Immanuel Wallerstein in the world press

Since there were 99 articles over the last 10 years in the Reuters archive
(with a real flood of articles after 1999) I really had to perform a
selection and take only articles dealing with Wallerstein and 'world system'
(any variations). From the 23 chosen articles I finally selected these
following

Enjoy the reading

Arno Tausch

07Nov2000 INDIA: The roots of suspense. 
RAJAt KAnta Ray
Light reading is an essential requirement of the fast moving world of today.
But if we pause for a while, and ponder the changing nature of the thriller,
matters of deeper historical import will spring to the eye. The roots of
suspense have changed dramatically in the last hundred years and more, and
all this is tied up with a series of transformations in what Immanuel
Wallerstein calls `the modern world system'.
What is the most obvious thing about the changing nature of the novel of
suspense? Till almost yesterday, the dominant form of entertainment was the
spy story. It easily dominated the world market in light fiction from the
1950s through the 1980s. But it had not always been so dominant.
Not that there hadn't been any spy story before this. The world's most
stunning spy story was written soon after the First World War. E Philips
Openheim wrote The Great Impersonation with Anglo-German rivalry at the
outbreak of the war of 1914 as the background of his classic spy thriller.
But this was not at the time the dominant form of light reading. I am
speaking roughly of the inter-war period. What was, in fact, the most
important form of entertainment then? There can be no doubt about the
answer. It was the detective story.
But the detective story itself is not very old. The novels of Wilkie Collins
(Woman in White in particular) and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe (Murders
in the Rue Morgue for instance) and the French novel by Emile Gaboriall
entitled The Widow Lerouge showed the way to the detective story in course
of the nineteenth century, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made it the most
popular form of entertainment with his stories of Sherlock Holmes in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century. And then Agatha Christie introduced
that other character in the 1920's - Hercule Poirot. The most startling of
her detective thrillers - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - was written around
the time of Openheim's The Great Impersonation, and is well remembered even
today. However, the heyday of the detective story is over. Children still
read Agatha Christie, but how many remember her distinguished
contemporaries, such as Dorothy Sayers, John Dickson Carr or Raymond
Chandler?
One might say, then, that the detective story dominated the world market
between the 1890s and 1940s and then it gave way to the spy story, which has
been going strong since the 1950s. But what was there before the detective
story in the way of light entertainment and suspense? Undoubtedly it was the
adventure story. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swifts
Gulliver's Travels presaged the genre. And then there were the all time
children's adventure stories of the nineteenth century - Robert Louis
Stevenson's Treasure Island, Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days,
H Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. Parents, too, read these tales with
equal pleasure even now. Yet how many today remember the greatest tale of
detection ever, which is indisputably E C Bentley's Trent's Last Case? Or
for that matter the most marvellous of all spy stories, Ophenheim's The
Great Impersonation?
What is evident, however, is the world of difference between the adventure
story and the detective story, and then again, between the detective story
and the spy story. They all belong to the common genre of thrillers, but the
sources of suspense are markedly different. The adventurer, the detective
and the spy, all bear the marks of a changing environment.
Therein lies the key to the shifting roots of suspense. Let us get back to
the theme of the modern world system. What produced this system was the
great geographical explorations. Europe expanded outwards and colonised the
world. It is not possible to imagine Treasure Island without the great naval
voyages and the age of piracy. But slowly Europe graduated from piracy to a
more organised system of plunder, both within and without. The result was
the rise of industrial societies, which were anonymous, individualistic and
impersonal. A world lurking with secret violence produced in due course the
man who detected the perpetrator of anonymous crime. The detective story
replaced the adventure story in due course.
What, then, produced the spy story? It probably had something to do with the
political changes in the modern world system in course of the twentieth
century. The world polarised, at first between the Axis and the Allies, and
then between the Soviet Bloc and the West. The world wide rivalries and the
associated cloak and dagger provided a congenial context for the novel of
espionage. And then the Soviet Union collapsed suddenly at the beginning of
the 1990's. The professional writer of spy thrillers was hard put to it to
write a story that would sell. It is too early to predict the demise of the
spy story, nor is it possible at the moment to envisage what will replace
it. But obviously our entertainment derives from the manner in which the
world is constructed at any given moment.
The Marxist who has capitalism as the bee in his bonnet will say that there
is nothing unexpected in all this and that it is somehow connected with the
development of capitalism in the modern world. Maybe. But then, the colonial
expansion, the industrial revolution and the bipolarisation of power blocs
were different moments in the unfolding of the world's destiny and they have
all left their imprint on our light entertainment.
(c)2000 Business Standard Ltd. 
Sources:BUSINESS STANDARD 07/11/2000 P11 
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22Mar2000 USA: The Crisis of U.S. Hegemony and the Black Liberation
Movement.(Review) (book review). 
By Oden, Robert Stanley.
Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in
the American Century. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
IN ATTEMPTING TO ASSESS THE PROSPECTS FOR AN EGALITARIAN SOCIAL
TRANSFORMAtion in the U.S. and indeed in the world, one is immediately
challenged by the complexity and enormity of the proposition. Seeking to
transform the capitalist world-economic system has been the expression of
the "Old Left" and the "New Left" since the beginning of the 20th century.
As we embark upon a new century, the theorizing and practice of Seeking an
egalitarian social transformation seem more formidable than ever.
Attaining that level of social transformation requires insightful analysis
of the past, particularly of social movements. Challenges to the capitalist
world-economy have occurred primarily through social movements of the Left.
The trajectory of social movements and their attempts to recast existing
social and economic hierarchies into a cooperative, socialistic culture that
privileges people over profit can be examined in several ways. One is to
look at how class relations and forces of production have changed over time
and to position the struggle for working-class democracy as the fulcrum of
social change as it relates to the productive processes of capitalism.
Operationalizing the class struggle as the primary lens through which to
analyze the social transformation of capitalist relations of production is
the paradigm of Marxist analysis for revolutionary change. Race is another
dimension that has affected the direction of social movements for social
transformation.
Theories of class as they relate to social transformation are well
documented. The use of race or a combination of both categories, however,
has been undertheorized in the sociological and political literature in
relation to social movements for economic and social transformation. In
short, few social and political commentators have analyzed the intersection
of race and the class struggle in the U.S. Dr. Rod Bush's recent book, We
Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American
Century, is therefore a significant contribution. The book provides an
analytic framework for the tendencies of Black nationalism that
significantly affected U.S. and international race relations. It examines
the relationship of capital accumulation to the process of understanding the
nature, scope, and prospects for Black liberation in the U.S. Finally, it
provides a framework for Black radicals, as well as progressives and
radicals from all communities, to understand the complex underpinnings of
U.S. racia l and economic hegemony.
Bush's theoretical framework for understanding the race and class dimensions
of the Black liberation struggle in the U.S. is derived from world-systems
theory, formulated by Immanuel Wallerstein (1979, 1983). This theory
conceptualizes and historicizes capitalism within a global economic
framework and positions the world-economy in a hierarchy with core,
semiperipheral, and peripheral states. The core states are the highly
industrialized, capital-intensive, and high-technology ones; the
lesser-developed industrialized states are in the semiperiphery; and the
underdeveloped states, primarily in the Third World, are located in the
peripheral zone. This global hierarchy has class and race distinctions.
These zones are reproduced within states in the form of class and race
stratification. Bush effectively utilizes world-systems theory to situate
the race and class struggle in the U.S.
Bush's theoretical framework draws upon Gramscian insights when he assesses
the nature of U.S. hegemony. He argues that the momentous events of
1968-including the French May, Prague Spring, the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, the Tet Offensive, insurgent political movements in the U.S.,
and other similar actions-represented a decisive moment in the antisystemic
movements of the Left. He contends that the U.S. assumed hegemony over the
world system at the end of World War II, but the events of 1968 demonstrated
that a strong anti-hegemonic bloc had formed to challenge U.S. imperial
designs. The oil embargo and accompanying economic events, including the
shift of world capital to Japan and Germany, ended the "American Century."
By 1989, much had changed in the geopolitical landscape, with the
transformation of state socialism into market economies in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe. In addition, social movements in the U.S., particularly
the Black liberation movement, had been brutally repressed (Newton, 1996;
O'Reilly et al., 1989). Within the U.S., a conservative reaction and
response to the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s was the initiation
of a racial project (Omi and Winant, 1986). The Left's response to
intellectual and political assertions of a Black and Latino underclass, one
that is pathologically structured into the periphery of the U.S. economic
system, was muted and fragmented. According to Bush (p. 27), however, "1989
in the United States is a continuation of 1968, as indeed it was on a world
scale. The revolutionary rhetoric of the 1960s is the reality of the 1990s."
Moreover,
The systems of power that were relatively entrenched and secure in the
1960s, and that proved their security with the largess with which they
responded to some of the demands of the insurgents, are much less strong in
the 1990s. The mature global liberalism of a hegemonic world power has given
way to a mean-spirited conservatism on the one hand and a Janus-faced
neoliberalism on the other (p. 27).
Bush argues that the contradiction of wealth and poverty has been
exacerbated by the increased mechanization of production, creating massive
joblessness. He points to the racial and cultural clashes of the 1990s
(beginning with the rebellion in Los Angeles following the Rodney King
verdict, through the events of Bensonhurst, Howard Beach, and Crown Heights,
as well as the Million Man March in Washington, D.C.) as events that
symbolize the widening of economic and racial contradictions. Within this
context, it is "the broadening and deepening of the capitalist process and
not its weakening that sharpens the contradictions of the system and will
create the social condition that will make fundamental social transformation
possible" (Bush, p. 29). Key considerations are the worldwide restructuring
of production processes, labor markets, and labor forces, and the ongoing
broadening and deepening of capitalist processes in our society and
globally. By connecting the economic cycles of capitalist accumulation on a
global scale, Bush is able to interpret the trajectory and dynamics of the
political and social movement history of African Americans in the 20th
century.
In his "Introduction," Bush challenges the left/liberal/social democrats for
de-emphasizing race-specific solutions in mobilizing the Left around
societal transformation. He dismisses William Julius Wilson's (1978, 1987)
notion that race, as a theoretical and practical concept, is disruptive to
transformative social struggles. The author argues convincingly against
Wilson and others' contention that race has declined as a significant factor
determining the quality of one's life and that an economic underclass has
unrelentingly emerged due to economic shifts, social isolation, and social
dislocation. Bush asserts:
The liberal/left/social democratic attack on the Black Power movement and
the elaboration of the notion of a behaviorally defined "underclass" reveal
a particular pattern in class analysis that cripples rather than strengthens
the attack on the structural inequality deeply embedded in the capitalist
system (p. 11).
This underlying critique is that these forces have embraced liberal
universalism, atop-down formulation that discredits movements from below,
such as the Black Power or Black Liberation movements. According to Bush,
true universalism can only be constructed from the bottom-up. Liberal
universalism is only a formula for a return to the status quo ante, circa
1965, the very status quo against which the Black Power revolt in the 1960s
was directed (p. 10).
Bush is upset not only by their opposition to calls for Black Power, but
also by resistance from "liberal and left intellectuals and organizations to
the rise of a militant quasi-nationalist ideology among Black activists and
in Black communities around the country" (p. 11).
The "structural context" for the attack on Black Power, Bush contends, was
U.S. hegemony, which afforded an expansion of political, economic, and
social concessions to the left-liberal establishment and an emergent Black
middle class. Black Power advocates were targeted ideologically and
militarily because of their antisystemic positions:
The radical section of the Black Power movement potentially constituted the
most effective challenge to the hegemony of the ruling coalition in the
post-World War II period (which by the late 1960s very definitely included
some leaders of the labor movement and sought to incorporate members of the
moderate civil rights establishment as well) (p. 12).
Bush's study focuses on social movements emanating from the Black community
in the U.S. that had traditionally struggled for "self-determination or the
transformation of America into a truly egalitarian society" (p. 55). These
social movements brought militant, antisystemic ideologies and praxis to
Black liberation. According to Bush, scholars have misunderstood these
movements because of the nationalistic consciousness encompassing the
movement. This "specificity" of nationalist consciousness runs deep and is
rooted in the struggle of the Black working class and lower economic strata
of the Black community. Bush skillfully links Black social movements to
antisystemic movements using theoretical frameworks developed by Arrighi,
Hopkins, and Wallerstein that connect social structure with social
movements. Wallerstein (1979:215) recognizes two types of antisystemic
movements: social movements organized around "class" and the national
movement around "nation" or people.
Capitalist strategies of relocating certain production processes to
peripheral zones contributed "to the rise of nationalist and national
liberation movements fighting for independence and sometimes also for
socialism" (Bush, p. 60). The increasing peripheralization of Africa, Asia,
and Latin America shifted the locus of conflict to "the masses of the third
world and ruling classes of the core zone and their subaltern allies in the
third world" (p. 61). For Bush, "people formation" is an integral part of
class formation. Because people relate to each other within the division of
labor primarily through ethnicity, multiracial equality is imperative. Bush
thus views the study of Black nationalists and the Black Power movements as
essential, since these movements have historically incorporated antisystemic
approaches and have been the center of antisystemic movements in the U.S.
Bush's exploration of Black nationalist movements in the U.S. connects them
with changes in the world order. The third chapter deals with the W.E.B. Du
Bois Booker T. Washington conflict as a focus for African American social
movements during the "age of imperialism," from the late 1800s to World War
I. Chapter 4011 the "Deepening and Blackening of American Radicalism"
extends the analysis from the World War I period up to 1930. Bush next looks
at the "Recomposition of the White-Black Alliance" that took place between
the Great Depression and World War II. The following chapters are periodized
in terms of the "American Century," characterized by labor peace, hegemony,
and civil rights, and the "Crisis of U.S. Hegemony," which witnessed the
transformation from civil rights to Black liberation.
This history includes a discussion of the impact of the Garvey movement and
organizations such as the African Blood Brotherhood, as well as the
influence of the Communist Party on the Black movement in the 1960s and
beyond. The interplay between the Communist Party and Black intellectuals in
Harlem and elsewhere is explored. Interestingly, the popularity of the
Garvey movement and other Black nationalist formations among working people
compelled the Third International to pursue the "Negro Question" in the U.S.
During the abbreviated "American Century" of U.S. hegemony, Black
nationalism reasserted itself through the Nation of Islam, especially with
the emergence of Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Movement was spawned.
Organizations like the Black Panther Party are credited with continuing the
ideological and political direction of revolutionary Black nationalism
formulated by Malcolm X. In the final period discussed, 1973 to the present,
U.S. hegemony is in crisis. Bush's insights into and information about the
Black movement during these historical periods is invaluable. By situating
the Black movement in the U.S within the economic and political conditions
of world capitalism, these movements come to life.
The final chapter, "The Future of Black Liberation," discusses the demise of
revolutionary Black organizations and the ascendancy of a more conservative
Black nationalist voice. These voices, Bush contends, "have claimed the
mantle of leadership in the Black community because they correctly
identified and acted on some of the internal barriers to Black success and
unity" (p. 233). Conservative expressions of Black nationalists today
emphasize "responsibility, self-respect, Black pride, and respect for one
another" (p. 233). Despite a rhetorical militancy, they have lacked
substantive programs and strategies capable of challenging white capitalist
hegemony and domination. Theirs is a plea for inclusion into the system and
a strategy for increasing the competitive position of some Blacks within
that system. As Bush points out:
The ascendancy of conservative nationalists and conservative white racists
in the political arena in the 1990s pushed the so-called culture wars to the
front pages of public discourse about race, while the systemic racism that
is the heart of the U.S. social, economic, and ideological structure
proceeded without significant critique except from the radical fringe (p.
234).
For Bush, the culture wars raging within the U.S. and elsewhere are a
symptom of the structural crisis capitalism has entered, which over the next
50 to 75 years will bring an end to capitalism as we know it. "Growth of the
third world within most of the core zones of the capitalist world-economy
indicates a fundamental demographic transformation that will deplete capital
of the reserves it has historically used to add new sources of cheap labor
to the workforce" (p. 240). Evidence of an erosion in capital's hegemony can
be seen in such dramatic examples as the disruption of the World Trade
Organization's proceedings in Seattle at the end of 1999. This disruption of
policy formation of trade agreements was organized by a cross-section of
working-class organizations represented by labor unions and environmental
groups. That mobilization's significance was its cross-class composition in
opposing global capital. Also significant was the absence, in numbers, of
Black participants, and other people of color (Mart [acute(i)]nez, 2000),
which illustrates the need for a Black strategy that encompasses the
capitalist world-economy and the global implications of trade policies as
major obstacles to achieving Black liberation in the U.S. Bush points to the
emergence of the Black Radical Congress in June 1998 in Chicago as a
positive sign of a Black radical response to the political conservatism of
the present epoch.
Bush stresses that a radical voice must appear in the Black community to
redirect the ideological and political trajectory of the Black movement in
the 21st century, and "continue to play a vanguard role in the United
States, as was indicated by the promise of the Black Panther Party" (p.
244). Nonetheless, he ultimately argues for a "broad inclusiveness among
movements for equality and social justice. There is a need to coordinate
among the various groups, but each group has a right to its own autonomy"
(p. 243). Therefore, radical Black nationalists must join with other social
movements for a global movement of egalitarian social transformation. An
emerging sentiment toward this position is evidenced by the actions in
Seattle and elsewhere. In connecting the local with the global,
Mart[acute(i)]nez (2000) sees the potential of cross-class and cross-racial
unity, while understanding the historical barriers that limited multiracial
and class unity in the Seattle demonstrations. For Manning Marable (2000),
th e levels of inequality produced by global capitalism are the "practical
consequences of how we live, work, and eat." He continues: "There is a
direct connection between the elimination of millions of jobs that can
sustain families here in the U.S., and the exportation of jobs into
countries without unions, or environmental and safety standards."
Bush agrees with Giovanni Arrighi's formulation that the "spread of mass
misery to the core sets the condition for solidarity among the classes,
which had previously been divided by the contrasting experiences of growing
social power and growing misery" (p. 244). Arrighi's formulation is being
actualized through the WTO demonstrations in Seattle, and other social
political issues in the U.S., such as the demonstrations and protest against
the death penalty in the Mumia Abu Jamal case, and the protest around the
acquittal of the New Yorkpolice in the brutal killing of Amadou Diallo,
where thousands of individuals across the working class have demonstrated
contempt for the lack of social and economic justice.
I believe that Bush provides a theoretical framework that progressive forces
can use to reach across race, class, and gender lines to create a
counter-hegemonic bloc against the world capitalist order. Bush's book
allows progressive African Americans and other progressives to resist
repeating the mistakes of the past, such as not recognizing the antisystemic
content of Black nationalism and the radical character and trajectory of
that tradition in U.S. history. This impressive social history by Dr. Bush
can also serve as an ideological handbook for interpreting the capitalist
world-economy and its effect on U.S. social movements.
ROBERT STANLEY ODEN is the Coordinator of the "Qakes Serves" Program and has
lectured extensively on the politics of Black liberation, the African
American experience, and the power shift in Oakland, California.
REFERENCES
Marable, Manning 2000
"Seattle and Beyond." Black Radical Congress. Web site (January).
Mart[acute(i)]nez, Elizabeth (Betita) 2000
"Where Was the Color in Seattle?" Colorlines, from Black Radical Congress
Web Site (January).
Newton, Huey P. 1996
War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America. New York: Harlem
River Press.
Omi, Michael and Howard Winant 1986
Racial Formation lathe United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York:
Routledge and Kesh Paul.
O'Reilly, Kenneth 1989
Racial Matters: The F.B.I.'s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972. New
York: Free Press.
Wallerstein, Immanuel 1995
After Liberalism. New York: The New Press.
1983
Historical Capitalism. London: Verso.
1979
The Capitalist World-Economy. Boston: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, William Julius 1987
The Truly Disadvantaged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1978
The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American
Institutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Social Justice, Vol.27, No.1
COPYRIGHT 2000 Crime and Social Justice Associates.
(c) 2000 Information Access Company. All rights reserved.
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SOCIAL JUSTICE 22/03/2000 P204 
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22Dec1999 USA: Society in Time and Space.(Review) (book review). 
By Tilly, Charles.
Society in Time and Space: A Geographical Perspective on Change. By Robert
A. Dodgshon (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 230 pp. $59.95
cloth $19.95 paper
Dodgshon believes it possible and fruitful to state general propositions
about societal change as a spatially embedded process. In so believing, he
rejects the turns toward phenomenology and cultural determinism that have
drawn many other geographers away from economic reductionism over the last
two decades. He also denies that theories of practice (for example,
Bourdieu's) or of structuration (for example, Giddens') can account for
large-scale social change, on the ground that such theories fatally draw
explanation toward the smaller-scale phenomena that visible, vital social
interaction produces or reproduces. [1]
What to do? Dodgshon adopts a venerable, if currently unfashionable,
theoretical device: assumption of a self-maintaining system. Here called
"society" or "a society," the sort of system in question has norms, rules,
goals, projects, center, and periphery. It also interacts with physical,
biological, and built environments. Thus far, Dodgshon would have received
approval from both Sorokin and Parsons. [2] He moves to a more specifically
geographical interpretation by arguing that the strategic embedding of
socially significant objects and activities in spatial arrangements
constrains social change. Human structure and agency interact, he asserts,
"not just temporally, through phases of recursive or dialectical succession,
but through strategies of spatial negotiation, with areas in which the
emergence of new practices and new institutional forms takes place
relatively easily being juxtaposed with areas in which it is prevented,
retarded or constrained by structural inertia" (16; the passage, alas,
provides a fair sample of Dodgshon's prose).
After extended reviews and critiques of other scholars' ideas about societal
change, Dodgshon edges into the view that although societies are complex
adaptive systems rather than simple equilibrium-maintaining machines, they
"ultimately resist ongoing change or cope with it badly" (51). The remainder
of the book then falls into three parts: (1) examination of historical
changes at the scales of world systems, empires, states, and regions; (2)
closer analysis of how socially produced landscapes, organizations, and
built environments introduce inertia into social systems; and (3) general
statements about the geography of societal change. Rather than sustained
examples, each section combines quick historical generalizations with
discussions of relevant theorists: Michael Mann, Mancur Olson, Immanuel
Wallerstein, Jack Goody, Marshall Sahlins, Allan Pred, Harold A. Innis,
Parsons, Claude Levi-Strauss, and many others arrive for interrogation, some
of them repeatedly.
In the book's most original argument, Dodgshon claims that, contrary to the
common idea of information technology as an accelerator of social change,
"This growth in the amount of information being carried forward by society
patently amounts to an increase in the inertia of landscape" (179). He
finally elaborates this idea into the notion that each society has an
established geography of inertia and unused freedom, a geography shaping
whatever involutionary, revolutionary, and evolutionary changes occur within
it. Relatively powerless people tend to occupy marginal and interstitial
spaces affording more flexibility, or unused freedom, precisely because
those spaces are not sites of domination. The book's closing pages
illustrate this line of argument by means of multiple observations on
European history.
Dodgshon never addresses the classic questions that arise in analyses of
large systems: how to tell whether some set of interacting units actually
form a coherent system; how to specify the limits on any given system; or
how to trace boundaries between a system and its environment(s). In
practice, he relies on conventional cultural, economic, and political
frontiers; the capitalist world system, Mesopotamian civilizations, the
Chinese Empire, the Portuguese Empire, France, Germany, and England all
figure explicitly as cases in point, with the system standing of regions
within them (for example, North America) left unclear.
Since the book's most substantial historical discussion concerns the
expansion of fixed capital-hence both environmental transformation and
increased constraint by built environment-in European industrialization,
neither the systemic model nor the naming of systems actually does much
explanatory work. G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton once remarked that George
Bernard Shaw's plays were the price that we pay for his brilliant prefaces.
In the case of Dodgshon, I prefer his concrete, historically grounded
accounts of spatial processes to his abstract surveys of theory.
(1.) See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, An Invitation to
Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, 1992); Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of
Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley, 1986).
(2.) See, for example, Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (New
York, 1962; orig. pub. 1937) 4v.; Talcott Parsons, Structure and Process in
Modern Societies (Glencoe, 1960).

