We held the second of our workshops on the definition of global history on March 21st and 22nd in Dundee. The first, last June, was on finance, and this one was on communication. When we were setting these up I thought what would emerge would be a set of objects and categories that had a "global", that is to say universal, history. This expectation has not been fulfilled and a much more unexpected, and to my mind interesting, set of ideas about global history has begun to crystallize for me from our discussions.
The version of global history that seems to me to be emerging is characterized by a benign tension between two poles. The first is an insistence that a global history can't simply be a general history. This disposition is skeptical about every particular instance of global history, because it is suspicious of abstraction away from experience. However it insists that global context is absolutely necessary for the understanding of phenomena like democracy, empire or capitalism. Underlying this move is a kind of neo-transcendental argument (most explicitly deployed by Andrew Sartori in his version of global intellectual history). This asserts that since global phenomena (like the state or science) exist then there must be conditions of globality which have been and are being fulfilled. This kind of argument, that avoids prematurely defining the empirical conditions of globality, seems much more promising than defining global history in terms of trade, empire or any other phenomenon.
The second pole follows on form work done in the last decade by Anthony Hopkins and Patrick O'Brien. This is an insistence that global history is local history. The point of global history is not to identify structures with world-spanning effect. In some ways that would be too easy. The point is to convincingly argue why global context counts in particular places for particular reasons. Global is not some teleology toward which societies develop; it is more like a technique or a repertoire that a society can mobilize (with more or less success). Sophus Reinert's work on emulation is a really powerful example of how a specific text translated into a variety of contexts to very different ends. The really tough work to be done will be to explain how globally significant ideas and contexts generate radically different outcomes in different contexts. Difference, rather than identity, seems to be the them of the work that we will be doing.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Secession or Dissolution
The Scottish Government published its White Paper on the Independence Referendum today, so the phoney war is finally over and we can start to debate seriously. Very few people are going to make their decision based on issues in international law, but there are some fascinating questions. For instance, if the referendum decision is for independence, the manner in which Scotland would legally constitute itself is not clear. There is no legally defined mechanism for secession from the Union. The Acts of Union (in British and Irish Parliaments) 1801, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, were never repealed, merely amended, in the UK and were only repealed in the Irish parliament in 1962 and 1983 respectively, long after Ireland had declared a republic and left the commonwealth (1948). The British response to that was the Ireland Act of 1949, which effectively decided to treat citizens of the Republic of Ireland as if they were still UK subjects (which is why I get to vote here in referenda and don't need a passport to enter the UK). So while the Republic of Ireland effectively seceded from the Union, it did so, in a legal sense, so incrementally that it didn't establish a precedent.
So if the Scots do decide on independence does that mean they secede from the union or does that mean that the union is dissolved? Since the constitutive documents of the union are all based on the 1707 settlement (explicitly cited in the 1800 negotiations which established that the Irish Parliament had enough constitutional authority to dissolve itself, but not enough to negotiate a new treaty of union), can a United Kingdom legally exist if one of the constituting parties pulls out of it? Wales would still remain attached to the Crown and the English Parliament come what may since the incorporation of Wales long precedes the Union, but all other dependencies of the Crown of England would need to renegotiate their relationship to the English Parliament. There are quite a few entities, such as the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, that are already subject to the Crown of England but not part of the United Kingdom, so there is domestic precedent for complicated constitutional machinery.
Oddly enough, if the legal situation was dissolution this would make the European issue much easier. Europe has already established that it recognises the entities consequent to a dissolution (Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) as successor states, so both Scotland and whatever constituted itself out of subsequent negotiations between Northern Ireland and England would be automatically members of the EU. The contrast would be with the Soviet Union. When it dissolved only the Russian Federation was recognised as its successor state and the other republics were new states, but the consequence was that it assumed all the debt of the Soviet Union. So either dissolution or secession have downsides from the perspective of England and Northern Ireland.
