AN ECONOMIC FOCUS BRINGS A DIFFERENT STORY

In preparation

* Take the "households" of several hundred cradle-rockers, doctors, priests (...) set up for each prince and princess at birth. So rooted was the custom that rather than cut down on the households of his four last daughters, Louis XV had them raised in a convent.

Louis XIV travels 

BLOOK 1 SHOWED

HOW NOTICING OMISSIONS

AND ATTENTIVE OBSERVATION

CONTREDICT HOW PARIS IS USUALLY SEEN. 

BLOOK 2 SHOWS

THAT GRASPING HOW SOCIETIES WORK

TRANSFORMS THE MEANING OF EVENTS:

UNDERLYING ECONOMIES AND THEIR EVOLUTIONS

ARE AT EXPLANATIONS' HEART

Harald Wolff 

How history should be understood, going from most to least important

# # #

One result

of ignoring that necessity:

"We were naïve,"

the Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces

in Afghanistan said..."

Harald Wolff 

"We didn't realize that Afghan corruption was inevitable, and when the officials we backed took the pay of schoolteachers and soldiers we lost the peoples' support."

-- General John Nicolson, talk at the American University in Paris, September 27, 2019

If the decision-makers had asked themselves how Afghan feudal society worked they would have known that imposing their ways was impossible. 

# # #

Setting ideologies, habits and beliefs

in their economic contexts

brings noticing whose interests they serve:

An hour of that approach 

would vaccinate against...

• Racism ("divide and conquer").
• Patriarchy (if women cannot get abortions men retain control).
• Gullibility (ads).

 Etc.

# # #

The economic example these pages use shows how

traditional African and French societies

resisted the unregulated search for gain

that would destroy them.

*     *    *
Next:
A very brief summary

SUMMARY AND CONTENTS

 0. Contents

ECONOMIC GROWTH EXPLAINS 

CONFLICTS BETWEEN NEW AND ARCHAIC FORCES

AND POWER'S BRACING

TO CONTAIN THE CHALLENGE

Take the railings that accent royal prestige

 France's 17th-century Louis XIV and the sultan of Bornu (Northern Nigeria) in the 1820's

 

As in blook 1,

click on the links at the pages' end

 as if you were turning them

and to scroll down a chapter,
  click on the title in the menu 

Contents

I. 
Comparisons, a new tool for history

II. 
Braking the search for gain

2.1. One can't bring in the harvest alone
2.2. When chiefs become kings
2.3. The grandiose destruction of wealth
2.4. Behavior whose logic escapes us 
2.5. Read history like a detective story
 or an explorer's account
2.6. Were economic motivations recogized 
2.7. Profits' explosive consequences

III.

Containing growth:
Kings and ritualized warfare 

3.3. Maintaining the status quo, the function of kings

3.2. Ritualized warfare, another brake on growth

IV.
Growth, 
and African cycles of stability and conflict 

4.1. Commerce strikes a communal society 

4.2. Throughout the savannah, comparable change 

4.3. Back to Djimini: violence reappears

4.4. Commercial forces win, then crumble

4.5. Another narrative

V.
"The past is another country:"

Take 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? 

V.

The end of brakes on gain —  almost

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Next,
Comparisons, a new took for history

*    *    *

"That's all, folks!" 

I. COMPARISONS, A LITTLE-USED TOOL FOR HISTORY

 1. Comparisons

 SIMILAR ECONOMIES, SIMILAR THREATS,

SIMILAR REACTIONS 

Take kings' violent response to ascendant producers

in  19th-century Dahomey and 17th-century France 

• In France,

Louis XIV's eliminating Protestants

eliminates the producers themselves 

Dragonnade by Maurice Leloir in Le  Roy Soleil by T. Cabu, 1931

In Dahomey, 

the monarch sacrifices 300 slaves

to keep producers from buying them 

Dahomey human sacrifice in 1853, "Le Tour du Monde"

-- Analyzed by Claude Meillassoux,

Ostentation, destruction, reproduction , "Économies et sociétés,"

 1968, II, 4, 760-766

Beyond Marx:

The struggle of 

"slaves against masters, peasants against lords"

yields to that of rising commercial forces 

and the authorities they menace.

To be continued.

