Charles W. King

One of the most important questions and subjects of debate in contemporary academic history is how Europe came to dominate the the rest of the world at the start of the twentieth century. At the height of European empire before World War One the sun never set on the British Empire and the French, British, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires controlled vast swaths of land from the Cape of Good Hope to the Bering Straits. Since the initial colonization of the Caribbean by the Spanish Empire in the 1500s, European powers steadily expanded their control over the Americas, Asia, and Africa. It is understandable that for decades historians and other academics searched further and further back into history to discover the origins of Europe’s considerable modern advantages. German sociologist Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was one of the first academic works to examine what made modern Europe. Since its publication in 1905 others have found the in medieval fairs and markets the rudimentary origins of the industrial capitalism that flourished in Europe in the nineteenth century.

The problem with these quests for the historical origins of European industrial capitalism further and further back in European history is that they neglect the rest of the world. In the twentieth century academic historians have begun to question the existing narrative of the origins of European dominance and prosperity. Historians of the Middle East like Beshara Doumani have found that important economic innovations like the commodification of land was not imported from Europe but arose independently and simultaneously in Palestine and other Ottoman provinces in the eighteenth century. As better histories of the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian Sub-Continent and Southern and East Asia have reached western academics in the past three decades it became necessary to reassess whether or not Europe was as far a head of the rest of the world as it had been thought to be throughout the Renaissance and Enlightenment. These histories have shown that the markets of medieval Europe were not substantially different from those of the rest of the world at the time, and suggested that origins of industrial capitalism lie elsewhere.

Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000) popularized the term and pushed the date for the divergence of between Europe and the rest of the world back into the nineteenth century. By comparing economic inputs and outputs Pomeranz and others argue that Europe did not begin to outpace China and the rest of the world until the Industrial revolution. The date of the divergence is not a settled issue in academic history, with many continuing to place it in the eighteenth rather than nineteenth century. However few serious academics now argue that European hegemony has its roots in the medieval period.

This academic re-examination of previously settled issues is important for contemporary policy-makers. As academics learn more about the economic and political histories of non-european powers policy-makers can be better informed about the nature of economic decisions and how access to resources like arable land and fossil fuels have affected societies in the past, how they might do so in the future, and what policies might be needed to maintain economic prosperity and political stability. These histories also correct previously held conceptions of pre-modern African, Asian, and American societies as backwards and iluminate how non-europeans experienced centuries of European domination. These perspectives are important for policy-makers and government officials attempting to create effective policy and relationships. The question, “Why Europe?” is essential not only for academics. It is one of the most important questions for historians and policy-makers all over the world because its answer informs decision making in the present.

Charles W. King

Vladimir Putin was recently re-elected for another term as President of the Russian Federation. Egypt held a poll in which the erstwhile opponent of Abel Fattah el-Sisi told reporters that seeing el-Sisi’s name on the ballot he could not help but vote for him. The People’s Republic of China has jettisoned its post-Mao restrictions on ten year terms for President, cementing Xi Jinping’s position as the most powerful Chinese ruler since Mao Zedong. While the latter was not technically an election, it did require the accession of the National People’s Congress. All of these recent events speak to the question of states derive legitimacy in the twenty-first century.

For centuries the divine right of kings was the leading theory of legitimacy in Europe. By the dint of the will of God, the royal houses of England, France, Austria, and many more were the legitimate rules of their domains. In a very real sense both Putin’s Russia and the People’s Republic of China since Deng Xiaoping have rested the legitimacy of their governments on economic prosperity. All of these belie what political scientists consider to be the root of sovereignty; a monopoly of violence.

The crowned heads of Europe, before they claimed the divine right of kings, were feudal warlords. Historically it is after establishing a monopoly of violence over a territory that legitimacy is established. A conqueror imposes their will through violence, and over time legitimates their continued rule and the rule of their successors through the sanctioned use of violence by the state as well as other means. For many states this meant transitioning to constitutional and republican systems.

In democracies that derive from the traditions of Locke and Rousseau sovereignty comes from the consent of the governed.Elections are not only a way for the people to select their representation, but also serve to re-legitimize the state. In countries like Russia and Egypt where elections are not free what purpose do they serve? For decades African and Central Asian dictatorships have used sham elections to prove to the outside world that their rule was legitimate. The Soviet Union used similar elections to legitimize the creation of communist satellite states after World War Two. But in most cases these rigged contests are seen for what they, so they must serve another purpose.

