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

French version

THE RATIONAL IS SUPPRESSED TO MISLEAD US 

The past is transformed when one notices the economic forces behind it, and our view of Paris changes when we grasp the realities that are left out.  

Illustrations make these pages hard to read on a phone. A tablet or computer works best.

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These blooks ("book-blogs") make their points briskly by headlines and images. The Index gives immediate access to the  main ideas. 

All drawings by Harald Wolff 

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A French-American who has lived in Paris for decades, I was, in the U.S., a college professor of history; in Paris an acknowledged  historian of Africa (to whom without a French degree academic doors were closed), then a tour guide and since covid, a historian again. 

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The familiar History shows how change happened, but to understand why, we must see how society is built on the economy — and what happens when that base cracks.

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Take a drama that took place in Dahomey, a slave-exporting kingdom on the West African coast, in 1853.

Human sacrifice in Dahomey in 1853, "Le Tour du Monde," 1863

-- Analyzed by the late anthropologist Claude Meillassoux,

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

When the British block its port to prevent boats carrying captives from sailing, the king finds himself with 300 useless prisoners that he must feed. He could sell them to independent palm oil producers, but they would add them to their labor force and increase their threat.

So he has the captives decapitated in a massive human sacrifice. He sits under a parasol, symbol of authority. His subjects behind him cheered each time the executioner raises a head. 

The monarchy is strengthened. So is the status quo. 

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Similar economies brought parallel societies, in preindustrial France and precolonial Africa. 

       A Royal Army on the March,16th-century tapestry (detail), Renaissance Museum

                                                                                                Royal horsemen in Northern Nigeria / zoom*

*"Zoom" links to the original picture and information about it.

And violence that stemmed from similar causes and led to similar outcomes.

Class struggle wasn't just slaves against masters or serfs against lords. It was also the clash between rising economic forces and the entrenched elites they threatened — when every rule favored the status quo.

These pages stress the economy

and social structure

to cast light on what counts most.

 

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Next,

0.1. 

Contents

0.1. CONTENTS

COMPARABLE ECONOMIC BASES, COMPARABLE WAYS OF CONTROL, COMPARABLE STRUGGLES 

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

Railings emphasize kings, and isolate them.  

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Contents

0.3. My background as a historian of Africa

0.2. Why choose Africa?

I. HINTERLANDS AT THE DAWN OF SUDDEN ECONOMIC GROWTH 

II. KEEPING GAIN FROM BEING INVESTED

2.1. One can't bring in the harvest alone   

2.2. Curbs on profits 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 like this

III. CURBING GROWTH: ARCHAIC KINGS AND RITUALIZED WARFARE 

3.1. Kings concentrate wealth, then make it circulate 
3.2. African kings, prestige and constraint 
3.3. "Absurd" succession practices 
3.4. Kings of medieval Europe are also restricted  
3.5. Detour: Images of Christ, from shepherd to warrior to king 
3.6. Commercial peoples' emphasized subordination

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3.7. Limits to traditional wars and raids
3.8. European warfare had comparable limits

3.9. Valor: Nobles react to nascent capitalists

3.9x. Did memory of feudal valor add to the carnage of World War I?

IV. THE AFRICAN PAST REVISITED

   4.1. The belief that whites dominate the African past

   4.2. The choice of a backwater

   4.3. Cycles of growth, violence and new authority 

4.3.1. The legendary empires of the medieval savannah

4.3.2. Economic change and a sign of the future

4.3.3. Another upheaval, kola nuts and routes to the forest

4.3.4. Traders and textiles come to Djimini 

4.3.5. Classless communities that elders lead 

4.3.6. A divisible currency brings upheaval

4.3.7. Djimini shows the struggle up close 

 4.4. Destabilized crowds sweep the Sahel  

4.4.1. Storms in preparation 

4.4.2. An explorer is taken for the messiah   

4.4.3. "Everywhere the humble show the masters their teeth"   

