Why Americans are F***-ed in the head over race

The history of the US has generated persistent racial derangement. It has been far more of a case of structures generating racism than of racism generating structures.

Source.

People have a pretty good understanding of their own continental ancestry. People are also relatively accurate at picking out other people’s continental ancestry.

This is not surprising. There was not much mixing of lineages across continents until relatively recently, at least outside continental border regions. This was due to the limitations of technology: specifically very limited transport capacitie. Moreover, thousands of years of separate genetic lineages, with genetic bottlenecks creating relatively small founder populations for various continents, meant that there are fuzzy-boundary, but relatively clear, patterns of physical markers of continental ancestry.

So, a folk concept of race based on continental ancestry has some, relatively straightforward, patterns of physical-markers to work off. Hence the history of skin-tone descriptors of race. With race becoming to be understood as being continental, or some significant sub-continental region, ancestry. (Medieval Europeans had a rather different concept of race, one much more language based — so it made sense for a C14th commentator to talk of Scotland being one nation with two races: highlanders and lowlanders as thy spoke different languages.)

The US in particular has a long history of obsessing over race because continental origin coincided with fundamentally different roles in colonial society (the settlers, the dispossessed and the enslaved). Different roles that persisted into the country created by the American Revolution.

Slavery, settlement and racism

As continents produce neither single cultures per continent nor single breeding populations per continent, analytically, remarkably little follows from physical markers of continental ancestry being relatively clear. But as physical markers of continental ancestry are collectively visually relatively clear, they can, very easily, have social meanings attached to them. Which, of course, has happened repeatedly. Especially when one region has systematically enslaved people from region(s) with different general patterns of physical markers. Or when folk from one continent have populated another. We can call these the slavery effect and the settlement effect.

Both have proved to be powerful generators of racism: attaching normative ranking to continental (or region thereof) origin. That is, positive social meaning to one’s own group and (especially) pejorative social meaning to those with a different continental origin (and so a different social role).

A third generator of racism has been imperialism: domination of a state created by one continental origin group over folk with differing continental origins. This has been a rather stronger generator of elite or theoretical racism than more general racism, as imperialism is mostly an elite activity. (A 2018 study found that the UK and Portugal, the two surveyed countries with the longest histories of colonialism, had generally the lowest levels of racism among the surveyed European countries.) Though all racism, and race talk, starts off as an elite discourse.

The fourth generator of racism has been ethnicised religion. The classic version of this being racialised Jew-hatred.

None of these factors are sufficient in themselves to generate racism. The Romans were mass-enslaving imperialists who settled new areas and tended to dislike Jews. Racism was not a feature of their culture.

For the Romans were not a xenophobic culture regarding descent. Folk of any origin could become Roman citizens, including ex-slaves. Their slaves could be of any origin. Their society and their thought did not structurally differentiate by continental origin.

Moreover, Romans traditionally were not moral universalists. So, they did not have to generate some generalised story about why some folk were slaves. Slaves were simply losers and if they were freed, and became Roman citizens, then they became winners. Folk would put that they were freedmen (i.e., ex-slaves) on their tombstones, as that showed how much of a winner they had become.

Islam and racism

The first significant discourse grading people as cognitively deficient, based on physical markers of continental origin, came out of Islam. Islam being an imperial, evangelising monotheist (so morally universalist) religious civilisation that systematically enslaved people to their north (including Europeans, notably Slavs) and people to their south (Sub-Saharan Africans).

Folk of such origins were repeatedly characterised by Islamic writers as being cognitively deficient. Often either due to too little sun (Northern Europeans) or too much sun (Sub-Saharan Africans). So, in Chapter Three of his Tabaqāt al-ʼUmam (Categories of Nations), geographer Sa’id al-Andalusi (1029–1070) wrote:

The rest of this category, which showed no interest in science, resembles animals more than human beings. Those among them who live in the extreme North, between the last of the seven regions and the end of the populated world to the north, suffered from being too far from the sun; their air is cold and their skies are cloudy. As a result, their temperament is cool and their behaviour is rude. Consequently, their bodies become enormous, their colour turned white, and their hair drooped down. They have lost keenness of understanding and sharpness of perception. They were overcome by ignorance, and laziness, and infested by fatigue and stupidity. Such are the Slavonians, Bulgarians and neighbouring peoples.

(The English word slave likely derives from Slav.)

The patterns of castrating male slaves, and of incorporating the children of Muslim fathers into the umma, the Muslim community, meant that centuries of mass slavery failed to generate an ex-slave underclass within Islamic lands. But there are still linguistic traces of these centuries of mass slaving: abd in Arabic can both refer to slave (as in Abdullah, slave of Allah) and to Sub-Saharan African.

Christianity and racism

The Americas were subject to imperialism and mass settlement from Christian Europe. Added to this imperialism and settlement, millions of slaves were imported from Africa. This made continental origins socially salient in the Americas and did so from within a morally universalising religious perspective Christianity). This was a situation made for racism to develop. Which it duly did.

Hence the confused interaction between Christianity and racism. On one hand, the Gospel of Love applies to everyone. Indeed, from the earliest days of Christian European settlement of the Americas, there were devout Christians who spoke and agitated on behalf of the moral status of the inhabitants of the Americas as children of God.

An early, and important, manifestation of this was the 1537 Papal Encyclical Sublimus Dei declaring that the inhabitants of the discovered lands, even if they did not know Christ, were children of God with natural rights and could not be enslaved. In the words of Pope Paul III:

… the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

This did not bar owning slaves someone else had enslaved. As African rulers were more than happy to take care of that stage of the process, Sublimus Dei had little effect on the Atlantic slave trade. 

The moral claims and reasoning of the Papal Encyclical were, however, in rather direct contrast with Sharia, which is entirely fine with enslaving non-Muslims who have not submitted to rule by Sharia (i.e. by Muslims), including sexually exploiting captured women. The last being endorsed no less than 15 times in the Quran and by the example (sira) and the acts and sayings (hadith) of the Prophet. A principle of Sharia is that the marriage of any woman captured by a Muslim man is automatically annulled by the act of capture.

The Anglosphere abolitionist movement in the C18th and C19th had strong Christian roots. As did the US civil rights movement of the mid C20th.

On the other hand, Christianity is a morally universalist religion. Like Islam, it required some justifying story about why you were systematically enslaving the children of God from Africa. It required some justifying story about why you were dispossessing the children of God in the Americas. 

Christian moral universalism later also required some justifying story why you were systematically denying the descendants of slaves political and other civil rights. These were never going to be good stories about the dispossessed, the enslaved, and the excluded. There were plenty of people who were racist, not despite being Christian, but because they were Christian.

Enlightenment thought, which was also morally universalising, had much the same confused interaction with race and racism as Christianity. On one hand, the scientific impulse to categorise could be, and was, mobilised to propagate racist ideas. On the other hand, seeing the world as a shared globe inhabited by a single human species, along with a sense of expanding human capacities, made slavery morally problematic on a scale never seen before. Hence the rise of the abolitionist movements.

As for the settlement effect, so long as the Amerindians were being dispossessed (and feared) by the settlers from Europe, the structural reasons to be racist against them remained strong. After they were subjugated and shoved into reserves, the underlying structural motives to be racist against them lost strength. The effortless virtue, and pleasures of contempt, that bigotry provides may linger, but the general social retreat from, and anathematising, of racism has further weakened what was already a form of racism in structural retreat. As the eminent political career of Herbert Hoover’s Amerindian Vice President, Charles Curtis, demonstrated.

The intensities of slavery

Slavery and its aftermath proved to be a different matter to self-justifying antipathy to Amerindians, who always had a certain warrior vigour going for them. As sociologist Orlando Paterson has brilliantly analysed, slavery does much more then reduce people to property, it imposes on the slave a form of social death. They have no social standing, no family standing nor heritage to be acknowledged. Slavery is profoundly stigmatising and dishonouring, as it deprives the slave of the capacity to have honour or any status that casts doubt on being a slave.

The slave States of the US operated one of the most closed slave systems in history. It became legally hard to manumit a slave and the stigmatising dishonour of slavery was not excised by freedom. A process of stigmatisation greatly helped by the slaves being of a different continental origin than the settlers. The generalised theories that justified slavery could not allow space for some moral transformation from not being a slave anymore.

Roman slavery, not having that justificatory burden, and not being divided by continental ancestry, was far more open. Hence ex-slaves could become citizens and would even boast of how far they had come from their former slave status.