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol.30, No.3
COPYRIGHT 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
(c) 1999 Information Access Company. All rights reserved.
This article may only be stored on a computer network for a maximum of 30
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JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY HISTORY 22/12/1999 P483 
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22Jun1999 USA: Untangling the Roots of Dependency. 
By VAN HOAK, STEPHEN P.
Choctaw Economics, 1700-1860
The Roots of Dependency, published in 1983, was a groundbreaking
interdisciplinary examination of Euro-American-Indian cultural contact and
its disastrous effects on Native Americans. Focusing on the Choctaws,
Pawnees, and Navajos, Richard White attempted to identify and isolate the
various factors that contributed to the material decline of American Indian
peoples. Roots of Dependency was widely acclaimed when it was first
published, both for White's strong thesis and his new approach to Native
American history. White's methodology differed from that of traditional
historians most notably in his interdisciplinary approach and in his
incorporation of a Native American focus and perspective into his
narrative.(1)
White began his study by examining the Mississippi Choctaw of the sixteenth
to the nineteenth centuries, showing how their initial adaptations to
Euro-American influences eventually turned to disaster. As Euro-American
market forces penetrated their economy, the Choctaws were driven to overhunt
deer populations to extinction and in the process destroyed their resources,
environment, and economy. Although he also cited alcohol as a major element
of this decline, White asserted that the Euro-American market economy was
the "critical" factor in understanding the "fate" of the Choctaws. White
claimed that the Choctaws "were lured into the market" by liquor, that the
subsequent exchanges "were literally dictated by whites," and that
ultimately "commerce ... left them hungry and vulnerable." White further
asserted that Choctaw resistance was rendered "utterly superfluous" and that
their actions served only to slow the destructive consequences of the market
economy. By the 1770s, according to White, the Choctaws had become dependent
upon Euro-Americans to adequately feed and clothe themselves.(2)
White's materialist thesis was based on the modern world systems theory that
became fashionable in the 1970s. This theory, as posited by Immanuel
Wallerstein, centered around the relationship between underdeveloped
"peripheral" regions and capitalist "core" regions. According to
Wallerstein, as peripheral regions are drawn into the global market they
become subject to an increasingly unequal and exploitative commercial
exchange with core nations. This unequal exchange eventually causes the
peripheral regions to become "dependent" on the core regions, lacking any
other viable economic choices. In White's work the core regions were the
European powers of the eighteenth century, while the peripheral regions were
Native American peoples, including the Choctaws? Armed with this theoretical
framework, White asserted that

For the Choctaws as a whole, trade and market meant not wealth but
impoverishment, not well-being but dependency, and not progress bu
t exile
and dispossession. They never fought the Americans; they were neve


r

conquered. Instead, through the market they were made dependent an


d

dispossessed.(4)


