Niall Ferguson Is Still a Ghastly Asshat

In the penultimate chapter of Civilization: You Kids Today Make Me Sick, Niall C.D.E. Ferguson identifies the sixth "killer app" of Western civilization as "work," but uses the term primarily as a shorthand for "God." Here at last Niall-o bares his stern but sexy Presbyterian soul, the better to impress his more religious fans and drive the rest of us sinners to our knees. Max Weber, argues Professor Ferg, was correct about the Protestant work ethic.  Protestant Christianity, with its asceticism and emphasis on the believer's worldly vocation, obliged its adherents to "work…save and read" (264), which had a buoyant effect on education, productivity, and investment in northern Europe. This ethic apparently did not extend to the benighted Papists, who by 1940 were 40 percent worse off than Protestant European nations. (I'm not sure what this means, and Ferguson cites only one source, a 2009 "working paper" by a Princeton prof, that may or may not be any good.) While the Protestant work ethic is now declining in the West, it is spreading to other parts of the world, and particularly to southern China, thanks to the modern revival and spread of Christianity in the region. The Christian faith, according to Our Man Niall's informants – who are, needless to say, Christian Chinese businessmen – promotes "thrift and industry" (277), creates a network of customers and creditors who can trust one another (283-285), and provides capitalism with the moral grounding it otherwise lacks. Jesus would gag on this idea, but many American evangelicals would approve.

The American Christian Right would not, however, enjoy Ferguson's critique of their modern brand of Protestantism, which he calls "just another leisure pursuit," a source of entertainment and counseling rather than moral education (276). Niall-o reserves the bulk of his contempt in this chapter, however, for the de-Christianized youth of the post-1960 West, who abandoned God and hard work for Freud and moral relativism. Young people now preoccupy themselves with pornography, violent videogames, and the manifold indulgences of "a vacuous consumer society and a culture of relativism" (288). Robert Bork couldn't have said it better, though he probably would not have directed as much bile against Cynthia Plaster Caster, whom Ferg presents as the symbol of Freud and Eros triumphant (274). (The Good Professor's anger may stem from Ms. Plaster Caster's rumored refusal to sculpt his own wedding tackle, on the grounds that there wasn't enough plaster in the world to contain Niall Ferguson's Tremendous Tory Tonker. But I digress.)

It is nice to see Professor Ferg returning here to the shallow and foolish intellectual style that characterizes his earlier chapters and his Newsweek articles. I say shallow because many of his arguments are based on sketchy or anecdotal evidence, and foolish because most of them are wrong. East Asians' work ethic, as Our Man Niall well knows, predates the recent spread of Christianity in southern China and Korea and is quite strongly expressed in Japan, a country that killed all of its Christians in the seventeenth century. (I'm old enough to remember scolds like David Halberstam telling us we all needed to be as thrifty and hard-working as the Japanese, who were about to buy the entire planet.) Chinese Christians who believe their faith will create networks of trustworthy customers and debtors may be correct, but while reading about them I cannot help but remember the phrase "affinity scam." Ferg's denunciation of the lazy and hedonistic West, meanwhile, is anecdotal and badly dated.  While I can't speak for Europe, Americans, at least, were quite productive and hard working until the start of the recent financial meltdown in 2008. If Americans were less likely to save than their Chinese counterparts, this is due more to flat wages and the presence of social insurance for the elderly than Americans' desire to consume. And if These Kids Today aren't working, it's because most Western economies are in or close to recession and middle-aged posers like me aren't ready to give up our jobs. 

 

Perhaps Ferguson, who fancies himself a cool cat and a guru to young people, believes he can attract younger fans by telling them to give up their sexting and their videogames, cut their hair, get a (non-existent) job, and go to church. Let me know how that works out for you, Niall.

The Colony That Kept Disappearing

The disappearance of Roanoke colony was long one of the great mysteries of early American history, one which challenged the ancient narratives of Anglo-American Manifest Destiny (since it suggested English colonization was reversible) and white supremacy. In the 1970s historian David Quinn offered a credible hypothesis to explain the event: he suggested that the colonists had probably moved to Chesapeake Bay, as they had been planning to do before England lost contact with them, and simply failed to leave a forwarding address. Later, they were probably wiped out by the Powhatan Indians, whose paramount chief told John Smith of how his warriors destroyed a white settlement. (See Quinn, North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements [New York, 1977], 438.)  Researchers at the British Museum, however, have just turned up another intriguing bit of evidence that may provide a different explanation. Earlier this year they discovered, on a sixteenth-century watercolor map by colonist John White, the traces of a star symbol (possibly written in invisible ink) marking the site of a fort on Albemarle Sound, some miles away from Roanoke Island. The settlers may have relocated to this new site sometime before 1590, when an English relief expedition arrived to find the main settlement deserted. A future archaeological investigation will have to determine the validity of this new hypothesis; until then, historians will either content themselves with Quinn's idea, or with the possibility that the Roanoke colonists were devoured by Nordic wraiths.

