Filed under: Uncategorized
Or, If I had to read this, so do you
Bad writing in economics has a long history:
Mr. Pennant, in his British Zoology, chap. I. div. I. sect. iii. under the article Sheep, makes the following observations:
It does not appear, (says that agreeable writer) that the breed of this animal (sheep) was cultivated for the sake of the wool among the Britons; the inhabitants of the inland parts of this island either went intirely naked, or were only cloathed with skins.
…
On the coins or money of the Britons are seen impressed the figures of the horse, the bull and the hog, the marks of the tributes exacted from them by the conquerors (Camden.) The Rev. Mr. Pogge was so kind as to inform me, that he has seen on the coins of Cunobelin that of a sheep. Since that is the case, it is probable that our ancestors were possessed of the animal, but made no farther use of it than to strip off the skin and wrap themselves in it, and with the wool inmost, obtain a comfortable protection against the cold of the winter season.
~Tench Coxe, Remarks on Lord Sheffield’s Observations on the Commerce of the American States; by an American (London, 1784), p.19-20
Update: also this little tidbit, a few pages later:
In England, it is well known they spend half their money in drink. (p.26)
* Made a tiny bit more tolerable by the fact that the original uses a long s, which I always hear it as a lisp while reading.
Image cite: Wiccked, “Sheepish,” Flickr, CC License
Or, This is Why We Can’t Have Smart Things
Here’s Andrew Sullivan, on Beast Books, the current bête noire of professionally nostalgic media entrepreneurs.
I miss the days when books were written because an author simply had something to say and took her time to say it well.
May I propose a thought experiment to see whether Sullivan’s nostalgia is just lazy thinking or a justified use of the world-weary declension card? When was that golden age? When books were written by disinterested Serious People, for pure thought, seriously? Precisely, I mean. I’d like dates.
Perhaps Sullivan is referring to that one golden afternoon of September 25, 1965, or perhaps those madeleine-encrusted years between 1913 and 1927. But probably he dates the true end of the golden age to October 10, 2006, no?
Somehow, I doubt any precision will be forthcoming. One hears lots of talk about the dangers of scientific ignorance, but I think ignorance of historical thinking is a problem that goes to the highest levels, too. If even our paid thinkers don’t understand how to think historically, what then? Goodness me, wreck and ruin, I suppose.
Pointless nostalgia will out, though. Écrasez l’infâme!
Update: links fixed.
Image cite: cybertoad, “White Horse,” Flickr, CC License
Link roundup time, folks:
Feign, Feign, Feign
Via Prof. Hacker, some thoughtful comments on “imposter syndrome” through the lens of Michael Chabon’s new book on being a dad.. Apparently, as in parenting, so on the tenure track: Fake It ‘Til You Make It. h/t
AAS Blog
The American Antiquarian Society, a much loved research center in dear Worchester, MA now hath a blog. It appears to have started up recently, and they’ve already hit a wonderful slightly snarky but erudite stride:
- “The present rarely surprises history. I take your “email itself” and raise you a century”
- Edgar Allen Poe, Original Balloon Boy.
- A taste test: Ye Olde Poundcake vs. a modern recipe.
“The stories that America made up.”
Via hotel boredom and Boing Boing, Robert Wuhl’s comedic retelling of American history. The tagline (above) makes it worth a look. Caveats: A little dated (it’s pre-election, and very borscht belt), and mildly nsfw (fer cussin’).
File Under Love
Finally, an oldie but a (new to me) goodie: the ribald back channel twitter feed from this past summer’s ALA conference. Yes, librarian gossip. Main topics: sex, sex, and how poor some librarians’, uh, presentation skills are. h/t.
purlpletwinkle, Not fooling anyone…,” Flickr, CC License
Filed under: Uncategorized
It’s Friday, I’m dissertated out, so here’s some links:
- Tim Burke has some smart things to say about Google’s recent sketchy shenanigans, and fairly sums up, I think, the general consensus among the digerati humanists w/r/t the current state of the Google Books project: Do Not Want.
