There’s a particular type of alternate history whose premise is: what if [fill in the blank past society] industrialized? (Rome is a particular magnet for this.)

The challenge of such speculation is that we have precisely one data point for what de novo industrialization looks like. Many parts of the world have industrialized, but they’ve done it by adopting the concepts and technologies developed elsewhere. As a result, our explanations for how it happens run the risk of being just-so stories, with no way to test them and see if they’re correct. Those being the only explanations we have, though, we pretty much have to go with them whenever we attempt to depict either an alternate historical industrialization, or this process happening in a secondary world.

But before we ask what it takes to industrialize, we should first look at what industrialization is.

I’m going to give a simple answer to this. An industrial society is one that’s figured out mechanized methods of production, rather than everything having to be done by hand. In order make that mechanization work, we had to harness new sources of energy — specifically, fossil fuels — and then reorganize labor around creating and operating the machines. As a consequence of such changes, a society of this type develops more specialized division of labor, and also tends to support higher, denser populations.

So: how do you get there from an agrarian society where muscles provide most of the power?

Obviously this is in large part a technological question. A Bronze Age society can’t industrialize for the simple reason that their metallurgy can’t support the kinds of technology necessary for powerful steam engines; hunter-gatherers, even less so. Even an iron-working society can’t necessarily manage it, because a boiler capable of surviving useful levels of pressure isn’t something any old blacksmith can bang together. But technology is only one side of the equation, and if all you’re looking at is the metallurgy, it’s easy to think that surely any place with good blacksmiths could figure it out — that it’s pure chance no other time period industrialized. In reality, you also have to ask yourself, what are we making these machines for?

Yes, aeolipiles — primitive steam turbines — existed nearly two thousand years before the Industrial Revolution got rolling. But they were essentially toys, producing very little power and using up tons of fuel to do it. They had no practical function. It took a completely different design to arrive at a steam engine that could do anything useful . . . and the odds that anybody was going to put in the work for that design were low, because what purpose would it serve?

When your vision of the Industrial Revolution is that change at its height, with massive engines driving locomotives or machines that fill whole rooms, you miss how inefficient, ineffective, and unreliable early steam engines were. Even if some Greek inventor tinkered around with the aeolipile or asked “I wonder if there’s a better approach?”, he would wind up spending tons of money and effort on making a device that still wasn’t worth it. The argument I’ve seen — the best just-so story we have for the Industrial Revolution — is that it started where it did and when it did because eighteenth-century Britain found itself in a situation where even a kind of crappy steam engine was better than no engine at all: coal was needed for heating purposes, their coal mines had gotten deep enough that they were flooding with water, and oh look, the fuel you need for the engine is right there where you’ll be using it. No need to pay for transporting it anywhere. The economics worked out to make that a problem worth solving with a new technological development.

Coal has been used for a long time in cooking and heating, but we’ve tended to go for the easy surface deposits first, and to switch away from it when those become less accessible. The roots of Britain’s industrialization probably lie in deforestation and the more intensive mining of coal in the century or two leading up to the development of actual steam engines — a set of circumstances that didn’t prevail in, say, Rome. They handled their mechanical problems with slave labor and had much less need for coal, living where they did; as near as I can tell, peninsular Italy had very little coal anyway (compared to Britain). So trying to invent a steam engine there would be a solution in search of a problem to solve: not a situation that favors the kind of technological development that has to pass through multiple not-very-effective stages before it gets to the good stuff.

And the good stuff, as you all probably learned in school, is steam engines that are smooth and efficient enough to be useful in textile production. Once you have those, it’s worth the cost to build them in places other than on top of coal mines and transport coal to them. Other uses, too, but after the water-pumping prologue, textile industrialization really is Act I of the Industrial Revolution, because it’s an easy place for a better (but still not amazing) engine to make a difference. So here, again, the just-so story says Britain was the right place at the right time: they had huge industries in both wool and (thanks to colonialism) cotton, meaning that productivity gains in something as basic as the spinning of thread could produce absolutely explosive growth. Everything after that — trains and steamships and cool steampunk gadgets — is flying on the momentum created by coal mining and thread.

Of course, all of this is the mundane path to industrialization. In a speculative world, it’s entirely possible to change the starting conditions and create a different trajectory; so long as it still follows the general pattern of “non-muscle energy source allows for new, mechanized, mass production,” it will feel industrial. If that energy source is the discovery of a vein of some mineral which, when a small quantity is placed into a device, becomes an abundant form of power, maybe nobody has to slowly iterate through crappy devices to reach a point where it makes economic sense to transport the stuff elsewhere. Or it’s a method of channeling magical power from the sky, recently discovered by an innovative sorcerer, which turns out to be useful for some productive task. (Quite possibly it’s still textiles: as noted in the previous essay, those are, alongside food, one of the basic survival requirements that have historically demanded the most time and labor.)

I’ll admit to ambivalent feelings about that latter example, because of what kind of magic I like in my stories. An industrialized form of magic is one that, by definition, can be depersonalized. At that point, no matter what words you attach to it, I no longer find it very magical: it’s just technology by a different name. I can still enjoy stories in such a setting; I’ll just enjoy them for reasons other than the magic. And I freely admit this is a personal opinion, not one shared by every reader. For worldbuilding purposes, it’s entirely fine to create a speculative twist on the process of industrialization — and then it helps to understand what does and does not make sense!

Given the surge in popularity of “tradwife” influencers these days, it seems an appropriate time to take a direct look at what it actually means for everything you need to be produced at home.

Starting with two basic facts: first, that essentially nobody has ever produced everything they need at home. And second, that the more you have to do so, the more your life sucks.

If you want an illustration of what I mean, check out the book Lost in the Taiga by Vasily Peskov. It’s a nonfiction account of the Lykov family, who fled religious persecution and spent fifty years living in almost total isolation in the Russian wilderness. By the time they started having regular contact with anyone outside their family, they were living the most horrifyingly marginal existence you can imagine: their house was a filthy, windowless lodge, they wore crude skins for clothing, and multiple family members (especially children) had died due to the almost complete lack of medicine. The weather itself had nearly killed them more than once when their crops failed, at one point necessitating the Lykovs taking turns keeping round-the-clock watch on their few surviving plants, to keep wild animals from destroying them.

And even then, the Lykovs weren’t fully self-sufficient. They depended on metal tools like their cooking pot which, if lost or destroyed, were completely irreplaceable. Yes, it’s possible to cook without metal vessels; yes, you could theoretically make stone tools if you didn’t have access to metal knives. But every such step toward self-sufficiency requires more labor, until every single hour in your day is devoted to the task of bare survival.