If we get to the point where Scotland, England and Northern Ireland are negotiating Scottish Independence, public international law is going to constrain all parties in interesting and possibly unpredictable ways. The domestic constitutional stuff could get interesting too. If there is a dissolution, given the 1707 union was an incorporating union and the Scottish Constitutional tradition was not continued, does the Kingdom of Scotland revert to the forms of 1707?
So if the Scots do decide on independence does that mean they secede from the union or does that mean that the union is dissolved? Since the constitutive documents of the union are all based on the 1707 settlement (explicitly cited in the 1800 negotiations which established that the Irish Parliament had enough constitutional authority to dissolve itself, but not enough to negotiate a new treaty of union), can a United Kingdom legally exist if one of the constituting parties pulls out of it? Wales would still remain attached to the Crown and the English Parliament come what may since the incorporation of Wales long precedes the Union, but all other dependencies of the Crown of England would need to renegotiate their relationship to the English Parliament. There are quite a few entities, such as the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, that are already subject to the Crown of England but not part of the United Kingdom, so there is domestic precedent for complicated constitutional machinery.
Oddly enough, if the legal situation was dissolution this would make the European issue much easier. Europe has already established that it recognises the entities consequent to a dissolution (Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) as successor states, so both Scotland and whatever constituted itself out of subsequent negotiations between Northern Ireland and England would be automatically members of the EU. The contrast would be with the Soviet Union. When it dissolved only the Russian Federation was recognised as its successor state and the other republics were new states, but the consequence was that it assumed all the debt of the Soviet Union. So either dissolution or secession have downsides from the perspective of England and Northern Ireland.
If we get to the point where Scotland, England and Northern Ireland are negotiating Scottish Independence, public international law is going to constrain all parties in interesting and possibly unpredictable ways. The domestic constitutional stuff could get interesting too. If there is a dissolution, given the 1707 union was an incorporating union and the Scottish Constitutional tradition was not continued, does the Kingdom of Scotland revert to the forms of 1707?
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Finance, Communication and Co-‐ordination in Eighteenth-‐Century Empires
Finance, Communication and Co-‐ordination in Eighteenth-‐Century
Empires
The workshop will be the first of a series that have as their goal specifying the objects of global history. Global history has not been successfully separated from world history. World history is a well defined field, the study of the species from a high level of abstraction, but global history, the study of the phenomena that have global effect, is not at all the same thing. There is another meaning of world history as the history of peoples outside the Atlantic basin, but while intrinsically interesting it poses no new intellectual challenge. Nor is global history usefully defined as the study of the emergence of globalisation. The teleology built into that conceptualisation excludes the dynamics of global history, which are not uni-directional, and ignores some the most interesting questions in global history, such as given we have many cultures why do we have only one science?
The objects of study in global history are the phenomena that co-ordinate behaviour across space and time, that create the possibility of acting in a way that has global significance. The most interesting ones are those that are implicitly, rather than explicitly, global. These include objects and categories such as information, money, facts, rights, data, or debt. Institutions normatively regulated by such ideas have local effect but global scope. The early-modern period, and in particular the eighteenth century, marks the fascinating moment when structures and norms with genuinely global force emerged, when, for instance, nosological systems that ideally could be extended to categorise the whole of natural history began to have regulatory force on communities involved in the interrogation of nature. After Linnaeus natural scientists, even those critical of his categorisations, formed part of a global community.
The fiscal systems of the eighteenth century sea-going empires were a set of laboratories from which the elements of a global financial system emerged. Those systems were far more than methods of extraction to support the costs of military competition; they were sophisticated and diverse means of communicating and co-ordinating behaviour. By the end of the eighteenth century fiscal systems were even being instrumentalised as a means of pursuing imperial goals and shaping behaviour, most notably in Hamilton's plan to constitute a new nation through a national debt. There is also a rich literature that reflected on the problems and possibilities offered by the fiscal systems of the empires. Imperial fiscal systems interacted in surprising ways; some financial instruments and forms of public credit were traded and used to transfer wealth in unforeseen ways. For instance the finance to support General Wolfe's campaign in Canada in the Seven Years War was moved through Irish banking networks, Catholic and Protestant, co-ordinated by the Nesbitt house from London.
