Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

Posted by baud147258 9/13/2025

Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction(acoup.blog)

334 points | 192 commentspage 2

dmbche 9/13/2025|

If you enjoy even a smidge of this, please look at other articles/series on their blog, ACOUP is absolutely phenomenal and I've not seen many writers (here also historian and tenured professor) both be so accessible and graspable while having a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation AND providing ample sources.

10/10 couldn't recommend more.

I believe the Sparta series is the most popular, but I really enjoyed the one on iron.

mcmoor 9/13/2025||

I found the one for Sparta too emotionally charged for my interest. But I really really endorse most of the other ones especially ones touching in economics and logistics of ancient world.

(Btw he's not a tenured professor, much to his chagrin, he's an adjunct professor. This is exactly why he wrote A LOT about broken academia system too.)

dmbche 9/13/2025||

That's an oddly specific thing to point out

mcmoor 9/13/2025|||

It's just funny since his blog is the entire reason I learned about the difference of adjunct and tenured professor, and why a big problem in academia is that they tenure less and less and rely on lots of adjunct professors instead.

theurerjohn3 9/13/2025|||

There is a vast gap in how academia treats adjunct vs tenure track professors, a difference the author of this blog has spent a decent amount of words explaining and complaining about.

simgt 9/13/2025|||

I've enjoyed Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond recently. If you have read it, how does it compare?

StefanBatory 9/13/2025|||

It's a problematic work. From what I remember from my time on /r/askhistorians, they really did not like it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wd6jt/what_d...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210619035356/http://www.columb...

My impression is that it is correct enough the look good on surface. Like learning Freud, you see his points, it makes sense, but the details are wrong and so you spend most of your time learning why he wasn't exactly right.

vwem 9/13/2025|||

It's been awhile since I've read it, but it does offer a similar approach in the sense that it's an easy read. Bret does a good job of making the various topics fun and interesting, even in areas I normally wouldn't be interested in.

As a side note, I've read some interesting critiques on Diamond's theories. But I did find the whole book to be an interesting perspective, even just thinking about things North America lacked such as animal husbandry that may have drastically changed the way it developed.

FearNotDaniel 9/13/2025||

> their blog

_his_ blog. It’s all written by one man. But I agree that it’s a remarkable blog, so fascinating and freely given.

While I’m in grumpy-old-man-shakes-fist-at-newfangled-grammar mode, I can _almost_ accept that people writing in the “historical present” is unavoidable these days since TV historians have made it so trendy, but it’s especially jarring when he changes tense in the middle of a sentence (emphasis mine):

> These settlers _were_ remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings _are_ trying to do is…

immibis 9/13/2025||

singular "they" is older than singular "you"

echelon_musk 9/13/2025||

I'd normally be frustrated with all of the grammar mistakes, as it indicates to me that the author can't be bothered to proof read their own work before they expect others to read it.

However, now I see the mistakes as an indicator that it hasn't been written with an LLM which then makes me more inclined to want to read it.

Conflicted.

Chris2048 9/13/2025||

"chatgpt, a guy on hacker news just said spelling mistakes are a sign llms haven't been used - write <thing> with a reasonable amount of convincing spelling mistakes so that it appears to be written by a human."..

onetokeoverthe 9/13/2025||

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curtisszmania 9/13/2025|

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