Zysman, John, and Laura Tyson, eds. 1983. American Industry in International Competition: Government Policies and Corporate Strategies. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press.
* J. M. Keynes, Collected Works, X, 97-98, quoted in Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour 1920-1937, p. 419. My thanks for this quotation to Morton Keller.
* In general. It is easier to stay warm if one has the means—the appropriate clothing and housing. Faujas de Saint Fond, a French traveler of the late eighteenth century, remarks that whereas English cultivators lived snug and warm thanks to coal fuel, French peasants often kept to bed in winter, thereby aggravating their poverty by forced idleness.
* Cf. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book IV, ch. 7, Part 2: “In all European colonies the culture of the sugarcane is carried on by negro slaves. The constitution of those who have been born in the temperate climate of Europe could not, it is supposed, support the labour of digging the ground under the burning sun….”
† Not everyone would agree. Cf. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model, p. 70, who says that it has become clear, “from many sources of evidence including physiological studies, that human bodies of all sorts can labor as effectively in the tropics as elsewhere if the bodies in question have had time to adjust to tropical conditions.” Blaut is ideologically opposed to the notion that the favors of nature may be unequally distributed.
* Some scholars would not agree with this historical sequence. They see the slave trade as not indigenous but rather imported by the European demand for labor. This trade “changed trypanosomiasis from an endemic disease to which both humans and cattle had some immunity and exposure, which was kept in check by the relatively full occupation of lands into a devastating disease that, since the end of the last century, has indeed prevented the development of animal husbandry in some areas of Africa.” Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model, pp. 79-80, who miscites Giblin, “Trypanosomiasis Control.” (Giblin is concerned, not with the effects of Atlantic slaving beginning in the sixteenth century, but rather those of colonial administration from the 1890s [pp. 73-74], a very different story.) Even on this later period, scholars disagree. Cf. Waller, “Tsetse Fly,” p. 100.
Note, moreover, that there is abundant testimony to the existence of slavery in Africa long before the coming of the Europeans, as well as of an active slave trade by Arabs seeking captives for Muslim lands. Gordon, Slavery, pp. 105-27. On the other hand, whatever the origins and effects of these earlier manifestations, the Atlantic trade certainly aggravated them. Cf. Law, “Dahomey and the Slave Trade”; and Lovejoy, “Impact.” Even here, however, Eltis, Economic Growth, p. 77, disagrees.
* Gibbon, the great historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by way of emphasizing the momentousness of this victory, remarked that had the Arabs won, all of Europe would now be reading the Koran and all the males circumcised.
* Eric Jones, The European Miracle, pp. 6-7: “Faeces discharged into water made China the world reservoir of lung, liver and intestinal flukes and the Oriental schistosome, all serious causes of chronic illness. Human excreta were used as a fertiliser, and soil-transmitted helminth infestation was an occupational hazard for the farmer. According to Han Suyin there was ninety per cent worm infestation among children in Peking in the early twentieth century and worms were visible everywhere on paths and alongside buildings…. Anti-social customs apart, this was the penalty for a dense population operating irrigation agriculture in a warm climate, with inadequate sources of fertiliser.” India, with the unhygienic habit of defecating in public space, often in streams and rivers that also served for washing and drinking, may have been in even worse shape.
† Jones, European Miracle, who cites Narain, Indian Economic Life, pp. 332-33. But Narain’s data come from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Europe had made substantial progress over earlier mortality levels. The differences between Europe and Asia had presumably been smaller five hundred or a thousand years earlier.
** The Yangtze alone deposits more silt than the Nile, Amazon, and Mississippi combined; and the Yellow River deposits three times that of the Yangtze—Link, “A Harvest,” p. 6.
‡ Because of dependence on artifice, such societies were highly vulnerable. It has been argued, for example, that the destruction (fourteenth century) by Timur and his Tartar hordes of the cisterns and water delivery systems of Persia was never repaired and turned a once populous, fertile land into a waste. The kingdoms and peoples of that area never recovered.
* In effect, this pattern of maximum reproduction enhanced political power, in terms both of combat fodder and of material for territorial expansion. In the last analysis, this was the story of Chinese aggrandizement over less prolific societies.
† Jones, The European Miracle, p. 5. Jones cites one apologist as arguing that many of these projects may not have involved that many workers after all, that they may have been spread out over time and taken generations to complete, and that the laborers may have been volunteers motivated by religious fervor (p. 10). Anyone who can believe that will believe anything: these projects typically used armed overseers and entailed spectacularly high death rates. On the losses that went with construction of the Grand Canal and the Great Wall of China—we are talking of millions of dead—see ibid., p. 9.
** That’s not quite true: the Europeans also had their despotisms. Visitors today to the great basilica at Vézelay may be interested to learn that the serfs who were conscripted to build it rose three times in revolt against the church authorities. Animals also paid; cf. the cathedral at Laon, which stands atop a hill and has in its tower the statues of four oxen, facing north, south, east, and west, commemorating the beasts that died hauling up stone from the plain below. But better oxen than people. And that was a kind of apology.
