Let us take stock of where we are. Drawing upon the Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan, I have tried to show that we can arrive at an objective and social scientific understanding of the modern world-system through personal encounter with the social movements formed by the peoples of the Third World (see “Personal Encounter” 7/25/2013 and “Cross-horizon encounter” 7/26/2013).  And in a number of posts on the development of the world-system, I have tried to formulate the key insights that emerge through such encounter, insights that enable us to understand that the European conquest and peripheralization of vast regions of the world from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries established the foundation for the present neocolonial world-system.  We who pertain to the peoples of the North, even though we materially benefit from global neocolonial structures, can arrive at this objective understanding, if we have the discipline to engage in sustained encounter, and if we are committed to understanding and not to the defense of particular interests.

      Conquest is not new in human history.  When humans developed food production in seven different regions of the world from 10,000 to 5,000 years ago, the foundation was established for economic and cultural development through the conquest of neighboring lands and peoples. 

     Food production had definite advantages over foraging.  By increasing both the quantity and the reliability of the food supply, it made possible the emergence of social classes not directly involved in food production and able to devote themselves to a wide variety of occupations.  Humans began to live in vibrant cities with markets, streets, temples, and palaces.  They developed crafts such as spinning, weaving, brick making, and metallurgy.  They invented new technologies.  They expanded trade and commerce.  They created sculpture, mural art, writing systems, weights, measures, mathematics, and new forms of political and social organization.

     But there also were clear disadvantages to food production.  It led to social inequality and to systems of social stratification that constructed ideological legitimations of inequality.  Generally those at the bottom were incorporated into the system through conquest.  The conquered peoples formed a lower class of forced laborers that originated from different cultures, ethnic groups, and/or nations.  In this way, class inequality and ethnic/national/“racial” domination have been intertwined throughout the history of domination in human societies.   Meanwhile, alongside class/ethnic domination, gender domination emerged as an important social phenomenon in the system of social stratification, and patriarchal ideologies justifying the exclusion and devaluation of women came into being.  And food production has environmental consequences.  It kills the diverse species of trees and plants of the natural environment, and renders the environment unlivable for a wide variety of animal species. 

     And so for 10,000 years our species has developed with an intertwined duality: on the one hand, great achievements in production, science, technology, literature, art, and music; and on the other hand, structures of domination that devalue the majority of people and that degrade the environment.  But the achievements could not have been attained without the domination, because domination established the material conditions necessary for the development of human resources.  Thus we see that domination and development are dialectically related: domination makes possible development, which in turn makes possible further domination.  Let us give name to this central human tendency since the agricultural revolution:  the dialectic of domination and development. 

     In the modern era, the dialectic of domination and development would reach an advanced expression.  Beginning with the sixteenth century Spanish conquest of America, the tendency for more powerful human groups to dominate other human populations became global.  By the beginning of the twentieth century, European nations had conquered nearly all of the American continents as well as most of Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.  Global structures of domination emerged, far surpassing in scope and depth the structures of domination of the earlier empires.  Vast regions of the world became obligated to provide cheap raw materials to feed the consuming and manufacturing center of the world-economy.  With their traditional manufacturing destroyed, the conquered regions were compelled to purchase the goods of the manufacturing center.  Unprecedented levels of human inequality emerged.  The new international elite became far more wealthy and powerful than the elites of the earlier empires that were based on merely regional domination and a primarily agricultural economy.  Meanwhile, the masses of the vast peripheral regions, whose ancestors had formed in many cases great civilizations, were reduced to forced and cheap laborers amidst social conditions of underdevelopment and widespread poverty.

     These modern global structures of domination have become institutionalized in a modern world-economy characterized by a geographical division of labor between core and periphery.  The periphery assumes the economic function of exporting raw materials, on a base of forced and cheap labor, to the core.  The core functions as the manufacturing center, on a base of relatively high wages.  This function has enabled the core to become consuming societies with advanced forms of manufacturing, technology, and science.  There has emerged an unequal exchange between the high priced manufactured goods of the core and cheap raw materials of the periphery, an unequal exchange that is central to the exploitative core-peripheral relation.  

     At the same time, the modern global structures of domination have established the conditions that make possible their negation, in that modern social conditions have provided fertile ground for social movements that envision human liberation from structures of domination. 

     Thus far, we have sought to understand the historic development of modern structures of colonial domination that established the foundation for the present neocolonial world-system.  In subsequent posts, we will seek to understand the historic development of movements that seek human liberation, movements that make evident the essential dignity of our species.

