BOOK REVIEW: Why We Get Sick

If you only read one book on health and nutrition, make it Why We Get Sick by Dr Benjamin Bikman.

Dr Bikman is a research scientist whose work concentrates on insulin. He also teaches. Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease — and How to Fight It has the comprehensiveness of a working scientist and the clarity of a good teacher. Dr Bikman also has various lectures available on YouTube which are well worth watching.

Why We Get Sick is organised into three parts — The Problem (8 chapters), Causes (5 chapters), The Solution (5 chapters) — with regular insert boxes to expound on salient points. The book is essentially about the nature and causes of insulin resistance and how to (re)achieve insulin sensitivity. That is, make your cells properly responsive to insulin rather than improperly resistant to it.

The “calories in, calories out” theory of obesity is simplistic and profoundly misleading, as what we eat, and how often, affects how much we eat and how much energy we expend. In other words, what we eat, and how often, affects the hormonal balance of the body which then affects whether we store fat in our bodies or use it up. The prime way mechanism determining which way our body goes is through our insulin response. Insulin is a hormone with a range of effects but it is primarily about managing our glucose levels.

Eating frequently drives up insulin levels. Eating carbohydrates drives up insulin levels. Fat does not generate a significant insulin spike. Protein with fat only generates a small insulin spike. Carbohydrates drives up insulin. Protein with carbohydrates drives up insulin.

A diet of fat and protein has minimal insulin effect. There are essential fats, there are essential proteins, there are no essential carbohydrates. Fat (if not seed oils or trans fat) is your friend, carbohydrates are not. For most people, a metabolically healthy diet is mostly (good) fat. The sugar you consume is far more likely to be turned into body fat than is the fat you eat.

So, if you follow the standard official nutrition guidelines and eat 4–6 regular meals and snacks a day of mostly carbohydrates, you are setting yourself up for developing insulin resistance.

What are some of the consequences of developing insulin resistance? Obesity, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, neurological conditions including Alzheimer’s, kidney disease, accelerated ageing and infertility. In other words, all the chronic diseases that increasingly plague our species can be largely traced back to insulin resistance. They are all conditions largely generated by metabolic ill-health.

Susceptibility to insulin resistance is partly genetic, partly some stress and environmental factors, but predominantly diet.

In Part I: The Problem: What is Insulin Resistance and Why Does It Matter? Dr Bikman takes us through what insulin resistance is (Chapter 1) and then, chapter by chapter, various health consequences.

Insulin resistance is the cells of the body becoming insulin resistant: that is, less and less responsive to insulin levels, which have to get higher and higher to have their required effect of regulating glucose levels in the body, especially the bloodstream. The more insulin there is flooding your system, the more food is turned into fat. This can be subcutaneous fat (under the skin) or visceral fat (in the thorax, especially around organs such as the liver).

Visceral fat is much worse than subcutaneous fat in its harmful health effects. It is also much less visible. Dr Bikman has a nice passage where he explains that fat you can jiggle is better than fat you cannot.

In Part II: Causes: What Makes Us Insulin Resistant in the First Place? Dr Bikman takes us through the causes of insulin resistance. The influence of age and genetics (Chapter 9), the causal role of hormones (Chapter 10), the interaction between obesity and insulin resistance (Chapter 11), the role of inflammation and oxidative stress (Chapter 12), and lifestyle factors (Chapter 13). Yes, you should get regular sleep (depending on you, 5–7 hours a night). Yes, you should exercise regularly.

Having laid out the full disaster, in Part III: The Solution: How Can We Fight Insulin Resistance? Dr Bikman takes us through the eminently practical (and inexpensive) things we can do to get back to good metabolic health. Eat less carbohydrates and fast regularly. In other words, do what you can to give your body a rest from being flooded with insulin.

As someone who has lost 39kgs (85lbs), and is no longer pre-diabetic, through doing precisely that, I am a believer.

Dr Bikman explains that a low-carb diet does mean you need to eat more salt. Often, when you are hungry, it means your body actually wants water or it wants salt. Having too little salt is more dangerous to your health than too much.

A tip not in the book: salted black coffee. Salt cuts bitterness, so salted black coffee can be a no-calorie, no-insulin affect, flavour-hit that blunts hunger cravings.

Dr Bikman has a nice explanation of the difference between fasting (not eating) and starvation (consuming your own muscles). If you have visible fat, and have no unusual health conditions, you can fast safely, though you may have to keep your salt intake up. He mentions the famous case of the seriously obese Scot who, under medical supervision, fasted for 382 days, consuming only water and minerals. Fat is stored energy, so body fat is what you consume when you fast.

Humans are designed to fast: that is why we are the fat ape. (Ever seen a picture of a chimpanzee with no fur? They are a bundle of muscle.) Breakfast is a hugely overrated meal, and often made up of foods bad for our metabolic health.

So, exercise regularly, eat whole foods, avoid processed foods (and seed oils), cut the carbs and adopt a mild fasting regime. The (inexpensive) path to metabolic health. Why We Get Sick concludes with a clear guide on how to do this.

And no, don’t drink fruit juice, that is flooding your body with sugar (and a particularly metabolically unfortunate sugar, fructose) generating an insulin spike. In fact, generally avoid drinking your calories.

Clear, informative, practical, based on good science: if you only read one book on health and nutrition, make it Why We Get Sick.

Crossposted from Medium.

Left-Hand Path, Right-Hand Path: someone being wrong on the internet

Good versus evil is not a universal religious or moral framing

I have a wide range of interests, many of them historical. One of the YouYube channels I have watched regularly is Dr Jackson Crawford’s channel on old Norse culture: serious scholarship delivered congenially in (generally) bite-sized pieces.

I have also listened to several of Tom Rowsell’s offerings from his Survive the Jive channel. He is mainly interested in matters Indo-European, but he ranges more widely, and some of his videos can be charming, such as this one on Hinduism in Bali. His material seems to be accurate (I have not spotted a significant error yet) and is engagingly presented.

Which brings me to Arith Harger’s channel. I listened to his video on What is the Left Hand Path? My interest in these matters is entirely historical and intellectual, but he gets SO much wrong in this video. Rather than give a detailed critique, I will cover the same ground based on available scholarship.

The first section of the video is actually quite a good discussion of the difference between Right-Hand Path and Left-Hand Path. He is correct in arguing that it does not neatly line up with good and evil. Even though, for Star Wars fans, the Right-Hand Path seems a bit Jedi-like and the Left-Hand Path rather Sith-like. It is when Harger tries to put the matter in a larger context that he goes seriously wrong.

The original source of the Left-Hand Path/Right-Hand Path distinction is from India. Specifically, from Yogic and Tantric traditions.

There is an excellent introduction to this distinction, and its likely cultural and historical origins, in Thomas McEvilley’s classic essay The Archaeology of Yoga. This is available on Jstor here and on Scribd here. The essay is, in part, a precursor to McEvilley’s masterpiece The Shape of Ancient Thought in which he examines the history of Greek and Indian philosophy and their interactions.

McEvilley argues that the Left-Hand Path/Right-Hand Path distinction is driven by the interaction between the patrilineal (and patricentric) culture of the invading Indo-European pastoralists and that of the matrilineal (and matricentric) culture of the resident farming population. To use slightly old-fashioned scholarly language, Aryans versus Dravidians.

