Yves here. It’s always perilous to take issue with some of the theories advanced in a book second-hand, as in a review. However, one of the contentions that Tom Neuburger recaps from the Alfred McCoy book, To Govern the Globe, looks to be at a high level of McCoy’s argument and plainly stated, so our disagreement does not seem liked to be based on a misapprehension.
McCoy argues for the durability, albeit with less ability to force compliance than empires, of what he calls world order. He depicts the British imperial order starting in 1815 as distinct from the “Washington world system” that began in 1945.
However, the period of US dominance depended heavily upon the system and (one hates to say it) values of the British empire, particularly when one sets the start date at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which happens to be when the UK had entered the Industrial Revolution and so the power of landowners was being displaced by the power of merchants and industrialist.
The shared element of both world orders includes:
Common law legal systems with a very large number of similar principles, such as the status of legal contracts, fiduciary duty and limited liability companies
Professional bureaucracies. Before Niall Ferguson started losing his mind, he wrote a fine book, The Cash Nexus, in which he attributed the UK’s ability to punch above its weight in military terms against France was its ability to borrow money in international markets at lower rates. That in turn resulted from England having professional (as in salaried) tax collectors, versus France’s corrupt tax “farmers”
Embrace of financial capitalism as opposed to industrial capitalism; with that came fierce opposition to Communism
Use of English as the lingua franca
Protestantism and Protestant values, particularly deferred gratification; a distaste for mysticism and Orientalism; proselytizing as an aid in influencing/controlling vassal territories
Sea powers that invested in protecting trade routes (admittedly the US later also became an air power but the UK had started down that path)
Those of you who have read McCoy are encouraged to tell me if and how he addresses issues like these. But absent an explanation, yours truly is predisposed to see the Washington era as an adaptation of the British model, and not a new world order.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
As we enter the next phase of the imperial Western experiment … as we wait for announcements that will firm up our understanding of the pivot our President takes … as we watch dismantled what should never, perhaps, have been built, it’s useful to take a long view of what we’ve done, how long we’ve done it, and how America’s turn as king of the place was thought out and managed. Until it wasn’t — wasn’t thought out; wasn’t very well managed.
This story is different than what you may have heard. You might have thought, for example, that Obama’s claim to have created the fracking boom was just his ego speaking. Or that his final push for TPP was just a beg for post-official wealth. Yes, they were likely those things; but they were both more. Obama had a grand strategy that died when he left office, one that matches the recommendations of the 19th Century naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan and has been followed by U.S. minds from before, during, and after World War II.
That strategy: Control the combined “big island” of Europe and Asia by controlling its coasts and inland population. It’s why, before World War II, our Western forward bases were at Asia’s front door.
To do this, we’ll take long looks over the next several weeks at the book pictured above: Alfred McCoy’s To Govern the Globe. It’s a massive history of what I’ve called above the “imperial Western experiment.” It covers all the “world orders”: the Iberian, birthed in Portugal and Spain; the British, with which we’re familiar; the American, which sadly few of us understand; and the next, what’s coming for us, the wolf or the Chinese, whichever, and probably both.
The story begins in the early 1400s and starts like this:
If you read that carefully, you see how brutality is the key to success.
1415 Portugal ventures abroad, capturing port of Ceuta, North Africa, and massacring Muslims.
1441 Portugal’s ships arrive from Western Sahara with first shipment of African slaves.
The Pope gave permission in 1455, and the race (and the rape) was on.
About World Orders
There’s a difference between world orders and world empires. Empires are things created; they come and go. Orders are ideas; they tend to persist. McCoy:
[From Chapter 1]
Despite their aura of awe-inspiring power, empires tend to be ephemeral creations of an individual conqueror like Alexander the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte that fade quickly after their death or defeat. By contrast, world orders are much more deeply rooted, resilient global systems created by a convergence of economic, ideological, and geopolitical forces. On the surface, they entail diplomatic agreement among the most powerful nations, which are usually those with formal empires or international influence. Lacking the sovereignty of nations and the raw power of empires, world orders are essentially broad agreements about relations among nation-states and their peoples, lending them an amorphous, even elusive quality.
At a deeper level, however, world orders entwine themselves in the cultures, commerce, and values of countless societies. They influence the languages people speak, the laws that order their lives, and the ways they work, worship, and even play. They are woven into the fabric of an entire civilization, with a consequent capacity to far outlive the empires that formed them. If the economic globalization of the past two centuries was a process, then the current world order is its ultimate product. World orders have much less visible power than empires, but they are more pervasive and persistent. To uproot such a deeply embedded global system takes an extraordinary event, even a catastrophe. Across the span of five continents and seven centuries, a series of calamities—from the devastating epidemics of 1350 through the coming climate crisis of 2050—has produced a relentless succession of rising empires and fading world orders.