Paper-‐givers and commentators include William Summerhill (UCLA), Steve Pincus (Yale), Alan Forrest (York), Carl Wennerlind (Barnard), Claire Priest (Yale Law School), Sophus Reinert (Harvard Business School), Daniel Carey (UC Galway), Ivar McGrath (UC Dublin), Philipp Roessner (Manchester), William Deringer (Columbia).
The workshop will include a series of graduate student roundtables and the organisers encourage interested graduate students to attend. Pre-‐registration is essential as space is limited.
Please contact Professor James Livesey (jlivesey@dundee.ac.uk) or Dr Nicola Cowmeadow (n.cowmeadow@dundee.ac.uk)
A workshop sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Institute, University of Dundee,
July 5-‐6, River Rooms, Ninth Floor, Tower Building, Nethergate.
The workshop will be the first of a series that have as their goal specifying the objects of global history. Global history has not been successfully separated from world history. World history is a well defined field, the study of the species from a high level of abstraction, but global history, the study of the phenomena that have global effect, is not at all the same thing. There is another meaning of world history as the history of peoples outside the Atlantic basin, but while intrinsically interesting it poses no new intellectual challenge. Nor is global history usefully defined as the study of the emergence of globalisation. The teleology built into that conceptualisation excludes the dynamics of global history, which are not uni-directional, and ignores some the most interesting questions in global history, such as given we have many cultures why do we have only one science?
The objects of study in global history are the phenomena that co-ordinate behaviour across space and time, that create the possibility of acting in a way that has global significance. The most interesting ones are those that are implicitly, rather than explicitly, global. These include objects and categories such as information, money, facts, rights, data, or debt. Institutions normatively regulated by such ideas have local effect but global scope. The early-modern period, and in particular the eighteenth century, marks the fascinating moment when structures and norms with genuinely global force emerged, when, for instance, nosological systems that ideally could be extended to categorise the whole of natural history began to have regulatory force on communities involved in the interrogation of nature. After Linnaeus natural scientists, even those critical of his categorisations, formed part of a global community.
The fiscal systems of the eighteenth century sea-going empires were a set of laboratories from which the elements of a global financial system emerged. Those systems were far more than methods of extraction to support the costs of military competition; they were sophisticated and diverse means of communicating and co-ordinating behaviour. By the end of the eighteenth century fiscal systems were even being instrumentalised as a means of pursuing imperial goals and shaping behaviour, most notably in Hamilton's plan to constitute a new nation through a national debt. There is also a rich literature that reflected on the problems and possibilities offered by the fiscal systems of the empires. Imperial fiscal systems interacted in surprising ways; some financial instruments and forms of public credit were traded and used to transfer wealth in unforeseen ways. For instance the finance to support General Wolfe's campaign in Canada in the Seven Years War was moved through Irish banking networks, Catholic and Protestant, co-ordinated by the Nesbitt house from London.
Paper-‐givers and commentators include William Summerhill (UCLA), Steve Pincus (Yale), Alan Forrest (York), Carl Wennerlind (Barnard), Claire Priest (Yale Law School), Sophus Reinert (Harvard Business School), Daniel Carey (UC Galway), Ivar McGrath (UC Dublin), Philipp Roessner (Manchester), William Deringer (Columbia).
The workshop will include a series of graduate student roundtables and the organisers encourage interested graduate students to attend. Pre-‐registration is essential as space is limited.
