Whatever Became of Cahokia?

Several years ago I wrote a blog entry about the rise of Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian settlement in North America, and the stresses and compensations of living in that extraordinary city. My entry did not, however, address the reasons for the city-state's decline, which began just a century after Cahokia's founding, in 1150 CE. Research for another project has introduced me to several articles which provide reasons for Cahokia's eventual disappearance (except as a cluster of mounds and a museum). One of the principal causes for the decline, according to Timothy Pauketat, Larry Beacon, and Edward Cook, was environmental: a series of droughts that afflicted Indian communities in the Midwest in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, leading to the abandonment of the farming villages that supplied Cahokia with food. The city already suffered from resource depletion: the American Bottom, fertile though its soils were, had a natural shortage of mineral resources, and the construction of Cahokia and its satellite communities produced severe shortages of firewood by 1150.

To these environmental stresses we may add a cultural one: Cahokia's religious and social elite began pursuing individual display and military glory in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a shift from more communally-oriented behavior that is demonstrated in the archaeological record by increased burials of exotic, even unique, "prestige goods" like copper jewelry and shell cups, and by the abandonment of mound-building in favor of constructing defensive palisades. This increased individualism undermined the elite's authority as mediators for the community, while increased drought and resource depletion made it clear that both the spiritual and material worlds were angry with the priest-aristocrats. By the middle of the 1100s Cahokia had lost about half of its peak population, and the rest of the city's inhabitants had dispersed by the early 1300s, just in time for the Little Ice Age to shut down the other Mississippian settlements in the Midwest.

Sources:  Larry Benson, Timothy Pauketat, and Edward Cook, "Cahokia's Boom and Bust in the Context of Climate Change," American Antiquity 74 (2009): 467-83; Mary Beth Trubitt, "Mound Building and Prestige Goods Exchange: Changing Strategies in the Cahokia Chiefdom," ibid, 65 (2000): 669-690.

Great Books That the Teacher Hasn't Read Either

In my last entry on Niall Ferguson's Dear God, I'm HUGE (also known as Civilization), I noted that Professor Ferguson's proposal for Western educational reform centers on a "Great Books" curriculum, of the sort that has fallen out of fashion in the United States and Europe. According to a footnote on the next-to-last page of his book, Niall-o's core curriculum would consist of "the King James Bible, Isaac Newton's Principia, John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, to which should be added Shakespeare's plays and selected speeches of Abraham Lincoln [an honorary Englishman, I suppose] and Winston Churchill" (324n). I am just about willing to bet that Professor Ferg hasn't read a few of these titles cover to cover, and he would be hard-pressed to teach any of them effectively to a class of 40 or 50 disaffected college students. Perhaps I might propose my own substitute list of ten "Western Classics That People Are Actually Likely to Read, Not All of Which Were Written By Englishmen"?

Sophocles, Antigone – is one's obligation to the state or to a higher morality?

Tacitus, De Germania – is civilization a source of improvement or weakness? 

Beowulf – can one be a Christian prince and still fight monsters?

Machiavelli, The Prince – can one be a good ruler without any sort of spiritual morality?

Shakespeare, Macbeth – is power worth it if the means to attain it corrupt the goal?

Voltaire, Candide – should we assume that priests and philosophers have all the answers?

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto – is the industrial bourgeoisie wrecking everything?

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House – are the bourgeois wrecking their own lives?

George Orwell, Animal Farm – is revolution the answer?

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – surely science, at least, is neutral and unbiased – except that it too is socially constructed…

These readings total about 1,100 pages, which modern American college students could probably handle in two semesters. Moreover, only three of them are by Englishmen; the other authors are Greek, Roman, Italian, French, German, Swedish, and American. Regrettably, none of these authors are female, unless one accepts Woody Allen's theory that Shakespeare was actually four women.

Mary Block on the Todd Akin Scandal

My longtime friend and colleague, Mary Block of Valdosta State University, is an expert on nineteenth-century American rape law. Whatever her immediate reactions may have been to Representative Todd Akin's declaration on August 19th that pregnancy was prima facie evidence of consensual sex, surprise was not among them. To media commentators who wondered where Akin's outre (and deeply ignorant) remarks came from, Mary sent the following explanation, which she has kindly permitted me to repost here:

Anderson Cooper stated on his show AC 360 that we did not know where Todd Akin got the idea that a raped woman could not conceive and most other print and TV commentators act like Akin simply pulled the notion out of his own backside. The idea that a woman can't get pregnant as a result of rape, however, has a long and storied history. It began when the Greek philosopher Aristotle asserted that even though only a man emitted seed during sexual intercourse, pregnancy depended on and resulted only from female orgasm. Several Greek and Roman physicians picked up on that theory of conception and altered parts of it, for example the Roman physician Galen posited that both males and females emitted seed during intercourse, but they carried forward the idea that no woman could beget a child unless she had an orgasm during coitus.