In much of the Americas, an intermediary mulatto or mixed race (i.e. mixed continental origins) identity grew up. Such folk served useful intermediary roles between a small settler elite and large slave or indigenous population. This did not happen in the slave South of the US, as the political importance of voting, and the scale of European settlement, worked against a mixed-race identity emerging.

There was no particularly useful social role that a mixed-race group could fulfil that was not already being filled by folk of European ancestry. Moreover, if ex-slaves and their descendants began voting in any numbers, they could begin to wield political power. Which was both politically threatening and an affront to the justifications for slavery. The result was the “one-drop” rule, whereby any African ancestry identified your slave origins, with all the associated stigmas and exclusions.

These structures served the divide-and-dominate politics of the plantation elite. Before the Civil War, the plantation elite used a range of mechanisms to repress poor “whites”, the masterless men, who had no stake in the slave system but who traded and socialised with the slaves. After the Civil War, and the failure of Reconstruction, the plantation elite used the same range of mechanisms to repress the ex-slaves and their descendants. They simply racialised the operation of exactly the same repressive mechanisms that had operated against the masterless men before the Civil War into what became known as Jim Crow. The former masterless men were now on the “right” side of the exclusions, and were thereby incorporated into the Southern system.

As African-Americans migrated to the industrialising cities, a version of such divide-and-dominate strategies turned out to be congenial to, and adaptable by, urban elites. Public policy was wielded to generate increasing residential segregation, as such segregation makes divide-and-dominate tactics far more effective.

A note in Richard Rothstein’s revelatory The Color of Law, sets out the path of residential segregation. Residential segregation that was driven by public policy. Including intensifying under FDR’s New Deal. In the ten largest US cities:

…in 1880, the neighborhood (block) on which the typical African-American lived was only 15 percent black; by 1910 it was 30 percent, and by 1930, even after the Great Migration, it was still only about 60 percent black. By 1940 the local neighborhood where the typical African-American lived was 75 percent black.

At all stages, such divide-and-dominate politics only worked because people bought into the political framings and discourses that legitimated them. Far more of our thinking and decision-making is unconscious than we realise. Social selection processes work on information and feedback: but not necessarily fully conscious, or sufficiently critically examined, information and feedback.

Weakening racism

The experience of the Second World War, both the mass mobilisation for a common purpose and the horrors of Nazi imperialism and racism, as well as the pressures of the Cold War, increased, both domestically and internationally, the embarrassment that American racism generated. At the same time, the continuing fail in transport and communication costs made it easier for marginal groups to organise, as did increased urbanisation and suburbanisation.

So, the structural supports for divide-and-dominate racism weakened. The civil rights movement, and particularly Martin Luther King, brilliantly played up the moral embarrassment of racial exclusion. Both the Christian moral embarrassment and the American-ideals moral embarrassment. With mass communications making it easier to reach people for persuasive effect.

Hence the successes of the civil rights movement and the retreat of racism from being pervasive within American society to being a moral shame. Though, as Glenn Loury makes clear in The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, complex patterns of stigma have been rather more stubbornly persistent.

From this history, we can see that structural racism (or analogues such as systemic racism) is generally not a useful term. For it has been far more the case that structures generate and mobilise racism than that racism generates structures. Nor are such structures a necessary part of the social system. They are more about bending the social system in a particular direction.

After the civil rights movement

Which brings us to the graph at the top of this post and its odd pattern whereby “white” (i.e. Euro-American) Democrats were very much more likely to say that they knew someone who was racist in 2015 than in 2006, but “black” (African-American) and Hispanic Democrats were apparently somewhat less likely to say they knew someone who was racist in 2015 than in 2006.

If someone knows more people they regard as racist than someone else, that can be because (1) they are more likely to meet racists; (2) they are better at identifying racism; (3) they are more expansive in their characterising of racism; or (4) some combination thereof.

So, taking the 2006 results in the graph above, it could be that Euro-American Democrats were more likely to meet racists than Hispanic Democrats or Euro-American Republicans. Or that they are better at identifying them than Hispanic Democrats and Euro-American Republicans. Or that they have a more expansive definition of racism than do Hispanic Democrats and Euro-American Republicans. Or some combination of the above.

If we move to the 2015 results, Euro-American Democrats were far more likely to believe they knew a racist than were African-American Democrats, Hispanic Democrats or Euro-American Republicans. They were also the only group who increased their likelihood of knowing a racist since 2006, and did so dramatically. By contrast, both African-American Democrats and Hispanic Democrats became, if anything, less likely to believe they knew a racist. (The shifts were not statistically significant but do accord with long term patterns of declining racism.)

The most plausible read of this data is that racism has declined somewhat in the US (in accordance with long-term trends) but Euro-American Democrats have acquired dramatically more expansive definition(s) of racism. (Unless they are registering dramatically increased anti-white racism — we can reasonably give that low probability.)

So, by 2015, Euro-American Democrats apparently lived in a US of significantly more racists among the people they interacted with, while African-American Democrats and Hispanic Democrats did not.

If fluctuations in racism are largely driven by changes in structural factors, as history strongly suggests, that suggests a change in structural factors that is particularly affecting Euro-American Democrats, but not other folk. Something that is making race much more salient to them.

An obvious factor is the massive increase, since around 2010, in the use of racial terms by US elite media. As Democrats have far more confidence in elite media than do Republicans (a long-term tendency that increased dramatically from 2015), the dramatic upsurge in the media’s use of racial terms could be accounting for much of the “more people know a racist” effect.

Especially as there clearly has been an expansion of what counts, within elite race talk, as racism. Partly because our concept of a phenomena tends to expand as the prevalence of that phenomena shrinks. There has been, for example, a creeping expansion of what is labelled as harm in Psychology. But there has also been an expansion of the concept of racism due to the expanding influence of intersectionality and critical race theory. Especially in the education of increasing numbers of younger journalists.

Is there a structural reason for this increased focus on race? One is fairly obvious: the value of anti-racism as a status play. The more intense one’s opposition to racism, the greater the moral prestige in being ostentatiously anti-racist and, conversely, the greater the moral shame from failing to appropriately oppose racism. So, a status-play purity spiral gets set up. One that can be used to lever folk out of jobs. The bottom-up (but still elite) prestige play then becomes a dominance play. In a situation of elite over-production, such status-plays are a very useful weapon in struggles over opportunities and resources.

Ostentatious anti-racism can make one reluctant to admit that racism has declined or to give credence to other factors in explaining social dynamics. One becomes invested in continuing to ascribe social meanings to race. The surge in hate crime hoaxes fits in with this.

Function does not require intent

Unconscious psychological processes outstrip conscious reasoning, both in time and in scope, which makes many psychological phenomena possible… 

Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerolology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, p.163.

The other reason for increased focus on race is less obvious, but has a longer historical pedigree. Overt racism might have become embarrassing, but the advantages to urban elites of divide-and-dominate politics has never gone away, so social selection pressures will continue to favour such politics. The more divided residents, workers and citizens are on racial grounds, the less elites have to deal with competing (against them) claims on resources. Symbolic race-identity politics are way cheaper for elites than politics that delivers good government. That is as true today in urban US as it was in the Antebellum or Jim Crow South. Hence racially-divided US cities are (by developed democracy standards) comparatively ill-governed, just as the Antebellum and Jim Crow South were in their time.

If anti-racism can be turned into a racialised divide-and-dominate strategy, as clearly it can, then all the better for opportunity-hoarding elites. Especially for elites facing intensified internal competition for resources and opportunities.

Intersectionality and critical race theory are very much elite products, coming out of places such as Harvard Law School. Nor do they have to be originally developed as divide-and-dominate mechanisms for social selection pressures to adapt them into divide-and-dominate mechanisms.

Moral concern easily becomes status plays. Status plays are naturally divisive. Moral dominion easily becomes social dominion. Such feedback loops provide much for social selection processes to work on.

Such outlooks and patterns of action do not have appear to their active proponents to be divide-and-dominate politics in order to function as such. Remembering that such framings and discourses work much better if folk can be convinced to go along with them, while social selection processes do not have to be entirely conscious. Especially as the prime mechanisms for self-deception are by manipulating salience. Particularly moral salience.

One cannot force oneself to believe what one doesn’t believe. We can, however, use focus on, for example, image-self-protection, to block paying attention to awkward facts or considerations. This is especially easy to do with highly moralised concerns and self-images. Both because of their emotional power and because it is inherent in moral claims that they be normative trumps. That one has an ostentatious image of oneself as being not-oppressive does not guarantee that one is not buying into politics that are, in fact, oppressive or self-serving.

Coverage by elite media of deaths in police custody, or at the hands of police, is particularly revealing. There is a general problem of police training and accountability in the US. One that varies far more by jurisdiction than it does by race (whether of police or civilian protagonist). If media had reported these things accurately, then a broad coalition could have been built up to improve police training and accountability.

