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

The tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration on steel and aluminum have kicked off a series of tit for tat retaliation between the United States and the tariffs stated target; the People’s Republic of China. The most recent Chinese tariffs on over a hundred American imports to China will amount to roughly $50 billion as a response to tariffs of a similar size directed specifically at China. The Administration, and President Trump in particular, contend that the trade deficit with China is a dire situation and that a trade war with the People’s Republic will be easy to win. The history of trade wars suggest that this conclusion may be dangerous.

The desire to have exports exceed imports as a key drive of economic growth is a key principle not of twentieth century capitalism, but of the mercantilist policies that dominated Europe throughout the Renaissance and Early Modern period. The British, Spanish, French, and Dutch Empires strictly regulated whom their colonial subjects could trade with, and prohibited the production of finished goods in their colonies to preserve them as markets for goods from the imperial core. While this was profitable for the imperial crowns and those companies granted monopolies by royal charter, it was the colonies that were able to skirt these laws, like the Thirteen American Colonies, that ultimately flourished economically. By the dawn of the twentieth century mercantilism was all but dead, slain by a hundred years of Freedom of the Seas and Trade imposed by the Royal Navy after the Napoleonic wars. Free trade allowed not only the British Isles to flourish, but the Empire’s colonies and trading partners abroad flourished as well.

Regardless of the trend towards greater free trade fostered by the British Empire and the United States, tariffs and other forms of economic warfare remained a tool of twentieth century geopolitics. During the 1970s the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries embargoed the United States and other nations that supported Israel during the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. Saudi Arabia and by extension O.P.E.C. learned lessons from the mixed results of these embargoes and in recent years have let the price of oil plummet to price American and other producers out of the market to preserve O.P.E.C.’s global market share. Russia regularly uses its control of natural gas resources important to Europe as a tool to extract diplomatic concessions, and the United States is tightening the effectiveness of oil embargoes on North Korea. Economic restrictions can be a useful tool for foreign policy, but they are not without their dangers.

During the Great Depression American exports dropped by nearly half. The consensus of economists and historians is that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and the tariffs imposed by America’s trading partners in retaliation were a major contributing factor to this drop, and the severity of the Depression. While tariffs protect the domestic industries whose goods they target, any consumer or company who relies on those goods will pay a higher price, usually for inferior goods. Tariffs decrease competition in the domestic economy, one of the drivers of health in consumer driven economies. The cycle of retaliation that tariffs start shrinks market access.

Market access as been a major principle of American foreign policy since the American Revolution, and trade conflicts may sacrifice these gains. As the United States gets deeper and deeper into the cycle of trade restrictions with the People’s Republic of China and other major economic powers it is important for policy makers to recognize that the economy of the United States has always benefited from competitive advantage and eschewed self-sufficiency and autarky as an objective. Trade wars, even victorious ones, pose a serious threat to the health of such economies. Moving to a autarkic mercantilist economy would be costly and counter to long standing American capitalist principles.

Charles W. King

Recently President Trump reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to the war in Afghanistan and pledged to send 4,000 troops to supplement the approximately 8,000 American and 6,000 allied troops in Afghanistan. While the President did not ultimately adopt it, there was an alternative which has received significant attention over the past few weeks. This alternative, advocated by Eirk Prince of Blackwater fame, is explicitly modeled on that of the British East India Company. According to Prince replacing American troops with private contractors could save the United States billions and defeat the Afghan Taliban. He claims to have thousands of retired American and NATO Special Forces ready to do this work, but experts contend that the potential talent pool of available Western Special Forces is nowhere near deep enough to supply Prince’s proposal. Also worth highlighting is that according to sources inside the White House, as reported by Foreign Policy, the thing that may have change the President’s mind on Afghanistan is the presence of extensive mineral deposits now being developed by Chinese companies, companies which may have links to Prince. While these reasons alone should be enough to give pause to anyone examine Prince’s proposal, it is also worth examining the model that he proposes.

