Peter Brown, in his debate with the dead Henri Pirenne ("Mohammed and
Charlemagne" in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, University of
California Press, 1982), suggests 543, in place of the Muslim conquests,
as the critical year, should we need one of those, for the End of the Ancient
World. That is the year the Bubonic Plague pandemic known as the Plague of
Justinian reached Gaul, having broken out in Constantinople the previous year.
Why Peter Brown might be right requires that I refine the concept of the
"demographic sink," which is, after all, detectable only by demographic
movements, suggesting that there is something subjective about it.
Right here I should advise those of you kind enough to suggest that I
read J.H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples, 1976, that, thank you, I have,
several times, already; and consequently assumed a priori that everyone
on this list has, also. - daf
A "demographic sink" arises when, for whatever social sources, a *shortage
of labour* is deemed to exist in some given locality *or* said locality is
regarded as *for all practical purposes* unpopulated. The preceding sentence
is going to look intolerably circular to some people, so perhaps I should
clarify.
We should, actually, replace the discourse of "migrations" and "invasions"
with one couched in terms of *acquisition of captive labour*. That is, people
and peoples tend to *penetrate into virgin territory* (phallicism deliberate),
bring the Light of Civilization unto benighted Savages, or liberalize the
immigration laws, not in order to do the work, but to watch other people
do the work. It is notorious, for example, that opponents of the predatory
expansionist imperialist wars fought by the USA in the earlier part of the
nineteenth century, the failed attempt to grab Canada, 1812-1815, and the
successful annexation of half of Mexico, 1846-1853 (includes the Mexican
War and the Gadsden Purchase), were concentrated in the Northeast, where
slavery was illegal; whereas "War Hawks" of 1812 and supporters of Polk
over Mexico in 1846 (as opposed to Members of Congress who voted for the
Wilmot Proviso, qv) were most prevalent in the slavery-legal West and
South. Admittedly, those motivated by "pioneer spirit" who migrated West
into slavery-unsuitable regions like the Western Reserve, which became
the Midwest, fully intended to do the work themselves, including some
of the work of committing genocide upon the Native Americans, should
opportunity arise. But they themselves were *consciously* "blazing a
path through the wilderness" in order to make the frontier safe for
immigrants from Europe. Those who prospered on the Frontier were land
speculators. To this very day, in the USA, to thrive, capitalistically
speaking, is called, "doing a land-office business."
As we recall, one of the unquestionably correct insights propounded by
Karl Marx is that wage-labour resembles other labour systems in being
*coerced*, but differs in that the coercion is *mediated by the market*.
By extension, "labour-power" is not a genuine commidity, as defined in
Chapter 1 of Book I of Capital; it is a pseudo-commodity, as it is quite
impossible to buy and sell labour-power without the remainder of the
organism being dragged along with it. Thus, Henry Ford may invest capital
in Detroit, and thereby create a demographic sink whereinto hundreds of
thousands of people from the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires would
subjectively experience themselves as "economic migrants" in crossing the
Atlantic Ocean in order to fall into it. Once at work for the Ford Motor
Company, they would, as you may recall, be under the surveillance of the
company's secret police, known, as I recall, as the Sociology Department,
or something like that.
The difference between chattel slavery and economic opportunity is that
of a continuum, not a dichotomy. Did not, does not, the industrial working
class, too, undergo what Orlando Patterson called "social death"?
The forms of captive labour are as various as the forms of society itself.
It may be, for instance, revocable or permanent. Servitude as labour-power
since ancient times, e.g., Jacob's service, in the Book of Genesis, as
bridewealth-payment to Laban, in return for the latter's daughters in
marriage (he had to marry the elder one first in order to get the younger
one, whom he wanted, as you recall), has been done on contract basis. So
has military service, since classical antiquity. Greek mercenaries appeared
as a major industry in the sixth century BC (or perhaps, in Egypt, even
earlier). When properly led, in an army whose core was a national force
of Balkan peasants, they became a social-revolutionary force in empowering
the conquests of Alexander The Great. G.T. Griffith, The Mercenaries in
the Hellenistic World, Oxford University Press, 1935, counts fifty thousand
mercenaries reaching Alexander between 333 and 323 BC; to which are added
those he recruited from defeated Persian armies. The commerce in women for
purposes of submarital polygyny (concubines and handmaids) on term contracts
for, say, one to five years goes back to the Song period (960-1279) according
to Patricia Buckley Ebrey (The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of
Chinese Women in the Song Period, University of California Press, 1993).