… Since the start of the age of exploration in the fifteenth century, some 90 empires, major and minor, have come and gone.23 In those same five hundred years, however, there have been just three world orders, all arising in the West—the Iberian age after 1494, the British imperial era from 1815, and the Washington world system from 1945 to perhaps something like 2030. [emphasis mine]
“Age of exploration” is polite. “Age of exploitation” is more accurate, since, as you’ll see, that’s the most common thread. Man’s inhumanity to man, globally expressed.
Why Study World Orders?
We’re looking at this now because it’s interesting. But more than that, we stand at a pivot from one order to the next, or worse, from one order to none, to dis-integration.
• What do these orders look like? On what strategies are they based? Why is the Pacific integral to them all?
• What’s America’s contribution? What makes the U.S. unique?
• And perhaps the biggest questions of them all: Was the whole thing, the project, worth doing to start with? And why did it start in the West?
Perhaps the original sin, as it were, was the existence of the proto-Indo-European “sky father” god, Dyḗus ph₂tḗr (Deus phter, “Zeus pater” to the Romans), who led a conquering people of the steppes as they swept before them neolithic humans who worshiped creatures they honored with statues like this:
What’s Special About the West?
Was a conquering male-godded people the start of it all? Is that why the West has followed a murdering course? Or did the West just get lucky, get started earlier?
The Mongols, people of the steppes, a conquering tribe, took armies through half the world; the Han Chinese did not, nor did they want to. The Spanish and other Europeans had steel in their hands and cruel hearts; the people they met in what we now call America were far less evil-minded. There are many tales along the Oregon Trail of how Original Americans were shocked at the behavior of the whites they met, even to each other (a post for another day).
We won’t answer all of these questions in this on-and-off series, but we’ll touch on them. We’re about to see new aggression against nations bordering the Pacific (the reason for studying Mahan and the “American century”), and we’ll see how it plays out. I hope, through our reading of Alfred McCoy, we’ll see context as well.
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Lot of false assumptions here. For instance —
OP: The Spanish and other Europeans had steel in their hands and cruel hearts; the people they met in what we now call America were far less evil-minded.
The Aztecs, forex, less evil-minded? This was a culture where the Aztec equivalent of a good Rotarian, for instance, underwrote a human sacrifice at a cost of 40 woven cloaks. The victim’s still-beating heart was then ripped out by an appropriately pious priest and those corpses not sponsored by merchants had their choicest cuts sent to the city market to be sold for chocolate beans.
The Aztecs believed the Sun required nourishment in the form of blood to rise each day, and without sacrifice, the world would fall into chaos. They killed between 20 to 80 people daily and on big ceremonies like the dedication of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, estimates vary wildly about the number of human sacrifices, but from 4000 to 80,400.
https://unamglobal.unam.mx/feeding-the-gods-hundreds-of-skulls-reveal-massive-scale-of-human-sacrifice-in-aztec-capital/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture#Scope_of_human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture
More generally —
OP: What’s Special About the West?
Technology.
Otherwise, all post-Paleolithic so-called civilizations till recently have been built on slavery, in which humans are treated like livestock– including being bred via castration and selective breeding and being slaughtered, like animals — and serfdom.
Not coincidentally, human brain sizes have gotten seriously smaller over the last 5,000 years since civilization began.
Human brains have shrunk: the questions are when and why
Human median brain size has shrunk by two-hundred cubic centimeters during the last 10,000 years. if we shrank another two-hundred, we’d again have the IQ of Homo erectus, the earliest member of genus Homo, who lived two million years back in the Pleistocene and was the predecessor of Homo heidelbergensis, who preceded Homo neanderthalis and Homo sap. That’s a vast decline.
Post-paleolithic civilizations.
I should have qualified that.
I don’t think that, when it comes to conquest and competition, the brain is the organ calling the shots. All this talk about world systems of “order” could be little more than a rationalization. But we will await further installments.
Yes, very much so – some very questionable assumptions in the article (I haven’t read McCoy, its on my long list). Vicious and all as European colonialism was, it was simply following a well trodden path that we can trace to pre-history. Modern genetics is teaching us that genocide is nothing new. Even in Africa, its often overlooked that the Arabs were treating it as a convenient quarry for slaves long before the Portuguese or English or French came along. And the ‘displacement’ (i.e. genocide) of Khoisan and other indigenous people by the Bantu of Africa occurred surprisingly recently in historical terms. And as to the statement that the Han were not interested in conquest… well, that is pretty debatable to say the least. Even when in notional decline, the final Qin dynasty was busy gobbling up huge areas of central Asia.