Granted, the Lykovs were not living in the most forgiving environment. But if you check out the stories of people who exited the “trad life,” you’ll find account after account of how much work they poured into living that way, until there was simply no time or energy left over for enjoying its supposed benefits. It’s an open secret at this point that the glossy, successful tradwives pulling in huge amounts of money from their work are showing a highly edited version of their existence, often involving armies of paid assistants — and/or their children, whose free time becomes a sacrifice on the altar of their mother’s career as an influencer.

Because that’s the first thing to know about home production as a system: everybody works. If you’re old enough to do some kind of simple task, like shelling peas, then you do it. Furthermore, you work nigh-constantly, because there is always more to do. The internet likes to pass around the claim that medieval Europeans worked less than moderns, but if you start to crunch the actual numbers, that doesn’t really hold up . . . especially when you consider the tendency to ignore women’s work. Even if a saint’s day or other religious festival meant the men weren’t going out to labor in the fields, the women still had to tend children, cook meals, clean up afterward, and probably spin thread while they watched the celebrations. Life will not go on hold just because it’s a special day.

But what do I mean when I say “home production”? It’s a fuzzy concept, but generally speaking, it refers to the idea that stuff is mostly made and used at home. You can also, of course, make stuff at home and then trade or sell it elsewhere; given how often houses doubled as workshops, it’s inevitable those two modes will overlap. And piecework, where someone gets paid per item they make, has gone hand-in-hand with home production for centuries, as a way for a household to bring in a little more money. Home production in the sense I mean it here, though, is about the idea of self-sufficiency: rather than buying things ready-made, you make them you and your family, for you and your family.

Measured by the time and effort invested, home production focuses almost entirely on food (including drink) and clothing, and neither one is fully seasonal. Winter still entails agricultural labor, and when it doesn’t, the men are probably working on making or repairing tools they’ll use when the weather warms up, or taking care of livestock. The women are busy turning the raw outputs into actual food, and the aforementioned spinning, which has to fill almost every moment it can if you’re to have enough thread to weave enough cloth to clothe everybody in the family. They might also make simple medicines at home, or crude furniture, or other necessities and minor luxuries, but those are a side note to the overwhelming demands of sustenance and shelter for the body.

And that’s still not the whole story, is it? Blacksmiths have been high on the list of necessary trades since we invented metalworking. (All right, since we invented iron-working. Apparently the proper term for someone who works bronze is a brownsmith!) Successful metalworking requires so much training and specialized knowledge, not to mention equipment, not to mention time, that nobody’s doing that and also being a full-time farmer. Pottery is much the same, because building and operating your own kiln is way too much to add atop everything else. Other things can be done at home, like milling grain, but they’re so labor-intensive that it’s vastly more efficient to have a specialist with the right tools do the job.

This is how “home production” turns out to be a spectrum. Yes, people used to produce most of what they needed at home — but not everything, and at the first opportunity, they started outsourcing certain tasks. If you could buy or trade for thread already spun (perhaps from a local poor spinster), you did; if you could buy or trade for cloth already woven, you did. You were, essentially, buying a respite from the endless labor that is the genuine trad life. Furthermore, specialization of labor is good for us as a society: a dedicated weaver can make finer cloth than someone who’s doing that in her spare time, and god knows a dedicated physician can know more about medicine than someone tossing a few herbs into tea and hoping that will do the job. When you don’t have to do everything yourself, you get better results.

But the belief that the traditional life was somehow purer and better isn’t entirely a new phenomenon. The transcendentalist philosophers of nineteenth century America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, touted the benefits of “simple living” out in nature. In recent years the internet has given them something of an unfair shake; it’s true they weren’t entirely self-sufficient, but neither did they claim to be. (Thoreau in particular has become the target of “his mom did his laundry and brought him sandwiches!” We don’t actually know how his laundry got done, and he himself admits he regularly walked into town to dine with friends and family.) It is true, however, that they approached their vision of simplicity from a relatively privileged direction, and could therefore afford a great deal of assistance and modern convenience. Their lives would have been significantly more difficult if the innovations of the Industrial Revolution had not made things like the production of their clothing faster and cheaper than the womenfolk of their families could manage by hand.

The flip side, of course, is that there can be genuine satisfaction in making stuff yourself. Especially if your job feels very separated from material reality — you spend all your time on the computer moving words or numbers around, all to create something far removed from the physical product, or that never becomes a physical product at all — then sinking your hands into a mass of dough, or sewing your own skirt, or raising vegetables, or any of the other simple tasks of creation often feels rewarding all out of proportion to its necessity . . . or maybe rewarding because it isn’t necessary. It reconnects you with the fruits of your labor, and that can be very good for the brain.

So although I have a ton of issues with the entire “trad” movement (even before we get to the often reactionary politics behind it), I recognize and value some of the impulse there. And for writers, it’s worth not only acknowledging the ugly reality of what real self-sufficiency looks like, but understanding the conditions that make people nostalgic for the concept. I would wholeheartedly believe in a spacefaring civilization where anything can be printed from a replicator on the spot — and therefore has thriving communities of hobbyists who enjoy making stuff by hand instead.

If your mental image of a shepherd is a person with a crook and a dozen sheep on a hillside above a farm, you need to scale up. And also, those sheep probably won’t be on the hillside for very long.

Transhumance is, admittedly, one of those topics where my knowledge is noticeably regional. I’m familiar with cattle ranching in the American West and, more globally, sheepherding — which I believe is similar to goats, both of them being caprines — but much less so with camels, and basically not at all with yaks or llamas or reindeer. I don’t even know if transhumance is a thing practiced with all those species! So take this with a grain of salt.

Having brought up the technical term: what is transhumance? (Not to be confused with transhumanism.) It is the practice of moving livestock between pastures, and in particular, the seasonal patterns thereof. On the extreme end, a herding society may be fully nomadic, packing up everyone and everything to move with the animals. On the nearer end, most people stay put, and only a small number of caretakers have to move around.

One way or another, though, the animals have to move. If you have a decent-sized pasture and just one cow you keep on hand for milking, she might be able to shift from spot to spot in the pasture, letting one area regrow while she grazes on another. As numbers increase, though, there’s no single pasture big enough, and keeping the herd in the same place will rapidly ensure they have nothing to eat. How large a herd you can support in how large an area will vary based on local conditions — good soil and regular rain will bring on faster, lusher growth than poor soil and aridity — but also, shifting pasture isn’t purely a matter of bare survival. Bringing your livestock to fresh grazing will improve the quality of their milk and, in the case of animals like sheep, the fineness of their wool. So the more a region is dedicated to animal husbandry rather than farming, the larger the herds will be and the more transhumance will shape the world around them.

So far, so dry and logistical. Let me take this out of the realm of theory and put it into a shape that might matter for a story: if you lived in Spain in, say, 1540, then twice a year you would watch two and a half million sheep go ambling down the roads.