- He also has some fair gripes about the awful balkanized state of other textual databases. Welcome to my life: I got 99 UIs, but a completed search ain’t in one, folks.
- There’s a new episode of CHNM’s Digital Campus out. We learn that Google Wave is apparently great for discussing Google Wave, but otherwise distracting as hell. A very good, and useful episode, even in non-google aspects.
- Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s new book Planned Obsolescence: Publishing Technology, and the Future of the Academy is up, and has lots of interesting things to say about the future of publishing and peer review. Perhaps the best work on these subjects I’ve read (and I’m only halfway through!). Highly recommended.
- Finally, because every Friday post should end with some contemplation of past, present and future, here’s Thomas Cole’s most serious series of paintings exploring political economy (which I might get to see this weekend!).
Happy Weekend!
Image cite: Krossbow, “Flotsam and Jetsam,” Flickr, CC License
Filed under: Uncategorized
Or, a bleg
Folks, I have a problem.
I’m trying to describe how American policy makers, as a group, moved from thinking and acting as if China was the (pre-1969) moon, to thinking and acting as if China were a real, reachable place where the U.S. had national interests and, importantly, the ability to protect or advance those interests in China.
(Analogous situations might include the climate change issue — where we are not quite yet at the turning point — or, indeed, the post-Sputnik shift in talking about landing on the moon.)
Here’s the problem: right now, all I can think to say is that China “became real” or China issues “became concrete.”
This is unacceptable — not just because those are ugly circumlocutions, but also because I’ve got a hunch that there is probably an actual (poli sci? soc?) term for this kind of phenomenon.
So I turn to you, dearest colleagues of the world wide interwebs. Any thoughts? Am I fretting over nothing?
Image Cite: Curious Expeditions, “Brains,” Flickr, CC License
In the (b)Log
Folks, I’m in the middle of backing up The Establishment here in Washington, and preparing to open up shop In Merry Ole soon, with stops at the someday-hopefully-an-alma-mater, so nothing substantive for the moment. But just so you don’t think I don’t love you, here are some Links To Amuse:
Unnatural Lincoln-Calhoun hybrids
I’m fairly surprised at the compositor’s (ideologically and morally) bizarre choice. I am emphatically not surprised that the first Cowen/Tabarrok co-production was about the public choice theory of the Marxist of the master class.
(Bonus! In the comments, someone declares Calhoun “a good looking man,” further demonstrating to what heroic lengths some people will go to be wrong.)
Ranke and his Archive of Truth gets the History of Science Treatment (nb: paywall for non university folks)
(h/t to Historiography Lab)
Three series of historical iconographyof the Tower of Babel.
Fascinatingly variable, apparently. (h/t)
The State as a nexus-of-contractors
A really interesting idea from one of the brilliant orgtheorists, which I wish I had time to think about a bit more fully, but don’t right now. Seems esp. relevant to the early 19th century, when the American federal state, was largely contractors.
Image cite: Max Klingensmith, “Chain Linkage,” Flickr, CC License
Or, Won’t Anyone Please Think of the commodities!
So today, in my endless backpacking through the archives of early Sino-American relations, I ran across this passage in a despatch from the U.S. diplomatic representative to China, the notoriously obstreperous Humphrey Marshall:
When I look upon this noble country and especially upon its magnificent inland water communications, its broad valleys, and the vast productive capacity of its fertile plains, I can but deplore the woeful, criminal mismanagement, by a feeble despotism, of its abundant resources. I am convinced that there never has been in the history of Mankind a worse government than that which for some years past has afflicted China. It is without strength, spirit, or capacity – too vain to learn wisdom – too ignorant to behold its own gross want of intelligence. It sits, an incubus on the spirit and upon the prosperity of the people. But, really I see very little to prefer in those who essay its overthrow. It would be very important to the United States, indeed to the world, could western powers unite in sending their diplomatists to Peking, or to Nanking and so, by a timely interference, put an end to this internal strife which promises nothing half so much as the utter paralysis of trade for years to come. [emph added]
~Humphrey Marshall, U.S. Commissioner to China, to the William L. Marcy, Secretary of State, 21 June 1853
This is a fairly standard-for-the-time diatribe from a Westerner about China, and certainly one that is repeated often in the State Department’s China mission archives. Typical, too, in its callousness. And finally, it reiterates the themes so prominent in that American genre of justification for conquests, a popular series that had recently reached new heights (see: Invasión Estadounidense de México, 1846-1848).