Instead, by intensely and selectively racialising their coverage, the “racist cops” narrative was firmly established by elite media. Turning this into a specifically African-American-and-police problem rather than a general accountability-to-the-citizenry problem and allowing those propagating, and those accepting, the narrative to thereby parade their ostentatious anti-racism. A way easier, and more immediate, social and cognitive reward than doing the hard work of increasing police training and accountability. Hence “defund the police”: a simplistic but convenient symbolic politics that was way easier to pander to than improved police training and accountability.

Revitalising divide-and-dominate

Even better, one of the key mechanisms for divide-and-dominate has been to fail to provide effective policing in African-American urban communities (as measured by homicide clearance rates), thereby generating much higher homicide rates in those communities. (In rural US, Euro-Americans and African-Americans have identical homicide rates.) These differential levels of violence do more to racially divide US cities than any other factor.

The “racist cops” media narrative, and activism, so congenial to moralised self-image, and their associated status plays, has increased the level of violence in those localities and so increased the most racially divisive element in US cities. If one was seeking to revitalise divide-and-dominate politics, it would be hard to do better.

A recent study found that the more educated you were, the more politically progressive you were, and the more you trusted the media, the less well informed you were on police shootings. (But the more conveniently you believed, as far as divide-and-dominate politics went.)

Social intent does not entail social function. Social function does not entail social intent.

Elite race talk is always a divide-and-dominate mechanism. Elite race talk has, historically, been racist. Indeed, racist discourses have always started off as elite theories. But anti-racist race talk works just as well as a divide-and-dominate mechanism, provided one continues to ascribe social meanings to race and do so in pejorative ways. Which, of course, is what all the talk about whiteness, white supremacy, white racism, etc. does.

It is still a case of structures generating the assigning of divisive social meanings to race, far more than the reverse, seeking to bend the social system to their benefit. Even doing so within ostentatiously anti-racist rhetoric and moral framings.

What is that French saying? plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing …

(An earlier version was posted on Medium.)

India v Pakistan v Bangladesh

India is an extremely genetically diverse nation, with considerable cultural, religious and linguistic diversity. So, what are the common features of India?  English, common law and parliamentary democracy: all legacies of British rule.

Pakistan is a nation with considerable cultural and linguistic diversity. So, what are the common features of Pakistan? Islam, English, common law (being nibbled away by Sharia) and (on a it-comes-and-goes basis) parliamentary democracy. The Middle Eastern Islam (pdf) of Pakistan is eating away at its other institutional commonalities.

Bangladesh ('the country of Bengal') is a country with very little cultural or linguistic diversity. For it, Islam, English, common law and parliamentary democracy are part of a dominant ethno-nationalist identity. It seems to be doing somewhat better than Pakistan, but not as well as India, suggesting that the ethno-nationalist identity is somewhat ameliorating the negative effects of Islam. 

The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise

I cannot recall reading a work of historical scholarship clearly written out of sheer irritation until I read The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain by Spanish-American historian Dario Fernandez-Morera.

Fernandez-Morera is clearly irritated and annoyed by recurring failures of Anglophone scholars to acquaint themselves with Spanish and French language scholarship on medieval Spain when writing about medieval Spain. He is clearly irritated by the failure of many such scholars to use the available Muslim and Christian sources; by their preciousness about using the word Spain (which, as he points out, many Muslim writers happily used); by their presenting medieval (particularly Muslim-ruled) Spain as some sort of golden age of multicultural co-existence; he is irritated by the notion that the invasion by Arab-led mainly Berber armies somehow raised the cultural level of Visigothic Spain; he is irritated by the dismissive treatment of Christian resistance to Muslim rule; he is irritated by the positive, even glowing, treatment of Muslim conquest and rule.

One way to tell he is so irritated--apart from simply reading the text--is his habit of starting chapters with quotes from noted scholars which the chapter then presents evidence clearly contradicting. There is no doubt about who his scholarly jeremiad is aimed at: he tells you in general in his Introduction and then by quoting from specific scholars at the start of chapters. No strawpersons allowed; they are hardly necessary, when so many large targets present themselves so clearly.

The irritation clearly helped motivate writing the book, and it does add a certain spice or zest to the reading, but it in no way detracts from the scholarly value of the book, which is very extensively footnoted--reading the footnotes is an education in itself--and filled with quotes from Christian, Muslim and Jewish sources. (The book is a particularly informative entree into the Jewish communities of medieval Spain.) He may push some arguments a bit far, as this sympathetic reviewer suggests, but effective rebuttals would have to be at least as well supported in the evidence.

Fernandez-Morera is also quite cutting about some obvious, and persistent hypocrisies--such as turning the Christian calendar into "Common Era" but being very respectful of the (equally religious) Muslim calendar. Or being dismissive of wider Christian connections but respectful of Islamic ones.

Really, it was jihad
It is startling to read claims by contemporary scholars stating or implying that jihad was not a significant motivating factor in the original Muslim conquest of most of the Iberian peninsula by Arab-Berber armies. Fernandez-Morera points out that the nice, sanitised, "inner struggle" contemporary Western construing of jihad is not actually supported by the Muslim or Christian chronicles. He is not above a bit of pointed irony in doing so:

Now, it is certainly possible that, for centuries, the medieval Muslim scholars who interpreted the sacred Islamic texts, as well as Muslim military leaders (including perhaps Muhammad himself when he led his armies into battle against infidels unwilling to submit), misunderstood (unlike today's experts in Islamic studies) the primarily peaceful and "defensive" meaning of "jihad" and that, as a result of this mistake, Muslim armies erroneously went and, always defensively, conquered half the known world. (Chapter 1)

Moreover, when the texts of the Maliki school of Islamic fiqh (jurisprudence) which dominated in al-Andalus are consulted:

... they talk of war against infidels--a Sacred Combat, or Holy War, or Holy Struggle or whatever other name one may choose to give this religiously mandated war against infidels. ... Thus what many Islamic studies academics call today "little jihad," as opposed to "greater jihad" (the "spiritual" one), turns out to be the only jihad examined in Maliki religious treatises and actually practised in Islamic Spain. (Chapter 1)

I started reading The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise while I was finishing Perfect Soldiers, veteran journalist Terry McDermott's book about the 9/11 hijackers. It was striking, even startling, to come across the same rhetoric from Islamic sources across a gap of over 1300 years; one contemporary, the other from early periods of Islamic conquest. Notably:

This willingness to die is found, for example, in the words of the Islamic Caliphate's Arab commander Khalid Ibn Walid in 633, ordering the Persians to submit to Islam, or else: "Otherwise you are bound to meet a people who love death as much as you love life." (Chapter 1)

The same rhetoric can be heard in our times from Hamas, from Osama bin Laden, from the Fort Hood killer, from jihadis in the US, in France, in the UK.  All ultimately derived from the Quran, Sura 62:6.

Fernandez-Morera cites or quotes a series of Maliki and other medieval Islamic sources emphasising jihad as fighting the infidel who do not convert or submit, citing Medinan suras, noting that Bukhari's collection of hadith elevated such jihad to a key obligation on free Muslim males after believing in Allah and His Prophet.

Fernandez-Morera also notes some controversy about how late in Islam the notion of inner struggle jihad and defensive jihad may have arisen. In Destiny Disrupted, Tamin Ansary dates the promotion of "inner jihad" as the "greater jihad" to Sufis during the Abbasid period, (p.107) though, as he also points out, some Sufi orders effectively became warrior orders (p.167). (Moreover, the original connection to Muhammad is via a statement of one of his companions of doubtful authenticity and apparently fails to appear in any of the six authoritative collections of hadith.) Fernandez-Morera is quite right to insist that the notion of Crusade (a late, and terminating, development in Christianity which required Papal authorisation) is quite different from jihad (a universal obligation on free Muslim males operating from the origins of Islam).

The original Muslim invasions included tabi'un, in charge of establishing proper Islamic rule and the first mosques. As with the invasions of Sassanid Persia, it included burning of captured books of philosophy and logic. The evidence of the religious motives are extensive, including from archaeology:

Coins minted in North Africa shortly before the invasion of Spain call upon the protection of Allah for jihad. (Chapter 1). 

The notion of separate political and religious motives does not really apply, and the Islamic histories themselves are clear on the religious motives for conquest. Muslim chronicles mention the destruction of churches--usually in triumphal terms and often to celebrate their being turned into mosques (Chapter 1). Southern Spain has no churches built prior to the Catholic reconquest (Chapter 2).

