"FOLLOW THE MONEY"... 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SURFACE

AN ECONOMIC FOCUS TRANSFORMS THE MEANING OF EVENTS AND SHOWS HOW THINGS WORK.

It does that by comparing the impact of economic growth on societies that culturally have nothing in common. Yet because their economies are based on the same necessities they react to similar economic pressures in similar ways. 

Take the kingdoms of Dahomey* in Africa and Louis XIV's France. Both were based on non-mechanized agriculture and the rulers of both controlled trade and production.

*A slave-trading kingdom in modern Benin.

• In Dahomey,* European demand for palm oil brought the rise of a class of independent producers. When the British blocked the port to keep slave-ships from sailing, the king found himself with 300 captives to maintain. Rather than sell them to palm oil producers who would use them as laborers, increase their revenues and defy him, he organized a massive human sacrifice to behead them (in 1853).

Sacrifice humain au Dahomey en 1863, "Le Tour du Monde"

-- Analyzed by the late anthropologist Claude Meillassoux,

Ostentation, destruction, reproduction , "Économies et sociétés," 1968, II, 4, pp. 760-766.

The king sits under a parasol, a symbol of power. The people behind him cheer each time the executioner raises a head.

• In France, many Protestants were nascent capitalists whose beliefs dismissed Catholic rules that limited gain.* When their economic success challenged the status quo, the king put those who would not convert at the mercy of dragoons (in 1684). Many left the kingdom.

* Such as not working on the approximately 50 saints' days (for more, please click). 

Dragonnade (detail) by Maurice Leloir in Le Roy Soleil by Gustave Toudouze, 1931  

Violence that the population approves.

Those who remained converted. No one cared if that was superficial since as nominal Catholics they had to accept religious barriers to gain, which brought their challenge to an end.

These pages concern cycles of conflict 

in precolonial Africa and preindustrial France,

between rising economic forces 

and those trying to contain them.

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0.1. 

Background

0.1. BACKGROUND

THE PAGES ON AFRICA COME FROM MY DOCTORAL THESIS FOR COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, 1975. 

"Growth and Violence in the Precolonial Sudanic Belt began with economic data in explorers' accounts of all the sub-Saharan savannah and the West African forest, followed by data from the archives of Paris, Abidjan, Dakar, Bamako, Ouagadougou and Accra, from interviews in those towns and in Segu (Mali) and from three months of field work in Djimini, in the northeastern Ivory Coast, in 1973.

Its point was that far from being "in decline" or possibly "stable" due to the Atlantic slave trade's repercussions, affirmations that seemed self-evident, those regions were transformed by the explosive growth that took place when it ended. Characterized by increasingly widespread and violent raids to obtain slaves for local production and by their far more exploitative use, the new cruel, exploitative but extremely dynamic societies were an insuperable obstacle to Western economic control. The latter immediately crumbled, allowing the economic domination that remains today. 

That study was published in a collection edited by Jean Bazin and Emmanuel Terray), successive directors of the l'EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences)...

Wars of Lineage and Wars of State in Africa, Éditions des Archives, Paris, 1982

Pp. 423-500

The article, the last and longest, received a glowing review in a French-Canadian publication. But though its editors were leading historians of Africa in France, the book was ignored there.

A well-known professor at my dissertation defense (Stuart Bruchey) had said that I was a "civilized Marxist" and proposed that Columbia publish the study. I wanted to make some changes... but life took another course.

# # #

I had married a Frenchman and lived in Paris. For two years I knocked on university doors, which stayed closed. So I became a tour guide. Terray wrote to the French consul in Washington when I needed his support to obtain a guide's card without going through two more years of schooling...

In spite of the quality of her work, Catherine Aubin could not find a place in the French university system. That will not surprise those that know how deeply that system turns inward and is reserved to an "elite," pre-selected by the important schools ("Ecoles Normales Supérieurs") and administrative competition (the "Agrégation"). Even if Catherine Aubin had published her thesis in the United States, even if she had published numerous articles — beyond her contribution to the collective work Guerres de lignages et Guerres d'Etat en Afrique ) that I published with Jean Bazin in 1982 — the situation would not have changed and she would not have been able to obtain a university position in France; her case is far from unique: no matter what her qualities and value of her work — and they are considerable — it is practically impossible for a foreign man, and perhaps even more for a foreign woman, to integrate the French university network of which the access is, de facto, solidly locked off from the start.  

--Emmanuel Terray,  Director of the EHESS, January 8, 1991

Being a tour guide led to French history and to the comparisons that follow.

     The Sheik of Bornu in Clapperton's narrative, 1824  / Louis XIV by M. Leloir in G. Toudouze, Le Roy Soleil, 1931

Railings emphasize and isolate kings in 19th-century Northern Nigeria and 17th-century France.

Here it is now,

the French sequel added.

 

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Next:

Why choose Africa?  

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O.2. WHY CHOOSE AFRICA?

THE REASON IS A CLEANING-LADY 

When my brother and I were small Cora Bailey, a Black woman from a neighboring town, would do house work and take care of us when our mother took a day off. She was a calm person whom we never thought of disobeying. 

She made superb lemon meringue pie and peanut butter cookies. Sometimes she brought her daughter, Doris, a teenager I admired because she could twirl.

