In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, while it was growing the industrial economy, emerged different kinds of Sport. One of them (maybe the most important) was the Rugby. On the one hand it showed us the new aristocracy from Oxford, Eton, etc. and on the other hand served as cultural event for many people and lifestyles all over the world.
[...] In other words, we humans, even we bourgeois humans, cannot get along without transcendence - faith in a past, hope for a future, justified by larger considerations. If we don’t have religious hope and faith, we’ll substitute hope and faith in art or science or national learning. If we don’t have art or science or national learning or Anglicanism, we’ll substitute fundamentalism or the Rapture. If we don’t have fundamentalism or the Rapture or the local St.Wenceslaus parish we’ll substitute our family or the rebuilt antique car. It’s a consequence of the human ability to symbolize, a fixture of our philosophical psychology.
We might as well acknowledge it, if only to keep watch on transcendence and prevent it from doing mischief, as did once a Russian hope for the Revolution and as now does a Saudi Arabian faith in an Islamic past. The Bulgarian-French critic Tzvetan Todorov, who has seen totalitarianism, warns that 'democracies put their own existence in jeopardy if they neglect the human need for transcendence.' Michael Ignatieff put it well: 'The question of whether . . . the needs we once called religious can perish without consequence ... remains central to understanding the quality of modern man’s happiness.' Evidently the answer is no, religion cannot perish without consequences. There are bad consequences and there will be more. That is not a reason to return to the older sureties. It is a reason to take seriously the transcendent in our bourgeois lives.
(The Bourgeois Virtues, Deirdre N. McCloskey, 2006)
In Japan, one of the most important facts in the second half of the nineteenth century was the signing of the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854 between the Commodore Perry, on behalf of the United States, and the Tokugawa Shogunate. Because of the weakness of its army, Japan was forced to accept trade relations with western lands.
What did this event? Firstly, opened the ports of Shimoda and Kakodate to the United States trade. Japan, as you know, had been isolated since 1633 and, therefore, this step helped the country to improve and to extend its commercial relations with other nations. Secondly, drove it to enhance its way of living by, for instance, setting up enterprises (without real competition, though) and leaving, gradually, feudal policies. Finally, it triggered upheaveals within the country and, as a result, marked the arrival of the Meiji period. More: Black Ships
Picture below: Com. Perry carrying the 'Gospel of God' to the Heathen, ca. 1854 (James G. Evans)
As you probably know, from last decades of eighteen hundreds to the first quarter of the twentieth century world economies were led by free trade and gold standard, in which social and economic progress settled. Meanwhile, imperialism and rivalries didn´t stop. As a result, the world was doomed to world war (thirty years of warfare, actually) and countries started to adapt their resources to the new context. Certainly, was the aftermath of the first world war what explains the end of the victorian boom, an era characterized by the economic interdependence all over the planet, and also by the idea that goods were manufactured in order to consume them wherever you live and work. One example of those was fordism, that spread the assembly line and mass production everywhere. Why, finally, main economies left the previous model
of economic globalization? Maybe, at this point we must study thepost-war conditions. In this way, we can read the following in Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: 'Its
causes went back to the Great War, which had left European nations in deep debt
as they struggled to rebuild their economies and pay off war debts. To restore
stability, Europeans borrowed heavily from the United States. When wobbly
governments and small investors defaulted on their loans, the U.S. Federal
Reserve reacted by raising interest rates. Starting in central Europe,
financial institutions began to collapse. As banks fell, other lenders
scrambled to call in their loans. Companies, governments, and private borrowers
were soon floating in a sea of debt. The panic then spread to the world’s stock
markets, which led to the Wall Street crash of 1929, which spurred more bank
closures'(p. 719).
The situation was untenable and the United States
enforced penalties to import and export assets, signing theSmoot-Hawley
Tariff Act, and also taking the first step towards protectionism. In response,
trading partners cut links and international relations started to break down. We
can also read some words in the textbook concerning that worry: 'After the United States enacted
protective tariffs, other governments abandoned free trade in favor of
protectionism. Manufacturers cut back production, laid off millions of workers,
and often went out of business'(p.720).
In Europe, actually, the crisis started when an austrian bank, theKredit-Anstalt Bank, collapsed.
In consequence, diplomacy tried to arrange the issue. It failed, anyway. One example to solve it was the Paris Conference of 1931.
Patterns of Recovery
Liberal economies were, hence, put in question, claiming that the market place hadn't a self-equilibrating structure. Here, we must quote figures like John Maynard Keynes, who despite believing in the free market, also argued that it should be controlled by the state. Therefore, following these ideas, countries like the United States applied its policies to stimulate the economy. In this particular case, it was called New Deal. However, there were other kind of responses. Sometimes diametrically opposite. These replications relied on popular support to carry out its strategies, which it could be divided in hard-core command economies and medium-core command economies. In this way, the state became the representative of the common will. Let me analyze them briefly.