P.S.: The title to this post refers to one of the more amusing student answers I received to an exam ID question ("Q: What was Roanoke?") back when I was a teaching assistant.

Niall Ferguson Is Still a Jackwagon

Much like its third chapter, the fifth chapter of Niall Campbell Douglas Elizabeth Ferguson's Civilization in My Pants, which discusses the "killer app" of consumerism, has some useful things to say and some vapid and silly things to say. Our Man Niall opens this chapter by arguing, quite correctly in my view, that there would have been no Industrial Revolution in the West without a previous consumer revolution, and that Western consumerism began with the manufacturing and consumption of inexpensive, high-quality clothing. In Britain, the consumer age began (as Joyce Appleby* noted) with widespread demand for imported calico, which British, European, and American weavers then began to manufacture domestically. When countries like Japan wanted to Westernize, Ferguson observes, they did so most conspicuously by adopting European-style clothing. And when Soviet citizens looked West in the mid-twentieth century, they coveted its high standard of living, and one particular Western export, blue jeans, came to symbolize all that capitalism could offer and communism could not. On the way to the fall of the Soviet Union, Ferguson offers a useful structural explanation of why the Industrial Revolution began in Britain – expensive labor and cheap coal – and introduces, though does not develop, the fascinating idea that the industrialization of the East Asian "tiger" economies in the 1960s decisively shifted the balance of power against the Soviet bloc. In the end, though, it was consumerism, the West's better "version of a civilian life" (237), that brought down the Berlin Wall.

There is much in this chapter that would give American conservatives brain embolisms, which is to say there is much to like about it. Ferguson's idea that economic development requires growing aggregate demand is textbook economics, but it is unlikely to win favor from Rand-Paul-type Republicans, who ascribe economic growth solely to the labors of a few great-souled geniuses whom the lumpish masses owe adulation and tax exemptions. His ascription of the fall of the Soviet Union to economic causes is a bit simplistic, but it is more consistent with the available evidence that the American right-wing dogma that Star Wars killed the Evil Empire. Ferg even has a kind word to say about John Keynes, whose proposals he credits with releasing the United States from the deflationary "trap" of 1929-32. This is of course heresy among Anglo-American conservatives, and suggests that the author may in fact favor counter-cyclical deficit spending, as long as it benefits politicians who are either A) dead or B) people he likes.

     

Ferguson's more valuable insights, however, are interwoven with the clumsy prose, half-baked observations, and cheap shots characteristic of his earlier chapters. In discussing Karl Marx, for example, he pauses to denounce the philosopher as a personally "odious individual" (207), which is not relevant to a discussion of Marx's ideas. In his account of the rise of American-style consumerism, he includes the ghastly mixed metaphor "The [blue] jeans genie was out of the bottle, and the bottle was more than probably distinctively curved glass container of…Coca-Cola" (242). Ferguson may consider this a beautiful and thought-provoking image, but it's more likely he gave that sentence little thought while he was writing it. Finally, Niall-o spends several pages toward the end of the chapter discussing not consumerism but the Western youth movement of the 1960s, whose damnation he considers an essential part of his own mission civilisatrice. What young male protesters in Berkeley and Paris wanted above all else, Professor Jackwagon asserts, was "unlimited access to the female dormitories" (245). "In the West," he continues a few pages later, "students indulged themselves with Marxist rhetoric, but what they were really after was free love" (248). These DFHs, as Ferguson would probably label them without irony, were not merely sexual reprobates; they were also responsible for a wave of violence that hit Western countries in the form of "race riots" and terrorism.