Now, the microsurgery performed upon Mr John Bobbitt has demonstrated that,
theoretically, even eunuchry, the sale of a man's entitlement to seek
reproductive success in return for econcomic opportunity contingent upon
demonstrable perfection as pliant instrument of one's master's will, is
in principle terminable by contract. (See Tsai, The Eunuchs in the Ming
Dynasty, State University of New York, 1996, for the peak reached during
the Ming dynasty, 1368-1644, in eunuchs' constituting perhaps the mainstay
of the state apparatus at the expense of the civil service.)
It should be remarked, given that World Systems Theory is Man's Work,
a narrative told by men, which nearly all the readers of this, if any,
are, about men, who Boldly Go Where No Girlz Allowed to buy, sell, and
traffick in gold, slaves (some of whom, admittedly, are in principle
allowed to be quite gorgeous), and molasses, whilst other men indulge
in the manly arts of violence in order to guarantee their ability to
so do upon a global scale, that sexual services, as captives, may be
ancillary = that is from Latin *ancilla*, a female slave - to production
as well as luxury consumption (those concubines and handmaids) when it
is not routinely demanded in marriage (or even supplementing that, where
sexual harrassment imperils you as to "giving at the office"). Catharine
A. Mackinnon reminded us, in Feminism Unmodified, 1988, that the usual
definition of consensual sex is figmentational insofar as, under conditions
of patriarchy, it is the presupposition of hierarchy which "makes sex sexy."
We have, in the Chinese classic, Book of Songs, a lament dating to 700 BC
sung by a serf-girl bemoaning her duty to perform sexual services for her
feudal lord that night in his mansion. Such literature does not, as a rule,
"come down to us"; but it happened, curiously enough, that it was one of the
*ritual duties* of the Zhou kings of Chinese Antiquity to collect regional
folksongs from their several, later proliferating, far-flung fiefs.
In this light, and as part and parcel of Dealing With My Sexism, I present
the Captive Woman's Survival Guide, where it is presumed that your captor gets
more prestige from capturing you as a "spear-won captive" than out-and-out
*buying* you in the slavemart, but you are his, body and soul, believe it.
Option 1. Fate worse than death, choose your local culture's normative
mode of committing suicide. In Classical Antiquity, as shown in the Pergamene
sculpture of the Gaulish warrior stabbing his wife, then himself, as in the
Indian Rajput caste, who, facing defeat, massacred their women, then attacked
the enemy in a suicidal charge, this may entail the performance of Man's Work
to put you safely out of the way before The Enemy arrives. In case you are
royalty, like the Carthaginian princess Sophronisba, bride, successively, of
the aging Syphax and the dashing Massinissa (who switched sides, according
to Livy, in the middle of the decisive campaign of Scipio Africanus, in 202
BC, over her wondrous beauty; but then realized, when captured by the Romans,
that, in Great Power warfare, the fortunes of war for petty tribal kings can
take one only so far and no more, so sent her a cup of poison in fulfillment
of his promise not to let her fall alive into Roman hands), prepare a
line for yourself. Elsewise, a male historian will do it for you. What
has come down to us is, "If my husband has no better wedding gift than this."
Japanese nobility were required to do it with discrete ladylike daggers
of the world's sharpest and hardest polished steel, with a quick, deft,
plunging motion into the throat; no ostentatious theatirics, please. The
wives of Chinese scholar-officials, on the other hand, hanged themselves.
In the event of joint husband-wife suicides, the man got the place of
honour, on the left. Which, in one famous story, a wife pointed out to
her husband as she respectfully hung herself to his right. There is the
curious tale, from the fall of Nanjing to the Manchu Qing dynasty in 1645,
of a scholar-official who rushed home to tell his spouse the good news of
his having been given a choice job offer by the victors. When he got home,
he found that his Virtuous Wife had hung herself, in keeping with due
Proprieties.
2. Option 2. Give a bravura performance; your life depends on it. This
is suggested by the role-modelling of Esther (="Ishtar") in Holy Scripture.
It is implausibly suggested, in the Good Book, that the lady, by sexual
charms, induced Artaxerxes II, fifth century BC, to repeal the - to be
anachronistic - genocidally antisemitic policies of his grand vizir, Haman,
whose historicity is unlikely; depose Haman himself; and in his place
appoint her own uncle Mordecai who, as she assured the King of Kings, was
almost as smart as herself. Or something like that. This Scripture is read
aloud annually at a festival designed especially for children, Purim. But
the kiddies don't know what it means, yet.
