Charles W. King

Marvel Studios’ recent blockbuster film Avengers: Infinity War features an apparently unstoppable villain with a monsterous goal; to kill half of the living beings in existence, at random. He purports to believe in the dire necessity of this task because there are not enough resources in the universe to sustain its current or future population, and that continued population growth will only result in an increase in poverty, desperation, and conflict. The heroes of Infinity War have an understandable problem with this but their instincts for self-preservation & protection are not nearly as interesting as Thanos’.

Thanos’ belief that the galactic population will increase past the galaxy’s ability to sustain them and lead to widespread suffering and strife is right out of An Essay on the Principle of Population by 18th century British political economist and cleric, Thomas Robert Malthus. In 1798 Malthus had watched over the preceding decades as the British population had soared and enclosure reduced the land held in common in the United Kingdom. There had been food protests across the nation as the British moved away for the ‘moral economy’ of feudal landholding to early modern market economics. Malthus was not the only English thinker concerned with the plight of the British poor, both John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government and Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations were written in part to speak to the same concerns. Unlike Locke and Smith, whose works both have long tangents opposing the British Corn Laws, Malthus supported the Corn Laws. He did so for reasons that Thanos would sympathize with, that the only way to address suffering was a sustainable food supply.

Thanos would also likely sympathize with the solution to the crisis in food availability in Ireland that predates Malthus, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick. Swift satricially proposed that the Irish poor sell their children to the rich as food, thereby alleviating their own poverty, increasing the food supply, and preventing population growth. Thanos and Swift’s solutions demonstrate how the most direct solution to a crisis may in a utilitarian sense provide for the greatest good and least suffering, but for other reasons are rightly considered truly horrific.

Another problem with Malthusian doomsaying, in addition to some of the horrific remedies it has led states to enact like the People’s Republic of China’s one child policy, is that in the more than two hundred years since Malthus’ essay it has little evidence in support of it. In 1798 Great Britain was in the midst of the British Agricultural Revolution that would see crop yields continue to grow and productivity to increase for decades to come. This trend would continue into the twentieth century with industrialized agriculture, chemical fertilizer, and new breeds of crops. The best evidence in support of Malthus is that real wages for European peasants were static for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution, except for a temporary spike in real wages in the decades after the Black Death killed approximately one quarter of the European population. This supports the idea that food availability affects poverty, but not Malthus’ other main contention: that population growth would always outpace productivity growth.

Thanos clearly believes this to be the case as well. However history does not bear Malthus and Thanos’ convictions out. Policies like the British Corn Laws and the P.R.C.’s one child policy have proven to have disastrous collateral effects. They show that galactic conquerors and policy-makers should not attempt to stop short of the kind of cliffs that Malthus described, but to foster and create the bridges over these chasms.

Charles W. King

Today the depiction of Germany as a country and a people is inherently conservative. German restraint in foreign policy and the insistence on austerity in the wake of sovereign debt crises in Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Greece have bolstered this reputation, but it goes back much further, before Germany was a unified state. The revolutions of 1848 reached Germany last, the counter-revolutionary push back began in Germany first, and in between the character of the revolutions of 1848 in Germany were never as radical as those in Hungary, Italy, or France. Germany, the United States, and United Kingdom are the three poster children for Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. How does this square with Germany as one of the standard bearers for the modern welfare state?

While not providing as extensive safety net as the Scandinavian countries, the welfare state in Germany is extensive. While many would be inclined to chalk this up to the prevalence of post-World War Two Social Democratic parties, similar to Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, this is incorrect. While the revolutions of 1848 may not have been as radical in pre-unification Germany, they did leave their mark. By the time of unification in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 industrial capitalism had spread throughout Germany, and support for socialism and anarchism had increased, as had anti-clericalism among the Protestant majority. Similar to the food protests in England in the 1700s described by E. P. Thompson in The Moral Economy of the English Crowd, social unrest increased in Germany as urbanization and industrialization increased, egged on by socialists and anarchists.