Spain practiced seasonal transhumance, where livestock move between summer and winter pastures. Thanks to the geography of the peninsula, in summer the sheep lived in the cooler, wetter lands of Old Castile and León, and then in winter they were driven south to the fields and hills of Extremadura and Andalusia. This ensured they had fresh grass year-round, which contributed to the excellence of Spain’s wool industry.

Wasn’t that terribly disruptive to everybody in between those two regions? Hell yes, it was — and for those at the ends of the route, too. Farmers weren’t supposed to plow the pastureland or use it for crops, and as the political power of the Mesta (the association of livestock owners) grew, this led to them pushing for more territory, forcing farmers off their land. To prevent the sheep from trampling crops, there were dedicated rights-of-way for the sheep (called cañadas) that nobody was supposed to build on or cultivate, but of course farmers encroached on those boundaries. And since the sheep had to follow set routes and the people along them hated this disruption, anybody selling lodgings or food often set an extortionate price — which in turn meant the wealthier members of the Mesta, each with thousands of sheep, eventually squeezed out the smaller livestock owners.

Seasonal transhumance on that gobsmacking scale is fairly rare, but smaller versions of it are extremely common. In mountainous areas, the transition is vertical rather than north to south: in the winter livestock will live down in the valleys, then be driven up to the slopes when the weather warms. In these cases a small number of shepherds (or cowherds or goatherds — whatever terms is appropriate) go with them to herd the animals, and to protect them. Those herdsmen have to be tough, because they’re frequently living alone or in very small numbers, in rough accommodations, and vulnerable to all kinds of threats. Outlaws and poachers, mountain lions and wolves, all may have an interest in snacking on an isolated flock.

Doing all of this benefits enormously from assistance. We probably could not have herded large livestock in any meaningful quantities without first domesticating dogs, who can sprint about to keep a herd clumped together or chivvy a straying beast back into the flock. Dogs also double as a warning system and assistant guard against the threats mentioned above. The addition of horses again makes it easier for a small number of humans to control and direct a large number of animals. Cattle ranching on the scale it’s been practiced in the American West is essentially unthinkable without mounted cowboys, as the average herd driven from Texas to the Kansas railheads in the late nineteenth century was three thousand head.

What usually puts an end to this kind of thing is the growth of enclosure. That doesn’t always mean literal fencing (though it can); it just means that land is cut off from common use, reserving it only to the landowner and whatever they choose to do with it. Often there are valid reasons for enclosure, as tighter control over a piece of land means you can do things like complex crop rotations for higher productivity without worrying that somebody’s sheep will interfere . . . but it also generates a huge amount of resentment among those common people, sometimes to the point of outright rebellion.

And sometimes rebellion itself is the cause of transhumance decline. Wars make it hard to move livestock safely across large distances, and with the pattern broken, it may be difficult to get back. Or perhaps you’ve been raising sheep for fleeces, and something causes that market to crater, so it’s no longer worth the expense of moving them back and forth. Conversely, something like an epidemic or an extended dry period can cause transhumance to surge, as there’s no longer as much need for farmland or the soil is no longer as fertile for crops.

So this can be anything from a background detail in a political brangle, to a source of income for an innkeeper on a livestock migration route, to a major inconvenience for a character attempting to travel quickly down roads filled with sheep, to the reason why your lonely shepherd protagonist stumbles across an ancient evil awakening in the hills. (We’ve had plenty of innocent farmboys in the fantasy genre. It’s time for the shepherds to shine!) Just remembering that humans are rarely the only ones living in an area can make a difference to the story!

Even if you work very, very hard with your worldbuilding, you may not be able to get readers to interpret it the way you want them to.

I’ve titled this essay “the past is a foreign country” because that’s a recognizable phrase (though few people know it’s from a book by the English novelist L. P. Hartley), and of course our worldbuilding often draws inspiration from the past — at least until we gain the ability to peer into the future. But I’m referring more broadly to the worlds we make, and the difficulty of translating fictional cultural differences effectively to your audience.

We touched on this a couple of months ago with the discussion of friendship, and how same-sex bonds could be expressed in astonishingly passionate terms compared to our models of friendship today. If you write that into a story now, you can insist all you like that it doesn’t imply anything more; some readers, maybe even most of them, are likely to find romantic and sexual overtones in it anyway. Those characters never sleep together? Maybe they’re asexual. They sleep with opposite-sex partners? Maybe they’re closeted or bi, and just not acting on those particular impulses. Especially since representations of queer desire have still not caught up with the straight kind, people open to those interpretations may have a hard time accepting that those two characters really are “just friends.”

The same can go for gendered behavior in general. I can say all I want — in keeping with cultural standards elsewhere and elsewhen — that crying is a perfectly masculine behavior, an expression of the powerful emotions felt by a properly manly heart. My modern Western readers will still have a hard time shaking the modern Western assumption that men should not shed more than perhaps a single stoic tear. If my heroic male character breaks out sobbing for anything other than the climactic death of a beloved character (and maybe even then), it’s going to carry a whiff of weakness, regardless of what standards prevail within the setting.

I’ve also talked about this in the context of beauty. We’re constantly bombarded with images and videos showing us the current ideal and marketing the notion that anything else is unattractive. Some forms of this, I suspect, are more amenable than others to worldbuilding in a different direction: if my story sings the praises of dark skin and beautiful clouds of hair, it’s clear that I’m pushing back against the white default (and I like to think my readers would be on board). It’s going to be a lot harder to make them understand why it’s appealing for people to black out their teeth, so their mouths look like empty holes. Even with all my anthropological training mustered to help me understand it, I look at photos of people with blackened teeth and see something that evokes a horror movie, not beauty.

Humor is notoriously difficult to translate from one culture to another. Now imagine making it up! This can be an effective way to signal cultural difference; if the alien ambassador laughs uproariously at seeing someone use a fork or tells a joke about that hilarious time his friend used the wrong meter in his poem, the reader receives that as evidence of very different behaviors and expectations. Much more difficult is establishing a variant framework of humor for your protagonist, where they find things funny that the reader does not share but is invited to empathize with. The best you can likely hope for is, through persistent effort, to establish what that framework is. Then, by the end of the story, the reader may recognize that what just happened will be considered funny — but that’s not the same thing as the reader laughing.

Or maybe what you’re going for is the opposite of funny, and your challenge is not so much making it register as making it feel real. If you read history — or, alas, if you encounter certain problems in the world today — you’ll eventually hit instances of bigotry that seem howlingly cartoonish. Whether they have to do with race, gender, class, religion, or any other point of difference, you can find instances of people saying things and committing acts that come across as absolutely and incomprehensibly inhuman.

You can put these in a story, of course. But I know authors who have written their own real-life experiences into their fiction . . . then have looked at the result, shaken their heads, and taken them out again. Because even when it’s reproduced directly from reality, the actual effect feels not real; it doesn’t produce the emotional result the author was going for. It winds up being distancing.

