Bret Devereaux
Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.
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What they believe
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The outcome of World War II and the Cold War refuted the beliefs that centralized state direction is efficient, that autarky is viable, that domination beats trade, and that a highly militarized economy can durably sustain national power.
the rather resounding verdict of the war (and the subsequent Cold War period) was that these assumptions - that centralized state direction was efficient, that autarky was a viable economic strategy, that it was better to dominate than to trade, that highly militarized economies could durably sustain national power - were false.
acoup.blogSaid 23 Oct 2026This on korrents
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Axis atrocities were not collateral damage but deliberate military policy bound up with Axis strategy
The atrocities could not be seperated from Axis strategy: they were the ways, means and ends, by, with and for which the Axis fought.
acoup.blogSaid 16 Oct 2026This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These 2: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
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From one piece Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IVa: The Fires of Industry 2 beliefs · acoup.blog
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korrents.com
The aggressor powers' aims in World War II were fundamentally economic: it was a war for resources.Their words
the strategic ends of the aggressor nations were fundamentally rooted in economic objectives. To put it in the classic formulation, World War II was a war for resources.
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Their words
the rather resounding verdict of the war (and the subsequent Cold War period) was that these assumptions - that centralized state direction was efficient, that autarky was a viable economic strategy, that it was better to dominate than to trade, that highly militarized economies could durably sustain national power - were false.
17 October
16 October
From one piece Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IIIb: The Opposite of Love 3 beliefs · acoup.blog
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Their words
a strategy which did not work then and has never worked since in any war ever, despite repeated attempts.
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korrents.com
The regular German military, the Wehrmacht, was fully involved and complicit in Nazi war crimes alongside the SSTheir words
the regular German military, the Wehrmacht was fully involved and complicit in Nazi war crimes, alongside the SS and the rest of the Nazi regime.
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korrents.com
Axis atrocities were not collateral damage but deliberate military policy bound up with Axis strategyTheir words
The atrocities could not be seperated from Axis strategy: they were the ways, means and ends, by, with and for which the Axis fought.
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From one piece Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IIIa: Focusing on Politics 2 beliefs · acoup.blog
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korrents.com
Democracies had real strengths in adaptability and economic mobilization in the Second World War.Their words
Historically, the United Kingdom, a fraction of the size of Hitler's continental European empire after 1940, nevertheless outproduced it in key categories like aircraft.
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Their words
Hearts of Iron IV's simplified politics serve to present an essentially authoritarian vision of politics in which the opinion of the people matters essentially not at all, where state power can easily and effortlessly shape outcomes
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Nothing matches.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 32 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
The outcome of World War II and the Cold War refuted the beliefs that centralized state direction is efficient, that autarky is viable, that domination beats trade, and that a highly militarized economy can durably sustain national power.
the rather resounding verdict of the war (and the subsequent Cold War period) was that these assumptions - that centralized state direction was efficient, that autarky was a viable economic strategy, that it was better to dominate than to trade, that highly militarized economies could durably sustain national power - were false.
Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IVa: The Fires of Industry Said 23 Oct 2026
The aggressor powers' aims in World War II were fundamentally economic: it was a war for resources.
the strategic ends of the aggressor nations were fundamentally rooted in economic objectives. To put it in the classic formulation, World War II was a war for resources.
Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IVa: The Fires of Industry Said 23 Oct 2026
Axis atrocities were not collateral damage but deliberate military policy bound up with Axis strategy
The atrocities could not be seperated from Axis strategy: they were the ways, means and ends, by, with and for which the Axis fought.
Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IIIb: The Opposite of Love Said 16 Oct 2026
Show 29 more
The regular German military, the Wehrmacht, was fully involved and complicit in Nazi war crimes alongside the SS
the regular German military, the Wehrmacht was fully involved and complicit in Nazi war crimes, alongside the SS and the rest of the Nazi regime.
Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IIIb: The Opposite of Love Said 16 Oct 2026
Terror bombing of civilians has never succeeded in collapsing support for a war
a strategy which did not work then and has never worked since in any war ever, despite repeated attempts.
Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IIIb: The Opposite of Love Said 16 Oct 2026
A game politics model in which the state shapes everything and the people do not matter is an authoritarian vision of politics, however unintended.
Hearts of Iron IV's simplified politics serve to present an essentially authoritarian vision of politics in which the opinion of the people matters essentially not at all, where state power can easily and effortlessly shape outcomes
Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IIIa: Focusing on Politics Said 2 Oct 2026
Democracies had real strengths in adaptability and economic mobilization in the Second World War.
Historically, the United Kingdom, a fraction of the size of Hitler's continental European empire after 1940, nevertheless outproduced it in key categories like aircraft.
Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IIIa: Focusing on Politics Said 2 Oct 2026
The Industrial Revolution was not inevitable: it needed a set of very specific preconditions that only Britain, at that moment, actually had.
In my view the key takeaway here is just how contingent the industrial revolution was: the industrial revolution that occured required a number of very specific pre-conditions which were really on true on Great Britain in that period.
Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? Said 26 Aug 2022
History has no predetermined path: its course turns on unpredictable contingencies rather than on deep currents that would have produced the same outcome anyway.
As much as we might want to imagine that the greater currents push historical events largely on a predetermined path with but minor variations from what must always have been, in practice events are tremendously contingent on unpredictable variables.
Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? Said 26 Aug 2022
An invention only matters when the principle, a workable design and an economically viable use for it all arrive together; the idea on its own changes nothing.
The specificity matters here because each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact.
Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? Said 26 Aug 2022
Handing an ancient society a modern machine would have achieved nothing: the Romans could neither have built a steam engine nor found a profitable use for one.
If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to.
Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? Said 26 Aug 2022
An economy running on muscle power has a hard and low ceiling on total production, because its only real input is land and the returns to more of it fall away fast.
New land can be brought under cultivation (or cultivated more intensively) of course, but marginal gains decrease rapidly (because the best land is cultivated first and because adding more labor to already cultivated land, while it can increase harvests, is less efficient than cultivating new land) and there is a fairly hard ceiling on total production of this sort that was, for the most part, fairly low.
Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? Said 26 Aug 2022
Roman economic growth came from institutions rather than from technology, which is why it did not outlive the institutions that produced it.
Roman economic growth, because it was a product of institutions instead of technologies, was not durable in the face of those institutions collapsing.
Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? Said 26 Aug 2022
Long-run GDP charts hide what matters: technologies are contingent and path dependent, so the same number can describe economies that work in entirely different ways.
All of which is why simple graphs of things like ‘global historical GDP’ can be a bit deceptive: there’s a lot of particularity beneath the basic statistics of production because technologies are contingent and path dependent.
Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? Said 26 Aug 2022
Being a rich or efficient agrarian economy is not what produces an industrial revolution, or one would have happened much earlier and somewhere other than Europe.
The thing is, being a particularly complex or efficient agrarian economy doesn’t seem to have been the most important thing for producing the industrial revolution or it almost certainly would have happened earlier and probably not in Europe.
Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? Said 26 Aug 2022
Sparta is a cautionary tale rather than a model: an over-militarised, paranoid state that added only oppression to human experience.
Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience.
Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Retrospective Said 19 Aug 2022
However normal the rest of Sparta is argued to have been, its enslaved majority is not: no reconstruction of the population makes Sparta anything but extraordinarily enslaved.
Consequently if everything else about our understanding of Sparta is made less exceptional, is made more like a normal Greek polis, we are still stuck with this absolutely wildly high percentage of enslaved persons in this society.
Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Retrospective Said 19 Aug 2022
Before railways an army could not carry the food it needed: anything longer than a few days in the field forced it to live off the country it was in.
The tyranny of the wagon equation is thus inescapable: an army that plans to be in the field for more than just a few days cannot bring all of the food it needs with it; it must find most of its food locally.
Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem Said 15 Jul 2022
About six weeks of supply is the most a pre-railway army could buy itself by adding carrying capacity, however many wagons it brought.
So there are sharp limits to how much extra range an army can get by adding carrying capacity; in practice about a month and a half’s logistics buffer is the maximum that’s possible and even doing that is expensive.
Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem Said 15 Jul 2022
The binding constraint on pre-modern campaigning was feeding the army every day it was in the field, not winning the battle at the end of it.
In order to move this army or sustain it in place it is thus necessary to ensure a massive and relatively continuous supply of food to the army. Failure to do that will result in the army falling apart long before it comes anywhere close to the enemy.
Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem Said 15 Jul 2022
A heavily centralised state is the most fragile kind: when Rome’s centre failed, its successors were left without the resources or administration to do what it had done.
Precisely because the late Roman system was so top-heavy and centralized, the collapse of central Roman rule mortally wounded it and left the successor states of Rome with much more limited resources and administration to try to achieve their aims.
Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions Said 28 Jan 2022
An institution can outlive the state that built it: the Church survived the collapse of Roman political authority when Rome’s other institutions did not.
But whereas other Roman institutions didn’t survive the collapse of Roman political authority, the Church as an institution very much did.
Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions Said 28 Jan 2022
The fall of the Western Roman Empire was a real loss of state capacity, not merely a change of management, and the evidence for that loss is ample.
Of course that assumes a loss of state capacity, but as we’re going to see, the evidence for that loss is actually quite ample.
Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions Said 28 Jan 2022
Urban life in the West did not merely change after Rome, it practically vanished, and had to be built again from scratch centuries later.
the system of social organization that characterized the ancient world practically vanished and would have to be redeveloped centuries later.
Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions Said 28 Jan 2022
Farmers were the overwhelming majority of every pre-modern agrarian society — 80 to 90 per cent of it — and that single fact shapes everything else about how those societies worked.
Because these folks – these farmers – make up the majority of the population of basically all agrarian societies in the pre-modern period. And when I say ‘the majority’ I mean the vast majority, on the order of 80-90% in many cases
Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers! Said 24 Jul 2020
Pre-modern subsistence farmers were minimising the risk of starvation rather than maximising output, and their apparently backward practices are rational once that is understood.
These small subsistence farmers generally seek to minimize risk, rather than maximize profits. After all, improving yields by 5% doesn’t mean much if everyone starves to death in the third year because of a tail-risk that wasn’t mitigated.
Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers! Said 24 Jul 2020
A pre-modern countryside produces an enormous amount of food and almost no extractable surplus, which is the hard limit on everything the state above it can do.
There is a ton of food in this countryside (nearly everyone is producing it) but hardly any surplus.
Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers! Said 24 Jul 2020
The "lazy peasant" is a slander of the leisured classes: pre-modern farmers stopped short of maximum effort because their priorities were not served by more of it.
This isn’t because they are ‘lazy’ – the ‘lazy peasant’ (or poor worker generally) is a standard hypocrisy of the literature of the leisured aristocratic class towards poor farmers, today and in the past – but because they have priorities which are simply not served by labor maximization.
Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers! Said 24 Jul 2020
The best-known popular history books are usually not written by the best historians in their fields, because writing popular history does not earn academic advancement.
pop history will not get you tenure, which leads to neglect in the academy and consequently the big pop-history books are often not written by the best historians in their fields.
Collections: How Your History Gets Made Said 9 Jul 2020
The point of academic history is to put historical knowledge into the public’s hands so that the public can make better decisions with it.
I am going to contend that the primary purpose of the discipline of history is to foster greater historical knowledge in the public, in order that the public can use that knowledge (and the skills that come with it) to make better decisions.
Collections: How Your History Gets Made Said 9 Jul 2020
Hard peoples from harsh places are not better at war: at the dawn of civilisation it was the softest and richest societies that won most often.
And it is quite clear from that evidence, that at the dawn of civilization, it was the least Fremen societies who tended to win the most.
Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part I: War at the Dawn of Civilization Said 17 Jan 2020
States were born in the richest and easiest country, not in hard marginal land.
Rather than hard, difficult country being the breeding ground for the state, it is in fact the richest, softest areas that were (for those who have been to Mesopotamia and are wondering why it doesn’t seem quite so rich and soft anymore, the word you want to look up is salinization).
Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part I: War at the Dawn of Civilization Said 17 Jan 2020
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Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 3 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Recommends The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States
This week’s book recommendation was a pretty easy choice: Kori Schake, The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States (2025).
acoup.blog 14 Aug 2026
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Loved The Iliad of Homer
First, for my personal favorite translation, I would suggest the Richmond Lattimore translation, The Iliad of Homer (1951) and The Odyssey of Homer (1965).
acoup.blog 31 Jul 2026
Loved Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity
this week I am going to go with a book I find myself recommending quite frequently, J.E. Lendon’s Soldier’s and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity (2006).
acoup.blog 25 Jun 2020
What others say about Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity →
Where they publish
Blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry His blog on ancient history, warfare and popular culture. Has a feed.
Weekly, usually mid-series: several thousand words working through how something was really done — a Roman farm, a pike block, a siege — and what a film or a game gets wrong about it.
