GLBS1000
Introduction to Globalization Studies
Week One:
I’m fascinated by the tradition of oral histories. The passing down of sayings and stories across generations, cultures, languages, and written artifacts, especially when those stories articulate universal truths which hold just as true today as they did in ancient times. In particular where the oral traditions across Greek tragedy, Homeric tales and ancient mythology are often just as fresh and insightful today as they were thousands of years ago. Holcombe’s description of East Asian Chuanshuo mirrors these western euro-centric traditions in the sense of also being mythical and possibly untrue, but firmly rooted in the exclusive access of those performing specific rituals and divination, and in being able to commune with forces more powerful than ourselves.
One of the common threads across Homer, Chunashuo and recorded mythology is how they move language from oral to written history, how they transition from performed oratory to distributed transcription. The 1899 discovery by two Chinese scholars of archaic writing on old turtle shells being marketed as ‘dragon bones’ helps us connect the oral histories passed between generations to the rituals of divination performed by Shang Dynasty rulers, and to begin to make sense of this transition. How Chinese oracular rituals of foresight and prediction not unlike those performed at Delphi, drove such linguistic innovation, but were similarly reserved for those with means, especially the ruling aristocracy.
Whereas the Pythia at Delphi inhaled the fumes of ecological fissures to perform their divine rituals, Shang Kings sponsored oracle bone divination, which performed a similar outcome of asking the divine and receive guidance. Of getting answers to the unknown from the beyond. In Shang bone divination, Holcombe describes how ‘heat would be applied to the chest pieces of tortoise shells and other animal bones, causing them to crack, and the shape of the crack was interpreted as an answer from the spirits.’ But from these elemental cracks came early Chinese instances of mark making and writing, where the inscriptions produced by the ritual of heat and pressure became logographic and pictorial marks which could travel and impart insight beyond the oracle themselves, and where subsequently the answers from the divine came to be inscribed directly upon the bones.
So as written language concurrently evolved across such diverse and independent cultures as Egyptian, Mayan, Greek and East Asian civilizations, very often at the root of these written transcriptions are mediations with forces beyond ourselves, forces providing a guiding hand for what to do next, and perhaps more ominously, to whom. These elemental marks became early letterforms, which over time became alphabets, scripts and sophisticated means of communication.
But what unites these independent practices is divination through ritual, shared appetite for communing with the ancestors of the past and the truth of the future, and a desire to turn the mark into meaning. And just like today, to make sense of the world around us. So the question here is what was it that propelled these independent processes across the globe to develop such semi-simultaneous modes of written language? What was it about these similar modes of ritual which caused the expansion of scripts, phonetic mark making and broader communication when we assume these civilizations were too far apart? Is that a fair assumption or, as Holcombe suggests, was there a strong enough ‘common grammar of diplomatic conversations from China to Byzantium’ to have these practices inform each other?
For those interested in learning a bit more about oracle bones, and to see some examples, I found this great resource form the National Museum of Scotland, which has a collection of these: https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/stories/world-cultures/oracle-bones
Week Two:
What are the societal processes by which we make sense of chaos, organize the disorderly, and bring harmony to discord? Who decides what constitutes the virtuous, and by what right do they hold such authority? Holcombe motivates an argument proposing that the formative three centuries of East Asian culture, broadly between 500 BCE – 200 BCE enable us to connect three primary approaches which attempt to codify the virtuous and moral within warring Chinese culture and facilitate a translation to modern schools of ethics.
For Confucianism, of which much canonical documentation survives, a virtuous society is one which is led by those of moral example, and that the utilitarianist maximization of the good seeks to promote acts of propriety, flourishing and positive morality. That the key to a thriving society was the individual cultivation of a principled life, which in turn influences others and provides scale across communities. In this, Confucius advocates for the strong adherence to ritual, a focus on humanity, and filial piety, something we also seek today in the values of empathy, relatability, and humanity in our modern leaders. In this sense the original Confucian philosophy advocates for a desired and determined dutiful outcome of the promotion of the good, but essentially from one to many.