As one of my college professors once told me in a seminar meeting, this observation is so wrong that one is nearly at a loss at how to respond to it. While I can't speak for students in Paris, the fundamental issue for young male American protesters in the 1960s was not sexual freedom but avoiding the draft and, if possible, ending the Vietnam War. Mssr. Ferguson seems so impatient with '60s-era protesters – or, perhaps, so obsessed with other people's sexual behavior – that in reading the slogan "Make Love Not War" he loses interest after the first two words. And blaming race riots and terrorism on sex-crazed juvenile delinquents is ridiculous. Race riots were a recurrent phenomenon in American cities from the Civil War through the early 1990s; those of the 1960s were reactions to poverty and police brutality, not generational strife. International terrorism in the 1970s, meanwhile, had much more to do with cheap machine guns, dysfunctional Arab nation-states, and covert Soviet manipulation than Youth in Revolt.

Ferguson's excoriation of DFHs is not entirely gratuitous. He probably intended it to be part of an ironic observation: that while young people in the rich, consumerist West were embracing Marxism and taking off their clothes, young people in the Eastern Bloc were embracing American culture, represented by blue jeans, and trying to throw off Marxism. Niall-o's heavy-handed treatment of Western youth, however, and his dismissal of their actual ideas (muddled as they were) suggests he is more interested in indulging his own disgust than drawing readers' attention to the ironies of history. Either that, or he hopes that condemning the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll generation will make him more appealing to These Kids Today.

* The Relentless Revolution (New York, 2010), 103-104.

Al-Andalus

Your humble narrator just spent a pleasant week in Spain, playing the Ugly American in the company of a tour group from several Anglophone and Latin American countries.  Such groups are apparently rather common in Spain; indeed, since the country has 44 million permanent residents and gets 56 million tourists a year, the odds are quite good that a passer-by on a Madrid or Barcelona street is a foreign visitor. Your narrator need not have worried about sticking out in a crowd. In fact, he and his petite amie were probably less conspicuous than the large groups of Russian and Japanese tourists who milled about, snapping photos and shoving other people aside.

When I was in graduate school many scholars considered Spain an outlier of European civilization, not properly part of the West (so-called). This may still be a common view, but my own limited observations suggest we would better characterize Spain as a frontier, with all that this term implies. For nearly eight centuries the Iberian peninsula was a contested borderland between the Arab world and Western Europe, and like other borderlands it birthed a blended culture. From the Islamic world the Spanish took Arab metal-working and architectural techniques, a number of Arabic words and place names (e.g. El Cid, from the

Arabic word for "lord" [sidi], and La Mancha, from the Arabic "Drylands"), and several elements of their cuisine, including saffron, rice, citrus fruits, and almonds. (An aside: the first time I ever ate marzipan that didn't make me gag was at a coffee shop in Toledo, Spain.) Medieval Spain was also a violent place; Castilians, Aragonese, and Moors built over 3,000 castles on the peninsula during their long war, and by the sixteenth century Spain had generated a large caste of warrior-aristocrats, the hidalgos, who became the vanguard of Spanish expansion into the Americas and the butts of Cervantes's novel. Moreover, like Europe's eastern frontier (per William McNeill, Europe's Steppe Frontier [Chicago, 1964]) or the southeastern part of North America, Spain retained human slavery long after its demise elsewhere in Europe. Arab, African, and even Native American slaves labored in Spanish fields and built the kingdom's castles and cathedrals. All of these elements made Spain a distinctive, even exotic, part of Western Europe.


Spain's frontier period came to a end, famously, in 1492, when its dual monarchs conquered the last Muslim state on the peninsula, expelled the kingdom's Jews, and began the exploration and colonization of the Americas. In the sixteenth century American gold helped turn Spain into the center of European culture, evidenced by European high fashion of the era, with its geometrically cut doublets and ruffed collars: the Spanish style. Spain's prominence ended with the precipitous decline of its power in the seventeenth century, the result of inflation, ruinous military expenditures, and a demographic catastrophe (plague and the expulsion of the remaining Moors) that bled the kingdom of twenty percent of its population. Following this disastrous century, Spain became even more thoroughly integrated into the West. It acquired a new European ruling dynasty, the Bourbons; adopted Enlightenment institutions, including one of the world's first great art museums (the Prado) and a much-admired liberal constitution; and embarked on a round of industrialization and railroad-building during the reign of Isabella II (1833-68). In the twentieth century Spain began running

a bit ahead of the rest of Europe, in cultural and political terms anyway: its artists, such as Dali and Gaudi and Picasso, pioneered modern (post-Impressionist) art, and, less happily, its murderous civil war offered the rest of Europe a premonitory glimpse of World War Two. Fortunately, the damage caused by this disastrous conflict is little in evidence today, though our Barcelonan tour guide was happy to tell us about the efforts of Montserrat monks to preserve the Catalan language during the dictatorship of that human-shaped bag of flaming excrement, Francisco Franco. Such small, local acts of defiance may may help explain why as many as 26 percent of Spaniards are regular church-goers today.