Destructive conquest
The speed of the Islamic conquest (less than 10 years) was, as Fernandez-Morera points out, not that historically remarkable and was aided by deep divisions with the elite of the Visigothic kingdom. He uses the Arab conquest of Persia to illustrate the common patterns in both conquests at the opposite ends of the Mediterranean-Middle Eastern region. The willingness to offer protection for (humbling) submission as an alternative to war and death or enslavement was part of the conquest strategy. (The Mongols would later offer a very similar choice; most conquerors offer some version of it--with Islam, it is sanctified and incorporated as the default mode for dealing with non-believers.)

Without denying its weaknesses and oppression of Jews and heretics, Fernandez-Morera seeks to rehabilitate the Visigothic kingdom, arguing that the Islamic conquest saw the destruction of a nascent civilisation built on Roman, Germanic and Christian foundations. He notes that:

Spain was under Roman control and influence longer than any Western land outside of Italy and produced more Latin writers and emperors than any other Roman province. ... the Visigoths were the most Romanized of all the peoples took over the Latin Roman Empire ... (Chapter 2).

A civilisation that was legally innovative, included ruling queens and the establishment of which was much less disruptive than the subsequent Muslim conquest. Muslim sources refer to the wealth and splendour of the society they conquered (even if the major measure of the wealth was the acquired loot).

Fernandez-Morera points out how deeply implausible the notion is that an Arab-led army mainly of Berber nomads somehow raised the cultural level of a urban civilisation drawing on Roman and Classical heritage. Especially given that much of the cultural sophistication the Arab elite had acquired had come from their Iranian and Christian-Greek subjects. He is somewhat caustic on the notion that the Islamic world "preserved" the heritage of Greek thought, given that the Greek-Roman Empire never lost it and it was Islamic conquests and piracy that profoundly disrupted the previous connections across the Mediterranean (Chapter 2).

Being Romans
Fernandez-Morera shares my dislike of the "Byzantine" formulation for people who regarded themselves as Romans and were called such by their contemporaries:

... the term Byzantine Empire was invented in 1557 by the German scholar Hieronymous Wolf, who as a Protestant would not have been sympathetic to Eastern (or Orthodox) Christians. to indicate that these culturally Greek people of the Eastern Roman Empire were not Romans, and somehow not even Greek ...
Eighteenth century Enlightenment scholars such as Montesquieu, who despised Orthodox Christianity perhaps even more than Roman Catholicism, adopted the term, thereby emphasizing that these presumably retrograde Christian Greeks had nothing in common with those pagan Greeks admired by the Enlightenment. (Chapter 2).

About the other
One of Fernandez-Morera's continuing themes is how the juxtaposition of Muslims with Christians and Jews led to great concern (particularly among religious scholars, clerics, priests and rabbis) with not having defections among the faithful to the blandishments of other faiths. One of the strongest responses to living with other religious communities was to more strongly define what differentiated them.

In the case of the Jewish communities, that led to strong efforts against the non-rabbinical Karaites, who were pushed into marginal status. The rabbis clearly had an interest in encouraging hostility to those who denied their authority, but it is also clear that their success was partly based on their success in portraying the Karaites as being a path to defection from the Jewish community (Chapter 6).

But there were similar concerns, and analogous responses, within the Christian and Muslim communities. Except, of course, the Muslims were the ruling community, so Islamic law, administered by the ulama, the religious scholars, ruled all. The existence of significant Christian and Jewish communities tended to elevate the role of the ulama:

As several Spanish and French scholars have pointed out, in no other place within the Islamic empire was the influence of Islamic clerics on daily life as strong as in al-Anadalus. (Chapter 3)

Al-Andalus was dominated by the Maliki school of fiqh, which took decisions by early Rashidun caliphs as sources of law, particularly Umar. Including the Pact or Condition of Umar. Andalusian Maliki jurisprudence was intolerant of adherents of other Islamic schools of jurisprudence, let alone non-Muslims:

... the practice of Islam in Spain was much more rigorous than in the East. If anything, the presence of large Catholic populations to the north and in their midst, along with the conversion to Islam of many of their earlier inhabitants, seems to have exacerbated the Andalusian clerics' zeal in adhering to Maliki teachings. In other words, far from being conducive to tolerance, living close to Christians exacerbated Islamism in al-Andalus. (Chapter 3).

Andalusian Maliki fiqh forbade musical instruments and singing. The ban was less than entirely successful, but was a major impediment to the development of a musical culture. Strict purity concerns also got in the way of interactions as the founder of the school:

... forbade using the water left over by a Christian, or using for ablutions anything a Christian had touched, or eating food left over by a Christian. (Chapter 3)

These and other food purity rules meant that "breaking bread together" was not a practical option between a devout Muslim and a Christian. As I have noted before, it is not morality that buttresses the role of clerics as gatekeepers of righteousness, but moral taboos.

Just because three different religious communities lived in the same cities and under the same rulerships did not mean there was much in the way of mixing, beyond that useful for commerce. The public celebration of non-Muslim religious festivals was banned, for example. Living in different areas was a practical solution to the religious barriers to mixing:

... "fear of the "other" as a source of influence and possible conversion, the three religions' marked differences in worship and purification practices, and the religious laws' exclusionary dictates and warnings against socializing with other groups made living even in the same block difficult at best. (Chapter 3)

As the Reconquista proceeded, Muslim clerics issued fatwa calling on Muslims to leave Christian-ruled areas. The pressure on Christians in particular was such that the last Andalusian state, the Emirate of Granada, largely became a Christian-free state (Chapter 7). (Catholic Spain would, of course, eventually expel all its open Jews and Muslims.) The last Emir of Granada, in the treaty of surrender, insisted on a provision that no Jew would have authority over any Muslim or collect any taxes from them (Chapter 3). Fernandez-Morera notes that the Muwatta, a key source of Maliki fiqh in particular, says that:

Zakat is imposed on the Muslims to purify them and to be given back to the poor, whereas jizya is imposed on the people of the Book to humble them. (Chapter 1)

Yet there is this persistent myth of Andalusian convivencia.  Particularly under the Umayyad's, there was considerable repression internally and regular raids and attacks externally:

The celebrated Umayyads actually elevated religious and political persecutions, inquisitions, beheadings, impalings, and crucifixions to heights unequaled by any other set of rulers before or after in Spain. (Chapter 4)

Something Fernandez-Morera establishes from both Muslims and Catholic sources. The implications are not all that encouraging for simplistic multiculturalism:

... multicultural and pluralistic al-Andalus was plagued with religious, racial, political, and social conflicts, so that the most successful rulers must apply brutal and terrifying force to keep the place from disintegrating, as in fact it ultimately did. ....
In contrast, the relatively more ethnically and religiously unified Catholic kingdoms did not present the same problems for their rulers and therefore did not encourage the same drastic solutions. (Chapter 4).

And (to continue the story beyond where Fernandez-Morera takes it), having completed the Reconquista, the eventual response of the Catholic kingdoms of Spain and Portugal was to use forced conversions and expulsions to re-create such unity.

Status of women
It is no surprise that concern for clear differentiation between the faithful and other faiths fell particularly strongly on women. Indeed, the higher the status of the Muslim woman (status which derived from the key man in her life), the more strict the requirements of separating differentiation.

The cultural and other activities of Andalusian women cited by those keen on pushing the convivencia narrative were either slave girls (or, in the case of celebrated love poetry, largely about slave girls) or otherwise restricted to the private sphere. While, as one would expect in a polygynous society where stealing infidel women was sanctified, sexual slavery was rife. So rife, that (along with the aforementioned expulsions) there is very little Arab or Berber genetic imprint in the present-day Spanish population. Conversely, the situation of Catholic women in Catholic Spain was markedly better than that of even high status Muslim women in al-Andalus (Chapter 5).

Submission and domination
As for the dhimmi system for Christians and Jews, which is presented as enlightened toleration under the convivencia model:

The system of "protection" then, was in reality, a system of exploitation and subjugation. (Chapter 7).

With Muslim historians emphasising that the various conditions and requirements were structured to humiliate Jews and Christians. Nor can we look elsewhere for this alleged Andalusian tolerance:

There was no more a culture of tolerance in what remained of the Christian community in Islamic Spain than there was in the Muslim or Jewish communities (Chapter 7).

An issue which preceded the Muslim conquest. Upon the conversion of King Recared (r.588-601) to Catholicism (589), Visigothic law persecuted Arianism and Judaism, aiming for the extinction of both. In this it did not succeed, but it did alienate the Jewish community enough that the invading Muslims successfully used them as allies against the Christians. Fernandez-Morera notes various parallels in the exclusionary laws and rules of Christians, Muslims and Jews (Chapter 7).

