The Cozens/Byrnes Merchants Networks Project - Book Section - Updated 5 August 2010

(This text of about 13,500 words is given without its footnotes which are difficult to place on a webpage of this design. We are gratful to Robert Griffiths (UK) for a permission to quote and for some additional information for the section on Dickens's novel, Great Expectations. Ed)

Chapter Two

History Wars, real Wars and moral wars (a cultural overview)

If you value the information posted here, and the project of this history website in general, you may like to consider making a donation to help reduce our production costs. It would be greatly appreciated. Options include: paying via PayPal which this website uses - Ed

One of the purposes of this book is to point to some problems in history-writing, sometimes problems with a very long career, and wax entertaining about them in a useful way; not necessarily authoritatively, but reliably.

There is nothing new about problems with history-writing. Historians endlessly discuss history as an endless conversation: how to research history, how to write and rewrite or review it, how to critique it. Historians and their readers are restless-minded people and History Wars are common. In India we will find recurrent disputes between Hindu versus Muslim historians and their findings. Since about 1945, US historians have rewritten the history of The American Old West. (1) The role of Zionism in Israeli life since 1948 is lately a heated topic. The once-hot topic during The Cold War, Communism, has cooled considerably, except in China, where a history war has bloomed as the government strives to present a “correct line” in propaganda and “history” (including historical drama) which emphasizes party achievements and the need for domestic stability. (2)

By September 2009, an earlier equation by a Russian parliamentarian of Stalin (as a totalitarian) with Hitler (as a totalitarian) was causing argument about the redecoration of a Moscow railway station. Meanwhile, newspapers by 2009-2010 told us that a “cultural rift threatens to rip Belgium apart” since the Flemish and the Walloons get along so badly. (3) Australians before 2010 had been conducting prolonged history wars,which were cultural horror shows where ideologized name-calling replaced discussion of historical factuality about the treatment of indigenous people (Aboriginals) on the Australian frontiers. What and how Australians should feel about the past in a post-pioneering era? The actual historical problems in question could have been easily solved with a few well-done website pages, albeit long ones.

We find that in any society, history wars tend to reveal far more ignorance about history than knowledge or wisdom. So, popular history. Many people find serious history writing to be tedious, boring. History warriors try to convince us otherwise, mostly by moralizing and ideologizing, as distinct from informing. Oddly enough, history wars tend to be conducted in print media, and rage mostly over printed texts. Films are mentioned relatively seldom. One wonders if this renders a print-media history war rather assymmetric?

Reflecting on the ways of economists versus those of film scriptwriters, we went back to rewriting our book, wondering afresh at the sorry, serial and surreal disconnects between Economics, and the findings of Economic History. After the Global Financial Crash (GFC) of late 2008, even by early 2009, it seemed that Economics is rather like the study of Medicine without the associated study of disease, heroically assuming perpetual wellness, apart from the effects of the occasional accident. Economists seem rather dedicated to not observing that making a living is a highly social activity, that cultures (and economies, and outcomes) differ in ambiguous ways that ambiguity-avoiders find downright offensive; that “human nature” itself has a confusing number of definitions, none of which quite fit the case.

Otherwise, Metaphors …

So we considered the a list of metaphors (given below) often used by historians to refer to business life in illustrative ways, that is, ways which are somewhat detached from the dry terminology often used to describe “economic behaviour”. (4)

Follows a list of metaphors commonly encountered in economic histories. The list has been compiled as we try to forge ahead, linking merchants in networks, linking networks to networks. Perhaps we might find something more organic than other historians have found?

Metaphor traps for economists and economic historians?

Various tensions exist between assumptions used by economists (about “economic man”) and the findings of economic historians (about real people). Some of the tensions can be due to findings made, sometimes by the action of different sorts of historical imagination. There is no need to read the metaphors as being presented in any particular order. But across centuries, as used by writers, the metaphors recur all too often, and often in bewildering permutations and combinations.

(Metaphor 1) Darwinian survival of the fittest: It’s a jungle out there! Possibly, given older histories of Mercantilism, and post-1945 de-colonisation, today’s questions of developed/under-developed economies smack too much of this metaphor? “Might is right” is the least-likable version of this metaphor.

(Metaphor 2) Family networks: Regarding businesses mostly owned and operated by families only, and sub-varieties thereof. Sometimes treated in terms of micro-studies (?). A variant of ethnic networks.

(Metaphor 3) Apocalypse/Apocalypticism: Malthusian scenarios of The Ride of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse – effects of epidemic disease, pestilence, famine, invasion, earthquake, volcanic eruption, problems various due to excess population. These scenarios are sometimes used to over-dramatise the problems faced by intrepid merchants.

(Metaphor 5) Ethnic networks: from the early eighteenth century arose what become known as “the Huguenot internationale”, an ethnic network of French Protestants who'd fled France due to religious persecution. At the worst end of the ethnic networks genre we find accusations about, say, “Jewish money-lenders”, and their ilk, so beloved of conspiracy theorists, of course. Here, even a play by Shakespeare, telling us about Shylock, can seem contentious. Here, any variation on considerations of merchants who share a particular ethnic/cultural background. A worst-case scenario here in recent years, we regret to say, would be Rwanda, Africa. The modern world has been bizarrely slow to punish the ringleaders of the mass-murderous Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. A medium-worse case appears with discussion of the US Mafia (of Italian origins).

(Metaphor 6), Eco-economic history: Regarding climate change, or very large regions, eg., the Monsoon Zone. Relatively rare but likely to be popularized in the future. For historians who are not scientists, or climatologists, as most are not, this is a more-than-challenging area of work for the future. Present-day challenges from global warming may well demand that such work is done!

