Accidental Historian

The State of the Blog 2013

I tend to put up some sort of State of the Blog post every year.  I usually do it in January, I think.  I also usually put up a bunch of grandiose plans that there’s no fucking way I’ll ever be able to actually carry out.

In truth, the blog isn’t really an important focus of mine.  Nobody pays me to do it.  Not that many people read it.  I just do it because I like writing and I don’t have a lot of outlets for writing these days.

So I don’t have a big State of the Blog this year.  I have five plans, such as they are:

1.  I’m going to do the After Tamerlane stuff.  Because it’s cool.

2.  I’d like to get back to the Byzantine Logic stuff.  I realized the other day that I haven’t done a proper Byzantine Logic post since before the move from Blogspot to Typepad, which is kind of crazy.

3.  1434 Fridays.  At least, I’d like to do 1434 Fridays at least three times a month.

4.  I’ve had an idea kicking around that I call “sketches.”  Basically, I get some interesting character sketches knocking about from time to time.  They’re usually short, single scenes of interaction between two or three characters.  I usually don’t have any intention of doing anything with the scene itself in a larger scheme.  I believe, though, that writing fiction is an act of empathy and sometimes a writer simply has to practice that empathy.  Sometimes it’s in the form of characters who occupy a whole series of novels.  Sometimes it’s in the form of characters who occupy a single page.

5.  I never finished A Distant, Dreadful Star.  This, I fear, is inexcusable.  Part of the problem is that I started writing it right before I bought the house.  Part of the problem is that I started writing it because I had a beginning but had no end.  It’s now sat dormant for nearly a year as far as writing is concerned.  It hasn’t been dormant in my mind, however, and I know exactly where the story has to go.

As such, feel free to read the first ten installments of A Distant, Dreadful Star.  The long lost (no, really, I wrote it back in March of 2012) 11th installment shall go up tomorrow.  For some reason I thought it would work better as the 12th installment and I needed to write another, more differenter installment first.  Looking back, I don’t think that’s the case.  With any sort of luck there will be a new installment every Wednesday until I finish.

Also, and I say this with a certain level of amazement, I’m really excited about this.  I was re-reading some bits that I haven’t looked at since I originally wrote them and there were several things that caused me to think, “Holy shit, I can actually write.”  I know that writers are supposed to hate everything that they wrote in the past because they’re never supposed to be satisfied.  I’ll admit that A Distant, Dreadful Star is far from perfect.  I’ll also admit that there are some parts that say exactly what I want them to say in exactly the way I want them to do it.

Sometimes you have to acknowledge the good is what I’m saying.

Repeating the Last Century, Part 4

I was reading The Communist Manifesto the other day, you know, as you do.  It occurred to me that Karl Marx’s historical reading of the nature of economics was spot on.  It also occurred to me that his conclusions of what had to happen as a result were somewhat less than spot on.  That should surprise no one, though.  We’re living on the back-end of the downfall of Communism as an actual, viable form of human governance, after all.

Still, there are parts of The Communist Manifesto that could have come from John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405.  That’s why we’re here to talk about my reading habits.  I was actually going to play a game where I quoted Marx and claimed that it was from Darwin and then said, “Nah, I’m just fuckin’ with you.”  But Marx used the word “bourgeoisie” nearly as often as Darwin uses extraneous commas, so I decided against it.  Also, he spoke of economic trends in the present tense, which would be a dead giveaway, at least for the five people who seem to frequent this blog and aren’t looking for evidence that Coldplay sucks.  So let’s do this in a more standardized way.

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Let’s talk Marxism.  Specifically, let’s talk Marxism as a critique of history:

Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way.  This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land.  This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

That, quite literally, could have come directly from the pages of Darwin’s book.  Don’t believe me?  Let’s take a look.