Andalusian Muslim society was a stratified one:

Arabs were at the top of the social scale, with Berbers in the middle, followed by freed white Muslim slaves who had become mawali; the muladis, further divided into first-generation converts and the rest, occupied a lower echelon, above that of only dhimmis and slaves. (Chapter 7)

With the muladis being a recurring source of unrest and revolt.

Something which clearly particularly irritates Fernandez-Morera is how Islamic imperialism in Spain often gets remarkably favourable treatment by Anglophone scholars, while Catholic resistance is ignored or belittled. As he notes:

... the relative scholarly neglect of the Christian sources on the Islamic conquest as testimonies of the Christians' loss--a neglect of the vision de los vencides ("the views or testimonies of the defeated") not present, for example, in studies of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. (Chapter 7)

He continues:

The implication is clear: these people should be grateful to the tolerant Muslim authorities for so graciously allowing them to practice their religion. Never mind the lowly status Christian dhimmis and even muladis occupied in Muslim society; the harsh restrictions they lived under; the extortion and humiliation they suffered through their special "taxes" (the jizya); the destruction of their ancient churches ... or even harsher punishments Christians faced for violating Islamic laws. Those punishments included drastic measures such as ethnic cleansing ... The punishments also included, as we have seen repeatedly, executions of the most painful and public forms.
Such was the spirit of Islamic Spain's "convivencia", which Norman Roth hails as "one of the many things that made Spain great, and which the rest of Europe could have learned from it to its profit". (Chapter 7)

Fernandez-Morera brings the threads together in the Epilogue, including the central thesis of the book:

Few periods in history have been more misrepresented than that of Islamic Spain.

A misrepresentation that wildly over-praised Islamic tolerance and treats the achievements of Visigothic Spain, and subjugation of Christians and Jews, remarkably dismissively. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise is at once an informative corrective to much historical misrepresentation and a worrying documentation of scholarship going systematically wrong.

Motivated misrepresentation
In his Introduction, Fernandez-Morera wrestles with why this persistent scholarly mythologising has occurred. He raises various possibilities--including the significant flows of Muslim oil money into funding academic activity. With associated pressures:

Doubtlessly, professional self-preservation as well as political correctness and economics as well as political correctness and economics have affected academic research in certain fields of study in contrast to the fearlessness demonstrated by professors when unmasking horrors in such dangerous areas of investigation as Christian Europe (the burning of witches! colonialism!) and Catholic Spain (the ubiquitous Spanish Inquisition!). Islamic Spain is no exception to the rule. University presses do not want to get in trouble presenting an Islamic domination of even centuries ago as anything but a positive event, and academic specialists would rather not portray negatively a subject that constitutes their bread and butter. In addition, fear of the accusation of "Islamophobia" has paralyzed many academic researchers. (Introduction)

The farce over the Yale University Press published work on the Mohammad cartoons sans cartoons provides him with an excellent illustrative example. It is not surprising that the Introduction also includes a strong plea to focus on where the evidence leads us, while being aware of the context of what we use as evidence.

There is also, as Fernandez-Morera points out, something of a prejudice against religious motives as explanations:

Failing to take seriously the religious factor in Islamic conquests is characteristic of a certain type of materialist Western historiography which finds it uncomfortable to accept that war and the willingness to kill and die in its can be the result of someone's religious faith--an obstacle to understanding that may reflect the role played by religious faith in the lives of many academic historians. (Introduction)

And even more so in other humanities and social sciences.

There is, of course, something of a tradition in Anglophone writings to be down on Catholic Spain; a tradition kept alive, at least in the popular mind, by the tales of Gloriana and the Spanish Armada. After noting the "stakeholder" problem, Fernandez-Morera suggests that:

Or perhaps since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment the critical construction of a diverse, tolerant and happy Islamic Spain has been part of an effort to sell a particular cultural agenda (Introduction).

Perhaps indeed.  Moreover:

In the past few decades, this ideological mission has morphed into "presentism," an academically sponsored effort to narrate the past in terms of the present and thereby reinterpret to serve contemporary "multiculturalism," "diversity," and "peace" studies, which necessitates rejecting as retrograde, chauvinistic or, worse, "conservative" any view of the past that may conflict with the progressive agenda. (Introduction)

Something that the decreasing ideological diversity of the academy (particularly in the humanities) tends to aggravate.

Still, while scholars such as Fernandez-Morera are willing to take a well-wielded scholarly axe to pretentious pieties, there is hope.

Rating boomers

Notionally, baby-boomers are born between 1946 to 1964. Experentially, that is nonsense. If you entered the work force after the advent of mass unemployment, you are not a baby-boomer. At least, not in the full deal sense. Just as if the 1960s did not overlap with puberty, you are not a baby-boomer in the full-deal sense. 

The full-deal baby-boomers lived through the young family social focus 1950s as those young children society was focused on. They reached puberty in the 1960s to provide the numbers for the summer of love and the years after. They experienced a massive broadening of higher education and, if so inclined, could relatively easily aspire to jobs in academe. If not, entering the workforce was a pretty painless process. Long hair was fashionable when they were young, and shaved heads when they started balding. Comfortable retirement was almost a given expectation. The world arranged itself for their convenience more than any generation before and, in many ways, any cohort since.

These were not the experiences of those born later.

The New York Times has produced a "what type of boomer are you?" quiz. A related article points out the very different experiences of the two halves of the "baby boom". It is very US-focus, but it does point out how very different the collective experiences of the full and shadow baby-boomers were. 

A startling development

One of the things that has been strongly associated with the modern age is for increasing life expectancies.

So, it is startling to discover that life expectancies for low-educated whites in the US are declining.

It is apparently not clear why, but the effect is clear, particularly for low-educated white women:

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

I have always scoffed at suggestions about how "unhealthy" modern living was on the basis of increasing life expectancies.  Clearly, the story is now more complicated.

How Chiefs Came to Power (2)

This is the second part of my review of Timothy Earle’s How Chiefs Come to Power: the Political Economy in Prehistory. The first part is here.

Warrior worries
Having started, in Chapter Three, with Sources of Economic Power, Earle then moves to, in Chapter Four, to Military Power: The Strategic Use of Naked Force. Since coercion would seem to be the basic element in rulership, one would think that is where one would start but Earle is determined to have economic power to be causally primary. (Note, this is not to be confused with the reality that a controllable surplus in excess of subsistence is needed for rulership to be possible: my point is that force is likely to be basic to control of such a surplus – a property right you cannot enforce is not much of a right, let alone a basis for rule.)

Earle starts the chapter with:

The military is a segment, group, or institution of warriors or other fighting specialists. They conquer, defend, police and intimidate (p.105).

The term ‘military’ has organisational implications I am uncomfortable applying to such early forms of rulership. Earle sees military power as basic to creating regional chiefdoms by conquest of other rulers and notes the ‘protection racket’ analysis of the creation of stratified and centrally organised society.

An approach Earle regards as insufficient:

Inherently warfare is limited in its effectiveness as a power for central control. Although military force may created a broadly integrated polity, it can as well dissolve it by intrigue, coup and rebellion. The power of force rips at the social fabric, the institution of society. To be effective as a power of centrality, coercive force must itself be controlled, a difficult task that is achieved by binding the military with economic and ideological tethers (p.106).

Well, warriors have to be paid, there has to be some basis for loyalty and giving warriors a vested interested in social stability greatly encourages said stability. But, again, Earle seems to have underlying his analysis a view of “natural” social processes that is not well grounded in actual social processes: particularly not the dynamics of specialist warriors.

Earle then takes us through the scholarly debate over the role of coercion in the development of societies and rulership. Earle identifies the key question as:

whether the warfare of chiefdoms represented the political failure of chiefs to organize stable regional systems or a successful chiefly tool to construct such systems (p.109).

Or both? Depending on local dynamics.

The point Earle wishes to make is that:

Only with the evolution of complex chiefdoms does the nature of warfare change fundamentally. It then ceases to be an outcome of unregulated competition and become a means of conquest. … Conquest warfare seizes control over the subsistence base in an emergent system of stable finance (p.109).

Which seems to be a way of saying that chiefs need access to sufficient surplus, sufficient military force and sufficient control capacity to achieve substantial regional power. That stable power must be broadly based. For:

the problems faced by elites who depend on tribute; when payments are withheld, costly and unpredictable punitive missions must be carried out. But the warriors are always a threat, whose demands quickly turn to treachery (p.110) .