I particularly think about this in the context of writing war. Military campaigns of the past often included atrocities that, while they may be smaller than the Holocaust on a raw scale, were so pervasive and appalling that to put them on the page would seem like absurd, mustache-twirling villainy. Vlad the Impaler is said not merely to have impaled people, but to have gathered up three hundred Saxon boys and executed them either by that method or by burning, entirely because the leaders of the towns of their homeland were supporting his opponent in a civil war. And that’s just one example! The routine cruelty of such rulers is so over-the-top — and trust me, ol’ Vlad was hardly the only one or even the worst — that reading too much of it winds up numbing rather than horrifying.

What all of this means in practice is that sometimes the most important question is not “is this realistic?” but “is this effective for my story?” Is your reader likely to get the intended emotional effect from it, or are you better served by changing tactics and taking a different route to your point? Sometimes the answer will be that you want to stand your ground; you want to put that detail on the page, whether it’s inspired by a historical factoid or your own personal experience, even if it means the reader may not receive it as you intended. That’s a valid choice! At other times, you may decide that you prefer an alternative approach. You choose one instance of wartime horror to focus on in detail, rather than subjecting the reader to the full litany of atrocities. You pick at the edges of our current beauty standards or assumptions about masculinity, chipping away at cracks in that edifice rather than running at it headfirst.

. . . but maybe don’t try to invent an alternate framework of humor the reader is supposed to find funny. I know we’re writing speculative fiction, but some mountains might just be too steep to climb!

“History is written by the victors” is a familiar adage, and it holds a lot of truth in it. But as an analysis of who specifically is writing the history, and what they’re out to do, it falls a bit short.

First of all, we should acknowledge that history — like many intellectual fields, and perhaps more than some — really does involve standing on the shoulders of, if not giants, then at least the ordinary-sized people who came before you. Until we invent time travel, there’s no way to go back and get fresh primary data on, say, the Battle of Marathon; we have a limited number of ancient sources on any particular topic, and some of those sources are probably based on their fellows, narrowing the pool even further. There are also histories we only know about because a later historian mentioned, summarized, or outright quoted those in the course of writing their own work. Archaeology can fill in some gaps, but not all of them, and not of all kinds. When we’re extremely lucky, a document turns up that contains a previously unknown fragment of somebody’s history, but that’s rare.

So who are the giants whose shoulders we’re standing on?

Some of them are, to put it bluntly, dilettantes. Some guy (it’s usually a guy) with time and money decides to write a history of his current era, a past one, or — if he’s feeling really ambitious — a sweeping account of everything up to the present moment, at least in his own land, or maybe the whole region. Or the whole history of the world! If he’s writing about the more distant past, he assembles all the previous histories he can gets his hands on and synthesizes them into one narrative, maybe with the aforementioned summaries and quotations. But what does he do when those sources disagree? If he’s a rigorous fellow, he’ll note the disagreements and perhaps offer his own judgment on which one is more reliable. If he’s not, then he’ll just choose and not tell you . . . or even make up his own answer, based on his philosophical convictions and what “makes sense.”

But while the dilettantes can be interesting, where I find this actually fruitful for worldbuilding is the more official end, where the Powers That Be get involved.

It’s not uncommon in history, but vanishingly rare in the fiction I’ve read, for there to be a royal chronicler of some sort whose job is to record the events of the monarch’s reign. This can be anywhere from a tool of governance (“let’s look up how we handled a similar situation before”) to an exercise in ego-stroking — with those two options not being mutually exclusive! It can also be a tool of legitimization, when the chronicler’s job extends past the current reign into the events that came before. A history of a dynasty burnishes the credentials of its current scion; if the dynasty is new, this may be even more important, as the chronicler lays out the arguments — genealogical, supernatural, or what have you — that justify why the current guy ought to be on the throne.

. . . and yes, this does sometimes mean that “history” ought to have sarcasm quotes around it. A chronicler’s job is not always to record fact, but rather to create a historical narrative that favors his employer. Someone who refuses will rapidly be out of a job, imprisoned, or even executed — and the latter two fates can also befall the dilettante who writes an unfavorable account.

But not always! While it’s often true, especially in older eras, that history is written to flatter those in power, there are some fascinating exceptions.

The Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty from Korea are a truly astonishing historical resource, covering nearly five hundred years in nearly nineteen hundred volumes. But even more impressive than their scale is their completeness and integrity, thanks to a well-regulated system. There were eight historians tasked with recording current affairs; the king was always accompanied by at least one and forbidden to conduct official business without a historian present. Then, after he died, those daily records and other sources like administrative accounts were compiled into an official version whose drafting and revision were overseen by ministers and scholars.

What’s truly gobsmacking here is the information security they practiced. After the official account was finalized, all its sources were destroyed, to prevent information from leaking out via other routes. Sounds like a recipe for flattering revisionist history, right? Except that even the king himself was not permitted to read the official history. Only authorized historians could do so, and if they spilled anything about what it said — much less tried to change it — they faced serious punishment. They had so much editorial independence and legal protection that it led to a famous incident still remembered more than six hundred years later: when King Taejong fell off his horse and tried to order his accompanying historian not to record that event, not only did the historian note the fall, but he also included the order he ignored.

Furthermore, the Veritable Records existed in multiple copies held in different locations — a security measure that’s the only reason we still have the earlier volumes, since all but one copy were destroyed during the sixteenth-century Japanese invasion. Making those duplicates was of course aided by the existence of printing presses: by the time the Veritable Records began, Korea had movable type. Doing the same thing in, say, eighth-century Europe would have been wildly more difficult.

If similar security measures had been taken with the text known as the Secret History of the Mongols, we might not now have the massively frustrating gap left by someone literally cutting pages out of it. The last bit of text before the hole has Genghis Khan saying “Let us reward our female offspring” — and given that other records allow us to piece together the scale of power and influence his daughters wielded, it’s a tantalizing lacuna. I await someone with the proper Mongolian chops to give us the alternate history we deserve, about one of them rising to become khatun over her father’s mighty empire!

Given the interest right now in “dark academia” as a subgenre, I’m a little sad we don’t have more stories about this process of making history and all the tensions around it. Whether it’s the discovery of some fragmentary text that undermines the official narrative, a royal chronicler balancing a commitment to truth against the desire to keep his head on his shoulders, or a Joseon-style historian defending a priceless archive against political attack, I feel like there’s real potential there!

Up front, I should say that “the language of flowers” is mostly bogus.

That’s not to say there is no symbolism in flowers and other kinds of plants! There absolutely is; in fact, there must be, so long as human culture has a tendency to trot out particular species or colors in particular contexts, and nature has a tendency to make some things bloom or sprout or leaf out at certain times of year. We will build up associations, because that’s how our brains work.

