What I Wrote to My Congresscritter

Once in a while, your humble narrator rouses himself from his apolitical torpor and sends a check to an advocacy group, or writes a letter (these days, an email) to his elected representatives. Concerning the danger of a politically-motivated default on the United States' debts, which at the moment appears entirely possible, I wrote my Congressmen the following:

"Dear Congressman Bucshon:

I am writing to express my dismay at your co-sponsorship of the 'Cap, Cut, and Balance' resolution which passed the House of Representatives last week. As a former employee of the Concord Coalition, I share your concern with the United States' budget deficit and your belief that Congress must address this critical problem. However, I also believe that in the short term, our government must pay its debts and meet its other commitments. Since we are currently in a recession and fighting two wars, the federal government must - as George W. Bush observed under similar circumstances ten years ago - run a short-term deficit to pay its bills. By voting to link an increase in the federal debt ceiling to a Constitutional balanced-budget amendment, an amendment which would take months if not years to pass, you effectively declared that you no longer believed it was a priority for the United States to pay its creditors. Should the United States default on its debts, even for a brief period, the results would be catastrophic: bank failures throughout the developed world, a collapse in the value of the dollar, a return to recession in the United States, and a chain reaction of credit downgrades not just for the U.S. government, but for state and local governments as well (including Indiana). I urge you to reconsider your position and vote to approve an increase in the federal debt ceiling prior to the default deadline on August 2nd.

Sincerely Yours,
David Nichols
Terre Haute, Indiana "
(July 24, 2011)

I hope this soon becomes an artifact of an obscure early-21st-century political spat, but given the ideological extremism of the current House Republicans, I fear my mildly-hysterical tone may prove justified. It's always unsettling when one has to invoke George II as an example of moderate statesmanship.

Gallant Trousers, or the Lack Thereof

In her recent article on the Chickasaw-Creek war of the 1790s ("How the Chickasaws Saved the Cumberland Settlement," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 68 [2009]: 2-20) , Wendy St. Jean noted the close military alliance that grew up between that nation and their white neighbors in the Cumberland settlements (Nashville and environs), which extended to Nashvillians' sending militia and artillery to help defend Chickasaw towns from Creek attack. The alliance had an emotional component, as well: at a July 4th dinner in Nashville, one of the toasts was to "our gallant sans-culotte allies of the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations" (p. 13). The toast was a nice play on words: it referred to the breech cloths and leggings that Chickasaw warriors wore in lieu of knee-breeches (or trousers), and also to western white settlers' sympathies for the more radical and ill-clad elements of the French Revolutionary movement, sympathies which some frontiersmen (in Kentucky and western Pennsylvania) expressed by forming Democratic-Republican societies to support the French Republic. One tends to think of the French Revolution as an Atlantic phenomenon, so I was pleasantly surprised to see pro-Revolutionary sentiments expressed in such remote settlements - and used to refer to people who (in the case of the Chickasaws) were fairly staunch opponents of France for most of the eighteenth century.

The End of the Holocene

Last month the Economist ran a cover story, "Welcome to the Anthropocene," discussing the startling idea that humans had so altered the Earth's surface, oceans, and atmosphere that they had actually inaugurated a new geological epoch. We are all familiar with the anthropogenic increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, but humans have introduced less well-known but no less profound changes to their physical environment: a 20 percent decrease in the amount of sediment discharged by the world's rivers, for example (thanks to 50,000 or so hydroelectric and flood-control dams), and a 150 percent increase in the amount of nitrogen transferred from the atmosphere to the soil (thanks to synthetic nitrates). Most of these changes are problematic, but they are all the consequence of creating a world economy and technosphere capable of supporting seven billion human beings. Turning back the clock to a "lower-impact" state - one should perhaps say "to the Holocene" - would require massive depopulation, which only a few idealists publicly favor.