Earle just does not like military force, or the folk who use it.

Yet plenty of societies manage to evolve quite stable systems of warrior loyalty. To the extent that, in early Central Eurasian societies, a ruler’s warrior band was expected kill themselves on his death and be buried with him. Even when that level of loyalty was not required, the notion that you did not survive a battle where your lord was killed remained a powerful idea for centuries. Warrior honour was not some invented figment, it has been a real and powerful force down the ages. Why is a fascinating question.

All societies need ways to distinguish warriors from murderers. But a warrior who cannot be relied upon is neither of use to his (or sometimes her) comrades nor attractive to a possible lord. Warriors have powerful reasons to communicate that they are honourable and to shun or reject those who are not. The commitment not to survive one’s sworn lord communicated that reliability in a very compelling way. Again, the notion of beneficial exchange, let alone social signalling, seems to pass Earle by.

In his analysis of the Andean highlands, Earle concludes that warfare was endemic, and there was a persistent failure to consolidate regional chiefdoms, because chiefly power rested solely on military power: chiefs were not able to extend their bases of power into broader and more enduring structures (Pp 113ff). By contrast, the Inkas were able to organise their state for war and conquer the squabbling chiefdoms with greater military force (p.122).
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After characterising the world of the Icelandic sagas as one of chiefs and their families living in constant fear, Earle traces the development of association of male status with weapons in Danish burials. The low population, the lack of evidence for fortified settlements and the pattern of weapons and barrows suggests a warrior elite focused on control of cattle to sustain prestige goods trade based on control of the craftspeople who produced the bronze weapons that dominated warfare (Pp124ff). Earle concludes that:

Warfare alone is an unstable source of power except where the very technology of warfare can be controlled and its spoils can be invested effectively in expanding the political economy (p.131).

Or simply dominated. The knightly class of medieval Europe did not depend on the control of the crafters that produced their armour and weapons for their position. Rather, their position was based on a high level of training being required to use the technology to maximum effect and that the combination of weapons, armour, trained warhorse was expensive. That being so, purchasing their weapons and armour from free crafters worked fine.

Earle then returns to the Pacific to illustrate the example of Hawai’i as warfare being part of an integrated structure of control. The evolution of warfare amongst the Maori as population strained resources (particularly after the Moa were hunted to extinction, though that specific trigger is not mentioned) resulted in endemic warfare with highly fortified settlements (pa) which provided excellent defence given the available technology and greatly impeded building large chiefdoms (Pp132-3). Until, that is, until potatoes and European military technology were imported, followed by an attempt to create a unifying figure to protect Maori interests.

By contrast, despite the histories being full of chiefly warfare where defeated enemies were reduced to food and utensils, in Hawai’i there was little evidence of fortified settlement or warfare affecting the pattern of settlement at all. The military technology was fairly egalitarian, with the canoes used to ferry troops being the only element with any inherent tendency to elite control. Like the Maori, the Hawai’ian chiefs attempted to adopt European technology as soon as it was available. Dying in bed seems to have been a rare event for a Hawai’ian chief. Those who reached any age were often greatly scarred while maintaining the support of one’s warriors seem to have been a matter of constant wariness (Pp133ff).

Yet even exemplifying Earle’s analysis of the inherently unstable nature of military power, the Hawai’ian chiefdoms still managed to construct complex structures of rule that hovered on the edge of being states by the time the Europeans arrived.

The structure and objects of warfare differed in the three cases – land and defence of settlements in the Andes, control of cattle in Denmark, control of commoners and the system of staple finance in Hawai’i. Earle quotes Machiavelli who contrasts strong rulers who can put large, well-equipped forces in the field with weak rulers who rely on friends and high walls. Earle interprets this to mean that walls are a sign of weakness: surely, Machiavelli’s point is that relying on walls is a sign of weakness (Pp141-2). Even the strongest of agrarian empires built fortifications, since they can be so useful for dominating a region.

Idea power
Which brings the analysis to Chapter Five, Ideology as a Source of Power. Earle defines ‘ideology’ as:

the proportion of cultural meaning that is used strategically to institute political domination or resistance (p.143).

Ideologies are thus associated with particular social segments. Earle has already framed consideration of ideas and culture such that it has elements systematically politicised and patterned to particular social groups. Why would ideology exist like that and did it actually conform to social segments in that neat way?

Earle argues that to be used strategically, ideology:

must be made concrete in forms such as ceremonies, symbols and monuments (p.143)

Certainly such activities can express power and send messages. An ideology:

as a view of the world, set forth an understanding of what is right, what is natural. It contains theories of the world and the place of human society and its segments within it …
An ideology also sets up institutional patterns of knowledge and meaning on which patterns of control are logically constructed and legitimized (p.144).

Which seems to be a way of not quite saying that rulership requires legitimacy based on some implicit (or even explicit) social contract to have any stability and the more complete and broadly based that legitimacy is, the more stable it is likely to be. Except that ‘legitimacy’ has implications that do not seem to fit into Earle’s analysis.

We then get a survey of the literature on ideology leading to an extended analysis of ideology and on to consideration of the ‘materialization of ideology’. The key question being:

how an individual’s motivations and worldview can be controlled and directed to work to the interests of one segment and potentially against the individual’s own interests (p.152).

There is a ‘delusion/false consciousness’ dynamic underlying this analysis which I am very uncomfortable with. But that rather goes with the discounting of human rationality and beneficial exchange that pervades the analysis.

One of the blessings of Earle’s analysis is that, with occasional lapses such as ‘materialisation’, he generally expresses himself in clear language and makes points of great simple sense:

Monuments convey a simple message of power and wealth. This elemental message comes regardless of the viewer’s language, age, gender or cultural affiliation. (p.156).

Quite so. Earle goes on to intelligently consider the utility and role of monuments for expressing and buttressing power (Pp156ff).

He begins his discussion of ideology in Denmark by reference to sagas such as Beowulf that, though they date from much later, do express the outlooks of a warrior elite. He notes that:

Dishonor is worse than death because it means loss of respect and the support on which all warriors depend (p.159) .

Correct, but a view rather lacking in his earlier analysis of military power.

For Earle, ideology becomes a way of building and reinforcing chiefly power through routines of compliance – rituals, common building processes and so forth. Thus the Inka had much more extensively articulated routines of compliance, monuments and material provision than the Andean chiefdoms (Pp188-9). In the three case study studies, the Andean chiefdoms were not able to expand their warrior leadership into the routines and practises of the society while the Danish chiefs were somewhat more able to gain some supporting symbols with the advent of bronze weapons. It was only in Hawai’i where chiefs were able to dominate and control key productive capacities (the irrigation channels and associated land) and to weave routines of compliance with supporting claims of divine connections into a system of power which verged on becoming states (Pp190ff).

Framework uber alles
Hence Earle’s conclusion:

To build political institutions, chiefs shape their positions from three primary power media – economy, military and technology.

So:

The consolidation and institutionalization of power depends on the systematisation of power strategies. Power strategies are the means by which ruling segments combine the sources of social power to pursue their political goals (p.193, emphasis in original).

Thus:

In the cases considered, the primary determinant appears to have been the nature of the developing political economy. The operationalization of one power strategy versus another rested on the ability to intensify and control aspects of the political economy and to use the mobilized surplus to develop power sources. (p.194, emphasis in original).

The nature of the power strategies adopted then deeply influence future social evolution. The Andean chiefdoms were never able to extend beyond specific walled-villages, the Danish chiefdoms beyond specific herds, so chiefdoms remain limited in both resources and territorial coverage (Pp194ff).

The Hawai’ian chiefdoms did much better, turning control over highly productive irrigation facilities into extensive social dominance. A small change in technology (the Western introduction of cannons and guns) was sufficient to turn rule of individual islands into a multi-island state (Pp 200ff).

Well yes. States originally evolved in river valleys, for they had the population density and surplus to support social complex societies with extensive social control structures. Pastoralist states evolved later and did so where there was enough trade with farming communities to provide sufficient surplus to support a dominant ruling clan and enough effective military mobility (chariots, then cavalry) to consolidate control over a sizeable area. This seems to be a long journey to get to a very unsurprising conclusion.

But Earle does not consider such wider patterns. His case studies are not enough of a basis to examine the origins of state-formation.

What he wants to draw from his case studies is a general analytical framework. So he identifies ease of control and the ways it might be extended to be crucial variable characteristics of power so:

The first critical variable appears to be how power may be restricted to (and controlled by) a few hands (p.203, emphasis in original).

Such leads directly to:

Economic power is the most easily controlled. The essence of the economy is its material nature (p.203).

