Filed under: The Past is a Foreign...Something | Tags: Coolies, Forbes, Politics, Utopias
The Unbearable Ubiquity of Steamship Accidents
Last we left John Murray Forbes, China trader and nascent railroad baron extraordinaire, it was 1860 and he was all het up about a possible Federal ban on the coolie trade. In a letter to a Massachusetts Congressman, he argued that banning this trade — as opposed to regulating it — would play into the Slave Power’s hands. Banning the importation of cheap Chinese labor would eliminate a source of free labor in the South, and thus remove a threat to the antebellum plantation complex.
He supported this point with a host of ad hominem attacks on a former American consul, and, more interestingly, an anecdote about a Chinese colonization scheme he’d once supported, but had subsequently dropped on the advice of a planter friend. Forbes’s unnamed interlocutor had made it clear that planters’ “jealousy,” of “any scheme of labor outside of their ‘peculiar institution’ ” would make such any importation of free labor untenable in the South.(1)
Thus was Forbes’s plan to simultaneously “improve the condition of the Chinese, and show in our tropics the benefits of free labor,” strangled in its cradle.
But let’s step back a moment. Who was this planter friend? And what was their actual exchange? How well does Forbes’s story in 1860 match up to what the document’s tell us?
Let’s start at the beginning. Forbes’s planter-adviser was one James Hamilton Couper, or as it’s misspelled in JMF’s published letters, Cowper.(2)
(more…)
Why is it that papers about money always read like Hegel wrote them? I.e. simultaneously Really Important and Uncannily Soporific.
Seriously folks, time to deploy some verbs, start using normal capitalization, and use words that make sense.
And then maybe I won’t fall asleep like four times while trying to read your work.
Maybe.
Image cite: Lesleyraez, “Old Coins,” Flickr, CC License
Filed under: The Past is a Foreign...Something | Tags: fire, intrigue, William Henry Seward
Or, your daily dose of archival intrigue.
toasty
Two notes, One sheet:
First hand (top of page)
Will you do me the favour to destroy the papers I sent you last night — I may have spoken more unnreservedly of a third person than I ought — It is growing colder — will you have a fire.”
Second hand (bottom of page):
My dear Madam
I considered your paper precious to me, and I thought it better to keep it, but since you express a wish to have it destroyed, I will comply. No need of fire. I feel warm.”
Filed under: History and Historians
Two quotes, intentionally out of context*, from Clay Shirky:
Metadata is worldview; sorting is a political act.
and
We’re used to the future turning out differently than we expected; it happens all the time. When the past turns out differently, though, it can get really upsetting, and because people don’t like that kind of upset, we’re at risk of finding new reasons to believe false things, rather than revising our sense of what actually happened.
Worth thinking about; mainly caught my attention because I’ve been thinking a lot about history and tech for a while now. That, and the ax I’m grinding about the purpose of History (the discipline) being the eradication of nostalgia (in political spaces; keep the nice family memories).
*Context: ruminations on the moral failings of the #amazonfail furor
Image cite: Chris Campbell, “The World’s Largest Axe,” Flickr, CC License
in small doses
I often begin these posts with some kind of appreciation of the serendipity of the archives; much of what’s appeared here are things I didn’t expect; or, more often, things that don’t fit into the project I’m working on as my main occupation, but that were just too interesting (for a given value of interesting) to forget completely. All well and good, I suppose.
But sometimes … sometimes you find what you’re looking for. Yesterday was one of those times. (more…)
Filed under: Adams Family, The Past is a Foreign...Something | Tags: JQA, Phrenology, Science!
Or, Phrenology Is Silly
At least, so John Quincy Adams, age 74, told his diary on Thursday, October 14, 1841:
Mr. Clother Gifford came to me, as a phrenologist, and proposed to give my head a scientific phrenological examination, which I declined; regarding the whole pretended science as a mischievous humbug, with all the evil tendencies of fortune telling – I did not say so to Mr. Gifford, but merely declined submitting my head to his examination.”