Whether the culture was patrilineal or matrilineal matters because, in a patrilineal culture, a child without a father lacked a crucial element of social identity. Patrilineal cultures tend to be particularly restrictive of female sexuality for that reason. Conversely, in a culture where a child gets their social identity from their mother, not having a designated father is likely to be less of an issue. Especially if uncles can readily substitute as protective male relatives.

So, mystical and occult traditions in patrilineal cultures are likely to be sex-restrictive, to be ascetic. Conversely, mystical and occult traditions in matrilineal cultures are more likely to be sex-permissive. The former naturally inclines towards the development of spirit-focused disciplines, where ascetic denial of indulgence and the body is the seen as the path to self-development. The latter naturally inclines to the development of self-capacity-and-bodily-focused disciplines.

There is no direct connection in this to any good-versus-evil dichotomy. But, outside the monotheistic traditions, good-versus-evil is not the normal religious dichotomy. In religions in the animist-polytheist spectrum, the more normal distinction is order-versus-chaos. This is particularly true in agrarian societies, where a bad harvest presages disease, death and, if there is a sequence of such harvests, disaster. This concern for order can be seen in the ancient Egyptian concept of maat. How to construct and maintain social order is a central concern of Chinese philosophy while to seek the Tao (or Dao) is seek to be in accordance with the natural order of the universe.

Ascetic, sex-restrictive disciplines tend to be more orderly than than more sex-permissive disciplines. Especially if, as is the case in various forms of Left-Hand-Path, the deliberate breaking of conventions and restrictions is seen as a technique to develop one’s capacities. The highly patrilineal Indian elite would clearly tend to see the mother-right vestiges of Dravidian mysticism and occult practices as very much other. So, the Left-Hand-Path would be seen as more chaotic (because it was) and therefore negatively.

Arith Harger does not seem to be aware of any of this background. Of course, admitting the Left-Hand Path/Right-Hand Path distinction is originally Indian does rather get in the way of presenting it as Old Pagan Wisdom. Though somewhat similar, though less developed, patterns of patrilineal pastoralist Indo-European overlay interacting with matrilineal farming-religion survivals can also be traced in European cultures and their pre-Christian religious and occult traditions.

Where Harger gets particularly confused is over the good-versus-evil distinction. This is not remotely an originally European idea. The pre-Christian religious traditions of Europe fairly clearly follow the normal order-versus-chaos division. Thus, in Norse mythology, various monsters of chaos threaten the order upheld by the Aesir in a pattern that recurs across mythologies.

The good-versus-evil distinction is essentially (as far as we can tell) an invention of Zarathustra (aka Zoroaster). It fits nicely in with monotheism — with a Creator God who creates both the material and the moral order. Opposition to such a God is not merely chaotic and disorderly, it is anti-moral and destructive.

Hence the original Jewish understanding of the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was that they were cities that were systematically anti-moral, preying on the weak and vulnerable and refusing to respect others. (Which makes way more sense than the later interpretation of the key sin of the cities of the plain being unnatural sex: see Chapter Four of Michael Carden’s Sodomy: A History of a Christian Biblical Myth.)

Norman Cohn’s book Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come is a good introduction to the hugely important shift in moral perspectives from order-versus-chaos to good-versus-evil. A shift in moral perspectives that explains much of the antipathy between the Romans (who were mostly definitely all about order, including in ways that seem wildly immoral, or even evil, to us) and the Jews and later the Christians. If one is going to truly embrace a pagan perspective, good-versus-evil has to go.

So, the Right-Hand Path/Left-Hand Path distinction does not map to good-versus-evil. As it originally arose in the intermixing of cultures on the animist-polytheist spectrum, that is not surprising.

The Right-Hand Path/Left-Hand Path is originally an Indian distinction, but as patrilineal pastoralist Indo-European overlay over the culture and religious perspectives of resident matrilineal agrarians we see in India also occurred in Europe, the distinction has a relatively easy path into European pagan traditions, even revived ones.

But surely it is better to get the history correct, rather than hopelessly confused.

Cross-posted from Medium.

BOOK REVIEW Rulers, Religion, and Riches

Jared Rubin’s Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not is a perceptive and informative attempt to answer the question of: why did Europe, particularly Northwest Europe, become so much richer than the Middle East? Especially given that Islam, in its early centuries, was comprehensively ahead of Latin Christendom in sophistication and level of commercial activity and in scientific enquiry.

As this shift was a case of a mutual reversal of fortunes — one started behind, but ended up ahead — the answer has to be an historical one. It has to be about unfolding processes over time, rather than some innate characteristic or difference operating in an undifferentiated away across the centuries.

Rubin states that the answer is not to be found in the doctrines of Islam, but in developing institutional dynamics, where one has to pay attention to what happened, and what did not happen. The latter points I strongly agree with, the first is less convincing. Rubin himself is advancing a set of propositions which he claims matter because they allow us to make sense of the world. Claiming that the doctrinal propositions of Islam do not matter, especially if they affect how institutions evolve, seems somewhat discordant.

Rubin’s basic argument is that rulers rely on propagating agents, agents in society who propagate their rule. Rule is propagated by some balance of coercion and legitimation. The more one can rely on legitimation to propagate one’s rule, the less coercion is required. Religious elites can potentially provide cheap (i.e., low cost to the ruler) legitimacy.

Rubin argues that Islamic religious elites provided cheaper and more effective legitimation to Islamic rulers than the Christian Church did to Christian rulers. Over time, that led Christian rulers to rely more on economic elites as propagating agents, so economic elites had more bargaining power, so they were able to push for more friendly-to-commerce rules, including more secure property rights, that promoted economic growth in Europe — particularly, post the Reformation, Protestant Europe. Conversely, the strength of religious elites, and the weakness of economic elites, in Spain and the Ottoman Empire led to commercial and economic stagnation.

Rubin has a nice definition of elites as: anyone who can influence how people whom they do not know act (p.29). I would add: who can recurrently influence, but I otherwise agree. More generally, I agree with his answer but not his analysis. Yes, I agree that the capacity for economic elites to bargain seriously with rulers was indeed crucial to the development of Northwestern Europe. This is a case that John Powellson makes powerfully in his 1994 Centuries of Economic Endeavour: Parallel Paths in Japan and Europe and Their Contrast with the Third World. Yes, the role of religious elites was very significant in Catholic Spain and the Muslim Middle East in explaining their commercial and economic stagnation. Yet, I disagree with Rubin’s structure of analysis.

Social bargaining

My disagreement centres on Rubin’s notion of propagating agents. Agents has a double meaning in economics. Economics is the study of purposeful action by agents in conditions of scarcity. Individuals and firms are all economic agents. But an agent can also be someone acting on behalf of an other, as in principal-agent problems.

Economic and religious elites are not really agents of the ruler, unless they hold some official position within the apparatus of the state. Dividing support for the rule of the ruler into coercive and legitimating agents (p.33) obliterates an important distinction between those outside the state apparatus that a ruler bargains with and those who, at least notionally, are under the ruler’s administrative direction.

