There's a story that, fifteen years after the end of the Vietnam
War, US and Vietnamese generals got together for a nostalgia fest.
"You'll have to admit," said a US general, that the US army defeated
the Vietnamese People's Army in every single battle that they fought."
"That is true, the Vietnamese general replied, "but it is not relevant."Ł
When Gunder Frank tells us that Portugal, a country with a mere
million and a half people - he may even be exaggerating slightly - could
not have possibly dominated the Indian Ocean trade because Portuguese
population, resources, and production stood to those of Asia like a
flea to an elephant, the latter is *true*, but not *relevant*. He
might even have told us that Vasco da Gama, in 1498, while in Malindi,
East Africa, hired an experienced Arab navigator, already internationally
famous around the Indian Ocean, to guide the Portuguese to Calicut;
otherwise, they would have got lost. This factoid is also *true*, but
not *relevant*.
Imagine, instead, the impact of a *business*, in possession of naval
artillery, on the Indian Ocean free trade zone. One aspect of Malindi
which is known to have struck da Gama even more than its Human Resources
was the local availability of Indian rice. The Indian Ocean was a free-
trade zone comprising small, competitive coastal states and large numbers
of small shipowners likewise competing in a free market. If the local
potentates raised customs dues conspicuously, trade might shift to
competing ports. Goods, by Mediterranean standards, were cheap. The
situation, that is, was ripe for takeover by a gangster. The part the
Portuguese played in the rise of capitalism was heavily dependent on
the fact that there was nothing much capitalistic about them. Portugal
was an *economic Tamerlane*. Recall the previous post: Tamerlane had
Qipchaq Turks with few resources whom he *adapted to live off much
larger polities* with inadequate, Plague-reduced, resources.Ł
"What?! That is garbled nonsense!" Says the reader, if any.
It is the hallmark of developing capitalism that the unified ruling-
and-exploiting class of the tributary mode of production bifurcates into
occupational specialties, broadly speaking, the politico-military and
the entrepreneurial. These have hardened in the mature form into the
Public Sector and the Private Sector. Following a period of blurring,
variously called Keynsianism, Welfare State, Mixed Economy, Swedish
Model, or egŁ Arab Socialism, the edges are resharpening such that
anything the state does well is Sold Off and what it does poorly is
Cut.
In the local variant of the Tributary Mode known Mediaevally as the
Feudal Lordship, cashflow-yielding "natural monopolies," from the local
watermill for grinding grain or the winepress or the tolls to get in and
out of places were conceded as a matter of course to the lord, especially,
in the case of customs, to the Lord King, as in Tunnage and Poundage. This
was even more true of Portugal than most places, as West African gold,
from the 1440s, became a royal monopoly, and by the early sixteenth
century was bringing in 120,000 cruzados a year, a cruzado representing
3.5 grams of gold. Tell your children that the mythical Prince Henry
the Navigator was not curious about the Nature of the Universe but
about where the gold which crossed the Sahara increasing in price
manyfold along the way was coming from, and whether it was possible
to steal it. The answer to the latter was No, but it was indeed possible
to "get it wholesale."Ł The pepper monopoly was founded immediately upon
da Gama's return, bringing in 130,000 cruzados for 1506 and 300,000
cruzados by 1516. Dom Joao II and Dom Manuel I were not competitive
capitalists of the sort who cut prices to beat the competition. The
protocapitalist Venetians, typically, feared they were, so hugged
the Egyptian Mamelukes for warmth; but the Portuguese carefully
followed the Venetian price-leadership and sold at exorbitant Mediterranean
prices. Withal, Portugal was a precursor of capitalism, which Venice
was not. Mediaeval protocapitalism was *discontinuous* from capitalism.
The Mediaeval city-states, the Florentine banks of the thirteenth and
early fourteenth century (which were depositories for Papal taxes: Peter's
Pence, Annates, First Fruits, etc, without which Papal power was impossible),
the Feudal Monarchy states of France and England (which were legalistic
compromises, cases of arrested development, compared to late-fifteenth-
century Second Growth), all had to be swept away. Goldsmith, in The
Building of Renaissance Florence, reminds us that Francesco Datini of
Prato, whose archive from circa 1450 was so lauded by Werner Sombart
and Fernand Braudel, was a *screwball* for his time and place.
