Those were just a few of the suggestions two Fordham history professors shared at a lunch seminar, where they shared preliminary findings from ongoing research projects.

The seminar, which featured Christopher Dietrich, Ph.D., and Yuko Miki, Ph.D., both associate professors of history, was held on Dec. 4 in the Walsh Library’s O’Hare Special Collections room at Rose Hill. The informal lunchtime gathering of scholars and doctoral students was sponsored by the O’Connell Initiative for the Global History of Capitalism, which aims to broaden the ways in which capitalism is understood.

The History of U.S. Energy Policy

Dietrich, the author of Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017), spoke about a project he’s been working on about U.S. foreign oil policy and domestic culture in the 20th century.

Talking to students about his research on oil policy during that time period, he said the common thread of the era is policymakers’ feelings of vulnerability and insecurity.

He broke the century into three eras. From 1910-45, the United States rose as a global power. The years between 1945-1973, on the other hand, were a period in which temporary measures adopted during World War II became permanent.   

“That permanency of a total economy always being protected by an advanced military posture is something I’m concerned with,” he said.

From 1973 to the present day, he said American power in the Middle East has been less focused on infrastructure, and more focused on finance.

“Within that broad story, there are a million smaller stories, and part of what the O’Connell Initiative allowed me to do was dig in a bunch places for those smaller stories,” he said.

One of the archives he visited was the George H.W. Bush Library and Museum in College Station, Texas. Although he was primarily interested in Bush’s thought process leading up to the 1990 war with Iraq, he also looked at the journal Bush kept when he was ambassador to the United Nations from 1971to 1973.

“I like to do personal history and intellectual and ideological work on the background of actors before they become principal movers in the story, and I was interested just to see if Bush said anything about third-world solidarity, sovereignty at the time,” he said.

The Unspoken Truths of Slavery

Miki, the author of Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2018), shared the ways she is expanding her research into slavery the Iberian Atlantic with visits to archives in Lisbon, Portugal, among other places.

Slavery that took place even after it was outlawed is a good place to center a critique of capitalism, because England and the United States, which were ascendant at the time, could not have made progress without it.

“So many of the narratives about slavery that we study are of the 19th century as the age of emancipation. It’s a very liberal triumphalist narrative where we all seem to be forming a western world where liberty triumphs over slavery,” she said, noting that in fact, a staggering amount of illegal slavery still took place at the time.

The Mary B. Smith, one of the last illegal slave ships to be captured on January 20, 1865, is a perfect example, she said. Brazil had won its independence in 1822, but its legitimacy rested on England’s recognition that it had abolished slavery. The capture of the Mary B. Smith was celebrated in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as proof of this change.

To understand Brazilian slavery, one needs to include its former colonial master, Portugal. When Miki did research there, she found what purported to be a manifest from the Mary B. Smith, with the names, ages, and genders of the 500 slaves who were “liberated” when the ship was captured.

“At first you think, ‘I have a list of the people on the ship. Maybe there’s a potential to write a history of these people.’” she said.

“But then you look at when they died: the 3rd of February, the 4th of February. Every person is dead. What do you do with a list of people who are liberated, but are already dead?”

The list was beautifully crafted, even though it detailed horrific suffering. That was the first clue that there was more to the list than met the eye, she said. Then there was the issue of the timing of the list’s creation, shortly before the slaves all perished.

“If you’re dying, you don’t speak Portuguese, you’re terrified, you’re barely alive, how does someone create this list?” she said.

Miki determined that a Brazilian official made up names and ages for real people who had died on the ship. By doing so, she said, he hoped to demonstrate that the country was serious about ending slavery, even it meant acknowledging those who were already dead.

It shows why scholars of capitalism need be more skeptical of the way they rely on merchant ledgers as a resource, she said. Sometimes, an “archive of liberation,” such as the one she discovered, is merely a mask for unimaginable agony.

“You need to account for the suffering. You can’t just make it a footnote to the success of antislavery,” she said.

The O’Connell Initiative in the Global History of Capitalism, which is supported by a gift Robert J. O’Connell, FCRH ’65, brings together scholars of every aspect of capitalism, from its earliest medieval manifestations to its global reach today. In addition to groundbreaking research, it supports lectures, debates, and workshops.