Technology was important, but I think there is a specific ruthless mindset among successful empire builders that can make a difference. I was recently reading up a little on what was arguably the first ‘real’ colonial conquest and genocide, the Elizabethan wars in Ireland. One striking thing was that despite the Irish nobility having spent several centuries side by side with England, there was a complete lack of comprehension about how wars were fought. Losing Irish lords handed over family members as hostages to the Queen, expecting them to be well cared for, as was entirely normal in Gaelic society when you lost out on a power struggle. When they were then tortured and killed, they simply didn’t know how to respond until it was too late. You can trace this sort of mismatch of power conception back to at least the Roman-Gallic wars. Arguably of course, the Romans were the first ‘modern’ colonialists.
I know its a point that can be argued endlessly, but I do think that the US as an empire has many genuinely unique and new characteristics which don’t owe themselves to any particular forebears. The one obvious one is that the ’empire’ is one of power projection in favour of monied and ideological interests, rather than one of land possession. The British Empire, if it had a philosophy, was ‘grab whats valuable using whatever force is necessary, and play everyone else against each other so they don’t interfere’. It was always robustly pragmatic in a way the modern neocons can only dream of.
Other fairly unique features of the US empire include:
-Its ideological focus – the refusal of the US to accept even benign and relatively friendly governments within its zone of interest if they are deemed not to buy into certain ideological constructs – hence its hostility to even mildly leftist governments in the Americas and Asia.
– its focus on control rather than ownership. Greenland notwithstanding, the US has had little interest in actual occupation or ownership of countries within its sphere of influence, in contrast to nearly every previous empire.
– Its openness to manipulation – I don’t think any empire in history has proven so vulnerable to doing what its supposed serfs want – Gulf Arab states, Israel, etc., are very much the tails that wag the dog. One could argue that much the same applies in parts of Asia (look up the Yoshida Doctrine, as an overt example). No previous self respecting empire in history that I’m aware of would allow itself to be so influenced by a client state as the US is in the Middle East.
Much of the uniqueness of the US empire I think comes from the raw economic power of the US homeland. Nearly every empire was previously forced, of necessity, to be based on some form of rational self interest – colonies or new possessions or clients had to be profitable or contribute to the overall wealth of the whole, otherwise it would be unsustainable. The US is pretty much unique in being able to throw vast resources at pointless expeditions without paying a domestic price. Its empire has become the ultimate in self licking ice creams.
The reality is that all empires are unique to some extent. Some are based on pure greed (either for land, glory, or power), some on notions of ethnic/religious power and relationships, some on ideology, some on real or perceived need for defence and they all create their own self justifying myths. All to some extent take on the personality (with the strengths and weaknesses) of its core host.
Thank you. You’ve covered most of the salient points I didn’t want to get into because I’d already written at some length.
In particular —
And as to the statement that the Han were not interested in conquest… well, that is pretty debatable to say the least. Even when in notional decline, the final Qin dynasty was busy gobbling up huge areas of central Asia.
Before CA turns up with the panegyrics to Chinese civilization, it’s good to get the historical reality established. December 1996 was when the last Imperial eunuch, Sun Yaoting, died –December 1996! — and in classical times China ran a slave market whose scale was only rivaled by that of imperial Rome.
We don’t hear too much about the Qin Empire these days, nor ever did, so I am not so sure of this claim. What counts is that modern China, mostly Han peoples, has “been there, done that” and is not particularly interested in conquest and Empire—because it doesn’t pay. Then, there are slaves and there are slaves. Chinese, Korean, et al slavery was due to debt bondage or punishment of crimes. American slavery was a matter of capture and breeding, and became entailed in an early form of finance capitalism, which accounts for its peculiar brutality.
Well, for Ireland, don’t forget that England was a small weak country that had embraced Protestantism, and had much more powerful Catholic enemies. Ireland was, if you like, the Ukraine of the time for England’s Russia, except that England was relatively lively much weaker. It was essential to prevent Ireland from being used as a base for Spanish operations against England: effectively the same reason why Elizabeth sent English troops to fight the Spaniards in the Low Countries.
And yes, Africa was the slave-trading continent par excellence, and even today politics in some African countries is still distorted by bitterness between slave-owning tribes and their victims.