In contrast to the minimal state oversight of Confucianism and non-reduction to single rules, Legalism promotes what would become a more Kantian deontological approach of seeking to enforce codified written law and the empowerment of government to make decisions for the greater good and has clear connection to modern conservatism. In contrast to the individualism of Confucianism, Legalism seeks the universalizable, that which must apply broadly and to all, and where everyone could act on a single maxim to make a collective difference. It’s not hard to empathize with an approach which seeks to pull together the warring threads of a hundred schools of thought in a more discriminate manner.
In the center ground is Daoism, which advocates for more of a (non)consequentialist set of ethics and came to mean ‘the way’. Holcombe articulates many of the challenges in trying to pin down the ‘nebulous and varied’ considerations of Daoism, but ultimately connects it to the ‘simple, poetic and enigmatic in the extreme’ language of the Laozi. Unlike the human centered Confucianism or the societal Legalism, Daoism seeks broader, more cosmic ethical virtue, one where human concern is ultimately inconsequential. It provides a broader appreciation of nature and the natural world, discards human morality as artifice, and advocates for nonaction. All three remain highly contentious in modern politics, where inaction is scorned, human morality is paramount and contested, and the natural world is often that which is abused.
All of this is to say that the ethical and philosophical ideas around leadership, morality, virtue, governmental intervention, and the roles by which we enable others to determine the broader good remain as relevant and contentious as they did during the origins of East Asia. But the writings of Confucius, Shang Yang and Lao Tzu still hold many universalizable truths that often seem long forgotten. And with the world seemingly more fractured, polarized and disrupted, perhaps it’s time to remind ourselves of some of their learnings.
Week Three:
Traditional Daoist teaching places great emphasis on the matriarchal origins of the world. Of understanding and fostering respect for the mother and her offspring, but also of her mysterious and unknowable, distant depth. The cosmic origin born from nothing in the darkness. It speaks of the harmony of filial and parental virtue, the distaste of the victory and abiding by the rituals of mourning. Only briefly does the Lao Zi make specific comparative gendered reference to ‘understand(ing) the male but sustain(ing) the female’ but places it within the context of broader harmonious complementary pairings. Similarly with Confucian teaching, it’s remarkable how ungendered many of the Analects are, speaking more to a universal set of virtues as opposed to the highly gendered Christian virtues of Father and Son.
Both Cho’s reading on the development of female Korean Buddhist practice and DeVido’s text on the evolution of Taiwanese Buddhist nun culture provide fascinating insight into the more practical, tactical, and highly gendered practices which are very different in lived experience from the original teachings of Confucius or the metaphysical teachings of the Lao Zi. And in many ways, despite gendered suppression of female spiritual vocation as Buddhist practice spread beyond China and Japan, Korean and Taiwanese nuns were essential to the faith’s survival, eventual flourishing, and more widespread adoption.
Female ordinance was often challenging, and those seeking to become nuns were often viewed as having ulterior motives arising from widowhood, lack of economic or familial means, gender discrimination, or simply having no other choice. Cho motivates an argument that Confucian historians were less than generous towards Korean women during the Chosŏn Dynasty, arguing that female Buddhists were ‘frequently depicted as tainted and potentially tainting because of their Buddhist faith and their status as women, so frequently the accusations naturally implied and linked them with sexual impropriety’. Yet the diligent, persistent work of female Buddhists, irrespective of ordinance, ensured continuity of ritual and education, as well as stability, especially during the uncertainty of The Colonial Period.
So, there’s a delta between the lightly gendered teachings, and the highly gendered lived experience of ordinance and recognized, clergical vocation. If harmony, equality and the complementary aspirations of Daoist and Buddhist faith are paramount, why then, as the faith began to travel beyond China and Japan, did it become more gendered? As a means of control? As something simply reflective of the more broadly gendered roles of the era? And how do these behaviors show up in other faiths?
Christian, specifically Catholic Christian ordinance is highly gendered, with only about 200 ordained Catholic female priests in the world, most of them in America. This is a great recent article on females who hear the call of the priesthood but also feel the suppression of The Vatican, and has many echoes of both Cho and DeVido’s papers. Much of this is centered around the priesthood needing to reflect and represent the image of the Son of God. There is no ‘daughter of God’ in Christian faith, but as congregations dwindle, especially fueled by the impact of a global pandemic, it may be worth taking note of the historical existential work performed by the female Buddhist nuns of Korea and Taiwan and embracing their critical work of survival and flourishing which came from East Asian mixed-sangha communities.