In recent years Richard White has shifted his focus from dependency theory
and begun to examine commonality and accommodation between American Indians
and Euro-Americans. In The Middle Ground White asserts that the Native
Americans of the Great Lakes region were able, throughout the seventeenth
and most of the eighteenth century, to forge a relationship with
Euro-Americans that was at least partially realized on the Indians' own
terms. Despite his new emphasis, however, the Native Americans of White's
"middle ground" still eventually succumbed to economic dependency by the
late eighteenth century. His definitions and explanations of dependency are
strikingly similar to those used in Roots of Dependency. White is not alone
in his support of his earlier study; other historians, with few exceptions,
have also refrained from directly challenging White's work.(5)
The idea that the Euro-American market had disastrous economic and
environmental consequences for Native Americans is a popular one. But recent
scholars have begun to question why American Indians and other peoples of
diverse races, ethnicity, and genders have predominantly been portrayed as
victims of the market. Were a few elite Euro-Americans really the only
people to prosper and benefit from commerce and the "world market"?
Historian R. David Edmunds has reminded historians that American Indians
were not new to the processes of the market, but rather had a long history
of specialized and complex trade prior to Euro-American contact. Bradley
Birzer has recently shown that many Native Americans and Western people of
color embraced entrepreneurship, some using voluntary associations to
prevent economic stratification and to temper the volatility of the market.
Birzer demonstrates that non-Anglos have traditionally been given little
credit for their ability to adapt to changing economic conditions and
markets. Ironically, borrowing from Richard White's concept of a "middle
ground" Birzer argues that native peoples were creative and energetic in
finding new ways to make the market work for them. Historian Daniel H. Usner
has similarly found that Indians from the region of the Mississippi
responded to the changing market with a "resourceful adaptability ... too
often neglected by historians."(6)
This essay will survey postcolonial Choctaw history and reevaluate Roots of
Dependency, focusing on the three primary weaknesses in White's materialist
argument. First, and most fundamental, the Choctaws did not emerge from the
eighteenth century an impoverished and economically dependent people. By
vacillating in their allegiance between rival European powers, by vigorously
combating the scourge of chemical dependency, and by shifting their
subsistence strategy to better exploit their changing environment the
Choctaws were able to maintain their economic independence both before and
after the abrupt end of White's story in 1830. Second, White failed to
identify the strong rhetorical element in self-abasing Choctaw speeches,
instead misinterpreting such speeches as evidence of Choctaw dependency.
Third, White's linking of liquor with the Euro-American market in his
analysis was misleading-alcohol was neither an inevitable nor a permanent
consequence of trade and commerce. Although many Euro-Americans certainly
used alcohol as a tool to manipulate commercial benefits, the Choctaws chose
to consume liquor and chose to combat its use after the deadly effects of
its consumption became apparent. By understanding that their problems arose
from chemical dependency and not from the Euro-American market as a whole,
they continued their long history of trade by seizing the benefits of
commerce even as they increasingly resisted the negative effects of the
Euro-American market such as alcohol. This essay will show the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries to be a time when the Choctaws began a long series
of eventually successful economic adaptations, rather than as a time that
saw the culmination of a futile Choctaw struggle against capitalist market
forces and dependency.(7)
When the French colonized Louisiana in 1699 they began an extended period of
friendly relations and trade with the Choctaws. Welcoming their new
neighbors, the Choctaws exchanged easily obtained deer skins with the French
for guns, ammunition, cloth, metal goods, jewelry, and blankets. But
gift-giving and reciprocity, more than trade, characterized the
Choctaw-French relationship; the exchange was not always "equal" nor subject
to modern Western economic concepts of supply and demand. In annual Indian
"congresses" French officials presented certain honored Choctaw
chiefs-"medal" chiefs-with lavish "presents" receiving only their goodwill
in exchange.(8)
By 1729 the English also began to entreat the Choctaws as potential trading
partners and allies. The Choctaw accepted the English, who were often able
to offer goods of higher quality and lower price than the French. But even
more important, many Choctaws realized that they could use the intense
rivalry between the English and French to their advantage. By alternating
their allegiances between rival powers they ensured themselves the best
possible trading relationships. Claiming themselves to be "poor" and without
the "time to kill skins to buy ammunition or clothes" Choctaws offered their
loyalties "if the presents" were "speedily sent." If gifts were not received
they often switched their loyalty to the rival European power, claiming that
their previous ally had "made large promises, but never performed them" and
offering their friendship to the new power if they could supply the desired
presents. Such gifts relieved many Choctaws of the need to hunt and barter
skins for Euro-American goods; the value of presents was often the
equivalent to the proceeds of an entire season's hunt.(9)
The Choctaws successfully employed the "play off" until 1763, when the
French ceded away their North American territories. In November of that year
English officer Maj. Robert Farmar met with the Choctaws at Mobile and
admonished them that they must no longer "run from one nation to another to
carry and receive mischievous speeches," and further warned that presents
would be given only to those who "deserve them." High ranking English
officials, despite contrary advice from both their subordinates and their
French predecessors, sought to wean the Choctaws off the system of presents
and convince them of their "dependence" on the English.(10)
But the Choctaws refused to allow the English to dictate the terms of their
relationship. To help convince the English of the error of their new policy,
many warriors began to assault and confiscate the goods of English traders,
especially those who attempted to enforce Choctaw "debts." In 1772 the
English convened an Indian congress in Mobile, the first held in almost
seven years. Although the conference temporarily assuaged the Choctaws'
anger, it did little to resolve fundamental problems. The speeches and
promises of the officials and chiefs resembled those of previous congresses,
and in a similar fashion poor relations between the Choctaw and English
resumed shortly after the end of the conference. But Richard White, in Roots
of Dependency, asserted that a new self-abasing rhetoric of dependency was
noticeable in the speeches of the Choctaw chiefs in 1772. To White this was
evidence that the Choctaws were becoming a dependent nation, their economy
and resources having been decimated by the market forces of English trade,
the end of the play off system, war with the Creeks, and the devastating
effects of alcohol.(11)
The speeches of the Choctaw chiefs in the 1772 congress were certainly
filled with rhetoric of dependency. Captain Ouma of Seneacha stated to the
English that "we are very poor and in want of ammunition," continuing that
"we are ignorant and helpless as the beasts in the woods, incapable of
making necessities for ourselves" and "our sole dependence is on you."
Appapaye of Olitachas agreed that "our dependence is upon our Father [the
English]." But this rhetoric was strikingly similar to that used by Choctaws
in previous congresses. In 1765 Chief Chulust Amastabe declared to the
English that he was "a poor ignorant savage, who has not even the means of
subsisting his family." Such rhetoric was common even in the French era,
when one Choctaw leader told the French that he hoped they would "look with
pity on us and will share with us" Beginning with their earliest encounters
with whites, the Choctaws used language both of self-abasement and of praise
for those they were entreating. In 1540 Chief Tuscalusa sent a messenger to
de Soto declaring that he-Tuscalusa-was "led captive by your perfections and
power."(12)
"Good talks" as the Choctaws termed their speeches, were integral in Choctaw
culture to friendly relations with the "other." Rhetoric of self-abasement
and dependency was used to gain the confidence and goodwill of others, and
was not reflective of an actual inability to provide for one's self or
otherwise mold one's life. Oratory was a highly valued skill among Choctaw
leaders, and young chiefs without such expertise were well aware of their
deficiency. Choctaws were known by many Euro-Americans to be "great
beggars," but most also knew that implicit in Choctaw self-abasing speeches
was an assertion of responsibility on the part of the "father" to supply his
"children" with presents. Implicit was the threat of conflict if the father
did not fulfill his responsibilities to his children.(13) This was a threat
that the English respected even while they were temporarily without apparent
rivals in North America.
Richard White correctly observed that the Choctaw in the late eighteenth
century were beset with a host of problems that threatened their survival,
most notably alcohol. English traders, unlike the French traders before
them, loaded their wagons predominantly with rum rather than ammunition,
blankets, guns, cloth, knives, or other metal goods. The deerskin trade
became a less effective way for the Choctaws to secure useful Euro-American
goods, as liquor and chemical dependency began to be the only proceeds of
the hunt for the Choctaws. White assessed the situation well, asserting that
"rum controlled the pace of hunting" and "drunkenness was the final proceed
of the hunt." Up to 80 percent of the proceeds of Choctaw hunts were being
expended on rum, and English officials noted chronic drinking among the
Choctaws, even to the point of death. Many Choctaws even found themselves in
"debt" to English rum traders. Annual gifts had previously ensured that
Choctaw warriors would receive at least some Euro-American products, but the
English refused to convene Indian congresses on an annual basis.(14)
Chemical dependency also sparked massive overhunting of deer populations in
the Choctaw nation. But considering the problems that were resulting from
widespread alcohol abuse, a reduced deer population was likely beneficial to
the Choctaws by minimizing the availability of skins to trade for rum. In
any case many Choctaws compensated for the loss of deer meat in their diet
by modifying their subsistence cycle. The Choctaws had always been a
primarily agricultural people, with hunting serving only a secondary though
important role in their subsistence system. Initially, as deer populations
declined Choctaw warriors began to hunt further west, some traveling across
the Mississippi on seasonal hunts in pursuit of game. The Choctaws
integrated these distant hunts with horse raiding on the Great Plains, which
served to enlarge their horse herds and thus further increased their
mobility and range. But most Choctaws began to move away from hunting and
compensated for the loss of deer by increasingly relying on agriculture and
livestock herding to provide both for their subsistence as well as to
generate a small surplus for trade.(15)
Choctaw leaders understood that liquor, not the Euro-American market, was
the source of their problems. Choctaw Chief Mingo Emmitta, at the 1772
congress, pleaded with the English to stop the "pernicious practice" of
liquor trading. In 1777 one Choctaw chief promised an English official that
if he could stop the rum trade "you will well deserve to be forever looked
upon as our Father and Benefactor." Despite these warnings and pleadings,
however, English leaders proved unable to block the entrance of liquor
dealers into the Choctaw Nation. By 1770 Bernard Romans noted that "the
excess in spirituous liquors" of the Choctaw was "incredible."(16)
Even as they combated the negative effects of trade, the Choctaws continued
to extract benefits from the market. Euro-American commerce continued to
provide the Choctaws with useful goods including guns, ammunition, knives,
blankets, and plows. Virtually all Choctaws produced at least a small
surplus of cattle, agricultural products, or furs to acquire what
Euro-American goods they sought. Choctaws raided for and bred horses, which
were kept as a source of "disposable wealth" to be traded away or consumed
during times of need. Some Choctaws even engaged in more traditionally
Western economic endeavors, such as wage labor or the operation of roadside
businesses that catered to white travelers.(17) Despite the contentions of
Richard White there is no credible evidence of widespread impoverishment or
significant social stratification among the Choctaws as a result of their
exposure to the Euro-American market. "Full-bloods" as well as
"mixed-bloods" participated in the changing Choctaw economy, though as
historian Donna Akers has shown, such distinctions in Choctaw society based
on racial purity are misleading. Though a small percentage of Choctaws began
to move from a subsistence economy to an acquisitive capitalist system, they
did not do so to the detriment of other Choctaws. In fact, those that
acquired "wealth" often used it to help fund Choctaw schools or to otherwise
help fellow Choctaws.(18)
A key element in understanding Choctaw resistance to Euro-American economic
dependency is their refusal to become a fur trade-specialized society.
Though they initially embraced the fur trade and significantly increased the
pace of their hunting, agriculture continued to play the dominant role in
their subsistence system. Thus when the alcohol trade and overhunting
produced a scarcity of deer, the Choctaws were far less vulnerable to
impoverishment and economic dependency than were other native societies that
relied predominantly on hunting and gathering for their sustenance.(19)
Through a variety of methods-agriculture, stock raising, horse trading, and
entrepreneurship-the Choctaws gradually replaced hunting as the source of
their trade goods and as their secondary source of sustenance that insulated
them during times of drought and crop failure. The changing geopolitical
landscape in the 1770s and 1780s furthered the Choctaws' efforts to preserve
their economic independence.
The Choctaws took advantage of the American Revolution to renew the "play
off" system, this time vacillating between the American-French-Spanish
alliance and the English. When the English were defeated in 1783 the Indians
quickly moved to play off the remaining Euro-American rivals in North
America: Spain and the United States. Fueling the fears of the Spanish, some
Choctaw leaders told Spanish officials about American efforts to win their
loyalty but assured the Spanish they would remain loyal to their "father" if
he continued to supply them with presents. Many Choctaws rejected trade
altogether in favor of gifts, "defaulting" on Spanish traders from whom they
had received goods but had not yet been "paid."(20)
Unfortunately for the Choctaws, the Treaty of San Lorenzo in 1795 resolved
the land dispute between Spain and the United States in favor of the
Americans, and an American territorial government was established in
Mississippi in 1798. As long as Spanish-American tensions remained high,
U.S. officials continued to court the southern Indians with regular gifts.
But American officials simultaneously attempted to separate the Spanish from
the Indians through a policy of trading "debt" relief and annuities for
land. Many Choctaws were glad to trade little-used and overhunted land in
exchange for presents, now in the form of annuities. Ironically, these
annuities allowed the Choctaws to continue to benefit from these lands for
many years after the date Richard White alleged the lands were rendered
useless by the effects of liquor and the market economy. But the land
cessions also served to isolate the Choctaws; after cessions in 1801 and
1805, Spanish influence in the region became insignificant. Without
Euro-American rivals to play off, the Choctaws became vulnerable to American
pressure.(21)
The withdrawal of the Spanish and the flood of white settlers into
Mississippi in the early nineteenth century changed the complexion of
Choctaw-American relations. Conflicts over trade and land rights between
settlers and Indians prompted the Mississippi government to press for
removal, and a treaty in 1820 gave the Choctaws land west of the Mississippi
in exchange for a strip of their existing land. U.S. officials hoped that
most of the tribe would move west to their new lands, but few did. Finally
in 1830 the U.S. government responded to increasing pressures from white
settlers and the Mississippi state government by coercing the Indians, under
threat of violence, into a removal treaty. Within a few years most Choctaws
reluctantly removed west of the Mississippi.(22)
Richard White's story of the Choctaws ends with removal in 1830, by which
time he claims they had become a destitute and economically dependent
people. But this characterization after removal is no more accurate than it
was before removal. The Choctaws were quick to forge a new and prosperous
home in "Indian Territory" Through their noncombative relations and rhetoric
with the U.S. government the Choctaws were one of the first of the southern
tribes to secure territory west of the Mississippi. As such their land was
excellent and well suited to their agricultural and ranching economy. The
Choctaws enlarged their cultivated lands virtually every year until the
Civil War, producing enough of a surplus to help feed white Arkansas
settlers and even starving families in famine-ravaged Ireland. Choctaw
leaders maintained friendly relations with the United States and continued
to use self-abasement rhetoric in their speeches to American officials while
simultaneously increasing their people's self-sufficiency and educating
their children to be able to exist in white society.(23)
As historian Bradley J. Birzer has recently shown, many Choctaws became
classical "Jacksonian" entrepreneurs, joining other Western racial and
ethnic minorities in using the market to make substantial economic and
material gains. The Choctaws successfully embraced the American market,
selling cotton and corn for cash which they used to purchase metal goods and
other items they could not produce internally. Some took advantage of their
location along overland trails by providing services and supplies for whites
migrating west. Choctaws often shifted their economic focus in response to
market demands, such as the rising price of cattle in 1852, "out-competing"
their white neighbors and igniting an economic "golden age" among their
people. Contrary to White's assertions, participation in the market was not
limited to "Americanized" mixed-bloods, though they were the leaders in the
economic transformation-within twenty years after moving west nearly all
Choctaws had given up hunting entirely and entered the market economy to
some extent. Yet the Choctaws were not "capitalists" intent on accumulating
wealth. They tempered the more destructive and volatile elements of the
market by continuing to be a communal and sharing society, helping others
who were less "successful." Judiciously using their annuities the Choctaws
invested in schools, sawmills, and blacksmith shops. Annuities had largely
taken the place of gifts and presents in Choctaw society, and their
government disbursed these gifts as had the chiefs previously.(24) Thus the
Choctaws formed a sort of "middle ground" economy that was inclusive of but
not dictated by capitalist forces.
By the late 1820s the Choctaws had all but eliminated the scourge of liquor
among their people. But the stress of leaving their homeland caused many
Choctaws to again resort to alcohol despite the best efforts of missionaries
and some Choctaw leaders to maintain temperance. Factions and divisions over
liquor arose within the Choctaws, but ultimately the temperance faction was
able to successfully pass strict laws against the importation of alcohol
into the new Choctaw nation. By as early as 1840, temperance meetings, the
establishment of a police force to enforce liquor prohibition laws, and the
expulsion of intemperate Choctaw leaders from positions of authority allowed
the Choctaws to once again largely eliminate alcohol abuse. Although "grog
shops" in nearby Texas and Arkansas continued to attract many Choctaws,
chemical dependency by the 1850s was far less widespread among the Choctaws
than was noted by Bernard Romans in 1770.(25)
According to Richard White the Choctaws were made "dependent and
dispossessed" by "an intruding market system under the control of a
metropolitan power" He further asserted that the Choctaws' exposure to
capitalism led them into an increasingly unbalanced relationship in which
exchanges were "dictated by whites" To White the market destroyed the
Choctaw environment and economy, and was such a powerful force that it
"rendered the Indians utterly superfluous" By the time of removal, White
claimed, the Choctaws were impoverished and dependent upon the United
States-a somewhat predictable ending for his declensionist narrative of
economic and environmental destruction at the hands of the capitalist
market.(26)
Richard White's depiction of the Choctaws as a destitute and economically
dependent people obscures their long history of successful resistance as
well as adaptation to new political, economic, and cultural changes. Far
from being impoverished-as an historian might assume from their diplomatic
rhetoric-the Choctaws in the nineteenth century were just as prosperous as
they were at the turn of the eighteenth century. The Choctaws continued to
secure presents in the form of annuities and continued to exploit what they
could from their environment. The trade network formed by the Choctaws was
not under the control of a vast "metropolitan power" but rather was
dominated by individual frontier exchanges by peoples of diverse races and
ethnicity, including Indians and Euro-Americans, as recent scholars have
similarly concluded. The Choctaws repeatedly adapted to changing frontier
market conditions and prevented market exchanges from being continually
dictated by Euro-Americans. When the fur trade no longer offered commercial
benefits to the Choctaws they diversified their economy so as to continue to
extract benefits from the market. In the absence of the "increasingly
unequal exchange" alleged by Richard White, his dependency theory collapses
and the Choctaws can be more appropriately viewed as an adaptive people
empowered by trade and commerce just as many Euro-Americans were. The
prosperity of the Choctaws was limited not by the intrusion of the market
into the Choctaw economy but rather by the deadly though brief onset of
chemical dependency and eventually by the destruction wrought by the
American Civil War.(27) The Choctaws did not always prevail in their efforts
to resist and adapt to Euro-American influence and invasion, but their
actions were certainly not "superfluous" nor did they emerge from the
eighteenth century an impoverished and economically dependent people.
Illumination of their achievements reveals the roots of Choctaw dependency
to be nonexistent.
NOTES
(1.) Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and
Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1983).
(2.) Ibid., xix, 94, 97, 146.
(3.) Ibid., xiii-xix; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System:
Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the
Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); and Immanuel
Wallerstein, The Modern World System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation
of the European World Economy, 1600-1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980).
See also Duane Champagne, Social Order and Political Change: Constitutional
Governments among the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Creek
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
(4.) White, Roots of Dependency, 146.
(5.) According to White the Indians of the Great Lakes were only able to
resist dependency while certain conditions existed, essentially the same
criteria cited in Roots of Dependency. See ibid., xiii-xix, 146; and Richard
White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 482-86. The
only direct challenge to White's conclusions regarding the Choctaws is Donna
L. Akers, "Living in the Land of Death: The Choctaw People, 1830-1860"
(Ph.D. diss., University of California-Riverside, 1997).
(6.) R. David Edmunds, "Pre-Columbian America Reconsidered" Halcyon 12
(1990): 13; Bradley J. Birzer, "Expanding Creative Destruction:
Entrepreneurship in the American Wests" Western Historical Quarterly 30:1
(spring 1999): 45-63; and Daniel H. Usner, "The Frontier Exchange Economy of
the Lower Mississippi Valley in the Eighteenth Century," William and Mary
Quarterly 44:2 (April 1987): 165-92.
(7.) A fourth argument against White's materialist thesis is that it ignores
the cultural change and continuity of the Choctaws. This argument, however,
has been addressed to some extent by other historians, including Donna
Akers. See Akers, Land of Death.
(8.) Louis XIV to De May, 30 June 1707, in Dunbar Rowland and Albert Godfrey
Sanders, eds., Mississippi Provincial Archives, 1704-1743: French Dominion,
vol. 3 (Jackson: Press of the Mississippi Department of Archives and
History, 1932), 3:51; De Bienville to De Pontchartrain, 20 August 1709,
ibid., 3:136-37; Duclos to De Pontchartrain, 9 October 1713, ibid., 3:129;
De Bienville to De Pontchartrain, 25 February 1708, ibid., 3:112; De
Bienville to De Pontchartrain, 21 June 1710, ibid., 3:151.
(9.) For quotations, see Deposition of John Pettyerow before the Governor, 8
October 1751, ibid., 16. For competition between the French and British over
prices and trade, see Regis du Roullet to Maurepas, 23 March 1733, ibid.,
1:170-72; Minutes of Council of Commerce of Louisiana, 8 February 1721,
ibid., 3:303; Abstract of Bienville to Maurepas,
(20) April 1734, ibid., 3:670-71; Bienville and Salmon to Maurepas, 13
September 1736, ibid., 3:693; Bienville to Maurepas, 28 April 1738, ibid.,
3:713-16; Bienville to Maurepas, 15 July 1738, ibid., 3:719-20; Perier to
Ory, 18 December 1730, ibid., 4:39, 54; Kerlerec to Pierne de Moras, 21
October 1757, ibid., 5:189; John R. Swanton, An Early Account of the Choctaw
Indians, in A Choctaw Source Book, vol. 7 of The North American Indian
Garland Series, ed. David Hurst Thomas (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985),
55; Deposition of John Pettyerow before the Governor, 8 October 1751, in
William L. McDowell Jr., Colonial Records of South Carolina: Documents
Relating to Indian Affairs, May 21, 1750-August 7, 1754 (Columbia: South
Carolina Archives Department, 1958), 15-16; "State of the Chickesaw and
Chactaw Nations," ibid., 36-38; John Highrider to Governor Glen, 24 October
1750, ibid., 38-40. For Choctaws entreating both the French and British see
Bienville and Salmon to Maurepas, 13 September 1736, in Rowland and Sanders,
French Dominion, 3:690-91. For the value of gifts, see Bethune to Cameron, 4
September 1780, in Records of the British Colonial Office, Class 5, part 1,
Westward Expansion (Frederick MD: University Publications of America, 1983),
reel 8, frames 612-13.
(10.) For quotations see Minutes of Council with Choctaws, 14 November 1763,
in Rowland and Sanders, French Dominion, 5:296; Council with the Chactaws,
by Major Farmar and Mons. D'Abbadie, 14 November 1763, in Dunbar Rowland,
ed., Mississippi Provincial Archives, 1763-1766: English Dominion, vol. 1
(Nashville TN: Press of Brandon Printing, 1911), 87, 89; Report of Johnstone
and Stuart, 12 June 1765, ibid., 187. For English policy and attitudes
concerning the Choctaw see James Adair, The History of the American Indians:
Particularly Those Adjoining the Mississippi, East and West Florida,
Georgia, South and North Carolina, and Virginia (London: E. C. Dilly, 1775),
306-7, 314-15; Farmar to Secretary of War, 24 January 1764, in Rowland,
English Dominion, 13; Extract of a letter from Lieutenant Forde at Tombeckbe
Fort, 3 December 1763, ibid., 39; Memorial of Governor Johnstone to the
Board of Trade, ibid., 150. For French advice to the English concerning the
Choctaws see Mons. D'Abbadie to Major Farmar, 4 October 1763, ibid., 35. For
English attempts to convince the Choctaws of their "dependence" see Memorial
of Governor Johnstone to the Board of Trade, ibid., 150; and Chactaw
Congress, June 12, W65, ibid., 228.
(11.) For conflict between the Choctaws and the English see Chactaw
Congress, 12 June 1765, ibid., 220, 229-30; Clarence Carter, ed.,
"Observations of Superintendent John Stuart and Governor James Grant of East
Florida on the Proposed Plan of 1764 for the Future Management of Indian
Affairs," American Historical Review 20:4 (July 1915): 830; Memorial of
Governor Johnstone to the Board of Trade, in Rowland, English Dominion, 150;
Report of Johnstone and Stuart, 12 June 1765, ibid., 184; J. Stuart to Earl
of Hillsborough, 2 December 1770, in British Colonial Records, 6:12-13. For
the Mobile Congress in 1765 see Chactaw Congress, 12 June 1765, in Rowland,
English Dominion, 215-55. For the 1772 Mobile Congress see "Papers Relating
to Congress with Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians, 9 April 1772" in Dunbar
Rowland, ed., Peter Chester, Publications of the Mississippi Historical
Society vol. 5 (Jackson: Mississippi Historical Society Press, 1925),
134-60; J. Stuart to Earl of Hillsborough, 7 January 1772, in British
Colonial Records, 6:236-43. For White's assertions see White, Roots of
Dependency, 78-79.
(12.) Papers Relating to Congress with the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians, 9
April 1772, in Rowland, Peter Chester, 150; Chactaw Congress, 12 June 1765,
in Rowland, English Dominion, 224; Swanton, Early Account, 55; Grayson
Noley, 1540: The First European Contact, in The Choctaw before Removal,
Carolyn Keller Reeves, ed. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985),
65.
(13.) F. B. Young, Notices of the Chactaw or Choktah Tribe of North American
Indians, in A Choctaw Source Book, The North American Indian Garland Series
vol. 7, David Hurst Thomas, ed. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), 14-15;
Rowland, Peter Chester, 152-53; Report of William Armstrong in Annual Report
of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1839, serial 354, 26th Cong., 1st
sess., Sen. doc. 1, 468; also Stephen P. Van Hoak, "The Poor Red Man and the
Great Father: Choctaw Rhetoric, 1700-1860," unpublished manuscript in the
possession of the author. The term "father" had a different meaning in
Choctaw culture than it did in Western culture. See Patricia Galloway, "The
Chief Who Is Your Father": Choctaw and French Views of the Diplomatic
Relation, in Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley, ed.,
Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1989), 254-78.
(14.) The French initially described the Choctaw as a temperate people, but
this changed with the arrival of the English. See Swanton, Early Account,
61; Perier and De La Chaise to the Directors of the Company of the Indies,
30 January 1729, in Rowland and Sanders, French Dominion, 2:613; Bernard
Romans, A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida (New York:
Bernard Romans, 1775), 69, 77; C. Stuart to J. Stuart, 4 March 1777, in
British Colonial Records, 7:616-17. For White's assessment see White, Roots
of Dependency, 84-85. For the figure of 80 percent see C. Stuart to J.
Stuart, 26 August 1770, in British Colonial Records, 6:24. For deaths due to
liquor see J. Stuart to Germaine, 14 June 1777, ibid., 7:270-71; Report of
the Proceedings of the Hon. Charles Stuart, 1 July 1778, ibid., 8:45, 50-51;
Cameron to Clinton, 18 July 1780, in George Athan Billias, ed., Report on
American Manuscripts in the Royal Institution of Great Britain, vol. 2
(Boston: Gregg Press, 1972), 159.
(15.) For declining deer populations see Romans, History, 86. For the
changing Choctaw economy see Daniel H. Usner Jr., "American Indians on the
Cotton Frontier: Changing Economic Relations with Citizens and Slaves in the
Mississippi Territory;" Journal of American History 72:2 (September 1985):
304-6; James Taylor Carson, "Horses and the Economy and Culture of the
Choctaw Indians, 1690-1840]" Ethnohistory 42:3 (summer 1995): 499-501;
Arthur H. DeRosier Jr., "Pioneers with Conflicting Ideals: Christianity and
Slavery in the Choctaw Nation," Journal of Mississippi History 21:3 (July
1959): 179; Champagne, Social Order, 90-92, 128, 148-49. Some Choctaws
permanently migrated westward, and by the nineteenth century more than one
thousand Choctaw had made a new home west of the Mississippi. For hunting
and migration west of the Mississippi see "Log of His Majesty's Galiot, La
Fleche, 93 January 1793," in Lawrence Kinnaird, ed., Spain in the
Mississippi Valley, 1765-1794, 3 parts, Annual Report of the American
Historical Association for the Year 1945 (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1949), 3:114; Delavillebeuvre to Carondelet, 7 May 1794, ibid., 281;
Sargent to Wilkinson, 16 October 1798, in Dunbar Rowland, ed., The
Mississippi Territorial Archives, 1798-1803, vol. 1 (Nashville: Press of
Brandon Printing Company, 1905), 6364; "An Account of the Tribes in
Louisiana, 29 September 1803," in Clarence Edwin Carter, The Territorial
Papers of the United States, vol. 9 (Washington: Government Printing Office,
1940), 9:63-64; Joseph Bowmar to Governor Claiborne, 15 April 1804, ibid.,
9:224; "Governor Claiborne to the Secretary of War, 23 July 1807," ibid.,
754; "Governor Claiborne to John Thompson, 25 July 1807," ibid., 9:758;
"Gaines' Reminiscenses," Alabama Historical Quarterly 26:3-4 (fall-winter
1964): 162; Ruth Tenison West, "Pushmataha's Travels," Chronicles of
Oklahoma 37:2 (summer 1959): 162-74; Young, Notices, 16.
(16.) For quotations, see Rowland, Peter Chester, 148, 150-51; J. Stuart to
Germaine, 14 June 1777, in British Colonial Records, 7:629; Romans, History,
77. Not all Choctaw leaders sought intemperance-one chief requested liquor
from the English at the 1765 Mobile Congress. Rowland, English Dominion,
248; also see Missionary Herald 26 (August 1830), 251. For examples of
intemperance see Gaines, Reminiscences, 193; "An Account of the Indian
Tribes in Louisiana, 8 November 1803," in Carter, Territorial Papers, 64;
and Jerry G. Hayes, "Ardent Spirits among the Chickasaws and Choctaws,
1816-1856," Chronicles of Oklahoma 69:3 (fall 1981): 294-309.
(17.) Carson, Horses, 504-6; Usner, Cotton Frontier, 304-6; Champagne,
Social Order, 90-92, 128, 148-49.
(18.) For lack of distinctions in Choctaw society based on racial purity see
Akers, Land of Death; Donna L. Akers Whitt, "Race, Ethnicity, and Identity:
Choctaw People of Mixed Heritage, 1828-1880" (master's thesis, University of
Oklahoma, 1994). For the continued nonacquisitive nature of the Choctaw
economy see Champagne, Social Order, 84-85, 128.
(19.) For a recent study of the effects of fur trade specialization see P.
Nick Kardulias, "Fur Trade Production as a Specialized Activity in a World
System: Indians in the North American Fur Trade," American Indian Culture
and Research Journal 14:1 (1990): 25-60.
(20.) J. Stuart to Earl of Hillsborough, 7 January 1772, in British Colonial
Records, 6:240-41; J. Stuart to Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations, 14 May 1777,
ibid., 7:642; Congress at Mobile, 26 May 1777, ibid., 8:317; J. Stuart to
Germaine, 14 June 1777, ibid., 7:63132; Campbell to Gillivray, 28 March
1778, ibid., 7:788-90; J. Stuart to Germaine, 2 May 1778, ibid., 7:853-55;
Proceedings of Hon. Charles Stuart, 1 July 1778, ibid., 8:45-55; Taitt to
Board of Commissioners, 5 August 1779, ibid., 8:548-49; A Talk from the Six
Towns... to Captain Colbert, 19 November 1779, ibid., 8:356-57; Cameron to
Clinton, 15 December 1779, ibid., 8:350; Cameron to Germaine, 20 December
1779, ibid., 8:337-38; C. Stuart to Cameron, 20 December 1779, ibid.,
8:340-43; Cameron to Clinton, 18 July 1780, ibid., 2:159; Bethune to
Cameron, 27 August and 4 September 1780, ibid., 8:601-13; Cameron to
Campbell, 18 September 1780, ibid., 8:617; Cameron to Germaine, 27 May 1781,
ibid., 8:657-58; Brown to Germaine, 9 August 1781, ibid., 8:670-71; Extract
of a Letter from Alexander McIntosh, 12 September 1771, in Rowland, Peter
Chester, 105; Peter Chester to Earl of Hillsborough, 28 and 29 September
1771, ibid., 96-97, 100, 103; Carter, Observations, 824; Chactaw Congress,
12 June 1765, in Rowland, English Dominion, 221; Bucarell to Ulloa, 20
January 1767, in Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley 1:18; Juzan to
Galvez, 11 July 1780, ibid., 1:382-83; Juzan to Ezpeleta, 19 February 1781,
ibid., 1:419; Ezpeleta to Juzan, 19 February 1781, ibid., 1:420-21; Cruzat
to Miro, 23 August 1784, ibid., 2:117-19; American Overtures to the Choctaw,
1792, ibid., 3:4-8; Message of Carondelet to Choctaws and Chickasaws, ibid.,
3:140-43; Lanzos to Carondelet, 25 April 1793, ibid., 3:152-53; Brashears to
Gayoso de Lemos, 8 June 1794, ibid., 3:297-98; Delavillebeuvre to
Carondelet, 7 May 1794, ibid., 3:282; Delavillebeuvre to Carondelet, 22 July
1794, ibid., 3:328; Jack D. L. Holmes, Gayoso: The Life of a Spanish
Governor in the Mississippi Valley, 1789-1799 (New Orleans: Louisiana State
University Press, 1966), 159; Edward Hunter Ross and Dawson A. Phelps, eds.,
"A Journey over the Natchez Trace in 1792: A Document from the Archives of
Spain," Journal of Mississippi History 15:4 (October 1953): 252-73; Governor
Blount to the Secretary of War, 20 September 1792, in Carter, Territorial
Papers, 4:172-74; Blount and Pickens to Secretary of War, 1 August 1793,
ibid., 4:29192; Secretary of State to Sargent, 20 May 1799, ibid., 5:58;
Sargent to Wilkinson, 16 October 1798, in Rowland, Mississippi Territorial
Archives, 64; Sargent to McHenry, 3 August 1799, ibid., 163-65; Sargent to
McKee, 2 November 1799, ibid., 192; Sargent to Picketing, 10 February 1800,
ibid., 206-7.
(21.) John D. W. Guice, "Face to Face in Mississippi Territory, 1798-1817"
in The Choctaw before Removal, Carolyn Keller Reeves, ed. (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 157-80. For the declining influence
of the Spanish in the nineteenth century see Wilkinson to Claiborne, 10 May
1803, in Carter, Territorial Papers, 5:217.
(22.) For removal see Arthur DeRosier Jr., The Removal of the Choctaw
Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970); and Mary Elizabeth
Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama
and Mississippi, 1830-1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961).
(23.) For postremoval period see Debo, Choctaw Republic, 58-79. For Irish
aid see Birzer, Entrepreneurship, 45-63. For an example of Choctaw rhetoric
see Spalding, Kingsbury, 167. For the Choctaws' receiving the best portion
of Indian Territory see Report of William Armstrong in Annual Report of
Commissioner of Indian Affairs (henceforth ARCIA) 1839, 468; and Akers, Land
of Death, 52, 62-65. For their increase in cultivated lands see Report of
William Wilson in ARCIA 1851, 367; Report of C. C. Copeland in ARCIA 1857,
239; Report of Douglas H. Cooper in ARCIA 1859 (Washington: Government
Printing Office, 1860), 195. Prior to the Civil War, only during a severe
drought that lasted several years in the 1850s did the Choctaws rely on
annuities for their subsistence; see Report of Wilson in ARCIA 1852, 411;
Report of Cooper in ARCIA 1855, 151; Report of Cooper in ARCIA 1856, 149.
(24.) For Choctaw entrepreneurship see Birzer, Entrepreneurship, 45-63.
Entrepreneurship is broadly defined by Birzer as using one's physical or
mental labor to make a profit and thereby changing the dynamics of an
economy. His approach is informed by the work of Joseph Schumpeter,
Frederick Hayek, Israel Kirzner, and Gerald Gunderson. For the new Choctaw
economy see Akers, Land of Death, 195-208, 267-67; James D. Morrison, The
Social History of the Choctaw Nation, 1865-1907 (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1987), 16-18; Report of Armstrong in ARCIA 1837, 541; Report
of Armstrong in ARCIA 1838, 508-9; Report of Armstrong in ARCIA 1841,
334-35; Report of Samuel M. Rutherford in ARCIA 1847, serial 503, 30th
Cong., 1st sess., Sen. doc. 1, 878; Report of Cooper in ARCIA 1859, 188,
195. For Choctaws' shifting their economic focus in response to market
demand see Report of Wilson in ARCIA 1852, 412. For Choctaw abandonment of
hunting see Report of Cooper in ARCIA 1858,157. For their use of annuities
see ibid., 469; Report of Armstrong in ARCIA 1840, 310-11; Report of
Armstrong in ARCIA 1841, 334-35; Report of Armstrong in ARCIA 1843, 409-10;
Report of Armstrong in ARCIA 1844, 457; Owen to Pitchlynn, 8 June 1845, in
Peter Pitchlynn Papers, box 1, file 93, Western History Collection,
University of Oklahoma, Norman.
(25.) For an overview of Choctaw temperance efforts see Hayes, Ardent
Spirits. For the temperance of the Choctaws after 1830 see Report of Thomas
Mayhew, 1828, in Kingsbury Papers, box 4, folder 1, Western History
Collection, University of Oklahoma, Norman; Kingsbury to Mayhew, 28 January
1829, ibid., 8:32; Spalding, Kingsbury, 88; Niles' Weekly Register
(Baltimore), 3 July 1830, 345; Missionary Herald 18 (December 1822): 378-79;
Report of Wilson in ARCIA 1851, 367-68; Hotchkin to Wilson in ARCIA 1852,
419; Report of Copeland in ARCIA 1857, 235; Cyrus Byington, "Changes in the
Choctaw Nation during the Last Eighty Years," in Kingsbury Papers, 1:4;
Morris, Life Among the Choctaw, 50. For factionalism see Spalding,
Kingsbury, 88. A law against liquor and the vesting of enforcement authority
for this law to the "light horse" were among the first laws to be passed by
the Choctaws under their new constitution. See Constitution and Laws of the
Choctaw Nation (Park Hill, Cherokee Nation: John Candy, 1840), 13-14. The
Choctaw police, or "light horsem," had varied success stopping the whiskey
trade. See Report of Armstrong in ARCIA 1838, 509; Report of Armstrong in
ARCIA 1843, 410; Byington to Cooper in ARCIA 1856, 153; Ainslie to Cooper in
ARCIA 1858, 163; Hotchkin to Cooper in ARCIA 1859, 194-95. For temperance
meetings see Rind to Armstrong in ARCIA 1842, 505; Stark to Cooper in ARCIA
1856, 164. For temperate requirement for Choctaw office holding see Report
of Copeland in ARCIA 1857, 235. For missionary efforts to secure Choctaw
temperance see William L. Hiemstra, "Presbyterian Missionaries and Mission
Churches among the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians, 1832-1865;" Chronicles of
Oklahoma 26:4 (winter 1948-49): 462-64; Spalding, Kingsbury 458, 104,
163-64, 166. The United States had a dismal record of supporting Choctaw
temperance efforts, even to the extent of providing the Choctaws with liquor
when it was to their advantage, such as at treaty conferences. See Hayes,
Ardent Spirits, 296-97. After removal, Indian agents lobbied in vain for the
government to take action to support Choctaw efforts against intemperance.
See Report of Elbert Herring, in Report from the Office of Indian Affairs,
1833, serial 238, 23rd Cong., 1st sess., Sen. doc. 1, 203; Report of Cooper
in ARCIA 1856, 150.
(26.) White, Roots of Dependency xix, 146,351. For an analysis of White's
narrative style in Roots of Dependency see William Cronon, "A Place for
Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative," in Journal of American History
78:4 (1992): 1365-66.
(27.) Birzer, Entrepreneurship, 45-63; Usner, Frontier Exchange, 165-72.
Stephen P. Van Hoak is currently a graduate student of history in the Ph.D.
program at the University of Oklahoma.

