Monthly Archives: June 2022

Books Early modern history History Politics

Notes from Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order

June 19, 2022 – 4:22 pm

P.11 MacDonald summarizes the dominant state of thinking in the discipline on why Europe conquered much of the rest of the world by exactly replicating the military revolution argument: “European warfare underwent a profound transformation beginning in the 16th century. On land, the spread of gunpowder-based weapons, as well as specialised fortifications designed to resist these arms, transformed the nature of combat. European armies were increasingly compelled to raise large standing armies, which were dominated by highly-trained and well-drilled infantry. Although driven by competition between European states, the unintended consqeuence of this ‘military revolution’ was to widen the gap in military power between Europe and the rest of the world.”

P. 20 “this process of discerning ‘what worked’ is by no means as easy as it sounds. Victory and loss in war are a result of complex and varying combinations of factors, many of the most important of which, like leadership and morale, are intangible. A study of contemporary military effectiveness  stresses indirect and hard to change factors like the international environment, political culture and social structure.”

P. 22 “In order for selection mechanisms to create a population of homogenous effective organisations … the ‘death rate’ amongst organisations has to be very high, the differences in effectiveness have to be large and consistent, and the environment has to stay fairly constant,,, these differences are difficult to meet in the context of military competition.”

P. 34 The way Westerners fought in the wider world in the early modern period was almost entirely different from the way they fought wars in Europe was almost entirely different from the way they fought wars in Europe with respect to nearly every one of the criteria that define the military revolution thesis. .. Rather than armies of 10s of thousands, the forces in Europe more commonly numbered only in the hundreds, While cannon-armed sailing ships were superior to anything other powers could put on the open ocean, they did not fundamentally change the balance of power.”

P. 36 Unless they enjoyed a major epidemiological advantage, Europeans were unable to defeat even middling non-Western powers in the period 1500-1750, and generally maintained their predominately nabal mercantile empires in the East under the sufferance of the Asian and African rulers o f the day. In the rare instance where Westerners sought to challenge this arrangement, they generally lost.”

P. 37 In Asia, great power armies that dwarfed their European counterparts hsd either already anticipated key elements of the military revolution centuries before Euopre, or had come up with alternatives.

P. 61 One of the few instances of the Portugese trying to conquer territory in Asia was their campaign against the rajah of Kandy in Ceylon. In 1594, 1630, and 1638 this resulted in disaster, as Portugese forces were ambushed and destroyed, their commaners being killed on each occasion… Kandyan forces did not have guns or armour like the Portugese, being armed with bows and spears, and thus they tended to avoid frontal attacks. Instead, they used the mountainous and forested terrain to wear down the Portugese with ambushes and attacks on their supply lines”

P. 74 There is no question that mainland Southeast Asian and perhaps most of the islands too had gubs well before the Europeans arrived. .. the sultan of Malacca was lentifully equipped with cannons by the time of the Portugese attack in 1511… diffusion of gunpowder weapons as beginning in Burma and Vietnam in the 1390s, before advancing to the rest of the region and Northern India through the next century, parallelling the fact that Mamluk and Ottoman guns had reached Western India by 500. Chinese cannons reached Java by 1421.”

P. 86 “the Mighals were not defeated by European,s and that though internal dynamics were the determining factor in their fall, their most dangerous military foes were Persians and Afghans, not the Portugese, Dutch or British.”

P. 87 “Bengal alone had a larger population than Britain in 1750.”

P. As in Africa, none of the Asian great powers had an interest in controlling sea routes or maritime trade in the way that Europeans obsessed about, making compromises and accommodations between the two groups much easier to strike.”

P. 100 “The repeated European disappointments and defeats at the hands of Islamic foes in North Africa right through to the 19th century scotches any notion that Western overseas expansion swept all before it. These reverses are even more significant given that the Spanish and Portugese committed far more resources in their failed expeditions across the Mediterranean than they ever did to those across the Atlantic or to the East. The Ottomans were dominant in Europe right through what is said to be the key century in the military revolution. The fact that their eclipse came only in the second half of the 18th century, and then at the hands of the Russians, is an awkward fit with the tenets of the conventional story. It is a strongly underappreciated fact that the Ottoman Empire enjoyed far more extensive and longer-lasting military and geo-political success than supposed paragons of modernity like the Dutch and the Swedes… Non-Western powers are portrayed as mere failures waiting to happen.”

