Imperial China

I just finished Imperial China: 900-1800, by F.W. Mote, which not only comprehensively covers a tasty swath of Chinese history but could stun a small mammal.  One thousand pages to cover a period that a general history of China would cover in a tenth of that.

Not surprisingly, its chief virtue is its inclusiveness.  Mote considers not just the dynasties but covers each emperor in depth, plus sketches of the chief intellectual and economic currents. 

Mote believes that China’s relationship with Inner Asia was key, and accordingly devotes quite a lot of attention to the Khitans, Jurchens, Mongols, and Manchus.  Much of this was new to me, and fascinating.  On the nomads’ side, the problem was how to govern an ancient and obstinate sedentary civilization while retaining steppe cred: the ruler must appear as a proper Son of Heaven in Beijing and as an able riding warrior up north.  Curiously it was the first of these, the Khitans, that managed the balance the best.  The Mongols did about the worst– Khubilai Khan was a competent ruler but his successors were all puppets of various factions, and the dynasty didn’t long survive his death.  The Chinese dilemma was, ideally, how to keep the nomads divided and keep their own military strong but not too strong (both emperors and officials had a justified horror of generals becoming rebels).

A factoid for fantasy writers out there: nomadic peoples are likely to be less sexist, not more so than agriculturalists.  Khitan women were very strong; Yingtian, the widow of the first Khitan emperor Abaoji, led her own forces in war and imposed her choice of heir over Abaoji’s wishes.  Queens were expected to sacrifice themselves when their husbands died; when she was reminded of this she pointed out that her children were too young and the nation was leaderless; still, she insisted that her right hand be cut off to be placed in her husband’s grave.  This silenced her critics, did nothing to reduce her powers– and ended the custom of sacrificing queens.

The Manchus, by the way, turn out to be the Jurchens renamed.  They were able to come out from under the shadow of the Mongols and co-opt them, and indeed co-opted many Chinese leaders as well. 

Mote emphasizes many times that the Chinese empire was the most populous in the world, the most prosperous, and for much of his period the most technologically advanced.  It had no aristocracy; it was an open society in which talent could and did move upward; it had a fairly efficient bureaucracy, and it was little affected by religious zealotry.  During times of crisis it could devolve into bandiry or warlordism, but it’s always had a remarkable ability to regain its unity, and at most times it was stable and safe enough that cities didn’t need to build walls. 

So why did it fall behind the West?  In a sense, it was too blessed.  Though it was conquered several times, there was a certain protocol to this– Chinese civilization was never threatened.  Its focus was always on the nomadic threat, to the point that the central government was uninterested in or actively hostile to maritime trade.  It didn’t have many early encounters with the West, and it didn’t find a single Western product it needed– rather, it exported manufactures (e.g. porcelain) in return for silver.

It’s hard not to look at the examination system and the scholar elite without comparing them favorably to European aristocrats.  Yet their scholarship was always based on the study of ancient literary classics; it didn’t prepare them for modern science nor give them a good framework for political analysis.  The system was constantly degraded by lazy monarchs, corruption, or dictatorial factions.  Both emperors and scholars tended to first appeal to morality or ancient writings, then resort to violence.  Only a few rare figures attempted what we’d call political reform. 

The last imperial dynasty was also hobbled by the fact that it was run by foreigners– the Manchus– who were obsessed with rooting out anti-Manchu sentiment.  (One of their projects was to re-publish all earlier literature with all offensive statements about the nomads removed.)  It led the rulers to a great conservativism that was also ill preparation for encountering the raucous Westerners.

Mote, whose name is after all an anagram for tome, can be dry, and he doesn’t always know how to bring a political movement to life, much less everyday life.  (For a more lively approach, jumping with visual details, try John King Fairbank’s The Great Chinese Revolution 1800-1985.)  But much of the dryness isn’t his fault, but ours.  Most of us are so ignorant of Asian history that it’s a mass of odd names and unfamiliar figures.  If you want to get well beyond that and tell your Ming from your Qing, this book’s for you.