As a historian, I have two questions about the "Anthropocene." First, when did this new geological epoch, if we may call it that, begin? One of the commentators on the Economist's website, "Callisthenes," argues that it may be difficult to identify a starting-point using geological rules, but the list of technologies the article provides allows us to identify some significant dates. The Haber-Bosch process of nitrate synthesis was demonstrated in 1909, the construction of large concrete dams began about 1880, and the takeoff in human CO2 production occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth  century. 1900 would seem a good ballpark estimate, but it's fair to say that no-one living at the turn of the twentieth century realized they were bringing the Holocene to a close, just as a fair percentage of humans today would prefer to believe that nothing has changed since the world's creation (in 4004 BC, of course).

My second question is the standard historical significance question: so what? On the time scales most historians work with (a few decades, usually), the inception of a new geological epoch wouldn't seem to leave much of an impact. Taking the past ten thousand years of human history and prehistory as a whole, however, the Economist article suggests an answer to the question "Which was more significant, the Neolithic Revolution [the introduction of human agriculture] or the Industrial Revolution?" Insofar as the Industrial Revolution has reshaped the surface and atmospheric chemistry of the Earth and stamped its geological record, an Earth scientist who accepts the concept of an Anthropocene would argue it was more significant, and that the Neolithic Revolution was primarily important as the precondition for industrialization. Whether historians will be inclined to discuss the matter with their colleagues in the Geology department remains to be seen.

(Above image via oilempire.us.)

An Empire, If You Can Define It

My friend Sydney Freedberg and I recently had an exchange on his website about the definition of the word "empire," and whether it properly applied to the United States. (This was apropos of an interview Sydney did with a Romanian news site on the NATO campaign in Libya.) Sydney defines an empire as a state with a "politically dominant, culturally distinct group" living in a core territory, and at least one ethnically distinct peripheral group with limited political rights. By this definition, the U.S. was an actual empire from 1898 to 1946, during its period of formal rule over the Philippines and establishment of protectorates over several Caribbean and Central American republics.

I think it's useful to have a limited definition of empire, if only because the term has become so widely and pejoratively used in the early twenty-first century as to lose its meaning. I would only add two caveats here. The first is that "empire" wasn't always pejorative; during the eighteenth century, for instance, it could merely mean "a large territorial state." As Peter Onuf points out in Jefferson's Empire (U. of Virginia Press, 2001, pp. 53-79) the first leaders of the American national republic frequently referred to the United States as an "empire." Indeed, Federalists discovered it was more politically useful to call the U.S. an "empire" than a "nation," since the latter implied that they wanted to create a consolidated national government (as their Anti-Federalist critics claimed).

The second caveat is that under Sydney's definition, the interstellar Empire in the original STAR WARS movies wasn't an empire, unless you count the Stormtroopers as the "core" ethnic group. Pretty much everyone else was an oppressed peripheral group. (In the prequel films, there was only one consistently oppressed subject race: the audience.)

The Best-Kept Secret in Chadron, Nebraska

During the past ten years I've visited three first-rate museums: the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, and the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska. The latter is a compact but richly-endowed and ably-interpreted archive of materials from the North American Indian trade: animal pelts, Indian handicrafts, European trade goods, models of pirogues and trade canoes, and a restored nineteenth-century trading post. I had thought myself an expert, of sorts, on this subject, but I quickly learned that the museum's designers curators had much to teach me. Here are some of my more intriguing findings:

1) Deerskins, which I thought Europeans used primarily for breeches and gloves, could also be used as water-resistant coverings for bags and trunks.

2) When Indians bought tobacco from traders, they purchased it in highly-processed units: large spun ropes of "twist" tobacco and pressed bricks of "plug" tobacco, both commonly flavored with spices and molasses.

3) Point blankets, the large, water-resistant woolen blankets sold by the Hudson's Bay Company, whose vertical stripes (or "points") indicated their cost in beaver skins, were commonly sold in pairs. I had no idea why this was so until I actually saw a display of point blankets: each "pair" was actually a single double-sized blanket that storekeepers subsequently cut in half. British weavers supposedly made the blankets this way to minimize export duties on individual items.

4) Indians sometimes wore padlocks as pieces of jewelry, rather than using them as actual locks - a point one might remember when trying to view padlocks as evidence that Indians had abandoned the concept of communal property.

