October, 2022 Research Update

Amici!  It is now November and for once this update is coming out on time!

October , as usual, has had me mostly focused on academic job applications (which I detailed in last month's update), as the application due-dates tend to be either in October or very early in November (Nov. 1 being the largest single cluster).

That said I do have a few odds and ends to report.  I recorded a few podcasts this month, talking with Roel Konijnendijk for r/Askhistorians on doing public scholarship on the internet (not yet up) and also with Three Moves Ahead discussing Victoria III, which just went live. In addition, I was interviewed for a feature piece in Endeavors, which is UNC-Chapel Hill's web-magazine highlighting their researchers (mostly faculty, of course).  Hopefully the timing ends up being fortuitous, as UNC is currently hiring for the permanent version of the position I was adjuncting for them last year.

Finally, before we get into talking about the book project, I do want to note that I realize the last couple of months have been very heavy on Paradox-based material.  I know that some of you quite like that and for others of you, that's not your jam, so I do want to note that this isn't going to become the Paradox-Power-Hour.  We'll loop back to their games eventually, but probably not before Spring.

In any case, this month is of course meant to be focused on working on the book project, tentatively titled Why The Romans Always Won (a title that will make a bit more sense after today's text snippet which explains what it is referencing).  It is, of course, the book form of my dissertation, but some pretty substantial revision is going to be necessary as my dissertation ran ::checks notes:: 788 pages.  So there are both different genre demands and also different length demands that need to be addressed here.  I've already given you all a layout of what it is about. 

I have a new structure planned out in 13 chunks (a chapter-length introduction, 12 chapters and then a short conclusion), subdivided into organizational sections.  The original plan was 14 chunks, but ch1 and ch2 seem better merged into a longish single chapter (now ch1).  In essence then the overall structure (with main points where non-obvious) is as follows (note that I plan to give each section a snappy title, but haven't yet):

Introduction (the question, the current 'answers' and their shortcomings)

Section 1: General Features
Ch1: Farming Foundations (How military resources are drawn from the countryside; key takeaway is that men are plentiful but economic resources are scarce)
Ch2: Supply Costs (discuss costs of food, animals, transport, wages, tools.  Shorter, because these have mostly been studied before).
Ch3: Equipment Production (discuss the production of metal and non-metal equipment; key takeaway is the relatively high expense of metal equipment compared to non-metal equipment).

Section 2: The East (Seleucids, Antigonids, Ptolemies)
Ch 4: Hellenistic Equipment Costs (assessing materiel requirements for Hellenistic infantry and cavalry; each of these 'equipment costs' chapters proceed along the same lines: establish the common troop types and what they carried, then determine via measurements or reconstruction the material requirements of that stuff.  The aim is to keep these chapters short with most of the reconstructions in the footnotes)
Ch 5: Hellenistic Mobilization Systems (discuss what we know of how these armies are raised)

Section 3: The West (Spain, Gaul, Carthage)
Ch 6: Gallic Equipment Costs
Ch 7: Spanish Equipment Costs
Ch 8: Non-State Mobilization Systems (Key take-away is that the tribal levy is very efficient, but scales poorly and individual polities already have small resource bases)
Ch 9: Carthage: Equipment and Systems (Carthage comes here and goes last because Carthaginian armies in this period were mercenary composites of the above systems).

Section 4: Rome
Ch 10: Roman Equipment Costs
Ch 11: The Roman Mobilization System (key take-away here is that Rome’s system, based on ‘willing compliance’ analogous to clientela allowed the Romans to scale up a very high-extraction recruitment system at very low overhead, while rolling recruitment maintained high troop quality at the cost of continuous military activity)

Conclusions

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That, at least, is the plan, though no plan survives contact with the enemy.  As noted, I intend to keep the reconstruction chapters (4, 6, 7 and 10) short whereas they made up the bulkiest parts of the original dissertation (collectively those sections ran some 246 pages without images).  My hope is that after this book is out, I can return to that material and put together a second book that functions as a cross-cultural gazetteer of sorts for arms and armor in the third and second centuries, but this project's scope is already big enough.

At present, the introduction and chapter 1 are pretty much fully revised.  My plan for now is to really knuckle down and try to get the two Section 4 chapters (10 and 11) done, along with ideally more of section 1 to be able in January to pitch the project to publishers as a 'vertical slice' so they can see the entire method.

That's the plan, in any event!  We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I promised you all snippets!  I've had to attach them as PDFs because I haven't figured out how to get footnotes to work in Patreon.  These are of course drafts and I am going to ask that you not spread them around; if I see these popping up 'in the wild' on the internet, I'll have to stop this fun experiment.  In any case, for the first snippet, let's start with the opening vignette (attached).  My plan is to put a new snippet (some longer, some shorter; this one is fairly short) up here on Tuesdays this month until we're back on the normal blogging schedule the week of Dec. 2.