Recent
- Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IVb: Iron Ends 30 Oct 2026 This is the back half of the last part (I, II IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) of our series looking at the vision of history advanced by Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and one of the mos…
- Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IVa: The Fires of Industry 23 Oct 2026 This is the first half of the last part (I, II IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) of our series looking at the vision of history advanced by Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and one of the mo…
- Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IIIb: The Opposite of Love 16 Oct 2026 This is the second half of the third part (I, II IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) of our long-delayed series looking at the theory of history advanced by Paradox Interactive’s Hearts of Iron IV, one of the most popular strategy ga…
Show 7 more
- Gap Week: October 9, 2026 9 Oct 2026 Hey, folks, no post this week as my work schedule has been pretty heavily disrupted and other tasks had to come first. Patrons will already know this background, but over the summer, we had a water leak issue in our bas…
- Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IIIa: Focusing on Politics 2 Oct 2026 This is the first half of the third part (I, II IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) of our long-delayed series looking at Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game, easily one of the most popular histo…
- Fireside Friday, September 25, 2026 25 Sept 2026 Hey, folks, Fireside this week! We’re now well into the Teaching Paradox series on Hearts of Iron, but as you may have noticed, the structure of those posts means they tend to be quite chunky (the first two have both be…
- Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part II: Divisions, Designers and Doctrines 19 Sept 2026 This is the second part (I, II IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) of our long-delayed series looking at Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and also one of the most popular strategy games curren…
- Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part I: Operational Art 11 Sept 2026 This week, at long last, we begin our long-delayed but always expected something that we blog for: the Hearts of Iron IV Teaching Paradox series! It is, appropriately, in four parts (I, II IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb)! This ha…
- Fireside Friday, September 4, 2026 4 Sept 2026 Hey folks! Fireside this week! Last week’s post was a monster (over 10,000 words compared to our more typically ~6,000) which left me with some non-blog catching up to do. Next week, we’ll be starting our next Teaching…
- Collections: Global Trade and United States Navy 29 Aug 2026 This week we’re doing another one of our series of military theory primers, this time focusing on a fairly simple contention: that the United States Navy is a load-bearing component of the global economy. I considered a…
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
x.com @BretDevereaux Posts.
Recent
- Huh, so Twitter certainly isn't a real place, but looking at the election returns...bluesky might be? 4 Nov 2026
- Gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that the election results we're seeing represent a rebuke of the president and his party and his ideology and also the horse he rode in on. 4 Nov 2026
- This week on the blog! We're finishing our Hearts of Iron IV series, focused on strategic ends and the place of modding in the game. In the end, I think there is a bitter irony that Paradox's least historically responsible game is their most successful. 31 Oct 2026 acoup.blog
Show 13 more
- I actually reject the premise here - that the period running up to the January crisis of 49 BC was typified by escalating cycles of judicial retaliation. This seems to mistake greater historical visibility (mostly because of Cicero's writing) for changes in practice. 29 Oct 2026
- Incredible, jaw-dropping achievement in (willful, I imagine) stupidity. "I wonder why China, an authoritarian regime that suppresses dissent, does not have museums decrying the founder of their regime and his legacy...which is them. It must be because he wasn't so bad." 28 Oct 2026
- This week on the blog - more on Hearts of Iron IV and this week's is a heavy one, assessing how the decision not to acknowledge or address war crimes and crimes against humanity causes the game to blunder into being a 'clean Wehrmacht' myth simulator. 17 Oct 2026 acoup.blog
- A bonkers question in so many directions, revealing in the amount of racism required. Even before you raise the technology issue, this is, "can ~500m people with PPP adjusted gdp of ~$2tn beat ~1.6bn people with ~$16tn PPP." Like, LOL, no, obviously 14 Oct 2026
- This week on the blog! more Hearts of Iron IV! Having discussed the military simulation in previous weeks, this week we look at how HoI4 understands politics and...it's rough - design streamlining leads to an incomplete and authoritarian political model. 3 Oct 2026 acoup.blog
- Not to belabor the obvious, but countries with net negative migration are that way because no one wants to live there. "We took America from a net positive migration to net negative" is basically just an admission of, "we made the United States obviously worse to live in." 2 Oct 2026
- I, uh, I can't help but notice that you left being sent to fight the slaver's rebellion or the Nazis. Y'know, the two largest wars the United States has ever fought. Also, morally, the best wars we ever fought. Can't imagine why he left those out, huh? 30 Sept 2026
- Well, you can sure tell the difference, given how well that war you started is going. Sure, our munitions are depleted, diesel is setting the bad kind of price records, but hey at least a washed up Fox news guy gets to act out his masculine insecurity on the global stage. 19 Sept 2026
- ...that is some cult of personality 'Dear Leader' garbage right there. 11 Sept 2026
- Because why would you ever need to teach about East Asia, I bet we don't compete with them or do business with them or have security partnerships with them. I see my days of not taking Hillsdale College (where this fellow works) seriously are certainly coming to a middle. 3 Sept 2026
- This week on the blog: why the United States Navy is a load-bearing part of the global economy, why there is no available replacement and thus why it is pretty bad that the American voter has decided in a fit of abject folly to vote to abandon that role. 29 Aug 2026 acoup.blog
- I wrote a(nother) thing! This time it is about how no amount of military technical excellence can salvage a situation where political leadership has, in their abject strategic idiocy, demanded the military accomplish an impossible mission. Gift link: 23 Aug 2026 foreignpolicy.com
- This week (well, really last week, I'm late on the plug) on the blog! A brief discussion on the financing of pre-modern navies (ships are expensive, but not all ships are equally so) and a recommendation for @KoriSchake's The State and the Soldier! 18 Aug 2026 acoup.blog
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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