As a medievalist, the striking absence from Rubin’s analysis is landholders. An analysis that covers priests (the Church), merchants (economic elite) and the king (ruler) but leaves out the landholding warlord class (knights and barons) is a little odd, to say the least. They are not economic elites, in the sense that merchants are, or religious elites and they are not accurately described as coercive agents, they had too much scope for independent action.

When one examines how merchants were typically incorporated in political deliberations (i.e., in overt political bargaining), it was by adding merchant representatives to the assemblies of nobles and Church hierarchy (bishops and abbots) that already existed. Analogous assemblies that did not exist in Islam. Which might be regarded as a bit of a clue.

Yes, there was a tradition of shura or consultation within Islam, but it was consultation with officials and dignitaries, who were included because of their personal standing, rather than their institutional connection. Occasionally, guild or trade representatives were included, but the entire process was far too occasional, limited and advisory to be comparable to the bargaining assemblies of Christendom.

It is easy to miss the continuity involved in the addition of merchant representatives to consultative assemblies within Christendom, as adding merchant representatives established the representative principle, which clearly would come to have great significance. But paying too much attention to the beginnings of the representative principle misses the continuity of bargaining assemblies.

Indeed, if one was looking for something that both Northwestern Europe and Japan had that Islam did not, it was a landholding warrior class with a clear corporate identity that regularly engaged in political bargaining with rulers. It is demonstrably much easier to add economic elites into political bargaining processes that already exist than to create such processes ex nihilo. Something that adversely affected China’s ability to cope with the challenge of the Eurosphere Powers. Japan which, unlike China, had a long and rich tradition of political bargaining did much better. The Japan-China comparison is a useful test of any general thesis about Islam/Middle East and Christendom/Europe.

As is comparison with Brahmin India, the other civilisation, apart from Islam, where law was dominated by a religious elite. (Hindu is a term I do not much like, as it covers a very eclectic set of religious traditions and obscures the remaking of the Vedic religion in the face of the challenge of Buddhism.)

Both Islam and Brahmin India generated fluid autocracies: autocratic states that came and went but generally left remarkably little enduring effect on the institutional landscape of their civilisations. The reason being that, in both cases, law was based on revelation and overwhelmingly in the hands of the religious elite. While this did not mean law was rigid, it did reduce its flexibility. One can make new precedents, or decree new rules. One cannot make new revelations with remotely the same facility.

Moreover, what can’t be entrenched in law is not likely to have enduring institutional power and it is very hard to entrench new things in law if it is based on revelation, on connection to the eternal. Especially new things that are to operate in one place but not another. The strength of local custom varied within Islam, but that was more about the circumstances of how Islam reached an area, and the strength of the local ulema, the religious scholars, rather than a more explicit process of legal adjustment.

Nor is political bargaining, certainly not explicit political bargaining, likely to be a prominent part of the political and institutional landscape, if political bargains cannot be entrenched in law. Political bargains that cannot be entrenched in law are not likely to be worth the effort and risks to engage in, or agitate for. In Christendom and Japan, political bargaining did not require any overturning or by-passing of the institutional structure of law. In Islam and in Brahmin India, it did.

States such as Wessex->England-> United Kingdom, France, Denmark and Japan have far longer institutional histories than any Islamic (or Brahmin) state. Apart from Denmark, they have longer institutional histories than Islam itself. The first historically attested tenno of Japan being Kinmei (r. 539–571, though he is counted the 29th Emperor), the first ruler of Wessex being Cedric (r.519–534) and of a united France being Clovis (r.509–511). Denmark only claims as far back as Gorm the Old (r.936–958).

It is important to note the difference between bargaining and resistance. The ability to resist the imposition of rules can generate a process of implicit bargaining. As economic historian Timur Kuran has so informatively laid out, there was plenty of implicit social bargaining involved in the evolution of Sharia. Notably in the evolution of the zakat, the Islamic charity tax. Chinese Emperors similarly engaged in implicit social bargaining with the gentry and merchant elites. Such implicit social bargaining has been a normal part of rulership down the ages.

Getting active agreement to new rules requires explicit bargaining. That has been less common. It was not a feature of Islam or of Brahmin India, due to religious elites dominating law, and the provision of mediating services, precisely because law was based on revelation. Nor was explicit social bargaining a feature of China, where the political model was autocracy administered by a meritocratic bureaucracy. The only explicitly hereditary element was the Emperor, the landed aristocracy having been euthanised out of existence during the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Conversely, explicit social bargaining was a pervasive feature of samurai Japan and of medieval Latin Christendom.

This was due to two inter-related factors. The first was that law in Christendom and Japan was explicitly human made. Even the canon law of the Christian Church, though it took revelation as a key source, was explicitly a human thing and possessed no inherent primacy over secular law. Christianity, Buddhism and Shinto are not legislating religions in the way that Islam, Judaism and Brahminism are. This is a doctrinal difference that generates major institutional differences.

The second was that the military elite was a landholding elite. Yes, both Japan and medieval Christendom developed the notion of land as being held in return for service. Over time, however, the landholding became more entrenched, with other levers being used to create a quid pro quo for military service. A landholding elite is an elite worth bargaining with: both because they are in a strong position to resist rules and because their active endorsement has value. Moreover, a landholding elite that is interested in increasing its income from its estates has reason to support effective property rights.

Islam did not develop such a landholding military elite due to the Sharia inheritance laws, which required property to be shared among all a father’s legal children. Yes, sons got more than daughters and older siblings got more than younger siblings. But inheritances still had to be divided. This made creating a landholding warrior elite impractical, given how expensive supporting a mounted armoured warrior was, because a landholding large enough to support such a warrior would not last beyond a single generation. Instead, Islam developed tax fiefs (iqta, timar and similar). A mounted armoured warrior would collect taxes from their land grant as payment for military service.

You don’t bargain with your tax agents in remotely the same way that you might bargain with warrior landholders with castles and military retainers. Nor do tax agents, who might be moved at any time, have anywhere near the interest in property rights that landholders who want their estates to be productive, and to be inherited by their son, do. Which is why Islam did not have the assemblies of nobles and bishops that Latin Christendom had, and could then add representatives of the merchants to. The institutionalisation of the doctrines of Islam had powerful effects on the social evolution of Islamic societies.

It is notable that the most successful Islamic State, the Ottoman Empire, the longest lasting major Islamic state, was a revealingly partial exception from these patterns. That is because the Ottoman dynasty developed the practise of re-issuing the kanun, the decrees, of previous Sultans, at the start of the reign of each new Sultan. This created an enduring body of administrative law that gave the Ottoman state considerably more institutional resilience than other Islamic states.

Muslim rulers were able to issue decrees in the silences of Sharia: mainly matters of state administration. As Rubin and others have pointed out, Ottoman rulers were able to use their ability to appoint and dismiss judges, and otherwise provide favours to the religious elite, to push the boundaries of kanun rather further than other Islamic rulers. But this was a difference at the margin, it did not change the fundamental dynamics. At least, not until late in the history of the Empire, when there were some (largely abortive) experiments with Parliamentarianism.

As what states were expected to do expanded in the C19th, so did the role of administrative law. This gave Muslim rulers a wedge against religious law in the face of the widening, and increasingly obvious, gaps between the capacities of the Muslim world and those of the Eurosphere states.

