Tag: war

Essay 115: Novels as Another University: Joseph Conrad

One can say that the first wave of imperial “neocons” was not the group that got the U.S. into the Iraq War (2003) but the group described by Warren Zimmerman in his classic book on the rise of the American Empire from the 1890s onwards:

First Great Triumph

How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power.

By Warren Zimmermann.

Illustrated. 562 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

“Americans like to pretend that they have no imperial past,” Warren Zimmermann tells us in First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. But they do.

The United States had been expanding its borders from the moment of its birth, though its reach had been confined to the North American continent until 1898, when American soldiers and sailors joined Cuban and Filipino rebels in a successful war against Spain. When the war was won, the United States acquired a “protectorate” in Cuba and annexed Hawaii, the Philippine Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico and Hawaii. “In 15 weeks,” Zimmermann notes, “the United States had gained island possessions on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of its continental mass. It had put under its protection and control more than 10 million people: whites, blacks, Hispanics, Indians, Polynesians, Chinese, Japanese and the polyethnic peoples of the Philippine archipelago.”

John Hay, at the time the American ambassador to Britain, writing to his friend Theodore Roosevelt in Cuba, referred to the war against Spain as “a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave.” He hoped that the war’s aftermath would be concluded “with that fine good nature, which is, after all, the distinguishing trait of the American character.” More than a century later, we are still asking ourselves just how splendid that little war and its consequences really were.

Zimmermann, a career diplomat and a former United States ambassador to Yugoslavia, begins his brilliantly readable book about the war and its aftermath with biographical sketches of the five men — Alfred T. Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay and Elihu Root — who played a leading role in making “their country a world power.”

Ironically, it turns out that any reader of Joseph Conrad’s (died in 1924) famous novel Nostromo from 1904 would have encountered the “manifesto” of the American Empire, very clearly enunciated by one of the characters in the novel:

“Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God’s universe. We shall be giving the word for everything; industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound (i.e., Canada/Greenland), and beyond too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth.

“We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it—and neither can we, I guess.”

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, Penguin Books, 2007, pages 62/63

The political stances of Conrad which seem so denunciatory of imperialism here in Nostromo seem very disrespectful of Africans in his Heart of Darkness as Chinua Achebe (Nigerian novelist, author of Things Fall Apart) and other Africans have shown and decried. Thus one sees layer upon layer of contradiction both in American empire-mongering and Conrad’s anticipation of it in his novel Nostromo.

Essay 57: The Issue of Deep Rhythms in History: Second Look

We have already seen, in the previous essay, that world violence against the vulnerable is a deep and constant theme or rhythm in world history, one that is “dutifully” avoided. (This avoidance may be called another rhythm all its own.)

In the realm of finance (Kenneth Rogoff’s book This Time is Different is about financial rhythms and cycles), we also sense deep echoes and rhythms:

Consider this entry on the medieval Florentine banking houses the Bardi and Peruzzi:  “These Florentine families gave their names to two great banking houses of the 14th century, commanding assets far greater than those of the later and more famous Medici bank.  They advanced loans to European monarchs, most notably Edward I, who used the money to finance his campaigns in the Hundred Years’ War.  He and his successors reneged on his debts in 1345, which led to bankruptcy for the Bardi and Peruzzi forms and sent shock waves through the European economy.

The Medici rules Florence from 1434-1494, long after these Europe-wide shocks.  Bond finance (governments borrowing from their own people as well as outsiders) to finance wars emerged out of insecurity on all sides of war finance and culminated in the brilliance of the Rothschilds (as Prof. Niall Ferguson’s contemporary two-volume history of this family shows).

Thus, wars and war finance have many centuries of gestation and provenance and defaults and shock waves were well known in the European economy of the fourteenth century long before the Medici and their famous patronage of the arts and their prominence in Papal politics.

One might argue that these are rhythms and echoes that have to do with deep structures like militarily organized violence (wars) and political organizations from kingdoms through states.

If you combine these two essays (56/57) you get a money-and-violence super-rhythm which goes on today.

Consider the Larousse entry on the Frescobaldi family:

“One of several banking families in 14th-15th century Florence with European-wide interests. 

“Their clients included Edward II of England, whose wars with Scotland they financed in exchange for customs revenues.

“The royal default on debts led to a crisis for the Frescobaldi bank in 1311.”

(Larousse Dictionary of World History, ed. Bruce Lenman, Houghton Mifflin, 1995, page 343)

This also shows you war-and-finance had a major destabilizing role in Europe long before our modern period and constitutes a potential rhythm or proto-rhythm.