For a more recent example, cf. the railway line (1840s) from St. Petersburg to Moscow—a corpse for every tie.
* Loess is a loose loam, ranging from clayey soil to sand, fertile if well watered, well suited to cereal crops. It was not the richest land within reach, but rich enough, and it possessed the virtue of being easy to work because it did not carry heavy timber and could be cleared and cultivated with nonmetal instruments.
In the western parts of North China, the primary loess deposits run as much as 250 meters deep. The soil is fine and friable, hence easily plowed—see Bray, “Swords into Plowshares,” p. 23. On the critical importance of ease of cultivation as against potential fertility in the early stages of agriculture, see above on the European experience. On China, see Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers, pp. 29-30. In his n.8 he cites Wittfogel to the effect that Egyptian agriculture began, not in the Nile delta, but upstream around what was to become the site of Memphis. Also the agricultural anthropologist-archeologist Carl Sauer, who stressed the importance of a soil “amenable to few and weak tools,” and noted that the American Indians first cultivated poorer but more workable soils.
† Irregular precipitation upstream led to large variations in the volume of water, and the build-up of alluvial deposits at the great eastward bend had the Yellow River changing course all over the place as it splashed and poured into the Great Plain. Hence the nickname: China’s Sorrow.
* Ingenuity and labor can still increase farm output, if not of rice and cereals, then of accessory crops. See Emily M. Berstein, “Ecologists Improve Production in Chinese Farming Village,” N.Y. Times, 10 August 1993, p. C4, re increase in fish crop and savings in fertilizer.
* This is the theme of, though not the inspiration for, the film The Magnificent Seven. Comparable situations lead to comparable tactics.
* “The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days labour, civil government is not so necessary.”—Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book 5, ch. 1, Part 2. Smith was thinking here of the protection of private property; but these considerat
ions also apply to the uses of power.
† After years of telling of this apocryphal exchange (versions vary, but that’s folklore), French teachers were afraid to ask their students who broke the vase of Soissons, because there would always be one wiseacre in the class to deny it. Cf. Bonheur, Qui a casse, p. 77.
* This split between western and eastern Europe is only one aspect of a profound chasm that still exists. And most people in eastern Europe know which side of the line they want to be on. Hence the expansion of “central” Europe to include everyone outside Russia. Also the inclusionary plans of the European Union and NATO.
* Already in late Roman times, Germanic tribes fought as allies alongside imperial forces to repel later invaders: thus Salian Franks, Visigoths, and others, with the Roman general Aetius against Attila’s Huns at the so-called Battle of Chalons (somewhere near Troyes) in 451. Attila and his Huns have come down in European tradition as quintessential symbols of barbarism and savagery. But today’s Turks do not feel that way: Attila is one of their favorite names.
† When they got to Vienna the second time, in 1683, the Turks found themselves facing not only Germans but the Poles of Sobieski. Europeans could work together when they thought they faced a common enemy. That this was a last gasp is shown by the rapid Ottoman retreat thereafter. In a short sixteen years, they left Hungary and pulled back to Bosnia and Serbia, thus giving up the middle Danube Valley to Christian settlement (Treaty of Karlowitz).
* The English and German versions of the verse (and maybe others) traduce the meaning by saying that “morning bells are ringing.” The point is, they are not ringing.
* The Chinese would seem to have been more afraid of rebellion from within than invasion from without. More modern armaments might fall into the wrong hands, and these included those of the generals. Cf. Hall, Powers and Liberties, pp. 46—47.
* For reasons well worth exploring in the context of the history of ideas and the invention of folklore, a number of scholars have recently tried to propagate the notion that European technology did not catch up to that of Asia until the late eighteenth century. The most active source at the moment is the H-World site on the Internet—a magnet for fallacies and fantasies.
* Jean Ziegler, La victoire des vaincus, p. 101, cites a Russian novel of the 1960s, Ajvanhu, by Juryi Rychten (the Polish translation is dated 1966) that has its Siberian hero complain: “I have never been able to understand how anyone can discover land that is already inhabited by people…. It’s as though I went to Yakutsk and announced that I had discovered that city. Tht would hardly please the Yakuts.” (NB: This is translation at three removes—Russian to Polish to French to English. But I don’t think it traduces the original.)
* The one exception to this disenchantment has been a persistent gratification in the spread of Christianity to a world of pagan religion, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. Far be it from me to defend these older practices. Still, the historian must note that those proffered “salvation” paid a high price and might put a different value on the exchange.
† Some would argue that all of this is patently untrue. The world is composed of a diversity of nations of unequal size and strength, and one does not see the strong always dominating or exploiting the weak. That is correct; but such forbearance is in large part conditioned by the balance of power. Nations will join forces if necessary to prevent hegemony; hence a rational calculus of forbearance. But it is a fragile calculus, liable to errors of appreciation. Thus it took many centuries to arrive at such an equilibrium in Europe, but twice in this century the balance has been challenged, with tragic results. The recent Gulf War was also the result of such a miscalculation (based on misinformation); and the reasons for the huge response were, first, the nature of the stakes (oil), and second, the conviction that it was important to affirm the principle of what used to be called collective security.