(Metaphor 7), The Medical Model: Of economic health, growth, maturity, decline, health versus disease, panaceas, support mechanisms, curative measures, underlying causes of problems, self-destructive behaviour, sector problems (eg, sub-metaphors such as “infection”, “paralysis”, “contamination”) in an otherwise healthy or a potentially-healthy body. Here, what has happened in modern Zimbabwe beggars both belief and description.

(Metaphor 8) The Plunder Model: Re highly aggressive growth in markets earlier moribund, rapid business growth due to new technology quickly overtaking, so that new models, new products, new styles of operation, virtually plunder their competition, Plunder, as with the British as often seen in India. Dispossession of indigenous peoples (plunder of land). Plunder also in the model of “the barbarians”; Ghengis Khan’s hordes engaged in plunder, so did the Vikings before them. In history, anywhere it was said that “the only good Injun is a dead Injun”, does the economic historian risk becoming an apologist for, quite frankly, genocide? (One senior British officer in the early days of the American Revolution wished to see not just a disciplinary thrashing of the rebels, but their extirpation.)

(Metaphor 9), Numbers games: The often-dry material found using trade statistics, discussions of reams of regulations; use of tax-based or maths-based models. Also, discussion about government intervention, or not; arguments about free trade. Analysis of revenue streams. Numbers games with money/investments, as with derivatives, etc, which in the USA led to the bankruptcy of 150-year-old investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008 as a prelude to a major financial crash, worldwide. (5)

(Metaphor 10), Scientific Progress: New forms of production or distribution due basically to scientific inquiry and technological innovation. In terms of the oft-noted linkages between war efforts and the innovative use of new technology, throughout history, this metaphor can easily re-morph as a business of re-powering a “mains circuit cable”. Economic historians can too-easily angst about questions of the speed or slowness, the rate of uptake of technology transfer (in history, particularly with the cases of India and China, both ancient cultures). We might observe today, where radical Moslem activists cause mayhem, they are often using elements of modern technology in quite stunning ways, while academics bemoan the so-called medieval character of the religion being espoused. We observe that peoples will use technologies that will best suit their ways of life, and will ignore the behests of (often) self-interested Europeans who fail to perceive their own tendencies to domination and violence. Science and technology don't promote hypocrisy, people do.

(Metaphor 11), Religious Prescription: Discussion of business ethics and behaviour as religion-based, especially religion of the more fundamentalist variety, see re, eg, in USA, “the gospel of prosperity” currently popular in US Protestant Christian circles, lately being exported to Australia. Discussions of cultural models. Discussions of the value of “values”. Today, much talk has been of “Asian values” in East Asian business success (“tiger economies:), or the rage of radical Islamists (relating to the problems of the Umma of Islam). Deepak Lal’s book cited here is partly dominated by this metaphor.

(Metaphor 12), Booms and Busts: With which everyone is familiar (sometimes from dismal personal experience). Trade cycles? The newspaper finance-page vocabularies used to refer to either booms or busts seem to suffer equally from a reliance on notions of growth, which evidently is seen as seamlessly desirable, whether or not it is actually achievable or sustainable.

(Metaphor 13), Heresies: Capitalism versus Communism and Socialism. Marxism. Notions of Social Credit. Arguments about definitions of currency: bimetallism, use of a gold standard or not, etc. Flotations of national currencies. Today, perhaps, whether funds for Internet transactions could or should be regarded as “borderless cash”, ie, any de-nationalised form of money, where transactions might be less than subject to taxation by governments. Problems of moral legitimacy re money-laundering/illicit transactions. Debate on government dependence on revenue from gambling. Clashes between so-called economic progress versus so-called cultural integrity. In recent decades, has globalisation, promoted from the USA in overhyped ways, of which Canadians have been beware, been a metaphor simply too large to be believable, or useful?

(Metaphor 14), Regionalism: A very broad category which could cover individual ports servicing a distinct region to entire groups of nation states. (Eg, The Atlantic Community,The EU.) (6) In South East Asia after 1786, why did Singapore rise as an entrepot and Penang basically fade away? Modern views on climate change, or global warming, seem set to dictate renewed historical interest in the careers of regions. And in histories of periods of climate change.

(Metaphor 15) The Outdated: References to older practices now outmoded, reference to the now partly-irrelevant; the obverse of which is excessive optimism about the future (sometimes called “neophilia”). These sorts of metaphors have often affected older writing on merchants and networks, and so may need attention from the historiographer. Discussion of “the outdated” may well become more apparent if problems due to climate change worsen as the Twenty First Century proceeds. (7)

And from May 2010 we can report a strange matter with Metaphors 9, 12 and 15, as afterthoughts on the 2008 GFC. Something happened, and it had to do with computer systems used world-wide.

Item: And we paraphrase from Sydney Morning Herald business pages 29-30 May 2010. Article, Living on the Edge by John Authers, author of The Fearful Rise of Markets, from FT Press, 2010. (8) Early in March 2007, Authers realised that two of the world's [stock exchange] markets held each other in a tight and deadly embrace. A week earlier, the world had "the Shanghai surprise", when Shanghai fell 9 per cent and the world markets had a day of global turmoil. That same afternoon in New York, the Dow Jones dropped two per cent in only minutes. Authers in New York that day checked the Bloomberg terminal. One screen of it showed minute-by-minute activity of the S&P500, the US stockmarket's main index. Then he looked at a minute-by-minute chart of the Japanese yen against the US dollar. The first chart looked the same as the second, he thought he'd made a mistake. Then he found that each time the S&P rose, the US dollar rose against the yen, and vice versa. What was going on? A correlation? But he felt that till this day of Shanghai Surprise, the yen and S&P had always moved completely independently. Both markets are quite liquid, and are operated for different reasons by quite different people. It seems that statisticians since have found that any move in the S&P can explain 40 per cent of moves of the yen, and vice versa. If these two markets have nothing in common, maybe neither is being priced efficiently? Or, are they being driven by the same investors using the same floods of speculative money?

