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.
Bret Devereaux did not write this page. What is this?
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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 II: Divisions, Designers and Doctrines 19 Sept 2026 This is the second part (I) 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 currently on the market. Last w…
- 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! This has been a long requested series that I put off for a long time beca…
- 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…
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- 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…
- Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part Vb: Pixel Armies for Pixel Societies 21 Aug 2026 This is the second half of the final part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa, IVb, Va, Vb) of our apparently five-part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized, with fictional worldbuilding…
- Fireside Friday, August 14, 2026 (On Financing Pre-Modern Navies) 14 Aug 2026 Hey folks, fireside this week as I get ready for the start of a new semester! For this week, I wanted to talk briefly about the wrinkles that financing navies poses with regards to our worldbuilding primer on pre-modern…
- Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part Va: Putting It Together 8 Aug 2026 This is the first half of the final part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa, IVb, Va) of our apparently five-part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized, in particular exploring the princi…
- Fireside Friday, July 31, 2026 (On The Odyssey) 31 Jul 2026 Hey folks, Fireside this week, as I am fresh back from a short family trip before the jaws of the Fall semester close upon me. I did get a chance to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and I wrote a review of it for For…
- Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IVb: Cohesion 24 Jul 2026 This is the second half of the fourth part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized. Last week we took a look at h…
- Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IVa: Leadership 18 Jul 2026 This is the fourth part (I, IIa, IIb, III) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized. We’ve talked about how armies are recruited, equipped…
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 25 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 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
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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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