(Oh, and Marshall’s comment about “those who essay its overthrow” is a reference to the recently begun Taiping rebellion, headquartered at Nanking (Nanjing). He feels it necessary to indicate that the rebels are not the lesser evil because many Western missionaries in China – especially Americans – at this point regarded the Christian-influenced mysticism of the Taiping as an indication that Christianity was finally sweeping China, and that their work had not, in fact, been for naught.)
Thus, the passage is in some (okay, many) ways unremarkable. But what I find interesting about it is how Marshall – a Kentucky Whig and staunch supporter of the plantation system in the U.S. – was able to shift the physiocratic “producer” rhetoric ( “broad valleys … and … fertile plains” ) in the service of a very different, if no less exploitative, kind of imperial conquest: one that focused on commerce.
That may not seem all that remarkable (and perhaps it isn’t — one needs markets to export the products of a plantation system, after all), but it nonetheless strikes my ear as profoundly unusual for a politician from anywhere but New York or Boston (and perhaps Philadelphia) to be expressing this kind of focus on cooperative international action in pursuit of commercial empire. Marshall’s other despatches indicate that he was a man profoundly concerned — at least while minister to China — with furthering American commerce all over the world, by force, if necessary.
(He was, in fact, continually asking Washington for a fleet of armed steamboats under his direct command, with which to patrol Chinese waters for pirates, and to threaten Qing officials. Commodore Perry had taken all the good ships to bully Japan with, you see.)
Incidentally, though the “internal strife” Marshall mentions — the Taiping Rebellion – did impede trade somewhat, it also claimed the lives of some 20 to 30 million people over the next ten years, making it by far the deadliest civil war in the nineteenth century, and perhaps ever (ours “only” killed around 620,000 and we’re still talking about it). This in a conflict largely, though not exclusively, fought using small arms. The rest of the world had to wait until the mid-twentieth century (WWII: 40-72 million) to surpass such a ghoulish mark, and then we had lots more toys to play with.
But yes, trade was impacted.
Image cite: Schilling 2, “What a waste, and so sweet,” Flickr, CC License
Filed under: Uncategorized
William Gladstone, on the (First) Opium war:
I am not competent to judge how long this war may last, nor how protracted may be its operations but this I can say, that a war more unjust in origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover the country with disgrace, I do not know and have not read of.
~as quoted in John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (1911), 226.
Ulysees S. Grant, on the Mexican War:
… one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.
~Ulysses S. Grant, Personal memoirs of U. S. Grant (1895), I:32
The irony (unsurprising reality?) here is that plenty of commentators in the U.S. decried the Opium war — in precisely Gladstone’s terms — but many of those same voices were raised just a few years later to call for Mexican territory and blood.
It occurs to me that unjust wars are all alike, yet still each unjust in its own way (cf. Tolstoy, families).
Filed under: Uncategorized
Lots of people find this blog by searching for “bacon”
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Letterhead, Whigs, William Henry Harrison
Or, Goodness that looks expensive and full of republican virtue
So, in digging through various (endless) letters about the election of 1840, I’ve come across a couple of examples of extreme dedication to the Whig cause: William Henry Harrison letterhead.
Here’s one of a coin apparently minted in Harrison’s honor (click to embiggen):
Here’s one with WHH in profile, with a vignette at his famous log cabin, complete with hard cider (click to embiggen):
How’s that for showing your dedication to the cause, eh? Buying reams of stuff stamped with ‘Ole Tip’s noble schnoz?
Sad thing is, these guys were probably stuck with it well after WHH’s untimely demise. Hopefully they had the tact not to use it …
I don’t know if the Democrats had similar stuff, though I’d expect so (but with, y’know, the Little Magician on it).