American Indian Quarterly
COPYRIGHT 1999 University of Nebraska Press.
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Sources:IAC TRADE AND INDUSTRY DATABASE 
THE AMERICAN INDIAN QUARTERLY 22/06/1999 P113 
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12May1999 AUSTRALIA: Global garden. 
By JAMES WARDEN.
James Warden draws on the past to illuminate the future of a grass roots
movement faced with accelerating environmental change
A HISTORY OF THE AUSTRALIAN ENVIRONMENT MOVEMENT Drew Hutton and Libby
Connors Cambridge University Press $90 hb, $29.95 pb, 324 pp FOREST FRIENDLY
BUILDING TIMBERS Edited by Alan T. Gray and Anne Hall Earthgarden Books
$9.95 pb, 80pp TRUE GARDENS OF THE GODS: Californian-Australian
Environmental Reform 1860-1930 Ian Tyrrell University of California Press
$US48 hb, 313 pp THE RECENT FURORE OVER Elle Macpherson and a
misrepresentation of the Australian landscape is emblematic of economic and
environmental brawls with long, historic resonance. Our best-known
supermodel was repatriated to promote the vast spaces and timeless natural
vistas of the West. Her fame and beauty could get the attention of those
hurrying down Collins Street at 5pm, the pallid-faced city dwellers
suffering Banjo Paterson's curse of the "fetid air and gritty of the dusty,
dirty city". The advertisement presented a narrative landscape of desire but
became controversial due to the presence of a noxious weed: Opuntia inermis,
the prickly pear. Whoever designed the shot probably thought, mistakenly,
that all deserts have cactus.
What the Western Australian Tourist Commission apparently did not know is
that prickly pear was one of the most devastating and despised plants
introduced to the continent. From the 1830s, when the ornamental hedge
jumped the fence, vast areas of agricultural and grazing land were
colonised. Instead of meaningful work, generations of farmers toiled
uselessly with pick and blade, only to turn and face the next infested
paddock. Nothing physical or chemical could beat it.
Lightly wooded areas were the most susceptible and broadacre land-clearing
was adopted to keep the bastard down. By 1920, prickly pear covered 23.5
million hectares and was spreading at more than 1 million hectares a year.
So, at the geographic and social levels, the plant powerfully shaped the
ecology and the political economy of eastern Australia. Yet something
happened to the prickly pear. Where is it now?
According to historian Ian Tyrrell, the tale of disappearance exemplifies a
remarkable and little-known Pacific relationship, and is implicated in the
much larger systemic developments of world history. Prickly pear was beaten
in Australia by Cactoblastis cactorum, a moth from Uruguay that liberated
millions of hectares in a matter of months. In the supreme Australian
example of biological control, the cactus problem was solved. Hollywood
might call the hero-pic A Bug's Life. Perhaps the phrase "she's cactus",
denoting dilapidated failure, happily derives from here.
Both plant and creature are part of a longer global history of ecological
imperialism in silent collusion with political and commercial imperialism.
The world systems of trade, commerce, politics and ideas have been
accompanied by an enormous transfer of organisms, from the microbial to the
zoological, from rice to rabbits, from sheep to leprosy, influenza, smallpox
and syphilis, lantana, rabbits, pigs and cats. In Eric Rolls's words, they
all ran wild, except cane toads, which walked, as they have short back legs.
(Frogs hop. Toads walk.) Elle and the tourist commission were blamed for not
understanding that the desert, the defining icon of Australia, does not have
cacti. A thousand Hollywood westerns have created an imperial myth of cactus
in the desert. That mistake would not be made with a bunny or with Bufo
marinus. One tour company is advertising to "see Kakadu before the cane
toads do", because they have just crossed the Roper River. You have about
three years.
We have known for a while that time is relative, that there is change in the
rate of change and that history does not move in simple cycles but in a
dialectical fusion. Opposites merge into new syntheses, which in turn
collide, fuse, change and never rest. Nowhere is this clearer than in
respect to the environment. Global warming, toxic waste, nuclear waste,
deforestation, desertification and the catastrophe of species loss are
defined in terms of the change in the rate of change. More is happening
faster.
Just a generation ago, we discovered that everything is connected to
everything else. The corollary was to act locally and think globally. The
homily is now reversed as we, the rich, are networked to everywhere that
matters and everyone who counts, and we are persuaded to think locally and
act globally. Amid rapid and complex change, the environment movement is
trying to slow the rate of ecological change, fix the broken bits and, in
Tim Bonyhady's words, defend the places worth keeping. Precaution is the
principle, and common citizens are the ragtag gang who take up the uneven
struggle in the knowledge that David versus Goliath was a fluke.
The change in the rate of environmental change is surely among the most
pressing of national concerns in an indubitably global context. We cannot
afford to go on doing what we are doing to the continent. Furthermore, the
tale of what we have done has not yet been adequately told.
Like a hammer, history is both a tool and a weapon. For the short struggles
and the long haul, the Australian environment movement is in dire need of
more hardware, such as these three books. Tyrrell tells a story he calls the
"Pacific exchange". It is a masterful, nuanced, superbly realised history.
He argues that, between 1860 and 1910, California developed an image of
itself as a garden, founded in the balance of horticulture and purpose-grown
forests, sustained by a remarkable relationship of environmental and
horticultural exchange with Australia. Regrettably, by 1930, the last lights
over the Pacific had faded. The West Coast of the US was bureaucratically
and financially bound to Washington policy, East Coast commerce and Midwest
industry. The Californian economy was solidly transformed by cars, oil and
Hollywood. Ironically, the movie Chinatown (1974) portrays Tyrrell's thesis
well, with 1930s LA overtaken by industrial irrigation schemes, suburban
development and corruption. For Australia, imperial preference and the
Depression wiped out the residual links. The nation looked back to Britain
until Singapore fell and the Americans arrived again, this time with General
Motors and Coca-Cola. They were over here, overpaid, over-sexed and - as
structuralists would say - over-determined.
The Pacific exchange had been both intellectual and organic. From 1850,
Australians had crossed the Pacific as the English language and gold fever
supplanted Spanish and monastic missions. Californians booked the return
passage. The diggers shared a frontier mentality, a quest for nuggets and
antiChinese racism. Ideas were also shared on horticultural methods,
irrigation and architecture, eventually in the form of the housing species
California bungalow. We sent Eucalyptus regnans and they sent Pinus radiata.
The exchange also brought Henry George, a celebrity reformer, met by
enormous crowds in Sydney in March 1890. "The issue of humankind's relations
with nature" was central to his thinking. John Muir later made powerful use
of his ideas in opposing the partial alienation of Yosemite for a dam. It
was, he said, "the people's park". Despite Muir's efforts, the Hetch Hetchy
Valley was drowned and, deeply saddened, he died shortly after. Muir's
influence in Australia has endured most obviously with the formation of the
Wilderness Society in 1976. The Henry George League also survives.
Aside from tax reform and nature conservation, George's movement wanted
closer settlement, yeoman-style farming, an improved and pleasing landscape,
and temperance. The legacy of that symbiosis of architecture, social policy
and nature conservation can be seen, for example, in the advocacy of Myles
and Milo Dunphy. By focusing on horticulture, Tyrrell's book counters the
historical concentration of interest in pastoralism. The glamour of cowboys,
the range, the ranch, the outback, the drover and the shearer has been more
compelling and cinematic than the market gardener. The garden model as a
mode of agricultural rather than suburban organisation he assesses to be far
more significant then we appreciate. From 1860 to 1910, the garden was the
hegemonic ideal of development in California, while in Australia Victoria
became the garden state. Biological control of pests, irrigation and the
rise of economic entomology are the main sub-themes along with
acclimatisation, which was the practice of transferring animals and plants
to improve the vista. The traffic, mostly one way, has caused catastrophic
ecological damage, yet continues apace with pasture "improvement" and
nursery introductions. Acclimatising wombats to England failed, but Tyrrell
does not permit himself that curious diversion.
Some of Tyrrell's characters - Muir, George and Ferdinand von Mueller are
still famous. Others are not: Frances Willard, who saw California as a
garden of the gods; George Perkins Marsh, the botanist; Ellwood Cooper and
John Bidwell, the advocates of sustainable agriculture; Elwood Mead, of the
closer settlement movement; Abbot Kinney, who saw a future in growing trees
rather than logging natural forests; George Chaffey, "the disparaged
engineering wizard"; George Goyder, who surveyed the line dividing
agriculture from pastoralism; and Clement De Garis, "one of Australia's
ideologues of the irrigated garden". Alfred Deakin has a cameo. Curiously,
Queensland irrigation is not fully assessed given the supposed American
influence on water engineers J. B. Henderson, A. Rigby and W. M. Mackinnon,
who don't get a guernsey.
Under Tyrrell's direction, characters, creatures, crops and ideas amount to
much more than a bag of interesting stories. He depicts a larger history
than any single event or species may suggest, for his superbly crafted
picture is also inhabited by two unnamed spectres. Neither appears in the
index or the references. One is Immanuel Wallerstein, the other Fernand
Braudel - both 20th-century European scholars who transformed our historical
understanding of global systems. Tyrrell's book is informed by their work in
the best sense, so the prickly pear is not just a weed but part of a much
larger history of colonisation, of mentalities, biologies, commerce and even
taxation. Prosaic things and common events, interpreted skilfully, bring
technical theory, such as structural history, out of the seminar room. For
Tyrrell and his absent friends, history is about the long contours of
everyday life.
Wallerstein's theory of world systems explains capital accumulation and
imperialism as deep and powerful historical structures. He developed ideas
about the core and the periphery, the strong State and the weak State, and
the power of rural and urban systems of production. For Wallerstein,
minisystems can occupy the periphery, operating outside world systems of
commerce and imperialism.
Tyrrell locates the Pacific exchange in this context. A mini-system was
developing between California and Australia based on the garden model, which
balanced horticulture, wood-lot forests, small-scale irrigation and
biological control. It flourished until 1907-10 when it was engulfed and
destroyed by the nationalising power of Teddy Roosevelt's version of
progressivism. The National Reclamation Act 1902 bound the Californian
waterways to industrial-scale production rather than mixed-garden
irrigation. The US Department of Agriculture asserted itself against
biological control. Insects were declared the enemy instead of "an equal
part of God's creation" as Ellwood Cooper thought. It was war.
California was "in the hands of incompetents", said the department's
entomology chief, Charles Valentine Riley. Berkeley professor C. W.
Woodworth was the attack dog sooled on to Cooper and his natural methods in
1907 when the white citrus fly infested Marysville orchards. Cooper and his
ideas were discarded in favour of chemical spraying - DDT became the future.
Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring and cancer ineluctably followed. The
garden model, an anti-system at the periphery, was consumed by the world
system, with Washington at the core. In perhaps the deepest irony, Cooper's
property, an exemplary mixed garden, was found in 1928 to be planted over
one of California's most profitable oil wells.
Tyrrell's book is also illuminated by the work of Braudel, who in
multivolume works The Mediterranean (University of California Press, 1995)
and Civilisation and Capitalism (UCP, 1992) wove the mundane and seemingly
frivolous into an account of the longue dure * e. He saw history on three
linked levels. The first is created by the land, the sea and the soil;
mountains, rivers, rain, heat, snow and the wilderness from which emerge
cities, the countryside, highways and railways. The second level comprises
social forces, the worlds people inhabit, with the trends and destinies of
their hierarchies and relationships. The third level we commonly understand
to be events, the doings of people, the actions of individuals. Braudel's
three levels correspond with geographic time, social time and individual
time.
Inherent in such history is the idea of "mentalities". How do we, here and
now, understand what they thought then. How can we understand the mind of a
feudal peasant, a feudal king, or Tyrrell's 19th-century figures, Marsh and
Mueller? Tyrrell argues for the necessity to "reconstruct" their mentality
and that the "mentality of 19thcentury conservation must be understood
before we can proceed". If these two great historians inhabit The True
Garden of the Gods, another spirit is curiously absent, given Tyrrell's
usual systemic attention to race and class. The missing figure is Woody
Guthrie, now fashionably revived in Billy Bragg's Mermaid Avenue, Bruce
Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad and Cormac McCarthy's borderland novels.
There are no voices of the people from across the border or from Oklahoma;
the wetbacks, the clapboard white trash, those who did not prosper and only
endured on the periphery with, as Springsteen put it, a "one-way ticket to
the promised land, a hole in their belly and a gun in their
hand". Perhaps Tyrrell would argue that the depredations of the industrial
cropping of the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys came later and were
precisely the implacable outcome of the world system.
His conclusion laments the loss of the garden movement to an uncompromising
world system with no concept of sustainability, as the garden model was
reduced to a town-planning aesthetic.
He need not have been so gloomy. Forest Friendly Building Timbers, edited by
Alan Gray and Anne Hall, is a consumer guide to plantation and recycled
timber as alternatives to native forest timbers. The book advocates the use
of species brought to Australia in the Pacific exchange. It is the newest
exhibit in the centuries-old forest dispute. In 1665, La Fontaine's fable of
the woodcutter mourned the cynical destruction of the "sweet and shady
spots". Tyrrell's characters a century ago - and Gray and Hall now -
describe artificial forests as the viable wood solution to logging native
growth.
Forest Friendly Building Timbers, published by Earthgarden Books, is
consistent with the expansive ecological minisystem promoted by its parent
magazine since 1972. The magazine has advocated a garden model of precisely
the type Cooper and his allies imagined, stripped of the acclimatisation
mentality, with the integration of horticulture, biological control,
independent and cooperative self-sufficiency, seasonal management of food
crops and wildlife maintenance. Earthgarden's priority is to balance forests
with gardens.
Each issue is tithed and the "eco-tax" distributed to different environment
groups. The last instalment went to Environs Kimberley in Broome to "help
prevent a destructive river-dam and chemical cotton growing proposals". The
sentiments are an echo of Muir, Cooper, Marsh and the long-gone Pacific
exchange and represent the most vibrant elements of the contemporary
movement.
Drew Hutton and Libby Connor's A History of the Australian Environment
Movement is a rich, readable and scholarly book, which opens with a strong
point about historical selfconsciousness: "Lacking a sense of its own
history, the contemporary environment movement has been slow to claim its
past." They are correct for several reasons. First, the archives of the
movement, although voluminous, are ephemeral and the files of all the
organisations I know are rarely reread unless there is a campaign reason to
brush off the dust. Second, environment campaigners are not often rewarded
for making a significant contribution to the community. With a few
high-profile exceptions, environmentalists are not recognised in honours
lists because what they do is unremittingly political. Third, the movement
has difficulty expressing public approval for a job well done, especially in
times of defeat. Some charismatic individuals have been celebrated, but many
more work on minuscule budgets with little or no pay - day in, day out.
Differences arise over the value of paid and unpaid work, of the grassroots
activists as against lobbyists and technical experts, while the instant
glamour of blockaders is only possible through mundane clerical and
fundraising work. Gender remains an issue. Although women tend to hold
networking jobs in conservation councils and environment centres, the
national organisations are headed by men.
The environment movement has to learn how to tell its own history, to
recover its past, to find ways of describing what was done and by whom.
Hutton and Connors go much of the way in filling the gap. Historical
obscurity means that past lessons are forgotten, campaign knowledge is not
well distributed and the movement may become strangely depersonalised, with
increasingly serious political ramifications. Environmentalists are targets
of million-dollar public relations strategies of government, industry and
shock-jock journalists. Environmental advocates, if not well-known, can be
easily smeared as zealots, extremists and dogmatists, and scapegoated for
causing rural decline. An emerging body of literature, including Andrew
Rowell's Green Backlash (Routledge, 1996), identifies the activities of
public relations companies and industry associations in distorting the image
of community campaigners to associate them with extremism, even violence.
The book is a polished, detailed narrative and superbly referenced, but
would have been strengthened by some fussing over method. The historian's
challenge of mediating between differing views of what happened should have
been addressed. The contested concepts of environmentalism, especially in
regard
to Aboriginal dispossession, should also have been discussed along with the
shifting cadences of key words: nature, wilderness, conservation,
acclimatisation, sustainability, wise use, development, protection. The
programmatic return to the sociology of Max Weber in the epilogue also
generates an analytical flaw in assessing a putative decline. The big groups
are identified as "developing the routinisation and bureaucratisation of
mature structures" and thus are inevitably caged by Weber's law of
oligarchy. "There is much to this argument," say Hutton and Connors.
However, the national organisations are not the movement. Even if those
organisations are mature, in that sense, the conclusion misses the point.
In focusing on big organisations and key events, what is lost, or not
devel-oped, is the breadth of the movement and its protean nature. Many
would rightly disagree that the big groups make up the movement and that
bureaucracy is the inevitable outcome. The mistake of eliding the national
organisations with the movement derives in part from a reluctance to
empirically depict the movement. In noting that "social movements are
notoriously difficult to define", no attempt is made to describe the living
contours. A portrait is expected to emerge from the telling. A more broadly
cast assessment of the Australian environment movement would include
Earthgarden, Wild magazine and Blinky Bill. It would directly critique the
ecological sensibility of writers such as the Jindyworobaks, Judith Wright,
Eric Rolls, Mark O'Connor, David Foster, Tim Winton and Richard Flanagan.
I would also include Les Murray in the broader movement, even though he
maintains a sepia image of work in the bush and writes as if we are still
only cutting on the edge of the forest: "I shoulder my axe and set off home
through the stillness." He wants the owls as well as native forest logging,
seemingly oblivious to the fact that none of us can have both for much
longer. In A Working Forest and Subhuman Redneck Poems, he barracks for a
rural underclass, seemingly loathes urban activism and, in common with
bellicose log-truck drivers, expresses a deep and misdirected anger at the
movement. But he is a poet of the bucolic narrative landscape. "Ecology?
Sure. / But also husbandry," he concedes defensively.
An assessment of the movement should include the environmentalism of visual
artists such as Arthur Streeton, Lloyd Rees, Fred Williams, Arthur Boyd,
Mandy Martin, John Wolseley, John Olsen; of emerging painters such as Mark
Schaller, David Larwell and Peter Walsh; of cartoonists Leunig, Petty,
Horocek, Nicholson and Tandberg. If the Green Party is in the movement, then
what about the Democrats? And the (human) ferals? They surely have made a
dramatic impact on environmental imagery in Australia. Friends of the Earth
deserves more attention because that organisation is crucial to the
character of the movement. FOE member Kate McCann designed the black hand on
the radiation symbol representing resistance to all uranium mines. Even more
powerful was Peter Dombrovskis's 1983 photograph of Rock Island Bend on the
Franklin River, which was published in full-colour, full-page newspaper
advertisements the week before the federal election of March that year,
asking voters: "Would you vote for a party that would destroy this?" Only
one answer was possible and Malcolm Fraser did not have it. The irrefutable
picture is on the cover of the book, yet its authors do not assess
photography as politics. Wilderness Society calendars have changed our
visual language and so has the work of nature photographers such as Olegas
Truchanus, Chris Bell and Ted Mead. Inspired by Ansel Adams's transcendent
images of Yosemite, their work loops contemporary Australian politics back
to John Muir. Steve Parish, at the popular end of the market with postcards
in every post office, is also part of the movement. The early scientists are
well documented in the book, but contemporaries are not included, such as
John Mulvaney, Harry Recher, Ian Lowe, Hugh Possingham and Jamie
Kirkpatrick. The work of historians and social scientists such as Geoffrey
Bolton, Tim Bonyhady, Robyn Eckersley and Val Plumwood have similarly
changed our understanding of the ecology as a philosophical and historical
subject, as Manning Clark changed our conception of Australian
sensibilities.
Finally, the rising consciousness about Aboriginal ownership of Australia
requires evaluation. The blackgreen relationship is complex, evolving and
often confronting for the movement, which could still better appreciate
Aboriginal issues but has travelled a vast distance in the past decade.
This book is not so much a history of the environment movement in this
broader sense as a narrative history of momentous environmental issues and
events. The authors ask why the movement has faltered in the 1990s. But has
it? Whether this decade has charted the rise, or decline, of an
environmental ethic is an open question. The environment movement, like
feminism and Aboriginal self-determination, must cope with appropriation,
backlash, mightily heightened expectations and far greater complexity. In
addressing the question, a dialectical method is hinted at but not fully
deployed to show the appropriation of green sentiment and the simultaneous
attack on environmental advocacy.
In the 1980s, the movement tried to compete on equal terms with
billiondollar companies, which either unconvincingly played the underdog or
were counter-productively nasty. In the 1990s, industry has been more
cunning and grants for environmental advocacy have been repeatedly cut. The
federal Coalition counters that more funds are available through the Natural
Heritage Trust. They agree with Margaret Thatcher that "we are all green
now". The resource industries and pastoralists admit that they once made
mistakes, but have learned from them. Yes, but which ones? Propaganda and
Orwellian logic are routine.
Six key topics of the 1990s are either missing from the history or treated
summarily in a truncated last section: Landcare; the vengeful corporate
response to Wesley Vale and Coronation Hill; the Intergovernmental Agreement
on the Environment and the State of the Environment Report; the black-green
success over the Starcke pastoral lease, from which emerged the Cape York
Heads of Agreement; the 1996 general election with its curtain-raiser, the
1995 Canberra by-election; and the Natural Heritage Trust. Admittedly,
writing contemporary history is difficult, as most people who were there are
still here to read about what Braudel called "history which still simmers".
Such observations aside, Hutton and Connors have written a good and probably
durable account of events, a history of the instant, the nouvelle sonnante,
grappling with the enduring, the longue dure * e. Yet, Braudel also warns us
about the history of events, the "surface disturbance [of] waves stirred up
by the powerful movement of tides". For Bra udel: "Such history is about
short, sharp, nervous vibrations. Ultrasensitive by definition, the
slightest movement sets all its gauges quivering.
But, although by its nature the most exciting and richest in human interest
of histories, it is also the most perilous. We must be wary of history that
still simmers with the passions of the contemporaries who felt it, described
it, lived it, to the rhythm of their brief lives, lives as brief as our own.
It has the dimensions of their anger, their dreams and their illusions."
(c) Nationwide News Proprietary Ltd, 1999. 
Sources:AUSTRALIAN (THE) 12/05/1999 
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01Mar1999 JAPAN: Aid dilemma raises fundamental questions. 
By MASAHIKO ISHIZUKA.
"This country is too poor," said a Japan International Cooperation Agency
expert in Kampala when asked how he evaluated his own service as an
instructor/administrator at a vocational-training institute in the Ugandan
capital.
He is one of some 10 experts from the agency, a governmental-aid arm, sent
to Uganda to help improve the local training institute.
His remark almost sounded as if his job of professionally training Ugandan
youths would not make much sense until the country is economically
developed. The irony is that youths who have completed training courses in
various professional fields have been left jobless because of lack of
opportunities.
"The phenomenal improvement in Japan's health conditions in the postwar
period has been possible only because of the country's rapid economic
development and resultant prosperity," said a doctor from Japan working at
the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Nairobi. KEMRI is a key aid project
that the Japanese government has been focusing on over the decades to help
Kenya fight indigenous diseases, such as malaria and hepatitis, and
parasites.
The point the doctor was trying to make was that unless general economic
conditions improve, whatever progress is made in hygienic or medical fields
will not lead to desired social effects.
Although these aid workers are meaningful in themselves, their remarks raise
important questions, if not skepticism, about Japan's foreign-aid policy,
especially in extremely impoverished countries such as Uganda and Kenya.
If all aid projects were of the so-called humanitarian nature, that would be
easy. But in reality they are not. Japan's aid projects have various
objectives - diplomatic, commercial, political and humanitarian. Some are
altruistic and some are egotistic.
Admittedly, if as U.S. theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said in his classic 1932
book, "Moral Man and Immoral Society," any state is driven by egotistic
intentions, any governmental aid can be said to be essentially serving
egotistic purposes.
Development issue
The recent trend to focus aid on meeting "basic human needs" may well be a
way to get rid of this complexity in arguments about the nature of aid. But
as the doctor at KEMRI pointed out, who is responsible for achieving general
economic development? The fundamental question then is: Can foreign aid help
a country achieve economic development?
Japan has been helping Kenya for many decades with economic assistance.
Pakistan is another long-time recipient of Japanese aid. But an economic
takeoff in either country is nowhere in sight.
Lots of doubts have been raised about not only the efficacy of but also the
integrity of aid projects. But even if each individual project was
meaningful and served its own purpose, what has been the cumulative, overall
effect of past aid in particular countries? The question is more daunting
when it comes to the net global impact of all the aid provided throughout
the world.
The answer will boil down to what concept Japan has had about the world in
designing and implementing its aid on such a grand scale as it has carried
out over the decades.
With its government finances increasingly hard pressed, Japan can no longer
take for granted that it possesses ample resources for generous aid.
The country will be forced to be more selective and articulate about the
effect of aid it provides. Accountability in this respect will be all
important. Without that, how long and on what scale will Japan be able to
continue to provide aid?
If Japan's aid policy seeks to help developing countries meet more than
basic human needs, how effectively can it do the job? What strategy does it
need to have?
Adjacent to the issue of the potential for economic development is that of
governance, a word increasingly popular nowadays. Governance may be a rather
vague word, differing from a political system or democracy. But how aid
affects the governance of the recipient is a difficult question.
Japanese officials like to cite East Asian countries as a successful case of
Japanese aid leading to an economic takeoff and subsequent development,
although it is not necessarily clear that Japanese aid was a major factor.
African countries are quite a different story. As demonstrated by the
Japanese government hosting in Tokyo two international conferences on
African development, in 1996 and 1998, Japan seems eager to commit itself to
the continent, which is remote from Japan psychologically, culturally,
historically and in almost any other aspect.
This requires the Japanese government to come up with all the more
convincing explanations to its people. Perhaps except for aid for
humanitarian or emergency purposes, it will take a lot of explanation for
the government to educate its people. Even before that, the government will
need to convince itself.
Immanuel Wallerstein, an American scholar, suggests in his book "After
Liberalism" that the greatest challenge the world will face in the 21st
century is the division between the rich North and poor South. If so, a
fundamental question that must be asked is whether aid as implemented now in
whatever form will be the answer. Should not a more basic restructuring of
the world system be considered?
Masahiko Ishizuka is a Nihon Keizai Shimbun editorial writer and columnist
for The Nikkei Weekly.
(c) Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc. 
Sources:NIKKEI WEEKLY 01/03/1999 
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13Feb1999 SCHWEIZ: Die Globalisierung der frühen Jahre. 
Immanuel Wallerstein über das moderne Weltsystem

