Dominion From Sea To Sea Part 8

Fernand Braudel was not impressed by Schumpeter's entrepreneur, Marx's cla.s.s struggle, or Max Weber's Protestant ethic; capitalists are people, too, they are human, "and like other human beings, they behaved in various ways. Some were calculating, others ready to take risks, some were mean, others prodigal, some had a touch of genius, others were 'lucky' at best." (It is a judgment readers might make about the dramatis personae in this book.) Instead, for Braudel long-distance trade was critical to the emergence and development of capitalism. Long-distance trade organized production and created new social structures at both ends of the commodity chain-sugar plantations in Hawaii and sugar mills in San Francisco, for example. Risks were high, but the profits were higher-almost unavailable in settled domestic production. English merchants caught otters in the Pacific Northwest and sold the furs in Canton, picking up money "by the shovelful"-it is just another example of a kind of trade that was "an unrivalled machine for the rapid reproduction and increase of capital." For Braudel, capitalism is not about markets but monopolies, and long-distance trade was one of the best routes to monopoly. Markets have always existed, he wrote, but superprofits come from extinguis.h.i.+ng market compet.i.tion, supply and demand, through control. But capitalism is also about change-"the essential characteristic of capitalism was its capacity to slip at a moment's notice from one form or sector to another." Meanwhile the essential characteristic of this historian was to bring s.p.a.ce and human structures together: "Geography ... helps us to rediscover the slow unfolding of structural realities, to see things in the perspective of the very long term." His definitive work, of course, was on the great trading areas of the inland sea separating Casablanca and the Riviera, situated first around the geography and distinctive and usually lovely climate of the Mediterranean, then around the stormy, moody Atlantic. To read his account of how peoples as diverse as the human rainbow created a Mediterranean world without discovering any new land is a memento for how the Pacific will serve as the site of an infinity of transactions in the twenty-first century.14 Empire The most familiar and least convincing theory of imperialism is about "the pressure of capital for more profitable investment than could be ensured at home" (and that goes double for the United States, with its vast continental market; protectionist tariffs at home were real guarantees of superprofits,15 compared to exports abroad). More convincing is the search for markets, with the China market always uppermost in the minds of businessmen and diplomats; more convincing still is great power rivalry over markets and compet.i.tion between national economies, where the strongest prefer an "open door" but lesser powers want to carve out their own private, exclusive, wellprotected zones of activity, otherwise called colonies. For Karl Polanyi, colonies were a kind of external protectionism, pound and franc and yen blocs masquerading as projects of native uplift. But the rivalry among the powers makes it difficult to separate economic from political motives.16 In the case of the United States, its internal colony-the continent, the national marketwas so huge as to generate much less thrust toward empire than among the European powers, and its industrial and technological prowess in the late nineteenth century propelled it toward seeking foreign access, not control, because it was compet.i.tive in almost every product. To want access and to want trade to operate under commonly understood rules is not the same as imperialism or zero-sum expansionism. It is internationalism, and Hay's Open Door was an early version of the internationalism that would describe American strategy after World War II.