The British East India Company was granted a Royal Charter by Queen Elizabeth I on December 30th, 1600 for the purpose of establishing trade between Britain and the Far East. At the time the protections of incorporation were only granted to ventures that advanced government agendas. Frequently, as in the case of the EIC, incorporation came with monopoly rights as well. The EIC’s most important monopolies were tea and saltpeter; the former being an inciting cause of the American Revolution, the latter being a key strategic resource. The Company would rule India for almost one hundred years before being stripped of its control of India in response to the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

In addition to the proximate causes of the 1857 rebellion (British attempts to change social norms of both the military and civilian population, and the adoption of greased rifle cartridges) company rule in India and well as later administration by the British Raj which replaced it, witnessed large scale famines as the result of typical drought seasons. One third of the population of Bengal died in 1770 as a result of Company rule. Tens of millions of Indians died as a result of these famines; meanwhile India was a net exporter of cereal grains, a subject we have touched upon before.

The British East India Company was not a successful business venture. The British Parliament was forced to bail it out numerous times between 1600 and 1857. It was a brutal instrument of imperial power. It exercised control of the Indian subcontinent thought violence, subject to little to no oversight from London. The Company facilitated control over the economies of the British Empire’s other possessions, including the Thirteen Colonies and the Empire’s African colonies. It was an engine for the extraction of resources and wealth from the colonies for the benefit of London, and it demonstrated phenomenal disregard for the value of human life in doing so. It is not an example that the United States should seek to emulate.

Charles W. King

Taxation without representation, the presence of the Royal Army in colonist’s homes, and the suspension of trade and English Common Law are the most well-known of the grievances levied by the Continental Congress against King George III. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was another, and like the statutes against trading with foreign powers and their colonies it was violated repeatedly by American colonists. Issued after the French & Indian War, known in Europe as the Seven Years War, the Proclamation forbade American settlers from expanding past the Appalachian Mountains, establishing the Ohio River Valley and the lands beyond at native territory. For many Americans access to the other side of the Appalachians was the point of going to war against France and her native allies. The British Government had promised large swathes of land west of the Appalachians in exchange for American service against the French, which the Proclamation nullified without compensation. The Crown sought to avoid another war by forbidding further encroachment by the Thirteen Colonies against neighbors, which is understandable even if how they thought they’d enforce such a measure is not.

The tension between adventurous trappers, prospectors, and settlers and the government was one of the enduring tensions of for the Thirteen Colonies and the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. Settlers’ going beyond the lands that the central government intended to protect was not exclusive to the colonial period. It would happen repeatedly and was the cause of conflicts between the United States and Mexico and dozens of Native American tribes whose lands were promised protection by the government only to be violated by settlers. Knowing that if they needed to they could rely on the protection of the Royal Army or the US Cavalry, Americans continued to push west ahead of their governments.

Neither is this phenomenon unique to the United States. Deriving from English Common Law principle of ‘Improvement’ that facilitated the Enclosure of common lands in the United Kingdom, this kind of settler colonialism was typical of the British Empire’s possessions in Africa and Australia as well. The British Raj is the exception; its history has much more in common with French methods of colonization. In Australia, South Africa, and Kenya the British Empire was drawn into repeated conflicts by settlers expanding past the established borders of imperial rule and turning to the Empire when conflicts arose.

The story of settler colonization is to a straightforward one of government sanctioned expansion into native lands. The history of the Thirteen Colonies and of other British settler colonies demonstrates an ongoing tension between settlers and their governments. It may appear to modern-policy makers that these tensions have little bearing on a world that has been blanketed with human civilization. This is not the case; there remain important swathes of land that humanity is only just beginning to explore. Brazilians are getting deeper and deeper into the Amazon jungle, against the wishes of their government. The possibility of creating new lands out of sand and steel in the oceans is becoming closer and closer to reality. As people reach deeper into the unpopulated places of the world and make previously inhospitable places prosperous policy-makers will have to be cognizant of how their own citizens and those of other nations will not only push the envelope, but beyond it.

Further Reading

John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-1900 (Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003)

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)