Über der Geschichte der deutschen Übersetzung des Hauptwerkes von Immanuel
Wallerstein, «The Modern World System», waltet ein Unstern. Natürlich kann
man das Ganze auch auf englisch lesen; man würde diesem Entwurf europäischer
Geschichte in globaler Absicht aber doch ein grösseres Publikum wünschen.
Die drei Bände frühneuzeitlicher Weltgeschichte des amerikanischen
Sozialwissenschafters und Historikers, der sich an seinem «Fernand Braudel
Center» in New York inzwischen auch mit der Geschichte der Wissenschaften
und ihrer Institutionen befasst, erschienen zwischen 1974 und 1989. Die
Übersetzung des ersten Bandes über die Anfänge der europäischen Weltökonomie
im 16. Jahrhundert wurde zwar 1986 bei Syndikat (Frankfurt am Main) verlegt
- aber dann war Schluss. Inzwischen ist sie längst vergriffen; ihre
glücklichen Besitzer aber können sich mit der These von der Strukturierung
der Welt nach den Bedürfnissen der europäischen Arbeitsteilung zwischen etwa
1450 und 1640 vertraut machen.
Wallerstein unterschied zwischen den «starken Zentralstaaten», der
«Semiperipherie» und der «Peripherie». Die starken Herzstücke konnten auch
Handelsstädte und Stadtrepubliken sein; man verfolgt die Verlagerung der
Zentren von Venedig, Genua, Sevilla bis nach Amsterdam. Die «Semiperipherie»
sind im Konkurrenzkampf abgesunkene ehemalige Zentren: Italien, Spanien,
Portugal, aber auch Süddeutschland gehören dazu. Die «Peripherie» liegt
gleichermassen im Westen wie im Osten: Süd-und Mittelamerika spielen vom
Zentrum aus gesehen eine ähnliche Rolle wie etwa Preussen und Polen. Beide
liefern Rohstoffe, die einen Edelmetalle und Zucker, die andren Getreide.
Für die eingefahrene Sicht der europäischen Geschichte war das eine neue
Perspektive. Man musste sich nicht mehr an die (ohnehin methodisch
fragwürdige) Geschichte von «Nationalstaaten» halten, sondern konnte die
Wanderung der ökonomischen Zentren als Index der Entwicklung nehmen.
Ausserdem war es ganz heilsam, etwa Preussen an der «Peripherie»
wiederzufinden und nicht im rückdatierten teleologischen Wunderschein
künftigen Glanzes.
Nun ist - achtzehn Jahre nach seinem Erscheinen - der zweite Band in einer
deutschen Übersetzung auf dem Markt. Er behandelt die Zeit zwischen 1600 und
1750 als eine Phase der Stagnation, aber auch der Konsolidierung. Mit der
Stagnationsthese schwächt Wallerstein die alte «Crisis in Europe»-Debatte
ab; die stürmische Dynamik des langen 16. Jahrhunderts verlangsamte sich
noch einmal, um dann seit der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts endgültig in die
grosse Expansion des kapitalistischen Weltsystems hineinzuführen. Das ist
der Gegenstand des 1989 erschienenen dritten Bandes. Der zweite Band über
den Merkantilismus diskutiert die Weltwirtschaft unter niederländischer
Hegemonie und verfolgt die Schicksale von Peripherie und Semiperipherie -
etwa am Beispiel Portugals und des Methuen-Vertrages mit England. Er gilt
seit Adam Smith als Musterstück internationaler Arbeitsteilung zum
wechselseitigen Vorteil - radierte aber die portugiesische Textilindustrie
durch englische Importe aus. Umgekehrt wurde der Weinhandel letztlich von
den Interessen der Abnehmer kontrolliert, und Portugal wäre es noch
schlechter ergangen, hätte es nicht das chronische Handelsbilanzdefizit mit
brasilianischem Gold ausgleichen können. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Wallerstein zeigt dann den (aus mitteleuropäischer Perspektive oft
marginalisierten) Kampf zwischen Holland und England um die Weltherrschaft,
ein Kampf, der sich im 18. Jahrhundert auf England und Frankreich verlagert.
England hatte ihn eigentlich schon 1763 gewonnen - aber Frankreich gesteht
das gleichsam erst 1815 mit der Niederlage Napoleons ein.
Das sind immer wieder gut zusammengefasste Perspektiven, wenn sie auch -
notwendigerweise - den Diskussionsstand der siebziger Jahre reflektieren.
Doch sollte man sich von keinem Gerede über das «Ende der grossen
Erzählungen» schrecken lassen - hier ist eine, die den Weltmarkt zum
Hauptakteur macht. Sie war nie unumstritten, wenn auch die Diskussionen bei
Erscheinen des Werkes vornehmlich im linken akademischen Spektrum geführt
wurden. Mit dem Aufleben der Globalisierungsdebatte könnte der ganze Ansatz
noch einmal neu und unvoreingenommen überdacht werden. Wie wäre es, wenn die
beteiligten Verlage sich zusammentäten, den vergriffenen Band neu
herausbrächten und den dritten gleich dazu übersetzten? Leser werden sich
unter dem Geschichtszeichen der Globalisierung schon finden.
H. D. Kittsteiner