Bill Williams attributed the war with Spain to a general American desire for overseas expansion, and particularly to agrarian interests who wanted new export markets. LaFeber placed more emphasis on business interests, their friends in the State Department, and their common search for markets; McCormick on the reality and the chimera of the China market; Marilyn Young on the rhetoric of empire; and still other historians on geostrategic concerns like coaling stations and bases in the Pacific. Kristin Hoganson in an important recent interpretation disagrees, locating the origins of the war in a culture of "manliness" and male aggrandizement that reached an apogee in Teddy Roosevelt's somewhat frantic efforts to express his manhood.17 For my purposes this causality is overdetermined: markets, strategic calculation, and a culture of manliness marked continental expansion from the 1840s onward; meanwhile no single expansionist episode had a determined quality. If many Americans questioned armed expansion, hardly anyone questioned commercial expansion.18 Schumpeterian thought helps us also to understand empire, and particularly the American empire conceived as an archipelago of military bases. His understanding of imperialism departed entirely from Lenin's theory, or from any iron necessity linking capital and empire. Empires existed long before capitalism (indeed he thought they were largely ant.i.thetical to commerce), and they have their own dynamic-which is akin to a perpetualmotion machine, or George Kennan's famous metaphor of the Soviet empire as a wind-up mechanical toy car, which expanded in one direction until blocked, then flipped around and went off in another direction. Empire is also atavistic: forces set in motion for one purpose (say, war) become routinized just as they lose sight of their goals. For Schumpeter, imperialism "is the objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion"; a cla.s.s of professional warriors forms to carry out expansion, and once in place, they tend to continue in place. Elsewhere he refers to imperialism as a policy, that is, a choice, which when called into action keeps going long after the policy disappears or can even be remembered. It quickly becomes an atavism ("the survival of interest"), or something impelled by atavistic forces in a nation, like Prussian Junkers who outlive their agrarian usefulness and opt for imperial aggression. Or a policy decision taken in the "dim past" simply becomes the immanent but invisible and forgotten rationale for system maintenance, around which cl.u.s.ter a host of military and political interests and large numbers of people dependent on the continued functioning of specific parts of the system, with no one envisioning the whole.19 Thus American forces arrive in South Korea in September 1945 and remain there today, with next to no contemporary understanding of how or why they got there in the first place; or in 2005 every bigwig and thousands of ordinary people in Hawaii wrap their hopes and fears around a single aspect of a now-preeminent base that the United States put next to no effort into for over half a century, simply because Congress threatened to close a small part of Pearl Harbor's vast operations, and that will cost jobs (Congress lost, of course). Empire thus grows not in the soil of capitalism but in the daily grinding of bureaucratic gears and the military's beloved "standard operating procedures." Like Hartz, Schumpeter understood that America was the nation "least burdened with precapitalist [sic] elements, survivals, reminiscences"20 (and we have argued that California was the least burdened of all), but he did not reckon with the permanency and career utility of several hundred foreign bases.

Hegemony.

The work that brings all of these concerns together is Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation, which develops the role of technology and industry in commodifying land and labor and vastly intensifying upheavals and business cycles into a theory of production for profit in the ever-widening gyre of the world market, beginning (as with Braudel) with the emergence of modern long-distance trade in the sixteenth century. Polanyi merges the national with the international to explain the transformation of the European balance of power that prevailed for a century after 1815; that world system necessitated a hegemonic power (England), whose minimum function required a night watchman-like concern for the free flow of trade and convertible currencies, a lender and power of last resort who would keep the system together.

In place of the conventional narrative that sees World War I terminating the European balance of power, Polanyi argues that 1933 was the critical year-"the snapping of the golden thread brought a world revolution." When Great Britain went off the gold standard it signaled that it was no longer the power of last resort, the force holding the world economy together. London could no longer lead, and Was.h.i.+ngton was not yet ready. In the wake of global economic collapse each industrial nation withdrew from the system in its own idiosyncratic way-a New Order in Germany, a New Deal in Americafollowed by another world war and the rise to hegemony of the United States. Nothing remotely comparable to the effect of 1914, 1933, and 1939 on Great Britain has happened to threaten the continued global leaders.h.i.+p of the United States today, which is why the American Century continues apace.

The hegemonic power bursts forth initially with comprehensive superi ority in those things that count, like advanced technology, productivity, and finance, which gives it an awesome but brief period of complete dominanceperhaps for twenty-five years (the United Kingdom, 1815-40, the United States, 1945-70). It then has a much longer run as primus inter pares. It does not dominate like an empire: it leads as first among equals, preferably with a broad, multinational, consensual mandate. It writes the rules of the game, but collegially. It influences others through its authority, its goods, its example, its vision (every hegemonic power seeks to foster or impose its own domestic revolution), and through consultation, consensus, indirection, and the establishment of distinct outer limits on the behavior of its allies, its adversariesand itself. It has the burdens of last resort in the world economy. Hegemonic powers are militarily dominant at the beginning of their careers, and superior force locks in their advantages for the long term. But in normal times military force is a last resort, and its use is almost always a sign of some earlier failure. The question for the hegemonic power is how to establish and maintain legitimate global leaders.h.i.+p.

Preface.

i. Chirot (1986), 224. (Daniel Chirot calls this the fourth revolution, the third being chemicals and electricity. I think textiles, iron, steel and railways, and autos and ma.s.s production all had more transformative impact than chemicals and electricity, but I can see his point.) Willa Cather quoted in Commager (1950), 153-54.

z. Weekly Variety, March i8, 1996, p. 123.

