New Book? New Book!

 

While my esteemed readers were distracted by more pressing matters, I apparently wrote another book. Hoozay!

To Be Men of Business: The Origins of Chickasaw Capitalism has been in the works for sixteen years, and I’ve written a few blog posts (here and here, for instance) about my progress and research findings. The finished product is now on sale from the University of Nebraska Press; those interested in buying a copy can obtain a 40% discount by entering the code 6AS26 at checkout.

It’s the perfect gift for the eccentric relative whose interests are well-concealed, or the college student you’re trying, for some reason, to steer away from business school and toward ethnohistory. And more power to you in either case.

Our Overdetermined Future

There is a joke about future expectations, and how they change within a society over time, and it goes like this:

Baby Boomers often seem disappointed because they were promised a future with flying cars and cities on the Moon, and got neither.

Gen Xers often seem unsurprised, because they were promised a cyberpunk dystopia, and here we are.

As new aspects of that dystopia congeal into reality, many Americans my age can’t even manage a raised eyebrow. Case in point: I was only mildly surprised to learn that a tech company CEO had managed to convert 200,000 of his own stem cells into neurons and link them with a computer. The journalists who reported the story were equally unsurprised, because they buried the lede. They knew what would actually draw readers’ interest: Sean Cole, the son of one of the CEO’s friends, then taught the brain-on-a-slide to play Doom, the successor to chess and Space Invaders as our era’s archetypal computer game.

No, this doesn’t surprise me, either.
 

I suspect Hon Weng Chong’s investors will eventually want him to turn his attention to something more profitable, but I think he’s already done humanity a great service: he has determined that you can theoretically distract a disembodied brain, generative AI program, or other potentially self-aware and angry mechanical intelligence with computer games. Would that humans had tried this strategy in the Terminator universe.

Mormon Cocaine Pirates of the Caribbean

Everything old is new again. The United States appears to have entered an undeclared naval war with Venezuela, much as it fought an undeclared naval war with France in the late 1790s and an undeclared armed conflict with the Barbary corsairs in the early 1800s. Since the Defense Department has gone in search of eighteenth-century precedents for its policies, it perhaps should not surprise us that others in the American national government have recurred to the early-national era for innovations in war-making.

Avast.

 

This is perhaps the kindest way to refer to a bill sponsored by Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a member of the LDS Church and a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump -  indeed, he once described the 45th president as "Captain Moroni," which apart from the final syllable is perfectly accurate. The Cartel Marque and Reprisal Reauthorization Act would authorize the president to issue letters of marque to private ships seeking to join the fight in the Caribbean. The privateers could then recover their expenses by seizing and (presumably) selling the cargo of captured vessels. Until last week, the U.S. Navy has apparently limited its attacks to Venezuelan-adjacent fishing boats, which may or may not have been carrying illicit drugs - particularly cocaine, a preferred pick-me-up of the American and European oligarchies. Of late American ships have begun targeting oil tankers, which are more valuable than small drug-smuggling (or fish-smuggling) vessels but harder to capture and dispose of. There is, at any rate, money to be made in private warfare, as American and Russian mercenaries have discovered over the past thirty years, and I dare say there are even a few retiring Congressmen who might enjoy the prospect, in retirement, of hoisting the black flag.

I will close with my original title for this post: “Go home, 2025, you’re drunk.”

The Cloth-Wine Context

David Ricardo (1772-1823), in his musings on the benefits of free trade, used the relationship between Portugal and Britain to demonstrate the principle of comparative advantage. In the early modern era, Portugal could potentially produce enough fabric to clothe its own people, but since it could produce wine comparatively cheaply, the Portuguese would benefit more by specializing in and exporting wine, and using the proceeds to buy English cloth. More people could obtain more cloth in this way, Ricardo argued, than by relying on home production; the British, in turn, would gain access to a lake of cheap Iberian wine.

David Ricardo (I think)

 

The economist Cahal Moran recently demonstrated that Ricardo's observation was grossly incomplete and ahistorical. Cloth, a necessity, was much more valuable in the aggregate than wine (a luxury), and a nation that exclusively traded the latter for the former would eventually run a trade deficit and lose hard currency. This was, in fact, the purpose of the 1703 Treaty of Methuen, which lowered Portuguese import tariffs in return for British naval protection. Portugal had an abundance of specie to cover the deficit: in 1693 prospectors had discovered gold in the southern interior of Brazil. The ensuing gold rush eventually drew several hundred thousand peninsulares from Portugal to Brazil, and accelerated the forced transport of enslaved Africans to South America. It also offered an irresistible temptation to stronger nations - either to steal Brazilian gold through smuggling and piracy, or to extract precious metals from the Portuguese through uneven trade agreements, backed by military force.

Britain didn’t need to push Portugal that hard. The two nations were already bound by dynastic ties: the reigning British monarch’s step-aunt was Catherine of Braganza, regent of Portugal. And, in return for its colonial wealth, Portugal obtained from Old Albion much that the ruling classes wanted and that ordinary people needed. In October 1710, T. LeFevre informed the Earl of Dartmouth that the Brazilian fleet had just arrived in Lisbon, bearing gold bullion, tobacco, and sugar to the value of 1.8 million pounds sterling - about 270 million GBP (US$345 million) in today’s currency. All of this, wrote LeFevre, already belonged to British merchants who had sold on credit “all the dyed cloth” and 75 percent of the wheat consumed in the port city and its dependencies. Portugal’s elite thus obtained, admittedly at a high price, the luxuries they wanted (fine textiles and American beaver hats), and the necessities their depopulating country found harder to produce, and not least important, the British naval protection their overloaded merchant fleets required.