Sharia inheritance laws not only blocked the development of a landholding warrior elite, they also undermined the development of any merchant elite capable of long-term political bargaining. The wealth of successful merchants also had to divided among all their children. And as successful Muslims tended to have multiple wives, that often meant lots of children. If wealth is constantly being divided, that strongly militates against the development of the merchant dynasties that were such a prominent feature of Latin Christendom. This generated coordination and time-horizon difficulties that reduced the potential value of merchant elites as political bargaining partners. Even if those bargains could have readily been entrenched in law, which they generally could not be.

Sharia has only narrow restrictions against incest — that Muhammad’s first cousin and first convert, Ali, had married Muhammad’s daughter Fatima, rather militated against expansive incest rules, given that the life and example of Muhammad is a fundamental source of Sharia. The consequence of narrow conceptions of incest, and law being based on revelation, was that kin groups were very strong in Middle Eastern Islam, as alternative social cooperative mechanisms were weak or hard to construct. Once the Abbasid Revolution of 748–50 had overthrown the Arab tribal confederacy of the Umayyad and Rashidun caliphate, Islamic rulers faced the problem that locally-sourced troops would be colonised by local kin groups. They therefore turned to slave soldiers, as slaves are separated from any kin connection. This created military elites further separated from the local populace.

By contrast, the Christian Church, particularly the Latin Church, had extremely expansive bars on incest. That, along with other features of Christian doctrine, militated strongly against kin groups. The effect was particularly intense wherever manorialism was adopted, as holders of manors (the Church, princes and the landholding elite) had an interest in not having kin groups interfering with their management of their manors. Both Church and rulers also had a strong interest in not having their organisations colonised by kin groups. The result was that kin groups disappeared from Christendom, except in the Celtic and Balkan fringe. A rich structure of alternative mechanisms of social cooperation developed, mechanisms that could be readily entrenched in law.

This meant that a much richer variety of institutional arrangements developed in medieval Europe, given that bargaining is a path-dependent process, so produced varying institutional patterns in different places. So the selection processes of history had much more to work with in Latin Christendom than they did in Islam. (Or, indeed, any other civilisation.) Social and political bargaining was more entrenched in the society, there were more potential bargaining partners, and more reasons to bargain. With the difference between Christian and Islamic doctrine, and their institutional expression, being a key factor.

The circle of justice

The concept of the circle of justice that Islamic thought adopted from pre-Islamic civilisations — one well known form claimed to be from a letter by Aristotle to his pupil Alexander, another version claim to be a statement by shahanshah Khosrow Anushirvan (r.531–579) — expressed a notion of just order that implies protection and regularity by the ruler, but not political bargaining. In his Muqaddimah (An Introduction to History), pioneer historical sociologist ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) reports the alleged words of Aristotle as:

The world is a garden the fence of which is the dynasty,
The dynasty is an authority through which life is given to proper behaviour,
Proper behaviour is a policy directed by the ruler,
The ruler is an institution supported by the soldiers,
The soldiers are helpers who are maintained by money,
Money is sustenance brought together by the subjects,
The subjects are servants who are protected by justice,
Justice is something harmonious*, and by it the world persists,
The world is a garden . .

(*Franz Rosenthal translates this, ma’luf, as familiar, but notes it may mean harmonious, which works better in context.)

One does not bargain with servants. (Other renditions of Aristotle’s alleged words use the term slaves.) The version ibn Khaldun cites as coming from shahanshah Khosrow is even more direct:

Royal authority exists through the army, the army through money, money through taxes, taxes through cultivation, cultivation through justice, justice from the improvement of officials, the improvement of officials through the forthrightness of wazirs, and the whole thing in the first place through the ruler’s personal supervision of his subjects’ condition and his ability to educate them, so that he may rule them, and not they him.

Of ibn Khaldun’s three stated versions of the circle of justice, the first he quotes is the alleged words of a Mobedhan, a Zoroastrian priest, to Bahram b. Bahram (either shahanshah Bahram II, r.274–293, or Bahram III, r.293):

O King, the might of royal authority materializes only through the religious law, obedience towards God, and compliance with His commands and prohibitions. The religious law persists only through royal authority. Mighty royal authority is accomplished only through men. Men persist only with the help of property. The only way to property is through cultivation. The only way to cultivation is through justice. Justice is a balance set up among mankind. The Lord set it up and appointed an overseer for it, and that overseer is the ruler.

Unsurprisingly, the version put in the mouth of a priest explicitly endorses religious law, and God as the source of authority, but does not explicitly mention the military.

The notion that the ruler sustains his own authority by sustaining rightful order, while long predating Islam, received extra power in a civilisation where law was dominated by the religious elite and predominantly based on revelation.

Ibn Khaldun saw royal authority as the key force giving structure to society, including being the greatest source of demand for goods and services. He wrote that:

Mutual aggression of people in cities and towns is thus averted by the authorities and by the government, which hold back the masses under their control from attacks and aggression against each other. They are thus prevented by the influence of force and governmental authority from mutual injustice, save such injustice as comes from the ruler himself.

For ibn Khaldun, the creation, sustaining, and breakdown of social order was very much about the rise, persistence and decay of dynasties, of royal authority. The fluid autocracies of the Islamic world were very well captured by his analysis.

Islamic dynasties show, over the longer-term, very different patterns than do the dynasties of Christendom, who ruled over much more institutionally persistent states. From 800–1500, the reigns of Christian rulers in Western Europe generally tended to lengthen over time and, with some bumps, tended to have declining chances of being deposed. The duration of their reigns also show no particular pattern within dynasties. Over the same period, the reigns of Islamic rulers generally tended to decline, have a generally increasing chance of being deposed, with their reigns tending to shorten towards the end of dynasties. (The trends in reign length, chance of being deposed and patterns within dynasties is from here.) The difference between rulers whose bargaining could be entrenched in law (i.e., institutionalised), and rulers whose power was more salient (i.e. more apparently dominant), but with much less capacity to make, and institutionalise, supporting social bargains.

Legitimacy

The other feature of having law not dominated by the religious elite, is that law can develop secular discourses of legitimacy. Indeed, as James Franklin points out in his excellent The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal, legal reasoning can be the basis of a wide range of intellectual spin-offs. Especially if it is not constrained by constant referring back to revelation.

Rubin treats legitimacy as a support for rule. Legitimacy is, however, a somewhat fraught concept. As political scientist Xavier Marquez has pointed out, it can be a bit of a catch-all filler as a concept. How do we know X was legitimate? People supported X. How do we know X lost legitimacy? People stopped supporting X. Legitimacy becomes rather like phlogiston: a postulated theoretical entity without independent evidentiary support.

Legitimacy has two senses. The first is doctrinal legitimacy: follows the accepted rules, procedures and other precepts of some normative system. The second is public legitimacy: is within the political (or other) system’s operative rules of deference and authority, it’s public normative structure. Public rituals, public speech, public acts, private and public sanctions, are all means to establish those public norms of legitimacy. Rituals of submission, for example, publicly display that people submit. Failures to follow doctrinal legitimacy becomes socially significant if and when it affects people’s behaviour. That is, if it is an operative social norm, which normally includes effective sanctions. Being able to grant or withhold legitimacy, in a way that affects people’s behaviour, thus becomes a powerful social lever.