It is now known that the Shanghai Surprise marked the start of the worst global financial crisis (2008) in 80 years. And if currencies are driven up and down by speculation, this skews the terms of world trade(s). If markets move in unison, risk management is more difficult. And so in one week of October 2008, globally, retirement assets took a hit of 20 per cent. By the end of 2009, Authers was finding that markets were becoming more tightly linked. Links with the prices of commodities and credit remained perversely tight. Markets are over-inflated. Authers gives regular potted media/TV interviews on such subjects, so he got a lot of feedback from his viewers. He thinks investment bubbles are rooted in human psychology, and that markets are driven by a mix of greed and fear. Greed swamps fear at least once every generation. So then Authers considers the history of bubbles. Holland's tulip mania (1637). The South Sea Bubble (1720). The Mississippi Bubble in France (about 1720). Later a bubble in English canals. Britain's Victorian times saw a bubble in US railway stocks. In the 1920s came a US bubble led by excitement about motor cars, The Great Depression depressed it. The US had a gold bubble in 1980. Mexican and Latin American debt burst in 1982 and in 1994. (There was a US 1987 stocks-crash problem this writer doesn't mention.) In 1990, Japanese stocks peaked and fell. In 1997, Asian tiger economies were suddenly in trouble. Came the 2000 dot.com boom/bust. Then the 2006-2008 GFC, associated with a US housing bubble, mortgage backed bonds fell. A bubble in Chinese stocks burst in 2007. A 2008 US crash hit the stocks of oil, industrial, foodstuffs, Latin American stocks, Russian, Indian, various currency anomalies. But in 2009 was one of the fastest rallies in history.

News from the real world cannot explain all this. Nor can greed. (Authers says he assumes that greed is a constant, so it won't vary; but we feel, the effects of greed can vary in all sorts of ways, including in gradations of willingness to engage in "rational" risk management or not). In any case, Authers wonders if somehow, fear hasn't been stripped out of equations and/or investors' decisions. (The psychologist might wonder how if fear and caution are removed from (real life, biological) herding behaviours, if animals will start behaving unrealistically and so fall into unexpected sets of dangers!) Authers boils it all down to five main points. (1) Use of other people's money by speculators (2) Herding behaviours (3) Safety in numbers, re use of computerised mathematical models that conjure overconfidence (or give an illusion that risk is less). (4) Moral hazard (governments fail to regulate banks adequately) (5) Rise of markets and the fall of banks. Investor specialisation broke down and anyone with a computer could "buy and sell stocks".

All sorts of markets which had been segregated (including for currencies, or credit) became interchangeable. If/when markets are injected with money or credit, risky assets can shoot up simultaneously and form bubbles (irrational exuberance?). This happened outside of the control of banks (which are controlled in their turn by central banks). To stave off feelings of being sidelined, banks engaged in more speculative excess. Thus lack of government control had two wings. Lack of oversight of banks. Lack of oversight of speculation(s) which had nothing to do with banks, or with governments either.

And we do know, that governments get annoyed when speculators bet against their currencies, so George Soros once did it to the UK just to reveal that it was possible to do so! All of which from Authers seems a good analysis, rather clearer and crisper, closer to the mark than Niall Ferguson's more academic view in The Ascent of Money. It seems to put all the debates about into better perspective re issues such as: (a) too big to fail? versus and vis-a-vis the use of stimulus packages (b) should governments all engage in more regulation of banks? (c) what about excess speculations?

But what it is little discussed is the place and role and speed of the effects of computerisation in the spaces where markets became interchangeable, where banks have been sidelined (and so can't insulate). It seems that such effects are novel in the history of financial bubbles and booms /busts. Such effects seem to be outside the traditional purview of governments. What if such effects can also serve to replace normal investor fear /caution in the earlier-used equations? Will the results be as hard to understand as the problem areas? Broadly, we found from the late 2008 GFC, that commentators all agreed that everything was so complicated, no one actually understood it. Which was a complete surrender of further claim to “rationality” in Economics. The Shanghai Surprise seems partly at least to be an outcome of computer speed, or if we like, of unexpected efficiencies rising up in computer linkages. But the efficiencies of the computer operations don't necessarily mean efficiency in human or financial or trade terms. Whatever our opinions as they differ, there seems to be much experimentation needed with the computer systems carrying the world's financial systems.

Business cycles?

Writers such as Authers have tried to inject a new metaphor into economic history by way of referring to investor activity as a form of herd behaviour. If we accepted this outlook, “business cycles” would be seen as being better explained by psychology, or socio-biology. Economics would be left sadly behind. But there is also an important subset of the Religious Prescription/Morality Metaphor which arose in the late Twentieth Century: some call it, Moral Hazard. Bearing in mind that the 1987 stock market crash frightened governments and financiers, and shortly the world noted a major savings-and-loans scandal in the USA, to be followed in 2000 by an almost-comical world-wide dot.com boom (highly fanciful delusions were rampant about huge profits to be made from software innovations used on the Internet), to be followed by the spectre of a world-wide crash of financial systems in 2007-2008 into 2009. (9)

Three such major boom-bust problems arising in about 22 years, one ranged about a set of newly emergent technology (computers and the Internet) says something for any usefulness in timing business cycles – they now occur about every seven-and-a-half years. But in these 22 years, beliefs have changed about the human behaviours involved, and the metaphor of herd-behaviour took the field to explain the weirder mood changes of investors who'd earlier been assumed to be cooly rational.

