Her straightforward, just-the-facts delivery parsed the little told history of an “archipelago” of nation states that helped establish tax havens. They ranged from Monaco in Europe to the Bahamas and Cayman Islands in the Caribbean to Liberia in Africa.

The March 8 talk, titled “Twilight Capitalists: The Global Cold War and the Unmaking of Postwar Capitalism,” was delivered at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus to kick off a three-day conference hosted by the O’Connell Initiative on Global Capitalism, sponsored by Robert J. O’Connell, FCRH ’65.

In her talk, Ogle described a group of men who she said were part of the political establishment during World War II—members of the diplomatic corps, those with high military ranks, or members of the CIA or the British Intelligence—whose dubious practices contributed to the development of offshore banking.

“After the war, they were out of a job, and most moved smoothly to private business and banking,” she said. “They used their experience abroad to apply themselves to the notion of free enterprise.”

Among them, she said, were “diplomat capitalists,” like Walter H. Diamond, who worked at the Federal Reserve Bank during the war and was responsible for shutting down German and Axis-allied banks. He later became an adviser on tax policy and went on “to become a giant on the best strategies on tax avoidance,” said Ogle. Another, Edward Stettinius, once served as the U.S. Secretary of State under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman; he helped develop the Liberia Company in 1947, a partnership with the Liberian government and American businessmen—thus making Liberia one of the earliest tax havens. And Robert B. Anderson, former Secretary of the Navy and later of the Secretary of Treasury, went on to establish the World Banking Corp. He was eventually sentenced to prison for money laundering and operating an illegal offshore bank.

Ogle also highlighted British ex-spy William Stephenson, former head of the British security in the Western hemisphere. Stephenson, she said, was the model for author Ian Fleming’s James Bond character. Together with Stettinius, he formed the World Commerce Corporation, which was promoted as a way to invest in developing countries, but which Ogle called “a CIA front, of sorts.”

From a bank that had “enough generals, admirals, and spooks to run a small war” to an expert in guerilla warfare who made his fortune from designing a machine gun silencer, Ogle named neo-libertarian institutions and individuals that, upon helping win the war, found ways to funnel tax funds away from those nations they once defended. (She also touched upon former Nazis doing the same practice in Panama, Brazil, and Argentina.)

In closing, Ogle elaborated on the 21st-century consequences to these 20th-century maneuvers. She said the former spies weren’t profoundly patriotic, and they didn’t necessarily reflect upon “how they drained the nation state(s).”
“The greatest damage we see today is the inequality, [and]that can be clearly linked to the fact that it [is]much easier [for individuals]to hide vast amounts of wealth,” she said. “It has had a tremendous effect, and it fuels the perceived problem people have with the way things work.”

The event will be held at the Lincoln Center campus in the McNally Amphitheater.

In a talk titled “Twilight Capitalists: The Global Cold War and the Unmaking of Postwar Capitalism,” Ogle will explore the mid- to late- 20^th century capitalism.

While the initiative, sponsored by Robert J. O’Connell FCRH ’65, funds research and conferences on the history of capitalism for the past 500 years, this year’s conference will home in on the United States and global capitalism in the 20^th Century. Panels and speakers will focus on four separate areas of study: diplomacy and development, finance and investment, propaganda and information, and infrastructure and the built environment.

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/history-of-capitalism-explored-at-lecture/ Fri, 06 Nov 2015 15:00:00 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=30531 Sven Beckert, PhD, Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, delivered the inaugural lecture of the O’Connell Initiative on the Global History of Capitalism. Calling the growth of capitalism “one of the most important historical processes of the past 500 years,” an eminent historian challenged some current views on this charged topic and called for a far better understanding of its history.

“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.