It is a social lever based on normative mechanisms. Norms are very much a social phenomena, as Cristina Bicchieri has carefully analysed; notably in The Grammar of Society and Norms in the Wild. Are economic elites purveyors of normative mechanisms? Not remotely in the sense that religious elites are. This is another distinction that the concept of propagating agents flattens.

The question of rival normative mechanisms to those of religious elites does, however, point back to the role of law in establishing norms of legitimacy. But also the processes of bargaining. Parliaments, Cortes, Estates-General, Diets, etc., could be legitimating mechanisms. One that religious elites were represented in, but were far from dominant in.

As previously noted, the incorporation of economic elites in political bargaining within Latin Christendom was not a self-contained dramatic institutional shift. It was an inclusion within, and extension of, bargaining structures that already existed.

If we go back to the break-up of kin groups and the Catholic marriage system (no concubines, no divorce, one wife, strong sanctions against bastardy), the full effect only came about where the secular elites went along with it. Which, anywhere manorialism extended to, they had a strong interest in doing. The Celtic fringe lacked manorialism, and so the Church was never strong enough to impose its marriage system on the Celtic fringe until the English-cum-British state smashed the power of the clan chiefs (Wales, Ireland) or bought them off (Scotland).

Which again takes us back to what the landholding warrior class was doing. The class that did not really exist in Islam, or in China, but did in Europe and Japan. A class that rulers definitely did bargain with, where it existed.

So, I agree with Rubin’s answer concerning the centrality of social bargaining and sources of legitimacy, but not his structure of analysis.

There is, however, much to recommend Rulers, Religion and Riches. Rubin is a very clear writer. He has intelligently and perceptively absorbed a great deal of material. He has thought seriously about the normative power of religious elites. Though incorporation of Cristina Biccheiri’s work on social norms, especially in The Grammar of Society and Norms in the Wild, would have been very beneficial to his analysis.

Rubin is also very good on the telling detail. His discussion of why the Ottoman rulers came to rely more on local notables I found particularly informative and insightful, for instance. Rulers, Religion, and Riches is a very worthy addition to the growing literature of comparative institutional analysis.

Cross-posted from Medium.

Readers wanted

I am writing a book on marriage for Connor Court. It would be very helpful to have some "beta readers" to run a critical eye over drafts of the chapters (and appendices) of the book.

So, if you are interested in being such a reader, say so in the comments.

The chapter plan is set out below. Feel free to nominate sections you may be particularly interested in.


Prologue: A society without marriage

Introduction: The problem of marriage

Part 1: The patterns of marriage

Chapter 1: What is marriage and where did it come from?
Appendix 1.1: Rationality and utility

Chapter 2: Of cousins, cults and clans

Chapter 3: Paths to patriarchy

Chapter 4: Caste and other household matters

Chapter 5: Why the state
Appendix 5.1: China, Rome and cycles of empire.

Chapter 6: Polygyny and social aggression
Appendix 6.1: Migration and social aggression

Part 2: Marriage and Western Dominance

Chapter 7: Classical monogamy and political diversity
Appendix 7.1: Republics outside the classical world
Appendix 7.2: Empire as a territorial equilibrium 

Chapter 8: Christian monogamy and supercharging cooperation
Appendix 8.1: Patterns of political bargaining

Chapter 9: The triumph of monogamy and the end of a civilisational cycle
Appendix 9.1: Sacredness and structure

Part 3: The Present and Prospects of Marriage

Chapter 10: Marriage at the margin

Chapter 11: Violence and victims

Chapter 12: Biology and culture
Appendix 12.1 Same sex attraction

Chapter 13: Conclusion

Afterword: Catastrophising and cultural flux
Appendix 1: Abstraction and Uncertainty
Appendix 2: Connection and Information


(Will update this post if and when chapter plan changes.)

No, Ibn Khaldun is not the father of economics

I am a great admirer of work of the C14th Muslim intellectual Abū Zayd ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldūn al-Ḥaḍramī (1332-1406), known as Ibn Khaldun. I gave a paper on his thought to the University of Melbourne Medieval Roundtable in April 2016, I will be giving another examining the course of the Ottoman Empire in the light of his analysis in August 2017. Widening the circle of those acquainted with his thought is laudable.

Overstating the case, however, is not. Such as claiming that he is the real originator of economic thinking: particularly via his Muqaddimah (1377) (sometimes also called his Prolegomena). Now, apart from the piece being an instance of the unlovely contemporary habit where people cannot be just factually wrong, or have made some analytical error, they must be morally delinquent, the claim is misconceived.

That Ibn Khaldun was a serious and perceptive economic thinker is clearly true, as is discussed in this 1988 contribution explicitly suggesting he was "the father of economics". But a key characteristic of any sort of father, metaphorical or otherwise, is that they have intellectual progeny, as is pointed out here. In this case, intellectual progeny specifically in the field of economic analysis. Within the Muslim world, Ibn Khaldun failed to do so.

It is not that Muslim intellectuals were not aware of his work. In The Muslim Discovery of Europe, Bernard Lewis instances Ottoman officials attempting to analyse European states via use of Ibn Khaldun's model of the path of states. It is simply that they failed to follow in his intellectual footsteps.

What makes Adam Smith (1723-1790) the father of economics, and originator of modern economic thinking, is not Adam Smith or even The Wealth of Nations (1775), it is Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), David Ricardo (1772-1823), Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi (1773-1842) and all those who followed on after. It was that Adam Smith had intellectual progeny, and, in the matter of economic analysis, Ibn Khaldun didn't.

It is worth noting that one reason that The Wealth of Nations had such an impact (apart from a book in the world of printing having a profound advantage over a book in the world of scribes) was that Great Britain was a parliamentary state, with the government by discussion that involves, and Smith's ideas rapidly became part of the political and policy debate. Conversely, Finnish priest and politician Anders Chydenius's (1729-1803) pamphlet The National Gain (1765), which preceded The Wealth of Nations and apparently advocated very similar ideas, was likely hampered in having an effect by Sweden being a more peripheral state, that Chydenius himself was a controversial political figure and Gustav III's coup of 1772, which abolished Parliamentary rule until it was restored in 1809.

If it turned out that Ibn Khaldun's ideas influenced Adam Smith, that might make him the Grandfather of Economics (vaguely possible, but not terribly likely; especially as the first complete scholarly edition of the Muqaddimah in Europe was not until 1858, part of the long-term scholarly impact of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798), but the temporal distance to intellectual progeny would still preclude him from being, in any useful sense, the Father of Economics or the originator of modern economic thinking.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Warrior Women: An Archaeologist's Search for History Hidden Heroines

Archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball's Warrior Women: An Archaeologist's Search for History's Hidden Heroines is book mostly about the fun and experience of being an archaeologist. As such, it is a lively and engaging memoir.

It is also refreshingly free of cant and jargon. It is clearly written for a lay audience, but that the author came late to academe (she got her Ph.D. at 49) after what could only be described as a broad range of life experiences--three marriages, six children, surviving breast cancer, and what she describes as:

a varied resume that included stints as a nurse in Idaho, an administrator in a convalescent hospital in southern California, an English-language teacher in Bolivia and Spain, and a failed cattle rancher in South America (p.xii)

likely helped the easy-to-read and practical tone of the work.

