HISTORY FROM FRESH PERSPECTIVES: SUMMARY AND CONTENTS

ECONOMIC GROWTH LEADS TO A CLASH BETWEEN OBSOLETE AND RISING FORCES

African and French populations react in comparable ways when profit-oriented producers destabilize the social order:

In Dahomey,* when the British block the port to keep slave-ships from sailing the king finds himself with 300 captives to feed. Rather than sell them to palm oil producers** who would use them as laborers, he beheads them through a massive human sacrifice (in 1853).

*The kingdom in modern Benin that controlled the slave trade on that part of the coast.

** Whom their White clients make independent of the king.

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 in the front row under a parasol, a symbol of power. The people massed behind him cheer each time the executioner raises a head.

• In France, Protestants were often nascent capitalists whose beliefs, applied in practice, threatened traditional controls on gain. When they sidelined Catholic businesses whose activities medieval guilds contained, Louis XIV billeted dragoons in their homes, saying that they could do whatever they liked short of killing them unless they converted (in 1684).

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

Both populations approve thwarting the disruptive forces, which reaffirms authority.

The essential conflict was not that of

"slaves against masters, peasants against lords,"

but of rising economic forces

and those trying to contain them.

These pages uncover those cycles of conflict.

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Contents

I. Hinterlands react to sudden growth

II. Braking the search for gain

One can't bring in the harvest or fish with large nets or hunt big animals alone; Curbs on gain that villagers impose; The grandiose destruction of wealth, a universal practice; From elders to chiefs to kings; Behavior whose logic escapes us; Were (are) tangible factors recognized?; Awareness of the economic base would avoid tragedies like this