 

Of Plymouth

I just finished Of Plymouth Plantation, the memoirs of the colony’s first governor, William Bradford.  I expected it to be dry, but it’s highly readable… Bradford himself might have meant to be dry, but his curse was to live in interesting times.  Lots was happening: persecution in England, exile in Holland, starting a new colony, meeting the Indians, getting screwed by capitalists, hotheads, and Frenchmen.  There’s even a hurricane and a visit by pirates.

Garrison Keillor talked about his ancestors coming over from England “in hopes of discovering greater restrictions than were permissible under English law”.  This is a great joke but not at all fair; the Puritans came over because King James, he of the Version, felt threatened by their rejection of the Church of England and actively persecuted them.  The Salem Witch Trials permanently darkened their reputation, but, hey, that was a different colony and two generations later.  Bradford himself seems quite level-headed and must have been an exemplary public servant– he was re-elected governor thirty times.

Curiously, he describes the Indians as cruel savages, but also valued peace with them and complains hotly of dissolute Englishmen who stole from the Indians.  There was no need to steal their land– he mentions pestilences which decimated the Indian population and left their land up for grabs.  Very likely these pestilences were spread by European fishermen and others who had visited the coast before settlement began.

The Pilgrims were supported by English investors, which led to endless squabbles which occupy much of the book.  The best early source of cash was beaver pelts– thousands were shipped to England each year.

It was fun to see names of quite a few places I knew, including the neighborhood I lived in for three years, Wollaston.  There was a settlement there founded by one Capt. Wollaston, but for awhile the main base of a lawless group of men centered on one Morton, whom Bradford singles out for dissolution and licentiousness, and for selling guns to the Indians.

Plymouth helped settle the region, and then declined, largely due to the rise of Boston.  Plymouth wasn’t well situated to be a major agricultural center, and it was an inconvenient port, too far within the Bay and with too shallow water– goods had to be brought ashore by boats, while at Boston they could be unloaded on a wharf.

 

An early look at early man

At a book sale, I picked up Early Civilizations, by A.A. Goldenweiser, an introduction to anthropology dating to 1922.  It’s surprisingly modern in approach, rejecting racial biases and stages of culture, respecting the mentality of all cultures and careful to draw parallels to our own when they exist.  But Goldenweiser was a student of Franz Boas who virtually invented multicultural liberalism.

You’re probably not going to run out to score a copy, but it does have useful sketches of the Eskimo, the Tlingit , the Iroquois, the Baganda, and the Central Australians.  The only really weak part of the book is the discussion of early religion and magic, and that isn’t the author’s fault– the weakness is in the early authors he’s reviewing, from Spencer to Durkheim to Freud.  They all wanted a simple system and they all seem pointlessly naive.  For instance, Spencer posited that bear totems derived from someone named Bear whose ancestors forgot that he was named Bear and thought they were descended from bears.  Freud is even worse; he creates a primeval drama of rebellion against a tyrannical father, which entered a “racial unconscious”.  Goldenweiser can’t help but point out that Freud’s myth is “without any foundation in the known facts of history or biology.”

One F. Graebner opined that cultural and technical elements must always be attributed to diffusion, as independent origin is unproveable.  It strikes me that this is a handy counterexample to Occam’s Razor.  Independent discovery is a more complicated theory, and yet very often it’s quite correct, as we can verify when we can examine the evidence historical times. 

Another tidbit: the author partly dismisses environmental factors as determinative of cultures and techniques.  Environment is obviously a huge factor; it’s just that it doesn’t explain everything. For instance, the Eskimo have lots of snow and build snow houses– fine, but the Chukchi in a similar environment do not.  (On the other hand they domesticated the reindeer and the Eskimo didn’t.)  The Indians of the northwest coast lived in the forest and had an impressive wood industry; those of the California coast didn’t, though they lived in a similar environment.  A warning to conworlders…

 

When hoplites were hoppenin’

Speaking of Thermopylae, I just finished Tom Holland’s Persian Fire, a history of the Persian war… the war that invented history.  One Herodotus was moved soon after the war to make some enquiries– ἱστορίαι– which became our word ‘history’ (and ’story’). 

Holland tries a little too hard to reach for contemporary significance, positing the war as the first conflict between European freedom and Oriental despotism.  There’s no need for that; it’s a fascinating story all on its own: two Greek city-states (by today’s standard town-states) of colossally different temperaments, Athens and Sparta, stand up to the superpower of the day and win.

