The Steppe Function

Review of January book club read, preview of February read

For February, the Contraptions Book club will read Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz, to be discussed the week of February 24.

House-keeping note #1: 💀Today, January 31, is the last day to subscribe at the current rate of $5/mo, which will persist as long as you stay subscribed. Tomorrow, Feb 1, the rate goes up to $7/mo. 💀

House-keeping note #2: Some of you have said you’re not receiving emails. The most likely reason is you downloaded the substack app and accidentally set newsletter delivery preferences to “push only.” Please set it to “email” or “email + push” to make sure you get it in your email inbox.

---

The first Contraptions book club discussion of City of Fortune by Roger Crowley went swimmingly well. I’m now genuinely looking forward to a full year of this track. You can catch up on the week-long discussion in the chat thread here. We also had a live discussion this morning that helped me tie all the ideas together to my personal satisfaction.

The next read: Raiders, Rulers, and Traders, by David Chaffetz, a view of history through the lens of horses and horse-borne nomad cultures. We’ll discus it on the last week of February, so you have 24 days to read it, but I have some preliminary notes and prompts for you in this issue, to think about as you read.

I’ll be keeping these book-club-focused newsletter issues and chat threads un-paywalled.

Let’s start with City of Fortune before getting to horsey matters.

The Venetian Contraption

I was fortunate enough to visit Venice while I was reading City of Fortune, and took a personal guided tour where I made sure to ask the guide to point out all the things the book was framing as salient, which I had entirely missed in my first trip to the city in 1998. I didn’t even visit the Doge’s palace or art museums this time. I spent all my free time looking for the subtler signs of the city’s forgotten heritage as a powerhouse of maritime commerce. And I got a good sense of the formidable machine whose contours can still be glimpsed beneath the modern museum/tourist-trap surface.

For the book club discussion, I also read Venice: A New History by Thomas Madden, which covers the full history of the city, as opposed to the middle period of its remarkable and precocious ascendancy to prototypical early-modernity. This was useful, since it’s really a proper three-act story (I recommend the Madden book for those of you who got Venice-pilled by the Crowley book):

• Act 1: Shelter from the fall of the Roman empire and attacks by Germanic tribes and steppe nomads by retreating to a miserable life on a marshy lagoon. Circumstances that offered no agricultural opportunities, but bountiful fishing and unrealized potential for commerce. Steal a saint and found a city without the baggage of antiquity. ~450AD to 1000 AD.

• Act 2: Realize the potential for commerce and build a mighty machine of public-private state capacity to profit systematically from it; one that resembles neither the empires of agrarian antiquity, nor the nomad cultures at their boundaries, nor seafaring peer states. 1000-1600 AD.

• Act 3: Get disrupted by Ottomans on the East and the Portuguese/Spanish on the West, harvest the residual old market for a century, and turn into the world’s first, and still the finest, tourist trap museum city. 1600-now.

The great lesson I took away from Crowley’s telling of the Act 2 story is the extent to which Venice broke the civilizational patterns of antiquity, both settled and nomadic, while also learning a great deal from both older playbooks to construct their machine of state, the first modernity machine.

Like the sedentary empires of antiquity they admired, aspired to emulate, and eventually surpassed, the Venetians steadily built up deep reserves of technocratic knowledge, engineering and business capability, and stable patterns of sustenance and surplus-generation. But unlike those empires, the stability was based on an innovative approach to maritime commerce, which had not hitherto been a reliable means of sustenance for anyone, rather than agriculture. And unlike those empires, the patterns of sustenance and surplus-generation were organized along recognizably modern industrial-rationality lines, centuries before the industrial revolution, rather than being bound to traditional non-technocratic knowledge, religion and mythology. To call Venice an early-modern republic is an understatement. The republican structure of government (which was quite unlike that of entities to which that label was applied in antiquity) was merely one aspect of a more complex multi-dimensional evolutionary leap.

