like hell, and some bones might be broken, but you will only notice that after adrenaline rush of the battle cools down. If you're trying to bludgeon some guy to death, it's going to take so much time that he might very well die of boredom before he dies of wounds.



Stabbing on the other hand was very lethal - a deep stab would can destroy vital organs, cause massive bleeding, or if it doesn't work, kill by infection. Before the invention of antibiotics, what happened very recently on historical scale, even a very small stab wound could easily kill you a few days after the fight.

Slashing was somewhat popular, but there are many problems with it. First, it is a lot slower than stabbing. It also has a short range - long slashing weapons like huge jrpg swords would be way too slow to be practical. It also causes shallow wounds that are a lot less likely to kill than deep stabbing wounds, is much easier to parry, and its effectiveness is seriously reduced by even light armor. There are also technological issues - many materials like bronze are too weak for long slashing weapons, and you need a lot of metal to make a sword than just a spearhead that you attach to a wooden stick.

Most historical slashing weapons are really hybrid stabbing/slashing weapons, with stabbing being the primary mode of use.



It's time to leave prehistory and enter history. The best known spearmen in the world are Greek Hoplites, and among them obviously Spartans.



The "300" movie is very inaccurate in its depiction of ancient Greek warfare. Persians didn't really have war rhinoceros, and Spartans didn't fight barechested to show off their abs. Hoplites were really fighting in heavy armor, as the very idea was to make holes in the enemy before he makes holes in you - bare chest doesn't really help with that.



Here's a guy reenacting a Greek Hoplite. I totally love those reenactment guys and great photos they provide. You can see he's got a good stabbing tool, and the best body protection he can get, even if it hides some of the muscle.



Hoplites did not fight alone - weight of all the armor slows them down a lot, and spear is not the greatest weapon unless at the right range. Hoplites fought in a phalanx. Phalanx is a long line of hoplites, many people deep, and sometimes many kilometers long, with all spears pointing in direction of enemy. Big shields are used to protect you and the guy on the left. It is very deadly as long as the enemy is in front of you and the formation holds. It also has very low mobility - it can go forward fast enough, but changing direction without breaking formation takes ages.

It is very vulnerable from the back and flanks, so it must be long not to get outmaneuvered, and it must be deep not to be broken by a frontal assault. Another useful thing is that the guy standing behind you also points his spear in direction of the enemy.



Greek and in particular Spartan Phalanges dominated Greek warfare, but they were far from invincible. In battle of Lechaeum a bunch of lightly armored Peltasts throwing javelins, which is like no-contact stabbing, destroyed Spartan Hoplite unit by "throw a javelin and run" tactics. That's the only such case in history, as normally a Phalanx was accompanied by support troops like Peltasts and cavalry, so tricks like that didn't work and the fight returned to phalanx superiority.

A much more significant blow to Spartan reputation for masculinity was battle of Leuctra where significantly smaller Theban hoplite army led by openly gay-married Sacred Band of Thebes totally pwned Spartan asses and killed Spartan king.



At some point Greece and in fact most of the known world was conquered by Macedon. Macedon armies also used Phalanx formation, with a tiny difference of using very long spear called sarissa in place of traditional short Greek spear dory.



Sarissa was very heavy, was carried in two parts that were only assembled before the battle, and was almost completely useless as a weapon except when used as part of a Phalanx.



The difference as shown by the reenactors is very clear.



And here are they charging at each other. Both weapons make sense only in a Phalanx, and sarissa more so. It also takes two hands to use, so Macedonian reenactor has a much smaller shield attached to his arm, while Greek reenactor can hold a big shield in his left hand.



The real power of sarissa can be seen in Macedon Phalanx. Now instead of two spearheads between you and the enemy there are five, what significantly increases enemy's expected number of blood-letting holes.



Here's another picture of a Macedon Phalanx, this time from one of my favorite games Rome: Total War. The game shows warfare with reasonable levels of historical accuracy, so there's a lot of hot stabbing action.



This was one of the greatest triumphs of stabbers. Macedon Phalanx was a deadly force but very vulnerable. Alexander used his tactical genius to leverage its power and minimize its vulnerabilities, and so conquered most of the world in just twelve years starting from a very small kingdom.

Here's a picture of Alexander showing equipment of Macedon cavalry. They used 4 meter long spears which they used to stab people. Charging with couched lance known from late Medieval era was completely unknown to the ancient people.