Photos above by author.  Top picture is of the bell tower at Seville Cathedral, formerly the minaret of the city's main mosque; middle picture a column detail from the Alhambra in Grenada; bottom photo a tilework illustration of the proclamation of the Constitution of Cadiz (1812), on display in the Plaza d'Espana in Seville.

The Dissolving Horizon

In several past entries, I have referred to the ongoing revolt in the archaeological community against the Clovis Horizon – the theory that there were no human beings in the Americas before the Clovis culture of 11,500 BCE (13.5 thousand years ago). Andrew Curry, writing in the May 2, 2012 issue of Nature, reports on some new developments in the campaign against "King Clovis." In Oregon, Dennis Jenkins has dated fossilized human excrement, or coprolites, to sometime between 14,300 and 14,000 years BP (Before Present). In neighboring Washington state, a 14,000-year-old site containing mastodon remains also yielded evidence of human activity, in the form of a probable projectile point made from the bones of another mastodon. In Texas, archaeologists found tools that were 1,000 years older than the earliest Clovis artifacts. Some of these findings were actually made in the 1980s, before scholars began seriously to question the Clovis Horizon, but as is so often the case with a scientific paradigm, archaeologists ignored evidence that didn't fit the model.

Meanwhile, a mitochondrial DNA study by Ripan Malhi of the University of Illinois suggests that the ancestors of the first paleo-Indians might have spent as much as 5,000 years hanging out in Beringia (the now-submerged Bering Strait land bridge) before following the coast or traversing the glaciers southward. If true, this would place the first humans in the Western Hemisphere as early as 21,500 years BP. Brian Kemp, one of the scholars studying On Your Knees Cave Man, counters with DNA mutation-rate data that place a 16,500-year limit on migration to the Americans.  Both dates, of course, are considerably older than the Clovis boundary.

Finally, the hypothesis that the earliest Americans included seafarers has been bolstered by a 2008 study identifying several species of seaweed at Tom Dillhay's Monte Verde site in Chile, and by a 2011 article "demonstrat[ing]" human habitation in the Channel Islands of California 12,000 years ago. The Clovis Horizon, in sum, is collapsing under the weight of many humble pieces of data: bone fragments, tool shards, seaweed, and poo.

Niall Ferguson is Still a Kneebiter

The fourth chapter of Niall Campbell Douglas Elizabeth Ferguson's (More) Civilization (Than You Deserve) is allegedly a discussion of the fourth "killer app" of Western civilization, medicine.  An unwary reader might expect this to be an essay on medical science, focusing on breakthroughs like Jenner's smallpox vaccine. Those familiar with Professor Ferguson's style and beliefs will not be surprised to learn that it is instead a defense of European imperialism, with particular emphasis on its French variant, bookended by a gratuitous denunciation of the French Revolution* and an account of the First World War (about which Ferg says, with admirable originality, "War is Hell" [p. 187]). On the main subject of his chapter, Niall-o declares that French colonial public-health policy is a good answer to "those like Gandhi who maintained that the European empires had no redeeming features" (171). Through mandatory smallpox vaccination, the development of a yellow-fever vaccine, and the draining of malarial swamps, French officials significantly increased life expectancy in their African and Indochinese colonies, nearly doubling life-expectancy in the latter region between 1930 and 1960. There was certainly a downside to French health policy, Ferg admits, insofar as French officials used disease control as an excuse to segregate French colonists from the indigenes, thereby undermining the racial egalitarianism of their imperial vision. On the whole, however, the French imperium was the model of a good European empire, while the German empire in sub-Saharan Africa, with its draconian laws and exterminationist wars, was the model of a bad empire.