3. For my critique of these terms see c.u.mings, "Rimspeak; or, the Discourse of the 'Pacific Rim,"' in Dirlik (1993), 29-50; see also Alexander Woodside, "The Asia-Pacific Idea as a Mobilization Myth," in Dirlik (1993),13-28; also McEvedy (1998), ix.

4. I published nothing related to this book until 1999, when I did a long paper on the American ascendancy" which appeared the following year in the British Journal of International Studies and in a shorter version in the Nation. These articles show that I did not antic.i.p.ate the recrudescence of unilateralism; my views about internationalism and expansionism had actually developed in the Reagan years, which involved what now seems to be a mild return to American nationalism and unilateralism. For another account predicting that the world was moving toward a broad multilateralism-even "governance without government"-see Hardt and Negri (2000), 13-14.

5. Gene Balsley (195o) in Rhodes (r999),193-94.

6. Schrag (1999), 27. George B. Leonard, later a leader of the Esalen Inst.i.tute, wrote in 1962 of the "migrating millions who vote with their wheels for California." Quoted in Schrag (1999), 28.

7. 'Just like the t.i.tle," Evans said, the script "was pure Chinese-n.o.body, I mean n.o.body, understood it." Evans in The Kid Stays in the Picture (Los Angeles: Woodland Films, 2002).

Chapter i. The Machine in the Garden.

i. Nugent (2001), 7; Fresonke (2003), i. About half of western historians think the West begins at the Mississippi or the Missouri, according to a recent survey, but the others say it starts from the eastern Great Plains or the foothills of the Rockies. Hine and Faragher (2ooo), to.

2. Fenton and Lawrence quoted in McWilliams (1946),181, 269; Wilson (195o), 4547; Wilson, "The Boys in the Back Room" (1940) quoted in Starr (1997), 287- 3. For this last point I am indebted to Kris Fresonke's masterful little book, West of Emerson.

4. Menand (2001), 6.

5. Bailyn, "Preface," Armitage and Bradd.i.c.k, "Introduction," and Armitage, "Three Concepts of Atlantic History," in Armitage and Bradd.i.c.k (2002), xvii-xix, 3, 11-15, 18.

6. Huntington (2004), xvii, 42-45.

7. Ibid., 305-8, arr.

8. Foucault (1972), 210.

9. Hodgson (1976), 113-14, 116-17; Mills (1956), 206-7.

to. LaFeber (1989), 9; Goetzmann (1966b), 94; Bryant (1947), 109-12; Tchen (1999), 29; Pletcher (2001), 9, 17; Varg (1983), 154-55.

11. Tchen (1999), 46-49, 56; Fairbank (1953), 226-27; Varg (1983), 156; Pletcher (200s), 15.

12. In Digby Baltzell's words, around 1900 these patricians "held the vast majority of positions at the very heart of national power, and set the styles in arts and letters." Baltzell (1964), 12.

13. Menand (2001), 7- 14. Quoted in Hunt (1987), 46.

15. Santayana (1967), 40-43, 59, 64; the point about forgetting is in a 1918 essay: Santayana (1967), 103. d.i.c.kens quoted in Varg (1983), 216; Commager (1950), 101. For a broader discussion of pragmatism see Louis Menand's excellent account (2001).

16. Hartz (1964), 9.

17. Hofstadter (1968), 447-48; Hartz (1964), 6, 9-10, ion, 13.

18. Hartz (1964), 3-22.

19. Hietala (1985), 1-2; Tocqueville (1840),1:193, 432.

20. Maclntyre (r98r), 2-3.

21. Santayana (1967), 128.

22. Wilde quoted in Seidensticker (2006), 202.

23. Arcadia was an isolated mountain kingdom in ancient Greece, and the Roman poet Virgil was probably the first to romanticize the agrarian life, as opposed to the city. Hanson (1996), ix-x.

24. Real estate boosters quoted in Brown (r995), 140.

25. Smith (1950), 123-24.

26. Reverend Smith quoted in Smith (1950), 132; Varg (1983), 220-22.

27. Williams (1973), 44, r42-64, 216; James quoted in Marx (1964), 353.

z8. Tocqueville (1840), 1:21; DeVoto (1952), 408. Pages 4o6-ii amount to a beautiful geographic poetry delineating the national s.p.a.ce of the United States.

z9. An unnamed Connecticut observer quoted by West in Milner et al. (1994), 131; Meinig (1993), 269-72.