Some of the gold, at least, went for architecture.

British merchants, meanwhile, grew wealthier. There was usually a good market for tobacco and sugar in Britain, and there was always a market for gold. The latter often never even touched Portugal’s shores, instead sailing east with a British convoy and transshipping in Lisbon harbor to English merchantmen. There is a name for commerce built on stolen labor, channeled by armed ships, and structured to build up a surplus of gold in the dominant trading partner’s homeland, and that name is not “free trade.” What British traders and diplomats in Lisbon had instead created was a very successful example of mercantilism. What David Ricardo created a century later was a very influential example of economic propaganda. A lot of that going around, actually.

Sources: Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth, 1: 298 (Eyre & Spottiswood, 1887); (CR Boxer, “Brazilian Gold and British Traders in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Hispanic American Historical Review 49 (Aug. 1969): 454-72, esp. 459-60; Timothy Walker, “Lisbon as a Strategic Haven in the Atlantic World,” in Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula, eds., The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination (Prentice-Hall, 2005), 60-75.

The Yellowing-Trees Month, in Brief

 

What I’ve been reading: The True True Story of Raja the Gullible, by Rabih Alameddine. A biography of modern Lebanon, from the perspective of a gay schoolteacher and his formidable mother. As is often the case with good writing, the fictional parts of the story seem more believable than the non-fictional ones.

 

Videos and films of note: 28 Years Later (2025), which is as good as people say. Since Danny Boyle has (IMO) never made two good movies in a row, I’m relieved to learn that Nia DaCosta will be directing the sequel.

 

Noteworthy remarks by one of my offspring: Addressed by my daughter to the crescent moon: “Hello, Earth’s fingernail." 

 

Quotes that make me less worried about the potential collapse of liberal democracy in America: “Truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”

 

The title of this post borrows the Ukrainian word for October, Zhovten, the Month of Trees Turning Yellow. One of my students, on learning that some Indigenous nations (like the Senecas) named the months of the year for natural events, told me that the same was true of the Ukrainian language. That's the Cool Thing I Learned Lately. 

Footnote of the Month

 

 "Yes, one has to wonder: where did they get a monkey? I can provide no answer." So wrote John Belshaw in an endnote to his book Becoming British Columbia: A Population History (UBC Press, 2009, p. 248n1). I don't know the context of the author's question, and I think this is a case where it's better to give one's imagination free rein. Would that I could use the same citation in one of my own books.

 

19th-century netsuke, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

 

Pushing the Limits

 

Geographical facts tend (I find) to lodge quite firmly in one's mind after one teaches them to students. I've taught Native American history for nearly 25 years now, and in my lectures have usually stated that the northern growing limit of maize is the latitude of southern Ontario. This supposed geographic fact, I would go on to say, gave the Wendat nation, who originated in southwestern Ontario, a considerable commercial advantage: they could produce a large surplus of corn, then trade it to northern neighbors who could not grow the crop. I probably read this in grad school, in a book or article by an early American historian, and kept it in memory for the next two decades.

Ojibwa village, Sault Ste. Marie, 1846 - via Wikimedia Commons

 

It's now pretty clear that I was wrong about that. Monographs by Cary Miller (Ogimaag, 2010) and Brenda Child (Holding Our World Together, 2012) observed that the Minnesota Ojibwas could grow maize in raised-bed fields, at a latitude above that of the Wendat homeland. I didn't understand the mechanics of this form of cultivation, and assumed it was probably conducted on a small scale. Clearly I was wrong about this. A new LIDAR study of the Sixty Islands site near Michigan's Upper Peninsula, conducted by Madeleine McLeester, has revealed that the Menominees and their predecessors were raising corn on a large scale from approximately 1000 to 1600 CE. The techniques they used to farm in this marginal environment included field drainage, intensive use of compost, and the aforementioned raised beds, which kept a temperature a few degrees higher than that of the underlying topsoil. These sophisticated horticultural practices allowed the region's farmers to raise corn on a very large scale - approximately 300 hectares, in the case of Sixty Islands.

 

In future courses I plan to share these findings (as well as the earlier work of Child and Miller) with students. I'll add that when they want to raise a valuable crop, human beings often find a way to push the apparent natural limits on its cultivation. This was true of Menominee and Ojibwa women during the Little Ice Age; it was also the case with Euro-American farmers in Vincennes in the late 1700s. I've mentioned to students, and to any other hapless person I could trap in a conversational cul-de-sac, that the northern limit of cotton cultivation in the United States is just below the latitude of Cairo, Illinois; I've seen cotton fields in the Missouri "Bootheel" and Kentucky's Jackson Purchase district, but not any further north. During the first American cotton boom, however, white settlers in southern Indiana were happy to experiment with the crop, even though it requires 180 frost-free days to grow and one cannot be assured of them north of the Ohio River. Constantin Volney observed that white farmers in Vincennes raised cotton and tobacco, and suggested that the local climate was warm enough for both crops - the Wabash River moderated local temperatures in early spring and late fall (Harlow Lindley, ed., Indiana As Seen by Early Travelers [Indianapolis, 1916], 18-19). I suspect, though, that the Vincennes habitants could not reliably raise a large crop of the desirable fiber, and it eventually became cheaper to specialize in wheat or tobacco and buy cotton textiles elsewhere.