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.
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.
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.
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).
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.