What was remarkable about the Portuguese clique, their vassals, and
their hirelings was *the absence of a sense of limits*. "He who holds
Malacca has his hands around the throat of Venice," wrote the first
Portuguese ambassador to China. That intrepidty of a Mario Puzo gangster
going around the world to make someone an offer which cannot be refused
is precisely what was important. Mediaeval Europe had been, by the 1330s,
cramped, crabby, legalistic, increasingly confining, hardened in orthodoxy,
technically stagnant, and overpopulated hence famine-ridden. It had almost
literally nowhere to go, and might have gone there, as China did later,
almost forever (until, that is, Yuan-dynasty style Chinese, with no sense
of limits, "opened" it like something I am Forbidden to eat).
Then the Bubonic Plague...
"There you go *again*!"
Why am I such a monomaniac about this? Because the Bubonic Plague
represents a challenge to social science theory, which as a true product
of a civilization which also produced capitalism, *refuses to admit any
limits*. If it can be shown that a catastrophe analogous to an asteroid
hitting the Earth from outer space (which also happens), ie, exogeneous
to sociological explanations, and smiting the Guilty (ie, the Rational,
Progressive, nonEurocentric) equally with the Wicked (ie, Backward,
Regressive, European), it will become possible to transcend the sterile
theoretical blockages about Why is Capitalism here and not there? Is
Capitalism, anyway? Who says the victims lay down and took it? What
did Capitlism arise out of, now that we know that it actually exists,
as it must have arisen out of what looked Capitalistic previously, right?
Wrong.Ł
Capitalism exhibits in all its phases a minority inhabiting a subjective
space of *no limits* and *acting accordingly* whilst *parasitic* off vast
majorities *constrained by very severe limitations*. It presupposes a
society in which a culture of limitations is reproduced along with the
means of subsistence. In its mature form, it ideologically denies the
objective reality of the social constraints which make it possible,
creating an imaginary world inhabited by a figment called The Individual,
whose Needs are Unlimited and on whom objective social constraints are
defined out of existence: "If I can make it, so can you." "You can do
anything you want, if you really want to." "Your Inferiority is entirely
in your mind." Fictitious Equality exists in Rights and Opportunities,
whilst objectively real social inequalities are adjusted for the purpose
of *reproducing the emotional plausibility of the Success-Failure
dichotomy*. The phrases "make it" (USA) and "get itŁ on" (Britain) mean
both "upward social mobility" and "sexual intercourse" for very good
reasons. ("You can make it if you try." How about, say, "Real Comers
*lay tracks* for the Little Engine That Could*." If I must be gross.)
<ahem>.
The Bubonic Plague, a species of End of the World, had drastic cultural,
as well as economic, effects which remain unthought-about. Specifically,
for example, in both Europe and China, there appeared Nouveau Traditional
cultures which were subtly different from the preceding Traditional
cultures. To clarify, a culture is Traditional, literally, if you *presume
at the level of the taken-for-granted* that it has been Handed On to you.
Ming China was explicitly dedicated, ideologically, to nailing shut again
the wide-open (if because it had been blasted open) economic and cultural
world of the Mongol regime, with its profiteering depraviites, its show-
business vulgarities, its laxity and permissiveness. (See John C. Dardess,
Confucianism and Autocracy, Columbia, 1983. Few people today thing of
Mongols as having been overindulgent; but your perspective is obviously
warped by not having Experienced the violent-criminal depredations of
the properyless, as the Ming founder's Confucian braintrust had.) In
the Islamic world, there was Tamerlane, who would, immediately or after
an interval, be followed by the builders of Gunpowder Empires. In Europe,
there was a prolonged period of predatory adventuring (Hundred Years War
including the involvement of Castile and Portugal, Chioggia War between
Venice and Genoa 1378-1381Ł, Florence's War of the Eight Saints 1375-
1378Ł ending in a brush with proletarian revolution, many many more).
The warfare was waged by mini-Tamerlanes like Edward the Black Prince,
governor of Aquitaine. It was contemporaneous with social upheavals
like the Jacqueries, the Normandy rising against the English in 1435,
the *ciompi* insurrection in Florence, the English Peasant War, the
Paris rising of 1360 and that of Etienne Marcel of 1402, the Hussite
movement in Bohemia from 1409 and its revolutionary Taborites after
1419 (who fought with the Chalice in one hand and the Blade in the
other. (The reactionary backlash from this in Germany was the Witch
Craze.) All of which left behind little cultural pockets of *No Limits*
which, because states were reduced to political garbage even where "state-
building" - Where would we go for cliches without Charles Tilly? - had
been advanced, France and then England when the War was brought back
home, was reproduced indefinitely. In Germany, political garbage already,
the demolition job was completed; lynch law ruled the countryside. And
so on.