On the one hand, the most relavant example of hard-core command economy was the Soviet Union, country in which the collective way gained immense importance. What did collective way mean? Roughly, collectivist policies tried to accumulate resources in the hands of the state. That's to say, everything you produce must be property of those who run the country's destiny. Private property and other individual rights were largely beaten in the name of the state. This sort of planned economy was very effective to mobilize people and technology, especially in war time. Nonetheless, it demanded much sacrificies (of all types) and the need of produce new tools caused the population, in the end, remain exhausted. In reality, things were not so easy: 'The realities behind the images (like in the poster above) of smiling farmers were low productivity, enormous waste and often broken-down machinery' (p. 724).
On the other hand, medium-core command economies like Japan and Germany did not take over the organization of production. The state was above everything, that's true, but it left some freedom for the commercial activity (always for the general interest), which was supervised but the state officials. The aim was to create loyalty and capacity to consume, but needing reliance on peripheries to satisfy their needs (great resources), so they kept the persistance in the way of empire because of primary staples for industrial recovery. Although Japan broke down, Germany, the Third Reich, was the best example of this kind of policy. Both of them were great militarized and led societies.
In conclusion, this financial crisis took countries to make decisions like to leave the gold standard and retreat into protectionism. Liberal democracies relied on the state as a key agent to stimulate economy. However, others, like the Soviet Union and Germany pushed for policies in which peoples support, expansionism and popular will played crucial roles, not only in the recovery but also in the nationalist and popular machinery.
Not only
social and political changes of the seventeenth century were important, but
also their causes and consequences. In this period of time, instability spread
all over the world, specifically in Europe, where we must mainly look for the reasons
of these important shifts. The steady increase of wealth in states like Spain,
Portugal, Netherlands, England or France (especially thanks to the gold and silver extracted from the colonial lands), involved all of them, and eventually others, in serious strains, particularly in the Thirty Years’ War.
In the lectures,
Jeremy Adelman often talks about the essential change from interconnection to interdependence
happened during this time, that’s to say, the path through which states and
regions began to be more sensitives to whatever political and economic transformation
that occurred in other parts of the world. One example of this new pattern of
behavior was the adjustment of China, that moved southwards in order to produce the
goods that europeans needed, which they exchanged for the silver that,
meanwhile, was being extracted from the Americas mines and that the Ming Dinasty decided
to use for its own consumption. Later, as we will see, the crisis of this
commercial interdependence will be, among others, the cause of the upheavals
within China and of what, finally, will incite the arrival of the Qing Dinasty.
Anyway, as you can see, at that point in time the world was already interdependent
from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean. Let’s now explain the causes and
consequences of this new reality.
On the one
hand, we may point out some causes of this turning point. To start with, in my
view, the main one was the paradox of becoming wealthy. While Europe was obtaining
more richness, the competition among their states rose deeply. What’s more,
they were divided into two religious groups: reformists and counter-reformists.
By the way, it’s commonly said that convictions were an excuse to gain bigger
revenues, and I strongly agree with this statement. The fact was that when
silver, above all, became scarce, states had to deal with this threat through
different replications. One of them was warfare (for instance, the long
conflict of Spaniards in Netherlands), another one was piracy (Francis Drake’s
actions), and so on. Secondly, besides competition, we have to stressed the
fact that during the seventeenth century there was a sort of ice age, the world
cooled, which caused famines everywhere and harmed seriously the harvests and
the whole agriculture in regions like China (the Deccan famine in India was
significant, too) where, as I said before, silver were exchanged for new goods
in order to sustain its needs. The scarcity of those preciosities rebounded in
the trade among China and Europe, forcing the Ming Dinasty to cope with revolts
within its own borders. As you probably know, the consequence of that issue was
the arrival of the Qing Dinasty, who created a new manchu state and also
modified the bureaucracy and military priorities of the ancient one. In
consequence, the Han majority was displaced. Finally, what was truly important was
the Mercantilism, a new relationship between states and merchants. By quoting
some words from the book Worlds Together,
Worlds Apart, ‘the lasting prosperity
of the landed interest depends upon foreign commerce’, what means that
states wanted to ensure that because ‘augmenting
our mercantile and royal navies, they necessarily become the means of our
permanent prosperity and of the safety and preservation of our happy
constitution’. So, as you can read,
the aim was to enrich states and to maintain armies in order to defend the general interest of the countries, if necessary, by doing the war. One example of that
was the Dutch East India Company. Russia, meanwhile starts to move westwards thanks also to commerce and warfare.
