8 ms·

Historical maps probably helped cause World War I

145 points by benbreen 3y ago

denton-scratch 3y ago
> Keeping that in mind, return to the map above and take note of Portugal and Brazil. I took note: Brazil is absent from the map, which doesn't show the Americas.
- jibe 3y ago
  Look again, it isn’t to scale, but the americas are there!
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    Oh my, so it is! The Americas is that little island off Japan.
TSiege 3y ago
The argument laid out in this post and in the title around maps, specifically the battle of cannae, leading to world war one is pretty weak. I buy that German generals were obsessed with the battle, but I don't see any evidence here that this caused the war. Going to war is first and foremost a political act even if it is followed by a military response. There's no mention of the complex politics of europe at the time with it's web of alliances, nor any talk of arch duke ferdinand. Sure German generals thought they could easily win the war following the teachings of Cannae, but they no more caused the war than the US military did with the invasion of Iraq
- jprete 3y ago
  I'm not an expert, but I think for World War I the military strategy questions - and in particular the misconceptions - were very relevant to the decision to go to war. My understanding is that the various combatant powers believed that the war would be quick and decisive in the way that prior wars had been; none expected or prepared for a four-year slog of trench warfare, defensive supremacy, or total depletion of whole demographics of the population. I've read that the American Civil War pioneered many of the technologies and strategies used in World War I, and if European military strategists had paid attention they would have had a better idea of what they were in for.
  - benbreen 3y ago
    Author here - yes, this is what I was getting at. The false promise of a rapid victory over the French via encirclement from the right flank (in the style of Hannibal) really was a major factor in justifying the risks of war for the German General Staff. And because Schlieffen was preoccupied with the idea that an ancient battle could be a model for that approach, it distracted from the now-obvious technological changes of the period (machine guns=defensive warfare) that made the approach impossible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan
    - gustavus 3y ago
      I'd argue against Schlieffen wanting to recreate the battle of Canne, and say that was much more the result of Moltke giving the Crown Prince permission to advance. After all the original Schlieffen plan was to have the Alsace region slowly retreat and give ground enticing the French further in, whereas the right flank that was to wheel through Belgium and strike at Paris was to do all the work. If anyone was going trying to recreate Canne I would argue it was Moltke, as he was the one that allowed the left flank to start moving forward.
      - jakderrida 3y ago
        > After all the original Schlieffen plan was to have the Alsace region slowly retreat and give ground enticing the French further in That actually would be a much better analogy to Cannae. Enticing them to break your center, not realizing until they're surrounded that the victory they've charged into is actually an epic defeat. I still don't understand why they'd assume French generals would do that, though. It really assumes a hopeless level of ineptitude on their part for it to work. Seems obvious to me they're better off stalling till Russians are mobilized, no matter how enticing the bait is.
    - TSiege 3y ago
      If that's the case you're trying to present, your article should be clearer about that. That wikipedia entry also doesn't seem to bolster your case. It doesn't even mention the battle of Cannae, but it does talk extensively about the importance of capturing the Belgian rail network for the German logistics in fighting France
- gustavus 3y ago
  So a couple of points of clarifications > specifically the battle of cannae, leading to world war one is pretty weak. I buy that German generals were obsessed with the battle, So not just the German generals specifically Schlieffen. The Schlieffen plan developed by it's namesake general was the governing document for the German plan of battle at the beginning of WW1. Schlieffen spent his entire life trying to figure out the plan that would eventually be his namesake, and he was also obsessed with Canne, so I could see an argument that was a contributing factor. If schlifen wasn't obsessed with the double envelopment he is less likely to send troops through Belgium and no Belgium means no UK involvement leading to a very different war. > Going to war is first and foremost a political act That is one of the fascinating things about WW1 is there are times where it seems as if forces more than men were dictating things. At one point after mobilization and but prior to the actual invasion of Belgium the Kaiser wanted to stop things as he believed a peace deal was reached and was told no, not only no but that such a thing was fundamentally impossible at that point because the military plans laid out by the generals many years ago had dictated so precisely how things had to happen that any change to the plans was close to impossible once they were set in motion. The same thing happened in the Russian side the Czar issued orders for mobilisation then stand down then mobilization again and then one general smashed his telephone so that it could not be rescinded. I think they is part of what made WW1 the war it was, it was one ran primarily by and for the generals (until the later years) with the political officials deferring all power and authority to them.
  - TSiege 3y ago
    From what I've been able to find, the importance of invading Belgium had more to do with capturing it's rail network for logistics, than recreating the battle of cannae
    - gustavus 3y ago
      I'd argue against that interpretation, the importance of invading Belgium had more to do with avoiding the French line of fortresses and hoping that the Belgians would just roll over than capturing rail networks that they wouldn't be able to use without a protracted war, which they had no anticipation of as they expected to be marching into Paris 900 hours after mobilization was declared.
- leroy_masochist 3y ago
  I agree with this assessment; the words "probably helped" are doing a lot of work here. Maybe a better way to put it would be, "probably were a factor in the timing of WWI". The German general staff was indeed very focused on the operational art of war and their working assumptions at the time of the war's outset (i.e., that they had an edge over the French via the Schlieffen plan) were certainly factors in Germany's overall calculus....maybe one of the proximate causeS, but not the underlying cause, which was the cumulative history of intense great power competition in the decades leading up to 1914.
- Miraste 3y ago
  The German military prior to WWI had far, far more political power than the US military in 2003. Voltaire's famous line "Where some states have an army, the Prussian Army has a state" didn't change in the intervening centuries, except that they acquired a whole empire in the meantime.
- User23 3y ago
  > Going to war is first and foremost a political act even if it is followed by a military response. Yeah I think we can safely assume that the German general staff were familiar with Clausewitz.
