Tag: gold

Movies as an Education in Global Looting: The Sea Hawk (1940)

Movies and the World as an Arena of Violent Domination and Global Looting

The classic Warner Brothers swashbuckler, The Sea Hawk, from 1940, within its romantic adventures and intricate swordfights (perhaps comparable to the car chases of later movies) is a partly historical, partly fictional version of a world built on imperial struggles and ransacking and despoiling. The hegemonic power in the West (and perhaps worldwide) is Spain. Phillip II the king-emperor wants to own and dominate and rule the whole world. In 1588, his Spanish Armada loses to England. (The British of course want to compare this to the Battle of Britain against the German Luftwaffe.)

Set in 1585, The Sea Hawk opens with King Philip II of Spain plotting world domination, laughing that all world maps will soon read simply “Spain” — once England is out of the way, of course.

The Spanish ambassador departs for England to escort his niece to Queen Elizabeth’s court, but in a spectacular sea battle, the Spanish galley is soundly damaged, boarded, raided and sunk by a group of pirates led by Captain Geoffrey Thorpe, a Sir Walter Raleigh stand-in played by Erroll Flynn. Thorpe rescues the galley slaves — they row the boat — and spares the crew, taking them aboard and delivering them to England. The jewels and other bounty (or a portion thereof) are a gift to the Queen.

His crew is part of a noble privateer coalition — the Sea Hawks — who justify their piracy as reclamation of English goods (and enslaved sailors) from the Spanish behemoth. The political fallout from Thorpe’s abduction of the ambassador forces Elizabeth to outlaw the Sea Hawks, including an official denial (and private approval) of his mission to Panama to steal a shipment of Aztec gold.

Inca gold is also mentioned in the movie as a target of robbing.

Sir John Hawkins (1532–1595), part of this group of global sailor-pirates and master-mariners, was one of the most notable sailors and naval commanders of the sixteenth century.

He is known for his pivotal role in the maritime history of England and the rise of the global slave trade.

John Hawkins, the son of a merchant, was born in Plymouth in 1532. He became a sea captain and in 1562 became the first Englishman to start capturing people in Sierra Leone and selling them as slaves to Spanish settlers in the Caribbean. (Notice that selling slaves does not discriminate against Spaniards even with Phillip II threatening England. Business is business.)

Stealing Aztec gold as part of colonial or imperial plundering and the slave trade were part of the dark side of history, something the standard history books “skate over” dishonestly.

A key scene between the Spanish aristocratic beauty and Captain Thorpe:

Doña María Álvarez de Córdoba: “I’m not in the habit of conversing with thieves. I thought I made that quite clear, Captain Thorpe.”

Captain Geoffrey Thorpe: “Why, yes, all except your definition. Tell me, is a thief an Englishman who steals?”

Doña María Álvarez de Córdoba: “It’s anybody who steals… whether it’s piracy or robbing women.”

Captain Geoffrey Thorpe: “Oh, I see. I’ve been admiring some of the jewels we found in your chest… particularly the wrought gold. It’s Aztec, isn’t it? I wonder just how those Indians were persuaded to part with it.”

The Sea Hawk (1940)

Donald Trump continues this tradition of looting when he says of Iraq’s oil:

“Think of it as our oil under their sand.”

Thus the whole world is an arena where the weak don’t have any property rights: not the oil or gold, not themselves (slavery) and not their country (colonialism).

This exploitative hierarchy and “world-system” is part of “the way of the world” and even a romantic adventure story like 1940’s The Sea Hawk gives you a Hollywoodized glimpse into its roots. Imperial struggles in the West spill over into colonization and ransacking and looting. History books one sees in high school are dishonest and in that sense uninformative or even disinformative.

The popular PBS travel series Rick Steves’ Europe unintentionally gives us a wonderful example of this notion of plunder and looting as a pillar of world history in the show on Venice. Rick Steves is talking about the various statues in Venice’s central St. Mark’s Square (Piazza San Marco), and comments “I’d call the style ‘Early Ransack.’”

This Rick Steves quip about ransacking and historical wealth-building is very informative.

Globalization and Its Nuances

The PBS TV program History Detectives had an episode entitled “Atocha Spanish Silver” where the wreck of the Spanish ship Atocha was described like this:

“In 1985, one of the greatest treasure discoveries was made off the Florida Keys, when the wreck of the Spanish ship Atocha was found. On board were some forty tons of silver and gold, which in 1622 had been heading from the New World to the Spanish treasury as the means to fund the Thirty Years’ War.”