Some of those associations will be based on color (whose symbolism was previously covered in Year Nine). Red is commonly linked with passion; therefore the floral-industrial complex has poured untold amounts of money into convincing us that only red roses are acceptable for romantic occasions like Valentine’s Day. But come wedding day, you’ll often see more white, because of the connection to innocence and virginity.

Other, less visible qualities can give also rise to certain associations. Notably, it’s extremely common for hallucinogens to evoke witchcraft and spirits — an easy linkage to understand! After all, hallucinogens are a great way to make you feel like you’re flying or otherwise experiencing magic. And, naturally, quite a few poisonous plants have dark connotations, thanks to their peril and the opportunity they afford for murder.

Or perhaps it’s the environment of the flowers. Orchids, which grow naturally in remote forests where people rarely go, are a Chinese emblem of the virtuous man, who ought to cultivate his finer qualities regardless of the approbation of others. Somewhat similarly, the lotus, rising out of muddy water to reveal its clean beauty, represents purity, enlightenment, and escape from the cycle of death and rebirth.

Behavior can play its part, too! Japanese camellias are linked with a variety of qualities like elegance and strength, but you’re not supposed to give them to a sick person, e.g. when bringing a bouquet to the hospital. Why? Because that species of camellia drops its entire flower at once, in a single piece, as if it’s been decapitated. Not a good omen. (In fact, some cultures feel it’s deeply inappropriate to give a bouquet of any kind to someone in the hospital, lest the wilting of the cut flowers symbolically imply the patient will continue to sicken and eventually die.)

Often, however, the symbolism is just . . . there? I’m not sure anybody has a good answer for why, in European culture, lilies are associated with funerals, other than “it’s been true for a very long time.” And even if we do have a potential answer — e.g. I’ve heard it said the soul is returning to a state of innocence, one of the qualities implied by lilies — that may be a retroactive explanation, rather than one backed up by historical evidence.

But you may have noticed me using phrases like “one of the qualities” or “a variety of qualities.” Symbolism is rarely a pure, one-to-one equation . . . and that brings us back to the language of flowers, and why it was probably never quite the thing the internet likes to claim.

The language of flowers is supposedly a form of cryptography, used to send coded messages through bouquets, boutonnières, and so on. If you try to research this, you will find elaborate claims for how it all worked — but those claims rarely cite primary sources, and they rarely hold water.

Starting with the fact that they frequently contradict each other. Do white carnations represent first love, or disdain? Do purple lilacs signify first love, or death? Any system of communication needs enough consistency for the sender and receiver to have reasonable certainty they’re working with the same message. I’ve seen websites claim this is why it was very important to be sure your recipient had the same dictionary of floriography as you do . . . but if that were true, we’d have a much more significant historical corpus of such dictionaries than we do. And were people really running around asking “Do you have Horton’s Glossary of Flowers? No, Murrow’s Floral Lexicon — drat, I don’t have that; I’ll have to go to the bookseller before I send you your bouquet tomorrow — just be sure not to use An A to Z of Floriography; I don’t want you thinking I’m telling you to die –” It seems unlikely.

Also, as systems of cryptography go, flowers are wildly insecure. Their message is right there, out in the open! If lovers were secretly communicating through bouquets, you can bet that Victorian mothers would have acquired dictionaries posthaste to vet anything their daughters received. Meanwhile, if a gentleman showed up to an event wearing an ambrosia boutonnière to signify that he returns a lady’s love, how many ladies there would think that message was meant for them? A bouquet sent as a gift can be targeted to the recipient, but any other display risks being broadcast to too many people. (This is also a major flaw in the supposed language of fans, though at least in that case, the signal is transient and could perhaps be “aimed” via eye contact. In reality, however, the language of fans was a nineteenth-century marketing gambit by fan manufacturers.)

Going back to that ambrosia boutonnière: just where did our gentleman get it? Kate Greenaway’s The Language of Flowers — an 1884 book that seems to be the main primary source of much writing on this topic — lists hundreds of flowers. Even with hothouses, I’m dubious that anybody would be able to get hold of, say, red balsam on demand, just so they could signal “touch me not.” On the receiving end, it assumes a high degree of botanical knowledge: could you tell the difference between marsh mallow, Syrian mallow, and Venetian mallow? Or recognize mesembryanthemum and myrobalan on sight? I know I couldn’t.

As usual, though, what’s realistic in history need not restrict what can fly in fiction. Thomas West’s City of Iron and Ivy takes this idea and runs for the end zone, with flowers grown by magic and carrying equally supernatural effects. That gets around the hothouse problem, and where flowers can do more than just communicate, it would absolutely be worth people’s time to learn the differences between various blooms. So despite the cynical objections above, I would love to see more of this in spec fic! I just appreciate it more when there’s attention paid to the practicalities, rather than swallowing hook, line, and sinker the accreted pile of internet claims about how all this supposedly worked in the past.

And, of course, nothing stops you from leaning into plant symbolism more broadly, letting go of the idea that it might be for coded communication. In fact, this is a good idea, because as I said at the start, all cultures have associations for many of the plants around them. Leaning into that, even with just a few words about how a yew tree in someone’s garden gives it a dark, funerary vibe, adds a tinge of realism and depth.

It’s possible, even in surprisingly ancient times, to have hugely sprawling cities — but they’re not quite the same type of sprawl we see today. The reason is simple: how are you going to get around?

A city that is a mile or so across can be traversed on foot in half an hour, give or take, depending on how fast the individual in question walks and how much traffic and crowding get in their way. Two miles, you can cross it in an hour, or get from the periphery to the center in half an hour. And when you look at historical cities in places like Europe, you frequently find that’s about how big they are. One to four square miles is a manageable size.

Cities with a larger footprint did exist, but they require you to change what you imagine when you think “city.” It’s more like the agrarian version of suburban sprawl — and, as Annalee Newitz mentions in Four Lost Cities when discussing Angkor, there’s some reason to think that pre-modern urbanism in tropical areas simply looks different than it does in temperate zones, due to differences in agriculture. Lidar surveys indicate that Angkor may have covered three hundred and ninety square miles! But that’s not a thousand square kilometers of densely packed buildings surrounded by a wall; that’s a complex patchwork of fields, houses, temples, and markets, connected by the complex works of irrigation infrastructure that were necessary to maintain it all.

That infrastructure points us toward one possible solution for getting around an enormous city: go by water. I’ve mentioned before that water transport is often more efficient than land until you get motorized options . . . but when it comes to cities, that’s far from a perfect answer.