I’d never really grasped the history of Athens, so the book was worth it for that alone.  Athens was a revolutionary state; its newfangled ‘democracy’ was created around 510, just 30 years before the main war.   And before the war it was a decidely minor power.  Oversimplifying, Athens was plagued by feuding aristocrats with an inclination toward tyranny; one of them, Cleisthenes, reorganized the state and gave ultimate power to the assembly.  Curiously, Sparta had undergone its own revolution about a century before, one which also devolved power from aristocracy to a larger citizen class. 

The great Greek vice was factionalism, both between and within cities.  Not even Sparta was unified– the king Demaratus squabbled with his co-king Cleomenes and was forced out… and went over to the Persians, where he advised Xerxes.  The Greek systems scaled badly; the individual cities could create alliances, but not a nation.

The Athenian leader Themistocles emerges as remarkably prescient.  I’d thought somehow that Athens was always a sea power, but it wasn’t; like any Greek state it trusted in land armies, which had won the battle of Marathon.  It was Themistocles who convinced Athens to switch to naval power, building 200 ships in a matter of years– a cheeky move when Xerxes had the squadrons of Tyre and Sidon, the premier shipbuilders of the day– and not only that, but to evacuate Athens and trust entirely in the fleet.  And yet, after the war, we find Themistocles too switching to the Persian side.

Holland also answers the main question I had after seeing 300: why didn’t Xerxes pursue his advantage– what did he do with his army after Thermopylae?  The answer is, the resisting Greeks barricaded themselves in the Peloponnese, behind a five-mile-wide wall near  Corinth.  Xerxes counted on the fleet to get past it, and that was defeated at Salamis.  It was also late in the year– too late for a major operation.  He went back home in disgust, leaving a general to take care of the problem the next year.

 

Divided we advance

I’ve been reading about the history of technology, and noticed some confirmations of a point made by Jared Diamond.  He was trying to explain why Europe rather than China took over the world, despite the early technological lead held by the Chinese; one of his ideas was that since China was normally unified, if an idea got stopped, it was stopped for good.  E.g. when a faction at court put an end to Zheng He’s impressive expeditions, the Chinese exploration of the world simply ended.

By contrast, when Columbus didn’t get support from his native Genoa, he turned to Anjou, then Portugal, then to the duke of Medina-Celi, and finally to the Spanish, who agreed to support him.  Similarly, when Tycho Brahe lost the funding of the Danish king for his observations (key to establishing heliocentrism), he moved to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor.  When the Catholic Church shut down Galileo and the possibility of discussing heliocentrism in Italy, discussion moved to freer areas in the Protestant north. 

Another example: the mill revolution in Europe in the Middle Ages.  There was an explosion of mill building– there were areas that went from having 4 mills to 200 in a couple of centuries.  The largest estates were the slowest to adopt the new techniques.  Their income was already good, and their peasants weren’t going to walk miles to find a mill outside the estate.  It was the smaller estates and the towns that built the most mills; these felt competition very strongly and needed all the income and technological advances they could get.

Of course, division is a mixed bag: Chinese unity probably allowed it to largely resist being colonized, and of course European disunity culminated in the World Wars that ended Europe’s control of the world. 

I think everybody knows that new ideas are sometimes blocked by opponents.  But I think it’d be more accurate to say that they are almost always blocked.   But ideally there are other institutions or countries where the idea can be pursued.  A unipolar world will eventually stagnate.

 

History lesson

You think this year’s Democratic nomination was vicious and overly long?  Look at 1960:

http://www.slate.com/id/2191942/

 

Forget feudalism

This was a shocker.  In sedesdraconis’s LJ I found a reference to an article by Melissa Snell which reveals that there’s no such thing as ‘feudalism’.

http://historymedren.about.com/od/feudalism/a/feudalism.htm

The usual understanding of feudalism is that it comprised a hierarchical system in which near-sovereign control over land was traded for military service… essentially a way of ordering society when strong central government was not possible.  This turns out to be not the case.