aiden3 3y ago
...I guess, yeah? Although the article does a fantastically terrible job talking about which maps, specifically, caused WWI. Very little substance.
- ftxbro 3y ago
  > the article does a fantastically terrible job talking about which maps, specifically, caused WWI. They argue (unconvincingly) that the map of the battle of Cannae caused it.
ftxbro 3y ago
This blogpost seemed tenuous to me. - cannae is a famous historical battle - the map of the battle was drawn sixty years after the battle - a german military leader studied the battle - germany was in ww1
- gustavus 3y ago
  The argument is a little bit stronger than that if your familiar with the specifics. Which goes more like - Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen is obssesed with the battle of Canne - Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen's entire life's work is to figure out how to beat France and Russia. - Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen writes a plan which becomes the sacred text of how the German army is to conduct a two front war against France and Russia. One of the critical parts of that plan is marching a truly massive German army through neutral Belgium. - When France Germany and Russia go to war Germany following the Schlieffen plan marches through Belgium triggering UK involvement in the war. Ergo if Schliffen isn't so obbssesed with Canne it doesn't end up being reflected in the Schliffen plan, if a double envelopment isn't the end goal of the Schliffen plan it's possible they don't go through Belgium, thus not triggering UK involvement and thus we have a very different war occurring. I don't agree but the theory is more plausible when you understand a lot of the details.
  - jjk166 3y ago
    > - Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen writes a plan which becomes the sacred text of how the German army is to conduct a two front war against France and Russia. One of the critical parts of that plan is marching a truly massive German army through neutral Belgium. > - When France Germany and Russia go to war Germany following the Schlieffen plan marches through Belgium triggering UK involvement in the war. Neither of these points are true. Schlieffen produced several different war plans for different potential scenarios and in WW1 Germany wound up following a very heavily modified version of one of those plans. While Britain officially gave the violation of Belgian neutrality as its reason for entering the war, and it certainly swayed public opinion in favor of the conflict, they had signed a treaty with France in 1911 pledging military support in the event of a German invasion regardless; and more generally had been in an increasingly antagonistic relationship with Germany for years. Perhaps had Schlieffen not been so obsessed with Cannae he would have made different recomendations, but the fact is that the rest of the German general staff generally agreed with the logic behind those recomendations. Then when their plans were put into action, they were largely vindicated as the invasion through Belgium did allow Germany to gain a massive advantage in the opening weeks of the war and sieze territory from which it would take years and millions of men to dislodge them. Indeed the main issue was that the plan assumed Russia would be slow to mobilize, giving the German army time to defeat France before they would have to reposition forces to the eastern front, but to everyone's surprise Russia instead mobilized quickly. A generation later, when the men who were boots on the ground at the time now led the German military, and had decades to study the previous conflict, they decided on attempting a plan that was broadly similar and again had great initial success. It's possible that Germany employs a totally different strategy in WW1 if Schlieffen isn't obsessed with Cannae, but there's no real evidence that they would.
thriftwy 3y ago
One of issues about WWI was German ressentment towards having so few colonies. If on these maps Africa, India and Americas would look larger, of course they will be super eager to start WWI and get their piece of now-visibly-even-bigger pie.
medo-bear 3y ago
causes proposed in lenin's book make more sense [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage_of_Capitalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Sta...
boxfire 3y ago
Ugh the first paragraph kicks off with a missing bit of information. Min Nan has at least 5 subvarieties. In my spouse's it's pronounced "de" not "te" (and she is Min Nan as a first language). She laughed and said there's no way the people in Xiamen said "te", or any of the subvarieties she is familiar with within coastal fujian where she spent the first 25 years of her life. So failed look at archaic miss transliterations, kind of reminiscent of the entire theme of the article. The example map being built on an argument from a bad assumption (a historical error as a pretext for argument). Perfect irony.
- CorrectHorseBat 3y ago
  de/te as in English or de/te as in pinyin? She and the article could well be both right if she's talking about pinyin pronunciation and the article not.
- bivargen 3y ago
  While I do not doubt that your spouse, this is besides the point, the point is that Min Nan pronounces the first phoneme of the word for “tea” with a dental stop, other chinese variants/languages realize the same phoneme with a dental affricate. I do not know if the article author/cartographer ever studied linguistics or phonetics, but this is the main takeaway from the map for me, a linguist, the pattern is the message, not the somewhat imprecise data points.
- tdtd 3y ago
  The "te" transliteration for 茶 in Min Nan comes from the Pe̍h-ōe-jī romanization system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh-%C5%8De-j%C4%AB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh-%C5%8De-j%C4%AB), which doesn't use the letter 'd' at all. As was common for Chinese romanization systems from before the 20th century, it used 't' for unaspirated /t/ (which we would use use 'd' for today in systems like Pinyin for Mandarin or Peng'im for Teochew), and used 'th' for aspirated /tʰ/ (which we sould use 't' for today in systems like Pinyin or Peng'im). This isn't an archaic miss transliteration, it's just an alternative transliteration strategy. In many languages that primarily use the latin alphabet, the phonemes associated with 't' and 'd' are /t/ and /d/, primarily distinguished by voice instead of aspiration (where aspiration is allophonic), so it's logical that the creators of earlier romanization systems focused on preserving that voice distinction, even if it's less common today for a variety of reasons.
icegreentea2 3y ago