Really? When we look around human societies, which is more centrally controlled: the means of violence or the means of production and exchange? Clearly the means of violence is almost always more centralised than economic activity (and then leads into control of the same). Earle is correct when he notes that economic activity can grow but such growth is often contra-indicated by highly centralised control.

Farmers are more easily controlled than foragers or herders, but that is a feature of being a stationary form of production. Indeed, binding peasants to the land is a classic way of extracting a surplus. The extractable surplus gives on reason to bind them to land, but it does not give the power to do so. (All these points apply even more so to mines, which often used slave labour.)

Control begins with control of violence. The question becomes how much one can embed that control within the society to provide stable control of a sufficiently substantive extracted surplus. But that does not provide the right answer, because it does not start with a Marxian ‘material basis’. A friend recently cruelly observed to me that Marxist academics’ notion of research is to look for footnotes, as they start with the answers. Earle’ concluding few pages are where that element in How Chiefs Come to Power is most obvious. (Particularly when he goes on about the features of the material nature of the economy Pp203-4.)

Earle agrees that military power is the essence of coercion, but sees it as hard to control. Hence the importance of:

Ideological power is the essence of social law. People act in certain ways because it is proper and necessary (p.205).

Which leads to:

The second critical variable of power appears to be how the media power may be used to co-opt and control one another (p.203, emphasis in original).

Each media of power has limits to intensification, so it is their interaction and mutual support which gives the most powerful effect.

So, in the three examples, the Andeans were hill-fort chiefdoms, the Danish were prestige-goods chiefdoms but the Hawai’ian were staple-finance chiefdoms, so had the most complete level of control and came closest to developing full states (Pp209-10). Earle’s conclusion being:

the sources of power are effectively co-opted by using the surplus generated from intensified agriculture to finance control over warriors and police, craft specialists and managers, priests and ceremonies. But if the political economy cannot be centrally controlled, the various sources of power also are difficult to control, and multicentric societies develop (p.211).

Sort of: the way I would put it is that turning power into authority is a matter of resources, coercion and legitimacy. The more broadly authority is based on these things, and the more it is embedded in patterns of life, the greater and more stable such authority is. Stationary intensive agriculture is easier to control, and provides more resources, so is a far easier path to state-building.

Part of my problem with Earle’s approach is that I do not see ideology as a separate “thing” to be managed. It pervades a society and is built on such things as the need for meaning, the need for rules, the operation of property and exchange that pervade social existence long before chiefly authority. Yes of course these are things that power-seekers have to pay attention to and seek to mould and use for their benefit. But the process is interactive, with resource possibilities, and what patterns and institutions exist or can be developed, playing off each other. Earle misses out those deeper connections, so starts his analysis at too reified a level.

This is also true in his consideration of violence. Why bother fighting? This is a basic question. Hunting wrests subsistence violently from nature: it is deeply part of the origins of our species. Hunter-gatherers are, by far, the most violent mode of human existence. For millennia, warrior elites emphasized their hunting prowess as way to display their effectiveness, virtues and utility as violence users.

Farming and herding are distinctly less violent modes of human life for the simple reason that they represent repeated interactions between individuals, families and groups with vulnerable assets. Farming is less violent than herding, since one is more tied down and so more vulnerable. If you are going to examine the origins of basic human social forms, they need to be connected to the basic patterns and frameworks of life, something Earle is very erratic at doing.

Not that there is any mystery as to why: it comes from the Marxian framework he wishes to use and vindicate. The problem is not from having an analytical framework. Far from it, economic historians and lawyers are often advantaged in their use of evidence precisely they have an analytical framework: it forces a useful analytical discipline – provided one remains grounded in the actual evidence (which economists do not always manage to do but the better economic historians are generally very good at). But they are analytical frameworks built up by prolonged engagement with reality: they represent distilled engagement with evidence, not deduction from first principles.

Marxism suffers from not being a framework built up in such a way. Its basic contours are pre-determined and Earle’s analysis is just another example of the common flaw of Marxist analysis of reality being forced into maximum conformity with the framework. The Marxist framework often does prompt people to ask good questions. Alas, it does not encourage answers anywhere near as good. As Earle's How Chiefs Come to Power demonstrates.

How Chiefs Come to Power (1)

Timothy Earle’s How Chiefs Come to Power: the Political Economy in Prehistory is a study sufficiently well-grounded in archaeological and anthropological evidence that the well-presented facts rather escape from the theoretical framework Earle wants to fit them in.

I originally was alerted to Earle’s work via a harsh review archaeologist Michael E. Smith had posted on Yoram Barzel’s book on the theory of the state. I greatly admire Barzel’s book on property rights but had not read this later work, so I was intrigued by the response. Having read a selection of Prof. Smith’s publications and finding them informative, very accessibly written and analytically sensible, his strong endorsement of Earle’s book was encouraging. Particularly given he also admired a book I had read and thought excellent.

How Chiefs Come to Power Earle is attempting to answer a straightforward question:

What allows aspiring leaders to be successful in one situation but fail utterly in another? (p.2).

In other words, since aspiration to leadership and power are part of the human condition, why does rulership (in its first stage of chiefdom) occur in some places and not others?

Earle distinguishes between authority, “the right and responsibility to lead”, power, “measured by the mastery a leader exercises over others” and control, “the ability to restrict access to the resources which are the media from which power can be fashioned” (Pp3-4). As Earle accepts a Lockian-Marxian notion of property and value coming from labour, his thinking about control gets a bit confused: all property is based on control—an act of trade is an exchange of control. Things are clearer if it is grasped how basic to human society the notion of property—of legitimate control—is, something that grows up and extends (pdf) well before the development of authorising authorities. But that requires some notion of spontaneous order based on a strong notion of beneficial exchange. For it is not labour that distinguishes the productive power of homo sapiens from other primates—all animals engage in mere labour—it is the notion of property and thus the power of exchange: ideas having sex in Matt Ridley’s vivid metaphor. How our species' distinctive creation of niches through discovery and transmitted learning generates its productive power.

Earle identifies the sources of power as social relationships (particularly kinships), economic power (being able to buy compliance), military might (coercing compliance) and ideology (routines of compliance). He holds that kinship, military might and ideology are, on their own, all weak sources of power while economic power depends on military power to defend resources and ideology to institute rights of unequal access (Pp4ff). The discussion is punctuated with references to various Marxist positions on the broad issues. (An Israeli archaeologist once explained to me that archaeologists tend to adopt broadly Marxian positions as so much of what they study is the product of the generation of economic surpluses beyond subsistence.)

The problem with political power is that it:

… must be inherently problematic, as it is contingent on multiple factors that can be used against central authority as well as being used by it (p.10).

Yet the long-term trend of world history has been for central power to expand and the number of independent polities to shrink: from maybe 100,000 at the time of the Neolithic agricultural revolution to about 160 now, the largest covering over a billion people (p.10). Clearly, the integration of the sources of power has become more effective over time: a selection process in favour of more successful techniques.

Earle holds that:

… the different sources of power are fundamentally intertwined and interdependent, but that they grow from a material base (p13).

Very Marxian, but surely somewhat dubious: after all, how does one get that material base in the first place? That they have to be sustained by a material base is clear, but that is not quite the same.
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Earle takes the view that the process of creating and stabilising power is multi-linear: different techniques win the process of selection in different circumstances. The key variable to success or failure is the chief’s ability to control and extend access to the sources of power (Pp12ff).

A chiefdom being:

a regional polity with institutional governance and some social stratification organising a population of a few thousand to tens of thousand people (p.14).

Making them intermediates between village-based polities and large, bureaucratic states. Hierarchies are used for coordination, granting advantages resulting in social stratification: the use of monumental constructions and prestige goods being used by archaeologists to document their evolution. All of which makes them emergent polities. Earle holds they have fundamentally the same dynamics as states, so are a good basis for studying rulership more generally, including the basis of modern states (Pp14-5).

The book is based around three examples, each covering about a millennia: Neolithic and early Bronze Age Denmark (2300-1300BC); Hawai’i from settlement to incorporation in the modern world (800-1824); and high Andes Peru to the Inca conquest (500-1534). By interweaving the analysis of the three examples, and how specific (particularly economic) circumstances affect choices and outcomes, Earle seeks to reveal the dynamics of rulership (Pp15-6).

Having established the framing, Earle sets out the long-term dynamics of the chiefdoms of the three regions one after another (Pp17ff). The Andean case has some puzzling population surges: the first likely due to the introduction of new crops. The second occurred without any noticeable technological change and during a period of glacial advance: the production of extra warriors for defence during a period of increased warfare is Earle’s suggested explanation (Pp54-5).

