Niall Ferguson is Still a Rotter

In the second chapter of Civilization According to Niall Campbell Douglas Elizabeth Ferguson, the author discusses the "killer app" of Science, and how it explains the expansion of Western civilization relative to the Rest of the World - to the Islamic World, in particular. The most powerful Islamic empire of the early modern period, Ferguson observes, was the Ottoman, which dominated the Middle East, North Africa, and southeastern Europe, and whose armies twice laid siege to Christendom's eastern bastion, Vienna. The second of these sieges, however, ended in what turned out to be a "long Ottoman retreat," as the empire was undermined, apparently, by its inability to replicate European science and technology. In the Muslim world, Professor Niall tells us, there was no separation of church and state, and the former had paramount power in matters of the mind; if religious leaders denounced European innovations as blasphemous, the state had no choice but to suppress them. In Western Europe, meanwhile, Europeans benefited from a lack of Church restraint on science, from state support for science in the form of royal scientific societies (an important point, actually), and from the printing press, which allowed scientists widely to disseminate their findings. (Also helpful, though Ferguson doesn't mention it, was a common learned language, namely Latin, which allowed researchers from different nations to communicate.) The result was a "scientific revolution" that made Europe more powerful, in the long run, than the Ottomans and other Islamic states, even though the Ottoman Empire routinely tried to copy Western technology and military science in the 1700s and 1800s.

The biggest problem with this chapter is Ferguson's failure to establish a convincing connection between science and state power, apart from a two-page digression on the scientist Benjamin Robins and his invention of the science of ballistics. Artillery is important, but inferior artillery and underdeveloped technology were not the most important causes of the Ottoman Empire's decline. Our Man Niall actually identifies one of these later in the chapter: inefficient taxation and the consequent inability of the Ottoman regime to pay for a modern army without heavy borrowing, at usurious rates, in Europe (p. 89). Another cause of Ottoman distress was the empire's loss of the northern shore of the Black Sea to Russia (ca. 1768-91), which opened the possibility of a Russian seaborne assault on Constantinople and forced the empire to devote precious resources to home defense. In sum, it was those old culprits, imperial overstretch and financial difficulties, that sickened the Sick Man of Europe.

Along the same lines, the Sexiest Scotsman fails to demonstrate persuasively the relationship between European science and European power. He discusses ballistics and rifled artillery, of course, but neither had much of an impact on European war-making until the mid-nineteenth century. May I suggest that a more important European scientific discovery than ballistics was the discovery of atmospheric pressure and the energy that one could generate by creating a vacuum? (I believe I may.) In the seventeenth century Otto von Guericke discovered that an evacuated sphere could not be pulled apart by two teams of horses, and in 1680 Christian Huygens proposed generating a vacuum in a piston to perform work. Guericke and Huygens' experiments helped lead to the first functional steam engines, which used a partial vacuum, generated by condensing steam, to produce a 5-horsepower "power stroke." Thomas Newcomen, who designed said engine, doesn't seem to have read about Guericke and Huygens' work, but his predecessors, Denis Papin and Thomas Savery, had certainly done so. Some decades later the inventor Nicholas Appert made another important discovery about vacuums, which is that a vacuum combined with high levels of heat helped inhibit organic decay, which Appert applied to the invention of canned food. The steam engine made steam-powered transport possible, and facilitated the mass-production of consumer goods like clothing. Canning made it possible adequately and reliably to feed very large non-rural populations, like city-dwellers and soldiers. Both technologies helped turn Europe into the most urbanized and industrialized part of the world by 1900. This, I would argue, was a more vital component of European power than big guns.

Why doesn't N.D.C.E. Ferguson spend more time discussing the relationship between scientific research and economic (and military) power? I suspect this is because he doesn't actually know that much about science, a pity given the premise of this chapter. Rather than describe the accomplishments of the European Scientific Revolution, Ferguson contents himself with summarizing the 29 "most important scientific breakthroughs" of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries (65-66), discoveries which are apparently important because the author tells us so, not because he explains their impact on Europeans' worldview and approach to the physical world. Much of the rest of the chapter is devoted to Ferguson's summary of Bernard Lewis's book on Islamic scientific backwardness, along with a paean to Ferg's Secret Boyfriend, Frederick II of Prussia, and a somewhat overwrought linkage of modern Israel with seventeenth-century Vienna - Jerusalem, he writes, is "the modern equivalent of Vienna in 1683" - accompanied by dark mutterings about the threat posed to Israel by the sinister lights of Perverted Muslim (Nuclear) Science. It’s worth noting that Ferguson’s curious reference to the 1683 Siege of Vienna is a “dog-whistle” to some conservative European nationalists, who believe that Christendom is once again under siege by the Turks – this time, by Turkish guest workers and by Turkey’s drive to win admission to the EU. Professor Niall, to his credit, tells these European nativists that they have nothing to fear from the Turks, who began "downloading" European secularism in the 1920s. Instead, they need to worry about defending Israel, the Besieged Vienna of the twenty-first century, from the nuclear forces of the devilish Iranians. This effort to create an alliance between old European nationalist conservatives and American neo-conservatives appears to be Ferguson's chief intellectual goal in this chapter. That's the Scientific Method, you see.