Cannae is undoubtedly the ur battle of annihilation in the western world (particularly in the relevant period). I think it's reasonable to argue that Schlieffen was heavily influenced and motivated by it, and that perhaps the schematic simplicity by which it was portraited may have led Schlieffen and other German planners astray. But to lean completely on Tuchman to characterize the military planning of the Germans is completely negligent. Simply saying that it's imperfect scholarship does not excuse you from lifting your main thesis straight from the book. It's clear that Schlieffen drew on Cannae as a model, but the argument presented in this article is just... missing a lot of stuff? First, the Tuchman quote: "Under Schlieffen, envelopment became the fetish and frontal attack the anathema of the German General Staff.". I don't think this is a fair characterization ('fetish'). Why WOULD Germany -want- to perform frontal attacks when envelopment was an option? In nearly all scenarios, envelopment is strictly better than frontal attack when possible! And the Germans were hardly afraid of frontal assaults even at the start of WW1. They straight up face-tanked the Belgium fortresses! And beyond Cannae, the Germans had plenty of recent military history where envelopment/flanking carried the day. In the Austro-Prussian War at the Battle of Koniggratz (arguably one of the major stepping stones to the foundation of the German Empire), an operational flanking maneuver carried the day. In the Franco-Prussian war (the actual founding war of the German Empire), the Battle of Sedan was a battle of encirclement (the Prussians basically totally enveloped the French). Perhaps Cannae was the archetype they were chasing, but they also had recent (and nationally significant) examples to draw on. They were not 'just' chasing a 2000 year old mirage - they were trying to live up to their own recent traditions and history. So when the author says, "Doubt never seemed to enter the minds of these military strategists of pre-war Germany. It did not seem to trouble them, for instance, that they were drawing world-changing lessons from a map of a battle of two thousand years earlier about which surprisingly little is known" - well, I'd argue that they weren't troubled because they weren't drawing world changing lessons from 2000 years ago. They were drawing world-changing lessons from recent world-changing events (they UNIFIED GERMANY! They MADE the GERMAN EMPIRE!) that their parents and grandparents just partook in.
- trynumber9 3y ago
  I agree but it's notable that Schlieffen, like many German officers who worked on war plans leading up to the Great War, wasn't even drawing lessons from his parent's experience - he partook in the Franco-Prussian War himself.
zeteo 3y ago
For anyone who finds the sequence from Cannae to WW1 tenuous or hard to follow: - Alfred von Schlieffen, chief military planner for the German Empire during a crucial period (1891-1906), was obsessed with the battle of Cannae. - A Cannae-style battle seemed impossible in the east, as the Russians had plenty of space to fall back and had done so during Napoleon's time. - So Schlieffen focused all German planning on a decisive blow in the west. The Germans would encircle the French army and annihilate it Cannae-style. - When, in August 1914, the Kaiser wanted to mobilize solely against Russia, the generals told him it was impossible to do so and they had to attack France instead. - Schlieffen's Cannae-inspired plan had the further consequence of flanking the French through Belgium. This drew in Britain and made it a world war.
slowhadoken 3y ago
You’ll never guess what happens next.
ethbr1 3y ago
It's curious how people are responding to the title, rather than the post, which touches on the title but is mostly about another thing: >> There’s something beguiling about the thought that a simple arrangement of lines might explain the world — like seeing human history as an enormous game of Civilization 6. But of course, that’s also the problem with using maps as a way of understanding history. If you’re not careful, they go from being helpful tools to misleading simplifications. To which I think the blog post makes an interesting argument. I've always thought about maps from a Tufte perspective: (1) They are abstractions from reality. (2) Consequently, they simplify and omit select details. (3) Consequently, they are created with an inherent and specific purpose in mind: details necessary for that purpose are included, those unneeded are omitted.(4) Ergo, we must be careful to understand a map's original purpose and ask whether its abstractions are likely to remain valid if we choose to employ it for another. F.ex. the tactical drawing of Cannae's double envelopment likely doesn't generalize to the strategic realm
- deleted 3y ago
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- hammock 3y ago
  Incredibly relevant commentary today, in regards to the Ukraine conflict
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    And to the Chinese map including new territory.
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      And Russian and Japanese maps of the Kuril Islands. Pakistani and Indian maps of Jammu and Kashmir and the Siachen. "thence north to the glaciers"
- kqr 3y ago
  I'm reminded of how all models are wrong...
roussanoff 3y ago
> It is said to prove a point about the globalization of tea: words for tea that sound like chai reflect a historical spread via overland routes, the argument goes, while words like tea are a legacy of maritime trade. A 2018 viral article by the data journalist Nikhil Sonad in Quartz first put this idea on the world’s radar. This “idea” was on wikipedia since at least 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Etymology_of_tea&oldid=667975750 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Etymology_of_tea&...
openasocket 3y ago
I mean, I wouldn't say that it CAUSED world war I. World War I was caused by political effects and the powderkeg that was European diplomacy at the time. Did it influence how World War I was fought? I'd say ... maybe, kinda, if you squint at it enough. The Schlieffen plan at its core was a classic envelopment. And, to be clear, that isn't a bad strategy. Enveloping the enemy is actually the cornerstone of modern warfare. Sure, it didn't go as expected in this case, but given the technology and doctrine of the time it was probably the most likely route to success. Or rather, it's very hard to imagine any plan for invasion by the Germans that didn't lead to the stalemate we saw, barring some massive blunder on the French side.
trynumber9 3y ago
Battle of annihilation became the fetish of the German army well before WWI. As the Germans already did it successfully in 1870 by encircling two French armies leading to what was - at the time - somewhat of a surprise victory. Why would one credit this obsession to a 2000 year old tactical victory (Cannae) and not the 40 year old strategic victories of Metz and Sedan? Schlieffen plan had the same aim but shifted northward to deal with the fact that after the annexations of 1871 any offensive through the south (now guarded by the Vosges) was unlikely to be successful.
- TSiege 3y ago
  This comment should really be higher
mikhailfranco 3y ago
Almost certainly did not cause WWI. May have influenced German overconfidence and some of their tactics.
moretrashplz 3y ago
Wars since the age of Napoleon have been caused by bankers, not maps. Let's be real.
0xDEF 3y ago
It's remarkable how little of what Putin and Russian state median say internally to Russians is covered in Western media. They are obsessed with old maps. A few months ago Putin flaunted a map from the 1700s without Ukraine as proof as that Ukraine has always belonged to Russia and that "Russians" live in all regions of Ukraine (beyond Crimea and Donbas).
- throwmeouthn 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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kgeist 3y ago