5) By the nineteenth century, the American fur trade had become not only an extension of the Atlantic economy, but the global economy. Plains Indians bought cowrie shells from the Indian and South Pacific Oceans, to decorate their clothing, and Northwest Indians sometimes bought Chinese camphor-wood boxes or coins ("cash") from European traders. This is a subject that I suspect (or at least hope) will generate a growing amount of research over the next couple of decades.

The Jamestown Conundrum

Daniel Richter's new book, Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts (Harvard UP, 2011), is in some ways a sequel to his last monograph, Facing East from Indian Country. In that 2001 volume, Richter shifted the spatial alignment of American historiography, replacing westward-facing accounts of European territorial expansion with an eastward-facing narrative of Native American contact and survival. In his new work, the author tries to change the temporal orientation of American history, arguing that since most of that history occurred before 1776, we can quite usefully view the American Revolution as a culminating, rather than inaugural, episode. American history, as Richter presents it, grew like a series of geological or archaeological strata, each laid down by a particular group of Indians or colonists, each providing at least a partial foundation for its successors.

I've not had the chance to read and digest Professor Richter's book in its entirety, but I can attest to the success of its methodology regarding at least one perplexing colonial episode: the unlikely survival of the English colony of Jamestown. The behavior of Jamestown's early settlers was a puzzle to historians when I was in college: instead of planting corn and tending to their own livelihoods, the English colonists spent their time refusing to work and bowling on the village green. Following the lead of Edmund Morgan and Francis Jennings, Richter explains this lassitude was a consequence of the settlers' historically-determined expectations: they had come to Virginia not to work but to enrich themselves by exploiting indigenous labor, and justified this exploitation by spreading (in a nominal way) their brand of Christianity, like medieval Crusaders or Spanish conquistadors.

Richter goes on to attribute the colonists' actual survival to the "medieval," or more precisely Mississippian, mindset of the region's paramount Indian chief, Powhatan. Like other great chiefs, Powhatan derived much of his power from his control of trade routes and access to exotic goods, which the English clearly possessed in quantity. Thus, in return for gifts of copper kettles, swords, and other prestige-conveying merchandise, Powhatan proclaimed the English not "strangers...but Powhatans" (p. 125) - simultaneously extending his authority over them - and allowed them to reside on his confederacy's land and trade for food. The seemingly-useless metal smiths who accompanied the early Jamestown voyages became the colony's most important workers, making copper and iron tools to trade to the Powhatans for food. Periodically, during the Anglo-Powhatan wars of 1609-1614 and 1622-32, the English would conduct "harvesting raids" (as Frederick Fausz has termed them) against Powhatan villages for supplies, but otherwise the colony, like its contemporaries at Plymouth and Quebec, survived chiefly through Indian trade until the 1620s. Richter concluded that this was less the consequence of design and more the result of an unconscious compromise between English desires to exploit Indian labor and Powhatan desires to acquire rare English goods at the lowest cost.

Whether the English ever invited the Powhatan Indians to play bowls with them, I know not. Perhaps.

Capitalism Defined, Part VI: Schumpeter and the Origins of Socialism

While Joseph A. Schumpeter (1883-1950) was best known for the term "creative destruction," which he identified as one of the positive features of capitalist economies, that term (which he did not coin) only hints at the subtlety and power of his analysis of capitalism. I have defined capitalism so far in this series as an economic system in which investors commodify economic inputs and mobilize them through markets to generate a financial return on capital investments. Schumpeter's definition of capitalism was much more dynamic: he identified it as "a form or method of economic change" (82), driven by entrepreneurs who in their pursuit of profits invariably and radically transformed farm organization, transportation, materials technology, and living standards.

Schumpeter's initial economic research focused on the origins of business cycles, to which several previous economists had assigned regular periods of various lengths. He was particularly interested in the "long cycles" described by Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev, who identified three sequential 55-year-long waves of economic boom and bust that began in 1790 and continued into the twentieth century. Kondratiev didn't specify the causes of these cycles, but Schumpeter argued they were the products of discrete industrial revolutions, caused by entrepreneurs' adoption of new technologies (like spinning jennies) or production of new goods and services (like rail transport). These revolutions produced not only profits for entrepreneurs but "avalanche[s] of consumer goods," which generally increased the purchasing power and improved the living standards of ordinary workers (67-68). Once the new methods of production had spread throughout the economy, however, markets became saturated with new goods and services, and firms which had borrowed heavily to expand or to adopt new technologies went bust. The result was growing unemployment and economic depression, which ended only when a new industrial revolution began and started the next cycle.