The next big power after fall of Macedon was Rome. Roman army completely changed many times during Roman history. At first Romans used walls of spears just like Greeks. Here's a picture of Roman Triarii from Rome: Total War.



Roman Legions in their best known form fought using short sword gladius. It was primarily a stabbing weapon. Romans didn't introduce many technical innovations to the art of stabbing, they were really good at tactics, engineering, and especially politics.



Another important part of Legionary equipment were usually two pila. They were thrown before engaging in melee. The part behind the head is made of soft iron which bend on impact, making it difficult to get rid of a pilum. This way even if pilum hit a shield, now the enemy had a sharp point sticking out of it, was made the shield a lot less useful or even dangerous to the user.



No history of stabbing would be complete without mentioning the most famous stabbing victim - Julius Caesar.



Caesar was killed by repeated stabbing with a Roman utility knife pugio.



Senators who killed Caesar intended to restore the Republic. The assassination was successful, but as far as restoring the Republic, it was an epic fail.



There were almost no innovations in stabbing technology for the next millennium after stabbing of Caesar. In late antiquity stabbing from horseback got quite popular. Here's a picture of heavily armed Parthian Cataphract cavalry.



Cataphracts look a lot like Medieval knights. Both them and their horses are heavily armored, and they use long spears to stab enemies. They didn't have stirrups, and still stabbed their enemies instead of charging at them.



This way of fighting didn't change until Late Middle Ages. In Battle of Hastings depicted by Bayeux Tapestry you can see cavalry having stirrups, but still using their spears as stabbing weapons, not for couched charge.



At some point in the Medieval era couched charge was developed. It was a result of better horse-riding technology including stirrups, nailed horseshoes, and solid tree saddle, as well as better armor of soldiers, which required more punch from the charge.



Cavalry was heavily armored, both riders and horses.



Here's a great photo of a knight reenactment.



Late Medieval infantry battles also had a lot of happy stabbing. Because soldiers were so heavily armored, slashing was almost useless. Armor like that needs to be pierced if you want to kill, slashing plate armor with a sword is not much better than bludgeoning it with a club.



And finally era of heavy cavalry was over. But it wasn't because of gunpowder yet. At first gunpowder was used more for siege artillery than for a field battle - guns were too slow and inaccurate for battle, but city walls are hard to miss and aren't really going anywhere.

What killed heavy cavalry was rise of pikemen and halberdiers, who were in many ways similar to ancient Greek Phalanx, and definitely not something you want to charge.



Masses of mercenary pikemen charging at each other were a bloody and quick way to resolve their differences.



One problem with pikes and other long polearms is that when fighting gets close enough, they are very hard to use, and something like sword is a lot more practical.



Pikemen armies saw gradual introduction of firearms. Arquebus is a very slow weapon, so unit equipped with them can easily be crushed by cavalry or infantry charge. A combination of arquebusiers, pikemen, and sometimes also swordsmen, and halberdiers can deliver hot lead over the distance, and make stab holes in anybody who comes too close.



This was however the end of stab-centric armies. As you don't need to shot and stab at the same time, "pike and shot" formation always leaves half of the troops unused. We could give everybody a gun and a pike, but that would be rather unwieldy and heavy. But hey - isn't a gun already a long stick that just needs something sharp on its end?

The idea isn't new, even 13th century Chinese cavalry used it. In this case it was more of a spear with attached gun than a gun with attached bayonet.



Muskets with bayonets replaced "pike and shot" armies. Even in Napoleonic Wars bayonet charges were important part of military strategy, as rate of fire was very low. Also a quick decisive charge is much more likely to rout enemy forces than slow fire.



As rate of fire increased tremendously, bayonets became less relevant. Now they're basically utility knifes, and even at very short ranges it makes a lot more sense to shoot than to stab. Stabbing after long history is no longer part of mainsteam military.



Tradition of stabbing continued for some time after mainstream militaries moved on. Polish heavy cavalry Hussars dominated 17th century Central Europe. They had those cool bad-ass wings, nobody's really sure what for.



Even in 19th century, Zulus were able to build an empire using mostly spears. It was probably the last stabbing-based empire in human history.



Now that stabbing is no longer of any military significance, it's mostly used for crime by people without access to guns, like the British. But you can stab even without a knife - there's a great collection of improvised stabbing tools from prisons - The Art of Shiv by Brett Yasko.



I tried to keep historically accurate but some simplifications were necessary for the sake of a good story. If you have any questions - use comments below the post.