See, odds are good that you’ll be more reliant on muscle power to move the boat, with a paddle, oars, or pole, rather than being able to benefit from natural forces. A river’s current will carry you downstream just fine — but going home? Now you have to fight that force. (Unless the river is tidal in that reach, but then you’re constrained to the timing of tides.) And within an urban context, you have much less space to maneuver about with wind. Don’t get me wrong; water is still often better. One or two people can operate a boat full of produce brought in from an outlying field, as opposed to needing to wrangle a draft animal for a cart or being limited to what they can carry on their own backs. But it’s not as dramatic of an improvement as being able to sail an entire ship or barge hundreds of miles for long-distance transport.

I’m talking about produce because that’s going to be the most common reason people in a large city need to move around. (Other goods, too, but food is the first ten items on the list of “what needs to be transported in or the city dies.” Water pretty much has to be there already or the city is dead to begin with.) Commuting of the sort that’s a dreary feature of daily life for many people in modern times was vastly less common in the past, because most people lived at or very near their places of work, i.e. within walking distance.

This starts to change with the Industrial Revolution — but not because we got motorized transport, not right away. Instead you started having factories that employed huge numbers of people in a very small area, and while some of them had associated lodgings nearby, the explosion of urban populations as people came thronging there for work meant that density became horrifically unmanageable. Cities had to spread outward, and somebody had to come up with a way to move people around faster.

Early on, the answer to this was the horse-drawn omnibus. (Which is where we get the word “bus” from; in older works, you see an apostrophe marking the bit we dropped, as ‘bus.) They were essentially the same idea as the hired coaches between cities, just repurposed for urban use and focused far more on moving passengers than luggage. They also didn’t require buying a ticket in advance, instead having the kind of hop-on, hop-off service we’re used to nowadays. As the nineteenth century progressed, many of them became double-decker buses, with passengers sitting on the roof as well as inside the carriage — though the top was usually only for men, as women would have more difficulty climbing the ladder in their dresses, and be exposing themselves to up-skirt ogling besides.

The earliest attempt at this was in the seventeenth century . . . so does that mean it could exist in any era? Perhaps, but I suspect the answer is that it’s unlikely. The challenge of the omnibus is making it sturdy and stable enough not to be a hazard to its passengers — at least, by the lax safety standards of the Victorian era — and also making the service profitable. Industrialization meant it was easier to produce steel for things like braces and wheel rims, and the sheer scale of demand for transportation allowed for entire networks of routes, rather than just one line that might or might not see enough use. Earlier eras are not going to offer the same favorable conditions.

Of course, we didn’t stop at horsebuses. Laying down metal rails in the street greatly increased the amount of weight the horses could pull (and gave passengers a smoother ride to boot); then we got engines that could move the trams in place of the horses; then we realized we could put the trams underground, where traffic wouldn’t slow them down, and we were off to the races with subways. Meanwhile, motorized water transport made regular large-scale ferry services possible, without having to worry as much about the vagaries of current, wind, or tide.

Expanding public transit made it easier to expand cities, because now people could live farther away from the noise and the stench, without spending half their day getting to work and the other half getting home again. Even now, though, it can often be an imperfect solution, because not all areas are equally served. If you look at a map of the London Underground, you’ll see that while the north side of the Thames has an abundance of lines, the southern bank — where there are fewer elites and important institutions — has vastly less. It isn’t always the case, though, that elite = access; where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the residents of wealthy Marin County to the north consistently oppose efforts to extend public transit up to their neighborhoods, because then the hoi polloi could get there more easily.

I should note in closing that public transit is not always mass transit. Our modern taxis and pedicabs are the descendants of horse-drawn hackney carriages and human-carried sedan chairs for hire, both of which became common long before we had omnibuses running regular services for large numbers of people. Those more individualized options really only require enough urban density for profit, and enough people with the money to pay for them — you’re not likely to see them hanging around slums waiting for passengers. (Even today, it can be notoriously difficult to get a taxi in a bad part of town.)

And, as usual, speculative fiction throws a few wrinkles into the mix! Science fiction often includes mass transit, because most of it assumes both the technology for such a thing and populations on a scale to make it necessary. Fantasy, by contrast, often leaves it out — but it doesn’t have to! Depending on how magic works, you could have self-propelled vehicles, animated constructs pulling them, even regular flying carpet service from the suburbs to the urban core . . . or no magic at all, beyond the straightforward ingenuity of past invention.

Suburbs are such a characteristic feature of the twentieth century, especially here in the United States, that you’d be forgiven for assuming they’re a wholly modern phenomenon. In fact, the general concept of “not quite in the city, but very much associated with it” is very old; it’s just the scale and to some extent the organization of it that changes.

And it isn’t hard to see why. Cities are, by nature, going to be noisier, smellier, and more crowded than the countryside; because of that, it’s practically a universal law that rich people will want to get away from them — but not too far away. They’ll maintain villas or equivalent just outside the city walls, within easy distance so they can go in for an afternoon or a day, then retire to more comfortable surroundings at night. They get all the economic and political benefits of being close to where the action is, without subjecting themselves to too many of the downsides.

Living outside the city isn’t only for the rich, though. Most pre-modern cities are going to have vegetable gardens and/or dairy farms outside their walls, which means they’ll probably also have the houses of the people tending those gardens and farms, and it isn’t uncommon for those to nucleate slightly into villages. After all, you don’t want to have to walk into the city for everything; much more convenient to have your parish church and local alehouse (or regional equivalents) closer at hand.

These things don’t form evenly. If you look at early modern maps — which are usually the first point at which we can see anything like accurate visual representation — they very much tend to string out along the major roads leading to and from the city. That’s because they also serve the function of catering to travelers, who might prefer to lodge just outside the city rather than in its (noisy, smelly, crowded) heart. Or the outskirts are where those travelers leave their horses and carriages, rather than trying to wrangle such things in tighter confines. Or they pause to eat and freshen up, then continue on in. The city winds up looking like an octopus, with legs stretching in all directions.

But that’s the thin end of the suburban wedge — the sort of thing called a fauborg in French, with the English “fore-town” being a less common equivalent. (A “suburb” is “below the city,” and reflects the tendency to build fortified towns on hilltops, meaning that their outlying settlements are literally below them.) So long as urban populations remain small, so will their penumbra.

As soon as something causes the city to boom, though, it’s going to have growing pains. Maybe the capital shifts there, or a war causes refugees to flood in, or famine and economic disaster hit the countryside, or industrialization creates a huge new demand for labor. Suddenly you have a lot more people, and the very pressing question of where to put them. Are existing sites in the city sufficient to take in these people? And even if the answer is “yes,” will they? Especially if the influx consists of refugees and penniless migrants, local establishments may not want to rent to them, or local government may forbid them to settle within the city’s bounds.