The theory made its way into Roman law in the sixth century during the reign of the Emperor Justinian (r. 527-565). Justinian's chief physician was a man named Aetios of Amida. Aetios was not just any physician, he was also one of the best trained and the foremost expert on the womb. The doctor told Justinian that in order for a woman to conceive, she had to experience 'violent passion,' by which he meant an orgasm, during sex, and that the more violent the passion she exhibited, the more likely was to become pregnant. Conversely, a woman who did not achieve violent passion was highly unlikely to conceive. Women who claimed to have been raped, according to Aetios, could never conceive because such an event was so traumatic the female could never experience orgasm and thus no woman could ever conceive as the result of a rape. Aetios is asserting, or perhaps inventing, the idea that conception is possible only if the sex is consensual. Rape is possible only in the absence of consent, ergo, any woman who cried rape yet subsequently conceived had lied. Pregnancy served as proof of consent and proof of consent negates a claim of rape.

During his reign Justinian compiled a Civil Code of all extant Roman law. His compilers actually broadened the law of raptus to include the forcible rape of virgins, nuns, and widows and added the ancient medical fiction that a raped woman could not conceive. Roman law thus made it official that any woman who claimed to have been raped, but who then got pregnant had lied. English canon lawyers beginning in the twelfth century, good Catholics that they were, emphasized the Roman law over Anglo-Saxon law, and in so doing, introduced Byzantine science into English canon and civil law. The idea quickly made its way into common law through the treatise writings of Gratian (late twelft century) and Bracton (early thirteenth century) and remained there until the early nineteenth century.

American law is based in English law. One point of note is that American courts rejected this medical and legal fiction in 1793 when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declared that rape was a crime against the honor and person of a woman and had nothing to do with the begetting of a child. Alas, unlike Todd Akin, the Pennsylvania judges were products of the American Enlightenment and men who respected eighteenth-century science. To be sure, there were men of medicine, and a few of law, who continued to peddle the idea that a raped woman could not conceive well into the nineteenth century, but most people considered them to be quacks.

I guess no one should really be surprised that those trying to force us to live according to the dictates of the ancient Near East would also try to force us to accept the science of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Akin was invoking the medical science of the ancient Greeks and Romans when he asserted that a woman who was raped could never get pregnant. What he meant when he used the phrase "legitimate rape" was that any woman who was in fact 'forcibly' raped, another term fundamentalists like Akin and Paul Ryan like to use, cannot ever conceive. Conception means consent and if she consented, then she could not have been raped. Therefore, in their twisted little minds, no rape exception need be written into any abortion laws because pregnancy serves as affirmative proof that a woman is lying about rape. She just wants an abortion. If enough of these guys get elected in 2012, expect to see reality TV showing us the witches being burned at the stake. Sadly, on some level, their invoking the science of the Dark Ages means they've advanced several millennia from their usual biblical frame of reference and that means, I suppose, that they can call themselves progressives!


Contact information:

Mary Block
Associate Professor of History
Valdosta State University
mblock@valdosta.edu

**

Many thanks, Mary!

It Should Be Thrown with Great Force

As a courtesy to those readers interested in my blog entries on Niall Ferguson and his 2011 book (White Christian) Civilization, here is an index to the entire series:

Niall Ferguson Is Still a Dolt (8 Nov. 2011)
A review of one of Ferguson's vapid Newsweek articles.

Niall Ferguson Is Still a Douchebag (29 Nov. 2011)
Niall-o threatens to sue one of Civilization's reviewers.

Niall Ferguson Is Still a Tosser (13 Jan. 2012)
On the Introduction to Civilization.

Niall Ferguson Is Still a Colossal Muttonhead (31 Jan. 2012)
Civilization, Chapter One.  Niall misinterprets early modern China.

Niall Ferguson Is Still a Rotter (11 Feb. 2012)
Niall-o urges Westerners to prepare for a holy war against Iran in Civilization, Chapter Two.

Niall Ferguson Is Still Careless and Intellectually Lazy (29 March 2012)
Civilization, Chapter Three. Niall is still a wanker.

Niall Ferguson Is Still a Kneebiter (27 May 2012)
Civilization, Chapter Four. Some empires are more equal than others.