>words for tea that sound like chai reflect a historical spread via overland routes, the argument goes, while words like tea are a legacy of maritime trade >A 2018 viral article by the data journalist Nikhil Sonad in Quartz first put this idea on the world’s radar It was common knowledge for decades. At least among linguists.
Soupy 3y ago
Love it. The core point that I actually took away is driving home the fact that maps are not infallible and this goes against common sense for most people. I don't know if it truly led to WWI, but faulty maps have definitely caused endless problems throughout history. Look at Bermuda - the lack of this island on maps (or inprecise positioning) from the 14th-19th century has directly caused 350+ shipwrecks littering its shores. And countries didn't share updated positioning data/maps for centuries because it was a strategic advantage to horde it. Cool now, horrifying back then. Even today, official US govn topo maps are constantly rectified and reprinted as new surveys and aerials are taken into account and we realize errors were made. You can actually explore the differences in the reprints via https://pastmaps.com/explore https://pastmaps.com/explore if you're curious about it (for full transparency, Pastmaps is my own project)
exabrial 3y ago
Any new form of communication usually provokes misunderstanding and often abuse by powers that be. To this day, people still believe things on the internet...
jacquesm 3y ago
I remember crossing from France into Spain and back again somewhere in the early 80's, when Europe definitely still had physical borders and not realizing I had done so until it had happened. My surprise stemmed in part from the fact that on the map there was a clear line and in real life there was absolutely nothing at all. It really helped me to understand once and for all that maps are just pieces of paper and that it's the real world that counts. Of course a days walk further where the highway entered Spain you'd have been stopped and asked for your passport. But high up in the countryside nobody really cared about where precisely that border was, the path is then on this side of the border and a little while later on the other. And this was at a time when the Basque separatist movement was very active with regular bombings. So the lack of a border and associated controls was in a way something that you wouldn't expect at all. Now, with Schengen in full effect all over Europe crossing a border is something that usually involves seeing some buildings without a purpose in the middle of a highway. The only time I have been stopped inside the Schengen area for document checks was during the COVID era and it felt pretty weird not to be able to just go from Amsterdam to Riga without such checks.
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  I'm not sure what the profound insight is supposed to be here. Everyone knows that borders are established by convention and agreement. That doesn't mean they don't matter. Borders exist for the sake of the common good, in a way that's analogous to private property, which also exists for the sake of the common good. I realize this must be a strange notion for those of us raised in a culture that's been shot through with liberalism and liberal/radically individualist ideas (I have here in mind the philosophical stance, not liberal institutions), where private property is understood as prior to the common good and where the common good is conceived as something that's grudgingly ceded from private property. But traditionally, the common good was taken to be prior to private property, and private property to be something the exists for the sake of the common good because it enables human flourishing. (Incidentally, this understanding resolves ethical problems concerning the use of what would otherwise be taken to be private property during times of crisis, such as whether the taking of food from a privately owned stockpile, by starving people, during a famine would constitute theft.) Now, how particular borders are enforced or respected or treated is a matter of prudential political judgement. Schengen is not borderless. It is itself defined by a border that is enforced by Frontex! It is precisely the Schengen border that enables free movement within Schengen. Member states have determined that free movement between them and them only is for the common good of these member states. Furthermore, just because free movement is now possible doesn't mean borders have ceased to exist. Administrative borders still exist because they circumscribe legal jurisdictions, and these may or may not coincide with ethnic boundaries or cultural regions. States have simply become more permissive about enforcing movement because of their membership in Schengen. But if a crisis were to occur, such as a flood of migrants that threatens the good of a nation's population, you can be sure that member states would control the flow of people over their borders again, if only temporarily, to contain the crisis and protect the common good of the population. Protecting the common good is, after all, the job of the state.
tomcam 3y ago
I just knew those cartographers were a sketchy bunch. But did any of you listen to me? /joke
hguant 3y ago
This was a fun article, but I think the core argument - indeed the article as a whole - is lacking because it fails to mention the actual major influence on the German general staff; Clausewitz, who did not rely on ancient battles and poorly drawn maps, but his own experiences and the immediate experience of those who were decimated by maneuver warfare in the Napoleonic wars. If there was a battle that the German high command was obsessed with, it was Austerlitz, where Napoleon showed how maneuver and control of his armies could decimate larger forces. That's, well, the reason the German general staff came into existence - analysis of Napoleon's victories and style of leadership showed that just amassing troops wasn't enough, here had to be a plan, and an operational art of war, beyond mere tactics. Many studies, even the very first war games, were done by the German high command, using exquisitely drawn maps (again, one of the things they learned from the preceding wars, actually knowing what terrain you're on, and where you are kind of matters a great deal) looking at the battles of the Napoleonic wars, and the power of maneuver over fires. The issue comes, not from machine guns, but from the absolutely devasting power of artillery, which turns nearly maneuvering blocks of infantry into, well, horrible casualties. Generals on both sides of the war looked for that one crushing engagement, that one sweep where they could break the enemy morale and carry the day. Of course they looked to Cannae, and spoke of victory to match it, it's one of the great battles and is taught for a reason. However, I think it's a mistake to look at the speeches and letters extolling a battle from 2000 years ago while ignoring entirely the world changing war that happened in their nation's recent memory, the one they literally wrote the book about.
jojobas 3y ago
I don't get the point, the author seems to make the point that double envelopment was not relevant by WW1. Guess what, it was relevant in WW2 and is still relevant today. The Reds were all about maneuver warfare in Russian Civil War and kept dreaming of it throughout the Cold War. A number of double envelopments has happened in the Ukraine war. When you're economically weaker the war of annihilation is your only bet.