Sources: Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (Harper Perennial, 2003); John Darwin, After Tamerlane, 174-75; Alfred Crosby, Children of the Sun, 71-76; Gavin Weightman, The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914 (Grove Press, 2007), 50-52; Andrew Wheatcroft, The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Struggle for Europe (Basic Books, 2008), 266-267; Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity (Walker & Company, 2009),159-163; Niall Ferguson, Civilization, 50-95.

Napoleonland

The Telegraph and the Times of London report that former French Cabinet minister Yves Jego is planning to build an amusement park commemorating the life and times of Napoleon Bonaparte. The proposed park will include a daily re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo, a Trafalgar water show, a ski run commemorating the retreat from Moscow (complete with fake bodies in the snow), and a re-creation of the guillotining of Louis XVI. Other attractions* may include an ice-skating rink where park visitors can shatter the ice and drown other tourists with cannon, an Egyptian pavilion where customers may buy pastries shaped like the Sphinx (provided they agree to bite off the noses), , a tunnel-of-love ride where an animatronic Napoleon shares his most romantic sentiments (e.g. "Don't wash; I'm coming home" or "I wish to marry a womb"), a coffee bar named "Damn Coffee, Damn Sugar, Damn Colonies," a regular bar where one may buy Whiff of Grape (TM) alcopop by the shot, and a Saint-Helena-themed hotel where guests are obliged to listen to has-been French politicians boast about their former accomplishments, or (if they visit the adjoining Elba lounge) lament their current isolation, preferably in the form of a palindrome.

Napoleonland is supposed to open in 2017, provided Jego and his associates can raise the 200 million Euros it will ostensibly cost - and provided no-one in Las Vegas beats them to the draw.


* Which I believe I made up.

Niall Ferguson is Still a Colossal Muttonhead

The first chapter of Niall Campbell Douglas Elizabeth Ferguson's Civilization discusses the first "killer app" of Western civilization, competition, and introduces the device he uses throughout the book to make his arguments, the poorly-crafted comparison. One can clearly see the benefits of interstate competition, Our Man Niall asserts in this chapter, by comparing the navigational and military achievements of Western Europe with those of Imperial China. In the 15th century Ming China was a rich, urbanized and technically sophisticated country, capable of sending huge "treasure fleets" across the Indian Ocean. By the middle of that century, however, the Ming emperor decided to turn his back on oceanic exploration, and because there were no rival powers to gainsay him the entire Chinese population had to follow suit. China as a result slipped into isolationism, economic stagnation, and disorder, which apparently lasted until the 20th century.

Meanwhile, the states of Western Europe, divided by geography into a multiplicity of competing states, were driven by their own rivalries to develop new navigational techniques and ships capable of reaching the Americas or East Asia (pp. 33-34). These competitors also developed improved cannons, one of the keys to their penetration of Asian markets, and - here one must give Ferg credit for a useful insight - devised systems of public finance capable of paying for hundreds of ships and cannon. The same interstate rivalries and navigational techniques also impelled and allowed Europeans to colonize the Americas, which, Ferguson notes - forgetting how dismissive he was of this point in his Introduction - provided Europe with an outlet for unwanted people and with "new nutrients like potatoes and sugar" (45), assets that China did not enjoy. Navigation and the interstate competition that fostered it were not the sole sources of early modern European power, but they certainly gave Europeans an advantage over a stagnant and declining China.

Well, perhaps. It all depends on which China you're talking about. Our Bearer of the White Man's Burden reports that the Ming Dynasty collapsed in civil war and famine in the mid-17th century, and that thereafter China remained "stationary" (46) until the twentieth century. This is bilge. The Manchu invaders who occupied Beijing in 1644 went on to create a dynamic polity and society in China in the eighteenth century. The imperial army conquered Formosa, Tibet, and eastern Turkestan, expanding China to its modern borders; the amount of arable land under cultivation doubled between 1720 and 1780, as Han Chinese colonized lightly-settled regions within the empire's borders; and the empire's population also doubled during the same period, to more than 300 million. Meanwhile, the Qing government repaired and expanded China's system of canals, lowered taxes, abolished serfdom, and lifted restrictions on land sales. By 18th-century European standards it was a model of "enlightened despotism."