Week Four:
Tales of monsters from the depths of the oceans, of giant creatures devouring ships whole, mermaids, many-headed leviathans and the horrors of the sea are common folklore across cultures, histories, and the literature of myth. Rarely proven true or debunked in favor of naturally occurring phenomenon and the humors of the ocean, such creatures have long held a place in our littoral imaginations that have sustained for thousands of years. But when the fantastic becomes the real, when the truly incredible manifests itself, we assign these moments on the crashing waves of history a special significance.
Chinese explorer Zheng He’s delivery of an African giraffe to the court of Nanjing in 1414 is one such astonishing moment. The giraffe had been acquired in Bengal from Saifu’d-Din, by the ruler of Malindi, where in turn it had likely been imported from the Kenyan coast and was probably one of the most traveled animals in the world in the early 15th century. Sheriff provides a colorful commentary on what the arrival of the giraffe must have been like for the Chinese nobles, describing how ‘the emperor's philosophers identified it as the fabled k'i-lin or unicorn, an animal associated with an age of exceptional peace and prosperity. It was taken as a sign of Heaven's favor and proof of the virtue of the emperor’. And far from the connection of the fear of foreign animals, monsters, and the terrors of the sea, was embraced as ‘the emblem of Perfect Virtue, Perfect Government, and Perfect Harmony in the Empire and in the Universe' for the Chinese in the Far East.’
When we think of the vast, diverse, and vibrant trade routes of the Indian Ocean in the 15th century, it’s easy to assume that these were often merchants doing ordinary things such as making pedestrian trips up and down the coast to trade spices, rice, or millet. But they were also performing remarkable feats such as successfully transporting a live giraffe over 6,000 miles from Southern India to Central Eastern China (the giraffe itself had traveled over 13,000 miles in total from its original point of departure in Kenya), and the logistical complexity of being able to do so must have been immense. It’s unfathomable how extraordinary it must have been to see such an animal from another continent for the first time.
But rather than be fearful of the unknown, it’s fascinating how the ruling class positioned the giraffe not as an African curiosity, but as a mythical personification of virtue, and divine sign of favor towards the emperor himself. That Heaven had seen fit to bless the emperor with such an incredible divine sign of perfection, serving to reinforce the exceptional harmony (whether real or imagined) for the Chinese people. Essentially Zheng He’s giraffe becomes politicized upon arrival in Nanjing and aligned with the means and communication of divine societal power. The uncanny discoveries of maritime adventure put to work in service of the political efforts back home.
Week Five:
Over a million Americans have died as a consequence of the current global pandemic, and over 6.5 million worldwide. The impact to society, economy, infrastructure, and the interdependent functioning of the world has been enormous and will be inter-generational. But it’s unfathomable to try and place this in context of the bubonic plague’s impact in the mid fourteenth century, where it killed a third of Europeans, and halved the population in China to 65 million. That’s a staggeringly devastating scale ten times the global size of the current pandemic, and isolated to a single country.
Campbell motivates the connection between the seismic upheavals brought by the Black Death and the resultant systems of servile labor developed in the Indian Ocean. Destitute and desperate, Chinese parents sold daughters to those who could feed and clothe them, and adoption was common as a last resort to ensure survival. What’s striking here is that such debt bondage, while leaving the individual little alternative, was voluntary as a means of economic survival for a family, and indiscriminate in who participated. Broad and diverse slices of the impacted populations across East Asia, as Campbell argues ‘entered debt bondage or slavery in return for subsistence as a survival strategy’. The cost of food, clothing and lodging was tied to paying off interest on loans to which the debtors had contracted into servitude. As Campbell describes, such debts could become permanent, and even inter-generational, at which point there is little material distinction between debt bondage and slavery.
As the politics of climate, energy and health accelerate in the modern era, there are obvious parallels to what has gone before in terms of risk and consequence. The debts owed by those impacted by natural disasters or those countries simply unable to cope with the rapid spread of contagion don’t just have immediate human cost, but longer term economic and political implications of cultural debt bondage. And while charitable efforts aspire to help, it’s hard not to paint a bleak picture about the long-term economic means of repaying foreign credit.