 

References

Diamond, Jared.  1999.  Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.  New York: W.W. Norton.

Kottak, Conrad Phillip.  2011.  Anthropology:  The Exploration of Human Diversity, Fourteenth Edition.  Boston:  McGraw-Hill.

Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, food production, agricultural revolution, Jared Diamond

     The first modern nation-states were Spain, England and France, and they emerged as nation-states during the fifteenth century.  They subsequently became the central actors in the European domination of the world unfolding from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries.

     Cuban political scientist Armando Cristóbal Pérez (2008) has analyzed the origin and development of the nation-state.  He maintains that modern states differ from pre-modern states, in that pre-modern states attained cohesion through religion, whereas modern nation-states attain cohesion through social and ethnic identity.   During European feudalism, he notes, new nationalities were continually emerging, as a result of invasions and conquests.  Nationalities have self-consciousness, rooted in an “us-them” distinction, and based on a historic memory of the community.  Nationalities have a common language and a unique written literature, and intellectuals play an active role in their formation.  When national self-consciousness aspires to develop organizations, including a state, that encompasses the national territory, the stage is set for the formation of a nation-state.  A nation-state involves a nationality that has a state, and a state that represents the interests of the nationality, or more precisely, the dominant class that pretends to represent the nationality.

     We have seen that the emergence of commerce and cities from the period of the tenth to the fifteenth centuries was undermining the material foundation of European feudalism (see “European feudalism” 8/13/2013).  The monarchs seized the possibilities inherent in this situation.  Supported by the most important members of the emerging urban commercial bourgeoisie, whose interests they promoted, the monarchs centralized the state, overcoming the fragmentation that had reduced their real power.  And they engaged in wars of conquest, establishing control over territories and forging new nationalities to coincide with the conquered territory.  
 
     The modern nation-state, therefore, originated from the decisive political action of the monarch, political action that sought territorial unity, expanding monarchial power and promoting economic development (as defined by the bourgeoisie) in opposition to the interests of an increasingly weak and ineffective class of feudal lords. In this transformation, the power of the Church had to be diminished, because the Church was integrally tied to feudalism.

     Thus emerged during the fifteenth century the modern nation-state, characterized by centralization, a defined political boundary that coincided with the cultural frontiers of nationality, a capital city, income taxes that are used to maintain a professional army and public functionaries, freedom of movement within boundaries, the promotion of the domestic market, and the separation of the monarchy and the Church.  Given the historic human tendency to attain development through conquest, the stage was set for the European domination of the world.

     In the forging of the nationality identity that is the base of the modern nation-state, conflict among the various emerging nation-states was central.  In the case of Spain, the Arab and Islamic invasions of the Iberian Peninsula from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries provoked a resistance among the various conquered Christian kingdoms, which gave impetus to tendencies toward the centralization and unification among the Christian Iberian kingdoms.  In France and England, tendencies toward political and linguistic unification were reinforced by the Hundred Years War of 1357-1453.  
 
     In eastern, central, and southern Europe, however, conflicts among emerging states did not lead to unification and centralization.  There were not natural geographic boundaries that reinforced ethnic and linguistic differences, as in the West.  As a result, Germany and Italy did not attain unification until the nineteenth century.  They entered the process of European colonial domination as latecomers, and their colonial empires were limited. Thus we see the importance of geographical factors as well as military, economic, and cultural factors in the formation of the modern nation-states that would become the central actors in the European colonial domination of the world.

     Above all, we must see that the peoples of Spain, England and France were neither culturally superior nor in some innate sense more intelligent.  They were typical actors in the ten thousand years old human process of conquest.  Particular factors, to some extent accidental, would make them winners for a period.  Other particular factors would facilitate that Spain would later fall, and England and France would continue to rise.  Still other particular factors would facilitate the rise as a global power of a new nation, the United States of
America.  And finally, various factors present today establish the condition that the continuation of the ancient human quest for domination will have the result that all will lose.


Bibliography

Cristóbal Pérez, Armando.  2008.  El Estado-Nación: Su Origen y Construcción.  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, feudalism, state, nation-state

     Seeking to understand the European conquest of the world that began in the sixteenth century, the Cuban political scientist and diplomat Armando Cristóbal Pérez (2008) analyzes the emergence of the modern nation-state in Europe.  