P. 134 The Industrial Revolution was certainly a vital part of explaining how Europeans were able to build their new empires. But the prior question is why Europeans wanted to build huge empires. Given the at-best uncertain returns in military and economic terms, in many cases later imperial expansion seems to have reflected concerns about prestige and status in an international context where great power standing required colonies. In the decades after WWII, however, being in possession of colonies went from being valorized to being deeply stigmatised as part of a fundamental change in the mores of international society… the rise and fall of European empires were crucially driven and shaped by changes in ideas and cultural contexts, rather than just, or even mostly, material factors and rational means-end calculation.”

P. 134 “the functionalist model, premised on rational learning and Darwinian survival pressures, is implausiable. Against the expectation of convergence on a superior Western style of warfare, it is striking how often non-Western opponents have improved their performance by adopting a very different style of war.”

P. 143 Outside the settler countries of the Americas and Oceania, European dominance fell even more suddenly than it had been established. .. the declining legitimacy of empires reinforces earlier conclusions about the importance of culture and ideas, as distinct from rational pursuit of power and wealth, in the making and remaking of the modern international system. Second, the fact that ‘backward’ non-Western forces have repeatedly bested ‘advanced’ Western forces supports earlier skepticism about the significance of weapons and military technology in isolation from broader concerns.”

P. 144 The wars of decolonisation, and subsequent Western counterinsurgency campaigns, decisively undermines easy assumptions that victory goes to those with the most advanced technology, the largest economies, and the most developed state apparatus. .. Us and Western forces are perhaps even further away from solving these problems than they were 50 years earlier… Claims that these kinds of insurgencies are not ‘real’ major power wars completely fail to deal with the fact that this kind of expeditionary warfare was how Europeans built their empires and created the international system in the first place.”

P. 150 “Moving away from the conventional story of Western hegemony puts our current circumstances in a new light. A more cosmopolitan, less eurocentric perspective, giving due weight to regions beyond Europe, shows Western dominance of the international system as relatively fleeting, and thus makes it much less surprising if this dominance is now being challenged with the rise of powers beyond the West. A multipolar global international order becomes the historical norm rather than the exception. … The questions that we ask, and fail to ask, about history changes our views not only of where we have come from, but also where we are, and where we are going.”

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Books Environmental politics History Politics

Notes from The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea

June 7, 2022 – 3:33 pm

P. 55 The Ulster Scots, or Scots-Irish, among other collectives, had turned the world inside out for decades… this group’s re-emigration is significant, because it confirms the choice to relocate as a political tradition. Between 1718 and 1775, more than 100,000 men and women migrated from Ulster to the North American colonies, in the largest such movement in the 18th century… Why did they leave the Old World. Many feared that a ‘counterrevolution’, a political upheavel that would undo the Glorious Revolution, was inevitable – they felt that their privilege as Protestants ion Ireland would be threatened… the expansion of linen manufacturing in Ireland had brought opportunity, but it also brough exposure to market downturns. Many Scots-Irish families had lost whatever security they once held, .. new labour practives were challenging the traditional roles of male householders… The Ulster Scots were not the poorest in Ulster, but they were under pressure during economic downturns. They felt that they could only retain their position by moving out… Bernard Bailyn has focused on the “distressed” Yorkshire “countryfolk” who faces “an uncertain economic future, many in a high state of religious agitation and eader to withdraw into a separate community of like-minded worshippers. Often affected by Methodist propaganda, they had a passionate desire to “draw apart from a corrupt and abusive world and to create a refuge for themselves and their community on the far margins of the British periphery. The promotional material for emigration to America insisted on the absence of feudal obligations… a desire to avoid landlords was more and more paralleled by a despire also to escape markets (a very demanding landlord indeed). On settler noted with pride that in America there “was no need for market days since each farm did its own slaughtering and raised most of what it consumed”.