4.4.4. A theocracy amps up growth...

4.4.5. Then contains it

4.5. Back to Djimini: violence returns

4.5.1. New forces menace

4.5.2. Nambolossé, the Senufo hero

4.5.3. The multiple deaths of Nambolossé

4.6. The new producers win, then crumble 

4.6.1. Destruction, slavery and economic growth

4.6.2. Adapting Islam to the need for labor

4.6.3. Samory's legend skips the raided

4.6.4. Detour: Nationalist history hides modern issues

4.6.5. Samory and the Senufo Judas

4.6.6. Colonial conquest does not bring economic control 

4.7. The slaves are freed and economies collapse

         4.8. Islam, a non-Western topic?

4.9. Africans take center-stage

 

V. USING THE SAME METHOD FOR FRANCE

 5.1. Similar agrarian economies, similar cycles of change

 5.2. Growth breaks lose 

 5.3. Economic growth and the "Wars of Religion"

5.3.1. Violence that has nothing to do with religion

5.3.2. The "season" of Protestant massacre

5.3.2. Catholic communities where people intertwine 

5.3.4. The traditional faith puts brakes on gain

5.3.5. The new faith shatters them

5.4. Monarchs seize the reins

5.4.1. Growing economies bring more active kings

5.4.2. Stronger kings disperse wealth

5.4.3. Detour: the French monarchy's lasting éclat

5.4.4. French Baroque's sobriety 

5.4.5. Archaic opponents of growth resist and are defeated 

5.5.6. Spain, no civil war, no protestants, no capitalists

5.5. Super-spending returns 

5.5.1. Celebrations
5.5.2. Favorites

5.5.3. Creation, destruction, replacement

5.5.4. The Hall of Mirrors 

VI. LOUIS XIV, THE ULTIMATE ANTI-CAPITALIST 

6.1. Does Louis need another palace?

6.2. The Versailles enigma

6.3. No water!

6.4. Gargantuan works bring water to the site 

6.5. The elimination and circulation of wealth 

6.6. Outlawing Protestants brings capitalists to heel 

6.7. Greater authority after violence 

6.8. Detour: a faith specific to France

6.9. Detour: memories of persecution and wartime rescues

VII. CONTROLS ON PROFIT START TO CRACK 

VIII. HISTORY THAT ILLUMINATES

Yes. 

But what past? 

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0.2. MY BACKGROUND AS A HISTORIAN OF AFRICA

THE PAGES ON AFRICA COME FROM MY DOCTORAL THESIS FOR NEW YORK'S COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN 1975

Its summary, Growth and Violence in the Precolonial Sudanic Belt, appeared in this French publication of 1982.

  

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

The publication's final article, translated from English by Emmanuel Terray, pp. 423-500

I maintained that far from being "in decline" due to the Atlantic slave trade's devastations as was widely believed, the sub-Saharan savannah underwent increasingly dynamic growth. Political, social and religious transformations followed, bringing a dynamism that made establishing colonial economies impossible. That explains why colonialists' first act when sure of their military hold was to free the slaves (in 1907). Eliminating their opponents' labor force destroyed them within weeks. Imposing colonial economies followed. 

My main source was economic data in explorers' accounts, collected for entire sub-Sarahan savannah from medieval records to slave emancipation. Documents from the archives of Paris, Abidjan, Dakar, Bamako, Ouagadougou and Accra confirmed growth. Interviews in those towns and in Ségou (Mali) and three months of field work in Djimini, in the northeastern Ivory Coast, revealed conflicts between rising and threatened interests.

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) in Paris. 

The article, the last and longest, changed the way in which African history is understood. It received an enthusiastic review in a French-Canadian publication but though its editors were leading French Africanists, the publication was ignored in France.

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A well-known professor at my dissertation defense (Stuart Bruchey) had said with a smile that I was a "civilized Marxist" and proposed that Columbia publish the study. 

I had married a Frenchman, had a small child, lived in Paris and had no way of returning to the States. Not knowing that the book would be ignored and thinking that eventually French university doors would open, instead of revising my thesis and sending it to Columbia I knocked on doors that stayed closed.

Then I became a tour guide. When I needed the support of the French consul in Washington to obtain a guide's card, Terray wrote...

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

Guiding led to French history and the comparisons that follow.

Here is that study, 

the French sequel added.

 

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Next:

0.3.

Why choose Africa?