Niall Ferguson Is Still a Jackwagon (7 July 2012)
Hunting the DFHs in Civilization, Chapter Five.

Niall Ferguson Is Still a Ghastly Asshat (26 July 2012)
On your knees and pray for salvation, dissolute youth of Western Europe! (Civilization, Ch. 6.)

Niall Ferguson Is Still a Fecking Gobshite, with Extra Gob (2 Aug. 2012)
Civilization, Concluded, and none too soon.

I'll probably have one more entry on Civilization in a week or so, but for now I think I've spent way too much time with Ferg's little billet-doux to himself.

Niall Ferguson Is Still a Fecking Gobshite, with Extra Gob

Niall C.D.E. Ferguson, O.F.G.*, concludes his book Civilizationpants with an expanded version of the essay he published in Newsweek last year, and which drew your humble narrator into this extended wallow in crapulence. To summarize: Ferg asserts that all civilizations eventually fall, and often do so very quickly, as in the case of the Romans, the Incas, the Bourbon Dynasty in France, and the Soviet Union. (That the Roman Empire took several centuries to collapse, that French civilization and the Bourbon monarchy survived 1789, and that even the collapsing Soviet empire enjoyed two decades of fitful adventurism before the final dissolution, are observations that need no expansion here.) In the modern West, the last imperial power, the United States, is likely to collapse in consequence of its excessive debts, which Ferguson argues are comparable to those of several past empires on the verge of collapse: Habsburg Spain, the Ottoman Empire, France under Louis XVI (again). The successor to America's imperial mantle, China, has absorbed some of the West's values but remains an aggressive and authoritarian state; it has downloaded some but not all of the West's "killer apps." Westerners probably cannot recover their former predominance without matching China's investments in education and scientific research, and without balancing their nations' budgets.

          Ferguson's last few pieces of advice seem sensible enough, as does his reminder in passing that Europe owed its rise to power more to its institutions than to its military strength. But I'm not sure I would want to appoint Niall-o to head any sort of Multi-National Task Force on the Current Crisis, in part because one of his proposals, regarding balanced budgets and austerity, would be very counter-productive right now. Setting modern Europe aside for the time being, Ferguson's insistence that the U.S. has reached an unsustainable level of debt elides one essential figure, which is the cost of servicing that debt. At present the U.S. government spends about ten percent of outlays on interest payments (including intra-governmental debt), which is high, but nowhere near the 50 percent paid by the Ottomans and Bourbons and the nearly 100% paid by the sixteenth-century Habsburgs. The reason debt-servicing costs remain low, even as the national debt climbs to record levels, is because interest rates are effectively zero – on some Treasury bills, they are negative. Given that the United States can essentially charge investors for the privilege of loaning it money, it behooves the U.S. government to borrow every penny it can lay hands on, and use the revenue to jump-start a stagnant economy. (Yes, this means we'll be bequeathing the millennial generation a huge debt, but right now we're bequeathing them a 20 percent unemployment rate, which is more damaging to their long-term economic prospects.)

          Mainly I want to keep Ferg away from policy-making because I'm not sure he's willing to support policies that reflect his more sensible assertions. Niall may be skeptical about the long-term correlation between military force and world dominance, but that doesn't mean he isn't prepared to commit American air forces to the destruction of Iran's nuclear program (as he intimates at the end of Chapter 2). He may favor scientific research and educational investment, but his idea of an appropriate education would be one steeped in Western classics – all written by British authors,** incidentally – rather than one which focused more directly on developing critical thinking skills. Niall-o has more recently argued that Americans shouldn't bother to invest in education, because it won't do impoverished children any good. In April 2012 Ferguson was one of the distinguished guests at the Millken conference, a $6,000-a-ticket gathering of the rapacious rich hosted by Ferg's soulmate Michael Millken. When one of the panelists, billionaire Jeff Greene, began talking about the stresses faced by the impoverished American underclass, and suggested that with a little more "education" and "after-school programs" poor kids might be able to stay out of jail, Ferguson "drawled…'Dream. On.'" It appears Niall-o doesn't really believe education will help anyone who is much below his own income level. Presumably, like other American conservatives, he would prefer to build more prisons, where as punishment disaffected young people would be forced to read Ferguson's books.

(The above photo is either of Michael Millken or Niall Ferguson; take your pick.)

*Order of the Fecking Gobshite, created by King George V in 1931, and awarded quasi-annually since then. 

** The author has decided to reserve discussion of Ferguson's ideal core curriculum for another blog post, as this one is already long.

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.