Grace Yen Shen, Ph.D., associate professor of Chinese history and director of graduate studies in history, said the monthly O’Connell Initiative gatherings have the given members of her department a new way to connect with each other.

The word “global” is often used to reference phenomena such as global warming, she said, or it’s used as a code word for non-western countries. In contrast, the initiative has helped history scholars see how European or American subjects like the Crusades or the American Revolution are very much part of a larger, worldwide system of monetary exchange.

For students, there’s also real value in hearing faculty talk about how they work in archives, she said.

That story includes not only Native American tribes evicted by English and later American settlers, but also poor whites who once called the mountains of Appalachia home.

In his new book, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017), Stoll visits an area just outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, to explore how the people who once lived there were pushed out and forced to surrender a self-sustaining, agrarian life in exchange for a wages-based living tied to coal mining companies and lumber mills.

“I wanted to write a book about notions of progress and why we think of certain people as being in its way,” he said.

“How is it that we refer to billions of people in the world as backward and primitive, as being either incapable of what we consider to be progress or in need of some kind of transformation in order to be part of the ‘modern world?’ I see all of these characterizations as fictions.”

Stoll has studied the reasons why people get kicked off their land, and in Ramp Hollow, he interprets it through the characteristics of capitalism as it originated in seventeenth-century England and the way it organizes life in the United States. In that system, land and labor have to become commodities, and both need to be free from any traditional claims on them. The process is known as “enclosure.”

The Way Capitalism Works

“In enclosure, not only does the lord take control of a piece of land and turn it into private property, but laborers are also available because the peasants who lived on that land and produced their own livelihood now need to make a living. They make that living by earning wages sometimes in the very fields they tilled for their own good,” he said.
“Enclosure is essential to capitalism everywhere; otherwise people who are producing their own wherewithal have no need to work for wages.”

Appalachia is an ideal archetype of enclosure, he said, because coal mining transformed the region very quickly. Eastern elites, like English lords, saw the transformation from an agrarian to an industrial/capitalist economy as necessary.

The book focuses on the formation of the rural working class during the 19th century. It details episodes such as the Whiskey Rebellion, the founding of West Virginia, and the arrival of timber and coal companies. Stoll relied on records he discovered during trips to the area, like a trove of documents from the Flat-Top coal company stored haphazardly in a dilapidated library in Bluefield, West Virginia.

“The archive in Bluefield began as the obsession of one person who’d collected an enormous trove of documents. Nothing was catalogued, things were just laying around. I’d never seen anything like it, but that’s where I found some of the most important documents in the making of the book,” he said.

Giving a Voice to the Voiceless

To give a voice to the voiceless, he also paired previously unpublished letters by residents with literature by authors born and raised in the mountains. One of these was G.D. McNeill, whose collection of short stories, The Last Forest (1940), includes a story called “The Last Campfire,” about a group of men who return to their boyhood home for one last camping trip. As they take in the view of a mountain called Big Black, that had been so important to all of them, “they cry out at the sight of the barren mountainside,” said Stoll, upon seeing how clear cutting had stripped it of vegetation.

“Those documents showed me the transition that people went through, from autonomy in their mountain households to dependency living on wages in lumber camps,” he said.

Although Ramp Hollow does not delve into the current state of Appalachia, Stoll said that it might interest those living there. It’s common to find residents who take pride in playing a part in America’s energy independence, but yet dismiss black lung disease and disasters like the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine explosion as a necessary and noble sacrifices.

“I’m not trying to embarrass anybody, but I want to present to them their own history in a way that is much more truthful than what they might have heard elsewhere,” Stoll said. “They were taken advantage of by government and by capital, and the two cooperated to dispossess them for the most selfish of possible reasons.”

It is there, said Timothy Brook, Ph.D., that international legal frameworks that make capitalism possible were first hashed out by traders from the Netherlands, England, Portugal, and China.

In his March 8 lecture at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, Brook, a professor of history and the Republic of China Chair at the University of British Columbia, described what it was like for a 17th-century Englishman by the name of Edmund Scott to deal with competing cultural and legal norms in the city.

Brook’s lecture entitled “What to do When the Chinese try to Burn Down Your Warehouse?” dwelled on thorny legal cases that Scott faced while in Bantam.