Indeed: this is the very argument which Brendan Simms has made on several occasions, such as here: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2019/09/from-backdoor-to-backstop-irelands-shifting-relationship-with-britain-and-europe. English war aims in France and the Low Countries were continually frustrated by Scotland prior to 1603, and English neuralgia about being ‘stabbed in the back’ carried over to Ireland. For some of the ‘New English’ (the ‘Old English’ settlers of the 12th and 13th centuries having largely been subsumed into native Irish society), the best antidote to this actual or potential Dolchstosslegende was genocide: see, for example, Edmund Spenser’s notorious ‘A Vewe of the Presente State of Ireland Discoursed by Waye of a Dialogue between Eudoxus and Irenius’ (1598).
I am not sure about this statement: ” its focus on control rather than ownership”:
– The Iran coup of 1953 related to the nationalization of Iran’s oil assets.
– The1973 Chilean coup related to Allende nationalizing commodity assets
– Our running feud with Venezuela seems to relate to Chavez’s nationalization of oil assets.
– Castro seized assets held by US mobsters.
– Russia’s seizure of Western-allied oligarchs’ ownership interests via lawfare looks to me to be crux of enmity (perhaps that is closer to Western “control” than “ownership”, but Lukoil proposed to sell a majority interest to Exxon. Putin nixed that).
– Virtually every IMF deal’s end-game seems to be privatization of any state assets.
– Does anybody doubt that Ukraine will have to “privatize” assets after the war?
I will admit that “control” and “ownership” can be a fine line.
Would it be the classic capitalists/industrialists (e.g. factory owners) who own, while oligarchs who control? – just to establish some differentiation
its [USA} focus on control rather than ownership. Greenland notwithstanding, the US has had little interest in actual occupation or ownership of countries within its sphere of influence, in contrast to nearly every previous empire.
A slight quibble here. In 1785 the USA occupied a small area based on the Eastern coast of North America. By roughly 1850(?–my US history is shaky) the USA had acquired everything from there to the Pacific Ocean below the British boundary lines and and above the Rio Grande, including roughly ½ of Mexico. Next, Alaska. Then, on to snap up Hawaii on the way to acquiring Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and almost landing Cuba. Oh and let’s not forget Panama.
I’d suggest thu USA was running out of places to grab without getting into a brawl with the other imperialist powers. IF you note, generally speaking, French, British and Russian expansions stalled about the some time. There was nothing left!
Since then, I’m in agreement, although Mr. Trump’s aspirations to invade and seize Greenland and Panama and beat Canada into submission by economic warfare suggests to me that the USA may have just been taking a break until the situation looked more favourable again.
you sound like Hasbara for the US, Michaelmas. There were hundreds of tribes throughout the Western hemisphere, many if not most were peaceful. The empires were an extreme example, and either being a european or adopting the european need to justify barbarism (doctrine of discovery, manifest destiny) like the Spanish justifications for mass religious conversions you use a hugely exaggerated and highly inaccurate example of human sacrifice. It goes hand in hand with stories of Pocahontas and thanksgiving.
you and the others commenting in agreement here are no better than Israelis, should they complete their genocide and look back with benign contempt at the Palestinian terrorists their heroic idf crushed..
Completely, agree, Felix,
From the Fall of Civilizations podcast, I learned that:
1. The Spaniards who recorded our knowledge of the Aztecs were very biased and motivated by conflicts of interest, and
2. The Aztecs captured military opponents who were most of the killed at their temples, whereas the Europeans killed their military opponents on the field. If one looks at total killing per capita, the Aztecs could not hold a candle to the various European powers’ wars in Europe.
Another aspect of Aztecs is they speak a language in the Athabaskan family, more related to tribes like the Navajo in the Four Corners and and tribes farther north on the Pacific Northwest coast and in Canada. Thus, they likely were new-comers to the Mexican Plateau and came a’conquerin’ not too many centuries ago.
I recall commenting on “Reminiscence of the Future” before regarding the benevolence of Russian traders when they established Fort Ross here in northern California, comparing the civilized behavior of his people and mine. Like you, another white guy used the same Aztec sacrifice comparison. what is it with the need for europeans to drag everyone down to your level?
I too am puzzled by Brits pretending like their Empire wasn’t vastly worse than Aztecs could even dream of. Great Britain over the centuries makes the actual German Democratic Socialists look like pikers. And they were smart/evil enough to destroy most of the records.