On the other
hand, the impacts were crucial to understand the world that was coming. The
increasingly importance of mercantilism caused the growth of important
companies, which in the mid and long-term would probably have a different
vision of their interests than those that previously had the states. Each state
had toeholds in Asia, in Africa, in America too, but, from this moment, companies
took control of the business in the name of each nation. In addition, the rivalry
between europeans smash up the old dream of recreate the ancient Roman
Empire. The Treaty of Westfalia (1648), closed the problems within Europe somehow, but
moved them abroad, which supposed a reordering of the world. Another important
point was the situation in which stayed nations like Spain who, because of the
great debts acquired to fund warfare, lost its key possesions
in Netherlands and political weight in the global framework after Westfalia. In the Islamic World, the Mughal empire weakened because of the trade with foreign companies.
In summary, the evolution and new behavior of global
trade triggered drastic changes in the importance states gave to the monopoly of certain goods, emerging that way mercantilism. That was reflected in strains within Europe, and in the second half of the century, everywhere. If we add to the previous calamities, the answers to natural disasters, famines and discussions on religion, seventeenth century may be considered as the perfect modeler of the post-columbus world.
While many
people claim that the political aftermath of the black death, as well as other important tensions suffered during the thirteenth and fourteenth century, created similar patterns of
behavior in all around Eurasia, in my opinion we must point out significant
differences in fields like religion, commerce and bureaucracy. That’s what I will
try to explain in the next lines. On the one
hand, it’s said that a leading consequence of that vacuum was the return to the
ancient religious beliefs. For instance, the Ming Dinasty came back to its old ceremonies and rites in order to reinforce political and social hierarchies
in China. Another example of these worries was the expansion of the islamic
dinasties sharing the same core religious. By the way, during this time we can study
the great role played by the faiths in the strengthening of the Safavid Empire,
the Mughal Empire and, above all, the Ottoman Empire. Europe wasn’t an
exception in searching the truth faith, so the Christianity was very important
in the statecraft of the majority of european micro-states. Moreover, those who
believe that the importance of the global trade was the result of searching new
markets in both extremes and center of Eurasia, also think that its development was based in similar foundations and causes. They even say that the
empires gave to the commerce the same value in exchanging goods and,
consequently, they obtained equal revenues. In particular, they consider that
the seven voyages of Zheng He are
alike than those of Christopher Columbus.
In other words, It could be believed that both series of expeditions (and also
others like those of Vasco da Gama or
Tomé Pires) only had the same purpose:
to expand their sales network. Finally, in what concerns to the administration,
the main evidence to its increasing importance was the creation of places from
which emperors and kings ruled with more and more officials, buildings and devices. That
is to say, with more centralized power. The Forbidden City, in Beijing, and The Topkapi Palace, in Istanbul, represented the weight of bureaucracy in the
construction of these new empires. In addition, taxes helped states to earn more
money with which carried out new projects or warfares and slaves became commodities.
However, although
what I have said before was crucial in order to build up these new societies
and empires, traditional and basic explanations sometimes go in the wrong
direction. For example, even though rulers set up a renewed and heavy system of
beliefs, is false that they behaved always identically. It’s obvious,
therefore, that the tolerance and respect to groups of Jews, Christians and so
on, was bigger in the Ottoman Empire than in the Persian Safavid one. Besides,
we must bear in mind that the spread of the commerce between the Iberian states
and their colonies had different foundations than those in China and the islamic empires.
China expanded its trade network thanks to the expeditions of Zheng He recalling better times, but after the upheavals happened
between scholars and eunuchs decided to stop trading that way. It’s that, one
important turning point for China, because in my view is highly probable they
missed the opportunity to become bigger and more self-sufficient slowing, as a
result, the conquests of Portugal in that area. The islamic world, meanwhile, continued
dominating the Indian Ocean and the east coast of Africa, forcing europeans to
discover new ways to find alternative raw materials than those they traditionally
used to buy or acquire. It was that way how they arrive to America, and the portugueses also to places like Calcutta, creating, thereby, new sea routes. Furthermore, the design
and construction of the bureaucracy that emerged in the fifteenth century wasn’t
so hard and efficient everywhere. Whereas in Europe didn’t exist a great empire capable to deal with enemies outside and within their own borders and
to carry out big projects together as was normal in China or in the Ottoman
Empire, the micro-states kept on fighting with their neighbors which meant a major
problem of money and effort.
To sum up, it’s
very clear that the changes caused by the disappearance of the Mongol Empire
drove the new societies to the need of creating tools of protection which they
found in the religion, commerce and bureaucracy. It’s also true that this new
concept of societies didn’t work the same way in each case. Some were more
tolerant, like ottomans, some more coercives, like safavids. Some were more
maritimes, like those in Western Europe, some less, like the post Zheng He
China. What’s more significant, actually, is the fact that they didn’t move
separately, but because of the other or, even, because of their own strains.