145 points by benbreen 3y ago

> Keeping that in mind, return to the map above and take note of Portugal and Brazil. I took note: Brazil is absent from the map, which doesn't show the Americas.

jibe 3y ago
Look again, it isn’t to scale, but the americas are there!
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  Oh my, so it is! The Americas is that little island off Japan.

TSiege 3y ago

The argument laid out in this post and in the title around maps, specifically the battle of cannae, leading to world war one is pretty weak. I buy that German generals were obsessed with the battle, but I don't see any evidence here that this caused the war. Going to war is first and foremost a political act even if it is followed by a military response. There's no mention of the complex politics of europe at the time with it's web of alliances, nor any talk of arch duke ferdinand. Sure German generals thought they could easily win the war following the teachings of Cannae, but they no more caused the war than the US military did with the invasion of Iraq

jprete 3y ago
I'm not an expert, but I think for World War I the military strategy questions - and in particular the misconceptions - were very relevant to the decision to go to war. My understanding is that the various combatant powers believed that the war would be quick and decisive in the way that prior wars had been; none expected or prepared for a four-year slog of trench warfare, defensive supremacy, or total depletion of whole demographics of the population. I've read that the American Civil War pioneered many of the technologies and strategies used in World War I, and if European military strategists had paid attention they would have had a better idea of what they were in for.
- benbreen 3y ago
  Author here - yes, this is what I was getting at. The false promise of a rapid victory over the French via encirclement from the right flank (in the style of Hannibal) really was a major factor in justifying the risks of war for the German General Staff. And because Schlieffen was preoccupied with the idea that an ancient battle could be a model for that approach, it distracted from the now-obvious technological changes of the period (machine guns=defensive warfare) that made the approach impossible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan
  - gustavus 3y ago
    I'd argue against Schlieffen wanting to recreate the battle of Canne, and say that was much more the result of Moltke giving the Crown Prince permission to advance. After all the original Schlieffen plan was to have the Alsace region slowly retreat and give ground enticing the French further in, whereas the right flank that was to wheel through Belgium and strike at Paris was to do all the work. If anyone was going trying to recreate Canne I would argue it was Moltke, as he was the one that allowed the left flank to start moving forward.
    - jakderrida 3y ago
      > After all the original Schlieffen plan was to have the Alsace region slowly retreat and give ground enticing the French further in That actually would be a much better analogy to Cannae. Enticing them to break your center, not realizing until they're surrounded that the victory they've charged into is actually an epic defeat. I still don't understand why they'd assume French generals would do that, though. It really assumes a hopeless level of ineptitude on their part for it to work. Seems obvious to me they're better off stalling till Russians are mobilized, no matter how enticing the bait is.
  - TSiege 3y ago
    If that's the case you're trying to present, your article should be clearer about that. That wikipedia entry also doesn't seem to bolster your case. It doesn't even mention the battle of Cannae, but it does talk extensively about the importance of capturing the Belgian rail network for the German logistics in fighting France
gustavus 3y ago
So a couple of points of clarifications > specifically the battle of cannae, leading to world war one is pretty weak. I buy that German generals were obsessed with the battle, So not just the German generals specifically Schlieffen. The Schlieffen plan developed by it's namesake general was the governing document for the German plan of battle at the beginning of WW1. Schlieffen spent his entire life trying to figure out the plan that would eventually be his namesake, and he was also obsessed with Canne, so I could see an argument that was a contributing factor. If schlifen wasn't obsessed with the double envelopment he is less likely to send troops through Belgium and no Belgium means no UK involvement leading to a very different war. > Going to war is first and foremost a political act That is one of the fascinating things about WW1 is there are times where it seems as if forces more than men were dictating things. At one point after mobilization and but prior to the actual invasion of Belgium the Kaiser wanted to stop things as he believed a peace deal was reached and was told no, not only no but that such a thing was fundamentally impossible at that point because the military plans laid out by the generals many years ago had dictated so precisely how things had to happen that any change to the plans was close to impossible once they were set in motion. The same thing happened in the Russian side the Czar issued orders for mobilisation then stand down then mobilization again and then one general smashed his telephone so that it could not be rescinded. I think they is part of what made WW1 the war it was, it was one ran primarily by and for the generals (until the later years) with the political officials deferring all power and authority to them.
- TSiege 3y ago
  From what I've been able to find, the importance of invading Belgium had more to do with capturing it's rail network for logistics, than recreating the battle of cannae
  - gustavus 3y ago
    I'd argue against that interpretation, the importance of invading Belgium had more to do with avoiding the French line of fortresses and hoping that the Belgians would just roll over than capturing rail networks that they wouldn't be able to use without a protracted war, which they had no anticipation of as they expected to be marching into Paris 900 hours after mobilization was declared.
leroy_masochist 3y ago
I agree with this assessment; the words "probably helped" are doing a lot of work here. Maybe a better way to put it would be, "probably were a factor in the timing of WWI". The German general staff was indeed very focused on the operational art of war and their working assumptions at the time of the war's outset (i.e., that they had an edge over the French via the Schlieffen plan) were certainly factors in Germany's overall calculus....maybe one of the proximate causeS, but not the underlying cause, which was the cumulative history of intense great power competition in the decades leading up to 1914.
Miraste 3y ago
The German military prior to WWI had far, far more political power than the US military in 2003. Voltaire's famous line "Where some states have an army, the Prussian Army has a state" didn't change in the intervening centuries, except that they acquired a whole empire in the meantime.
User23 3y ago
> Going to war is first and foremost a political act even if it is followed by a military response. Yeah I think we can safely assume that the German general staff were familiar with Clausewitz.

aiden3 3y ago

...I guess, yeah? Although the article does a fantastically terrible job talking about which maps, specifically, caused WWI. Very little substance.

