Tag: merchant

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.

Countries and Deep Patternings: China

China’s High-Level Equilibrium Trap as a Concept

The Pattern of the Chinese Past
Mark Elvin
Paperback: 348 pages
Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1st edition (June 1, 1973)

The 1973 classic work in Sinology, Mark Elvin’s The Pattern of the Chinese Past gives the student an “exemplum” in the kind of scholarship that might be called “pattern-seeking.” Without such attempts, all of history becomes formless and shapeless and an endless parade of “routs and rallies,” and “crimes and follies and misfortunes” (in Edward Gibbon’s catchphrase).

Professor Elvin renders Chinese history through an economic perspective instead of using the common dynastic classification by attempting to answer three questions:

  1. What contributed to the continuity of the Chinese empire?
  2. Why was the Chinese economy the most advanced in the world from the Song dynasty (960-1279) up until the latter half of the Qing dynasty (mid-1800s)?
  3. Why did China fail to maintain her technological advantage after the mid-fourteenth century while advancing economically?

In the first section of the book, the author elucidates the staying power of the Chinese empire was due to the following factors. The economics of defense in relation to the size of empire and the power of its neighbors never became an extreme burden that it rendered the state impotent for any consecutively long period of time. It was always able to reformulate itself after a short disunity or rule by a foreign power of the whole, which only happened twice within a two thousand year period (Mongol and Manchu rule). Two other factors that contributed to the continuity of the Chinese state include a relatively isolated existence from the rest of the Eurasian landmass and the important placed on cultural unity, beginning with the first emperor’s destruction of local records in order to quell local loyalties (pp. 21-22). Both of these factors had been built up over time through a revolution in communication and transportation.

The second section of the book analyses the causes of the economic revolution that occurred between the 8th and 12th centuries and the technological growth that accompanied it. The transformation of agriculture, especially in the south, was the major impetus that fueled the economic growth of this period. This revolution in agriculture had four aspects.

  1. The preparation of soil became more effective as a result of improved or new tools and the extensive use of manure and lime as fertilizer.
  2. Seed improvements allowed for double cropping.
  3. Improvements in hydraulic techniques and irrigation networks.
  4. Specialization in crops other than basic food grains (p.118).

Improvements in transportation and communications were almost as important as agriculture in growing the economy. Water transport saw big gains and led to the golden age of geographic studies and cartography, with envoys traveling as far away as Africa. Money and credit matured during this time helping to expand the economy. Paper money made its first appearance in 1024. Improvements in science, medicine, and technology also occurred during this period. However, despite all these advancements, “this period was the climax and also the end of many preceding centuries of scientific and technical progress” (p. 179). Although the Chinese economy continued to advance from the 14th century on, albeit on a smaller scale, it was not accompanied by improvements in technology.

The last section deals with this phenomenon, describing the distinctive characteristics of this late traditional period (1300-1800), and then proceeding to point out why technological advancements did not keep pace with the growth in the economy. This period sees a rise of small market towns in the sixteenth century and a decline in contact with the non-Chinese world around the middle of the fifteenth century. Also, by the eighteenth century serfdom disappeared, aiding population growth, which had reached 400 million by the mid-1800s. Elvin interestingly points out that the highly sophisticated metaphysics that evaded Chinese intellectual thought during the Ming and Qing dynasties negated any deep scientific inquiry (p. 233). In the attempt to explain the lack of technological advancement, Elvin disputes a number of conventional explanations. Contrary to popular belief, there was enough capital during this period to finance simple technological advances, also there was minimal political obstacles to economic growth.

In short, Elvin believes “that in late traditional China economic forces developed in such a way as to make profitable invention more and more difficult. With falling surplus in agriculture, and so falling per capita income and per capita demand, with cheapening labor but increasingly expensive resources and capital, with farming and transport technologies so good that no simple improvements could be made, rational strategy for peasants and merchants alike tended in the direction not so much of labor-saving machinery as of economizing on resources and fixed capital. Huge but nearly static markets created no bottlenecks in the production system that might have prompted creativity” (p. 314). This condition is what he terms as a “high-level equilibrium trap.” The term “trap” to describe the condition of late imperial China’s technological advancement in relation to the economy is similar to Escape from Predicament, Thomas Metzger’s analysis of the “predicament” that confronted Chinese intellectual thought from the Song through to the end of the Qing dynasty. Both explanations have at their core the idea of late imperial China not being able to generate real sustainable progress internally, stating that it was the Chinese response to the Western threat in the mid to late 1800s that finally brought the needed change.