30. Webb calls the 98th meridian "an inst.i.tutional fault ... running from middle Texas to Illinois or Dakota'; and "practically every inst.i.tution that was carried across it was either broken or remade or else greatly altered." Webb (1931), 8, 18. Others agreed that Turner's "frontier" thesis did not extend to the West but chose the Tooth meridian instead-see Stegner (1953), Viii and Reisner (1993),107 31. Lawrence, Studies in Cla.s.sicAmerican Literature, quoted in Marx (1964),145.

32. Marx (1964),13-15, 29, 69, 246-48.

33. Cronon (1991), xv1, 9-12.

34. Ibid., III-13.

35. Mailer (1968), 88; Cronon (1991), 208-11, 226-30.

36. Cronon (1991), 90-93, 307, 310; Frank Norris, The Pit (1903), quoted in Cronon (1991), 3.

37. U.S. Census data available at www.experts.about.com/e/m/ma/Madison (and the same, for Granville).

38. McMurtry (1997), 699.

39. William Morris Davis's 1915 map distinguished the Allegheny Plateau from the prairies and plains, in Meinig (1998), 311; on the Western Reserve and Granville, see Meinig (1993), 225, 228.

40. Elliott West, "American Frontier," in Milner et al. (1994), 124-25; Linklater (2002), 72-73, ,6o-66.

41. Rogin (1975),103; Linklater (2002), 72-73, 16o-66,175.

4z. Hine and Faragher (2000), 333.

43. Stegner (1953), 220-21; Smith (Y950),190; Slotkin (1992), 30; Limerick (1987), 125.

44. Nugent (2001),131-3z; Hine and Faragher (2000), 334-36; Linklater (2002), 228; Weigley (1967), 267. The ,6o-acre limit was finally dumped in 1982 for a standard six times higher. See Limerick (1987), 136.

45. Jehlen (1986), 9, 92, 131, 235.

46. Hine and Faragher (2000), 27; Thornton (1987), 23-32, 36-37; Braudel (1995), 1394-96. Russell Thornton's work contains close and careful comparisons of various estimates, and the reasoning behind his own. He interpolates his figures from scholars at odds over how many natives existed in North America above the Rio Grande at the time of the first encounters with whites, with estimates ranging widely between 900,000 and 56 million (the high figure is from Sale [1990], 315); see also Stannard (1992), Io-II; Nugent (2001), 23-24; Berger (1991), 28-9; and Todorov (1982),133. The most recent discussion of these numbers that I have found is in Mann (2005), 92-94, 130-33, who notes how much disagreement on the numbers remains among experts.

47. Stannard (1992), 33; Hine and Faragher (2000), 27; Kicza (2003), 176; Thornton (1987), 71-76; Karl W. Butzer in Conzen (1994), 45; Painter (1987), 163; Mather quoted, p. 75. If scholars differ over how many Indians existed in what became the United States around 1492, they don't differ much over how few remained just a century ago: 250,000 according to Hine and Faragher (25-27), 300,000 according to Nugent (23-24); Lowitt (1984) listed 246,834 Indians on reservations in 1891 (p. 122).

48. West in Milner et at. (1994), r25-26; on Michigan see Kolodny (1984), 131, 150, 154; Winthrop and Ma.s.sasoit quoted in Linklater (2002), 28-30, 44. Linklater points out that settlers in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa also declared that natives did not have any legal claim to land (p. 210).

49. West in in Milner et al. (1994),130.

50. Meinig (1998), 16o-6i.

51. Taylor (2006), ch. i and pa.s.sim; Raines quoted in Heizer (1971), 30; Limerick (1987), i88. The quarter-million figure is for overland transit before the Civil War and the railroads, and the number of Indian murders (362) is for 1840-60. In the same period whites killed 426 Indians. See Unruh (1979), xv, 9, 16o, 179, 185. For a sensitive essay on Olmsted's views, see Dawson and Brechin (1999), 183-85.

52. DeUoto (1942), 363-64; Brown in Milner et al. (1994),416; Mitch.e.l.l (1981), 243-44.

53. Webb (1931),138; Brown (1995), 87, 91- 54. Webb (1931), 67-68,169-71,177-79; Brown (1995), 97, 119, 373; Weigley (1967), 268.