ftxbro 3y ago
> the article does a fantastically terrible job talking about which maps, specifically, caused WWI. They argue (unconvincingly) that the map of the battle of Cannae caused it.

ftxbro 3y ago

This blogpost seemed tenuous to me. - cannae is a famous historical battle - the map of the battle was drawn sixty years after the battle - a german military leader studied the battle - germany was in ww1

gustavus 3y ago
The argument is a little bit stronger than that if your familiar with the specifics. Which goes more like - Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen is obssesed with the battle of Canne - Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen's entire life's work is to figure out how to beat France and Russia. - Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen writes a plan which becomes the sacred text of how the German army is to conduct a two front war against France and Russia. One of the critical parts of that plan is marching a truly massive German army through neutral Belgium. - When France Germany and Russia go to war Germany following the Schlieffen plan marches through Belgium triggering UK involvement in the war. Ergo if Schliffen isn't so obbssesed with Canne it doesn't end up being reflected in the Schliffen plan, if a double envelopment isn't the end goal of the Schliffen plan it's possible they don't go through Belgium, thus not triggering UK involvement and thus we have a very different war occurring. I don't agree but the theory is more plausible when you understand a lot of the details.
- jjk166 3y ago
  > - Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen writes a plan which becomes the sacred text of how the German army is to conduct a two front war against France and Russia. One of the critical parts of that plan is marching a truly massive German army through neutral Belgium. > - When France Germany and Russia go to war Germany following the Schlieffen plan marches through Belgium triggering UK involvement in the war. Neither of these points are true. Schlieffen produced several different war plans for different potential scenarios and in WW1 Germany wound up following a very heavily modified version of one of those plans. While Britain officially gave the violation of Belgian neutrality as its reason for entering the war, and it certainly swayed public opinion in favor of the conflict, they had signed a treaty with France in 1911 pledging military support in the event of a German invasion regardless; and more generally had been in an increasingly antagonistic relationship with Germany for years. Perhaps had Schlieffen not been so obsessed with Cannae he would have made different recomendations, but the fact is that the rest of the German general staff generally agreed with the logic behind those recomendations. Then when their plans were put into action, they were largely vindicated as the invasion through Belgium did allow Germany to gain a massive advantage in the opening weeks of the war and sieze territory from which it would take years and millions of men to dislodge them. Indeed the main issue was that the plan assumed Russia would be slow to mobilize, giving the German army time to defeat France before they would have to reposition forces to the eastern front, but to everyone's surprise Russia instead mobilized quickly. A generation later, when the men who were boots on the ground at the time now led the German military, and had decades to study the previous conflict, they decided on attempting a plan that was broadly similar and again had great initial success. It's possible that Germany employs a totally different strategy in WW1 if Schlieffen isn't obsessed with Cannae, but there's no real evidence that they would.

thriftwy 3y ago

One of issues about WWI was German ressentment towards having so few colonies. If on these maps Africa, India and Americas would look larger, of course they will be super eager to start WWI and get their piece of now-visibly-even-bigger pie.

medo-bear 3y ago

causes proposed in lenin's book make more sense [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage_of_Capitalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Sta...

boxfire 3y ago

Ugh the first paragraph kicks off with a missing bit of information. Min Nan has at least 5 subvarieties. In my spouse's it's pronounced "de" not "te" (and she is Min Nan as a first language). She laughed and said there's no way the people in Xiamen said "te", or any of the subvarieties she is familiar with within coastal fujian where she spent the first 25 years of her life. So failed look at archaic miss transliterations, kind of reminiscent of the entire theme of the article. The example map being built on an argument from a bad assumption (a historical error as a pretext for argument). Perfect irony.

CorrectHorseBat 3y ago
de/te as in English or de/te as in pinyin? She and the article could well be both right if she's talking about pinyin pronunciation and the article not.
bivargen 3y ago
While I do not doubt that your spouse, this is besides the point, the point is that Min Nan pronounces the first phoneme of the word for “tea” with a dental stop, other chinese variants/languages realize the same phoneme with a dental affricate. I do not know if the article author/cartographer ever studied linguistics or phonetics, but this is the main takeaway from the map for me, a linguist, the pattern is the message, not the somewhat imprecise data points.
tdtd 3y ago
The "te" transliteration for 茶 in Min Nan comes from the Pe̍h-ōe-jī romanization system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh-%C5%8De-j%C4%AB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh-%C5%8De-j%C4%AB), which doesn't use the letter 'd' at all. As was common for Chinese romanization systems from before the 20th century, it used 't' for unaspirated /t/ (which we would use use 'd' for today in systems like Pinyin for Mandarin or Peng'im for Teochew), and used 'th' for aspirated /tʰ/ (which we sould use 't' for today in systems like Pinyin or Peng'im). This isn't an archaic miss transliteration, it's just an alternative transliteration strategy. In many languages that primarily use the latin alphabet, the phonemes associated with 't' and 'd' are /t/ and /d/, primarily distinguished by voice instead of aspiration (where aspiration is allophonic), so it's logical that the creators of earlier romanization systems focused on preserving that voice distinction, even if it's less common today for a variety of reasons.