Is this an obvious case of globalization? What about Marco Polo? Rome–Han dynasty China trade in silks? Silk Road and Samarkand? Colombus? Magellan? Vasco da Gama?

All of these cases constitute a kind of harmless kind of “pop globalization” based on exotic voyages and travels.

Consider another such example, perhaps more academic:

“About the middle of the sixteenth century Antwerp reached its apogee. For the first time in history there existed both a European and a world market; the economies of different parts of Europe had become interdependent and were linked through the Antwerp market, not only with each other but also with the economies of large parts of the rest of the world. Perhaps no other city has ever again played such a dominant role as did Antwerp in the second quarter of the sixteenth century.”

(Europe in the Sixteenth Century, Koenigsberger and Mosse, Holt Rinehart Publishers, 1968, page 50)

Debt repudiations in several places in the 1550s are described like this:

“This caused the first big international bank crash, for the Antwerp bankers now could not meet their own obligations.”

(Europe in the Sixteenth Century, Koenigsberger and Mosse, Holt Rinehart Publishers, 1968, page 51)

This sounds like some kind of identifiably global period.

Actually, modern historians define globalization as “price convergence” (i.e., wheat has now a unified “world price,” implying a world market). This rigorous definition is confirmed by and also shows up in the data in the 1820s and may or may not be prefigured by all the Marco Polo and Atocha silver stories, mentioned above.

These episodes in history are not there yet.

One sees wheat prices and other commodity prices converging in the 1820s and thereafter based on railroads, steamships and telegrams.

The classic in this kind of analysis is:

Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy, by Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson.

Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson present a coherent picture of In Globalization and History, Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson present a coherent picture of trade, migration, and international capital flows in the Atlantic economy in the century prior to 1914—the first great globalization boom, which anticipated the experience of the last fifty years. The authors estimate the extent of globalization and its impact on the participating countries, and discuss the political reactions that it provoked. The book’s originality lies in its application of the tools of open-economy economics to this critical historical period—differentiating it from most previous work, which has been based on closed-economy or single-sector models. The authors also keep a close eye on globalization debates of the 1990s, using history to inform the present and vice versa. The book brings together research conducted by the authors over the past decade—work that has profoundly influenced how economic history is now written and that has found audiences in economics and history, as well as in the popular press.

(book summary)

In everyday language, we associate the word globalization with some ever-increasing Marco Polo phenomena. While that’s not entirely wrong, globalization in the more technical sense begins to show up in the data only from the 1820s. At this point, we begin to see the convergence of worldwide wheat prices, for example. This makes the world, for the first time, a global “store” with unified prices. Here is the technical beginning of globalization. The years 1870-1914 are subsequently the first real era of modern globalization and represent a kind of “take-off” from the first stirrings of the 1820s. World Wars I & II might be seen as globalization backlash.

At this moment in world history, whether Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will constitute a new wave of deglobalization remains to be seen.

Education and the Historical Swirl: Part II

We concluded Part I on this topic with the following comments which we wish students to incorporate into their educations, irrespective of the major, field or concentration:

The gold standard itself, dominated from London led to intricate problems: Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939 (published in 1992) by Barry Eichengreen, the leading historian of monetary systems, shows the downstream pitfalls of the gold standard.

In other words, the de facto emergence of Britain/London as the world commercial and policy center and the relation of this emergence to empire and international tensions and rivalries, means it is very problematical for any country to steer a course other than staying in tandem with British moods and ideologies, such as free trade. Any country by itself would find it difficult to have a more independent policy. (Friedrich List of Germany, who died in 1846, wrestles with these difficulties somewhat.) The attempts to find “autonomy and autarky” in the interwar years (Germany, Japan, Italy) led to worse nightmares. The world seems like a “no exit” arena of ideologies and rivalries.

The “crazy dynamics” and the semi-anarchy of the system, which continues to this day and is even worse, means that policy-making is always seen through a “dark windshield.”

History in the globalizing capitalist centuries, the nineteenth and the twentieth, is a kind of turbulent swirl and not a rational “walk.”

Here’s a bizarre but necessary comment on this sense of turbulent and surprising swirl propelling history forwards and backwards and sidewards at the same time:

The historian, Barry Eichengreen (mentioned above), is a distinguished analyst of world monetary systems at U.C. Berkeley and perhaps the leading expert today on the evolution of such systems.

From movies such as Shoah and Last of the Unjust by the great filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, we know that Barry Eichengreen’s mother was Lucille Eichengreen, a Jew born in Hamburg, Germany (1925) and deported to the Łódź Ghetto in Poland during World War II. She survived through many miraculous accidents and contingencies, then wrote about her experiences.

