Whatever anybody thinks about the overall quality of Last Jedi - and I think you can have honest disagreements about how well the whole thing hung together - it was an absolute masterpiece in messing with tropes, both in general and of Star Wars in particular. The whole movie is an exercise in how overrated heroes are…

Colonial exploitation played a much, much smaller role than is usually supposed. Economic expansion was happening before the silver mines in the Americas really got rolling, and coincides more with the end of the general boom in the second half of the 16th century than its beginning.

Hope you enjoy them, thank you!

If it were just the one weird uncle, we wouldn’t be in the trouble we’re in today.

These are all really good points, especially about Italy as the beneficiary of redistributive policies.

I hope you enjoy it! I’m on a major medieval economic history kick right now, so I’ll have a BUNCH more on that coming soon.

That’s what happened to the Cistercians right around this time. 

That’s what “disbanded” means - the order ceased to exist as an entity. Yes, some joined the Hospitallers, and others were pensioned, but there were no more Templars.

Yes and no. Rousey and McGregor were lightning in a bottle, but the UFC also gave them the keys to their PR machine in a way that they haven’t done with anybody else. The UFC was actively pitching them out to major media outlets, looking to craft narratives, and generally putting its weight behind them; those aren’t…

The expansion of the late medieval and early modern economy and the rise of capitalism is coming up in a pair of episodes in November, after I do two on Roman cities in October.

So, something I’ll do an episode on at some point is the arms industry around 1500, because it’s fascinating. You start to see borderline mass-production of weapons and armor; it’s called “munitions-grade” because it’s very obviously not the high-quality craftsmanship we think of with regard to these kinds of things.…

You can be a mercenary - someone who fights for money, usually on contract - without warfare being your profession.

One of the things I argue in these episodes is that historians are wrong about when the Military Revolution started - 1500 is the accepted early date, but I think it’s more like 1350. Contracts and widespread professionalism started to appear around that time, and more so than technology, I think that’s what actually…

Yeah, Caferro’s book is great. I’ll do a thing on the condottieri at some point.

If you can’t see society, culture, and politics in sports, I feel sorry for you, because you’re missing out on what make them meaningful.

That’s a really misleading understanding of how MMA striking currently looks. The game that’s being played at the upper levels of the sport has seen enormous improvements in the last three or four years in pace, variety, and fundamental soundness. If you think what’s there now can be summed up with “a bunch of shitty…

Appreciate your input. I talked to the sound designer and we’ve made it less intrusive in these two episodes (as opposed to the first two), but overall, the music’s staying.

The fight would be at heavyweight - Jones cuts quite a bit to get down to 205, so he’d probably weigh in between 225 and 240 pounds.

Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler (which I highly recommend) talks at length about how mass-mobilization warfare - the long-term product of these kinds of state dynamics - created the circumstances for a broad-based postwar economic growth.

Okay, I’m now ASSURED that it’s up on Google Play.