While Venice did have a governing mythology of sorts, built around the cult of St. Mark and a few ritual/ceremonial elements, it was a pale shadow of the sort of mythology that powered Constantinople. One sign of this is that the famous names of Venetian political history, like Enrico Dandalo (who basically created the Venetian maritime empire, the Stato del Mar, by hacking the fourth crusade), are basically unknowns relative to both famous Italians from other cities, such as the Medicis, and famous Byzantine emperors.

One way to think about this is that with Venice, a new way of conceptualizing national narratives arrived. One based not on mythology and great heroes, but on robust and dynamic capabilities and institutional knowledge (of seafaring and commerce, and highly artificial urbanism on a swamp). What we would call state capacity today, coupled with a strong market economy. A revealing feature is that they actively avoided acquiring large land territories, building a network of strategically positioned trading footholds instead, legitimated through trading rights negotiated with more traditional powers, and backed up with naval power. They wanted the margins of trade without the headaches of large-scale governance.

But trying to think of history in alternative-to-mythic terms is a bit like trying not to think of a pink elephant. You need an alternate anchor image to displace the default anchor. This is why, in the book club discussion, I prompted people to try and think of machine-like metaphors for the Stato del Mar. The story doesn’t actually lack the colorful personalities, wars, theatrical political events, dynastic soap-operas, and pageantry that we humans reflexively turn into hero-powered mythologies. Those are just not the most salient bits of the Venetian story. But until you shift frames from pink elephant to blue contraption, it’s hard to avoid the lure of heroes and their dragon-slaying deeds.

The blue contraption that was the Stato del Mar showed that it was possible to have the benefits of both nomadic and sedentary civilizational patterns, and make something other than warfare or agriculture the raison d’etre of an entire society.

Until Venice came along and showed how it was done, seafaring cultures around the world, much like the nomadic cultures of the Eurasian steppes (steppes are terrestrial oceans really), took for granted that theirs was a bleak, hostile, uncertain world that could not be tamed, let alone domesticated, cultivated, and harvested with clockwork seasonality. It could only be precariously inhabited, with supplementation of native resources through predatory violence directed at better-endowed geographic neighbors.

Indeed, we find precisely this more Hobbesian attitude in Venice’s evil twin on the other side of the Italian peninsula, Genoa. The Genoese were more like pirates by default who did some opportunistic trading, rather than merchants by default who occasionally resorted to piracy. Their patterns of self-sustenance resembled the horse-trading, protection-racketeering, raiding and pillaging of the steppe nomads more than it did the systematically evolved and exercised capabilities of their Venetian frenemies. While this gave Genoese commercial culture a certain rascally free-wheeling startup-like dynamism (which is partly perhaps why it was the Genoese who partnered with the Spanish to unlock the Americas for Europe), it meant they didn’t quite make the kind of leap Venice did.

We also find this piracy-first seafaring culture on the Indian Ocean side of the trade routes. And both Turkish and Arab seafaring cultures were closer to Genoese than Venetian.

So Venetian seafaring culture was quite the outlier among peer seafaring cultures with comparable levels of technological capability.

Our chat discussions explored various ways to conceptualize the Venetian contraption. My own favorite way is as a kind of centralized blockchain (the state archives of commercial records from Venice’s heyday run to 45 miles of shelving) that drove the commercial operations with an excruciating attention to detail, and remarkable precision given the uncertainties of maritime commerce. Others in the discussion pointed out the clockwork nature of the machine, especially towards the end, as it retreated and consolidated in the face of the Turkish threat. It did this by running militarized state-organized merchant convoys on fixed routes, on fixed schedules with tolerances of just days to a few weeks on transportation legs that might take months. The account of this late phase reminds me of the Atlantic war between allied supply shipping and German U-boats in WW2.

There was discussion of how the machine was something like a command-economy platform, but as I argued, this isn’t quite right, since the determinacy of Venetian operations came from discipline, not from control of both supply and demand of a complete market.

The machine-like nature of Venice is most evident in the fact that there are no grand, epic adventures of Venetian seafaring, in the tradition of say the Illiad/Odyssey, or Sinbad the Sailor’s adventures on the Asian side. It worked almost boringly well, with predictability and determinacy, through some very volatile times and spaces.