By the first half of the nineteenth century a high degree of economic integration had developed between North West Europe and the British Isles and North East America.  The world economy of the later nineteenth century was partially the consequence of extending the dense commercial networks of the North Atlantic basin to new parts of the globe: South America, parts of Africa, India, South East Asia, Australasia, and East Asia.  One of its distinguishing features was that, right across the world, the price not just of luxuries but of even quite common commodities (like food grains) was decided not by local or regional factors but by market forces on a global scale.[1]

Darwin points out that the world market was a result of globalization.  Marx points out that the world market is a bad thing due to the fact that it’s a product of people who intend to profit from the market costs.  Neither Marx nor Darwin was wrong.

That’s the funny thing about Communism/Marxism/Socialism/whatever you want to call it.  The base assumptions made by Karl Marx weren’t wrong.  We’ve spent the last century in a conflict between Communism and capitalism based on the conclusions drawn by those conclusions, though.  There’s been a great deal of wrong drawn in that space.  The reason for that wrong was simple: part of the wrong was based on Marx’s own conclusion.  Part of the wrong was based on the lack of willingness on the part of the free market capitalists to acknowledge any path to economic security other than their own.  Part of the wrong was based on a belief that there is a binary response to the human condition.

In the next post I shall discuss how there isn’t a binary response to this conflict between Communism and capitalism.  I shall also discuss how, at least in the context of the United States in the late 20th and early 21st Century, we’ve given up allowing that conversation.

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[1] John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 330.

Repeating the Last Century, Part 3

The difference between a good history course and a bad history course is simple.  In the good history courses students learn how to take disparate bits of information, pull them together, and come to a deeper understanding of what was happening in the world.  In the bad history courses students simply learn names, dates, and places with no connection.  In the truly terrible history courses students learn names, dates, and places with an ideological bent to convince them to buy into an ideology or patently false interpretation of reality.

This, for the record, is why you hear Evangelical Christians spout off about liberal schools indoctrinating children.  Evangelical Christians of the sort who worry about evil liberals and their agendas usually do so because they have an agenda themselves and can’t see anything outside of the framework of competing ideologies and force-fed interpretations of reality.  The idea of a good education and well-rounded students is an ideology, in that it is an ideology of instruction.  A good education producing well-rounded students does not and should not be an ideology of interpretation, however.  The simple fact is, though, that a well-rounded and knowledgeable student will most likely not take the blinkered reality of the zealot, which makes it appear to that blinkered zealot that there is a nefarious goal in mind.

This interplay of notions of how reality works is what drew me to the particular bits of John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 that occasioned these posts.  It is, in fact, a tale of convergence.

In the latter third of the book I hit a section called “Global Economics” that focused mostly on the British Empire and its system in the late 1800s, since that was the height of the empire upon which the Sun never set.  British thinking about money and globalization, then, dominated much of the world’s thinking about money and globalization.  All of that came together to produce this remarkable passage:

London’s size and wealth thus grew in sympathy with the surging growth of international trade.  Among its merchants and bankers,[1] it was an article of faith that what was good for London  was good for the world.  The idea of free trade and the open economy was adopted in Britain in the 1840s and ‘50s not just as a policy but as a total world-view, an ideology promoted with crusading passion.  It imagined a world in which peoples would be freed from their bondage to rulers by the flood tide of commerce.  Individual freedom and international trade would move forward together.  Free trade was regarded as the key to British economic success, and to the economic progress of the rest of the world. (The alternative – protection – was rejected politically in Britain before 1914, and its supporters were divided over what to protect.)  Its champions insisted that letting the market decided on what it made sense to produce was the most efficient way to use economic resources.[2]

Stop me if you’ve heard any of this recently, possibly in a contemporary and immediate context.  The fascinating thing about the bit that I quoted above is that it is still an economic stand made by proponents of free market capitalism and libertarianism today.  It’s also fascinating in the way that it’s an ideology that eats its own tail.

We think now of free market capitalism and the freedom that it entails in the minds of its supporters as the downside of the legacy of the Cold War.  As such, we think of it, discuss it, and argue about I in the context of that great ideological conflict of the 20th Century: the fight between capitalism and Communism.  However, if you put Darwin’s passage above in the proper historical context something leaps out immediately.  Britain adopted free market economics in the 1840s and ‘50s and it became at fully entrenched, unassailable position over the next thirty years.

Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848.  He wrote Das Kapital two decades later.  Marxism, then, arose as a counterpoint to the increasingly entrenched capitalistic free market system.  The reasons for this are pretty obvious, especially if you follow me through my two points of convergence.  I’d already realized we seem to be repeating history in a disturbingly similar way.  What threw me off was the way other people are seeing the same thing but from different perspectives.

The day after I read the bit about economics Fred Clark put up a post about Christianity Today’s objections to employee health care and compared it to the old Gilded Age notion of the company town.  Fred’s purposes for discussing the company town were different than John Darwin’s reasons for discussing British adherence to free market capitalism and my reasons to start thinking about Marxism and Communism but they all pointed in exactly the same direction.  The system only works if the people at the very top who control the conversation do so while exploiting the people at the bottom and not allowing them to point it out.

The latter half of the paragraph from After Tamerlane should, hopefully, draw the conclusion completely together.

Countries without capital or an industrial base should concentrate their efforts on the production of “staples”: the raw materials or foodstuffs for which a world demand existed.  They should use the income that their staples earned to buy the manufactures they needed, and to pay back the interest on the capital they borrowed – since staple production could expand only if there were railways and harbours to bring the goods to market.  Any other policy – for example building up industrial production behind a wall of tariffs – was not only inefficient (because industrial goods could be bought more cheaply abroad), it was also unjust.  It meant that the consumer was taxed in favour of those who had gained the production of tariffs, a political process that (so free-traders implied) was invariably corrupt.  Enlightened colonial rule should thus enforce free trade (as the British did in India), just as wise diplomacy should always encourage it.[3]

Consider the implications of the free market system as envisioned by 19th Century British capitalists.  Those “staples” were raw materials.  In some cases it was things like food or tea.  In most cases, though, it was things like cotton and silk that would then be sent elsewhere and then turned into textiles and sold back to the producers of the raw materials.

For the British this made perfect sense.  They had all the factories, after all, and manufactured goods are more expensive than raw materials and generally have a higher profit margin.  Part of the reason that manufactured goods are more expensive than raw materials, it’s important to note, is that manufactured goods include raw materials.  So the British were buying materials from their undeveloped colonies at price X and selling them back at price X + Y.  Moreover, they were also engaging in infrastructure improvements – mostly the building of railroads – that worked to their benefit.  Infrastructure improvements allowed the colonizers to move raw materials to port and bring manufactured goods back to the producers of the raw materials and also allowed them to quickly move troops around so a smaller number of British forces could be used to hold a larger area than if large, permanent garrisons were necessary.  All of this, then, could be billed to the colonized people under the guise of paying their rightful share for all of the civilization the British had gifted to them.

It should be blatantly obvious that the things the British were paying for in this system were far lower in price than the things they were getting paid for in return.  This doesn’t make any economic sense until you realize that the world’s primary source of capital at the time was London.  The Brits were more than happy to make loans to cover the difference at a reasonable interest rate.

The goal of British free market capitalists, in short, was to turn the entire world into a company store.

This was an untenable situation.  The British proponents of free market capitalism didn’t see it that way, but they were the isolated ones at the top.  They could afford to sit around in their splendid isolation and discuss how the economic situation that was best for them was also best for everyone else.

It wasn’t, for the record.  That’s why Marxism and then Communism began to gain traction at the same time.  It’s important to note, though, that Marxism was initially supposed to be a workers’ revolt in the already industrialized world.  It wasn’t until Trotsky and the Comintern that Communism took on the agricultural workers’ revolt that we think of today in places like Vietnam and Central America.  As such, it’s useful to consider another link that I ran across that very afternoon.

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal put a link up to a Foreign Policy article with the snarky description, “Charles Emmerson makes case at Foreign Policy that world in 2013 eerily similar to world in 1913. True, the Czar and the Kaiser have been restless of late, and the Entente is irresolute.”