I do agree about Fergusson, and the ‘Cash Nexus’ is a pretty good book but, for me, the most satisfying study on the origins of British debt markets and their contribution to war finance (chiefly against France) is that of the late Peter Dickson (1967): https://www.routledge.com/The-Financial-Revolution-in-England-A-Study-in-the-Development-of-Public-Credit-1688-1756/Dickson/p/book/9780751200102?srsltid=AfmBOorTLzg1WGcBAb1c_a4xgTDTTtxVehsu29gLvgtCABeAHk5JiDYK (also https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/5305/Memoirs-21-21-Dickson.pdf). Eric Hargreaves and Henry Roseveare covered much the same ground in 1930 and 1991 respectively: https://academic.oup.com/ej/article-abstract/41/161/97/5267038 and https://www.routledge.com/Financial-Revolution-1660—1750-The/Roseveare/p/book/9780582354494?srsltid=AfmBOoqILyqpoxQjPBdLWxe5-5kFjjNqG5DjCBj-zSh1ur9-pMR5PsOq (though the latter is more of a pithy textbook).
@ Froghole —
Ferguson’s ‘Cash Nexus’ is a byblow of — and mostly siphons off material already in — his massive book/books on the Rothschilds in 1998 (they were one volume in the UK, as I recall).
The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets 1798-1848
The House of Rothschild: Volume 2: The World’s Banker: 1849-1999
Those I do recommend, in the same spirit as one recommends Caro’s THE POWER BROKER in that they’re long but absolutely worthwhile. They made Ferguson’s name and to my mind are by far the best work he’s done. They certainly strike me a lot more favorably that his recent hagiographies of the British empire and Kissinger.
I did buy his book High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg, however, because I’m interested in the Eurodollar market’s origin and development, and Warburg was instrumental in that and Ferguson has a chapter on it.
And it’s decent as far as it goes, but limited. As always I get the sense that those who know aren’t talking and those who are talking don’t really know what they’re talking about.
Any accounts on the Eurodollar you’d care to recommend?
Many thanks. There is surprisingly little on the mechanics and evolution of the eurocurrency markets after c. 1955, and what there is, is often buried in works of financial history which have a wider application.
Herbert Prochnow edited a volume of essays entitled ‘The Eurodollar’ in 1970 (Chicago UP).
The venerable Paul Einzig (the Martin Wolf of his day, only vastly more prolific) produced ‘The Eurodollar System’ in several editions between 1964 and 1970. Einzig essentially dictated his books in a few sittings to his secretary, but although they are often flawed, they do illustrate his immense understanding of all aspects of the financial markets, especially forex (speaking of which, this came out last year, Ranald Michie having investigated many of the pillars of the City: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/forex-forever-9780198903697?cc=gb&lang=en&).
Also, Paolo Savona and George Sutija, ‘Eurodollars and International Banking’ (1985): https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-349-07120-3.
Wayne Clendenning also produced ‘The Eurodollar Market’ in 1970 (OUP), but it received rather unsympathetic reviews.
There are a number of articles which are vaguely on point, with one volume of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking being devoted to it in 1972:
Catherine Schenk: https://www.sfu.ca/~poitras/EEH_Eurodollar_98.pdf (from 1998, and includes a handy, though short, bibliography)
Kathleen Burk, ‘Witness Seminar on the Origins and Early Development of the Eurobond Market’, in Contemporary European History, v. 1 (1), 1992, 65-87 (a useful companion to Schenk’s article).
Jay Levin, ‘A Financial Sector Analysis of the Eurodollar Market’, in Journal of Finance, v. 29 (1), 1974, 103-17.
Raymond Mikesell, et al., ‘The Eurodollar Market and the Foreign Demand for Liquid Dollar Assets’, in Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, v. 4 (3), 1972, 643-703
George Rich, ‘A Theoretic and Empirical Analysis of the Eurodollar Market’, in Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, v. 4 (3), 1972, 616-35.
William Gibson, ‘Eurodollars and US Monetary Policy’, in Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, v. 3 (3), 1971, 649-65.
Carlo Altamura, Jory Spater and Jorg Baberowski, ‘The Paradox of the 1970s: the Renaissance of International Banking and the Rise of Public Debt’, in Journal of Modern European History, v. 15 (4), 2017, 529-53.
Gary Burn, ‘The State, the City and Euromarkets’, in Review of International Political Economy, v. 6 (2), 1999, 225-61.
Scott Newton, ‘Sterling, Bretton Woods and Social Democracy, 1968-1970’, in Diplomacy and Statecraft, v. 24 (3), 2013, 427-55. Some of the themes of which are amplified by Aled Davies here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-city-of-london-and-social-democracy-9780198804116?cc=gb&lang=en&
Seung-Woo Kim, ‘Knowledge, Contestation and Authority in the Eurodollar Market’ here: https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781783274451/money-and-markets/ (this volume of essays in honour of Martin Daunton, one of the finest British economic historians of the last century, contains much else of value).
My cup overfloweth, I guess! Jeezus.