An election is a large and complicated process, taking hundreds or thousands of people to organize. Rigging an election takes even more manpower. The ability to mobilize the people required to have the kind of turn out and margin that re-elected Putin is a clear demonstration of the power of the Russian state and Putin’s control of it. The ability to stage rigged elections is a stand in for more obvious and bloody forms of violence, but at its core it is a form of state violence. Rigged elections like those in Russia and Egypt have not only foreign but domestic audiences. They demonstrate to the population that the state is powerful and organized, and that opposition to that system is futile and dangerous. They are relatively cheap in blood and treasure compared to putting down riots in the streets.

Democracies attempt to put as much distance as possible between their legitimacy and the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence through elections and representative government. It is important to recognize that in the late twentieth and early twenty first century elections can serve another purpose, as a relatively bloodless demonstration of the state’s monopoly of violence.

Charles W. King

As the field of economics has developed better methods for understanding economic systems, scholars have used them to both look both forwards and back. For economists applying historical data allows them to refine and improve their models and theses. For historians economic methods facilitate big picture history. Tools like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Consumer Price Indices (CPI’s) are as useful to historians as they are to economists and policymakers. They allow historians to compare and contrast the economic history and development of technologies and politics in disparate parts of the world that were difficult to compare based on narrative history.

One of the most important questions for historians and social scientists for the past two centuries has been the rise of Europe; what was it that led Europe—particularly Great Britain—to become the power that it was in the 19th and 20th centuries? For decades the predominant historical narrative was one of the “Protestant Work Ethic” and market capitalism. Historians reached further and further back into European history to find the roots of industrial capitalism in the most rudimentary medieval markets.

This narrative was upended by economic histories of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Comparisons of agricultural productivity in the richest parts of Europe (Great Britain, Holland, and Italy) and the richest part of China (the Lower Yangtze Delta) found that they were roughly equal through 1800. Court documents and merchant’s ledgers in reveal that the commoditization of land occurred simultaneously in both England and Ottoman Palestine. These revelations have helped historians better understand how economies and nations have developed.

Innovation in economic history has not been without controversy.  Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman’s 1974 book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery attempted to revise the narrative of American chattel slavery, arguing that it was both more productive and less harsh than historians and the public at large had previously believed. Fogel and Engerman rely on the measurement of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) to demonstrate slavery’s productivity. TFP cannot be measured. It is found by measuring total output, labor input, and capital input, weighting the importance of capital and labor, and deriving TFP from those numbers. It is the fuzziest of fuzzy maths. To show the quality of food each slave received Fogel & Engerman used the weight of pork each slave was given per week, failing to consider the cut and quality of pork. The result is a tremendously important but problematic work.

Economic history is an innovative and important field of history with ramifications for policy-makers as well as historians. Understanding long term trends in economics and what caused the European breakout will help formulate new policies. But historians, economists, and policy-makers must resist the temptation to use economic methods to distill history down to a single statistic. Doing so ignores important variables and human factors that will continue to make both academic research and governance difficult, but without them history and policy will become myopic, less illuminating, and less useful.

Further Reading

"A not-so-golden age," The Economist, June 15, 2017, accessed June 15, 2017, http://www.economist.com/news/china/21723459-how-will-affect-xis-chinese-dream-china-has-been-poorer-europe-longer-party.

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism trans. Talcott Parsons, (London, UK: Allen and Unwin, 1930).

Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)

Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasats in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Pres: 1995).

Robert William Fogel & Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1974).

Charles W. King

The discipline of anthropology has a problematic past. It was created by the imperial powers of the eighteenth century to apply scientific rigor to examinations of their imperial subjects in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The premise of these studies of subject peoples was to catalog how they were different from their European masters.  This is a process which social scientists now term ‘othering’. Describing persons as ‘others’ permits that would violate societal norms if taken against people you identify with. The ways in which imperial anthropologists described their subjects further established justification for European imperial domination. Cultures in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia were frequently described as emotional and matriarchal, in contrast to rational and patriarchal Europeans. For societies like those of imperial Europe that associated femininity with irrationality, and that prized the scientific and the rational as inherently morally superior describing a culture as matriarchal or emotional is a way of describing them as inferior.

Being inferior and being sub-human was a distinction made by imperial anthropologists or the government that funded them, it provided justification for the way those government wanted to treat their subjects. The historiography of slavery in the United States is an excellent example of this. To this day most American high school students are taught that slaves in the American South had a matriarchal culture. The historical record does not support this. Enslaved women were more equal to their male peers and had more access to positions of authority within enslaved communities, but only relative to free women at the time. Nowhere in the United States were enslaved women at the top of the hierarchy of enslaved people. What is a matter of historical record is that enslaved people in the United States were not considered to be human. This is a matter of record in speeches, laws, and court decisions and one of the frequent rationales for their supposed inferiority was a lack of a capacity for reason.

