Reviews for The History of the Navy During the Rebellion, Volume 2

The average rating for The History of the Navy During the Rebellion, Volume 2 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-11-13 00:00:00 Kent Hilen A comprehensive look at history of communications from antiquity to the 50s, when the author died. This book was his swan song, and wasn't accepted well in the academic community. The book shifts many paradigms of communication and its role in legal systems, governance and economic development. Below is my longer review: Harold Innis is effectively one of the first economic historians. His investigation into communications in empires that prospered and later collapsed, was aimed at finding answers to contemporary (after First World War) economic problems. The results of his efforts formed a new paradigm. As with anything new, his approach to looking for answers in distant history through second hand sources was frowned upon by the scientific community for lacking sophistication and, what they called, “inferior colonial perspective” on the history of the world. However, in the introduction of Empire and Communications, Alexander John Watson calls the book and Innis’ findings nothing less than “prophetic.” Even though he was denounced as a serious scholar because of his commoner background and, what his contemporary colleagues thought to be, a mediocre knowledge of economy and history, Innis’ study of communications of antiquity has laid the foundations for the work of such communication star-scholars as Marshall McLuhan. It was McLuhan’s quoting Innis’ work in his books that brought the renewed interest in the latter’s work. A number of concepts that Innis discovered in his study of history of communications may be applied today. For example he refers to “Civilizations can only survive through a concern with their limitations, and in turn through a concern of their institutions, including empires.” In part of his introduction to the historical study he conducted, Innis quotes Bryce who sums up that all past empires had a tendency towards aggregation, which in turn is almost the very reason for their demise. An example of Rome’s highly centralized top-down organization is brought forward as invoking such strong centrifugal and centripetal forces that destroy it within and without. From this example Innes extrapolates the importance of efficiency of communication, especially when time and space in vast empires such as Rome, determined the formation of power structures. Innis goes as far back as Egypt and Babylonia. He places a great deal of importance to the development of writing and reading as a major step in furthering the power of the ruling class and ultimately the Monarch. “With the use of papyrus the systems of administration became one of numerous officials. Administration and its dependence on writing implied religious sanctions which meant encroachment on law.” The rise of the Greek civilization “was apparently accompanied by a change from voluntary to obligatory [aristocratic form of government]. Innis quotesThirlwall, who eloquently describes the validity of the notion that the legal system is entirely in the hands of the aristocracy, i.e. those in power “In the absence of a written code, those who declare and interpret laws may be properly said to make them.” However, a key point is evident in Innis’ conclusions about the Greek civilization. He firmly believes that it is “the spread of writing that contributed to the collapse of the Geek civilization by widening the gap between the city-states.” He also concludes that it is the oral tradition of the Greeks, that prevented them from forming an absolute monarchism and theocracy. Through Innis’ detailed examination of the influence of papyrus, paper and later, the printing press, he continues to weave a thread of the written word and its influence on legal systems in different societies.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-01-26 00:00:00 Aron Frisch Innis writes socio-economic historiography like Hemingway fiction. Sentences are spartan in the book's main sections while footnotes and appended scribblings vy for the position of shortest syntactically incomplete semantic units. Comes with a downright silly bibliography -- a roughly estimated average of four works cited per page. Sometimes obtuse (which has mostly to do with syntax, in some cases with terminology) and always dispassionate (an attitude McLuhan in the foreword calls "a lack of a fixed point of view; ie a mosaic approach" (speaking of which, the later chapters of the book feel very familiar to any reader of McLuhan's and show clearly where the latter got his self-admitted inspiration)). Innis casts a rock in the historical pond by putting communication (technology) in the limelight and tracing its development throughout and influence on pivotal moments in human history (mostly limited to the ancient mediterranean cultures plus the west) and while even the more critical reader can't but be thankful for a recalibration taking into account historically underlit elements, one can't help but wonder if tackling such a huge subject (ie the evolution of human society starting from Mesopotamia all the way to the early Cold War) with such an obsessive lens (namely, comm tech) isn't leaving any other angle -- potentially even móre important -- unseen. Nevertheless, astounding in scope and erudition and frequently eye-opening in conclusions/interpretations (such as recasting the American civil war as essentially newspaper-driven, pointing to the lawyer class as a de facto synthesis of aristocracy and clergy and naming monopolies of knowledge, the intellectual chasms they irrevocably open w/r/t the public at large and mass culture as the biggest enemies of the West (or any culture, for that matter)), Empire and Communications is a challenging though potentially rewarding read, remaining for the most part totally accessible to amateurs such as myself.