The medievals never talked about ‘feudalism’; the concept was the invention of 16C French and Italian scholars, attempting to understand a 12C text, the Libri Feudorum.  Unfortunately they bungled the job.  They imported contemporary notions into the document (especially the idea that ‘fiefs’ were lands held by nobles), and they mistook the earlier writers’ own speculation for fact. 

Their interpretation solidified into received wisdom, till it was blown apart by Susan Reynold’s 1994 book Fiefs and Vassals.  Snell’s review is rather short on what’s right if feudalism is wrong.  But these seem to be the main points.

• There was an immense amount of variation.  The worst part about the ‘feudalism’ concept is the implied uniformity.  Land could be held in all sorts of ways, and people’s ideas of rights and property were different from ours.
• The implied class structure– serfs, clerics, knights– is hopelessly simplistic.  The armed forces were by no means limited to fighting nobles or knights.
• Most grants of land weren’t based on any agreement to provide military service, though they might be based on service already provided.  There was generally no idea that a grant could be revoked if the grantee broke an oath of fidelity (if it was even required).
• Far from being lawless, medieval society expected general obedience to the king.
• Serfs’ relationship to their lord- manorialism– was really a separate concept, not considered at the time a form of vassalage.

Some additional useful information and criticism are found in these two reviews of Reynolds’ book: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/reynolds-2%20reviews.html

There’s a lesson here somewhere about the dissemination of new insights.  This might be a very academic dispute, but I find it remarkable that I’ve never run into it in 34 years… the time since Reynolds’ predecessor Elizabeth Brown published her critique.  You’d think someone would tell the public that the textbook understanding of the Middle Ages is just wrong.

 The important question is of course… what about the conworlders?  I welcome the opportunity to rethink some aspects of Almean history.  In general we should avoid not merely reproducing the fiefs-for-service idea, but exclusively European models.  Bernard Lewis’s From Babel to Dragomans, which I recently mentioned, has some good descriptions of Islamic models.  China looked pretty different too, not really having what we think of as an aristocracy.

 

The failure of neoliberalism

I’ve been reading Ha-joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans: The myth of free trade and the secret history of capitalism.  It’s amazing.

Its target is clear enough, but like any criminal enterprise it has a confusing array of names.  Europeans call it “liberalism”, Americans call it “neoliberalism”; I’ve also heard it called the Washington Consensus.  It’s the set of policies– free trade, eliminating tariffs, free movement of capital, privatization, safeguarding intellectual property, balancing budgets– that the IMF pushes on developing countries, and the Economist holds up as the self-evident standard for everyone.

Pretty obviously these are policies that rich First World companies like: they want to sell their products everywhere without restriction, they don’t want copycats, they hate when protectionist or nationalist governments get in their way.  But it’s also claimed that these policies will somehow promote development and prosperity; indeed, enthusiasts like Tom Friedman maintain that it’s “the only model on the rack”.

As Chang shows, it’s not.  It’s not how the First World developed.  It doesn’t produce prosperity and it doesn’t develop economies.

• In the 1960s and 70s, under protectionist import substitution policies, the developing world grew at 3.0% annually.  In the 1980s and beyond, under neoliberalism, the rate was 1.7%.
• Where neoliberalism was implemented earlier and more thoroughly, in Latin America, the contrast is even greater: 3.1% in the 1960s/70s; 1.7% in the 1990s; 0.6% in the 2000s.
• Africa didn’t grow much in the ‘bad old days’ (1 to 2% a year), but it’s shrunk under neoliberalism.
• Mexico grew at a rate of 3.1% under import substitution (1955-82); neoliberalism was a disaster, with growth rates from 0.1% (1980s) to 0.3% (2000s) to 1.8% (1990s).  The free trade agreement with the USA wiped out whole swaths of Mexican industry.

Most damningly, the policies the First World preaches to the rest of the world are completely the opposite of those it used in its own development.  Neoliberalism is climbing up the ladder, kicking it away, and advising those below to learn to fly.