Though the chosen examples display different pathways to complexity, Earle believes that the comparison is still analytically fruitful: such as the complex interaction with population pressures. Earle writes of the animal herding in the Denmark case study:

Animal herding lowers the carrying capacity of a region and makes no sense in the logic of a subsistence economy. Its increase most probably resulted from the use of animals as a source of moveable wealth within a prestige good exchange system (p.65).

Really? Power can consolidate itself by reducing the productiveness of its area? Whether looked at in terms of internal dynamics or competitive interaction with other cultures, this looks deeply implausible. Earle's claim about carrying capacity is true in some areas but highly misleading and does not sustain his conclusion. In some areas, such as river valleys and plains with particularly rich soils, farming is the more productive activity in the sense that it can support more people. In other areas, not so much. What herding typically does is produce more value for less effort. So animal herding can increase the resources available to a culture: otherwise it would not have evolved in so many different cultures and would not be persisted with. That herding societies – which certainly had chiefdoms, even states – were freer and richer than agrarian societies was a perennial observation of visitors from agrarian empires. It does require trade with farming cultures, and clearly access to prestige goods from trade can consolidate a ruler’s position, but it does so precisely by increasing the access to goods from choosing more productive activity. Earle could do with more confidence in human rationality and the implications of beneficial exchange.

What animal herding also provides is inheritable and expandable assets. There is the resource base for social differentiation – something herding societies tend to display. Earle then points to evidence that expanded agricultural activity (such as through irrigation works) in Hawai’i and Peru supported expanded surpluses rather than expanded populations, surpluses used for elite purposes (Pp64-6). So why wouldn’t animal herding also represent expanded capacity?

In examining the sources of economic power, Earle begins:

The development of political systems must be based on an ability to lead and to have others follow. Leaders who provide rewards are accepted, but those who fail to do so lose authority. Leadership is always problematic; it requires an individual, family, community, or nation to relinquish and transfer autonomy and transfer loyalties. No individual or group does this joyfully, for it means sacrificing personal or group interests to a different, larger, or distant body (p.67).

This seems to rather preclude that people may see political leadership as some sort of exchange beyond direct rewards. Unless there is some sense of “return” for accepting leadership, why would not revolt be a permanent (or at least a permanently incipient) thing? Do leaders not provide public goods, for example?

Earle says of economic control that:

Control over the economy is a direct and material control over the lives of people (p.67).

He then asks if such control is possible in a subsistence economy, exploring two lines of analysis: voluntarist, adaptionist theories seeing chiefdom as a form of solution to social problems or way of expanding social possibilities and coercive political theories arguing that autonomy is not give up except in the face of power. (Why the answer cannot be both escapes me: coercion as a way of delivering public goods.)

Earle argues that the model developed by Marx and Engels “may have general applicability to the emergency of social complexity” (p.70). Since it is based on a false theory of value, an incoherent theory of exploitation and has a truly terrible track record when operationalised as a political theory or economic management approach, I am more sceptical. Particularly as one starts off with two deep problems for analysis: first, not grasping that all exchange is about swapping control (i.e. property is prior) and, second, that exchange results in mutual improvement (i.e. gains from trade).

Earle differentiates staple finance (payments to rulership, either in kind, goods or labour service) and wealth finance (objects such as primitive valuables, prestige goods or money exchanged within the ruling elite). For the former, he sees land tenure as vital:

The critical factor appears to be how the development of technologically intensive farming provides the opportunity for control by ruling institutions through a land tenure system (p.71).

First, what about herding? Second, land is stationary, therefore farmers are more easily controlled whether they are direct owners of the land or not. (We come back to pastoralist societies being freer and wealthier than agrarian ones.)

That Earle may be going for rather too much analytical complexity here is indicated by his partly perceptive, partly way over-egged analysis that:

Technological improvements of the resource do two things. First, they radically differentiate land in terms of quality. … Second, improvements evidently delimit and mark the resource in ways that can be easily represented and recognized within the cultural landscape. Improvements such as walls, terraces, and ditches materialise the division of the landscape and form the basis of a cultural system of land ownership (Pp 71-2).

I get that academics often like talking about ideas (their expertise) and not the niceties of production and exchange (their distance from which often feeds into their sense of status), but really. Farming makes people much easier to control, the creation of a surplus-to-subsistence allows the support of an elite, expandable and inheritable productive assets promote social differentiation. Clearer and simpler, surely? What’s more, it is also usefully extendable, yet differentiable, to the herding case.

Trying to build irrigation into some generally important factor in the development of rulership – a continuing theme in Earle’s discussion: his original PhD thesis, a critique of the irrigation management thesis of Wittfogel and Service, analysis Hawai’i chiefdoms as using ownership of irrigation as a form of economic control and extraction – strikes me as dubious. Irrigation is surely much more likely to have its largest (and most common) effects in establishing patterns and structures of interactions between farmers. (One of Elinor Ostrom’s anecdotes in this presentation goes to that.) But, as previously noted, notions of spontaneous order do not appear to figure much in Earle’s mental landscape: he seems to lack the necessary building blocks of mutually beneficial cooperation as a pervasive feature of human economic interactions.

The sense of rather too much missing the basic point continues:

In chiefdoms, wealth is the means of symbolising relationships upon which social ranking rests. Since the social structure is the most important determinant of cultural, political and economic values, substantivist economists define the economy as “institute process” (Pp73-4).

Wealth is not a social ranker in itself? Nor a benefit in itself? Does not any signalling effect flow from that? And, if the social structure drives cultural, political and economic values, what creates and drives the social structure? Human action does not seem to be causally gradable in such a way.

So Earle’s contention that:

control over the ideology of social ranking rested on control over the system of wealth finance (p.74)

rests on the same dubious causal ranking. Building on his original dissertation, Earle argues that the use of control over irrigation by Hawai’ian chiefs fails to conform the “managerial” “solution to problems” hydraulic analysis of Wittfogel. The control by the chiefs was the dominant factor, with land use rights of commoners flowing from provision of corvee labour: so a widow could only retain land use if she remarried, transferring the rights to the new husband (Pp75ff).

The structure is not so different from medieval serfdom, where a warrior elite protected serfs in return for labour and inheritance generated an interest in long-term investment in making the lands more productive. Clearly, the elite control has to be accepted, but military power, protection and access to land provide a potent combination to ensure acceptance. I see no need to reify ideology in quite the way Earle does, but then I have no problem with property and exchange being endemic to human society.

If, however, you do not see property as endemic to human societies (particularly in farming societies), nor the control relationship as in any way protective, then the basic dynamics of power and property does become more a mystery to be explained. Hence Earle discusses the differences in dynamics between irrigation and dryland agriculture in Pacific islands, and particularly Hawai’i, making rather more of a meal of what seem to be the practical dynamics of control and extracting a surplus than seems necessary (Pp84ff). Particularly as intensive irrigation seems to have grown up in a period of intensive competition between chiefdoms – which is to say, one where the value of providing protection and extracting maximum value from the lands one does control was maximised, while the production possibilities of irrigation may have also encouraged conflict – more surpluses to seize.

That Earle rather doesn’t “get” the protective role is indicated by this following passage in his discussion of the emergence of chiefdoms in Denmark:

during this period permanent settlements were placed prominently on the highest ground. Why would these settlements have been built on these exposed hills, where the winds bite mercilessly? Perhaps their high visibility declared the territorial rights of the community over the lands upon which the settlements looked (p.100).

And perhaps tops of hills were easier to defend and made it easier to see enemies coming? That would be my vote, given it was the normal reason people set up their homes on tops of hills.

As herding developed, so did chiefly power. Earle does note that cattle are controllable assets that permit social differentiation. Though he seems not to understanding pastoralism very well:

Cattle … would have difficult to control unless their pasturelands were owned. The open pastures were naturally unbounded, and it must have been difficult to define their ownership and rights of use (p.101).

Pastoralist societies did not find it particularly so: with techniques such as branding, regulated use of common lands, the considerable memory capacity of pre-literate societies, they managed.

Earle then makes a meal of arguing that trading for metal goods would have consolidated chiefly power (Pp100ff): metal weapons would certainly have increased warrior power and the connection between cattle-owning chiefs and their warrior bands.

The ability to control economic resources and to extract a useable surplus does seem to have a great deal to do with the extent and permanence of chiefly power (p.104): but Earle makes reaching this unsurprising conclusion much more analytically inelegant than he needs to, not because the cases are complex, but because he too much wants to have social causality to be structured in a particular way and is too ready to overlook enduring basic patterns.


This review will be concluded in my next post.