One must offer Ferguson some light praise for resisting the urge to write about one of his most favorite subjects, the British Empire, light of the world and land of the palm and the pine. One may then damn him for implying that there is such a thing as "good" imperialism. Every empire rests on the same original sin: the idea that there are certain races or ethnic groups or nations who are unfit to govern themselves, and who must therefore surrender their agency and destiny to another people. In theory, colonizers might be acting from benevolent intentions, such as the French "mission civilisatrice." In practice, imperial power attracts the cruel and the greedy, and empires therefore tend to become primarily instruments of exploitation. Ferguson acknowledges that European medical researchers weren't initially acting from benignly paternalistic motives: they were more interested in the survival of Europeans in tropical climates than in the well-being of colonial peoples. They focused their research on diseases that most affected Europeans, like malaria, rather than those that killed Africans, like "cholera and sleeping sickness" (174). Prof. Niall is less ready to acknowledge that colonial public health programs did not begin to affect colonized peoples' death rates until rather late in the colonial period - the 1930s and '40s - and that their primary goal, other than preventing the spread of disease to European settlers, was to ensure healthy workers for European mines and plantations and healthy soldiers for European armies.

Like other apologists for empire, Our Man Niall claims that policies intended to facilitate European exploitation were in fact enacted for the benefit of the "natives" - e.g. his observation that the French blessed Indochina with "20,000 miles of road and 2,000 miles of railways...coal, tin, and zinc mines, and...rubber plantations" (191), as if these were schools or cultural centers instead of money-making enterprises using cheap land and cheap labor. The positive effects of imperialism were fig leaves covering up the primary function of empire, which was to enrich a few Europeans, give the European lower and middle classes a false sense of racial superiority, and impoverish much of the world's population.**

Ferguson's imperialism is perhaps less obnoxious in this chapter than in his previous work about the British Empire (e.g. Empire, 2003) but it is still present, and one must wonder why. Partly, I think, Niall-o is still a British nationalist at heart, and longs for the days when Albion ruled 40 percent of the globe. There has also long been a strain of imperialism in Anglo-American conservatism that Ferg probably caught when he was a young Tory.  This strain manifested itself in James Burnham's Suicide of the West (1964), which mourned the breakup of the European empires as a loss of territory by the Free World to the Communists; more recently, it appeared in Dinesh D'Souza's and Newt Gingrich's denunciation of Barack Obama's father for his "anti-colonial" views, which both men viewed as somehow anti-American. Ferguson's celebration of empire is a necessary compliment to this anti-decolonizationism. Finally, I suspect Professor Ferguson embraces pro-imperial views as something of a posture, an effort to appear contrarian, cheeky, and clever. What he forgets is Scalzi's Law: "The failure mode of clever is asshole."


* Our Man Niall does argue, in contrast to scholars like Simon Schama,  that much of the violence of the French Revolution was a product of the French Revolutionary wars, not of the French Republicans' ideology.

** George Orwell observed that a penny was a common hourly wage in British India before the Second World War, and that an Indian laborer's leg was often thinner than a British person's arm.

The Country Where I Quite Want to Be

Your humble narrator has just returned from Finland, where he attended the biennial Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference in North American Studies at the University of Helsinki.  As some of this weblog's readers may not have been to Finland, I will indulge in a few paragraphs' worth of travel writing, with the aim of wafting my readers off to that mysterious land of silks and spices (or at least of xylitol gum and reindeer).

There is much to like about Helsinki in early May.  The city is clean and pleasant, its buildings painted in bright pastel colors.  Helsinki's parks were green and free of snow, the trees just putting forth their first leaves.  The weather for most of my stay was clear and sunny, with temperatures in the 50s.  While chilly by Midwestern standards, this was warm enough that one could enjoy a beer or coffee out of doors at midday, and many of the locals did so. 

As one might expect, Helsinki's people were ethnically homogenous: nearly all white and Northern European, except for a few Somali immigrants, East Asian tourists, and Romanian street musicians playing "When the Saints Go Marching In." Outside of the conference (where everyone was as casually friendly as conference-goers usually are), the Finns with whom I spoke were polite but reserved, and generally avoided making direct eye contact.  Most spoke at least a little English, which is fortunate because the Finnish language was designed by aliens - it has 12 cases and virtually no cognates. (The Finnish word for "university," for instance, is "ylionpistu.")  Apart from "kiitos" ("thank you"), I did not pick up ay Finnish words on the trip.

I am not qualified to say much about Finnish culture and society, except that they have the same fondness for ice hockey that Kentuckians do for basketball (i.e. it is the state religion), that their educational system is quite good but on the verge of budget cutbacks, and that a notable minority are partial to drinking heavily and howling in the streets at 3 AM.  Just like college students, except they don't grow out of it.

Finland's national bird is, of course, an Angry one.

(The title of this post comes from this fine song by Monty Python.)