icegreentea2 3y ago

Cannae is undoubtedly the ur battle of annihilation in the western world (particularly in the relevant period). I think it's reasonable to argue that Schlieffen was heavily influenced and motivated by it, and that perhaps the schematic simplicity by which it was portraited may have led Schlieffen and other German planners astray. But to lean completely on Tuchman to characterize the military planning of the Germans is completely negligent. Simply saying that it's imperfect scholarship does not excuse you from lifting your main thesis straight from the book. It's clear that Schlieffen drew on Cannae as a model, but the argument presented in this article is just... missing a lot of stuff? First, the Tuchman quote: "Under Schlieffen, envelopment became the fetish and frontal attack the anathema of the German General Staff.". I don't think this is a fair characterization ('fetish'). Why WOULD Germany -want- to perform frontal attacks when envelopment was an option? In nearly all scenarios, envelopment is strictly better than frontal attack when possible! And the Germans were hardly afraid of frontal assaults even at the start of WW1. They straight up face-tanked the Belgium fortresses! And beyond Cannae, the Germans had plenty of recent military history where envelopment/flanking carried the day. In the Austro-Prussian War at the Battle of Koniggratz (arguably one of the major stepping stones to the foundation of the German Empire), an operational flanking maneuver carried the day. In the Franco-Prussian war (the actual founding war of the German Empire), the Battle of Sedan was a battle of encirclement (the Prussians basically totally enveloped the French). Perhaps Cannae was the archetype they were chasing, but they also had recent (and nationally significant) examples to draw on. They were not 'just' chasing a 2000 year old mirage - they were trying to live up to their own recent traditions and history. So when the author says, "Doubt never seemed to enter the minds of these military strategists of pre-war Germany. It did not seem to trouble them, for instance, that they were drawing world-changing lessons from a map of a battle of two thousand years earlier about which surprisingly little is known" - well, I'd argue that they weren't troubled because they weren't drawing world changing lessons from 2000 years ago. They were drawing world-changing lessons from recent world-changing events (they UNIFIED GERMANY! They MADE the GERMAN EMPIRE!) that their parents and grandparents just partook in.

trynumber9 3y ago
I agree but it's notable that Schlieffen, like many German officers who worked on war plans leading up to the Great War, wasn't even drawing lessons from his parent's experience - he partook in the Franco-Prussian War himself.

zeteo 3y ago

For anyone who finds the sequence from Cannae to WW1 tenuous or hard to follow: - Alfred von Schlieffen, chief military planner for the German Empire during a crucial period (1891-1906), was obsessed with the battle of Cannae. - A Cannae-style battle seemed impossible in the east, as the Russians had plenty of space to fall back and had done so during Napoleon's time. - So Schlieffen focused all German planning on a decisive blow in the west. The Germans would encircle the French army and annihilate it Cannae-style. - When, in August 1914, the Kaiser wanted to mobilize solely against Russia, the generals told him it was impossible to do so and they had to attack France instead. - Schlieffen's Cannae-inspired plan had the further consequence of flanking the French through Belgium. This drew in Britain and made it a world war.

slowhadoken 3y ago

You’ll never guess what happens next.

ethbr1 3y ago

It's curious how people are responding to the title, rather than the post, which touches on the title but is mostly about another thing: >> There’s something beguiling about the thought that a simple arrangement of lines might explain the world — like seeing human history as an enormous game of Civilization 6. But of course, that’s also the problem with using maps as a way of understanding history. If you’re not careful, they go from being helpful tools to misleading simplifications. To which I think the blog post makes an interesting argument. I've always thought about maps from a Tufte perspective: (1) They are abstractions from reality. (2) Consequently, they simplify and omit select details. (3) Consequently, they are created with an inherent and specific purpose in mind: details necessary for that purpose are included, those unneeded are omitted.(4) Ergo, we must be careful to understand a map's original purpose and ask whether its abstractions are likely to remain valid if we choose to employ it for another. F.ex. the tactical drawing of Cannae's double envelopment likely doesn't generalize to the strategic realm

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hammock 3y ago
Incredibly relevant commentary today, in regards to the Ukraine conflict
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  And to the Chinese map including new territory.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    And Russian and Japanese maps of the Kuril Islands. Pakistani and Indian maps of Jammu and Kashmir and the Siachen. "thence north to the glaciers"
kqr 3y ago
I'm reminded of how all models are wrong...

roussanoff 3y ago

> It is said to prove a point about the globalization of tea: words for tea that sound like chai reflect a historical spread via overland routes, the argument goes, while words like tea are a legacy of maritime trade. A 2018 viral article by the data journalist Nikhil Sonad in Quartz first put this idea on the world’s radar. This “idea” was on wikipedia since at least 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Etymology_of_tea&oldid=667975750 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Etymology_of_tea&...

openasocket 3y ago

I mean, I wouldn't say that it CAUSED world war I. World War I was caused by political effects and the powderkeg that was European diplomacy at the time. Did it influence how World War I was fought? I'd say ... maybe, kinda, if you squint at it enough. The Schlieffen plan at its core was a classic envelopment. And, to be clear, that isn't a bad strategy. Enveloping the enemy is actually the cornerstone of modern warfare. Sure, it didn't go as expected in this case, but given the technology and doctrine of the time it was probably the most likely route to success. Or rather, it's very hard to imagine any plan for invasion by the Germans that didn't lead to the stalemate we saw, barring some massive blunder on the French side.

trynumber9 3y ago

Battle of annihilation became the fetish of the German army well before WWI. As the Germans already did it successfully in 1870 by encircling two French armies leading to what was - at the time - somewhat of a surprise victory. Why would one credit this obsession to a 2000 year old tactical victory (Cannae) and not the 40 year old strategic victories of Metz and Sedan? Schlieffen plan had the same aim but shifted northward to deal with the fact that after the annexations of 1871 any offensive through the south (now guarded by the Vosges) was unlikely to be successful.

TSiege 3y ago
This comment should really be higher

mikhailfranco 3y ago

Almost certainly did not cause WWI. May have influenced German overconfidence and some of their tactics.

moretrashplz 3y ago

Wars since the age of Napoleon have been caused by bankers, not maps. Let's be real.