A fresh theme was arising also, a rising concern with “the ethical investor”, who was closely followed by “the green investor”, who was ethical as well as concerned about the effects of human-induced climate change. As attitudes changed here, talk arose in TV documentary circles of “the psychopathic corporation”. It was noted that the corporation is a legal person. This legal person (directed by its directors, absurdly overpaid CEOs and senior executives) often behaved in an amoral, anti or unsocial way, and displayed no conscience, as with a sociopath. And so the ethical investor impotently confronted the allegedly sociopathic personality traits of corporations. One might say that after scepticism from the early 1970s was first expressed internationally about “the limits to growth”, an attitudinal sea-change slowly occurred which no economic historian should have ignored. But we certainly refrain here from prognosticating about what ravages climate change may or may not wreak on The History of Economic Thought.

And not surprisingly, any lengthy treatment of merchants’ lives, across centuries, will meet all such metaphors, as they have occurred to the minds of writers of all breeds of history. Economists might well assume things heroically as they see fit; economic historians are morally and methodologically obliged to look at losers as well as winners. Less heroic, but far more realistic. Most people are not heroes and most economists are also not heroes.

Maritime history and international trade

The periods we treat displayed many varieties of capitalism. Including “gentlemanly capitalism”, a subset of Mercantilism which bowed to the cliche'd English exaltation of affluent country living, the status of which motivated many British merchants. (10). Since Mercantilism ruled the periods we treat, we provide a Wikipedia definition of Mercantilism - as a post-feudal (1500-1800s) “economic theory often regarded as a form of economic nationalism that holds that the prosperity of a nation is dependent upon its supply of capital, and that the global volume of international trade is “unchangeable”. Economic assets, or “capital” are represented by bullion (gold, silver and trade value) held by the state, which is best increased through a positive balance of trade with other national (exports minus imports). The theory assumes that wealth and monetary assets are identical. Mercantilism suggests that the ruling government should advance these goals by playing a protectionist role in the economy by encouraging exports and discouraging imports, notably through the use of tariffs and subsidies. The theory dominated Western European economic politics from the 16th to the late-18th Century. ... Mercantilism encouraged the many inter-European wars of the period and fuelled European expansion and imperialism both in Europe and throughout the rest of the world until the 19th Century or early 20th Century.”

Ferguson treats the rise of purely financial capitalism since 1720 in his useful overview. (11) We refrain from discussing improvements in accounting procedures, but we feel obliged to remind the reader that there has long been a distinction to be made between commodities handled by land or on water. For best profitability, ships (and merchant trains on land, as on The Silk Road) handled commodities that were low in weight, high in value. Landlubbers tended to transport and exchange bulkier, less specific, more unwieldy commodities. (12) And with economic history, it's rather as though too many definitions of capitalism have been provided by landlubbers. Regarding mercantilist times, for example, if international trade and a nation's commercial fleets are ignored, strange things will happen to discussions of a nation's use of bullion, and so, its banking sectors. Whereas, the idea of people setting off on a treasure hunt is as old as time. What about movies about treasure hunts?

The ways of scriptwriters

Is there any use at this point in reflecting on popular history, beginning, say, with a film masterpiece. The Mission (1986) which treats the international/local implications of rivalry between Portugal and Spain over South American territory. They were also Catholic European powers bowing to Papal authority in the matter of a division of the globe into spheres of influence, due to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. In South America, the issues were complex, ranging from bowing to Papal pressure, resentment of Jesuits, colonialists' contempt for religious missionary work with natives, and the institutionalisation of slavery. The result? Europeans fought it out amongst themselves, the indigenous people suffered greatly, the juggernaut of European colonialism moved on. What this masterpiece with its unforgettable music has no need to say, is that Europe's Protestant powers felt not the slightest obligation to observe Papal pronouncements on the distribution of world resources, and did what they thought fit. And that the rest is history.

Leading to ... the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), starring Russell Crowe, a joy for any maritime history buff. A scientist however might take issue with the film's sub-plot about evolution, where in what seems to be the Galapagos Islands, the ship's doctor imparts his hobby of naturalism to a bright young crew member. It seems, the doctor's thoughts pre-empt some of the work of Charles Darwin. So we find that the requirements of film drama often sideline historical factuality. There is little point in historians complaining, especially if they enjoy a good film.

Lawrence of Arabia (starring Peter O'Toole) is regarded as poor history, but a grand spectacle, a grand movie. The noted movie of the 1945 Normandy invasion of Nazi-occupied France, The Longest Day, is quite good, but overlooks the question of how many French civilians died during the early manouvres.

Ideal for consideration here is an excellent French TV-movie series, The Accursed Kings – in which appears a cleverly-scripted Lombard banker, cynically wise, shrewd, world-weary, as trapped by his always-scheming creditors in an absurd French economy as they are trapped in debt to him.

Situation: The Templars / Jacques de Molay as sometime royal bankers have annoyed King Philip of France by denying him further credit for his usual sorts of activities. Enraged, Phillip destroys their Order. In the first movie, Gerard Depardieu stars as Jacques de Molay, the Templars leader who is to be burned at the stake by the profoundly unapologetic king. While he is roasting, the unhappy de Molay curses the king's descendants. The curse works well, though with agonising slowness as machinations unfold.

After this brutal pillage, there appears on the scene a new "banker", a Lombard, who often needs to remind his French clients that he does have loyalty to his brother Lombard bankers. Meaning, that transnational considerations may prevail at times over the primacy of French affairs. At one point this Lombard banker debates a new transaction with a Catholic prelate who wants to pawn ecclesiastical treasure and expand his credit. He is driven to explaining to this clerical babe in the financial woods (now vacated by the disbanded Templars) what banking can be like ...