The historic purpose of anthropology as justification for enslavement and exploitation is something that the discipline continues to grapple with today. For policy-makers it is important to take lessons from anthropology’s attempts to reform their discipline. The western world continues to prize rationality, and it is easy to describe those it competes with as irrational, whether they are religious zealots, nationalist fanatics, or both. Previous articles have discussed the rationality and strategic value of suicide terrorism and nuclear weapons, and warned how treating these threats as the results of irrationality is unproductive and dangerous. A certain amount of ‘us versus them’ is inescapable in geopolitics, borders are drawn on maps and people self-identify as specific nationalities and cultures. Policy-makers must be careful not to exacerbate these perceptions. Doing so makes it easier to justify exploitation and the use of force, and harder to come to diplomatic agreements. Policy-makers must be wary of repeating the mistakes of their imperialist forebears who treated the rest of the world as resources to be enslaved and exploited and suffered a crippling backlash in the twentieth century.

Further Reading

Jane Burbank, and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History. (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2010).

Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York City, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978).

David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)

Charles W. King

All historical disciplines risk falling afoul of determinism, none more than environmental history. If the environment is the major factor in historical outcomes then there is no human agency, and it is possible to determine the course of future events based solely on the environmental circumstances. In academia this is a common criticism of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, regardless of the prizes it won. The propensity to flirt with the danger of determinism does not mean that environmental history is not important to both historians and policy-makers. Like a player being dealt cards at the beginning of a hand of poker, the environment does not determine the outcome of the game but places both constraints and freedoms upon historical actors.

After the initial colonization of the Caribbean until the 20th, century European powers found it almost impossible to take colonial possessions from each other. The British famously lost thousands of men in a number of attempts to take Spanish colonies, due to tropical diseases which the newly arrived expeditionary forces had no immunity to. Napoleon’s attempt to roll back the Haitian Revolution also failed due to massive casualties caused by yellow fever and malaria contracted even before the French troops made landfall. For centuries tropical diseases killed almost three quarters of Europeans arriving in the Caribbean. The freedom of action of existing colonial possessions and populations was protected from European forces by the disease rather than cannons. However, this protection was not a guarantee of successful revolution or independence. When the Panama Canal opened in 1914 vaccines and modern medical techniques had reduced the effect of tropical diseases enough to change the balance of power in the Caribbean, but many colonial possessions remained under the rule of their original colonial masters. During the centuries of European colonization that exacerbated the geopolitical import of tropical diseases historical events were shaped by the environment, but never to the elimination of human agency.

While even hazardous environments like the Caribbean or Arabian Desert can conceal hidden assets, some environments are more obviously advantageous. One of the major factors why Europe, and Western Europe and England in particular, experienced the Industrial Revolution first, and went on to dominate the rest of the globe, is environmental. Some countries like Germany possessed plentiful and easily extractable supplies of lumber, coal, and iron. Others like Portugal and the Netherlands had population sizes and geographies that facilitated sea trade and demanded capital intensive economies. England possessed both ample resources, and a geography and population that encouraged the English to turn to trade. These assets did not dictate that England, the Low Countries, and the princes of the Holy Roman Empire would become the United Kingdom, Netherland, and Germany of today, they gave freedom of action. Scotland possessed the same advantages as England, and is credited with many of the innovations that provide the foundation for the modern world. Scotland has not been an independent country since 1707. The advantages of geography and environment must be seized by political actors and are no guarantee of success.

Environmental circumstances can provide considerable advantages, such as the plentiful access to lumber, coal, and iron in Western Europe, or disadvantages, like regular drought cycles throughout the tropics. In both cases it takes political action to make use of these advantages or turn these disadvantages into disasters. For historians the environment is an important factor in historical events, always as a part of a human narrative. Policy-makers cannot afford to ignore environmental circumstances, both historical and current, in making policy. Environmental circumstances shape societies, and awareness of the drives and perspectives of foreign powers facilitates good diplomacy and policy making. Environmental circumstances frequently shape national policy; aggressive acquisition of scarce resources, policies to compensate for changing circumstances, and the displacement of people. An accurate assessment of the current environment is essential to effective policy responses. Presuming that environment dictates history is dangerous, but ignoring the environment’s impact upon history is foolish and results in poor policy-making.

Further Reading

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, (New York, NY: Verso: 2002).

J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).