Since those people still want to be in or near the city, though, they’re going to crowd as close as they can get — and I do mean crowd. The kind of shanty town that springs up in these circumstances usually has an insanely high population density, not least because the kind of people shoved out to the margins don’t have a lot of money to spend on construction. The buildings may barely even merit the name, being a conglomeration of tents, lean-tos, and whatever makeshift materials can be pressed into service, or shoddy walls and roofs thrown up in a hurry that may come down even faster. There’s little to no infrastructure, and because these places are frequently outside the official authority of the city, there’s little to no governance. Disease and crime are extremely high — but the people who live there can’t just afford to pack up and go somewhere else. They have no choice but to cope.

Until, of course, something else intervenes. Quite frequently that is fire: all it takes is one spark and a place like this is liable to go up in flames. Then, since the people who lived there almost certainly have no legal title to the land, it’s easy for someone else to snap that up, or for whoever owned it in the first place to seize their chance to evict everyone en masse. The area is unlikely to revert to green field pastoralism, though, because by now you’re no longer looking at a modest little city supplied by its neighboring vegetable gardens. If the settlement has grown enough to have this kind of extramural slum, odds are very good that it will also grow straight into the space left behind: gentrification by fire.

Throw all of these factors into a pot together, and you get the process by which a city grows. I used the term “extramural” there very deliberately, because in any society without efficient artillery or equivalent, most cities are going to be walled, and these elite houses, neighboring villages, and suburban slums are outside that line. But walls aren’t a one-and-done affair; new ones may be built farther out, with or without demolishing the older version first. If you look at the historical geography of Constantinople, you’ll find a steady march up the peninsula on which the city sits, with the Severan Wall enclosing a modest area, the Constantinian Wall significantly farther out, and the famous Theodosian Walls farther still. You can track the growth of the city by how much later rulers felt needed to be protected.

Or cities can grow without moving their walls. London and Westminster were separate settlements about two miles (three kilometers) apart, but a lot of business was in London while much of the work of government was in Westminster. When an enterprising earl received a chunk of the land between them in the mid-sixteenth century, he deliberately constructed a fashionable area — now Covent Garden Square — to attract the kind of rich tenants who might be regularly visiting both places. It was the prototype of a later building spree that created the West End we see today, part and parcel of how for the last two or three hundred years, London has been steadily absorbing those and all the smaller towns around it. Nor is it the only one: many other cities worldwide have sprawled to an enormous footprint many times larger than their original cores.

What’s different about modern suburbs — especially in the U.S. — is that they’re often entirely new construction, along the lines of Covent Garden, with developers creating communities out of whole cloth. Or perhaps I shouldn’t say “communities,” because that implies a kind of social fabric that rarely exists there. Many of these places get referred to with phrases like “bedroom town,” pointing at the way residents are expected to sleep but not really live there. The worst of them have few if any local businesses, so that you have to conduct all your shopping, doctor’s visits, and outside entertainments somewhere else.

But to get that kind of suburb, you need something else in the mix: transportation. And that’s next week’s essay!

It may seem something of a non sequitur to swerve from talking about friendship to public baths, especially when that latter topic has come up before. But Year Four‘s essay focused on such baths as a place one goes to get clean, devoting only half a sentence to the notion that they might also be — often were, and are — a social nexus.

For this to make sense, you have to expand your mental image well past bathing as the modern goal-oriented shower at home (get in, get clean, get out), and think more in terms of a spa. Or the better comparison nowadays might be a beauty salon, the kind of place you go to get your hair cut, dyed, and/or styled, while somebody nearby is having their nails done. These tasks can take a while, and if your local salon has a clientele of regulars who know each other and the staff, of course people will fill the time with conversation. (Or we did, before people had smartphones to stare at instead.)

Public baths can be just a place to get clean, but that’s rarely all they are. As a result, going to one is less likely to be an errand you check off in the middle of your busy day and more likely to be a good chunk of the day all on its own, as you attend to a variety of bodily needs — at least if you’re sufficiently wealthy that you can afford the add-on services, not just quick scrub.

Haircuts are a perennial need, of course, with frequency depending on style, and some kinds of hairdos (especially for women) that take enough time to set up that once done, you leave it in place for a week or more. Those with facial hair may need it trimmed or shaved off, whatever’s the fashion; the same can be true of those who need a bald scalp for whatever reason, whether it’s status, religion, clearing the way for a wig, or getting rid of lice. Nails also need care, and polish or dyes for those go back thousands of years. Massages are a natural accompaniment when the muscles have been relaxed by warm water — and, yes, sometimes the “massages” are of the euphemistic kind; bathhouses are a notorious site of sexual activity, be that prostitution or unpaid hookups of an illicit (e.g. homosexual) type.

But massages in the therapeutic sense lead us toward more general medical services. And it turns out that the notion of going to a place of bathing for its “healing waters” is not be entirely bogus! Analysis of the waters in Bath, England — famed as a healing center since pre-Roman times — recently uncovered fifteen different species of beneficial bacteria that can help combat E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and other prime culprits for infection. Mind you, it’s also possible for the waters of a communal bathing place to become a filthy breeding ground for bacteria that are much less friendly . . .

(I should note, by the way, that concerns over hygiene have also been used as cover for less admirable impulses. Where bathing is communal, you have the question of who’s allowed in: not just gender segregation, but also class and racial. Just a bit to the north of me are the remains of the Sutro Baths, an indoor public swimming pool in San Francisco that in 1897 lost a legal battle over prohibiting a Black man from using their facilities. Racists absolutely couched their efforts at discrimination in health terms, casting minorities as inherently “dirty” spreaders of disease.)

The use of public baths for broader medical purposes means that going to such a place could be anything from a quick dip, to your entire afternoon, to several weeks of leisure while you “take the waters” in a suitably tony establishment. So let’s look at what kinds of social opportunity that affords!

If it’s a regular item on your schedule, odds are fairly good that you can expect to see certain friends (or people you emphatically do not consider friends) every time you visit. That gives you a chance to at least exchange greetings and maybe some quick news about what’s going on in your lives: not an in-depth conversation, but that isn’t needed when you see each other every week.

Should you be spending more time there, however, more possibilities open up. Steam baths, saunas, and soaking pools give you a reason to lounge around for a while, perhaps enjoying a snack or a drink, or reading a newspaper if your society has those. Now the bath is a place you might go specifically for the purpose of catching up on news and gossip — useful if a character is trying to investigate something! It can also be an unparalleled opportunity to schmooze, with a socially adept character inserting themself into a nearby conversation with an interesting tidbit or a clever bon mot. The more exclusive the establishment, the more likely it is that this is one of the places the old boys’ network (of whatever gender) operates, and gaining access is a great way to get a leg up.