Cite:
John Quincy Adams diary 41, p. 494 [electronic edition]. The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection (Boston, Mass. : Massachusetts Historical Society, 2004), http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries
Image citation:
Gaetan Lee, “Phrenology Heads,” Flickr, CC License
Part 1 of an infinite series
Stephen H. Branch to John C. Calhoun, New York City, February 8, 1844
My Dear Sir:
I am studying Mnemo-Phrenotechny, or the art of acquiring memory, with every possible facility afforded me for its most critical mastery. Men of science say that it is the most wonderful and useful discovery of the age. If convenient, I purpose [sic] coming to Carolina’s genial and friendly skies to impart it to yourself and children as a slight testimonial of my regard for you. I am happiest when tendering my sincerest homage to distinguished integrity and genius. I love to sacrifice at virtue’s hallowed shrine. Palsied, indeed, be my humanity when I cease to cherish the immortal patriots and god-like intellects of my country. I know you will be highly pleased with this new science, you are so alive to all that glorifies the mind.
I remain, with profound respect,
S. H. Branch”
The Papers of John C. Calhoun, Clyde N. Wilson, ed. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1986), XVII:774.
Image Credit: malavoda, “Hypnosis,” Flickr, CC License
Filed under: Golden Ghetto, Power At Play | Tags: China, Forbes, Merchants, Play
While writing to his wife, Sarah, about what he’d been getting up to while earning the family fortune at Canton, John Murray Forbes, China trader extraordinaire (and later, railroad magnate), happens to mention one of the more curious aspects of the Anglo-American community at Canton:
I have very little national feeling, and indeed I used to think the English our superiors, but faith I am changing my mind fast the more I see and know of them. They are almost as much governed by old custom as the Chinese are, while we are daily advancing. … The English have one trait in which they differ widely from us; they keep up their boyish games through life. Cricket and Ball of all sorts is played in England by men of all ages, and in this part of the world they esteem nothing childish which gives zest to exercise; thus, as I have told you, the gravest people of Canton may often be caught playing leap frog, and ’tis not logn since, at Macao, one of our cricket players was a judge from Bengal.
They are quite right. Where there are a thousand modes of exercising as in England and at home, other modes might be preferable, but there is surely no occasion for so much attempt at rubbing up our dignity by grave demeanor and consequential deportment — in fact a man can only forfeit the respect of others by mean actions; those who are wanting in real dignity of character are much the most disposed to stand upon ceremonials. So endeth the first lesson…”
Very “upon the playing fields of Eton,” no? Though it’s rather difficult to imagine leap-frog as preparation for world dominion.
Why these games? Well, first and foremost, because there was nothing to do at Canton. Work took up most available hours, and when it didn’t foreigners were restricted to their small neighborhood (what one scholar has called the “golden ghetto”). Second, the homosocial environment: the foreign merchant community at Canton was almost entirely male, the result of a Chinese ban on Western women living in the foreign ghetto (they wanted to keep the Westerners from getting too comfortable, you see — not a terribly effective anti-colonial policy, as it turns out), and, one imagines, no small amount of wifely resistance to being dragged across the world to sit in a counting house in a pestilential sub-tropical port. Third, the traders, at this point, tended to be younger men, usually in their twenties and thirties (one generally made it rich quick, and then either retired or, like JMF, ran the operation from a nice office in downtown Boston); lots of excess energy after a day stuck in a cramped, dusty, and hot “hong” (office/warehouse).
Also, I should note that, leap-frog aside, the “games” the merchants and their clerks usually got up to were of the more upper-crust sort — horse riding, boat races (both crew and yachts), that sort of thing — competitive sports where discretionary income, as well as physical skill, could make a difference. (Incidentally, fifteen or so years earlier, JMF’s older brother, Thomas, died while sailing his yacht near Macao).
Still, this type of activity, under such conditions, is part of what makes the experience of the commerce in China exceptional, if not unique.
But what to make of how these games changed JMF’s ideas about Britons? I’m not sure. On the one hand, close association with the advance guard of the British empire has greatly decreased his respect for British claims to superior civilization and refinement; but on the other, he admires how, at least in the ritualized social space of certain types of games of sports, British customs for enacting status distinctions are allowed to fall away (or be covered up) — a classic move of American democracy, particularly the Southern variety. More than anything, it makes me think of the drinking parties (barbecues) the great planters of the slave south threw whenever they were running for office — I suspect a similar sort of strained camaraderie was performed here, albeit with a different sort of power underlying the performance — cash money, not direct control over labor.
Thoughts on other instances of power at play? Were the blue-bloods up to similar shenanigans in the Raj?
In any case, weird enough for the blog, I think.
Cite: John Murray Forbes to Sarah Forbes, Canton, 25 March 1836, Letters (supplementary) of John Murray Forbes, edited by edited by his daughter Sarah Forbes Hughes, 3 vols.(Boston: George H. Ellis, 1905), I:26-27.