The book wears its scholarship lightly but pervasively. There are boxes (ranging in size from half a page to three pages) providing background on matters touched on in the main narrative and the text is extensively footnoted and referenced.

The rhythms, discomforts and joys of archaeological endeavour are nicely brought to life. Much of her archaeology was in the former Soviet Union, concentrating on various kurgans or burial mounds, and the "joys" of dealing with Soviet agencies and suspicion of outsiders are woven into the narrative. Though it turns out that the contemporary People's Republic of China is worse, with Chinese officials going as far as to insert a (headless) museum exhibit mummy into a dig site as part of the official disapproval of interest in the Caucasian features of said mummies (p.140).

Davis-Kimball also interweaves current observation of steppe nomads with the archaeology, partly in the hope that the lives of the former might shed light on some of the finds of the latter (which, on at least one case, it did). Indeed, the observations about the life of steppe nomads are of interest in themselves. The book is something of a treasure trove of information on the archaeology, ethnology and history of the steppe nomads and is worth reading for that alone.

The warrior women of the title are only one of several themes in the book. The most striking passage on warrior women is early in the book, when the characteristics of the 194 adult skeletons found in the Povkrovka kurgans are listed. 94% of the men were buried with weapons, 3% with a clay pot or two, 3% with a child (though none of the women were). Roughly 15% of the women were buried with weapons, 7% with artefacts that suggested they were priestesses, (3% fell into both categories), 3% with chalk whorls too fragile to be of practical use and 75% were buried as hearth women (Pp46-7).  The percentage of women buried with weapons is within the range of Scythian, Saka, Sarmatian burials more generally.

Davis-Kimball's book is full of striking details, though at times I would have liked a bit more interweaving with general patterns. Low population densities societies tend to teach women to fight (the men might be away) and (as Davis-Kimball notes, p.62) the horse archery of the nomads made imbalances in upper body strength and physical size less of a problem than other styles of fighting. Since it took a lot of grass to support animals, and a lot of animals to support people, and pasture is effectively a given, there would also be less pressure on women to give birth early, allowing a warrior stage of life in one's teenage years among early nomad peoples (most of the women warriors found died in their teens, p.60). There is not much evidence of women actually fighting with armies among later nomad peoples (and limited evidence for the early nomads, p.65), though more intense competition for pasture (and trade) may have shifted the balance against incorporating women in armies, rather than as last-ditch home guard. Even with these early nomads, Davis-Kimball suggests that women warriors may have been largely auxiliary or home defence forces (p.65).

Davis-Kimball is interested in all of the roles of women in these societies. Their apparent domination of religious activities is striking. Those men who seem to be of religious or shamanistic significance seemed to have cross-dressed (Pp180ff), part of the wider pattern associating queer folk with shamanistic roles. A considerable part of the text examines the role of women in spirituality and religion, religious rituals and belief in goddesses, particular a Mother Goddess.

A 12th century sheela na gig on the church
at Kilpeck, Herefordshire, England. 

The two chapter segue into the myths and archaeology of Ireland towards the end of the book at first seems to be just about being an archaeological memoir but she relates both back to the archaeology and history of the steppes. (Davis-Kimball clearly favours the steppes as the origins of Indo-European languages and culture.) That the genealogy of Irish heroes is always traced through the female line suggests a matrilineal past (p.210). She also points out that these were oral traditions until written down by Irish monks seems to have affected their transmission, with the role of women becoming more dependant and more morally perverse the later the transcription (Pp196ff). (She actually uses the term patriarchy correctly, as authority being centred in certain males, which is good to see.) There is also a discussion of those oddities, the sheela na gig's (Pp205ff).

The role of women in Norse (Viking) society is also discussed, including how archaeology supports Ibn Fadlan's claims about the rich adornment of their women: indeed, the archaeology suggests that women might have had more role in commerce than the men (Pp216ff). There is also a nice discussion of the series of powerful women in Mongol history--that the Mongol elite was highly polygynous did not seem to stop wives being regents in the interregnum between the death of one khan and the election of the next (Pp220ff). The contrast with Islamic history on this matter is striking, likely reflecting steppe women being taught to fight and the absence of religious-based relegation of women.

The final (short) chapter provides a summary of what has been traversed in the book, noting the historical downward shift in the standing of women when patriarchal priesthood-kingship models were adopted but ending, where she began, with the sheer fun of archaeological discovery.

Jeannine Davis-Kimball's Warrior Women is both an informative journey and a fun read. A good starting point or way station to understanding the varying gender dynamics of human societies in history.

Sultans of Rome: The Turkish World Expansion

Some works of history are excellent introductions to the history of a period, region, people. Others are much better read only if you already had some background knowledge -- either because they assume such knowledge, or because the author has such a pronounced point of view that background knowledge is desirable to balance out what is being written, or not written.

Sultans of Rome: The Turkish World Expansion by archaeologist Warwick Ball falls into the last category.

Which is not to say that I did not find it a useful and informative work of history. It gives an excellent overview of Turkish history, informatively covering the centuries before the Seljuks conquered much of the Middle East. The difficulty comes with the coverage of the Ottoman Empire (Chapters 7 - 10).

A European State
The author is at pains to point out that the Ottoman Empire was, from very early on, a European state. The Ottomans first took territory in Europe in 1354. The movement of its capital from Bursa to Edirne (formerly Adrianople) in 1363 meant that its capital was in Europe for the rest of its history, until the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate in 1922 and the Ottoman Caliphate in 1923. With Selim I's conquest and abolition of the shadow Abbasid Caliphate in Cairo, this location history meant that the Sunni Caliphate was resident in Europe for over 400 years, though the Ottomans put much more emphasis on the title once they started losing Muslim-inhabited lands to European states, particularly Russia.

Ottoman Empire at its greatest extent --
being positively Roman in its use of client states.

At its height, the Ottoman Empire controlled about 20% of the land area of Europe (p.7). It was clearly a part of the European state system. Even the phrase used of its latter years, the sick man of Europe, acknowledged that. So, yes the Ottomans were a European state, indeed a European Great Power an acknowledged (though not original) member of the Concert of Europe. So it is easy to have fun with various historians and commentators who talk of the Ottomans as being somehow exterior to Europe and to being European; and Ball does have such fun.

The trouble is that Ball is so concerned to score points in current controversies--former French President Giscard d'Estaing's comments about Turkey not being part of Europe are clearly a particular annoyance--that his text systematically minimises differences, and emphasises similarities, between the Ottoman state and European states.  In doing so, Ball does make several useful corrective points. But he also pushes his book into the realm of polemic.

Ottoman astronomers, C16th.

The notion of a clash of civilisations based on Team Christian versus Team Islam is easily demolished. Not least because there was often such vicious hostility between Catholics and Orthodox on one side, and Sunni and Shia on the other. Selim the Grim's expansion of the Ottoman Empire by 70% with, among other things, the conquest of Mamluk Egypt, completely (if temporarily) shifting the axis of advance of the Empire from conquest of Christian lands to conquest of Muslim lands, was largely motivated (or at least justified as being) to block the advances of the rabidly Shia Safavid dynasty which had conquered Iran and brutally converted it to being Shia.