"You confess souls. I confess purses."

A wonderful way of putting it. An implication is that bankers have moral as well as prudential authority, power and responsibilities. The granting of credit to ruling parties is a complex business. Suffice to say, the Lombard's machinations need to be as convoluted as the affairs of his clients while the curse is played out. How much is any of this a dire conflict between the sacred and the profane? Or just a game with an appeal destined never to wane? The question is, how true is any it? If historians distrust bankers, then do historians distrust bankers partly because bankers' customers can be untrustworthy? Do economic historians need some guidance on such points? Should economic historians be loyal to Economics or to Social History? Economists might know a little about taxation systems, but who represents Economists? Politicians, bankers or historians?

Do historians distrust bankers perennially? In this book, we explore some aftermaths of the Seven Years War (1756-1763. Aspects of the American Revolution. Later chapters will argue that by the 1840s, lessons learned by Britain from the American Revolution help explain why Australia remains a monarchy and does not declare itself a republic. Before this argument appears, a good deal of popular and unpopular history has to flow under the bridges of consideration.

The scriptwriter of Jefferson in Paris (1995), a French-American production, has lived in the Caribbean, Ruth Prawer Jhaabvala. Set 17784-1789, with Nick Nolte playing the future president, Jefferson in Paris treats Jefferson's time as Plenipotentiary Minister in France for the new United States. Also, his relationship with his female slave, Sally Hemings, who accompanies him to Paris, with whom he allegedly later had children. At one point, Jefferson has to tell a group of French “investors” in the American Revolution that any outstanding debts will be paid only slowly, the US had very little money to hand. What the movie does not show, is anything regarding Jefferson-in-London. But about April 1786, Jefferson spent weeks in London, concluding treaties with various powers including the Barbary States (whose pirates had already been harassing American shipping coming newly into the Mediterranean). In London, Jefferson met with various pro-American merchants (including Benjamin and Samuel Vaughan), who were more or less, expatriate Patriots of the Revolution and British-resident friends of the new United States. (13)

By April 1786 a bruised British lobby group wished to see Jefferson about a running sore of Anglo-American relations, their old debts. They were The British Creditors, comprised of at least 200 merchants (individuals or firms whom we can name). Their sometime-chairman was one Duncan Campbell (1726-1803). Jefferson and Campbell duly met, but American historians have taken surprisingly little notice of the meeting (this is treated in detail in Chapter 12). Arguably, the debts amounted to between two and five million pounds sterling, depending if interest would be calculated. These were private debts resulting from transactions between American colonials and British merchants mostly resident in Britain. The problems were resolved by the Jay Treaty of 1794 which was widely deplored in America, especially by Jeffersonians. The creditors ended with little better than 40 per cent of what they had wanted. American historians still find it hard to cope with the topic while British historians say almost nothing. This, as an outcome of the most-famous revolution in human history! (14)

A great white whale

With film, it is easy to become preoccupied and diverted from a focus by Americana. The movie, Moby Dick (1996), set in 1851, was partly shot near Melbourne, presumably in Bass Strait. The Maori appearing as harpooner Queeq-queeg seems an excellent advertisement for New Zealand. Patrick Stewart makes a superbly-obsessed Captain Ahab. Whaling was an exploitative/pillaging industry, rising and falling according to its profitability, yet whaling literature is regularly drizzled with reports of the sadness of the whaling men who had to kill such magnificent animals. Captain Ahab turns that sadness into a mad, obsessive rage not so much about the whale that damaged him, but against what we might call, the random malice of the universe and its often unkind attitude to human affairs. In Herman Melville's long novel on Ahab's obsession are references that literary critics never go into – remarks about the great whaling house of the Enderbys of London. As maritime historians, we think there was something here that Herman Melville misunderstood, perhaps about his won family history, a confusing matter which bears on his grandfather (Thomas, probably a participant in the Boston Tea Party), and/or Capt. Thomas Melville, who sailed for Enderbys in the Third Fleet of convict ships to Australia. (Matters discussed in a later chapter.)

Economics and Americana

Film is not a good medium for illustrating types of capitalism across or between cultures, as the emphases of The Mission and its themes reveal implicitly. Film is an excellent medium for illustrating attitudes to capitalism and types of capitalism within cultures. But we need to notice more than movies which are basically dramas set within industries. If a descent is made into American pop culture – we find that the spirits of American moralism and self-criticism are hardly absent. (15) However, the ordinary business of making a living is indeed, too ordinary for any theme of “economic history” to prevail over drama. A movie for example about a family business which has stamina (as a business) might well be given over to themes of family dynamics or morality, sibling rivalry, revenge. Or the discovery of ways to stave off business threats. Or the need to cope with changing times and technology and any resulting arguments and personal stress.

American western movies have long been routinely concerned with the competitive, power-mongering aspects of land acquisition or land use (war with Indians, range wars between cattle herders and sheep herders). But it is interesting to wonder with film-writing around the world, what would happen if movies were made about topics such as Holland's extraordinary tulip mania, the South Sea Bubble. The creation and early years of the Dutch or English East India companies. Or the first three decades of the Australian Agricultural Company in eastern Australia – a company which still operates. British-India might well have inspired far more movies than it so far has and it remains disappointing that it hasn't. African scenarios have inspired far more movies with economic activity as a theme, notably on miner Cecil Rhodes, though two movies exist about well-known individual traders dealing with tribes. But despite today's political correctness, movies with an African location regrettably still tend to exotica.