0xDEF 3y ago

It's remarkable how little of what Putin and Russian state median say internally to Russians is covered in Western media. They are obsessed with old maps. A few months ago Putin flaunted a map from the 1700s without Ukraine as proof as that Ukraine has always belonged to Russia and that "Russians" live in all regions of Ukraine (beyond Crimea and Donbas).

throwmeouthn 3y ago
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kgeist 3y ago

>words for tea that sound like chai reflect a historical spread via overland routes, the argument goes, while words like tea are a legacy of maritime trade >A 2018 viral article by the data journalist Nikhil Sonad in Quartz first put this idea on the world’s radar It was common knowledge for decades. At least among linguists.

Soupy 3y ago

Love it. The core point that I actually took away is driving home the fact that maps are not infallible and this goes against common sense for most people. I don't know if it truly led to WWI, but faulty maps have definitely caused endless problems throughout history. Look at Bermuda - the lack of this island on maps (or inprecise positioning) from the 14th-19th century has directly caused 350+ shipwrecks littering its shores. And countries didn't share updated positioning data/maps for centuries because it was a strategic advantage to horde it. Cool now, horrifying back then. Even today, official US govn topo maps are constantly rectified and reprinted as new surveys and aerials are taken into account and we realize errors were made. You can actually explore the differences in the reprints via https://pastmaps.com/explore https://pastmaps.com/explore if you're curious about it (for full transparency, Pastmaps is my own project)

exabrial 3y ago

Any new form of communication usually provokes misunderstanding and often abuse by powers that be. To this day, people still believe things on the internet...

jacquesm 3y ago

I remember crossing from France into Spain and back again somewhere in the early 80's, when Europe definitely still had physical borders and not realizing I had done so until it had happened. My surprise stemmed in part from the fact that on the map there was a clear line and in real life there was absolutely nothing at all. It really helped me to understand once and for all that maps are just pieces of paper and that it's the real world that counts. Of course a days walk further where the highway entered Spain you'd have been stopped and asked for your passport. But high up in the countryside nobody really cared about where precisely that border was, the path is then on this side of the border and a little while later on the other. And this was at a time when the Basque separatist movement was very active with regular bombings. So the lack of a border and associated controls was in a way something that you wouldn't expect at all. Now, with Schengen in full effect all over Europe crossing a border is something that usually involves seeing some buildings without a purpose in the middle of a highway. The only time I have been stopped inside the Schengen area for document checks was during the COVID era and it felt pretty weird not to be able to just go from Amsterdam to Riga without such checks.

lo_zamoyski 3y ago
I'm not sure what the profound insight is supposed to be here. Everyone knows that borders are established by convention and agreement. That doesn't mean they don't matter. Borders exist for the sake of the common good, in a way that's analogous to private property, which also exists for the sake of the common good. I realize this must be a strange notion for those of us raised in a culture that's been shot through with liberalism and liberal/radically individualist ideas (I have here in mind the philosophical stance, not liberal institutions), where private property is understood as prior to the common good and where the common good is conceived as something that's grudgingly ceded from private property. But traditionally, the common good was taken to be prior to private property, and private property to be something the exists for the sake of the common good because it enables human flourishing. (Incidentally, this understanding resolves ethical problems concerning the use of what would otherwise be taken to be private property during times of crisis, such as whether the taking of food from a privately owned stockpile, by starving people, during a famine would constitute theft.) Now, how particular borders are enforced or respected or treated is a matter of prudential political judgement. Schengen is not borderless. It is itself defined by a border that is enforced by Frontex! It is precisely the Schengen border that enables free movement within Schengen. Member states have determined that free movement between them and them only is for the common good of these member states. Furthermore, just because free movement is now possible doesn't mean borders have ceased to exist. Administrative borders still exist because they circumscribe legal jurisdictions, and these may or may not coincide with ethnic boundaries or cultural regions. States have simply become more permissive about enforcing movement because of their membership in Schengen. But if a crisis were to occur, such as a flood of migrants that threatens the good of a nation's population, you can be sure that member states would control the flow of people over their borders again, if only temporarily, to contain the crisis and protect the common good of the population. Protecting the common good is, after all, the job of the state.

tomcam 3y ago

I just knew those cartographers were a sketchy bunch. But did any of you listen to me? /joke

hguant 3y ago

This was a fun article, but I think the core argument - indeed the article as a whole - is lacking because it fails to mention the actual major influence on the German general staff; Clausewitz, who did not rely on ancient battles and poorly drawn maps, but his own experiences and the immediate experience of those who were decimated by maneuver warfare in the Napoleonic wars. If there was a battle that the German high command was obsessed with, it was Austerlitz, where Napoleon showed how maneuver and control of his armies could decimate larger forces. That's, well, the reason the German general staff came into existence - analysis of Napoleon's victories and style of leadership showed that just amassing troops wasn't enough, here had to be a plan, and an operational art of war, beyond mere tactics. Many studies, even the very first war games, were done by the German high command, using exquisitely drawn maps (again, one of the things they learned from the preceding wars, actually knowing what terrain you're on, and where you are kind of matters a great deal) looking at the battles of the Napoleonic wars, and the power of maneuver over fires. The issue comes, not from machine guns, but from the absolutely devasting power of artillery, which turns nearly maneuvering blocks of infantry into, well, horrible casualties. Generals on both sides of the war looked for that one crushing engagement, that one sweep where they could break the enemy morale and carry the day. Of course they looked to Cannae, and spoke of victory to match it, it's one of the great battles and is taught for a reason. However, I think it's a mistake to look at the speeches and letters extolling a battle from 2000 years ago while ignoring entirely the world changing war that happened in their nation's recent memory, the one they literally wrote the book about.

jojobas 3y ago

I don't get the point, the author seems to make the point that double envelopment was not relevant by WW1. Guess what, it was relevant in WW2 and is still relevant today. The Reds were all about maneuver warfare in Russian Civil War and kept dreaming of it throughout the Cold War. A number of double envelopments has happened in the Ukraine war. When you're economically weaker the war of annihilation is your only bet.