Emmerson offers this great summation of what I was thinking at the time: “In many ways, the world of 1913, the last year before the Great War, seems not so much the world of 100 years ago as the world of today, curiously refracted through time. It is impossible to look at it without an uncanny feeling of recognition, telescoping a century into the blink of an eye. But can peering back into the world of our great-grandparents really help us understand the world we live in today?”

Yes.  Yes it can.  And we’ve got a ways to go.

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[1]One thing that did annoy the fuck out of me whilst re-reading the book was the apparent lack of the services of a good copy editor.  Darwin apparently has some sort of written Tourettes that compels him to splatter commas all over the place.  That might be a British thing, I suppose, but I’ve read a few British historians in my day and don’t remember seeing that many egregious commas.  John Julius Norwich, for one, seemed to know where to put his commas.  Each page also seemed to have at least one or two minor but obvious grammatical errors or missing words or something similar.  It gave me a sad.

[2] John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 335.

[3]Ibid., 335-336.

Repeating the Last Century, Part 2

[Note: I changed the name of this series, as the first name I came up with was awful.  This one isn't all that much better, but it doesn't make me cringe.  So, hey!]

There’s a reason I decided to start my exploration of John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 with a comparison to Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory.  Well, there are two.  The first is that the whole 1421 is fairly well-tread ground ‘round these here parts and John Darwin also brought China up since, y’know, it was kind of important in Eurasian history.  The second is because I truly enjoy mocking Gavin Menzies and his 1421 theory.  John Darwin actually took down both the 1421 theory and one of the main supports upon which the subsequent 1434 theory was built in the space of about three paragraphs.  This was done unintentionally, though, as Darwin’s book doesn’t mention Gavin Menzies at all.

For those who happened to stumble onto this blog recently and have no idea what the 1421 theory is, I suppose I should offer an explanation.  Basically, a retired British naval officer with no formal training in history got it into his head that the Chinese discovered America in 1421.  This theory was based on some pretty specious evidence and then supported by a great deal of research that depended on the theory being true.  At its core, though, the 1421 theory was based on one absolutely accurate bit of historical truth: in the early 1400s the Chinese emperor sent magnificent treasure fleets all the fuck over the place under a eunuch named Cheng-ho.

I mentioned in the first post on this topic that there are basically two incorrect ways of looking at the history of the last couple centuries.  The first is one of inevitable Western supremacy over the globe.  The second is to look at the West as a rapacious horde that set upon well-developed or even superior cultures in other parts of the world and attempted to destroy them.  The former type of history tends to make incorrect assertions about the quality of Western civilization.  The latter type of history tends to go too far in the opposite direction and make untenable claims about the superiority of the colonized over the colonizers in everything except technology and military might.

Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory and its follow-on theory that China actually started the Renaissance in 1434 are near-perfect examples of fantastical histories that make untenable claims to support and anti-colonial stance.  The claims themselves are unsupportable without making the most generous possible assumptions about other, seemingly related discoveries.  They also completely ignore the standard scholarship about how the history of China, Europe, and the New World played out.  More importantly, at least as far as the 1421 theory is concerned, the claims are so much vapor.  We know that Europeans made it to the New World and began to exploit its resources from 1492 on.  Even if the Chinese did discover the New World in 1421 they did nothing with it.  Even if Cheng-ho did discover the west coast of North America this would not put him on the same level as Christopher Columbus or John Cabot.  It would put him on the level of the Vikings who planted an unsuccessful colony on Nova Scotia a couple centuries before Columbus.  It would, in short, be an interesting historical footnote.