And when it’s not just the local bath but a whole town like Bath, now you’re looking at sociability on the scale of tourism or a vacation. Whole families or groups of friends go there together, and being invited to join such an excursion signals a particular level of belonging. These trips might be seasonal — especially if the site is known for its mild climate — or maybe everybody with the money and freedom to do so decamps there in times of pestilence, hoping the healing waters may protect them. If enough people have gone at once, then this becomes the scenario you’ve seen in Regency romances: lots of maneuvering around courtship and marriage, with or without a side order of political intrigue.

I have to admit, though, that the core element here always feels a little odd to me. I grew up in a culture that’s fine with swimming pools but emphatically does not expect people to get naked around each other — which is kind of necessary if you’re trying to get clean! When I’ve been at an athletic club with a steam room or sauna, clients are expected to wear towels over key areas. So the notion of some key stages for socialization being clothing-optional is just weird.

But weird is fine. Weird is an opportunity for worldbuilding!

I say on a fairly regular basis that we are social primates. But there are limits to that; our brains are adapted for small groups, and cope much less well with hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of people. It’s therefore not surprising that we’ve developed tons of ways of dividing society into smaller, more manageable sets: families, neighborhoods, co-workers, etc. And clubs — which, for lack of a better umbrella term, I’m going to use for a whole swath of voluntary associations.

Because of the breadth of scope implied there, some types of club have already appeared in previous essays. The gangs of Year Six, for example, or the craft guilds of Year Seven, or the mystery cults of Year Eight, or the burial societies of Year Nine: all of these are examples of how people may club together for various purposes.

But if that were all, this wouldn’t merit an essay. So let’s talk about the fun end of things: secret societies and their ilk.

There are differing levels of secrecy in play here. The peak would be a society whose existence, membership, and activities are completely unsuspected by outsiders . . . but good luck pulling that off. In theory these absolutely exist, then and now, and I’m just not aware of them because they do such a flawless job of staying hidden. What we know of human behavior and security failures, however, means this is generally unlikely: sooner or later, word will get out. For this reason, I tend to side-eye such groups in stories — though if they have mind-control magic or similar methods available to them, then maybe they can indeed scrub all knowledge of themselves from the broader world.

More often, though, secrecy operates at a less restrictive level. The group is known to exist, but outsiders don’t know who’s a member. The membership is known, but they don’t speak of their business outside their ranks. The membership is known and engages in public activity, but rumors persist that that’s just the face they present to the world, and behind the scenes, they get up to all kinds of nefarious deeds.

This is, of course, the stuff of conspiracy theories. If you “know” a group exists, but there’s no proof of anybody being a member, it’s probably nothing more than rumor — but good luck disproving a rumor. If a group definitely exists, but they won’t talk about themselves, why not? What are they hiding? In the long run, this can become a form of corrosive distrust, either for one paranoid individual or for whole communities, where they wind up doubting all the available evidence and insisting that something else must be going on behind the scenes.

But for stories? This can be great, because it automatically introduces tension and intrigue to the narrative. And secret societies do genuinely exist, because if there’s one thing we love more than belonging to a group, it’s belonging to a special group, one where your membership means being inducted to privileges — including knowledge — that not everyone else gets. That heightens the feeling of social connection with your fellow members. Secret societies are also extremely prone to ritualizing their business, holding elaborate ceremonies for inducting new members or promoting someone within their ranks, and even dressing up their ordinary meetings with special robes and solemn formalities: measures that strengthen the bond between members, and help ensure that nobody will break ranks.

That helps explain why quite a few secret societies have no particular purpose beyond their own existence. The infamous Skull and Bones, a secret society for students at Yale, doesn’t carry out any public activities that I’m aware of, which differentiates it from the more ordinary student clubs organized around a certain mission or area of interest. It’s simply a way for a select group of individuals to join an elite tradition, forging connections with each other which may benefit them going forward. In this they are akin to the gentlemen’s clubs that began to form in Britain around the seventeenth century, although those latter often had some ostensible unifying theme: military service, political affiliation, or alumni of a certain university.

Unsurprisingly, it’s extremely common to find that members of such clubs and societies go on to careers in politics. These are the the “old boys’ networks” in action — very specifically boys, since many of them resisted or to this day resist admitting women to their ranks. (Though there are women’s secret societies as well, e.g. the Sande in West Africa.) To the extent that a group of this kind has a purpose, it’s the furtherance of its members’ power . . . which readily lends itself to conspiracy theories about a plan for world domination.

That last, of course, is the stuff of the Illuminati and the Freemasons — at least in folklore. The actual Bavarian Illuminati simply wanted to oppose superstition and monarchical abuses of power, but after their suppression in the eighteenth century, some people believed they continued in secret, blaming them for every kind of event and social movement imaginable, all around the world. (I say “blame” because usually people assume these later Illuminati to be nefarious, rather than crediting them with shifts the speaker thinks are desirable.) The facts that the Freemasons publicly exist, each Grand Lodge is independent without answering to a top authority, and (in the Anglo-American tradition) they explicitly prohibit discussions of religion or politics within their lodges, do not keep them from being the focus of similar rumors of machinations for a New World Order.

In some cases there may be real evidence of foul activities. The Ku Klux Klan has not just secretly but publicly and with pride carried out murder and acts of terror against Black people, explicitly to further a white supremacist agenda. Some instances of malicious groups, however, are very much a “handle with care” situation, as with the “leopard” or “human leopard” (sometimes also crocodile and chimpanzee) societies of late colonial West Africa: these do genuinely seem to have existed, may have committed murder, and in some cases possibly did engage in cannibalism . . . but given how much those became a stereotype of racist pulp fiction, I would proceed with a great deal of caution before trying to insert anything like that into a story.

Having dwelt a lot on the negative side, though, I’d like to note that isn’t the whole story of clubs. Fraternal orders like the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Knights of Columbus, or the Odd Fellows may have the ritual elements, but their purpose is often openly charitable or oriented toward aid. Groups like the burial societies I mentioned before fall under the header of “friendly societies” or “benefit societies,” which seek to help members support each other and/or outsiders like immigrants or the indigent poor; depending on their focus, these swing in the direction of cooperatives or volunteer organizations. Even groups with a primary focus like religion may take on such missions: the Catholic Trinitarian monastic order is officially the Order of the Most Holy Trinity and Captives, because the ransom of Christian captives held in other lands was a core principle upon which they were founded. (In modern times, where that’s a less common problem, they evangelize and help immigrants.)

What all these groups have in common is the use of social bonding to help further their purpose, whether that’s the advancement of members’ political careers, the spread of religion, or the protection of orphans. Probably all of us know that merely donating money to an organization creates a weak feeling of attachment at best. By contrast, face-to-face interaction with a small enough group of fellow members that you know them all as friends — at least in the loose sense of that word — is a far more powerful lever for motivation. We like to feel as if we belong, and once we do, we don’t want to let our fellows down.

In our increasingly digital, disconnected world, that’s a useful thing to keep in mind.