P. 67 “as Cuba burned during the first war of independence, the colonial authorities were imagining a resettled order through displacement. An official scheme in 1871 proposed to import between 40,000 and 50,000 German immigrants to the island. Following a similar logic, and facing revolution during the second war of independence, they thought of displacing enture populations to strategic locations under a policy of ‘reconcentration’. These were the first concentration camps. But cramming the countryside with German settlers or emptying it entirely of unmanageable populations were two sides of the same coin. Displacement was still understood as an antidote to revolution.”

P. 70 “White in Britain Paine was a revolutionary, in America he was not. He chose America, arguing for its independence and for a repudiation of aristocratic and monarchic privileges … Radical egalisatrianims was his stance in one location but defence of property rights characterised his posture in another. Displacement had transformed his politics. Much later, in Agrarian Justice (1797), Paine suggested that 15 pounds be paid to every person on turning 21: a social entitlement that would have ensured the establisjhment of a yeoman republic of independent landowners. It was a proposal very similar to that found in Harrington’s Oceana, a proposal also evoked in Lane’s later “commonhold”.

P. 75 Wakefield believed that capitalism tended to produce the conditions for its own demise … Pauperisation was not the only problem: the sons of the lesser gentry were finding no career opportunities, and small capitalists were downwardly mobile – he would have known, as he was one of them. This was the social revolution that most concerned Wakefield, because, if the conditions of the labouring poor would necessarily deteriorate before they could improve, an imminent revolutionary crisis was inevitable. “A ruined man is a dangerous citizen,” Wakefield sourly noted, before adding “there are at all times in this country more people who have been ruined than in any other country.”

P. 88 Caroline Chishom’s activism for women’s emigration – she published tThe ABC of Colonisation in 1850 – also aimed to turn the world inside out. Chisholm consistently and influentially advocated for the sponsored emigration of “respectable” poor farmers and especially single women. The latter would enable colonial fathers of working-class families to become respectable manly breadwinners. Her insight was that it is appropriate reproduction that turns the world inside out and she called for the systematic “population” of Australia, which she saw as “the future England of our Southern Hemisphere”. 

P. 99 This synthesis had important gendered implications. Jefferson assumed that a farmer knew what was best for his fam, and that a father knew what was best for his family … Jeffersonianism represented the “apotheoiss of the republican father and head of the household”.

P. 106 “The Market Revolution was revolutionary indeed. Predicated on other revolutions – including the transport, legal and industrial revolutions – and on unprecedented economic development and a commercial boom, initially in wheat and cotton, it prompted many worlds turned inside out. Charles Sellers set the scene of ongoing culture wars between opposinig subcultures. “Arminiam” market contronted Aanitnomian” land … The market fostered individualism and competitive pursuit of wealth by open-ended production of commodity value that could be accumulated as money. But rural production of use values stopped once bodies were shelter and clothed and bellies provided for. Surplus produce had no abstract or money value and wealth could not be accumulated. Therefor the subsistence culture fosted family obligation, communal cooperation and reproduction over generations of a modest comfort”. 

“Banks, paper money and ‘money changers’ were all perceived as part of the market revolution from which the settlers were escaping in the first place.”

P. 298 “The political tradtions that aim to turn the world inside out constitute an anti-revolutionary sensibility that relies on three fantasies: perpetual household production, where capitalism never begins; perpetual primitive accumulation, where capitalism permanently remains in its initial stage, and where social contradictions are always deferred; and in the promise of political community somewhere else – the promise of a political community that is born without the need of violence or revolution. The first two fantasies are found to remain unfulfilled – contradictions are displaced too, sometimes quite rapidly. The spatial fix is at best a temporary solution. The first fantasy rests on a fundamental exclusion – a move that is inevitably and often spectacularly bio;lent. Setting up a polity against someone – in the case of settler colonialism, against indigenous peoples – is not like setting up a polity without them: the settler colonial polity cannot be amended by inclusion, because it is foundationally violent and dispossessory. If this exlusion is to be addressed, the settler colonial poultry must be dissolved, which is a … revolution. The world turned inside out cannot keep its promises.”