The whole idea, though, doesn’t actually do anything to help with Menzies’ central theory that China was better than Europe.  Rather, the idea mocks that notion, since it operates under the implicit assumption that the Western notion of progress and success is the correct framing.  Ergo, Menzies makes the assumption that since the 15th Century was the Age of Exploration in Western history then China must have been exploring even more, even better, and even earlier.  Anything else, according to this formulation, is an implicit admission that Chinese culture was inferior to European culture.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The Chinese Empire at the time of Menzies’ supposed 1421 voyage was undergoing a drastic change that was well within the scope of what China had been for most of the previous millennia and would be well within the scope of what China would be for the next four centuries.

Let’s let John Darwin offer the explanation:

The early phase of Ming rule in China between 1368 (when the dynasty began) and the 1430s had seen the forceful reassertion of a distinctly Chinese political and cultural tradition after the long interlude of alien rule under the Mongol Yuan.  The early Ming emperors reinvigorated the bureaucratic state and the examination system on which it rested.  They swept away the chief ministers of the previous regime and created a personal absolutism.  They proclaimed devotion to Confucian orthodoxy, and fostered the collection and publication of Confucian texts.  In 1420 Peking was reestablished as the imperial capital, once the completion of the Grand Canal assured regular supplies from the great grain-basket of the Yangtze valley.  In all these ways the Ming were the real founders of the system of government that lasted in China until the revolution of 1911.  Their reaffirmation of Confucian cultural supremacy lasted almost as long.[1]

That’s a lot of stuff for the emperors to be working on at the same time they were supposedly sending fleets to discover the Americas and then destroying all of the records.  This also highlights the strength of the Chinese system.  China, at its core, was a stable, self-sufficient empire.  With the exception of the occasional worries over Korea, Japan, or Vietnam, China was rarely overly threatened by a neighboring external force.  The Mongols were the only conquerors that China knew for well over a millennia.

Consider the geography of China.  Once the borders of the Chinese empire were defined they were pretty much the same as what we think of today when we think of China.  On the eastern edge was the ocean.  On the southern edge was the jungle and small, not particularly threatening kingdoms of Indochina.  On the southwestern edge and the west there were formidable geographical barriers keeping China separated from the next great basin of civilization in India.  To the north was Mongolia and the doorstep to the vast, nearly empty steppes.  There was, in short, nowhere for China to go if it wanted to expand.  Since almost the whole of the known hospitable lands were already under the control of the imperial power there was also no struggle of small kingdoms to ignite the desires of would-be world conquerors.  China instead created their bureaucratic civil service and set out to make themselves into the most stable and long-running civilization in world history.  Only ancient Egypt could compete.

Western history has traditionally interpreted Chinese stability as a form of cultural stagnancy.  This could not be further from the truth, as the other Asian cultures looked to China with both envy and awe and often attempted to duplicate Chinese systems and successes in their own lands.  European travelers to China in the period before Western colonization began in earnest were similarly overawed by the greatness that was China.

Still, there was the bit about the Mongol conquest to consider.  It’s important to realize, though, that China changed the Mongols far more than the Mongols changed China.  Such was the strength of Chinese culture that the interlude under the Mongol thumb was more of an aberration and slight readjustment of society.  As such, when the Ming came to power in 1368 their goal was not to prove their awesomeness by conquering the world, but to reassert the old Chinese way of doing things.  In fact, let’s see what Darwin has to say about it.

Ming rule represented a vehement reaction against what was seen by its original supporters as the corruption, oppression and overtaxation of the Mongol Yuan.  In deference to Confucian beliefs, the Ming emperors embraced an agrarian ideology in which land was true wealth, and wealth was anchored in social obligations both upward and downward.  Social order and cultural cohesion, the vital conditions of imperial stability, were locked into the system of agrarian production on whose food payments and land taxes dynastic authority depended.[2]

China, in short, was primarily inward looking during the period of the early 1400s.  That still doesn’t explain the fact that there were, in fact, voyages of vast treasure fleets under one of the Ming emperors.  Again I shall let Darwin offer an explanation.