Immanuel Wallerstein: Das moderne Weltsystem II - der Merkantilismus. Europa
zwischen 1600 und 1750. Aus dem Englischen von Gerald Hödl. Promedia
Druck-und Verlagsgesellschaft m. b. H., Wien 1998. 430 S., Fr. 52.20. 
Sources:NEUE ZUERCHER ZEITUNG 13/02/1999 
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04Jan1999 KUWAIT: The view ahead - Japan, U.S. to unite as market fades. 
from YOMIURI SHIMBUN, January 04, 1999 WASHINGTON In this second installment
in a series of interviews with world leaders and prominent figures, Prof.
Immanuel Wallerstein raises major financial and political issues that will
have to be addressed in the 21st century.
Wallerstein is a sociologist renowned for his "world system theory," by
which he analyzes capitalism and international politics. Born in 1930 in New
York, he graduated from Columbia University in 1951 and currently teaches at
the State University of New York at Binghamton. Wallerstein was interviewed
by Yomiuri Shimbun correspondent Akinori Uchida. Yomiuri: What is your
overview of the 20th century? Wallerstein: The 20th century-there are so
many things to say. First, the 20th century has certainly been the
culminating century of the modern world system and the capitalist world
economy in terms of economic achievement and expansion. Secondly, it has
been the American century, in the words of Henry Luce (the late publisher of
Time, Life and Fortune)-it has been the century in which the United States
has become the hegemonic power. The third major thing about the 20th century
is what I call the "anti-systemic movement," a term I use to cover the
social movement, labor movements and the socialist parties, etc., which
arose in the 19th century as a protest against conditions in various
countries. Plus the nationalist movements, or national liberation movements
that arose in all parts of the non-Western world, basically as a protest
against imperial rule. These movements together were rather weak in the 19th
century. The 20th century saw them triumph, everywhere. I would underline
the word "everywhere. There was, of course, the communist world, which was
about a third of the globe, and which had communist parties in power. You
will notice that I did not mention the Cold War. That's not accidental. I
think the Cold War taken by itself is overplayed and misunderstood. I think
there is no question that the United States and the Soviet Union created a
situation in which they were great rivals after 1945, and they each had
their zone of importance. They were both great military powers and they kept
each other at bay with mutual deterrents. But my contention is that in many
ways this was a fake. In addition, one could say that the 20th century was a
century of incredible and awful destructiveness. And not merely the total of
the destructiveness-how many people were killed and how many buildings were
destroyed-but also the quality of the destruction: Nazism, Stalinism, the
dropping of the atomic bomb. These are all events of a dimension that were
not known previously. You have insisted that a new world system will replace
the current system when it ends in 30 to 50 years. What is your view of the
21st century? I have to start by explaining that historical, large-scale
systems have lives. We have been in such a system for 500 years-the
capitalist world economy. It started in one corner of the world and expanded
to include the entire globe. For at least a century now, it has covered the
entire globe. And for various reasons, it is coming to an end. That is to
say, systems come to an end when the internal contradictions within them
become so acute that you can't just solve the problems with a little
tinkering-if they come to a certain point where they can no longer work,
then what you have is chaos and a bifurcation. Technically, in the physical
sciences, this is where there are two solutions to the major equation. Built
into this theory is the idea that it is intrinsically impossible to predict
which of these two, or more than two, possible alternatives will be chosen.
It is not simply that we don't know enough-it is that there is no way that
anyone could ever predict such things. So we have to live through it to know
how it comes out. What we can say is that during this period a little push
in one direction, rather than in another direction, may decide the issue.
And there are billions of actors engaging in those little pushes. We never
have perfect order. It will all escalate over the next 30 to 50 years. All I
can say is that we'll have a new system. I don't know what that system will
look like. I only know that it will be different. I can guarantee that there
will be a very big political struggle, because the stakes are incredibly
high, and people aren't going to just sit around with their hands folded and
not do anything. In view of the current recession affecting some regions, do
you have anything positive to say about the 21st century? For me, eight
years of Japanese recession is nothing. Furthermore, what is very clear is
that public opinion can change very quickly. All that you have to have
happen in Japan is for things to improve a little. People will eventually
come to see that Japan in the last 100 years has been doing well. And that's
the thing to remember. Japan has experienced outstanding economic growth. I
think that the next 30 years at least, will be a very unpleasant period in
which to live. The optimistic thing is, I think, that individual efforts to
push the world in the direction we think it ought to go in will be more
meaningful and efficient in the next 30 years than at any time in the last
500 years. So we live in very good times-in times where our personal effort
will matter. It will make a difference in 20 to 30 years from now what
people do right now. And I take that to be a very optimistic thing-your
input matters in this situation, in a way that your grandfather's and
great-grandfather's input didn't matter. What kind of role could or should
Japan play in the next century? I think that the Japanese people should aim
at the same thing everybody else is aiming at: reconstructing the world
system in a more rational, democratic and egalitarian way. I don't see any
special role for any special group of people. I think that the Japanese
would be making a mistake if they were only to analyze the system in terms
of success of hegemonies and their possible hegemonic role. They also have
to be aware of the crisis in the world system, and that some historical
choices have to be made, and not for Japan, but for the entire world. I am
interested in your argument about a struggle between Japan and Europe in the
coming decade. What kind of outcome do you predict? The issue of the
relations between Japan, western Europe and the United States is less about
the crisis of the system than about how the system has been working. What we
can say about the old system as we look at it over 500 years is that there
have been a small number of hegemonic powers before. I would say there have
been essentially three-the Dutch in the 17th century, the British in the
middle of the 19th century and the United States in the 20th century.
Hegemony is a very difficult thing to maintain, because the very processes
by which you maintain it undermine it. So hegemony always declines. I see
the United States as in hegemonic decline. I think it is no longer as
economically far advanced. In 1945 it was way ahead of Europe and Japan. By
1970, it was more or less in an equal position. But I think that with the
end of the Cold War, it has lost the political edge it had to maintain its
authority vis-a-vis both western Europe and Japan by insisting that they had
to follow the U.S. line because there was a cold war going on. But that
excuse has disappeared. They've lost the political edge. They are going to
lose-they haven't yet lost-the financial edge, and they are going to lose
the cultural edge. And the two zones rising and competing now are Japan and
western Europe.
I think they will both, in the next 20 years, assert themselves,
economically, politically and militarily. We will also have three zones
fighting each other for economic goodies. I have a general theory that three
always reduces to two. If you have a three-way competition, it is always in
someone's interest to join forces with another to defeat the third. And my
theory is that the likely coupling will be the United States and Japan, for
various reasons. The United States has two things it can offer Japan-it has
two things that Japan does not yet have. One is an incredibly large
scientific and intellectual establishment-its university system, etc. Of
course, Japan has one too, but it is not that large. And that's essential in
terms of creating new economic processes and new ideas. They can offer this
to Japan. It's what we call R&D (research and development). I think the
United States is strong and will remain strong for the next 30 years. And
the second thing that the United States has that Japan doesn't have is
military capability. The United States is the strongest military power in
the world. I mean after all, Japan is East Asia, the United States is
basically European. How could they ever get together? My argument is that
the cultural gap is actually a plus, not a minus. If you look at western
Europe's relationship with the United States, the biggest problem that they
have is a common cultural background. As I see the history of the 20th
century, OK, what happened is that in 1945, Europe ceased to be the United
States' cultural elder brother, and became its cultural junior partner.
There was a shift. That's why I think that we will see, in the first 20
years of the 21st century, the United States and Japan moving much closer
together economically and politically, and a rift growing with western
Europe. Now, if these were normal times-if the capitalist economy were just
going to go on for another couple of centuries-then I would predict that
somewhere down the line, in the late 21st century, Japan might become the
new hegemonic power. We are going to start down that road, but these other
problems, which I call the "structural problems," of the world system, are
going to interfere with that process. U.S. public opinion didn't want us to
march on Baghdad, and there has been a Vietnam syndrome that has said very
clearly, for 25 years now, "Yes, we want to be militarily strong. Yes, we
want to stand up to everybody. But no deaths. No more than, let us say, 200
casualties." You can't be a superpower if public opinion says not more than
200 casualties. So the first problem is an enormous sense of constraint on
use. The United States fought (the Vietnam) war without paying a penny. They
got that money from four powers-Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait
footed the bill entirely. Why? Because the U.S. president also knew that he
couldn't get the money from Congress that was required to fight that war.
You can't be a superpower if you can't get the money from Congress.
That's a very different situation. What kind of roles will innovation and
technology play in the coming century? I don't think that there is an Asian
crisis. I think that since circa 1970, the whole world economy has been in
one long downturn. After 30 years of going up and expanding, there are 30
years of going down-30 years more or less. There were periods when the
United States did very badly, and there were periods when western Europe did
very badly, and during those periods Japan was doing quite well. Now, in the
last decade it is Japan that is doing badly.
That is nothing special. That's part of the beat period. After this period
is over-which I suspect it might be in a few years-we are going to have a
new expansion of the world economy, with new leading products, and that is
where I think Japan is going to do very well. Hedge funds are one of many
ways in which people play a game of making money through financial
operations. I don't think it's impossible for the world powers to get
together and say, "Yeah, we have to get together and create some new
safeguards and some new regulations, even if it violates our theoretical
desire to have the states out of the picture." I think they can do it.
Europe's new currency will, in substantive terms, be equal to the U.S.
dollar. So it spells the end of dollar hegemony. Bit by bit, reserve funds
will be in euros as well as in dollars. One of the wonders of the capitalist
world economy is the expansion of technology. There is no question that in
the last 500 years we have seen technology of a kind we have never seen
before, and that is a great achievement. But this is an achievement in the
context of the unceasing accumulation of capital-the driving force behind
this achievement. To have the accumulation, we had to have the technology.
We've seen information technology of various kinds springing up, producing
wonderful things in the last 10 to 15 years, but it doesn't compare to what
we are going to see in the next 30. Biotechnology is an absolutely major
sphere. New sources of energy are an absolutely major sphere. We are going
to see lots of things put into practice in the next 20 to 30 years. We are
going to have all that technology, but I am more doubtful about some others.
What role will the environment issue play in the 21st century? What we see
in the 20th century is an accumulative buildup of basic destruction by
economic producers who weren't paying their bills. The bill is enormous. So
the question is who could pay these bills. Please elaborate on the
North-South conflict. I think the reality of the world is constant
polarization, which is getting worse and worse. And I think the South is
collectively not ready to tolerate that. I analyze this as three different
kinds of pressure that they are going to put on. One is what I call the
Saddam Hussein option, which is an open challenge to the U.S. military. The
other I call the Khomeini option. It's quite different. It says, we don't
play by your rules at all, we don't accept the integration of cultural ideas
of the whole world system, we don't accept the rules of the interstate
system. The third one I call the individual option, which is: We not only
have an economic polarization of the world system, we have a demographic
polarization of the world system since 1945. In the north, birthrates are
going down, markedly, and old age survival is going up. And in the South you
have a big expansion. So there is a growing disparity in numbers of people.
And in the North there aren't enough people really to do the work. So what's
happening is, of course, migration. Well, I see this process as continuing
for the next 20 or 30 years, whatever the governments do, so that by the
year 2030, certainly for North America and western Europe, and even for
Japan, you are going to have the Third World within. Japan is not going to
be made up only of Japanese. Maybe 80 percent Japanese. Well, the minute
that becomes a social reality of all the Northern countries, it changes
their politics, because either you admit these people to full citizenship,
and full rights, or you don't. If you don't, you have the makings of a civil
war situation. Copyright 1999 The Daily Yomiuri
Copyright(C) 1999 THE YOMIURI SHIMBUN/DAILY YOMIURI.
(c) 1999 Chamber World Network International Ltd. 
Sources:ASIA INTELLIGENCE WIRE 
THE YOMIURI SHIMBUN/DAILY YOMIURI 04/01/1999 
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17Jul1998 USA: Promoting Polyarchy - Globalization, U.S. Intervention and
Hegemony. (book reviews). 
By Burbach, Roger.
By William I. Robinson, Cambridge University Press, 1996, 485 pp., $59.95
(cloth), $22.95 (paper).
This is a pathbreaking study of the changes in U.S. policy wrought by the
"epochal shift" of globalization. The core of the book, which includes case
studies of U.S. policy in the Philippines, Chile, Nicaragua and Haiti, shows
how the United States has largely abandoned its decades-old policy of
supporting Third World dictatorships, and is now promoting polyarchical
regimes which are formally democratic but dominated by local elites tied to
the global economy. In Latin America, the policy shift to polyarchy took
hold in Chile in the mid-1980s when the United States abandoned its support
for the Pinochet regime. This shift gathered momentum with the 1990
electoral victory of Violeta Chamorro in Nicaragua and culminated in the
1995 U.S. invasion of Haiti that restored the democratically elected
Aristide government to power.
In his analysis of polyarchy, Robinson applies the Gramscian concept of
hegemony to the international arena. He argues that the core countries, led
by the United States, now realize that in order to successfully control the
periphery they cannot simply rely on openly coercive policies. Their
continued hegemony also depends on their ability to influence and shape
civil societies so that control can be internalized and a consensual form of
domination can be established. This explains why newly created institutions
like the National Endowment for Democracy selectively fund political
parties, civic organizations, polling agencies, trade unions and newspapers
in other countries. These forms of intervention in civil society are
reinforced by the very process of globalization, which imparts a
"culture-ideology" of consumerism and fosters the development of attitudes
and beliefs that facilitate consensual domination.
The ground-breaking ideas put forth in this book are a counterpoint to the
world systems school of Immanuel Wallerstein and more classical Marxists and
neo-Marxists who argue for the continued primacy of the nation-state.
Robinson advances a model that sees the United States as the last national
hegemon of the capitalist world system. It will not be replaced by another
imperial power bloc like a united Europe or Japan, he argues, but by
transnationalized elites and supranational institutions like the World Bank,
the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. According
to Robinson, states will continue to exist, but instead of serving the
"nation," they will increasingly serve the interests of transnational
capital, particularly financial institutions and multinational corporations.
In the concluding chapter, Robinson argues that there is a basic
contradiction between capitalism and democracy, even in its polyarchical
form. Global capitalism is polarizing the world's population between a
narrow elite which controls most of the world's resources - some 400
transnational corporations own two-thirds of the world's productive assets -
and the rest of the population, which is increasingly impoverished.
This polarization will not necessarily lead to a crisis of the new
transnational order and the demise of globalization. Like Gramsci, Robinson
emphasizes the importance of human agency and does not see any outcome as
historically predetermined. One possible scenario he envisions is the
continued survival of polyarchical governments at the same time that the
bulk of the population becomes increasingly powerless and alienated.
Robinson does point out, however, that the very process of globalization
also generates new possibilities for progressive politics on a transnational
scale, citing examples of labor and cross-border organizing, international
environmental movements and the spread of progressive ideologies like
feminism.
By laying out such a clear and complex picture of U.S. policy in the context
of the global transformations of the late twentieth century, Robinson's book
provides the left with a new framework for understanding international
politics, and more importantly, with some useful pointers on how human
agency can influence that process.
- Roger Burbach.

NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol.32, No.1
COPYRIGHT 1998 North American Congress on Latin America Inc. (NACLA)
(c) 1998 Information Access Company. All rights reserved.
This article may only be stored on a computer network for a maximum of 30
days. 
Sources:IAC TRADE AND INDUSTRY DATABASE 
NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 17/07/98 
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16Jul1998 UK: Rotten to the core. 
By Frank McLynn.
Progress and barbarism
Clive Ponting
Chatto & Windus, £30
When historians look back on the twentieth century will they stress the
technological revolution, air travel, the computer chip, the Internet, the
elimination of diseases like smallpox? Or will they dwell rather on the
Holocaust, man's general inhumanity to man, and the spectacle of
a planet committing gradual suicide with pollution, the destruction of the
ozone layer, and the rapid consumption of the earth's resources - and all
that by a handful of capitalists driven only by greed and selfishness?
Clive Ponting poses the question in the classical form put by Flaubert in
Bouvard et Pecuchet where Bouvard is the eternal optimist and Pecuchet the
unregenerate pessimist. While acknowledging mankind's great triumphs in the
fields of medicine and technology, Ponting agrees in the main with Pecuchet
that human beings are a pretty dismal lot and there is a motif of
near-despair that runs through his book.
Ponting has given a lot of thought to problems of structure in the writing
of a general history of the twentieth century and his solution is a very
good one. He moves gradually from the broadest themes to the narrowest, from
the general to the particular, layering his narrative cleverly so that the
history of, say, Mexico or the Soviet Union is told cumulatively over the 21
chapters. From broad-brush sections on economies and societies we proceed
ultimately to close-ups on dictatorship, revolutions, and genocide.
His basic conceptual framework is borrowed from "world systems" theorists
like Immanuel Wallerstein in that he distinguishes three types of
nation-states: those in the "core", those in the periphery, and those in the
semi-periphery. The "core" states are those that were economically dominant
at the beginning of the century by reason of industrialisation: Britain,
France, Germany, and the US. Most of the rest of the world, based on
agrarian monoculture, constituted the "periphery". A few states, in the
course of development, made it into the "semi-periphery": Russia, Spain,
Portugal, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina,
Uruguay, and Japan, for example.
Ponting claims that over the century there has been very little "social
mobility" between these classes of nations. Japan, it is true, has ascended
into the core and a few others (Turkey, Iran, Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan, South
Korea) have moved from the periphery to the semi-periphery, but by and large
the model holds good. Ponting rather oversells this paradigm of the world
via economic determinism, but it is certainly true that the gap between rich
and poor nations is the thing that would strike a visitor from another
planet most forcibly.
The "core" nations, containing one-fifth of the world's population, possess
80% of its wealth. As Ponting argues, of the six billion people now alive,
one billion have no access to drinking water, 880 millions are illiterate.
and 770 millions are at starvation level. On the other hand, the very
phenomenon of transnational corporations, to which Ponting rightly devotes
so much space, works against the idea of a model based on nation-states. And
does it make sense to describe a superpower, as the Soviet Union was for 40
years after the Second World War, as a member of the "semiperiphery"? There
is something very wrong with an economic model that assigns an inferior
place to a nation-state which could have blown the core skyhigh with its
nuclear arsenal.
Ponting's career as an author has been patchy, with his debunking biography
of Churchill as something of an unbalanced nadir, but here he is back to his
best form. He is up against formidable rivals in the shape of Hobsbawm,
Mazower, and Gilbert, who have all written general histories of our century
and, while not scaling the heights reached by Hobsbawm - not least because
he gives us no convincing reasons for the sudden and wholly unexpected
demise of the Soviet Union - Ponting easily holds his own with the other
two.
His statement of what should be tentative ideas in the form of dogmatic
assertions sometimes irritates, as do his verbal tics, particularly the
overuse of the adjectives "major", "massive", "problematic", and "unclear"
(or its cousin "far from clear").
Some of his propositions are just plain wrong, as when he writes of the
Kuomintang in China in 1937-45. (They "had to devote their efforts to
fighting the Japanese, not the Communists". In fact, during these years most
of the opposition to the Japanese came from Mao, as Chiang-
kai-shek was always more interested in fighting domestic Reds than foreign
invaders.)
Ponting also tells us that the murderers of the Mississippi chief of the
NAACP Medgar Evers were never prosecuted. In fact Byron Le Beckwith was
found guilty of the murder and sentenced to life in 1994 (admittedly 30
years after the assassination).
Yet these blemishes should not distract us from a solid and impressive
achievement. Ponting is particularly sure-footed in his use of statistics.
His figures for war casualties are much more accurate than those produced by
Mazower or Gilbert: he correctly estimates the total Russian dead in the
"Great Patriotic War" of 1941-45 as 50 million, instead of the absurdly low
20 million which has been habitually quoted in the West since 1963.
Most of Ponting's statistics are depressing. Who could argue for progress
against barbarism when faced with figures like these for the twentieth
century: 100 million dead in two world wars, 150 million dead in all wars,
100 million deaths from famine, 10 million from natural disasters, 25
million from car crashes, 100 million citizens killed by their own nation
states. When repression was at its height in mid-century, half the
population of the world suffered death or some form of torture. Not so much
a vale of tears, more a bottomless chasm of evil.
Not Available for Re-dissemination. 
Sources:THE HERALD 16/07/98 P14 
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22Mar1997 JAPAN: SPECIAL - The once and future boom. 
In this article, Eisuke Sakakibara argues that pessimism about the Japanese
economy is overdone