Nor was China an isolationist state during the 17th and 18th centuries. No-one tried to build a fleet comparable to Zheng He's again - in part because China didn't have enough readily-exploitable timber to keep building enormous oceanic ships - but Chinese traders used smaller vessels to join the Indian Ocean trading network at Melaka, and the Qing government allowed Europeans to establish trading posts at Canton and Macao. Qing China used these connections indirectly to exploit the riches of the New World: at least 30% of the silver and gold from Spanish America was shipped to China, to pay for silks, sugar, tea, and other goods that the Chinese produced for export. At the same time, Chinese peasants acquired American crops like sweet potatoes and maize and used them to cultivate the empire's central and western uplands. Certainly, China stagnated around the end of the 1700s, as it reached the limits to growth set by elite conservatism, soil erosion, and a lack of energy resources, but this occurred at the end of 150 years of growth, not as a continuation of a 200-year-old trend.

Ferguson organizes his book both chronologically and thematically, which means that he intends in each chapter to cover a distinct and sequential epoch in world history - in Chapter One, the period from 1400 to 1650. However, he goes out of his way to indicate, through scattered references to Chinese stagnation and complacency in the 18th and 19th centuries, that Chinese history essentially stopped in 1650, and didn't restart (in an economic sense) until the Maoist revolution. A nation's history, however, doesn't just stop because you've ordered it to do so for the sake of narrative convenience. Maybe Ferguson should sue the Qing Dynasty for complicating his story.

[Sources: Gale Stokes, "The Fates of Human Societies," American Historical Review (April 2001): 508-525, esp. 514, 516-18; Jeremy Black, Warfare in the 18th Century (Smithsonian, 2005), 31-39; John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 (Bloomsbury, 2008), 129-131; Kenneth Pomeranz, "Their Own Path to Crisis? Social Change, State-Building, and the Limits of Qing Expansion, c. 1770-1840," in The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840, ed. David Armitage & Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 189-208, esp. 192-194; Niall Ferguson, Civilization (Penguin, 2011), 19-49; Charles Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (Knopf, 2011), 162-192. Thanks to commenter John for recommending the last title.]

New Rules

Periodically, when the American federal government undergoes an especially grievous episode of gridlock, incivility, or general craziness, I am prone to wishing we could simply scrap our ancient and seizure-prone federal Constitution and turn Washington, D.C. into a theme park. Reason, however, tells us that just as Nature abhors a vacuum, so would human beings find it difficult simply to raze the American national government without building a replacement – and that nowadays a new federal constitution would be likelier to draw its inspiration from Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins than from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. In the interest of providing an alternative to a Christian Dominionist government, I herewith offer, with tongue somewhat in cheek, my own outline of a replacement constitution. Comments are welcome so long as they amuse me.

Dave’s Constitution:

1. All persons residing in the territory or jurisdiction of the United States are entitled to the equal protection of its laws.

2. All persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are U.S. citizens and entitled to the privileges and immunities thereof.

3. Neither the U.S., the states, nor any subordinate jurisdiction may abridge freedom of speech, the press, the rights of peaceable expression and assembly, and the right to petition officials for redress of grievances.

4. Neither the U.S., the states, nor any subordinate jurisdiction may abridge religious freedom or provide any legal or financial support to any religious entity.

5. No American citizen over the age of 18 may be deprived of the right to vote for any reason.

6. Neither the U.S., the states, nor any subordinate jurisdiction may infringe the right of persons to secure enjoyment of their homes, businesses, persons, and possessions.

7. The U.S. government, the states, and all subordinate jurisdictions guarantee the rights of habeas corpus, due process of law for those accused of a crime (including the right to an attorney and compulsory appearances of witnesses), and immunity from cruel and unusual punishment, including the death penalty, "stress positions," and waterboarding. Up yours, Dick Cheney.

8. The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall extend to all weapons invented prior to 1791, including smooth-bore, black-powder cannon. Private citizens owning wooden, sail-driven ships of war may not engage in privateering without a Congressional letter of marque and reprisal.

9. The old Ninth Amendment is pretty awesome, so let's keep that.

10. The executive of the United States shall consist of a president, elected by majority vote of the citizens of the United States every four years; a vice-president (ditto), who shall succeed the president in the event of his or her death or resignation; and such subordinate officers as Congress may authorize by law. All will be bound by oath to support this Constitution and faithfully execute the laws of the United States.