Ming diplomacy was intended to secure the external conditions for internal stability.  From the point of view, the famous voyages dispatched by the emperor Yung-lo around the Indian Ocean under the eunuch Cheng-ho were an aberration, prompted perhaps by fear of attack by Tamerlane and his successors.[3]

I shall pause here and point out a few things.  First, we know that there were treasure fleets under Yung-lo.  We also know that they were only really dispatched around the Indian Ocean.  Those voyages are all the records we have.  Menzies took those voyages and offered a fanciful notion that they managed to make it all around the globe and discovered the Americas over half a century before Columbus’ voyage.

Menzies’ theory makes little sense, however.  China was not an easttward-looking empire in the early 1400s.  They were looking west, south, and north.  The Ming Dynasty was still relatively fresh and looking to reassert itself.  Exploration and adventurism wasn’t the sort of thing that would cement their power in the agrarian, inward-looking Chinese system.

Darwin’s bit about Tamerlane, in fact, offers the most plausible explanation for why the Chinese treasure fleets might have existed at all and why they would necessarily focus on the Indian Ocean.  Remember that the Ming had just thrown off the Yuan.  The Yuan were alien monarchs put in place by foreign conquest under the Mongols.  The Timurids under Tamerlane appeared to be the true heirs to the Mongol legacy of Gengis and Kublai Khan would have been just as terrifying a specter to the new Chinese emperors as they were to the Middle Eastern and European rulers who had just barely beaten back the Mongol hordes.  These fears would play out in the Indian subcontinent, where Tamerlane's heirs created the Mughal Empire, which would last in one form or another for over three centuries.

It’s also important to consider the exact nature of the particular emperor who sent the treasure fleets out.  Further, we must consider the aftermath.  Again we look to John Darwin.

Yung-lo, the “second founder”, who reigned from 1403 to 1424, was an exceptionally determined and aggressive monarch.  His naval imperialism, the protracted effort to incorporate Vietnam into his empire, and his military drive against the Inner Asian nomads may all have been part of an abortive strategy to assert China’s primacy throughout East Asia.  But the strain was too great.  His successors adopted a drastic alternative.  The adventure in sea power was quickly abandoned.  Private overseas travel and trade were forbidden.  And to secure North China against invasion from the steppe, or unwelcome contact with its nomads, they preferred to rely not on military expeditions but on the Great Wall.[4]

This doesn’t completely negate the 1421 theory, but it does call the notion itself into question.  It certainly puts the kibosh on the notion of the subsequent 1434 theory, though.

As such, consider this a branching off.  I will be working on two separate sets of posts.  The former will stay in the 1400s in China so I can mock Gavin Menzies and his 1434 theory some more.  The latter will jump forward some four and a half centuries so that we can look with John Darwin into how the world we live in today is simply walking back across the same ground as the world of a century ago.

Why?  Because it’s been a while since I’ve written about history.  It’s also been a while since I’ve decided to undertake a series of posts that there’s no freaking way I could possibly complete.  Let’s see if this is any different…

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[1]John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 87.

[2]Ibid.

[3]Ibid., 88.

[4]Ibid.

Repeating the Last Century, Part 1

History is a complicated subject.  There’s really no way to get around that fact.  The problem, though, is that most people think that history is really, really simple.  Everyone took history in school, after all.  The history they took was just a collection of names and dates and places and all anyone had to do was remember who did what on which day.  Simple, right?

Names and dates and places and important battles are easy to remember and put into a multiple choice test.  Knowing names and dates and places, however, isn’t what history is about.  The point of the study of history is to figure out why a particular person was in a particular place to fight a particular battle or make a certain discovery or whatever.  That particular bit of understanding tends to be rather involved and it’s why there are a lot of people out there who can write books extending to several hundred pages about things most people can’t be arsed to read even an article abstract on.

We know a great deal about history, though, because of all of those historians who spend their days writing about crap that most people don’t care to know or understand.  The simple truth is, in fact, that although we don’t and can’t know everything there is to know about history, there’s very little out there that can completely re-write the history books.  This is why when some kook comes out with a new book about how so-and-so did such-and-such and there’s been a gigantic cover-up real historians shrug and then go on with their business.  It’s self-evident to actual historians that such a thing isn’t possible, so they tend to ignore it.