Sadly for us, Louisiana Purchase is not the story of a singularly important American land deal, but a 1941 American comedy starring Bob Hope. Australian productions might well routinely refer to convict transportation to Australia, but we cannot recall ever noting the existence of an American or British movie mentioning a case of an English convict sent to North America before 1775.

Follows the result of a quick, roughly chronologised survey of film industry world-wide work on the topical areas of Economic History, mostly American. (And we note that United Artists began life as a film distribution consortium created by noted film artists to compete with other California-based movie studios, one co-founder being comedian Charlie Chaplin).

1610: We can't here dwell on an excellent movie, The New World (2005). The New World, which, once discovered, is soon changed forever: such is life for indigenous people when Europeans arrive, rather as in The Mission. In a context of economic history, The New World is not so much about economic activity, or early tobacco planting, or early English efforts at colonisation in Virginia, as about Indians' relationships with English whites, and given the issues, the film remains impressive, excellent, recommended, more so for the dignified and dignifying depiction of the Indian princess, Pocahontas, who seems far more impressive for not being sentimentalized.

1667: In 1940 appeared Hudson's Bay, about the founders of the British-Canadian Hudson's Bay Company (set 1667++). It's an expansive production but “lacks punch”. Lacks any sense of adventure/facing peril, is all just endless talk, one reviewer complains. It's mostly about French-Canadians with various English backing. (We know that the English eventually won.)

Aspects of the acquisition by whites of traditionally Indian land are given in The Last of The Mohicans (1992), set during the Seven Years War. One impression is of the pristine quality of the wilderness of the time, which one imagines was quite intoxicating to whites newly arriving from long-settled areas of England. Did the experience of such pristine purity of landscape and resources have anything to do – at an almost mystical level - with the developing and separatist outlook of colonists before the American Revolution? In conjunction with the religious views of the American colonists of the times, probably, yes.

1767: Slavery and its aftermaths of course are prime US themes. A noted anti-slavery polemic was Roots: The Saga of an American family, (1977) by Alex Haley. It was protested as plagiarised, regarded as non-scholarly, and finally removed from library history-book shelving and consigned to fiction, but it still made for a watchable mini-series in 1977. The saga began with Kunta Kinti, a Gambian man said to be transported to slavery in Maryland by 1767, owned by one John Waller.

Mandingo was a novel by Kyke Onstot, set on a southern USA plantation using slaves. It inspired two films, Mandingo (1975) and Drum (1976). Both movies are panned in a noted movie guide, Mangindo being a “trashy potboiler” and oversexed with it in an s&m kind of way. It is probable that aspects of plantation-owner attitudes are better given in the classic Gone With the Wind, though that ostensibly is more a social-history movie about a post-war reconstruction scenario.

1776++: The Patriot, (2000) starring Mel Gibson uses a southern plantation setting at the time of the American Revolution. The hero had made his reputation during the Seven Years War in the French and Indian wars, knows warfare too well, and is initially reluctant to fight the British. Said to be well-filmed, but somewhat cartoonish in script or depictions. One memorable scene concerns a fearsome duel between Gibson's character and an energetically sadistic British officer, who is actually based on Banastre Tarleton (of whom we hear more later). Another American movie on the American Revolution is Revolution (1985) featuring a trapper, with splendid production values but a “ludicrous script”. We should not forget here the wonderfully well-scripted and multi-awarded TV miniseries John Adams, (2008), based on David McCullough's respected biography (2001) of Adams, though the production is more about high politics than anything else, and a must-watch for anybody in any country.

1815: Desire Under The Elms (1958) is about “family hatred and greed for land”, “a brooding account” of 19th-Century New England farming life.

1815: House of Rothschild (1934) is “an entertaining chronicle of the famed banking family” at the time of the Napoleonic Wars (ending 1815), and it's surprising it has not been remade, rehashed, or revamped. (Niall Ferguson, a Scottish economic historian has recently written a book on Rothschilds drawn from original documents in possession of family members.)

1820++: The World Moves On (1934), a John Ford movie, also seems ripe for a remake. The story involved a family saga set in Louisiana, across 100 years (from say, 1820?), to the time of World War One, and finally, three brothers are heading businesses in England, France and Germany. It is, perhaps, a rare exercise in tracing American cultural attitudes to Americans acting as international traders and mostly resident abroad.

1834: Two Years Before the Mast, is based on work by American writer Richard Henry Dana Jnr, begins in 1834, and the movie (made 1946) is “badly-scripted” yet still an illustration of Dana's campaign for better treatment for sailors.

1839: The continued enslavement of blacks in the Americas north and south and Caribbean by 1839 is the topic of Amistad (1997), on release a somewhat over-hyped movie about the destiny and freedom of a Spanish slave ship's “cargo”. Amistad is also partly an attempt to put an American ex-president, the American system itself, in the dock about the legalities and morality of the issue of slavery as he (John Quincy Adams) finds himself drawn to the case. A patchy production but with worthy ideals.

1840: The Mountain Men (1980), set to the 1840s, starring Charlton Heston, is about hard-drinking American fur trappers, “a subpar western”, a flick that's a “tiresome, unnecessarily bloody, good guys vs Indians epic”. (A wikipedia page reports that America had about 3000 fur trappers working between 1820-1840, a major rendezvous point was in Wyoming.) The movie Jeremiah Johnson (1972) starring Robert Redford outlined the life of fur-trapper John “Liver-Eating” Johnson, (1824-1900), an independent operator, that is, free of the influence of the large fur trading companies. That is, an American individualist.

