Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, July 2015

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste.

Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

This is by now a contemporary classic, which I should have read years ago. To enjoy it, you need to like geeking out over designing steel boxes; the culture of longshore work, the politics of their unions, and their (totally correct) fears of technological obsolescence; why container ports have economies of scale; and a dozen other things that usually lurk in the background of our world. If you read this weblog, it's probably right up your alley.

Further commentary is outsourced to Steve Laniel.

Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change

This is one of the few genuinely-evolutionary ventures in social science I've ever run across. Spruyt's aim, as his title suggests, is to explain how Europe came to be dominated into sovereign territorial states, which subsequently imposed that some mode of organization on the rest of the world. He wants a genuinely selectionist explanation, which he realizes means he needs to explain why such states survived, or tended to survive, while other, contemporary forms of polity did not. And he realizes that there were alternative forms of polity: not just feudalism, but also city-states (as in Italy) and city-leagues (as in the north), which were, for a time, serious contenders. Spruyt is very sound on how the causes which led to the formation of any of these polities need not be, and generally aren't, the same as the causes of their ultimate selection. It's very nice to see such a mass of historical detail intelligently organized and brought to bear on an interesting theoretical problem.

Being me, naturally I have some qualms or quibbles. (1) Spruyt essentially looks at three case studies: the French kingdom, the Hanseatic League, and the city-states of northern Italy. But his account, if valid, should generalize to at least the rest of Europe; I'd really like to see whether it does. (2) As a methodological point, the number of polities involved is very small, even if we go down to treating every city in the low countries or Tuscany as a distinct unit of selection. On general grounds of evolutionary theory, then, we should expect noise effects to be quite large relative to fitness differences, which in turn will make it hard to learn those differences. In other words, with so few kingdoms, city leagues, etc., to examine, I worry that Spruyt may just be creating narratives to retrospectively match mere chance. (The thought experiment here would be something like: in the alternate history which followed the same path as ours up to, say, 1450, but thereafter city leagues came to dominate western Europe, how hard would it be for alternate-Spruyt to assemble the split evidence into a case for the selective superiority of leagues, over sovereign territorial states?) (3) A lot of Spruyt's argument for why territorial states did better than city leagues is that the later lacked a central locus of authority which could credibly negotiate with outsiders, and make agreements stick by imposing them on the constituent cities. So why did no one invent the idea of a league where the league itself was the sovereign? Or was it just that when they did, they called it the United Provinces, and they happened to form a contiguous territory? (4) Spruyt takes the rather odd position that variation and selection are two temporally successive phases of an evolutionary process, rather than just being logically and causally distinct. (This idea seems to arise from a rather forced-sounding interpretation of Stephen Jay Gould's papers on punctuated equilibrium.) This is, I think, both wrong as a matter of general evolutionary theory, and superfluous to his own actual argument. (5) The opening chapters spill much too much ink on very parochial internal debates of the international relations sub-sub-discipline, giving little sense of its wider relevance to social science.

(Thanks to Henry Farrell for pointing me at this.)

Kameron Hurley, The Mirror Empire

Hurley's earlier science fiction novels (1, 2) were enjoyable mind candy, but this is great mind candy: world-building in which the human, the fantastic, and the all-too-human mingle; multiple realms of fantastic weirdness; comp