When I was 15 Cora told me that Doris wasn't coming because she had had a baby, and then, that he had died. "She misses him," she said.

At about that time my aunt, who worked at the Urban League in the town where Cora lived, told my mother that Cora was a prostitute. "We don't need you any more," Mom told her. We never saw her again.  

The accusation may not have been true. In any case there had never been anything untoward in the ten years that Cora took care of us, and her private life was none of our business. She may not even have known the reason for being let go. 

Such unfairness led to my being on the left and her memory explains being drawn to Blacks. It led to choosing African history.

Blook II is dedicated

 to Cora Bailey.

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Next,

Contents

0.3. CONTENTS

 0.3. Summary & contents

ECONOMIC GROWTH BRINGS A CLASH BETWEEN TRADITIONAL AND RISING FORCES 

Contents

I. Hinterlands at the dawn of sudden economic growth

II. Braking the search for gain

2.1. One can't bring in the harvest alone   

2.2. Curbs on gain that villagers impose  

2.3. The grandiose destruction of wealth

2.4. Elders, chiefs and kings

2.5. Ways whose logic escapes us 

2.6. Were (are) the real aims recognized? 

2.7. Awareness of the economic base would avoid tragedies and nonsense

III. Curbing growth: kings and ritualized warfare

3.1. Kings maintain the status quo 

3.1.1. Kings concentrate wealth, then make it circulate 

3.1.2. African kings, prestige and constraint 

3.1.3. "Absurd" succession practices 

3.1.4. Kings of medieval Europe are also restricted  

3.1.5. Detour: Images of Christ, from shepherd to warrior to king 

3.1.6. Commercial peoples' subordination

 3.2. Ritualized warfare, another brake on growth

  

IV. Africa: choosing a backwater

4.1. The African past revisited  

4.2. Commerce strikes a communal society   

4.2.1. Legendary empires of the medieval savannah   

4.2 2. Trade strengthens social systems, then transforms them

4.2.3. Classless communities that elders lead

4.2.4. Cowries, new traders and textiles... 

4.2.5. The cowrie currency meets violent resistance

4.2.6. Introducing a pattern of change

 

         4.3. Throughout the savannah, same cycle 

4.3.1. Back to the hinterland: Violence reappears

4.3.2. Commercial forces win, then crumble

4.3.3. Another narrative

V. "The past is another country:" pre-industrial France

     5.1. Enigmas, often clues 

     5.2. Growth and the "Wars of Religion"

     5.3. Absolute Monarchy wins

     5.4. The Sun King, anti-capitalist? 

The end of brakes on gain — 

 almost

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Hinterlands at the dawn of sudden economic growth

I. HINTERLANDS AT THE DAWN OF SUDDEN GROWTH

TIMBUKTU TOWARD 1850 AND PARIS TOWARD 1450 WERE BACKWATERS COMPARED WITH THE TOWNS OF ITALY, THE MIDDLE EAST, INDIA AND CHINA 

Timbuktu: Soldiers accompany a caravan because authority is weak and routes unsafe.

 "Arrival at Timbuktu," Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa by Henrich Barth, 1855 / zoom (color added)

But expanding production has led to states emerging in the most commercial regions (west of Lake Chad and along the Senegal and Niger Rivers) and Timbuktu will soon be part of a powerful theocracy.*

* Africa's slower economic growth was due first to climate zones that hampered the spread of agricultural improvements (A Popular History of the World, from the Stone Age to the New Millenium par Chris Harmon, 1999, a rare account to connect economic and political change) then to the states that supplied the Atlantic slave trade and blocked the commercial forces that came from the north (please read on).  

Paris: The north-south trade route looks like a country path. 

Louis II of Anjou arrives in Paris, "Chronique de Jean Froissart," toward 1475 / zoom 

But France has recovered from the Black Death and the Hundred Years' War and the economy is slowly growing. Explorations and discoveries are about to bring a commercial expansion that will provoke religious and political upheaval...

To understand how those societies reacted,

grasp how they worked. 

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Next,
II.
Braking the search for gain

II. BRAKING THE SEARCH FOR GAIN

MENU: 2. BRAKING THE SEARCH FOR GAIN,

UNMECHANIZED AGRICULTURE DEMANDS COLLABORATION

  Zoom

Why profit had to be contained

and how doing so took place.

• One can't bring in the harvest alone...

• Curbs on gain that villagers impose

• The grandiose destruction of wealth

• Elders, chiefs and kings

• Ways whose logic escapes us 

• Were (are) real aims recognized? 

• Awareness of the economic base...

*     *    *

Next,

One can't bring in the harvest alone... 

II.1. ONE CAN'T BRING IN THE HARVEST ALONE...

OR FISH WITH LARGE NETS OR HUNT BIG ANIMALS

So work must be collective. 

 The Harvesters by Pieter Breughel the Elder, Flanders, 1565 / zoom

When expanding towns lead to growing crops for market, lands used communally become private and the pursuit of individual gain weakens the community. Then people leave —"He went off to seek his fortune," is how many fairy tales begin.

Some migrants learn a craft or become merchants — that's how a middle class grows up — but most finish as vagabonds, mercenaries or thieves. 

Those who remain on the land become sharecroppers or serfs.

Ways to limit such change appear. 

Next,

2.2. 

Curbs on gain that villagers impose