The Rosy-Fingered Goddess Dawn

A Byzantine historian I know once told me he envied American historians their wealth of primary sources, even for under-documented periods like the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Classical historians, he noted, have at their disposal far fewer sources, many of them fragmentary, and can assume that no "new" documents on their subject will be discovered in their lifetime. Americanists, he concluded, can always write a book based on "new" documents, previously unseen by historians, whereas Classicists can only offer new interpretations. With respect to my friend, I must reply that interpretation lies at the heart of the historical profession, and that new interpretations of old stories are often much more interesting than new stories.

Take, for instance, the case of the Roman Emperor Caligula (12-43 CE), whom Anglo-Americans mainly know (thanks to Robert Graves and Bob Guccione) as an insane and sexually depraved tyrant who impregnated his own sister, then cut out and ate her fetus. In a new biography (U. of California Press, 2011) of the third Julio-Claudian emperor, Aloys Winterling argues that much of Caligula's apparently crazed behavior was actually a form of political satire, intended to keep a dissembling and sycophantic Senate in check. Caligula famously made his horse a senator, for example, not out of madness but as a critique of the Senate's self-aggrandizement. Similarly, when Caligula fell ill and a prominent senator offered his life to the gods in exchange for the emperor's, Caligula demanded his suicide to deter excessive flattery. Flattering the emperor, the author suggests, was the primary way individual senators jockeyed for power in the early imperial era, but as a result of competition for previous emperors' favor the political "coin" of flattery had become badly debased, to the point where ambitious senators were offering their lives on the emperor's behalf. In calling the senator's bluff Caligula was trying to "deflate" the currency of flattery and make the surviving senators more reserved in their praise. It is an intriguing argument, and one which makes sense of Caligula's abuse of the Senate. One might add, as reviewer Mary Beard has done (see the link above), that the early empire had no established rules of hereditary succession, and that Caligula had reason to assume that the more ambitious senators might aspire to the throne. In any event, Caligula died at the hands of several senators, and later imperial historians, such as Suetonius, treated him unkindly so as to flatter his successors by comparison.

What of Caligula's sexual deviancy? Mostly this was made up by Graves, Pulman, and Guccione, of course, though the famous story about his staffing a brothel with noble Roman women appears to have been true. Whether this makes him a tyrant or just a misogynistic asshole I leave to the reader's judgment. Myself, I would like to think he once dressed up as the Goddess Dawn and danced for his uncle Claudius, but regrettably historical reality is not always more interesting than fiction.

The Virtual Chamber Pot War

To commemorate the forthcoming bicentennial of the War of 1812, the U.S. Navy is organizing a media and public-events campaign highlighting its role in the conflict. According to the Washington Post, these include a commemorative book and Twitter feed, a web video starring Richard Dreyfuss, several Tall Ships displays, and an interactive online game "allowing children to experience virtual life at sea by emptying chamber pots off the side of a ship." No, really.

The article notes that during the current era of defense cutbacks, the Navy is trying to use the 1812 bicentennial to revive public interest in its mission. This seems misguided to me on two counts:

First, Americans only care about two or three of their wars, and the War of 1812 isn't on the list. Americans remain fascinated by the Civil War, because many associate it with a chivalrous feudal civilization tragically crushed by a modern industrial society. (That this is a myth goes without saying, but most people prefer the legend.) We also like remembering World War Two because we got to fight Nazis, and because tanks and planes are fun. The Vietnam War is still remembered by Americans because it wrecked the lives of so many Baby Boomers, but few people in this country actually celebrate it. That's about all. No-one today much cares about the War for American Independence, as important as it was, because the causes for which the combatants were fighting seem arid and legalistic. The Mexican War and Spanish-American War remain largely forgotten, except that the latter evinces an image of Teddy Roosevelt in a cowboy hat. Modern Americans also care little about the First World War, the First Gulf War, and (pace M*A*S*H) the Korean War. The late unpleasantness in Iraq and Afghanistan will probably fade into obscurity in twenty years' time. And the War of 1812? Who cares, apart from me, Don Hickey, and the benighted Canadians? It was merely a three-year episode of incompetence and hooliganism, best forgotten by anyone who wants to retain any respect for the United States.