55 DeUoto (1942), 249-50, 305, 5o6-7n. In a subsequent book, however, DeUoto was almost pioneering in finding a "tendency to write American history as if it were a function of white culture only," with "a dismaying amount ... written without regard to the Indians.. . [and] their diverse and always changing societies." See DeUoto (1952), xv.

56. White (1991), 5, 170, 497, 501-2.

57. The United States is always far out in front of any other advanced industrial nation in murders per capita. When compared with j.a.pan, the disparities become chasms. In 1998-2000, the United States had .04 murders per i,ooo people, ranking it with Uruguay and Bulgaria; England, France, Germany, and Italy were at o.i per thousand; in j.a.pan the figure was o.o, that is, statistically insignificant. (United Nations figures cited at www.nationmaster.com/cat/cri-crime.) Of course, no episode in American history, including the elimination or removal of Indians, compares to the German destruction of European Jewry or the ma.s.sacres of Armenians by Turks.

58. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Cla.s.sicAmerican Literature, quoted in Slotkin (1973), 2.

59. Slotkin (1973), 5, 18, 42-43, 52.

6o. Ibid., 162; Slotkin (1985), 53-54; Elliott (1970), 44; Todorov (1982), 49-50, 53.

61. Todorov (1982), 144.

62. Remington quoted in White (1968), 109; Townshend (1869), io6,148-49 63. Goldberg (1993), 150.

64. Baudet quoted in Rogin (1975), 8; Goldberg (1993),150; New York World, January 18, 1874, quoted in Slotkin (1992), 41.

65. Rogin (1975), 11; Francis X. Holbrook, "Come, Papillangi, Our Fires Are Lighted," in Barrow (1973), 112-25- 66. See David Grann, "The Lost City of Z," New Yorker (September 19, 2005), pp. 56-81; also McNeill (1983), 39; Mann (2005), 4-5.

67- Parrington quoted in Hofstadter (1968), 36m, 364.

68. "The Middle West," first published in 1901, in Turner (1920), 127-57; see also "Contributions of the West to American Democracy," first published in 1903, in Turner (1920), 235; "The West and American Ideals," first published in 1914, in Turner (1920), 27475.

69. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler in Farewell, My Lovely (1939), 103.

70. For example, Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel recently offered a return to Jeffersonian republicanism as a cure for the ills of American civil society. See Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's Disco ntent.America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 3-7, 124-33, 351.

71. George G. S. Murphy and Arnold Zellner, "Sequential Growth, the Labor SafetyValve Doctrine, and the Development of American Unionism," in Hofstadter and Lipset (1968), 207-9; Mokyr (1990), 4.

72. Nordlinger (1995), 51; Was.h.i.+ngton's address quoted, 50-51.

Chapter 2. "The Remote beyond Compare".

,. McPhee (1993), 18, 21-22, 105; see also the excellent historical maps in McEvedy (1998).

2. Arif Dirlik in Dirlik (1993), 5; Evelyn Hu-Dehart in Dirlik (1993), 252; Wolf (1982), 153.

3. David J. Weber, "The Spanish-Mexican Rim," in Milner et al. (1994), 47; McEvedy (1998), 40, 54.

4. Quoted in Polk (1991), 47; see also Wolf (1982), 131.

5. Bean (1968), 18; Starr (1990), 232. "California" is a word no one has nailed etymologically, but Carey McWilliams thought that it appeared first in the Song of Roland as "Califerne" and probably comes from the Persian term Kari-i farn, "mountain of paradise." McWilliams (1949), 3 6. Philbrick (2003), 3, 12; Weber in Milner et al. (1994), 49; McEvedy (1998), 34; Winchester (i99i), 83-91. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the first written usage of "Pacific Ocean" came in 1555: "The sayde sea cauled Pacc.u.m." In 1568 another author linked "the sea pacifick"to "the sea of Magellan."

7. Polk (1991), 122, 254.

8. Das.h.i.+ell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (New York: Vintage Books, [1929] 1989).

9. Bean (1968), 2o; Starr (1973), io; Morgan (1967), 34; McEvedy (1998), 56.

io. Heckrotte and Sweetkind (1999), 20-28,50; Polk (1991), 289-90, 326; Starr (1985), ii; Stegner (1953), 275, 423.