11. The vice president, just to clarify, is part of the executive branch. Up yours, Dick Cheney.

12. Any U.S. citizen (born or naturalized) may run for president or vice-president, provided they are at least 35 and have been a resident of the United States for at least 20 years.

13. The president shall have the power to veto federal legislation, but not to alter or amend such legislation.

14. The legislative branch of the U.S. shall consist of a single legislative house, the Congress of People's Deputies. The voters of each electoral district will elect one Deputy every two years, for a two-year term, with vacancies to be supplied by special election. Each Deputy must be a U.S. citizen and at least 30 years of age.

15. The legislature shall have the exclusive right to levy federal taxes, print or coin money, borrow money on the credit of the United States, and declare war. It may approve treaties, Constitutional amendments, or impeach and remove the president by 3/5 vote. It shall have plenary authority to regulate foreign and interstate commerce, up to and including the nationalization of American businesses.

16. It should go without saying, but corporations are not people.

17. The U.S. and state governments will provide free public education and health care to all U.S. citizens and permanent residents. The standard of health care service provided will be no lower than that afforded participants in the Medicare program before it was terminated by President Rand Paul.

18. All federal and state elections shall be publicly financed. No private money may be spent therein, except by George Will, who may spent $5.00. No, not five dollars a year. Five dollars period.

19. The judicial branch of the United States shall consist of a Supreme Court and such inferior courts as Congress may establish. All federal judges will be elected by the voters of their jurisdiction for a 7-year term, renewable.

20. This Constitution may be amended by a 3/5 vote of the Congress of People's Deputies, with the concurrence of a 3/5 plebiscitary vote of American voters, to be conducted by the states under federal guidelines.

21. The official anthem of the United States will be a mashup of Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.” with Notorious B.I.G.’s “Bullshit and Party.” This clause is not subject to the amendatory authority in 20, above.

22. The capital of the United States will be moved to Omaha, Nebraska. The capitol itself, along with the president's mansion and principal executive office buildings, will be located in Carter Lake, Iowa, which, being located wholly within Omaha's boundaries, accurately represents the duality of Man.

23. The official flag of the United States shall be a red banner bearing a portrait of Eugene V. Debs.

24. The official motto of the U.S. will be “Up Yours, Dick Cheney."

Dress to Kill

Our quote of the week comes from R.R. Palmer's classic study of the Reign of Terror, Twelve Who Ruled, and concerns the 20 special commissioners whom members of the Committee of Public Safety appointed to oversee the political reconstruction (and destruction) of Lyons, after that city rebelled against the Republic:

"The commissioners were apparently in need of clothing, and their wants were not modest. For each one, out of the public funds, were ordered, to be exact: a blue coat with red collar, blue trousers with leather between the legs, breeches of deerskin, an overcoat and leather suitcase, a cocked hat with tricolor plume, a black shoulder-belt, various medals, six shirts, twelve pocket handkerchiefs, muslin for six ordinary cravats, black taffeta for two dress cravats, a tricolored belt, six cotton nightcaps, six pairs of stockings, two pairs of shoes, kid gloves a l'espagnole, boots a l'americaine, bronzed spurs, saddle pistols and a hussar's saber." (Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton UP, 1941/2005), 167.)

Palmer includes these details to make a more entertaining narrative. Modern historians, following the lead of Linda Colley, might pause to consider the social significance of these ad hoc commissioners' wardrobes. The colored coat and trousers, cocked hat, and handkerchiefs were marks of a gentleman (or at least of someone rich enough to afford clothing of high-quality fabric); the spurs, boots, pistols and saber denoted a member of the nobility, or at least one qualified to ride and bear arms; the tricolored belts and plumes symbolized the republic; and the deerskin breeches were fashionable at the time and probably came from North America. The Committee on Public Safety, which dispatched this special commission to Lyons, may have wanted them to appear as modest sans-culottes adorned in virtuous homespun, but the commissioners themselves had other ideas: they wanted to be armed noblemen, ready to ride down their government's enemies. Which indeed they did: the commissioners at Lyons went on to execute over 2,000 people in France's second city. Maybe the "blue trousers with leather between the legs" were chafing them a bit too much.

(The awesome anime painting of Louis Antoine Saint-Just is courtesy of Ysa, from Deviant Art, and is used with permission of the artist. The original image may be found here. Copyright (c) 2008-12 by Ysa.)