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Books Politics

Notes from Debt and Austerity: Implications of the Financial Crisis, Jodi Gardner, ed

June 7, 2022 – 3:31 pm

P. 3 “Financialisation, the increased importance of capital markets in turning the material economy into financial assets to be traded on global markets, is a key to understanding how debt circulates in global markets. The contemporary creation of new housing, urban infrastructure and student loans are all examples of how the material economy is as often as much about generating tradeable financial assets in global markets as responding to local demand. Scholars comment on the startling growth of traded assets in the run-up to the global financial crisis of 2008, and the importance of these flows to the UK and the US.”

P. 4 The speculative activity in financial markets was certainly not confined to housing. Consumer credit (eg car loans, credit card debt, student loans etc) grew rapidly in the decade before the global financial crisis, and was also converted into credit derivatives on global markets. Many argued that consumer debt replaced the state in stimulating demand, and fuelled the economic boom experienced before the financial crisis.”

P. 6 In response to the 2008 global financial crisis, the UK government, like those of many other countries, pursued emergency fiscal stimulus meqasures and bank bailouts to avert collapse of the financial system. Years of “quantative easing” followed through which central banks bought government bonds and corporate ‘toxic’ debt. In many ways the public safety net, which had been shrinking as a mechanism of popular redistribution, had not disappeared byuty was “placed under the banking sstem” in a fashion that was “unprecedented in scale and duration… private sector debt was transformed into a sovereign debt crisis in what Blyth called the “greatest bait and switch in modern history”… consensus around austerity was pushed by many national governments, such as in the UK, and by international institutions such as the European Commission, the IMF and the European Central Bank. These institutions saw sovereign debt as potentially economically and politically destablising and imposed austerity policies as a precondition for financial aid. Many academic and policy observers argued that austerity was more political than economic  that austerity was part of a longer-term political project to promote a permanent smaller state, a more reliberal state.”

P. 7 “Rarely did austerity policies remain at the central government level, but were often pushed down to the local level, where tough decisions about the distributional aspects of the cuts were forced onto local government… pushed the crisis to lower spatial scales of government, non-governmental actors and low-income households. Within the context of the UK and US, austerity was pushed down to the poorest areas in the country, which were dependent on redistributive grants from central government.”

P. 13 Citizens Advice highlights what they call “the hidden problem of household bill debt”. These debts are for essential services (including fuel, water, and telecoms, rent arrears, debts to government (such as council tax arrears or overpayments of tax credits) and fines or penalty notives. In 2017-18 Citizens Advice received almost 700,000 complaints about these debts – nearly double the complaints received about commercial consumer credit … the CAB estimates that in 2017 over £19 million was owed to government and essential services providers, a 34% increase from 2010.”

P. 18 “The growing use of surveillance and sanctions may be understood in relation to what Wacquant describes as the “distinctive paradox of neoliberal penalty”. That is, those governmental practices that celebrate the “free market” and individual responsibility, on the one hand, while deploying increasingly intrusive and punitive policies to protect the market, on the other.”

P. 23 “Smith examines Margaret Thatcher’s Right-to-buy policy as the key to understanding the “normalisation” of debt.” 

P. 25 “Although there are many forms of the poverty premium, we argue that the most important form of poverty premium is in the debt infrastructure itself – the numerous ways in which small debts, owed to the private or public sector, are allowed to escalate into large debts and into problem debt.

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Books Feminism History Politics Women's history

Notes from Patricia Tilburg, Working Girls: Sex, Taste and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919