• The first nation to modernize, Britain, did so by state intervention, going back to the Tudor monarchs who pressed for the creation of a wool processing industry rather than shipping raw wool to the Netherlands.  Britain protected its industries with high tariffs on manufactured goods– 45-55% in 1821.  (It also prevented its colonies from developing manufactures.)
• The United States was built on protectionism too; by 1820 average tariffs were 40%.  They were raised during the Civil War and stayed that way till WWI.  During this period it was the fastest growing country in the world, and had the highest tariffs.
• France had something of a free trade policy in the 1800s (tariffs at about 20%).  Concluding after WWII that this had something to do with its economic underperformance, it reversed these policies, directing the economy through state-owned banks and nationalizing key industries; tariffs rose to 30%.  The strategy worked; France was a technological leader by the 1980s.
• South Korea, Chang’s native country, was desperately poor in 1961, with a per capita income of $82 (less than Ghana).  Under heavy state direction, it achieved growth rates above 6% and its PCI today is $13,980.  Its growth slowed in the 1990s when it was forced to accept some IMF direction.
• Japan developed after WWII under heavy state direction.  Imports were tightly limited; foreign ownership was banned in key industries, and where allowed, subject to restrictions (technology sharing, limited ownership, local contents requirements).
• China is big enough to ignore the IMF and develop under its own protectionist regime.

Not only does protectionism work, it’s the only thing that does.  Naturally it doesn’t and shouldn’t last forever: once national industries are in good shape they can compete without government help.  But without protection and local control of investment, the nation won’t have national industries.

Chang goes on to show that state enterprises can work quite well; that free movement of capital was rightfully restricted by the First World during its own development; even that corruption and lack of democracy don’t in themselves prevent development (and tend to lessen once countries do become prosperous).

Intellectual property ‘rights’– actually demands by corporations– sound benign, but Chang points out that they are a great obstacle for developing nations, which cannot afford First World prices for pharmaceuticals, software, and textbooks.  Developing nations need to absorb a huge amount of new knowledge; copyright doesn’t benefit them, but stands in their way– it’s a luxury of rich nations.  And once again, it was only promoted by the First World long after they’d put away their own historical piracy.

Neoliberals have belatedly started to notice that their prescriptions don’t work as well as they should.  Their favorite explanation now is “culture”… some people, they say, just have the wrong values.  Chang neatly demolishes this by going back in time and showing that people’s complaints about poor people are always the same.  The Japanese were once described as lazy and emotional, and with “a quite intolerable personal independence”.  Koreans were dirty, sullen barbarians.  The Germans were “a dull and heavy people” who “never hurry”, unable to cooperate or receive new ideas, and prone to thievery.  Such observations are either simply wrong, or have nothing to do with whether nations can develop.

Despite the somewhat incendiary title, Chang isn’t against capitalism, trade, or globalization.  He simply wants the Second and Third Worlds today to have the same ability to control and encourage their own development that the First World nations enjoyed.

Chang has the best answer I’ve seen to David Ricardo’s old explanation of how poor nations ought to stick to whatever they have a relative advantage in… which generally ends up being resource extraction.  That is the best approach for maximizing current income.  But it fails if you want to increase your income beyond that point– if you want to develop, in other words.  To change those relative advantages– and perhaps create some absolute advantages– you have to sacrifice some current income (e.g., set tariffs to encourage native industries, or direct investment to future possibilities rather than current hot spots, or invest in R&D).

 

Wide-open elections

D’oh… 1968 felt wide-open, but a reader points out that, of course, the Democratic nominee was Johnson’s VP.

So, let’s see when was the last election with no sitting president or veep as the nominee: 2004 Bush, 2000 Gore, 1996 Clinton, 1992 Bush, 1988 Bush, 1984 Reagan, 1980 Carter, 1976 Ford, 1972 Nixon, 1968 Humphrey, 1964 Johnson, 1960 Nixon, 1956 Eisenhower… there we go, 1952, Eisenhower vs. Stevenson. 

Though maybe that gets an asterisk, since both Truman and his VP, Barkley (then 75), were in the race for awhile.  So: 1948 Truman, 1944 Roosevelt, 1940 Roosevelt, 1936 Roosevelt, 1932 Hoover, 1928… OK, 1924, Hoover vs. Smith.

The next earlier case was the previous election, 1920: Wilson was incapacitated and his VP, Thomas Marshall, wasn’t interested, nor interesting to others.  Apparently Marshall liked to tell a joke about a woman with two sons: one ran away to sea, the other was elected vice president… neither was heard from ever again.