While the heroes of Schumpeter's economic narrative were individual entrepreneurs, he observed that it did not take long for the firms these innovators built to turn into monopolistic corporations. Nor did Schumpeter think this was a bad thing. Large corporations tended to be more efficient than small ones, because of their ability to employ economies of scale, and while critics of monopolies argued that they tended to stifle innovation, Schumpeter didn’t believe this was true. In the long term, he admitted, a monopolistic corporation might benefit by inhibiting technological change, thereby conserving its sunk costs in plant and equipment, but most corporations preferred the short-term profits that came from adopting new technologies and productive techniques – as evidenced by the investments most twentieth-century corporations made in research and development (96-97). Competition between firms thus might diminish over time, but competition between old and new productive methods remained constant.

Like Marx, Schumpeter believed that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction, though his explanation of how this occurred was subtler and more sociologically informed than Marx’s. Marx and Engels argued that capitalism would fall when an immiserated global proletariat discovered it had “nothing to lose but their chains.” Schumpeter countered that capitalism would fall when the bourgeoisie discovered they had nothing to fight for. He explained that the chief motives of capitalists were the drive to innovate – either to invent or to adopt others’ inventions – and the desire to accumulate capital. As capitalist economies became more dominated by large, “heavily bureaucratized” firms, however, entrepreneurs would encounter increasing constraints on their ability to innovate (134). Those who prospered would instead be those who could serve as cogs in a corporate machine or, at best, members of a corporate research team. Moreover, ownership of capital property would become less materially satisfying as the means of production came to be dominated by joint-stock companies, whose owners – shareholders – held their property in a highly “dematerialized and defunctionalized” way (142). Anyone who has worked for a large corporation or cast a proxy ballot in a shareholders’ election will recognize the truth of both of these observations. Essentially, Schumpeter concluded, the emergence of monopoly capitalism tended to prepare most people for life in a collectivist state, which offered the same amount of bureaucracy and greater economic security into the bargain.

Schumpeter added that the industrial-era bourgeoisie was a class singularly ill-suited to governance. They viewed the state as an impediment to their goals, and lacked the sense of responsibility that the European aristocracy had developed by the early modern era. At the same time, the bourgeoisie could not function without certain utilities, like roads and military protection, that the state provided, nor could it thrive without the existence of cities, which required considerable organization and political management to thrive. Capitalism, or rather capitalists, thus needed a "classe dirigiste" (136) to manage affairs of state. A.J.P. Taylor, in a quote I mentioned earlier in this blog, would confirm this statement with his observation on the post-Revolutionary French middle class. Schumpeter, who was more interested in the twentieth than the nineteenth century, merely concluded that this was another reason capitalists would eventually give political ground to labor union leaders, urban reformers, democratic politicians, and (to use James Burnham's adjective) "managerial" types. This is largely what did happen in most of the world's industrial countries in the mid-twentieth century, at least until the Reagan-Thatcher revolution in the 1980s.

(Citations above are from Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [New York, 1942].)

Capitalism Defined, Part V: Polanyi and the Fictions of Free-Market Societies

While Max Weber founded what one might call the sociological study of capitalism, the Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi was among the first scholars to identify capitalism as a fit subject for anthropological study. Following the lead of Jacob Malinowski (whose study of Trobriand Islanders in the 1920s became a classic) and sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (who developed the gemeinschaft/gesellschaft dichotomy), Polanyi argued that Adam Smith’s economic man, who pursued only profits and personal comforts, was a myth. The primary function of most human economies, Polanyi observed, was to improve participants’ social status and augment their “social assets,” not their store of worldly goods. In pre-state societies like the Trobriand Islanders’, people’s primary economic goals were reciprocity – the symmetrical exchange of goods as gifts, usually in a social context attended by ritual (7-9) – and redistribution, whereby chiefs accumulated goods for the purpose of giving them to followers. The former ethic promoted social cohesion, while the latter produced political hierarchies by tying clients to their chiefly patrons. Neither ethic, though, was typical of capitalist societies; indeed, one later ethnohistorian, Daniel Richter, called redistribution a “kind of upside-down capitalism” because it involved negative accumulation (Ordeal of the Longhouse [Chapel Hill, 1992], p. 22).