And the Ottomans were ever opportunistic, making alliances with Christian states when it suited them, incorporating Christian forces into their armies, having Christian vassal states. The border lands between civilisations are noted for such patterns. But that does not mean they are not border lands between civilisations.

But a civilisational divide
To talk of the Ottomans not being a European Power is geographic nonsense. But to talk of them being of a different civilisation than the Christian states is not. The advance of the Ottomans into Europe was the advance of a civilisation from outside Europe into Europe. As the Ottomans imperium lost ground after 1683, so that was the retreat of a civilisation from Europe.

Skull tower at Nis, Serbia, erected by
the Ottoman commander to contain skulls
of defeated Serbian rebels, 1809.

That there were non-Muslim minorities in Muslim lands did not mean that Muslim-majority countries were not lands of Islam as a civilisation. Just as the leaving of Muslim minorities in Christian-majority countries did not stop those being lands of a different civilisation. Nor was being a majority required for a civilisational divide, who controlled the state in a territory was sufficient. The border of the Ottoman Empire was a civilisational divide, one that not only represented a different established religion, but different marriage systems, understanding of law, basic institutions and metaphysical presumptions.

Jihad as system
When Ball writes "the perceived Holy War symbolised by Kossovo--was simply not an issue to the early Ottomans" (p.98) he is being less than accurate. The Ottomans turned jihad into a system. A system operated for their benefit, but a system nonetheless. (Indeed, creating systems to expand and buttress their rule was the Ottoman genius.) All the first nine rulers of the Ottoman state called themselves ghazis (holy warriors).

Serbian historian Srdja Trifkovic, in his The Krajina Chronicles: A History of the Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia (which I review here) provides a useful summary of how the Ottomans used jihad, (and his work is a useful corrective to Ball's Ottoman spruiking more generally). Raiders devastated border regions, promoting flight and reducing economic activity (and thus long-term ability to resist) while the spoils of raids (already sanctioned by Islamic jurisprudence) motivated and maintained the raiders. Larger armies periodically probed the borders. Eventually, conquest of a new region would be accomplished, the surviving inhabitants would be subject to the jizya poll tax on non-believers, Muslim warriors were settled as “tax-farmers” in the newly-conquered region and the process would roll on from the new (expanded) borders.

Mehmet II triumphal entry into Constantinople
(painting by Benjamin Constant).

The Ottomans could be very pragmatic in how they interpreted non-believer submission to their rule. Hence their extensive use of Christian vassal states and Christian warriors. But that same pragmatism used jihad quite ruthlessly as a means and justification for imperial expansion. The Ottomans were never a jihadi state, but they were certainly a state that used jihad, and did so quite systematically. They saw themselves as expanding dar al-Islam; as, indeed, they were. During the long imperial retreat, they were defending dar al-Islam.

An Islamic Empire
As Ball points out, it was only after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 that Muslims became a majority of the Empire's subjects (p.158). The balance of pragmatic consideration then moved to harsher treatment of what were now clearly non-Muslim minorities. This culminated in Hamidian Massacres of the 1890s and the Armenian, Assyrian and Pontic-Greek genocides followed during the Dynasts War. While admitting to the slaughters, Ball is at pains to blame European factors--the rise of nationalism (p.156), the push of the Christian Powers to protect Christian nationalities within the Empire (p.158). This represents a sadly typical "I will now signal I am a good and sophisticated person" move of allocating the "real" agency for anything bad to those bad "white" people. Ball having systematically glided over awkward bits in his Ottoman narrative makes it easier to do.

A photograph, taken by the American W. L. Sachtleben,
depicting the victims of a massacre of Armenians
 in Erzerum on October 30, 1895, being gathered
for burial at the town's Armenian cemetery.

The reality is that the Ottoman Empire was always ultimately an Islamic state. The Ottoman dynasty prided itself on being a defender of Sunni Orthodoxy and Sharia, albeit with typical Ottoman systematic finessing, was the dominant law of the Empire. (In accordance with Sharia, the various millets each operated their own law, but only as subordinate to Sharia.) With a majority of their subjects being non-Muslims, of course the Ottomans were pragmatic in their treatment of non-Muslims. But Muslim supremacy was always the bedrock the state was built on.

The balance of tolerance and oppression
There is a recurring pattern in history of states with established and legitimating religions being pragmatic when the dominant group is a minority and then becoming increasingly oppressive as the dominant group's proportion of the population shifts to being a majority, with that intolerant oppressiveness worsening as their dominant group's proportion of the population increases further. We can see this pattern in Norman Sicily, where the treatment of Jews and Muslims was relatively tolerant when the Christians were a minority, tending to worsen as the Christians became a majority and culminating in the expulsion of the remaining Muslims (and later the Jews). We can also see the pattern in Spain and Portugal during and after the Reconquista, culminating in the expulsion of the Jews and later of the Moriscoes.

Similarly, the treatment of Jews in Christian Europe was often worse than in Islamic Europe because Jews were typically the only significant religious minority in Christian states, and a relatively small one at that, while Jews were part of a wider mosaic of religious groups in Islamic realms. (Not that Jews did not also suffer massacres and pogroms in Islamic lands.)

Selim III receiving foreign dignitaries,  1789.

But the wider pattern also occurs in Islamic lands. Indeed, is continuing to this day, with the flight of the Jews after 1948 and the current steady erosion of Christian populations in the Middle East. The Ottoman massacres and genocides were a particularly vile manifestation of the wider historical pattern. (The Habsburg Monarchy also had ethnic minorities of dubious loyalty in a time of rising nationalism, with Russia posing as protectors of Orthodox groups: but the Habsburg state did not resort to massacres and death-marches as a response, not even under the stress of the Great War.)

So, there are some serious weaknesses in Ball's treatment of the Ottoman Empire. But there is also plenty of useful and striking information. And even folk being polemical can make useful points. The discussion of the Ottoman attempt to incorporate the Roman heritage, for example, is enlightening.

The real strength of the book is in its treatment of the wider Turkish history, which extends centuries before the Seljuk and Ottoman Empires.  The Turks are no longer the folk who suddenly appear out of the steppes as conquerors in the C11th, but as a people with a rich and complex history before that. So, a useful book, but not one to be read as a stand-alone, particularly not regarding Ottoman history.

Are we heading towards peak globalisation? The ages of trade, globalisation and IT

This is based on a comment I made here.

The history of (long distance) trade can be divided into 4 eras, one of which is regional and transitional:

Continental-coastal: outside local areas, trade was limited to thin networks of high value items with some (highly fluctuating) upward tendency in the extent of such networks, but no significant link between Afro-Eurasian trade systems and American trade systems. 

Oceanic-global: Europeans link the globe via exploitation of routes their explorations opened up, with silver the dominant trade item and non-local trade still limited to thin (though expanding) networks of high value items. 

Atlantic-transition: Huge increases in the level of shipping (including through greatly expanded canal networks) creates an Atlantic economy on the cusp of mass trade, a matter of quantity having a quality all of its own. 