1840++: Great Expectations, the 1946 version, is said to be “one of the greatest movies ever made”. It's the tale of the outcomes of the unlikely situation where an ex-convict in Australia (Magwitch) has become wealthy in the sheep industry, and funded the education and upbringing into affluent life of a young Englishman, who is horrified about age 21 to discover the truth of the origins of his income. Dickens, publishing in 1860, used this as a way to illustrate the ills of the English social system. It becomes a grim tale, but the Australian-inspired part of the plot is dated roughly to 1840, (and in fact as a Depression lowered spirits in NSW) and outlines a difference in class systems, plus the presumably amazing economic opportunities provided by pastoralism in Australia, according to Dickens, who ironically had two sons who emigrated to Australia and did rather badly. Much more badly than Magwitch.

1864: The parlous situation of America's Indians was portrayed as early as 1925 with The Vanishing American, (“a modest B movie” set 1864 or later) about Navajo Indians afflicted with a corrupt government agent. It was remade in 1955. Based on a novel by Zane Grey.

1878: Trail of the Lonesome Pine was based on a novel and made in 1915, remade in 1936 with Henry Fonda, a classic story of feuding families (the Hatfield-McCoys 1878-1891 in the West Virginia-Kentucky backcountry) while the American West experiences change due to the advent of the railways. Added are the machinations of an aspiring mining magnate. Has lots of mindless violence and preaches peace and tolerance. (Maybe backwoods melodrama, but the first outdoor film made in full Technicolor.) Dakota (1945) is about what became a cliché scenario for westerns, a “pioneer railroad territory dispute”.

Any number of American westerns depict rapacious economic motives overtly or covertly in the contexts of conflict with Indians or Mexicans, mining, attempts to control entire towns in newly-declared states, the extension of railways, range wars (sheepherders versus cattle ranchers). The movie Tribute to a Bad Man (1956) starring James Cagney is a “frontier justice” western set in the 1870s, about a “resourceful, ruthless land baron using any means possible to retain his vast holdings,” and thus presumably remaining a thorn in the side of The American Dream as dreamt by us ordinary folks. It's set in Wyoming/Colorado, based on a short story by Jack Schaefer, Hanging's For The Lucky. (Schaefer wrote the western movie classic, Shane.) And for 1880 we have The Baron of Arizona (1950), about a landgrabbing villain who tries to lock up too much of Arizona's land. Until one day, or decade, arrives the American oil industry.

1902++: There Will Be Blood (2007) is a rendition of an Upton Sinclair novel, Oil! Starring Daniel Day Lewis, it might have been a sociological exploration of work in the early American oil industry, post-1902. It is attentive to the everyday risks to life and limb of the oil business, but it descends gratuitously into religiosity, violence and madness, sans redemption. (The particular religiosity being classically pure Evangelical Protestant Americana, impossible in most other Europeanized cultures, it has to be said.) Amid sundry character studies of individuals, the relentlessly corporate outlook of an early oil industry giant, Standard Oil, is taken entirely for granted. Nevertheless it is a lovingly-made re-creation of a bygone era.

1906: A Place in the Sun (1951) is a depiction of the lives and morals of America's idle rich – and a remake of Theodore Dreiser's (1906) An American Tragedy.

Then come treatments of the much-written-about robber-barons of the later nineteenth century's “gilded age”, discussed due to their use of anti-competitive tactics and/or unfair business practices. US commentator Mathew Josepheson popularized the phrase robber-baron during the Depression, in his 1934 book, as public contempt for big business grew in the US. A contrary view adopted by some historians was that the robber barons (read, industrial statesmen) had brought order to chaos as America had industrialized. (16) A wikipedia page lists 20 major robber barons (Or, Rich Uncle Pennybags), who if they have not become subject of movies have become cliches for screenwriters concerning not so much the acquisition of wealth as the exertion of undue power and influence.

All of which power and influence was interrupted by The Great Depression. Here, in Italy we find for the 1920s: Time of Indifference (Italian-made 1964), a “turgid melodrama of moral and social decay in Italy during the late 1920s, with special attention to a nouveau-poor family, from a novel by Alberto Moravia, whose main preoccupation was with middle-class lives. Following, and internationally, any variety of movies depict life during The Great Depression, but the actual causes of the depression are probably unfilmable, too arcane for cinematic depiction. And incidentally, we observe that possibly the best question to ask about booms and busts, is whether finally, capital is actually destroyed, which is a worst case scenario, or simply redistributed, which is a different, less-worse scenario.

To most people, the ultra-rich seem a different species of humanity, despite the fact that the rich and ultra-rich can fall horribly low. The Great Gatsby (1974) treats F. Scott Fizgerald's novel about a wealthy Long Island society lad during the jazz age. By 1963 the rich had long been resented, lampooned, if not vilified in American life. The movie Wheeler-Dealers (1963) was “a funny, fast-moving spoof of Texas millionaires who play with investments just for fun”.

The classic robber-baron-film is Orsen Welles' Citizen Kane, (1941), based on William Randolph Hearst (1863-195), a controversial, powermongering, newspaper baron. (17) The movie emphasizes the difficulty of the work of the biographer, interpreting a life validly, while exploring the action as a wealthy man tries to control press coverage of his political life as reporters strive to delve his private life.

The life of a newspaper baron is untypical, so it is not fuel for the burning of the American Dream. What about a salesman's life? What exactly is the stuff of the tragedy in the tragic death of an ordinary man? Death of a Salesman (1951) began life as a 1949 play by Arthur Miller, really a play about a man who dies a victim of his own self-deception. The work's impact arises from the ordinariness of the man's aspirations, which are widely shared. And by now, everyone knows that any way of life at all entails dealing with certain difficulties coming with the territory.

