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

French version

AN ECONOMIC FOCUS TRANSFORMS THE MEANING OF MANY EVENTS AND ANTHROPOLOGY REVEALS HOW THINGS WORK

Those tools show how societies that have only their agricultural base in common react in similar ways when economic growth destabilizes them.

Political, religious, military (...) explanations, from which prominent individuals emerge, explain how change happened. For why, one must look to deep-seated economic transformation.

I suggest that the great underlying theme is one of class struggle, not only between oppressor and oppressed, but between rising economic forces and rooted interests that become obsolete. 

The late anthropologist Claude Meillassoux introduced that theme for the kingdom of Dahomey in the mid-19th century:

European demand for palm oil had brought the rise of producers independent of the king, so when the British blocked the port to keep slave-ships from sailing he 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 beheaded them through a massive human sacrifice (in 1853).

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

-- 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:

Slaves were the most important source of wealth. Their spectacular destruction maintained the status quo and buttressed authority.

These pages use transformation 

in pre-colonial Africa and pre-industrial France

to suggest that drama universal.

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Next,

0.1. 

Contents

0.1. CONTENTS

ECONOMIC GROWTH DESTABILIZES AGRARIAN SOCIETIES IN SIMILAR WAYS AND BRINGS SIMILAR CONFLICT BETWEEN OLD AND RISING INTERESTS 

Take the sub-Saharan savannah from the Middle Ages to the freeing of local slaves toward 1907, and France from the explorations of the end of the 15th century to the Industrial Revolution. 

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

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: 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' emphasized subordination

3.2. Ritualized warfare, a way to cancel wealth

3.2.1. Traditional slave raids limit violence

3.2.2. European warfare had comparable limits

3.2.3. Valor: nobles react to nascent capitalists

3.2.4. 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. Change ripples down from the Saharan fringe

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. Senufo fight back

4.5.3. Interpreting the story

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 

4.6.7. The slaves are freed and economies collapse

           4.7. Islam, a non-Western topic?

4.8. 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. Absolute Monarchy takes 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. Louis does not need another palace

6.2. Waterless Versailles

6.3. Gargantuan works bring water to the site 

6.4. Outlawing Protestants brings capitalists to heel

6.5. Detour: a faith specific to France

6.6. Detour: memories of persecution and wartime rescue of Jews

6.7. Controls on profit start to crack

VII. HISTORY THAT ILLUMINATES

Of course. But what past? 

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O.2. WHY CHOOSE AFRICA?

THE REASON IS A BABY-SITTER 

When my brother and I were small, Cora Bailey, a Black woman from a neighboring town, would 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 pies and peanut butter cookies. Sometimes she brought her daughter, Doris, a teenager I admired because she could twirl.

Some years later Cora told me that Doris 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 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,

0.3.

My background as a historian of Africa

0.3. 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, was published in this work in 1982.

  

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

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. These came to an end when the colonial conquerors freed slave labor to establish their own economies.

The thesis's basic source was the economic data in explorers' accounts. Also useful were documents rom the archives of Paris, Abidjan, Dakar, Bamako, Ouagadougou and Accra, and interviews from those towns and in Ségou (Mali). The research involved as well three months of field work in Djimini, in the northeastern Ivory Coast, in 1973.

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, upset the way in which African history is understood. It received an enthusiastic review in a French-Canadian publication but though its editors were some of Paris's leading Africanists, the book was ignored in France.

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. 

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But 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.

So 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

Being a tour guide led to French history and 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 is that study, 

the French sequel added.

 

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Next:

I.

Hinterlands at the dawn of sudden economic growth

 

I. HINTERLANDS AT THE DAWN OF SUDDEN ECONOMIC 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,* then to the states that supplied the Atlantic slave trade and slowed the rise of commercial production (Section 4, The African past revisited). 

-- Climate zones: A Popular History of the World, from the Stone Age to the New Millenium 

by Chris Harmon, 1999, a rare account to connect economic and political change. 

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 the effect 

of that sudden growth,

grasp how those societies functioned

and how they replied. 

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Next,
II.
Keep profits from being invested