More sophisticated state societies, like ancient Greece, medieval Europe, or eighteenth-century Dahomey, had more complicated economies, but they still weren’t capitalistic. Most produced for household or local consumption, and the trade in which they engaged – which, granted, might be very valuable (like the spice and slave trades) – usually consisted of luxury goods bought and sold by social outsiders or state employees. These societies did employ various kinds of money, like cowry shells or gold coins, in trade, but Polanyi argued that they used money as a “semantic system” to represent and discharge particular social obligations, like bride price or fines (190-194). Production, consumption, and trade thus remained thoroughly “embedded” (82) in political or social relationships, and philosophers from these societies, like Aristotle, defined the "good life" as a communal one, where people took pleasure not in material accumulation and consumption but in festivals, theater, political debate, and even battle.

The primary innovation of capitalism, Polanyi argued, was to yank economic inputs out of these social contexts by commodifying them (30-32). The merchants, industrialists, and liberal economists of the 18th and 19th century developed and codified a new set of economic "fiction[s]" (32), like wage labor and free trade, which subordinated previous social relationships to the new imperatives of commodity exchange. They then used the power of the state, first in Britain, later in other countries, to remove all impediments to the commodification and exchange of inputs. They passed enclosure laws, built poorhouses, removed tariffs, and instituted a global gold standard. They thereby created a so-called "self-regulating market," which capitalists and liberal economists believed was natural but was in fact highly artificial and socially destructive. Capitalism, Polanyi argued, created a global wave of ghastliness, knocking down laws, customs, and institutions that might have mitigated its ill effects. Nineteenth-century India saw the destruction of its textile industry and the spread of famine due to rising grain prices; Native North Americans lost their land and went into a steep demographic and cultural decline; and twentieth-century African migrant laborers escaped starvation only by losing their homes, families, and culture.

One might argue (as I would) that Polanyi's conclusions are a bit shrill, since he observed in his earlier work that the British developed mechanisms for defending their society against capitalism's evils: trade unions, a protectionist movement, and the creation of a welfare state after 1906. Presumably, other societies injured by capitalism's "self-regulating market" were able to develop their own countermeasures, like the legal defense associations that Plains Indians established to recover some of their lost lands. One might also argue that Polanyi was merely adding another layer of sophistication to Marx's early analysis of the cultural bankruptcy of capitalism. This is in some ways, however, beside the point. Polanyi's real strength lies in his analysis of pre-capitalist economies and his careful differentiation of societies with some of the features of capitalism (like trade and currency) from those that are genuinely capitalistic. In defining a thing, it is helpful to understand what that thing is not; in the case of capitalism, it is very helpful to know that the great majority of human societies have not organized their economies according to its rules.

Quotes from George Dalton, ed., Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi (Boston, 1968). See also Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, 1944); idem, "Traders and Trade," in Jeremy Sabloff and C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, eds., Ancient Civilization and Trade (Albuquerque, 1975), 133-154.

Quote of the Week

"In France, the bourgeoisie, after the great Revolution, resorted to every kind of desperate expedient for avoiding responsibility - empire, revived monarchy, sham monarchy, sham empire - until the failure of all left them with no escape from responsibility in the Third Republic, and even that perished from lack of a true governing class." A.J.P. Taylor, in The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918 (new edition, London, 1948), p. 138. I don't think Taylor is entirely fair to the Third Republic, but I suppose it was hard for someone who remembered that republic's last few years to credit it with ever having produced responsible legislators or capable leaders.

[Image at right: the coat-of-arms of the aforementioned "sham monarch," Louis-Philippe (1830-48).]