Secondly, the U.S. Navy actually performed rather badly in the War of 1812. Individual ships fared well in single-ship duels with British frigates, but the Navy as a whole could not prevent the Royal Navy from blockading the American coast and strangling the U.S. economy. The only strategic naval victory won by the U.S. during the war was the Battle of Lake Erie, which gave the U.S. control of that vital waterway during the 1813 campaign. Otherwise the Navy merely won a little glory while failing, as it was bound to fail (given Britain's overwhelming naval superiority), to defend the shores of the homeland. This is perhaps the wrong example to give to a Congress and a people who are growing tired of spending billions of dollars on nuclear-powered supercarriers, and who legitimately wonder what purpose such vessels serve in an era of drone warfare and terrorism. If the Navy wants to build support for its mission, perhaps it would be better off sticking to subliminal messages buried in boy-band music videos.

Niall Ferguson is Still Careless and Intellectually Lazy. Also, he's a Wanker

In the third chapter of Civilization for Me, But Not for Thee, Niall Campbell Douglas Elizabeth Ferguson addresses the relationship between property and liberty, with a sketchy comparison between (British) North America and Iberian South America. In North America, Ferg tells us, the "American dream" was, from an early date, "real estate plus [political] representation" (99), and for the most part migrants to the continent were able to achieve both. "Even the lowest of the low had the chance to get the first foot on the property ladder" (111), via land-grant clauses in indentured servants' contracts, local governments that secured property rights, and, after the American Revolution, through cheap land prices. (Secured through the subjugation or expulsion of the indigenous population, of course, but as we've noted before Niall doesn't particularly care about Indians.) Meanwhile, in Latin America, the "American dream" revolved around loot and martial glory, and the post-conquest elites were content to become the "idle rich" (113) while the Crown monopolized land ownership and the Indian, African, and mestizo populations stewed in poverty. Even after the nineteenth-century independence movement, economic inequality persisted, which destabilized the region's independent states: when populist insurgencies arose and demanded a more equitable distribution of property, landed elites backed dictators who would protect their wealth.

There is one hole which a reader could immediately poke in Our Man Niall's argument: among migrants to North America, "the lowest of the low" were black slaves, who had access neither to real estate nor political representation for 250 years. However, to his (limited) credit, Ferguson has anticipated this argument, insofar as he devotes the second half of the chapter to a comparative study of slavery and racial ideology on both continents. Whereas slaves in British North America were property for life, with very few opportunities to obtain their freedom, and whereas their post-Civil War successors were subject to a century of violent racism and marginalization, Latin American slaves sometimes had opportunities to earn their freedom, or to move their children up a more flexible racial hierarchy through interracial liaisons. (The latter were more violent and exploitative than I indicate here, but Ferguson doesn't mention that either.)

In thus shouldering the White Historian's Burden, Ferg provides himself with a convenient excuse for continued inequality in the United States - "social problems" engendered by slavery and Jim Crow continue to "bedevil...many Afro-American communities" today (138). That these problems may be due to persistent institutional and economic factors - white racism, eroding tax bases, and the monopolization of land and capital by a plutocratic white elite - are unpleasant facts that Niall generally prefers not to confront. His solution to the problem of inequality in the twenty-first century is a classic conservative one: at the microeconomic level, hard work and access to credit; at the macroeconomic level, privatization of state assets and export-led growth, to which he attributes Brazil's recent economic boom (139). Brazil actually doesn't prove Ferg's point, since it had higher rates of annual per capita income growth during the statist 1960s and '70s (4.5% per annum versus 1.3% in the '90s), and since its recent growth is largely due to public investments in education, transportation, and alternative energy. Meanwhile, the microeconomic proposal of More Banks for Everyone, which Ferguson made in a previous book, seems ill-advised given the similarities between modern Western bankers and "loan sharks." (Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism [Bloomsbury, 2010], 55; Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money [Penguin, 2008], iv.)

Still, in this chapter Ferguson expresses views about inequality and racism that would prevent him, if he were a natural-born American citizen, from winning the Republican nomination for president. I cannot imagine giving him any stronger praise.