Because there was a sense of Impending Doom, and with good reason, as
the population was falling from 80 million to 55 million (Braudel) or from
67 million to 40 million (Jacques LeGoff), cultural Tamerlanes appeared,
manifested, Experienced.
--Giovanni Bocaccio dropped out of Law School and wrote a dirty book,
excuse me, *humanist classic*, set during the Bubonic Plague.
--Later, while many Forentines gave their children to the Church, as
their fourteenth-century ancestors hadn't, the Medici acted as if the
banking business was not *cool*, threw a Big Party, and invited all the
artists.
--Mystics invented the *Devotio Moderna*. Heretics, however, committed
Excess in pursuit of the Primitive Church. See Hussites, above. Even the
vestigial Byzantine Greeks had their *hesychasm* movement.
--A freak accident of the Hundred Years War, Burgundy, confected a
courtly culture of violent crime and chivalrous romance, ending with
Charles the Rash (d. 1477, in combat).
The most intense pockets of *No Limits* were in Castile-Aragon. Portugal
was a slightly milder place, as it usually tended to be, until Philip II
took it over after the Quixotic death of King Sebastian in the desert at
Mers el-Kebir (1578) and the brief reign of Cardinal Henry (d. 1580). The
fact remains that Dom Joao II threw Columbus out for the crank he was. But
after Granada, in 1492, his neighbours believed that *literally anything*
was possible, so long as it wasn't expensive. When Columbus, that
Castilianized Genoese, washed ashore on the Portuguese coast in 1493,
Dom Joao II, always the good sport, took him to Lisbon to Dry Out. Columbus
thereupon dictated the "Sovereigns' Letter," published in 1992 by a Spanish
historian. In it, Columbus announces to *los reyes catolicos* that he is
now prepared to recover Jerusalem from the Infidels, for which he requests
"fifteen thousand foot and five thousand horse." Kirkpatrick Sale, in his
book review, thought this objectively impossible, as the Ottomans were
there. In fact, Selim the Inexorable did not take the place from the
Mamelukes, and Egypt with it, till 1517. It was impossible because Columbus
was delusional, living in *No Limits* without so much as a patent of nobility
to his name.
Briefly, then: (1) it matters *not at all* for the emergence of capitalism
that a place like Portugal (or Spain) lacked the institutional infrastructure
of then-capitalism, so long as that institutional infrastructure existed
somewhere that happened to be convenient: Italy, Germany, Burgundy.
(2) Capitalism *qualitatively changed* production. This is, in fact, the
only thing to be said for it. If Asia was *itself* incapable of qualitatively
changing what it produced, as was so, it was inevitably going to be harnessed,
by successive invaders by sea and later by land, to adapt *quantitatively*
what it produced: At one time the Mughal Empire was induced to export huge
quantities of very cheap cotton textiles to England. At another time British
India was coerced into *importing even cheaper* cotton textiles while
exporting money. India was made to grow opium to sell to China which was
made to import it or else, to get China to export money. This is the same
China which had expiated its wave of conspicuous consumption during the
dictatorship of Hoshen (1796-1799) by executing him. Opium was already
coming in. Six years earlier, before his affair with Hoshen, Qianlong
told Lord Macartney, "Our Celestial Empire produces all things sufficient
to our needs." That is the voice of *limits*; it's the legacy of the Ming
founder.
(3) Gunder Frank acknowledges that by 1800 we may allow that Europe
dominated Asia, whatever he means by that. But *it is not possible to
get from 1500 to 1800* without allowing for the Portuguese doing something
real in and to Asia, and explaining why they were there. Which is not
obvious. Also, explicating their cultural impact, which was in some ways
weird. The Portuguese Arabized Latinism, *mandarim*, "commander," got
into South Chinese argot as *mandarin*, "someone from Beijing," as in
Mandarin dialect, Mandarin cuisine. We may have Latinised Arabisms, eg,
*amir*, "commander," which in the twelfth century Kingdom of Sicily becomes
Ammiratus Ammiratorum, which becomes Admiral, *almirante*.Ł
Daniel A. Foss
<what would we ever *do* without facts>