     The dynamics that gave rise to the modern nation-state began to express themselves during European feudalism, which Cristóbal dates from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, fragmentation and particularism emerged. Cities disappeared (except Florence, Venice, and Geneva, which were tied to commerce with Asia).  Monarchs had nominal power over what was essentially a rural territory.  In its fullest expression, feudalism involved the disappearance of the state, with its functions assumed by feudal lords. But this was never completely attained, because the centralized state existed over feudal-vassal relations and was not totally dissolved.  Nevertheless, manors were sovereign territories in many respects, governed by feudal lords who could emit money and declare war.  Monarchial power was more nominal than real.  On the religious-cultural plane, Christianity expanded; the power of the Church, centered in Rome, increased; and Latin emerged as an interstate language among elites.  
 
     The dynamics that undermined feudalism expressed themselves from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries.  There began to emerge what Cristóbal calls feudal re-urbanization.  The growth of commerce and industry created a class of free merchants and artisans, an incipient bourgeoisie that needed certain liberties, such as movement from place to place, the making of contracts, and the buying and selling of goods, which could not be exercised under feudal conditions of servitude.  The new cities emerging in feudal rural territories made evident the need for the transformation of feudalism.

     Immanuel Wallerstein interprets the feudal period in a somewhat different way.  He maintains that there was an expansion of European commerce in the period 1150-1300, but the period 1300-1450 was characterized by a decline in production, commerce and population.  By 1300, the population growth of Western Europe had surpassed its capacity to produce sufficient food, given its level of technology.  This led to food shortages, which gave rise to epidemics.  At the same time, the general crisis stimulated wars among states and peasant rebellions and revolts.  So this period, which Wallerstein calls the "crisis of feudalism," was characterized by decline in agricultural production, manufacturing, commerce and population and by wars, social conflict, famine, and epidemics (Wallerstein 974:17-27).   
 
     Let us combine these two interpretations.  Commerce and industry began to expand following the tenth century, laying the foundation for an urban-centered society based on commerce and industry.  But the development of the society in embryo was constrained by the structures of feudalism, provoking various problems and conflicts.  These dynamics were making evident to major political actors the need for a fundamental transformation of feudal structures.  
 
     The stage was thus set for decisive political action by monarchs, in alliance with the emerging commercial bourgeoisie, establishing the modern nation-state in the fifteenth century.  We will explore this in the next post.


References

Cristóbal Pérez, Armando.  2008.  El Estado-Nación: Su Origen y Construcción.  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

Wallerstein, Immanuel.  1974.  The Modern World System, Vol. I. New York:  Academic Press.  
 

Key words: Third World, revoluti on, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, Wallerstein, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, feudalism

     Jared Diamond maintains that the most advanced societies in terms of capacity for conquest have been those that were the earliest and most advanced in food production.  

     In contrast to hunting and gathering, food production makes possible a much larger population size and population density.  Since only a small minority of animal and plant species is edible, the conversion of land to the cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals means a significant increase in consumable calories per acre.  Moreover, the domestication of animals and their conversion into livestock: increases the availability of meat and milk and milk products; provides fertilizer, thus increasing crop production; and provides plow animals for agriculture.  In addition, food production permits permanent settlement, thus making possible a shortened birth interval as well as the storage of food surpluses.  
 
     Food production is an indispensable prerequisite for conquest.  In addition to the military advantages stemming from a large population size, the storage of food surpluses makes possible the support of a wide variety of full-time specialists, including monarchs, bureaucrats, professional soldiers, priests, and metalworkers, all of whom have important functions in wars of conquest.  And the domestication of animals facilitated that humans would obtain diseases from animals and would eventually evolve a degree of resistance to epidemic diseases, such as smallpox, measles, and influenza.  This was a major factor in the conquest by Europeans of the indigenous people of America and the Pacific Islands.

     Diamond maintains that neither more advanced cultural characteristics nor a higher level of  intelligence was the reason that some societies developed more advanced systems of food production.  He maintains that the decisive factors were environmental: climate change, decline in the availability of wild foods, increase in the availability of domesticable wild plants, and/or the availability of domesticable animal species.  These environmental factors made it necessary for human societies to turn from hunting and gathering to food production, if they were to survive.