No wonder the best known Venetian adventure is the non-fictional tale of Marco Polo, which unfolded primarily on the land route to Kublai Khan’s court, through the Eurasian steppes. The Venetians had fully domesticated at least their corner of the Mediterranean, if not larger oceans. Adventures came from their less predictable landside activities, which they never did master.

Speaking of which…

Preview: Horse Culture

For the February read, I’d initially picked Empires of the Steppes by Kenneth Harl, which turned out to be rather disappointing (I’m currently finishing it up anyway). This is partly because it’s kinda sloppily written despite being very comprehensive. But about halfway through, I realized what was really bothering me about the book: It lazily centers warfare, heroes and myth-making as the primary frame of the narrative, and seems to miss the significance of the actual star of the story: the horse. And all the technologies and cultural patterns it spawned.

If the hero-mythologizing approach to history is distortionary when applied to sedentary civilizations, it is downright misleading when it comes to steppe nomad cultures. Even the title feels wrong. Even the most powerful of these cultures, such as those of Genghis Khan or Timur, cannot be called empires in any sense of the world. Empires need cities, sedentary patterns of productive enterprise, and sustainability. Powerful nomad cultures did constitute a non-sedentary pattern of civilization arguably, but did not form “empires.” They did often catalyze the fall or emergence of empires in existing sedentary civilization cores though, often peopled by the nomads themselves.

The internal unit of organization of steppe-nomad civilization was arguably flow-based rather than stock-based. Rivers of potential being actualized for a while before drying out or changing course dramatically. Steppe “empires” could only be considered empires to the extent container shipping or global supply chains today can be considered empires.

So casting a broader net for better frames, with ChatGPT’s help, I found the book I’ve now made the official pick. Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz. While it is still human-centric, the relative emphasis on the horse looks much higher.

This has already proved a very fertile frame, even though I haven’t gotten to the book yet. Even in the more human-centric Harl book I’m reading, the most interesting and revealing bits are about horses. Here is a sampling:

1. Early Iron Age warfare was chariot-based, and only later became mounted cavalry-based, because early horses were not strong enough to bear human riders. They could only draw chariots. It took centuries of selective breeding to produce cavalry mounts. This is counterintuitive. Chariots are visibly fairly complex material technology and seem like they should come after mounted riding. But getting to better horses through breeding is actually the more advanced technological accomplishment. Interestingly, horses originally evolved in the Americas but disappeared there until Europeans re-introduced them. When Native Americans developed a horse culture nearly overnight, it was powered by the human-bred Eurasian horse.

2. Sedentary civilizations could not figure out how to breed horses reliably, so their primary relationship with the steppe nomads was literally horse-trading, in exchange for civilizational core products like grain and luxury goods. This failure had subtle causes. In the case of the Chinese, for example, it was because the horse feed in China didn’t have sufficient selenium to breed strong horses. In other cases, the causes were more obvious: India has historically been a huge importer of horses because they simply don’t thrive naturally in the tropics.

3. You’ve probably noticed that images of steppe nomads feature cartoonishly large humans riding unusually high and forward. This is not bad artwork. That’s literally what they look like (look up modern Mongolian horse-riding videos). Steppe horses are shorter and smaller, but strong enough to bear humans, and with much higher endurance than the more stereotypical tall horses we’ve gotten used to. They can apparently gallop all day, albeit at a lower top speed than the fancier horses of sedentary civilizations. And the high-riding look is because the riders literally stand up fully, leaning forward in their stirrups, rather than sitting or hovering in the saddle. The stirrups (and kit generally) are also different, allowing the riders to control the horse with their feet alone, leaving the hands free for the archery they were famed for.