If we lean on the Chinese impact of the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century to motivate speculation around parallel potential impact in a modern American context, it’s the same consequence as if the pandemic had halved the American population from 330 million to 165 million, an impact over sixteen thousand times worse than COVID-19. Every other person in the country would perish, and those fortunate to remain left devastated and destitute. Such a Black Swan event would change everything. Who would help? Who could help? What would that aid look like, and what would the cost be?
I’d always thought of The Black Death as a particularly European phenomenon, a likely consequence of a western education of course, and certainly not one with similar origins to the current pandemic. Considering the scale of the human consequence of the bubonic plague in East Asia is staggering and challenging to comprehend. But it’s also a fascinating insight into the highly resilient means by which families will do anything to survive.
Week Six:
The history of slavery in The United States has often been written as a geographically contained, racially motivated, and morally reprehensible period, isolating sharp moral blame to those who lost The Civil War. Such blame was neatly asserted by those located far from the plantation’s whip and may be viewed as a means of attempting to change a narrative of seventeenth through nineteenth century economic necessity into one which seeks to protect the moral identity of an emergent but troubled nation as a whole. If history is written by the victorious, there is often risk in diminishing that such victors were also complicit and culpable in that which they fought against.
As Sven Beckert argues, “merchants and manufacturers in the past did know that slavery was a moral problem, but then they tried to say that such moral considerations were extraneous to the concerns of business”. The systems and means of production between North and South in an emergent American economy were highly inter-dependent, symbiotic, and closely supported each other economically. However, much of this relationship, complicated to untangle and with numerous exceptions, has grown into a distinct moral binary where the immoral means of production are separated from the morally acceptable means of financial gain and export. It’s hard to untangle them both into one holistic economic system, and easier for us to compartmentalize them geographically and morally and wrap the discussion around a single morally reprehensible issue, slavery.
But I don’t think the answer here is to simply view the entire system as morally abhorrent and a product of the economic development in The New World. That feels just too convenient and an easy means of explaining away the immeasurable suffering of millions. As Eric Williams points out, slavery itself cannot be contained into neat, racially oriented categories which align with moral causes, and the barbarism of methods such as transportation do not cause the same moral outrage as plantation slavery in modern readings.
Beckert makes a helpful contribution in his advocacy for companies with antebellum era roots to reach back into the past and confront their own history. To understand the supply chains and labor conditions upon which their businesses were built. But this isn’t simply a symptom of the past, it’s also a problem in the present. In contemporary supply chains, where the cheapest natural resources and means of extracting them still produce an economic horse race. Where the supply of cheap and abundant labor, and Adam Smith’s ‘good land’ still play a significant factor. Cobalt extraction in The Democratic Republic of Congo and the local human exploitation to produce components for smartphones, laptops, and electric cars by companies such as Apple, Google and Tesla still happen today.
But when the problem is ‘over there’ it’s easier to morally compartmentalize it. Physical distance gives us moral distance. We know these practices exist, yet we are still highly dependent upon our apps. Our moral aspirations towards a greener economy through responsible fuel consumption are still highly tethered to immoral human suffering in the mines of The Congo. This can feel as if we’ve learned nothing, but as Williams points out, economic necessity is the driving force, not moral compulsion. It may not be sugar, cotton, or tobacco these days, but it doesn’t mean these same problems have been eradicated.
Week Seven:
The technology of slavery is often assigned to the violent efficacy of the whip. But the measures of the scale and the ledger were also, as Edward Baptiste neatly articulates, ‘key parts of the “whipping-machine” system that raised cotton output steadily over time’. Whips would balance accounts at the end of the day when the scale came up short, with violence filling the space between expectation and outcome. The ledger as an instrument of torture, weaponized measurement and documentation, and bookkeeping as a means to push ever larger production of both cotton and terror is just as culpable as the whip.
Such exploitation has deep roots in the plantation pushing systems of the nineteenth century, where the commercial output of individual slaves was measured with intense scrutiny. Economic imperative for growth at any cost was held together through the granular recording of picking performance per dehumanized ‘hand’. Hands who fell short were brutally beaten. But what is measured can be managed, and as aspirations towards national growth and influence increased, so the demand for increased output scaled in parallel. As economic demand for cotton grew, so did the means and methods of ensuring a Southern output which matched such increasing demand from the mills of Manchester. As Baptiste eloquently explains, ‘fearing punishment or even death, minds scrambled to come up with ways to speed hands’.