Please contact Professor James Livesey (jlivesey@dundee.ac.uk) or Dr Nicola Cowmeadow (n.cowmeadow@dundee.ac.uk)
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
The Politics of the Passion
This year Holy Week falls alongside Passover and the cycle of readings falls on Luke's Gospel, so on Sunday we had Luke's version of the Passion. Every year at Easter something new strikes me and as it happens I've been teaching about revolutionary journees and the status and nature of the event so this year Luke's historian's understanding of politics drew my attention. Luke does a great job of illustrating how everything gets out of hand very quickly for everyone. From Peter's point of view and that of the other disciples the rush of events is overwhelming. There you are on Thursday night at a seder with your friends and by Friday afternoon your best friend is being crucified. So of course you lie about your relationship to him as events are unfolding. At no point could any reasonable person think that this is going to end with a judicial murder, and this way you get to hang about and see what is going on, until it has gone so far that nothing you do makes any difference. Herod and Pilate do what good politicians do when all the options are bad. They have a huge public order problem so they play for time and when they have no other option they embrace the lesser evil, killing an innocent man, to avoid the greater of a revolt. Luke, it appears, was Greek and so he has less insight into the motivations of Judas or the Temple priests, but it doesn't take that much of an effort of the imagination to see Judas the Sicarii trying to provoke Jesus to act like a true Messiah and restore the Kingdom, or the priests desperate to sustain the Temple worship in a very difficult situation. And the Temple authorities were right that the situation was unstable and potentially catastrophic. The Temple would be destroyed not that long after the Jesus incident. The grace notes, like the women allowed to stand at the foot of the cross, or Joseph of Arimethea being give permission to take the body, ring true to an event whose momentum has pushed to murder, but has now receded, leaving the participants unsure of what they have just done.
Seen through Luke's eyes there are no pantomime villains in the history. It is a true tragedy, where everyone does the best they can, at least by their own lights. However the outcomes, read in any secular way, are all disasterous. Judas's suicide is only the beginning of the appalling political consequences. Worse are the centuries of hostilities between Christians and Jews expressed in the most odious anti-semitism only latterly overcome. The Temple, Judea and the Empire eventually fall.
It seems to me even if you are not a Christian and do not see these events as a narrative of redemption Luke's account carries a telling critique of "Machiavellian" or 'Hobbesian" separation of political ethics from morality. All the acts of "saving evil"backfire. The illusion of a political cunning operating outside our understanding of what is demanded by justice is exactly that, an illusion. The acts of calculation are as disasterous for individuals as they are for the collective. Judas ends up in despair, Peter never recovers from his sense of guilt, Pilate has to give up any idea he had that he represents law. The message here is that willing it so does not make our actions good, that moral good is intrinsic. And it seems to me that a lot of the interesting political questions lie right there, where intuitions of moral imperatives meet the demands of the liberal polity.
Seen through Luke's eyes there are no pantomime villains in the history. It is a true tragedy, where everyone does the best they can, at least by their own lights. However the outcomes, read in any secular way, are all disasterous. Judas's suicide is only the beginning of the appalling political consequences. Worse are the centuries of hostilities between Christians and Jews expressed in the most odious anti-semitism only latterly overcome. The Temple, Judea and the Empire eventually fall.
It seems to me even if you are not a Christian and do not see these events as a narrative of redemption Luke's account carries a telling critique of "Machiavellian" or 'Hobbesian" separation of political ethics from morality. All the acts of "saving evil"backfire. The illusion of a political cunning operating outside our understanding of what is demanded by justice is exactly that, an illusion. The acts of calculation are as disasterous for individuals as they are for the collective. Judas ends up in despair, Peter never recovers from his sense of guilt, Pilate has to give up any idea he had that he represents law. The message here is that willing it so does not make our actions good, that moral good is intrinsic. And it seems to me that a lot of the interesting political questions lie right there, where intuitions of moral imperatives meet the demands of the liberal polity.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Three Things on the Road to "What is to be done?"