We get a deeper insight into “the way of the world” by seeing that the Holocaust itself has as a backdrop the anarcho-craziness of the world. The Fascists and Nazis were jumping from the “frying pan into the fire” by imagining that world conquest and world-murdering could “stop the world.” They and their favored populations could “get off” and step into a racial dreamworld. They were taking today’s concept of “gated community” and applying it to the “racial community” (Volksgemeinschaft, in German).

This led to the phenomenon depicted in Goya’s famous aquatint: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

The perceived madness of the world and the madness of leaders that this perception leads to have never been analyzed together.

The fact that the behavior of world leaders could be “crazy like a fox” (half-insane, half-opportunistic, or Machiavellian “clever”) is a complicating factor or twist from Mussolini until today.

Education and Seeing the “Swirl” of History

The tempo and rhythm of world events and world history are not captured in the linear and bland books one reads in schools and colleges where the sense of the stormy forward turbulence of the world is not communicated. Here’s an example that does communicate this “crazy dynamics”:

The leading historian, James Joll, in his excellent Europe Since 1870: An International History talks about gold and the gold standard in this way:

“The world supply of gold was diminishing, as the effects of the gold rushes in California and Australia in the 1850s and 1860s passed. This coincided with the decision in the 1870s of many of the leading countries to follow Britain’s example to use gold rather than silver as the basis of their currency — Germany in 1871, France in 1876 for example — so that the demand for gold rose just as the supply was temporarily declining. This in turn led to some doubt about the use of a gold standard and to much discussion about ‘bi-metallism’ and about the possibility of restoring silver to its place as the metal on which the world’s currency should be based, though this movement had more success in the United States than in Europe, where gold has now established itself firmly. By the 1890s however the discovery of new gold deposits in South Africa, Western Australia and Canada put an end to these discussions and uncertainties, as far as currency was concerned, for some fifty years.”

(James Joll, Europe Since 1870: An International History, Penguin Books, 1976, page 35)

These twists and turns and accidents or contingencies don’t communicate the real semi-turmoil surrounding all the decisions, which we can infer from the comment by a German politician in 1871, “We chose gold, not because gold was gold, but because Britain was Britain.” (Ian Patrick Austin, Common Foundations of American and East Asian Modernisation: From Alexander Hamilton to Junichero Koizumi, Select Publishing, 2009, page 99.)

Professor Joll delineates the emergent primacy of England:

“The establishment of London as the most important center in the world for shipping, banking, insurance-broking and buying and selling generally, as well as the growth of British industry, had been based on a policy of free trade.”

(James Joll, Europe Since 1870: An International History, Penguin Books, 1976, page 34)

The gold standard itself, dominated from London led to intricate problems: Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939 (published in 1992) by Barry Eichengreen, the leading historian of monetary systems, shows the downstream pitfalls of the gold standard.

In other words, the de facto emergence of Britain/London as the world commercial and policy center and the relation of this emergence to empire and international tensions and rivalries, means it is very problematical for any country to steer a course other than staying in tandem with British moods and ideologies, such as free trade. Any country by itself would find it difficult to have a more independent policy. (Friedrich List of Germany, who died in 1846, wrestles with these difficulties somewhat.) The attempts to find “autonomy and autarky” in the interwar years (Germany, Japan, Italy) led to worse nightmares. The world seems like a “no exit” arena of ideologies and rivalries.

The “crazy dynamics” and the semi-anarchy of the system, which continues to this day and is even worse, means that policy-making is always seen through a “dark windshield.”

History in the globalizing capitalist centuries, the nineteenth and the twentieth, is a kind of turbulent swirl and not a rational “walk.”

Essay 79: Past and Present Thinking

History is “forever new” and we keep asking “what’s new?” but the past is “forever suggestive” and so we inquire here as to whether the past gives us interesting echoes of the more recent.

Specifically, we juxtapose the “closing of the gold window” in August 1971 (Nixon) and the British gold standard gyrations between 1925 and 1931, when England left gold (i.e., September 1931).

At the time, under Nixon, the U.S. also had an unemployment rate of 6.1% (August 1971) and an inflation rate of 5.84% (1971).

To combat these problems, President Nixon consulted Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns, incoming Treasury Secretary John Connally, and then Undersecretary for International Monetary Affairs and future Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.