The cases—the murder of a Dutchman, the warehouse fire referenced in the lecture title, and others—all brought to the fore questions about who had jurisdiction in the city, what the applicable law was, and who had authority to mete out punishment, he said.

In one case, the Dutch turned over a suspected murderer of one of their own to the king of Bantam. The king, realizing that the suspect was a slave of a Bantam aristocrat, gave him back to his owner, and ordered the owner to pay the Dutch a “bloodwit” of 100 pesos. The Dutch insisted that was insufficient, and a highly illuminating conversation ensued between them and the Bantam regent, said Brook.

When they were asked by the regent whose laws they obey while in a visiting country, they replied that when aboard their ships they were governed their own laws, but on shore they went under the laws of the country.

“The Dutch were acknowledging what we call territoriality—they are under the jurisdiction of the territory,” said Brook, author of Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global Age, (Bloomsbury Press, 2014)

Brook said “bloodwits” had been phased out in Europe in the 13th century, so the Dutch refused to accept payment from the murder’s owner. They also had no standing to insist upon the death penalty for the murderer, so they asked instead for a written statement from the Bantam regent that would assure that an injury done to them would not go unpunished, despite their status as foreigners.

This last exchange, said Brook, exemplified the start of a long process of negotiation between different cultures, and the move toward “extraterritoriality—that is, the right to suspend the legal oversight of the place you’re in and deal with your own problems yourself.”

Extraterritoriality is the widely accepted maritime law today, he said.

“By the time you get to the 19th century, extraterritoriality has become the norm for Western colonial enterprises in Asia. The English in China and the Dutch in Java have their own courts and their own laws. They do not attend to the laws of the territories,” he said. “But if you go back to 1604, this is just starting to be formed and worked out.”

Having their own laws was key to Western merchants, he said, because for trade to flourish they needed to be able to predict what’s going to happen if someone from a territory tried to burn down their warehouse or kill their sailors.

“Capitalism may have emerged in Western Europe in one sense, but it emerged because Europeans were interacting with the rest of the world,” he said. “The turn of the 17th century is the pivotal point, because this is when the Asian and European economies start to link up.”

“Had capitalism stayed in Europe, it would not have become capitalism,” he said.

Brook’s appearance was part of the O’Connell Initiative on the Global History of Capitalism, an ongoing forum that includes guest lectures and research grants open to Fordham faculty and students.

]]> 65446 https://now.fordham.edu/business-and-economics/capitalism-is-the-solution-to-income-inequality-says-gannon-lecturer/ Thu, 28 Apr 2016 16:00:00 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=45139 The expanding gap between the top earners and nearly every other socioeconomic group in the United States has put a spotlight on the fairness of free-market capitalism.

Nevertheless, the best chance the country has for resolving its worsening problem of income inequality is to embrace a fair and responsible free enterprise system, said this year’s Gannon lecturer on April 26.

In a recent New York Times opinion piece and again at Fordham, Peter A. Georgescu, chairman emeritus and former CEO of Young & Rubicam, stressed that income inequality in America has reached crisis level.

Moreover, the inequality of opportunity that it produces among young women and men has dire social consequences: steep high school dropout rates; abysmal college prep; nonexistent early childhood education; single-parent homes; drug and alcohol abuse; high unemployment; trauma and stress-related conditions; and a dramatic drop in life expectancy.

The quickest and most effective solution to the crisis is capitalism, Georgescu said in his talk, “Capitalists Arise! Income Inequality in America Today,” hosted by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“Free market capitalism has done amazing things for this country and for the world. … Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty,” said Georgescu, a child survivor of a Romanian labor camp and no stranger to deprivation and hardship.

“It has made America a leading economic and military force in the world, and just after the Second World War through the mid-1970s, it built the greatest middle class and the greatest economic market the world had seen.”

Free market capitalism, as it was originally imagined, revolves around five key stakeholders: customers; employees; company shareholders; the corporation itself; and the community in which the corporation does business. Georgescu offered as an example the Johnson & Johnson Credo, crafted in 1943 by former chairman Robert Wood Johnson, which Georgescu said epitomizes the priorities of capitalism.

The goal of business in a capitalist society is simple, he said—create jobs and pay fair wages, and do so while attending equally to these five constituencies.