     Food production emerged independently, without awareness of it having been developed elsewhere, in at least five areas of the world: Southwest Asia (also known as the Near East and the Fertile Crescent); China; Mesoamerica (central and southern Mexico and adjacent areas of Central America); the Andes Mountains of South America; and an area that today pertains to the eastern United States. There are four other areas (Sahel, West Africa, Ethiopia, and New Guinea) where food production may have emerged independently, but there is some possibility that they had contact with food producing societies.  These nine areas all developed food production in the period of 8500 B.C. to 2500 B.C.  They were thus societies with a capacity for conquest and for the development of empires and advanced civilizations.

     In addition to the development of food production independently, many societies have developed food production as a result of cultural diffusion.  This occurred in two early advanced civilizations: the Indus Valley region of the Indian subcontinent (7000 B.C.) and Egypt (6000 B.C.), both of which began to domesticate plants and animals that originally had been domesticated in the Fertile Crescent.  
 
     Food production makes possible conquest, and conquest is the foundation of empires and of great civilizations.  Conquest has been central to the human story for 10,000 years.  It would attain its fullest and most advanced expression in the modern era, with Spanish conquest of America and with English and French domination of vast regions of Africa and Asia.  Ultimately, human conquest would reach its limit, when in the middle of the twentieth century, the great conquering powers found that there were no more lands and peoples to conquer, placing the world-system in a profound and systemic crisis, and making necessary a shift to the creation of civilization on a foundation different from conquest, on a foundation of knowledge, mutual understanding, and solidarity among all peoples.  Such a shift would represent a change in human social and economic development as profound as the shift from hunting and gathering to food production.  And like the agricultural revolution, the turn to cooperation is necessary for human survival, and because of this, there is a reasonable possibility that it will occur.


Reference

Diamond, Jared.  1999.  Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.  New York: W.W. Norton.


 Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, Wallerstein, world-system, world-economy, conquest, food production, development, underdevelopment, guns germs steel, Jared Diamond

       Jared Diamond, Professor of Geography at UCLA, begins his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, with Yali´s question.  Yali was a local politician whom Diamond had befriended in New Guinea twenty-five years prior to writing the book, and his question was: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”  Diamond sees the question as one that can be generalized to the global inequalities that exist in the world today: Why do some nations and regions of the world have a high level of material goods, while others are lacking in the most basic material necessities?  His book can be seen as an effort to refute the racist explanations that, he maintains, are still prevalent, at least privately or subconsciously, in regions of material abundance.  Such racist explanations attribute inequalities to biological or innate differences in ability or intelligence.

     The premise of Diamond´s book is that inequality has emerged in human history primarily as a result of conquest, which enables some societies to expand their territory and take control over subjugated populations. So the question becomes, what enables some societies to conquer others?  
 
     Diamond maintains that the conquering societies in human history were large and politically centralized. Such societies were able to support specialists who are professional soldiers and who develop technologically advanced weapons, and they had a hierarchical political structure that is able to mobilize human resources in the cause of conquest.  In addition, the conquering societies had evolved a partial immunity to contagious diseases.  And they had horses, which Diamond describes as the Sherman tank of ancient warfare.  Diamond uses the phrase “guns, germs, and steel” as shorthand for these characteristics.

     Diamond applies this perspective to the conquest of the indigenous peoples of America by Spanish conquistadores.  Spanish weaponry was more advanced, principally with respect to their steel swords and steel armor, whereas the indigenous had not discovered iron, and their weapons were made of stone, bronze, or wood.  In addition, the indigenous were disadvantaged by the lack of horses, a situation that had occurred as a consequence of the fact that most large mammal species in America had become extinct thousands of years earlier, during the first human migrations to America.  Diamond also explains the impact of disease on the conquest of the indigenous peoples of America, a consequence of the greater evolution of natural immunities to infectious diseases among the populations of Europe, Asia, and Africa as against those of America.  In the case of the Inca, an epidemic of small pox had spread overland across South America as a result of contact with the Spanish in Panama and Columbia.  The epidemic had killed the Inca emperor and his designated heir, instigating a battle for control of the throne between two factions.  Thus the Spanish did not face a united Inca empire.  
 
     So the European settlers and conquerors were more advanced than the indigenous populations of America in terms of “guns, germs, and steel,” that is, in regard to those characteristics that are decisive in relation to conquest.

     In the next post, we will address the question: Why are some societies more advanced than others with respect to “guns, germs, and steel”?  
 

Reference

Diamond, Jared.  1999.  Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.  New York: W.W. Norton.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, Wallerstein, world-system, world-economy, conquest, development, underdevelopment, guns germs steel, Jared Diamond