Globalised: From the 1820s onwards, steam (via steamships and railways) sets off an era of mass trade, which means Rogowski factor income (pdf) dynamics come to dominate the political economy of trade.

With mass trade (without which there is not globalisation worth the name), trade seriously impacts the income of general factors of production (land, labour, capital). Outside the Atlantic economy, there is no globalisation worth the name until the 1820s (pdf) because the technology did not support the required level of mass trade. According to Angus Maddison's calculations (pdf), in 1800, merchandise exports were about 1% of world GDP: by 1913 they were 8%.

One can tell that the Atlantic economy (particularly Britain) was on the cusp of mass trade as wheat prices converged (pdf)--wheat prices within the Atlantic economy (expressed in silver) narrowed from a range of 6.66:1 around 1400 to a range of 1.88:1 around 1750--and, in Britain particularly, free trade v protectionism starts becoming a political issue.

Before that, the political economy of trade was about fighting over the rents from thin trade networks of high value items because trade was not "mass enough" to affect general factor incomes. Though such trade was disproportionately important for state revenues. Trade was overwhelming non-competing items, because transport costs were so high, it was very unlikely traded items could compete with local production.

(As an aside, I have suggested that the change to mass trade and cheap communication matters for the history of monetary theory: in particular why the price-specie flow mechanism made sense to David Hume but rather less so later.)

Once transport technology advances enough for mass trade, then scarce factors of production want trade protection to protect their scarcity premium from foreign competition. If an economy is importing a factor of production (or its products), then that factor of production is scarce in the local economy. So, importing food implies land is scarce, importing capital implies capital is scarce, importing labour implies labour is scarce (in the local economy).

Plentiful factors of production want free trade to get access to wider markets, increasing their income (by increasing their sales and by reducing their costs through not having to pay local scarcity premiums). If an economy is exporting a factor of production (or its products) then it is plentiful in the local economy. So exporting food implies land is plentiful, exporting capital implies capital is plentiful, exporting labour implies labour is plentiful (in the local economy).

In an era of mass politics, two out of three factors of production wins (domestic) political economy fights. Hence the broad patterns of the political economy of trade in the first globalisation era from the 1820s until the Great War. Britain exported capital and labour and imported food. Capital and labour were plentiful and imposed free trade against the wishes of (locally scarce) land. Germany imported food and capital and exported labour. Capital and land were (locally) scarce and imposed protection against the wishes of (plentiful) labour.

The Anglo settler societies (Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand) exported food (and minerals) and imported capital and labour. Capital and labour were (locally) scarce and imposed protection against the wishes of (plentiful) land. Latin America had weak states, which relied on (easily imposed and collected) tariffs for revenue but also imported labour and capital, so moved to protection whenever powerful land interests could be overcome.

Very few countries exported capital in the period before 1913, and as the combination of having both plentiful land and plentiful labour is (to say the least) odd, the general tendency was towards protection among countries able to set their own trade policies. (Which European colonies, and various countries subject to European power, generally were not.)

There was retreat from, and stagnation of, globalisation in the 1914 to 1945 period, largely due to the huge shocks to the global trade system of the two World Wars and the Great Depression. There was also some interruption to the pattern of declining sea transport costs (though vastly increased uncertainty may have been a factor in that also by affecting research and investment decisions).

Over the long term, the 1914-1945 globalisation-retreat interlude turned out to be an interruption in the process of globalisation; though a major interruption, it took until the 1970s for world trade to recover to the level it would have reached if the pre 1913 trends had continued. (The latter observation is taken, as is much of the information in this post, from an excellent history of trade over the last millennium,  Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millennium by economic historians Ronald Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke.)

Globalisation continued to be driven by falling transport (mainly in air transport) and communication costs.* Which, along with other aspects of technology, began to have some unexpected effects on the patterns of mass trade. (Paul Krugman's Nobel memorial lecture is an excellent summary of that.) As factors of production became more internally differentiated, this tended to favour free trade interests by breaking up pro-protection coalitions. 

As the breakdown in international trade was strongly associated with the disasters of the 1914-1945 period, this generated increased public policy commitment among the developed democracies to liberalising trade as part of  a commitment to a more stable international order. (Capital-importing countries outside the developed world generally continued to tend towards protectionism.) Just as the dominant naval power of the 1815-1913 period, Britain, supported a liberal trading order, so, after 1945 did the succeeding dominant naval power of the US.

Also, if your income is not directly affected by trade, you will tend to favour freer trade as it broadens choices and tends to lower prices. So, electorates with large public sectors and more welfare-dependent or retired folk are likely to tend to be more favourable to freer trade.

As information technology (IT) develops, and communication costs become tiny, we start getting not merely wholesaling of films and TV but retailing of films and TV as well as huge growth in computer games. Intellectual property (IP) becomes a big deal as new forms of rents from trade become available. In the words of the post by econblogger Scott Summer that inspired this post:

Because the US is the dominant producer of intellectual property, the US government (both liberal and conservative administrations) will argue for low overseas taxes on multinational earnings, weak anti-trust laws to preserve the profits of US companies with patents, copyrights and/or large network externalities, and strong intellectual property rights, to extract money from non-American consumers of stuff developed in California.
You might wonder why even liberal American politicians would defend the robber barons of California. The answer is simple; these firms produce lots of tax revenue for the US, and for California. They don’t want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Nor do they want to share eggs with Europe and Asia. It doesn’t matter if our firms exploit consumers in Asia or taxpayers in Europe, as long as they share 30% of the loot with public employees in the US.

And these industries are a very big deal, particularly for the US. Computer games are a multi-billion dollar industry, apparently overtaking films for export income. It is plausible to argue that it is precisely because we have global markets, that protection of IP by states in return for taxing the income therefrom has become a feature of international politics.

On the horizon, we can see the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and 3D printing. This seems likely to make the IP issues more salient, not less; both in their use and as the two technologies may well undermine mass trade in goods and services.

Globalisation has been fundamentally driven by technology: in particular, falling transport and communication costs. Public policy certainly can affect (profoundly) how specific countries have interacted with the pressures and consequences of said falling transport and communication costs. Major breakdowns of the international political and economic order can even more so.

Nevertheless, those falling costs created pressures and expanding opportunities that public policy responded to.

If technology now starts to strongly favour localisation, then that pressure will be reversed as technology will no longer be encouraging global connections in production and distribution of goods and services. If that is so, at least in terms of mass trade in goods and services, we may be approaching peak globalisation.

* As air transport has increasingly bled off high value items (including people), this has tended to limit shifts in real sea transport rates, as technological improvement in sea transport is being applied to cheaper and cheaper (in aggregate) products.

ADDENDA. A dramatic effect of the European created Oceanic-global trade era was the Columbian Exchange; but that was, in the spreading across the globe of crops and animals, more a matter of changing local production patterns than trade as such.

One of the high value items tending towards mass trade in the Atlantic economy was the Atlantic slave trade, in itself partly a result of the population collapse in the Americas due to the importing of the Eurasian disease pool to the Americas as part of the Columbian exchange. The Atlantic slave trade manage to move across the Atlantic likely similar magnitudes of African slaves as the Saharan slave trade had across the Sahara (with likely similar death rates, particularly when the death rates from creating eunuchs are included) but in just over three centuries rather than twelve.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]