However, this is not the capitalism that we know and operate within today, Georgescu said. Capitalism has gone awry due in part to thinkers such as Milton Freeman, who in 1980 stated that the “real purpose of business is to increase shareholder value.” Since then, corporate priority has shifted from five key stakeholders to just one, creating a system that Georgescu called “shareholder primacy.”

Research data support this trend, he said: Over the last 40 years, wages have flat-lined, while profits and shareholder returns have steadily increased. Currently, 90 percent of private corporations’ profits go to shareholders.

To further destabilize the system, the current ratio between CEO salaries and average employee wages is about 600 to 1, Georgescu said. CEOs, meanwhile, are beholden to shareholders’ demands, as they are constantly under the threat of “deliver or get fired”—a threat that is not remote, given that the average tenure of a CEO is under four years.

The solution is not, as some have suggested, a redistribution of wealth, whether through punitive taxation or social unrest (the latter of which would be more akin to a “redistribution of poverty,” he said).

Rather, the solution is to end the culture of shareholder primacy and return to a model that prioritizes all five key stakeholders—especially employees.

“Who are the real value creators? Where do the ideas come from? The employees. So, the employees must get fair wages,” he said.

“Free enterprise can work. The profit motive is very effective. But the profits have to be channeled the right way. You have to share the pie. Let free enterprise create a bigger and bigger pie, but then make sure you share the bounty. … It has worked before and it can work again.”

Inaugurated in the fall of 1980, the Gannon lecture series brings distinguished speakers to Fordham to deliver open lectures on topics of public importance. The series is named for Robert I. Gannon, SJ, former president of Fordham.

“Capitalism, so it seems, is as familiar as it is unknown,” said Sven Beckert, PhD, a Harvard history professor and Pulitzer Prize finalist, during a Nov. 6 lecture at Fordham. “Passionately articulated opinions and widely shared certainties go hand in hand with only vaguely remembered facts. … Our thinking about capitalism urgently needs the voice of historians.”

Providing that voice is the mission of the O’Connell Initiative on the Global History of Capitalism, for which Beckert was delivering the inaugural lecture. Named for its benefactor, Robert O’Connell, FCRH ’65, who was present, it will produce scholarship on the social, economic, and ecological history of capitalism from medieval times to the present.

Beckert argued for a global view of capitalism that integrates all its players worldwide, at the level of communities, regions, and nations—and not just those of Europe.

“Much of the history of capitalism as it has been written to date has been told as the quintessential Eurocentric story, in which the rest of the world is largely featured only as a story of failure,” said Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard. “In a world such as ours today, however, in which the most dynamic capitalist economies are to be found outside the North Atlantic region, such a story is clearly unsustainable.”

He focused the lecture on his recently published book, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf, 2014), for which he won the Bancroft Prize and received a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

His book examines capitalism through the lens of cotton because its history demonstrates the unprecedented increase in human productivity and consumption brought about by industrialization and by capitalism generally.

The book addresses the Great Divergence, or the surge in economic growth in some regions, especially the North Atlantic, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Rather than being driven by climate, Protestantism, or “peculiar” European institutions, it had its roots in “war capitalism”—“the violent appropriation of territories in the Americas, labor in Africa, and markets all over the world”—that made the industrial revolution possible, Beckert said.

In some ways, slavery was at the core of the expansion of industrial capitalism, he said, disputing those who have described it as “essentially premodern” and “a surviving artifact of an earlier world that was done away with by the very capitalist revolution.”

“Indeed, at a particular and crucial moment in capitalism’s history, slavery stood at the center of the most dynamic and far-reaching production complex that had ever been created in human history.”

He also examined the “fashionable” view of “state intervention as somehow contradictory to the unfolding of capitalism,” noting states’ various interventions throughout history to block imports, mobilize workers, conquer distant markets, and support industries.

Understanding capitalism’s history, he said, “will help us navigate some of our contemporary dynamics.”

Perhaps most importantly, he said, it will put the lie to notions of a “master process” unfolding in history, or the fulfillment of an “essence that has been there from the very beginning.”

“Instead, history is a continuous process in which people’s interests, preferences, hopes, beliefs, politics, and power shape the world in which they live and in which we live,” he said.