Niall Ferguson is Still a Tosser

After flogging Niall Campbell Douglas Elizabeth Ferguson a couple of times last year for various kinds of bad behavior, I made a brief mention of plans to read Prof. Ferguson's macrohistory of Western Europe and how it got to be So Damn Fine, published last year under the modest title Civilization. My loyal readers will either be mildly pleased or politely indifferent to learn that I have now managed to plow through most of the Sexiest Scotsman's opus, and will shortly begin a multipart review in which I explore the strengths (there may be one or two), flaws (and there are at least a few), and amusing factual errors thereof and therein. To start, I have a couple of observations to make about Ferguson's preface and introduction.

First, allow me to draw attention to Our Man Niall's brief summary of other scholarship on the rise of the West. On page 10 he asserts that historians like Jared Diamond and Kenneth Pomeranz have attributed the growth of Western power to simple "good luck," rather than to Western Europeans' superior institutions - in Ferguson's phrase, their "killer apps." The examples he gives of this unlikely "good luck," however, seem like pretty important determinants of European power to your humble narrator, and as Ferguson later reveals some of them seem pretty important to him as well. Surely, Ferguson writes, it was not the "geography or the climate" of Europe that accounted for its rise - except that he later ascribes interstate competition in the West, a key component of Killer App Number One, to Europe's convoluted and knobbly geography. "Did the New World provide Europe with 'ghost acres' that China lacked?" Professor F. then asks, dismissively. Actually, it did; the resources and produce of the Americas - arable land, timber, fish, grains, sugar - were a tremendous boon to Europeans in the early modern period, rescuing them from the Malthusian trap into which they had fallen, while New World gold and silver helped Europe buy its way into the Indian and East Asian trading system. "Was it just sod's law that made China's coal deposits harder to mine and transport than Europeans'?" Dr. Ferguson inquires. Kind of sounds like it to me, actually, and it was Europe's use of cheap coal that touched off its transport and metallurgical revolutions and allowed it finally to pull ahead of China. Qing China certainly had the means to industrialize if it had enjoyed access to so much concentrated energy: the Chinese had had a wood-driven "industrial revolution" in the 11th century, until their foundries ran out of charcoal, and they had invented powered spinning machines and looms as early as the 14th century. In history, stupid contingencies sometimes matter, as Ferguson, a routine practitioner of counterfactual history, should bloody well acknowledge.

My other observation is short and sweet. It is that Ferguson isn't always careful to check his historical facts. Exempli gratia, taken from his preface: "The greatest political artist in American history, Abraham Lincoln, served only one full term in the White House, falling victim to an assassin with a petty grudge just six weeks after his second inaugural" (xxiv). The assassin was John Wilkes Booth, and the "petty grudge" was the "Civil War" - Booth was a Confederate spy and staged his attack on Lincoln as part of a multi-person attack on Union leaders. Perhaps Ferguson was confusing Booth with Charles Guiteau, Garfield's assassin? I guess all these 19th-century presidents look alike after a while.

(Sources: Gale Stokes: "The Fates of Human Societies: A Review of Recent Macrohistories," American Historical Review [April 2001]: 508-525; Alfred Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for Energy [Norton, 2006], 68; Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest [Penguin, 2011], pp. xxiv, 10.)

A Parting Quote for 2011

"Dresden, royal residence of dukes and kings of Saxony since the Middle Ages, whose Baroque skyline had inspired painters such as Canaletto, where Friedrich Schiller had written 'Ode to Joy' and which Napoleon had seized for his imperial command, greeted the 150 POWs trudging into the city on January 12, 1945, with a billboard proclaiming TRINK COCA-COLA."

From Charles Shields's new biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes (New York, 2011), p. 62. The sentence above is a good sample of Shields' prose, which is lively, perceptive, and humorous. The biography as a whole is first-rate, and doesn't pull any punches.

Vonnegut's experiences as a prisoner-of-war, particularly his witnessing the firebombing of Dresden, shaped the author's most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. For all that book's strengths (and it is a masterpiece), Vonnegut was a novelist, not a historian, and his account of the Dresden bombing is not the most accurate. His famous summary of the attack, to the effect that it only benefited one person and that person was Vonnegut - and that "one way or another, I made five bucks for every person killed" - is doubly incorrect. The author's sardonic estimate of the profit he made from the dead assumes that 135,000 people died in the attack, an assumption based on David Irving's 1963 book on Dresden. Irving has a habit, shall we say, of playing fast and loose with the truth, and he overstated German casualties by at least 75,000.

Vonnegut's other observation, that he was the only beneficiary of the Dresden raid, is also untrue, though few people know the truth of the matter: that the attack on Dresden saved the city's tiny surviving Jewish population from deportation to the death camps, which was originally scheduled to take place three days after the raid. Among the survivors was Victor Klemperer, whose harrowing diary remains one of the best primary sources on Jews' experiences in Germany during the war.

**

Happy New Year, everyone.