IN FISCAL 1996 (which ends on March 31st), Japan will probably have achieved
GDP growth of 2.5% or more, as forecast by the government. That will be
among the highest of the G7 countries. The short-term pessimism over the
economy that has recently been pervasive in Tokyo and elsewhere is based
primarily on two assumptions. The first is that the Y 7 trillion ( $57
billion) tax increase in April 1997 will be a major drag on consumption and
may result in a "double dip" recovery. The second is that the non-performing
loan problems, which are worsening, may result in bankruptcy for some large
financial institutions.
Neither speculation can be supported by the facts. First, the tax increase
has been anticipated for the past few years, and to the extent that
consumers are rational, has already been incorporated into their consumption
behaviour. Indeed, housing starts jumped substantially last September in
anticipation of the consumption tax rise and have plateaued since.
Additionally, there has been a small increase in automobile purchases during
the past few months. True, there may be some small reactions to these
purchases during the April-June quarter but those reactions will be
temporary.
What is more important is that business sentiment has been improving,
reflecting continuing favourable prospects for profits. In all industries,
it is now expected that profit levels will increase on average at slightly
less than 10% in fiscal 1996 and 1997. Investment in plant and equipment is
expected to grow substantially in fiscal 1997, reflecting the outlook for
profits. I do not intend to make any macroeconomic forecast here, but I will
say that achieving the 1.9% growth predicted by the government for fiscal
1997 should not prove hard.
The writing off of non-performing loans by banks, on the other hand, is
proceeding steadily and their total amount is now Y 29 trillion, as against
Y 1,346 trillion of total assets. There has been some downgrading of several
top banks by rating agencies as well as market rumours about financial
distress at some banks during the last few weeks. But the finance minister,
Hiroshi Mitsuzuka, has said that both the Ministry of Finance and the Bank
of Japan would stand firmly behind those institutions, and the market has
swiftly regained its stability. Large-scale streamlining and restructuring
are being undertaken by these banks, and the authorities fully back the
efforts they are making to overcome their present difficulties. Indeed, the
so-called "Tokyo Big Bang" will be implemented in the coming years to
deregulate Tokyo's financial markets, and these deregulatory efforts have
been carefully scheduled, with full consideration given to the process of
recovery of the industry's shattered health.
Both domestic and foreign observers have expressed some scepticism about the
possibility of implementing the six broad reforms announced by the Hashimoto
government. It is true that neither the prime minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto,
nor his party, the Liberal Democrats, has ever been perceived as the
ultimate "reformer". In fact, both have been seen as somewhat nationalistic
and often conservative.
But the history of reform is surprising: it has often been tough
conservatives who have implemented genuine reforms. Edmund Burke spoke of
radical reform to preserve nationhood, and it is exactly that type of reform
that the Hashimoto government has set about implementing. I, for one, have
long defended the Japanese-style market economy, and my position remains
unchanged. Job security, harmony within society, and co-habitation with
nature should still be the cornerstone of the Japanese economy and society.
However, we must adapt to the ever-increasing trend toward globalisation and
quickly adjust our system in order to survive in this new environment. As we
have done for the 130 years since the Meiji Restoration, we will quickly
absorb what needs to be absorbed and become fully competitive with the
Anglo-Saxon and other systems.
In sectors such as automobiles, semi-conductors, and machine tools we are
still fully competitive. It is in areas such as finance and information that
we need to concentrate our efforts to catch up.
The Tokyo Big Bang is a series of reforms to restructure our financial
system and institutions to achieve such goals in the area of finance. During
the current session of the Diet (parliament), a bill will be enacted to
deregulate cross-border and cross-currency financial transactions
completely. That act would transform the international financial field in
Tokyo. Following foreign-exchange deregulation, blueprints to deregulate or
internationalise areas such as securities, banking, insurance, business
accounting standards, and taxation should be announced by the end of 1997.
Most of the changes should be enacted, where legal action is necessary, in
the normal session of the Diet between January and June 1998. Mr Hashimoto
has said the Tokyo Big Bang will be completed by 2001, but the process is
likely to be quicker than that, with most of the necessary measures in place
by the end of the century.

The lessons of Asian history

Some of the irrational pessimism currently pervading Japan seems to be the
result of an identity crisis to which many Japanese have fallen victim since
the end of the cold war and the achievement of Japan's goal of catching up
with the West. Until quite recently, Japan could easily identify itself with
the free non-socialist world, despite historical and cultural differences,
and could concentrate on economic activities.
However, with the end of what Samuel Huntington, a professor at Harvard,
calls the civil wars among the western powers, a new perspective on the
world scene that places greater emphasis on differences between
civilisations has emerged - and many Japanese who have had a few qualms
about Americanising their way of life in the search for economic prosperity
have suddenly lost their confidence now that they have achieved what they
thought was their goal. Some confusion has naturally been generated and a
serious search for national identity has ensued.
In order to understand the nature of this search - and to grasp its
implications for modern Japan - it is necessary to look at some recent
trends in Japanese historiography. Serious soul searching has been going on
for some time now, particularly among philosophers, anthropologists,
economic historians, and among Asian regional specialists. Many have taken a
long, hard look at Japanese history before the Meiji modernisation in the
19th century and Asian history before westernisation.
Influenced by the writings of Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein
(historians who helped establish a tradition of global comparative history),
large numbers of Japanese intellectuals are beginning to realise that a
global economic system existed in the areas around the Indian Ocean, the
Arabic Sea, the South China Sea, and the East China Sea long before the
westernisation of the world. The Mediterranean world sketched by Braudel and
the world system across the Atlantic Ocean described by Wallerstein were
nothing other than subsystems of the global system that encompassed Africa,
the Mediterranean, the Islamic Middle East, India, China, and Southeast
Asia.
The centre of world economic and commercial activity from about the eighth
and ninth centuries until around the dawn of the 18th century was the area
encompassed by the Islamic empires, India, Southeast Asia and the coastal
areas of China. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Europe entered this global
commercial network. Europeans imported enormous amounts of consumer goods,
ranging from cotton products, tea, and ceramics, to lacquerware and
seasonings such as pepper and cloves. They exchanged those goods for silver
and gold which they obtained from North and South America.
The key to this global economic system was the importance placed on
commercial activities by Islamic merchants. Around the time of the Abbasid
dynasty, cross-border trade became extremely active in the Islamic world
with merchants acting as mediators for the movement of goods among western
and African countries, India, and (later) China. Joint business operations
resembling modern corporations thrived. Islamic, Jewish, and other merchants
travelling on dhows - wooden ships with triangular sails - had reached as
far as the southern coast of China as early as the 11th or 12th century.
Chinese merchants sailing on junks reached Calcutta and other Indian ports
on the Bay of Bengal sometime between the 12th and 14th centuries.
It is true that Venetian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English merchants
participated in this global trading network. But compared with their
Islamic, Indian, and Chinese counterparts they were latecomers, originally
interested in importing luxury Asian goods for the European nobility and
bourgeoisie in exchange for wool and woollen products or silver and gold.
Admittedly, the Industrial Revolution, which began in Europe in the late
18th century, and European superiority in firearms, have shifted the balance
towards the West over the last 200-odd years. However, according to the new
view emerging among Japanese intellectuals, Asia has a long tradition of
global trade among countries with diverse cultures and religions. What we
are witnessing now is the "Asian Renaissance", born of the fusion of Asian
commercial globalism and western capitalism.
Owing to geography, Japan found itself at the periphery of the Asian global
trading network, and precisely because of this peripheral location it has
been able to retain its independence throughout its history. In this sense,
Japanese history resembles that of western Europe, particularly England, in
that the nation was never trampled under by the military aggression of the
Chinese, Mongolian, or Islamic empires. Japan was late in developing its
economic system compared with other Asian and Islamic countries.
Unlike economic historians of the past, Japanese Braudelians and
Wallersteinians claim that Japan's modernisation had proceeded fairly
steadily before the Meiji Restoration of 1868. They claim that levels of
productivity, education, and culture during the 17th and 18th centuries in
Japan were comparable to those in Europe. In explaining the rapid increase
in agricultural productivity during the Edo period (1605-1868), they
introduced the concept of an "Industrious Revolution" (increase in labour
productivity by independent and relatively entrepreneurial farmers); this
was conceived as a counterpart to the Industrial Revolution of the West.
Of course, some catching up was necessary in order to revolutionise
production "industrially" and to equip a modern army. But the infrastructure
of modernity, according to the new view in vogue among Japanese
intellectuals, was already there.

Japan as model

The implication of all this historical work is as follows: the pivotal
question facing Asia and Japan today is not an all-or-nothing choice between
globalisation western-style or receding into a pre-modern and backward
tradition. Rather, the question is how Asian countries can help create a new
global system along with the West.
Many aspects of western market capitalism need to be incorporated into the
new system, and in this context reform - perhaps even revolution - needs to
be implemented quickly. However, this does not imply that the traditional
elements of the Asian economic structure - family and regional ties, or what
Francis Fukuyama, of George Mason University, called the "trust" network -
need to be changed. Rather, the "Asian Renaissance" may well create a new
paradigm, one that is different from western individualism or laissez-faire
capitalism. In such a paradigm, it is likely that there will be an important
role for Japan, because it is both part of Asia and a nation that has
succeeded in modernising its system without fundamentally losing its culture
and religion. In other words, the sun may well rise again in the 21st
century, with Japan not emulating the West but instead playing a leadership
role in the effort to fuse modern western capitalism with pre-modern but
nonetheless well-developed Asian global commercialism.

Eisuke Sakakibara is sometimes called "Mr Yen". He is the director-general
of the Ministry of Finance's International Finance Bureau, and the author of
"Beyond Capitalism", a defence of the virtues of Japan's economic system. 
Sources:UNITED KINGDOM 
ECONOMIST 22/3/97 
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