Happy Leap Year

Given its rare appearance on the calendar, it is unsurprising that February 29th was seldom a day of great moment in American history. However, there are two significant events that occurred on Leap Year during the colonial era, both involving Puritans and Indians. The first (1692) was the formal filing of a legal complaint by Thomas Preston, Joseph Hutchinson, and Thomas and Edward Putnam of Salem Village against three women whom they accused of injuring their daughters and servants by witchcraft. The accused were Sarah Good, a woman "previously suspected of witchcraft by her neighbors," Sarah Osborne, a middle-aged woman involved in a land dispute with the Putnam family, and Tituba, a Native American slave. The three women set the pattern for what would become known as the Salem Witchcraft Trials or the Essex County Witchcraft Crisis, a crisis originating with legal disputes in Salem Village, actual belief in witchcraft, and fears of "devilry" left over from the Indian wars of the 1670s and early '90s. Before they was over, the trials would implicate 185 defendants (mostly women) from 22 towns and result in deaths of 20 people - all so that Salem could become a happening place on Halloween thenceforward. (Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare [Vintage, 2002], 8, 21-23, quote 23; see also Joseph Conforti, Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America [Johns Hopkins, 2006], 124-127.)

The other noteworthy event which took place on Leap Year in colonial New England was the Deerfield Raid of 1704, wherein a war party of Abenakis, Hurons, and Caughnawagas attacked the Massachusetts town of Deerfield, killing 50 people and taking another 100 captive. The raid led to one of the most famous captivity narratives of the colonial era, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion (1707), written by the most prominent of the ransomed prisoners, Rev. John Williams. It also resulted in the decision by Williams' daughter Eunice to stay in Canada, convert to Catholicism, and marry a Mohawk man. Her grandson, Eleazar, led an equally famous life in the nineteenth century: educated by Congregationalists in New England, he went to Oneida country in 1816, successfully converted a number of Oneidas to Christianity, and became an advocate for voluntary removal of the Oneida nation to a new homeland in Wisconsin. Williams also asserted, later in his life, that he was the lost Dauphin of France, demonstrating that outrageous self-pronouncements were not merely the province of Anglo-Americans. (Conforti, 131-32; Karim Tiro, The People of the Standing Stone: The Oneida Nation from the Revolution through the Era of Removal [University of Massachusetts Press, 2011], 135-144.)

Aztecs and Samurai

In a post from my Voyagers to the East series, I noted that Hernan Cortes brought a dozen Aztec Indians to Spain in 1528 for presentation to Carlos I, and that several members of this cortege, whom Bernal Diaz described as jugglers and acrobats, wound up moving to Rome to adorn the court of Pope Clement VII. Courtesy of Charles Mann's fascinating book 1493, I have since learned that this was not the first party of Nahua to visit Spain: in 1526 Spanish priests had brought over another group of Mexican "jugglers," who turned out to be skilled players of the game of ullamaliztli. The Venetian ambassador to Spain reported on the ball players' padded garments and on the immense speed and dexterity with which they propelled the ball to the goal. The purpose of the game puzzled the ambassador, but more puzzling still was the ball itself, made of some sort of "pith" that caused it to jump about. The pith was actually rubber, which Europeans had never seen before, and the ball's behavior was such that the ambassador couldn't describe it because there was no precise word in contemporary Italian for "bounce."* (Charles Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created [Knopf, 2011], 240-42.)

Jarring juxtapositions like this one are among the more compelling features of Mann's narrative. Another, more jarring (and fascinating) example of this trope occurs in Mann's discussion of Asian migration to colonial Mexico, which apparently was quite substantial in the seventeenth century. Spanish treasure ships had begun regular voyages across the Pacific in 1565, stopping in Manila to exchange Mexican and Bolivian silver for Chinese silk and porcelain. Apparently, many of these vessels brought Asian immigrants back with them to Latin America. The 100,000 or so trans-Pacific travelers included Japanese emigrants who had been stranded in China or the Philippines when the Tokugawa regime sealed the home islands' borders. A few of these were samurai whom the viceroy allowed to retain their katanas and employed in Mexico's colonial militia. I am fairly certain I made the previous sentence up. (Hastily checks book.) Nope, there it is on page 324. Mann cites a recent article by Edward Slack, who identifies the countries of origin of colonial Mexico's chino population (China, the Philippines, Japan, India), describes their professions, and observes that Asians were the only non-whites in Mexico licensed to carry weapons and serve in the colony's militia. (See Edward R. Slack, Jr., "The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted Image," Journal of World History 20 [Winter 2009], 35-67.) Professor Slack does not offer suggestions for how one might turn this fascinating story into a film plot, but such a movie script (perhaps a mashup of Yojimbo and Treasure of the Sierra Madre) almost writes itself.

* The English word "bounce," per the Oxford English Dictionary, existed but was not used to describe the bouncing of a ball until the seventeenth century.

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 diverted precious Ottoman 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. Appert applied this insight 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 and 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 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.