Otto von Bismarck was the architect of German unification, an arch-conservative he was concerned with the increasing support for the left and the level of social upheaval in Germany in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. He correctly discerned that the majority of the popular support for the German left was not because the general population supported or even understood the political objectives of the Communists, Socialists, or Anarchists, but these groups advocated programs like state provided medical care that directly addressed the needs of working and middle class Germans whose economic situations were precarious in the new industrial capitalist economy. Bismarck concluded that if economic precariousness was a source of political instability it was in the interest of the state to provide an economic safety net. This is why the arch-conservative German Empire was the first state to implement what we would recognize as a modern welfare state.

Part of the reason for the political instability that Bismarck and other political leaders across Europe and the United States needed to address during this period is a result of what is known as the “Paradox of Rising Expectations”. As people’s economic situations got better over the course of the 1800s they expected them to continue increasing, as wealth concentrated at the end of the century and growth slowed the increase over time in the standard of living began to slow political unrest increased. However, as Imperial Germany and other European nations demonstrate this does not always lead to revolution or democratization. Policy-makers expecting to see increasing democratization in the People’s Republic of China have recently been surprised by a reassertion of control by Xi Jingping. They would to well to remember that the paradox of rising expectations can be weathered not only with economic growth, but also with the pragmatic implementation of government programs.

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

Recent sovereign debt crises in Europe, the Trump Administration’s vociferous objections to trade deficits have, and the growing American national debt have many in Congress and the public increasingly concerned about debt as an instrument of national policy. More and more American states are passing balanced budget amendments forcing them to pass revenue neutral budgets each fiscal year, and some are pushing for the adoption of a federal balanced budget amendment. While this sounds like fiscal responsibility, the issuance of debt by governments is a tremendously important tool of domestic and foreign policy. The former is illustrated by the importance of bond programs to the New Deal and World War 2, the latter is less obvious.

The First Bank of the United States, established by Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, in 1791 was created not only to raise revenue for the new federal government and standardize currency across the new country, but also as an important tool of foreign policy. During the course of the American Revolution the Colonies built up a significant amount of debt to European creditors, France among others. The First Bank of the United States took ownership of these debts, meaning that if the new government failed, those European creditors would never recieve payment. This gave France and other European nations a reason to continue to support the fledgeling United States, and to permit the open trading relationships that the United States needed to prosper in order to service the debt. The nationalization of the colonies war debts made those creditors invested in the success of the United States, an effect that the issuance of government debt continues to have today.

Debt forgiveness is also an important foreign policy tool. After World War Two the United States owned a considerable amount of European debt that the post-war European nations were incapable of paying back. The State Department’s Office of Foreign Building Operations (now the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations) convinced Congress to turn the debt over to them. The F.B.O. would write off the foreign debt in exchange for goods and services from the debtor countries. The F.B.O. purchased the historical palaces that are now the U.S. Ambassador’s residences in Paris and Rome with this debt. It filled American embassies all over the world with cutting edge Knoll furniture made in Europe by paying for the furniture with debt write offs. European countries were ecstatic to write off their war debts in this way because it put money into their national economies and industries rather than sending it abroad to the United States. The F.B.O.’s creative use of debt facilitated a blossoming of American diplomacy around the world and helped the European economic recovery.

The United States and other major backers of the Bretton Woods system that includes the World Bank and International Monetary Fund regularly use access to credit, as well as debt forgiveness and restructuring as leverage to get developing nations to implement specific economic or political policies. Japan and China both own large stockpiles of American national debt in the form of Treasury Bonds. These stockpiles make Japan and China investors in American prosperity. While the Chinese owned debt is considered to be a danger, they also provide an early warning system, as China would have to either call those debts in—damaging both the Chinese and American economies—or write them off in a conflict. American and European sanctions regimes against the Russian Federation do not currently include Russian sovereign bonds, but they could and this would be a significant increase in the pressure on the Russian State. National debt is only a millstone when other policies put a nation’s ability to service that debt in danger, the ability to issue debt is an important strategic policy tool for the United States and all national governments.