Jun

1

An excellent book is The Wool Trade in English Medieval History by Eileen Power, the "most interesting woman" of the 1930s. Shows that they counted every aspect of the sheep better than technicians do their counting today. Also shows that the entire English Constitution devolved from the free markets of the pastoral shepherds and the exporters versus the merchants of wool in medieval times.

The wool entrepreneurs developed into the middle class of England from whom the industrial revolution, the constitution,and prosperity evolved. A typical passage:

In these baillifs accounts, the long rond of the shepherd's year unrolls itself like on of those horizontal Chinese scrolls that have taken one from spring to winter by the time the eye has traveled along their length". In the manorial roles sheep were carefully divided into ewes, wethers and yearlings, lambs, and there was set down the number with which the reeve started the year, the numbers added by purchase or natural increase, lost by disease, sold or given in tithes, (the number that disgraced themselves by not giving progeny) and the number left at Christmas when the account was drawn up. Of course every purchase was accounted for, and balanced with the ending sales to wholesales.

A great admirer of Eileen Power to whom I owe the introduction to this great scholar is Tracy Quan   whose books and persona are equally scholarly and interesting.

Stefan Jovanovich adds: 

Amazon has a free Kindle edition of Power's best seller from the 1920s: "Medieval People"

(Caution: Historical Hobby Horse in Use) Power was a colleague of Norman Angell, Ramsay MacDonald and C. P. Trevelyan in the Union of Democratic Control - the last "pacifist" organization that was not simply a front for the Comintern.

What Angell wrote about the Grand Illusion of Imperialism is still true and is worth considering in light of recent efforts to find a new cause of war in the South China Sea:

"wealth in the economically civilized world is founded upon credit and commercial contract (these being the outgrowth of an economic interdependence due to the increasing division of labour and greatly developed communication). If credit and commercial contract are tampered with in an attempt at confiscation, the credit-dependent wealth is undermined, and its collapse involves that of the conqueror; so that if conquest is not to be self-injurious it must respect the enemy's property, in which case it becomes economically futile. Thus the wealth of conquered territory remains in the hands of the population of such territory. When Germany annexed Alsace, no individual German secured a single mark's worth of Alsatian property as the spoils of war. Conquest in the modern world is a process of multiplying by x, and then obtaining the original figure by dividing by x. For a modern nation to add to its territory no more adds to the wealth of the people of such nation than it would add to the wealth of Londoners if the City of London were to annex the county of Hertford."

Angell was equally prescient about the Balkan Wars and their danger:

"The fundamental causes of this war are economic in the narrower, as well as in the larger sense of the term; in the first because conquest was the Turk's only trade -he desired to live out of taxes wrung from a conquered people, to exploit them as a means of livelihood, and this conception was at the bottom of most of Turkish mis-government…..

"If European statecraft had not been animated by false conceptions, largely economic in origin, based upon a belief in the necessary rivalry of states, the advantages of preponderant force and conquest, the Western nations could have composed their quarrels and ended the abominations of the Balkan peninsula long ago-even in the opinion of the Times. And it is our own false statecraft-that of Great Britain-which has a large part of the responsibility for this failure of European civilization. It has caused us to sustain the Turk in Europe, to fight a great and popular war with that aim (he is referring to Crimea), and led us into treaties which had they been kept, would have obliged us to fight to-day on the side of the Turk against the Balkan States"


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  1. gpc on June 3, 2015 10:07 am

    Stefan,

    I will play Captain Obvious here–at the risk of being obtuse, are you celebrating or denigrating Angell’s insights? If the former, how much can you trust the acumen of one who had the misfortune to argue on the verge of WWI that trade and economic interdependence had rendered war obsolete? Or is my understanding of Angell superficial and merely based on “what everyone knows” — are there worthy insights to be gleaned from reading him in the original?

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