June 3, 2022 – 9:27 am

p. 20 “the Romantic grisette was rarely represented labouring – a considerable contrast to her later incarnation, the midinette. Henri Monnier’s 1829 lithograph Les Grisettes depict only scenes of romantic entanglements between a bourgeois man and his grisette mistress. Also typical of the genre was the 1834 song “Les Tribulations de Mlle Flore, coururiere en robe” in which a mournful seamstress sings of her parade of unfaithful lovers: a painter, a drummer, a hussar, gendarmes, cooks, infantrymen. Flore never hints at her own work; we only know she is a seamstress because of the song’s title The grisette, rather than actually working, was instead often pictured as a devotee of popular fiction, especially sentimental Parisian novels like those of Paul de Kock… Already in the 18th century, she was seen to hold more cultural capital in the form of Parisian fashion sense than many noblewomen. Jules Janin’s entry for “La Grisette” for 1840s “moral encyclopedia Les Francais peints par eux-memes defined the gristte’s taste as both a contrast to the idle luxury of bourgeois women and as a national heritage. “Their industrious hands ceaselessly and forever shape gauze, silk, velvt, linen .. this innocent continual conquest at the point of a needle is a thousand times more durable than all of our conquests at the point of a sword … They reign as despots over European finery… And must this French taste be universal so that those girls, those children of the poor, who will die poor like their mothers, become the omnipotent representative of fashion in the entire universe!”

p. 21 The grisette’s sexual availability went virtually unquestioned in Romantic-era fiction. Ernest Desprez counselled young men in search of a grisette mistress that “the virtuous grisette is one that has only one lover”.

P23 By 1850, the grisette had become an object of melancholic nostalgia, harkening back to an earlier Paris….representing “the passage into modernity, first as a new aesthetic, that of debris and ruins, then as an existential feeling, that of the loss of the city as a physical and spiritual home.”

p. 26 By the turn of the century, the grisette still regularly appeared throughout popular culture as a sign of heightened romantic longing for a lost Paris, a France of small-scale industry, sentiment amd elegance. She was frequently conflated with contemporary garment workers, tethering living belle epoque working women with a figure of literary wistfulness.  Parisian garment workers in this period inhabited new post-Haussman city spaces with novel freedoms of movement, increased access to the consumer economy and (for some) newfound political activism… The most popular grisette of the turn of the century was Musett’s Mimi Pinson, who was featured in songs, poems, postcards, ballet, vaudeville shows, short stories, novels, films and even a series of dolls… a statue of Museet by Antonin Mercie was dedicated with great fanfare in front of the Theatre Francaise.”

P. 38 In the Parisian imaginary, the belle epoque midinette tended, like her grisette grandmother, to inhabit a liminal moral space between libertinage and bourgeois feminine virtue. Often surrounded by carefree coquettes who toil alongside her in the couture workshop and encourage her romantic follies, the midinette heroine was, more or less, a good girl. She might take a lover, or be seduced or raped, but she is generally a young woman of romantic loyalty and goodness. While melodramatic tragedy was one possible trajectory for fictive midinettes, they were often represented as unchaste, but, ultimately content, either happily married, in concubinage or managing their own couture shops.”

p. 39 the term midinette referenced the moment in the workday when these young women were best observed by lubricious flaneurs, the noon lunch hour… a spectacular urban figure, inseparable from the commercial delights of post-Hausmann Paris, .. like an enchanting species of city bird (to which she was regularly compared).

P 65 For French manufacturers, Parisian garment workers were women who required protection because of their talent and importance to the French economy, and because they were embedded in a charmingly archaic paternalistic workplace…The Bon Marche was praised for providing dowries for single female employees. La Samarataine had created a nursery for employees’ children. Two fashion houses were singled out for providing maternity benefits. In striking contrast, Carette’s comparatively brief section on British employers’ pension policies explained tersely that in England “It is not the custom of industrial or commercial businesses to provide for the retirement of their employees or labourers… The laborer is used to counting on no one but himself.”

p. 139 lunch reform “the reality of the malnourished sweated laborer is nearly elided in favour of a chic coquette who chooses not to eat her fill in order to revel in the pleasures of Parisian couture (rather than being deprived of adequate nourishment because of a meager salary.)”

p. 171 Recent scholarship .. reappraises women’s wartime strikes, noting, among other things, the way in which the garment strikes were read as “a festice assembly of women who sang their way into the Ministers’ – and the public’s – hearts.” .. the female and more traditionally feminine nature of the garment strikes made them more sympathetic than munitions strikes, including munitionettes.. the relatively sympathetic treatment of Parisian garment worker protest was embedded in a symbolic system of the midinette that pre-dated the war.”

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