Image Credit:VTDarkStar, “Leap Frog,” Flickr, CC License.
but more like basket weaving
Q. Can you tell us about specific disciplines and how they fare in peer-reviewed competitions?
In history there is a high degree of consensus among scholars about what is good. But it is not based so much on a common theory, or method, or whether people think the discipline is part of the humanities or social sciences. It’s a shared sense of craftsmanship. People care about whether the work is careful. They believe they can identify careful work. And that they can convince others about it. The degree of consensus has varied over the years. In the 1960s, for example, the discipline was polarized politically. But it has found consensus in the practice of scholarship.
Historians believe that contrasts sharply with English literature. As one told me, “The disciplinary center holds.” That sense of consensus makes history proposals and applicants very successful in multidisciplinary competitions like the national fellowship and grant programs.
…
Panelists who are in English literature perceive that their discipline has a “legitimization crisis.” … Some are unsure whether “quality” exists.
…
Like history, economics is a highly consensual discipline. But the consensus isn’t grounded in craftsmanship; it’s in mathematical formalism. As a result, while the last few years have seen more openness to other approaches, like behavioral economics, most economists believe they have fairly straightforward measures for evaluation. They know what excellence is, and say they can identify it when they encounter it. But intersubjectivity is also at the center of their evaluation process. …”
~Karen J. Winkler, “Reviewing the Reviewers: A Q&A With Michèle Lamont,” CHE, 3 April 2009. (h/t to Ralph Luker at Cliopatria)
From my own, horribly limited and absolutely anecdotal experience, what Lamont says about how historians evaluate each others’ work rings true. An evaluation of craftsmanship — careful work, qualified claims, mounds and mounds of evidence — is thebasis for most, if not all, critiques in the discipline. This is why the third-worst thing you can say about any historian is that they got their footnotes wrong, the second-worst is a charge of “antiquarianism,” and that the high crime is plagiarism — they are all variations on a single charge of faulty craft-work.
I think this is also why there are few, if any, prodigies in history. Careful craftsmanship is not an inborn skill.
However, it also strikes me that Lamont leaves something out, at least in the interview (the book is not yet ready to hand). Craftsmanship is a framework and a rhetoric that hides a lot of conflict based on methodological and political orientations. The culture wars continue, both within the discipline, and at its margins — e.g. cultural history vs. social history; econ history as done by economists vs. history of econ culture, as done by historians; historians’ participation in, & evaluation of, works in “American Studies”; etc., etc. But like all frames, that of craftsmanship both constrains and conditions the utterances made within it; so in the end, I think that as good a controlling rhetoric as any, and (with my disciplinary chauvinism showing), perhaps better than most.
Image credit: Anyhoo, “DSC_0578 – Ivory Tower,” Flickr, CC License
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Business, China, Forbes, Pidgin, William Henry Seward
coo coo ca choo
In the mid-19th century, Western merchants in China — Americans included — conducted business through ad hoc languages. Under Chinese law, all foreign merchants at Canton were required to to hire “linguists,” but these were usually not language experts, but rather middlemen who, in theory, facilitated business between foreign merchants, native merchants, and the port’s administrative governor.(This rarely worked in practice, at least according to foreign merchants.) Adding to the difficulties, foreign merchants, even if they had the inclination to do so, were forbidden to learn Chinese (or rather, it was illegal for anyone to teach them Chinese, which amounted to the same thing). Certainly, translators existed, but generally trade was conducted through the mediation of a pidgin — a simplified language that usually combines elements of two other languages, usually for commercial purposes.
(The word pidgin, in fact, probably derives from encounters between English speakers and Chinese speakers at Canton. The word is thought to come from a Chinese mispronunciation of the English word “business.” Though hardly the first pidgin, the term for the language used in trade at Canton was the specific case generalized to encompass all languages with similar structures, beginning in the 1850s.)
This pidgin was central to the operations of the trade. What’s odd, though, is how rarely I’ve encountered it in the archives. You’d think it would be all over American merchants’ records, as they often communicated with their Chinese counterparts through letters. But no; instead, they appear to have written all communiques in English, and then had them translated on the spot, perhaps only verbally.
So far, I’ve run across three examples. Collectively, they question the general understanding of this pidgin as a primarily a commercial language, at least in some particular circumstances.