Many thanks, anyway. I’ll start with the links
Before Niall Ferguson started losing his mind, he wrote a fine book, The Cash Nexus,
I first read the Rothschild books and The Cash Nexus, and then kept running across articles penned by some other Niall Ferguson. I’m reassured to find I’m not the only one. : )
After the Rothschilds and THE CASH NEXUS Ferguson was essentially just out there cashing in and fellating The Powers That Be.
This could be a fun topic to wrestle with.
I think we’re going to have to drill down on what the difference is between an ’empire’ and an ‘order’. It sounds like an order requires a set of rules, perhaps a mix of formal and informal, regarding how things are done. Does Spain/Portugal meet that criteria? I suppose so, because they did create a lot of local proxies that cooperated with them.
Does it need to be stable for any period of time? How do we define stability?
«absent an explanation, yours truly is predisposed to see the Washington era as an adaptation of the British model, and not a new world order.»
This. History is multi-causal, but my CT du jour traces it back to MI6 teaching Wild Bill Donovan how to organize the OSS back in ’41.
I think the primary logical flaw is the Western focus on the nodes, from individuals to atoms, rather than the feedback between nodes and networks. “Multipolarity.”
Monotheism being a core assumption, when a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell.
To the Ancients, gods were metaphors. Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. Monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Ancient Israel was a monarchy.
Constantine adopted Christianity for the monotheism as the Empire came together. So the Catholic Church was the eschatological basis for European monarchy. Divine right of kings, as opposed to consent of the governed. When the West went back to popular forms of government, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics, morality and law.
Leaving this state where might is right.
The bull is power. The matador is art.
RE: Empires vs Orders
Looks like the commentariat has a wealth of knowledge regarding the British/American Financial Order. The Iberian order that predeeded it I think is fundamentally different. Whether it was medieval ancien regime, or holy Roman empire, or both, it was unable to put up much of a fight against the Financial Order which ate the Iberian Order´s lunch back in the 16th century. Of course before the Medieval (mostly Christian/Catholic) Order was that of Mesopotania of which Michael Hudson writes. Of course there were other Orders in China, Africa, and the Americas that are outside the lineal progression we 21st century people are interested in. I am among those who feel that the Financial Order, at least as led by the USA, has pissed in its own drinking water and a new Order is in the wings.
Efficiency is to do more with less, until we reach peak efficiency and can do everything with nothing.
Basically trade credits and debts. Aka, derivatives.
As these linear, goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people see money as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate. Consequently Econ 101 considers it both medium of exchange and store of value.
In your body, blood is the medium, fat is the store. They are not synonymous.
Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over, but we would still be fighting over the lots.
As money is a contract, storing the asset side of the ledger requires a debt to back it.
Given the one job the flunkies in DC are really good at, is running up the debt, it would seem the secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
Somewhat idiosyncratic.
The first documented empire was Uruk’s Sumerian expansion, 4000=2500 BC. At first a few military outposts, but these were turned into peaceful trading stations as military offensive was much more expensive than simply trading prestige textiles. Basically multiethnic and peaceful.
The Imperial Papacy, 1050-1300 and up to about 1700 was the first European Empire. Its dynamics were spelled out in the Papal Dictates (mid-11th century) explicitly on how to make kings dependent on the popes. Rome developed international banking to finance its wars of conquests against other Christians (esp. Germany and Eastern Orthodoxy) before turning against Islam and non-Christians.
The US has indeed appropriated the British Empire, not much structurally different.
“The Imperial Papacy, 1050-1300 and up to about 1700 was the first European Empire. Its dynamics were spelled out in the Papal Dictates (mid-11th century) explicitly on how to make kings dependent on the popes. Rome developed international banking to finance its wars of conquests against other Christians (esp. Germany and Eastern Orthodoxy) before turning against Islam and non-Christians.”
What study would cover that best?
p.s. How would Graeber fit into this discussion over which power was genocidal and which was not?
p.s. Why did the Arabs fail to sustain against the Spanish? Why was the Reconquista successful? From a financial point.
Could you proved some references about this Imperial Papacy? It is not familiar to me. I was more of the impression that the papacy was one among sevral shifting European powers.
“Perhaps the original sin, as it were, was the existence of the proto-Indo-European “sky father” god, Dyḗus ph₂tḗr”
Complete rubbish. Several wrong assumptions in this narrative:
1) Assumes the Neolithic populations of Europe spoke non-indo-european languages. This is supported neither by archaeological nor genetic evidence – Renfrew’s Anatolian origin theory posits the neolithic expansion was fundamentally indo-european in character.
2) The pantheon of indo-european Gods includes both the earth mother and the sky father as primary. The pantheon is very very old – and shared by all indo-european origin populations. None were mono as the author assumes the earth mother goddess was.