It is, in fact, trivially easy to disprove the kooks in most cases.  The problem is, though, that it requires an assertion of historical knowledge that most historians have or will readily accept but that isn’t exactly common knowledge amongst non-historians.  It’s much easier, really, to say, “Yeah, that’s not how that worked,” than it is to actually explain why it is that it didn’t work that way.  The difference in effort, too, explains part of the reason why trained historians don’t spend a lot of time debunking the kooky theory.  They just go back to their real interest, which is incrementally changing the history books to incorporate new knowledge and remove outdated theories based on our understanding of the world before that knowledge came to light.

There is one way that historians end up rewriting history books, however.  It’s not about pulling new information out of the ether.  It’s not about making some mind blowing discovery that negates everything we thought we knew before.  It’s about taking what we already knew and looking at it from a different perspective.  Historians do that all the time.

One of the most magnificent examples of re-writing our understanding of history came out in 2008.  English historian John Darwin published a massive tome called After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405.  I actually picked up a copy of the book back in the summer or fall of 2008 because the book looked fascinating.  His goal, as the subtitle suggests, was to break down the history of global empire for the previous six centuries.  He did so in just over five hundred pages, which means that the book is both densely packed with information and argument and shallow in how deeply it deals with the background information behind any single idea or argument.  In short, it’s the sort of book that only a historian can truly appreciate, since it requires a deep underlying understanding of many things.

I first read the book shortly after I bought it and I remembered appreciating it but not getting too much out of it beyond an appreciation for what Darwin’s arguments were.  I pulled it out again well over a month ago and started re-reading it, this time much more slowly than in the past.  The second time around I think I managed to appreciate just how truly magnificent and breathtaking the book is in its breadth and scope.

Darwin’s argument, basically, is that traditional western interpretations of history are wrong in that they’re written with a certain air of inevitability and cultural superiority.  This is truly important, since we’re sitting on the back end of the legacy of European colonialism and we’re still dealing with the fallout of that legacy.  More importantly, though, we’re still dealing with the ingrained cultural notions that are the inevitable outcome of that colonial ideal.  Europeans and Americans still function under the misapprehension that there’s something inherently superior in Caucasian culture and genetic makeup when compared to non-Caucasian culture and genetics.

Darwin’s work also butts up against the most common non-Western notions of history.  Since Westerners had an understandable tendency to attempt to erase the history and culture of their colonial possessions and replace it with their own, supposedly superior, culture and history, we do have pretty wide gaps in the historical records of the people colonized by Westerners.  Those gaps have been subsequently filled in by partisans who have tried to play up their culture and downplay or outright villainize the involvement of Europeans.  Interestingly enough, though, in many cases these histories either implicitly accept Western framing of the notion of history or attempt to completely obliterate Western history in an attempt to de-legitimatize Western historians.  Both approaches are highly flawed and lead to conclusions that are far from accurate.

This time around I was most fascinated by Darwin’s treatment of world history from 1880 or so through the early days of the Cold War.  I realized while rereading the book that we seem to be basically replaying large parts of world history in the years leading up the World War I.[1]  His arguments brought the world of today into greater focus.

As such, consider this the introduction of a series on John Darwin’s magnificent work and what it means to genuinely overturn standard notions of history.  Before I get to the 1800s, however, I feel it’s a good idea to make a baseline comparison between Darwin and someone else who thought he’d overturn all of history as we know it.  That’s right, we’re going to go look at Gavin Menzies.

Hooray!

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[1]Up to a certain point.  The geopolitical realities of the world in 2012 are far, far different from those of 1912.  The United States has no military or economic peer and there is no uneasy détente between equally balanced European powers who have their claws dug into colonies all over the world.  I do not, in short, expect that we’ll end up plunging into World War III at any point in the near future.  That said, it’s fascinating to see how people talk about the world today and compare it to how they talked about the world a century in the past.