Three things that might be worth reading together as one route to thinking through the mess Europe is in. Martin Wolf's piece in the FT is really interesting because it thinks beyond the debate around the German "duty" to carry Europe on its back. As Wolf himself points out the institutional context for an "insurance and adjustment union" is really hard to imagine though. The political economy of such a union is not obvious either but Steiglitz's latest helps to specify why the goal of such a union should be minimising inequality if it wants to maximise efficiency. Acemoglu and Robinson have an awful lot of useful things to say about the institutional design and civic culture that promote these goals. Their thinking is directed for the most part toward developing nations and economies, but the central insight that a democratic citizenry is the necessary context for a rational economy holds in other directions.
Read together these amount to a specification for a refounded European Confederation. A United States of Europe is politically incredible and the current institutional architecture does not work. Necessity does drive innovation.
Read together these amount to a specification for a refounded European Confederation. A United States of Europe is politically incredible and the current institutional architecture does not work. Necessity does drive innovation.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
When all the choices are bad
When the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement was held I flew back from France to vote and if I still had an address in Ireland I'd be doing the same tomorrow. Trouble is I'm not sure what way I'd vote, not because I don't agree with Paul Krugman's cogent arguments for voting against the austerity pact, but because the price Ireland might pay for doing so could be really terrible. It comes down to a political calculation. If an Irish No vote was likely to provoke a crisis in the entire strategy of the European Union it would be worth the risk, but if not the chances are Ireland would be made an example of to illustrate just how dangerous it is to think that you really retain real political agency as a small country in the Union. In the end we probably should do the brave thing and get up on the barricade, but it would be nice if the Belgians or the Luxembourgeois got to be at the point of crisis and not us. It would also be comfortable to be able to persuade myself that the austerity programme is so irrational that it will collapse without any help, and so we could vote safely with a good conscience. But a sad history has confirmed that economic relations do not impose rationality on us and if we don't attend to the political moment on its own terms it just makes matters worse. Once more into the breach....
Sunday, May 20, 2012
The End of (yet another) Illusion
David Brooks had a piece in the New York Times during the week analysing the structural problems in western democracies. The argument derives from Tocqueville's aristocratic liberalism; democracy only works when a well-designed constitution gives directing power to a wise elite who can balance the passions of the multitude, but are themselves constrained by divided government. The passions have been left unconstrained and the elites no longer committed to civic governance so the system is falling apart as elites try to buy power by pandering to the passions rather than controlling them. This position is shared in whole or part by a lot of clever people who developed their thinking in response to the crisis of liberal democracy in the seventies and the closure of one way thinking marked by the "halt of the forward march of labour". In certain corners of the academy and government this kind of thinking is taken very seriously. Tocquevillian liberalism is coherent and one can reconstruct rationally how it became attractive to liberal intellectuals, but it is one more false god that leads us astray. It is of no use at all when trying to imagine a way through the present crisis in a way that could sustain and enhance the fabric of a free society.
A blog post is to short to develop a full critique of aristocratic liberalism and all I want to do is point out that is a bad guide to history and so likely to be a bad guide in politics. In really major structural crises free societies have not relied on the conservatism of Toqueville but the moral force of Jacobinism. Lincoln and Roosevelt both faced existential threats to the survival of the republic and appealed to justice and the people to mobilise its defense. Both faced real opposition from the bastion of restraint, the supreme court. It was their capacity to define a compelling account of justice and freedom, not their capacity to manipulate the elements of the system that made them successful. It might be worth looking at Roosevelt's four freedoms again too.
A blog post is to short to develop a full critique of aristocratic liberalism and all I want to do is point out that is a bad guide to history and so likely to be a bad guide in politics. In really major structural crises free societies have not relied on the conservatism of Toqueville but the moral force of Jacobinism. Lincoln and Roosevelt both faced existential threats to the survival of the republic and appealed to justice and the people to mobilise its defense. Both faced real opposition from the bastion of restraint, the supreme court. It was their capacity to define a compelling account of justice and freedom, not their capacity to manipulate the elements of the system that made them successful. It might be worth looking at Roosevelt's four freedoms again too.
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