The process by which human effort is abstracted into statistical record, which can then be measured, analyzed, and optimized is a critical part of modern business. We see such methods of scrutinizing behavior show up strongly in our experience of sports, politics, supply chains, and especially weaponized for commercial means in digital products. Insight into the duration of engagement, where we’ve been before and where we might be inclined to go afterwards, allow organizations invested in the collection of such data the means to serve us more targeted, optimized messaging with higher and higher behavioral propensity to purchase. Precisely targeted advertisements unrelentingly follow us around the web.
This passive digital servitude can often feel self-serving and voluntary. Most of the time we are unaware even of the extent to which it is happening. Such data can also be weaponized to influence and shape political outcomes, expose the private, and centralize vast repositories of our willingly given personal information into the hands of the few.
Baptiste’s work provides deeper, more visceral context to Eric Williams’ alignment of the origins of slavery with economic demand, but it’s the specific systems of measurement perpetually oriented towards faster and bigger, and an inherently capitalist economic imperative of more which justified and supported the use of violence meted out against those held in slavery at the end of the whip. Ledgers and scales became the origin and justification of such violence, which was economic in source, and abhorrent in racially motivated, immoral retrospect. Baptiste motivates that ‘the scale and slate and lash did, in fact, continually extract a truth: the maximum that a man, woman, or child could pick’. The whip did not act alone, and those setting quotas, much as we see in modern agricultural and digital abuses, act as shadow figures with a high, but hidden degree of overlooked responsibility.
Week Eight:
Eric Williams motivates a compelling argument about the economic, as opposed to racially discriminatory origins of slavery. How the economic imperatives of an emergent United States, and its aspirations toward participation in increasingly global markets birthed subsequent systems of pushing human labor through brutality, racism, and the moral abhorrence of involuntary servitude. Upending the traditional historical and moral view of southern brutality defeated by northern liberation and forcing modern readings to confront the tyranny of the ledger and the cotton scale on uncomfortable but equal terms with the whip.
A helpful lens on Williams’ work can be to look at the close connections between the development of systems of servile labor and the institutions of debt. Gwyn Campbell in ‘The question of slavery in Indian Ocean world history’ makes clear the connection between those left destitute in China by the wrath of the Black Death, and the establishment of debt bondage, including the sale of family members into servitude as a means of familial survival. Such debts could grow to be hereditary, entering long-term slavery ‘in return for subsistence as a survival strategy’. But whereas the natural disaster of the bubonic plague forced millions of Chinese citizens into debt, the deliberate, calculated, and deliberate system of peonage during the late nineteenth century in The United States, while compelling similar long-term suffering motivated by debt, has very different origins much closer aligned to widespread systemic racism.
In the aftermath of The Civil War, the establishment of increasingly racially motivated codes restricted black people's right to own property, conduct business, buy, and lease land, and move freely through public spaces, with a particular focus on liberal definitions of vagrancy and infringement upon subjective social norms. This resulted in large sections of the African American population being compelled to pay off such debts with work, usually hard manual labor previously accommodated by slavery. And while peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867, it was not universally eliminated until the 1940s. Often picked up for minor offences with severe penalties and enormous fines, the repayment of these obligations through debt servitude was, as the fascinating documentary from Sam Pollard calls it, ‘slavery by another name’, and experienced strong racial bias. With the principle of chattel ownership struck down due to the 13th amendment, and creditors even freed of the responsibilities of ownership itself, those ‘owners’ to whom the debt was being paid were able to work their ‘hands’ longer, treat them with increased brutality free from consequence, and given the abundance of black labor being supplied, work them to near death at minimal cost. This wasn’t just slavery by another name, it was far worse, where the economic imperatives for production could now be weighed against an inexhaustible supply of labor freed of the economic restraint which comes with ownership.
If debt shapes the behavior of those in debt, then those to whom the debt is owed run enormous risk of abuse and exploitation. And as we see with both peonage and the antebellum era southern states, creativity with the credit ledger often proved just as effective as the lash as a means of control. Such accounting abuses may have usurped servile labor over time, but the malleable weaponization of the terms of economic debt, especially regarding the repayment of foreign aid to those unable to ever get out of the red isn’t going anywhere soon.