On this equilibrium power model of imperialism, see Landes, “Some Thoughts on the Nature of Economic Imperialism” and “An Equilibrium Model of Imperialism.”
* When the crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they sacked, raped, and massacred; whereas when Saladin recaptured the city for the Muslims in 1187, he spared it.
* In the Canaries, the Spanish found natives still living in the stone age. These Guanches, as they were called, after some early, unhappy experiments in coexistence, made ferocious resistance and in spite of drastic inferiority in weapons (clubs vs. steel and guns), held the invaders off for more than a century. The Canaries were not fully subdued until after Columbus.
The Guanches posed a theological and spiritual problem. Were they human? Did they have a soul? Did they live according to law? Could they be Christian? The major reason for these moralistic excursions was the justification of conquest and enslavement. The Spanish had a need for legitimation; they wanted a blessing on their enterprises and always got it.
* The recent Argentine practice of taking the children of “disappeared” (note the transitive verb) political adversaries, including babies born in prison, and then giving them to their jailers or even the policemen who murdered the parents, to rear as their own, has long antecedents. Cf. this shipload of the “converted” children of Jews banished from Portugal in the expulsion of 1497, wrenched from their parents and saved for the next world, sent to the Cape Verde Islands because volunteer settlers were not available—Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus, p. 201. White men went in to these tropical lands, but few came out.
* The extent of this holocaust is a subject of disagreement. High estimates of the population of the Caribbean islands at the time of Columbus’ arrival run into the millions, over a million for Hispaniola (Haiti) alone. These are based on a count supposedly done by Bartholomew Columbus (the admiral’s brother) in 1496 and repeated as authority in subsequent reports—Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, pp. 65-67. What kind of count this was is impossible to say. On the other hand, Sauer, p. 204, states that plague and disease were not reported in the islands until 1518, at which time the native population of Hispaniola was down to some eleven thousand. How, then, had the missing persons been extinguished? By brutality, murder, forced labor in placer gold mines, a precipitous fall in births. Still, it is hard to understand how even a busy colony of sadists, butchers, and taskmasters could kill so many (that is, over a million) so fast.
* Is that really so? The British colonists in North America were capable of cold murder; but hot torment and torture? And if one asks who can measure these things, there does seem to me a significant operational difference here, namely, that if I were an Indian, I would rather have died at British than at Spanish hands. Dead is dead, but that way I might go to my death swiftly and reasonably whole.
* This decisive superiority of European armament in 1500, along with other technological advantages already discussed, sticks in the craw of scholars who want to believe that European global hegemony was a lucky accident. As one iconoclast has proclaimed: “My 1400-1800 book ‘shows’ that Asia was way ahead of Europe till 1800 and that Europe joined/climbed up on Asia using American money. The ‘expansion’ of Europe and its progress/advantage over Asia from 1500 is a Eurocentric myth.” Andre Guilder Frank, University of Toronto, on the Internet, H-World ©msu.edu, 7 June 1996.
* The first Portuguese to arrive in India were misled by native idolatry into thinking that Hinduism was an exotic form of Christianity.
* They also explored the east coast of Asia as far north as Kamchatka, but there too decided to abstain. (Once you’ve seen an ice floe, you’ve seen ’cm all.)
* The Yellow and South China seas have always been a notorious nursery of pirates. Witness the terrible fate of many of the so-called boat people fleeing Vietnam in recent years.
* Columbus himself made a point of spreading the news. After his return to Spain in March 1493, his letter of discovery was printed thirteen times—once in Spanish, nine times in Latin, three times in Italian. Gomez, L’invention, p. 95.
* This may have been intended a
s a consolation for those who could not get to the New World and meet the Amazons on their home turf. From a letter of 1533 from Martin de Salinas, official in Valladolid, to the secretary of Charles V—Gomez, L’invention, pp. 120-21. Legend had it that Amazons coupled two or three times a year in order to have children, then gave the male babies away.
* It would seem, however, that the Mexicans were astonishingly inclusive in their diet, finding animal protein in dogs, guinea pigs, and worms, among other fauna. The worms have become something of a cult item for aficionados of pre-Columbian American cuisine, if we arc to believe an article on the subject published in 1990 in the magazine of American Airlines. As a kindness, I shall not cite the name of the author, who brags that he tried some of his worms live and was bitten on the tongue for his temerity.
* The battle dogs were also terrible—rippers and killers against which Aztec weapons were almost unavailing—but their tenacity limited the damage. The Spanish used them primarily in reconnaissance and against prisoners and passersby, instruments of terror and entertainment. Cf. Todorov, La conquête de l’Amérique, p. 146.
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