3) Assumes somehow expansionist tribes are “sinners”. That makes every successful nation/tribe as sinners. Really ridiculous. Incidentally, the most successful genociders are the Han Chinese – there is less genetic variability among the 1.5 billion Han than on the island of Java. Or in europe. Consider what processes produced that result. Or look at what the Han are doing in Tibet for a hint.
I’m really getting tired of this “Europeans are bad and the source of all expansionist evil” narrative. It’s just how humans operate. If you;re not expanding, you’re shrinking.
Chronos.
Though by the age of the Olympians, Zeus didn’t give way to Dionysus. Tradition prevailed over renewal.
Setting the stage for the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, to take root, as a metaphor for renewal and rebirth.
Which was of no use to the Catholic Church, so it was shrouded in the Trinity.
A good book on the subject is Gilbert Murray’s Five Stages of Greek Religion.
At Gutenberg Files but on my phone so no link.
“If you;re(sic) not expanding, you’re shrinking.”
So if you’re not getting fatter, you’re getting thinner?
the question makes no sense outside English language because the word “West” makes no sense.
For instance if you put the cursor of the timeline at the 17th century (or the 18th) and the location in Spain. There is ipso facto no “West’ just because you will be speaking Spanish and “West” is not a Spanish word. USA has not been invented so what Americans can mean in the 20th c. is nihil.
In Spanish, the word “Occidente” with a political meaning appears early 17th to designate European nations vs. Orient(al) nations. Before that the word Occidente is mostly geographical like “Oeste”, and historical when discussing Roman Empire split in two (Occidens = Roma, Oriens = Constantinople).
The split of Roman Empire is central, because the Oriens of it, its oriental half was in fact the actual sole Roman Empire after the dissolution of the western half in 476.
Germanic state-less nations dismantled Rome but the Empire kept going strong from Constantinople. It shows trivially in Arabic and in Russian languages where all along the Middle-Ages and until now the word “Roman” (rum/rim) designated what was later labeled “Byzantine” by German geographer Hieronymus Wolf.
Vladimir the First for instance, ie. Rurikids, made a deal with the Romans
This is a key point: Germanic nations wanted hard to appropriate themselves Roman Empire prestige, and tried to replicate it (Holy German-Roman Empire). But Roman Empire never ceased to exist, until 1453. After the fall of Constantinople, there was rewriting of History by designating Roman Empire as “Byzantine Empire”, which helped set the idea that Roman Empire was Rome and Catholicism, NOT Constantinople and Orthodoxy.
The war of the Catholics against the Orthodox, the split of 1054, the sack of Byzance in 1204, were all based on the staunch ambition of Germanic derived kingdoms (Carolingians) that wanted to death that Rome, the Pope and themselves were the heir of Roman Empire.
What does this means relatively to what many centuries after, Americans would call “West”? Simple: two of the three canonical components of European civilization, are not from Western Europe ie from the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant subset but from the Orient: Greek culture & philosophy, Christianity.
See what, among other cultural and historical FACTS, shows English American word “West” is bullshit?
As I often say as a Mediterranean European: pale faced gringos don’t know sh*t about History.
there has never been a word order, ie. a ruling entity over the world. “Empire” is used in the context of monarchic regimes, where a kingdom is mostly equivalent to a country, and an empire many countries, Kingdom of Austria but Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kingdom of Spain but Spanish Empire (with the “Indians” , Philippinas, etc), After monarchies the idea is still the one of a sole jurisdiction and capital over many countries.
USA is not an empire, it wants to become one, and its sets of coercive tools and vassals is named in soft wording “world order”. But this is a wish not a fact.
The Aztecs were not less “evil minded” than the conquistadors. Their blood sacrifice activities were horrific, and their own empire’s conquered subjects were unhappy enough to ally with the Spaniards.
The picture so far, the catalogue of world orders, is like a Petri dish that is jumping its edges. It’s kinda crowded in this late stage capitalism world order and the spores are flying in the wind with no cruel and bloody place to land that hasn’t been claimed. So perhaps the new manifest destiny is looking for internal territory, new human enlightenments. The late great unipolar world of industrialism, whether socialist or capitalist gradients, has run out of low hanging fruit. Time to evolve to a less depleted spiritualism. And as if on cue, multipolarism emerges. I notice they are claiming now, with science backing them (Denis Noble, etc) that evolution is self guided. I would interpret this notion as a truism because why else does evolution exist? I’d love to see a new ism, maybe Nature-ism guide us now.
Just a few quick notes. First, thanks as always for the thoughtful comments. I’ll continue to monitor this thread.