4. Each nomad went raiding or warring with a string of 3-5 (or even more) horses, changing frequently so they always had a fresh mount. And nomad groups had vast numbers of horses, as well as access to large wild/feral herds. Only a fraction of the horses were domesticated and trained. The stock was very low-cost but high quality, and basically free to maintain. The steppes provided the food, and the minimal domestication ensured that they mostly took care of themselves. For example, steppe nomad mounts are apparently not shod with iron horseshoes; they do whatever wild horses do to keep their hooves trimmed. This adds up to a picture where horses, despite being large animals, had unit economics resembling that of chickens in modern factory farms. This shows up in the attitudes of nomads. Though horses were prized and valued, they were treated like a cheap, high-volume commodity. You could say the relationship was one of harvesting from wild herds and practicing a kind of r-selection breeding rather than K-selection. By contrast, the heavy cavalry horses of medieval sedentary civilizations typically cost a fortune to train and maintain; a burden which could bankrupt poorer knights.

That last point makes me wonder if modern Russian approaches to tanks is similar to steppe-nomad attitudes towards horses. They seem to deploy them as a kind of disposable volume weapon, despite their size.

Long after the sedentary civilizations caught up in horse-tech, and innovated their own specialized K-selected forms (heavy cavalry with larger horses, high-speed light cavalry but of the seated Arab variety), the steppe-nomad approach to horse power still proved decisively superior. It took the invention of firearms to finally disrupt all horse power, including steppe nomad horse power.

But the horsiness of steppe nomad culture goes deeper. I’m getting the sense that out on the steppes, the horse was both the boat and the fish of the vast land-seas that are the steppes. Horse meat and fermented mare-milk provided a good deal of the caloric requirements of the nomads. Trading the horses, as well as the goods they transported, to sedentary civilizations was the economy. All of the technology (and it was significant and sophisticated, if narrow, which is why I’m inclined to treat steppe nomad culture as a civilization in aggregate) was horse-related. Horses in sedentary civilizations were much more specialized.

The picture I’m beginning to form is one of a kind of indeterminate cloud of low-unit-cost horsey potential on the steppes. A potential that could not be localized easily in time or space, but moved rapidly enough to secure a vast perimeter. The power of the steppe nomads came from being an illegible horsey smear across two continents, always with way more horses than humans, which is true even today of Mongolia.

Steppe nomads were rightly suspicious of the temptations of cities and buildings as a dangerous temptation into luxurious degeneracy. A stationary nomad loses much of his power. And horses apparently don’t like standing around either. They like running around.

Unlike Venice, which lends itself well to machine metaphors, I think the horsey steppes are best understood as a dynamic and fluid state prevailing over a large spatial zone that serves as an active boundary condition for settled civilizational cores. And perhaps as a sort of battery of a kind of potential as well. What sort of potential? Perhaps vigorous martial potential? Keen competitive intelligence as opposed to production intelligence? Something like an LLM of civilizational vigor?

This boundary condition represents a sharp discontinuity in relations between humans and environments. If you’ll forgive the bad pun, it’s a steppe function.

Our goal for February is going to be to decipher this steppe function.

What happens when you cross the boundary between a settled civilizational core and a horsey nomadic steppe? What is different about being in an environment of vast herds of wild and domesticated horses flowing back and forth across thousands of miles as opposed to farms and cities where life is lived within a narrow spatial range? What is the nature of literal horse power? How does that horse power transform when it crosses over to sedentary civilizations? What are modern analogues to medieval horsey steppes?

Keep these questions in mind as you read.

I’m guessing we’ll find good answers to at least some of these when we read the February book, and explore the various bunny trails it suggests.

One suggestion: Before you begin reading, and occasionally as you read, glance at one or more maps of the steppes. I highly recommend using the Google Earth app or a globe rather than a projected map — the steppes are so extensive (a big chunk of two continents), the curvature of the Earth actually makes a very big difference to the sense of proportions. And the geography, being the negative space of sedentary civilizations, is very unfamiliar to most of us. I’d especially recommend getting familiar with the region around the Caspian Sea on the European end, and the Tarim Basin on the Asian end.

Also spend some time browsing photos/videos of the steppes, and different kinds of horses. The range between a steppe nomad horse and a large English farm horse is very dramatic. Heavy cavalry warhorses were very different from Arabian speedsters.

A lot of counterintuitive things start to make sense once you get a feel for the geography and topography, and the two animals that partnered to colonize it.