On the afternoon of Friday, August 13, 1971, these officials along with twelve other high-ranking White House and Treasury advisors met secretly with Nixon at Camp David. There was great debate about what Nixon should do, but ultimately Nixon, relying heavily on the advice of the self-confident Connally, decided to break up Bretton Woods by announcing the following actions on August 15:

Speaking on television on Sunday, August 15, when American financial markets were closed, Nixon said the following:

“The third indispensable element in building the new prosperity is closely related to creating new jobs and halting inflation. We must protect the position of the American dollar as a pillar of monetary stability around the world.

“In the past 7 years, there has been an average of one international monetary crisis every year …

“I have directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets, except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability and in the best interests of the United States.

“Now, what is this action—which is very technical—what does it mean for you?

“Let me lay to rest the bugaboo of what is called devaluation.

“If you want to buy a foreign car or take a trip abroad, market conditions may cause your dollar to buy slightly less. But if you are among the overwhelming majority of Americans who buy American-made products in America, your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today.

“The effect of this action, in other words, will be to stabilize the dollar.”

Britain’s own experience in the twenties is explained like this:

“In 1925, Britain had returned to the gold standard.

(editor: This Churchill decision was deeply critiqued by Keynes.)

“When Labour came to power in May 1929 this was in good time for Black Friday on Wall Street in the following October.

“After the Austrian and German crashes in May and July 1931, Britain’s financial position became critical, and on 21st September she abandoned the gold standard.

“London was still the world’s financial capital in 1931, and the British abandonment of the gold standard set off a chain of reactions throughout the world.

“Strangely enough Germany and Austria maintained the gold standard…”

(Europe of the Dictators, Elizabeth Wiskemann, Fontana/Collins, 1977, page 92-93)

Nixon’s policies gave us the demise of Bretton Woods, while the economic gyrations of 1925-1931 were part of the lead-up to World War II.

The setting is both “infinitely different” across the decades but the feeling of “flying blind” applies to both cases: U.S.A. “closing the gold window,” August 1971 and Britain’s overturning Churchill’s 1925 return to the gold standard, by 1931. One gets the sense of “concealed turmoil” and a lot of “winging it” in both cases. Policy-makers disagreed and they all saw the world of their moments “through a glass, darkly.”

Essay 39: Movies as a “Parachute” or Backdoor Into the Field of Economics

Here’s a second example of using movies to “sneak up on” a field such as economics.

Think of the movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, from 1948, a Humphrey Bogart classic:

In 1925, in the Mexican oil-town of Tampico, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), two unemployed American drifters, survive by bumming for spare change. They are recruited by an American labor contractor, Pat McCormick (Barton MacLane), as roughnecks to construct oil rigs for $8 a day.  When the project is completed, McCormick skips out without paying the men.

Returning to Tampico, the two vagrants encounter the grizzled prospector Howard (Walter Huston) in a flophouse. The loquacious and penniless ex-miner holds forth on the virtues of gold prospecting and the perils of striking it rich. The two younger men feel the lure of gold and contemplate its risks. Dobbs and Curtin run into McCormick at a cantina, and after a desperate bar fight, they collect their back wages in cash. When Dobbs wins a small jackpot in the lottery, he pools his funds with Curtin and Howard to finance a gold prospecting journey to the Mexican interior.

The flophouse mentioned above (“Oso negro”) has a quick scene which is a marvelous “parachute” into economics:  a group of men begin to reflect on why gold is so expensive while the basics of life like water or air are not.  Howard (their “cracker barrel philosopher-sage,” played by Walter Huston) explains that a thousand men set out to find gold.  999 of the men fail to find any, one finds some.  The price of gold has to reflect the costs of finding it (i.e., men, equipment, time, effort, opportunity costs, risks, danger, etc.) by all thousand and include the 999 failures and not just the one success.  This is an example, albeit primitive, of something like the labor-theory of value explored by Ricardo and then Marx:

Labor theory of value

The labor theory of value (LTV) is a heterodox theory of value that argues that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of “socially necessary labor” required to produce it. … Marx did not refer to his own theory of value as a “labor theory of value.”

Again, using this movie as a charming or enchanting “jumping off place,” you would begin to “dive into” those pages of the textbook that are relevant, much as you’d use a dictionary to look up some words. You then read towards the front and the back of the textbook, coming at it your own way, mindful of these questions of yours which begin to give the field a “shape.” You could do the “standard slog” through the textbook, none of which you remember three days after the course because nothing was based on your own “enchanted” searching and exploring.

Lastly, the author of the original 1927 novel, on which the movie is based, B. Traven was a German anarchist and he may have analyzed the world and its prices and costs (i.e., economics) like Howard in the movie.  This too is itself another “pathway” into economics, a biographical one.