Second, any impression of clear dividing lines between McCoy’s orders is well offset in the rest of the book itself; these ideologies and cultures blend into each other, the previous falling as the next one rises. Ultimately, the US strategic approach to empire is different from the British, as I’ll make clear in future examinations. And of course, folks may disagree. But that’s for later.
Lastly, as to the relative massive brutality of the Spanish, it probably hardly need saying that murdering millions for gold, glory and advancement is a far greater degree of evil than cultural human sacrifice and playing football with heads. It’s not the kind but the scale of Western destruction that’s constantly before us as we read this book. And I do mean constantly. But that too is for later.
With that, carry on, and thanks.
Thomas
the usual American is of Northern-European look, the usual Mexican is 50% pre-Colombian look, or more. So it seems that the killing by Spaniards was not so effective.
There are many historical facts, sourced, about the colonization by Spaniards, rather than usual clichés.
and again, in the 16th,17th, 18th centuries there is no “West”. What you mean with “West” now as an english speaker didn’t exist back then and destructive tendencies and levels of killing of Europeans didn’t need New Word to manifest themselves.
Check the History of German expansion into the Baltics, or the 30-Years war.
Given the undue interest the Brits have shown in USA politics over the years and the undue influence they seem to exert (second only to Israel) in getting the USA involved in problems they create, what makes one think the control has passed to Washington ?
To wit, the suggestion US Treasuries might be cleared by the LSE’ London Clearing House. I’m sure it’s perfectly innocent, even if The Square Mile is the epicentre of fraud in the financial world.
The real estate for the Anglo-American Empire’s HQ might have changed, but its management hasn’t.
This sounds like an exciting topic–a discussion of empire/world order or what– maybe something new and unprecedented? (AI planet)?
I’m firmly in the “or what,” camp. I have never felt less sure of predicting what may or may not be emerging.
I’m personally going to start with the assumption that structures (both empires and world orders) shift with historical change and that some of the old structural assumptions, especially among academic Marxists, are more and more misleading.
The whole concept of the proletariat is going out the window because a robotic/AI workforce is clearly foreseeable. So much for class struggle. When all of us are unemployable, the old political isms are going to be viewed as quaint primitive beliefs. Poverty and material scarcity will come to an end, and the new economics will be one of esteem. People will compete for status in ways that are difficult to predict, but this competition will not be characterized by violence. People may not be better, but it will be a better world.
The models, from math to monotheism, break down over infinities and disappear at zero. Everything in-between is relational. Even the models are nodes in the networks.
Best to keep a few such mental tools in the toolbox.
Generals lead armies, specialist is a rank just above private.
I haven’t read the book.
I surmise that an “order” is a situation where one nation’s oligarchy imposes a system upon other nations with the collaboration of the other nations’ oligarchies, such that the ruling nation is at least tacitly benefiting with the compliance of other nations.
An “empire” would be a situation where one nation’s oligarchy imposes a system upon other nations by force and without consent, although that consent might develop over time at least within the oligarchies of the conquered people.
Thus the Nazis had their “Reich”, which constituted the heartland ruled by the Nazi oligarchy, and then they had the “New Order in Europe”, which was supposed to be European fascism united in willing submission to the Reich. The problem here was that the Reich ruled so oppressively and the fascist oligarchy outside the Reich was so unpopular that the “New Order” had failed even before the Allies brought it down with a crash.
I do not think this book has a theory as to class relations. The military can often control or substantially influence governments, and its interests may not be aligned with those of oligarchs. Similarly, in 1815, the UK had both landed wealthy and rising industrialists, but no one who would rise to the level of an oligarch.
I enjoy alternate histories but as a sort of “musack”, partly because the inexorable march of class relations are ignored.
99% of the “tipping points” hypothesised in European history since around 1700 seem to me to be silly. Which instantly makes me look like a total nihilist.
However I actually think there are a few “potential turning points” in Western history. I won’t repeat myself and bore people but the terrible and unwarranted defeat of the Labour govt in 1951 UK (this should utterly discredit first past the post – check the turnout and stats if you don’t believe me) was IMHO one of those turning points that fundamentally put us onto the “stupidest timeline”.
There are various levels of orders. For example, monotheism begat a monolithic paradigm, as opposed to a dualistic paradigm. The problem is that reality is usefully understood dualistically. There is no more conservative without liberal, as there is left without right, up without down, positive without negative, attraction without repulsion.
So when we try modeling it monolithically, the polarities tend to polarize, rather than dynamically interacting.
The anarchies of desire versus the tyrannies of judgement. Heart and head. Motor and steering.