*      *      *

Next,
Hinterlands react to sudden growth

HINTERLANDS REACT TO SUDDEN GROWTH

THE RUDIMENTARY ECONOMIES 
OF PRE-COLONIAL AFRICA AND PRE-INDUSTRIAL FRANCE 
MAKE THE IMPACT OF GROWTH EASY TO DISCERN

Paris and Timbuktu were the main centers
north of the Alps or in West Africa,
but they were isolated
 in comparison with the Italian towns
and insignificant next to those
 of the Middle East, India and China 

• By 1450 France
had recovered from the plague
and the ravages of the Hundred Years' War.
Economic growth was gradual
and gently-centralizing power contained it

 Charles VI greets Louis II of Anjou near the Saint Michel gate, Chronicle of Jean Froissart, about 1390

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

• By 1850 
sub-Saharan trade and production were expanding

and states able to keep them in check
had emerged in the most commercial regions
(in Northern Nigeria and west of Lake Chad) 

"Arrival at Timbuktu," Travels and discoveries in North and Central Africa by Henry Barth, 1855 (color / Internet)

Timbuktu: soldiers precede the caravane because authority is weak and routes unsafe. 

• But upheavals were on the way

° In western Europe,
the geographic discoveries of the end of the 15th century
would bring unprecedented growth and social cataclysm.

° In West Africa,
growth had been relatively slow because climate belts
 discouraged the spread of agricultural improvements,
but after 1850 the end of the Atlantic slave trade
would turn breezes of change into hurricanes.

 -- Climate belts:
A popular history of the world, from the stone age to the new millenium,

by Chris Harmon, "The African civilizations," 1999.
A rare history to see political change as the result of economic evolution.

 .
End of this beginning.

*      *      * 

 

Next,
I.
Braking the search for gain

II. BRAKING THE SEARCH FOR GAIN

2. Braking the search for gain

SEEKING PROFIT SAPS 
 THE COLLECTIVE EFFORT THAT ALLOWS SURVIVAL,
SO PRE-CAPITALIST SOCIETIES CONTAIN IT

Historians ignore a priority
that transforms the meaning of institutions and events.

This chapter explains why containing profit
-- that is, limiting growth --
was necessary, and how it took place

Egyptian painting 

• One can't bring in the harvest alone   

• The origin of supernaturally-backed authority 

• The grandiose destruction of wealth

• Practices whose logic escapes us 

• Read accounts like detective stories

• Were (are) economic reasons recognized? 

• Growth's explosive consequences

*      *      *

Next,
One can't bring in the harvest alone 

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

OR FISH WITH LARGE NETS 
OR HUNT BIG ANIMALS

So unmechanized work must be collective --
think of the Harrison Ford film Witness,
where Amish meet to build a barn

Noon by Pieter Breugel the Elder, about 1550

Pursuing individual gain weakens the community.

Worse, communal lands become privately owned.
Then many leave --
"He went off to seek his fortune"

A few become merchants in the growing towns -- that's how a middle class grows up -- but most finish as vagabonds, mercenaries or brigands. 

Those who remain become sharecroppers or serfs. 

That menace explains the universal brakes on gain,
which villagers begin and centralized power extends.  

*      *      *

Next,
When chiefs become kings 

WHEN CHIEFS BECOME KINGS

CHIEFS APPEAR

WHEN PROFIT-SEEKING OVERWHELMS VILLAGE DYKES

With further growth they yield to kings,

whom sacred power reinforces 

• In traditional Africa,

a newly-rich man is admired 

if he shares his wealth,

tolerated if he spends it 

and sanctioned if he keeps it

Les cahiers d'Afrique / Internet

Griots -- traditional singers -- follow him, chanting praises that turn into mockery of his servile origins unless he gives the tip they expect: that is, unless he siphons off resources to reinforce the social order.

Expecting immigrants to bring gifts when they return to the village, and pestering them if they don't distribute enough, makes the same point.

• Kings control more complex societies
and magic reinforces them.
In France

° Sanctification at Reims
gives them magic power

The central panel of Joan's story as shown at the Panthéon, by Jules Lepneveu, end 19th century

The height of Joan of Arc's epic is persuading the Crown Prince to make the journey through English-held territory and be crowned at Reims.

Cavalcade of Louis XV after the sanctification, October 16, 1722 by Martin le Jeune

Sanctification lasts several days: vigil, ceremony, banquet, cavalcade.

Henri II's Book of Hours, about 1540

Then the king cures scrofula by his touch. 

-- The classic study:

 The royal touch: monarchy and miracles in France and England

by Marc Bloch, 1923

Monarchs are mediators with the ancestors,
divine rulers or representatives of God:
They maintain the cosmic harmony.

Translation
(since they can't influence nature): 
They maintain the social harmony
by containing what threatens it --
notably the search for profit. 

  
*      *      *

Next,

The grandiose destruction of wealth