3. Give a bravura performance; then murder the sexist pig who is by this
device lulled into a false sense of security; and likewise get immortalized
in Holy Scripture. This is exactly the story of Judith and Holophernes. Holy
Scripture, remember, is always sold as Non-Fiction.
4. OTHER (Specify). Use your own sick imagination.
In the spirit of the foregoing, I herewith offer a Survival Guide For A
Slavic Tribe Being Irked By Kutrigurs, Utigurs, Avars, Huns, Bulgars, Khazars,
or other Turkic-speaking (occasionally Iranian-speaking) Peoples. It is
not, by the way, generally realized that, had the small Iranian tribes of
Serbs and Croats merged before they got about as far west as they could, a
great deal of Trouble might have been spared us today. (See J.V.A. Fine,
19831991, below.) It is suggested, by the probabilistic guesswork of
historians, that you, qua Slavic tribe, are Dwelling, as they say, in the
southern Ukraine.
Option 1. Surrender gracefully. Whether The Enemy appreciates that you
are Friends is unpredictable. Whether The Enemy accepts that you have no
military potential, but will offer to teach you, in goodwill, in return
for obedience, as opposed to massacring you as too-sturdily-dangerous young
lads (whilst appropriating the women, for the time being, at least), is
also unpredictable.
2. Fight to the last woman and child, then run for it; the Turco-Iranian
cavalry will cut you down before you get very far.
3. Migrate in the direction of Moesia, Illyricum, or Pannonia, in
anticipation of settling, still using the Latin, in *agres vacantes*. Five
hundred years from now, which is the sixth century, the official language
will be Greek, when the same regions are definitively conquered by Basil II
(976-1025). The latter was one of those curiously monastic commanders, like
Charles XII of Sweden, who felt that making love and war were mutually
exclusive, howbeit they were hardly "hippies."
That hundreds of thousands of Slavs chose Option 3 was the outcome of
the Bubonic Plague, without which it is unlikely to have become common
knowledge that there was plenty of uncultivated land in the East Roman
Balkans. And what's more, that the noncultivation of suchlike lands was
distressing to local communities who were unable to produce their staple
crops, fish, or other food products at anything close to peak efficiency;
possibly, in some cases, were even starving, given the fiscality of the
East Roman state from the time of Justinian onwards. Those historians of
the Balkans or of Byzantine civilization who, unlike Warren Treadgold (The
Byzantine Rivival: 780-843), ignore the Bubonic Plague, will have, have had,
all sorts of curious problems explaining whatever happened in the sixth and
seventh centuries in the Balkans. Here is John V. A. Fine, The Early Medieval
Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century, Ann
Arbor, 19831991, p. 37:
What was the fate of the indigenous population? Many were killed, while
others were carried off beyond the Danube as captives (some of whom were
reansomed and returned), or fled to walled cities or to the islands. Still
others withdrew to the mountains or remote regions, and their descendants
reappeared later as Vlachs or Albanian who begin to turn up in written
sources in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Thracians simply
disappeared from history. But many indigenous peoples surely simply
remained; perhaps in their original homes or perhaps a short distance
to establish new homes in the same general area....
Why not, instead, posit that a considerable percentage of the indigenous
population was already dead, for which reason the availability of fertils
albeit uncultivated lands (combined with tax collectors attempting to extract
the full tax burden from the survivors, as well as landlords whose expectations
of luxury at the very least were undiminished and possibly, with great riches
concentrated into the hands of relatively fewer heirs, even enhanced) enticed
the migrants as conquerors. The latter, unwitting protectors of the locals
from the state, were dependent upon these same locals for *environment-
appropriate technologies*. As a Slavic tribe, the incomers would have no
expectation that the construction mud used in their original miserable hovels
in the southern Ukraine would be available in the desired quantity and
quality in the destination. Perhaps it was preferable, or at least
conventional, to build in some other medium. This is, of course, a joke, but
the point should be obvious: A labouring population, especially an
agriculturally labouring population, does not simply "migrate" blindly.
"Migration" is, rather, a stupid word.
Fine continues:
Archeology in western Yugoslavia shows considerable cultural continuity
from the pre-Slavic to the Slavic population....The acquisition of such
things as metalworking techniques and architectural and grave construction
features suggests that close and friendly contacts existed in places between
the two populations. (p. 38)
Close, and friendly, whether the indigenous people liked it or not. They
had better show good will in doing whatever it was they had to show the
incomers how to do.
Building being closed at this time. Continued tomorrow.
Daniel A. Foss