Changes in the American oil industry came in for fresh scrutiny. Giant (1956), with Rock Hudson and James Dean, as based on a 1952 novel by Edna Ferber, about a wealthy Texan ranching family named Benedict, who are surprised when an employee finds oil on Benedict land he has inherited due to an unfortunate death. A wikipedia page notes that “The movie portrays how the oil industry transformed Texas ranchers into the super-rich of their generation.” Issues which helped produce a father and his son who became American presidents, named Bush. Giants indeed.

Turning elsewhere, is it the decline of Empire or ordinary British reticence that inhibits the Britain's film industry from filming outrightly “economic” themes? Apart from themes of once-great Imperialism, British movies tend to be preoccupied by questions of social class (mostly taking money or lack of it for granted, made obvious by settings). And/or social history, bleakly-inspired depictions of changing times in social life. But Outpost in Malaya (Or, The Planter's Wife, a novel) is a 1952 British offering “mostly about marital disharmony on a rubber plantation”. But set at the time when anti-Japanese forces still roved in remnants in Malaya, a time of political uprising when Churchill was still British prime minister. Nothing to do with the movie, the Malayan Emergency produced an apparently deathless phrase “winning the hearts and minds of the people”, later exported violently to Vietnam by the USA and still beloved, however horrendously misapplied, by American military strategists.

On and on go the lists and the rises and falls, the business cycles, the booms and busts. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, (1956) is based on a 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson, about the search for the purpose of life in a world dominated by big business, or, corporate mentality. Or simply, overwork? Were the 1956 scriptwriters presciently pre-damning a dominant, domineering American ideology of business? These themes inspired a great deal of America's self-critical and social commentary writing in the 1950s-1960s, also producing popular phrases about planned obsolescence, feeling lonely in the crowd, stuff which if you like is born of the conflict between imposed materialism and a more self-chosen existentialism.

Different again, a timeless moral fable, and set whenever-it-is in Mexico, is a US-made contribution, product of Robert Redford, with striking music by Dave Grusin, a charming, David-and-Goliath movie plot about poor villagers, big business, the status of water rights and a malicious land buy-out - The Milagro Beanfield War (1988). A 1983 movie is Circle of Power, about already-affluent wealthy people engaging in “executive development training” to enhance their power, and simply humiliating themselves. And if we recall the pro-peace, anti-materialist ideas of the hippies of the 1960s and1970s, we find the anti-materialism line, merely helped line of the pockets of the producers of plays (Hair), pop music, music festivals and music road movies.

Eisenhower's warning to America about the rise of the military industrial complex from 1945 reverberates in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satire on the fearsome Cold War doctrine of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction by atomic warfare): Dr Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. When we confront our fears, it helps to laugh at them, and this movie moved the goalposts of world black humour. Thank you, Mr. Eisenhower.

If we ignore the minor irony of Hollywood (a large set of big businesses) making movies about big business, we find American Beauty (1999) is about the American Dream gone sour for average punters. American Dream (1989) is about a labour strike at a meat plant in a small town: a company is profitable but decides to reduce wages and break a labor union just for the hell of it. High drama. And then computers arrived! The PCs hit the desks in 1983, the world changed, and the computers ruled, ok. Men around the world were qwerty-ised and had to change their view about dealing with a typewriter keyboard, which beforehand had been regarded as a tool of women's work. World-wide, actually, computerisation challenged men to become more skilled at communication.

Computerisation changed the ball games of the industrial landscapes for trade unions, too. Enter financial capitalism dressed in a brand new suit! (Not surprisingly, The Corporation (2004 Canada) was produced as a historical treatment of corporations since the industrial revolutions and the contemporary threat they (or, corporate mentality) may pose to the integrity of the world's ecosystems and the environments they rely on.)

The Bank (Australian-Italian 2001) with typical Australian irreverence is about an econometrics geek who invents a computer program which predicts stock market crashes. (18) Antitrust (2001) is a modern, hi-tech (computer industry) and somewhat predictable look at business practice in an extremely large and geekish corporation which gives out no awards for our guessing which corporation it is, or which way the plot will make our consciences bend in the winds of cyberspace.

1990: Enter financial capitalism in its brand new computer suit for the stock exchange jockeys of Wall Street -- the Masters of the Universe, who were best at making Faustian bargains with their own egos and arrogance. Someone lit a Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), as adapted from Tom Wolfe's novel. The movie was billed as “an outrageous story of greed, lust and vanity in America.” The making of the movie was itself such a vanity that it inspired a book, The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood, by Julia Salamon (1991). Thus can social satire in the USA, a nation which is mostly an irony-free zone, shoot itself in the foot. Commercially the movie was a flop.

Poor Wall Street. More movies spring to mind. Wall Street was a 1929 film by Roy William Neill. Wall Street is also a 1987 film by Oliver Stone, whose father was a New York stockbroker. Stone's movie gave us Gordon Gecko (played by Michael Douglas), whose credo, “Greed is good”, rapidly entered the world vocabulary, sometimes properly coated with irony, but alarmingly, often sans irony. There is, following the 2008 GFC, to be a 2010 sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. The 2008 GFC was surely a bigger bonfire of the vanities of the Masters of the Universe. The size of the egos to be cremated since 2008 hardly bears thinking about!

And not forgetting as High Americana a powerful business magnate adopting the persona of an enigmatic vigilante superhero, first appearing in a comic strip (1930s?), blown up into a powerful tale of good versus evil: Batman: The Dark Knight (2008). Not forgetting quality documentaries such as the one Niall Fergusson made from his book Ascent of Money. Nor forgetting that Michael Moore's anti-capitalist movies made since 1989 are ideologically quite predictable and therefore pedestrian, and were predated anyway by the 1960s phase of America's self-critical writing.

It is not the Americanization, but the internationalization, or globalisation of conscience, that may interest us more deeply? The Price of Sugar (2007) is a documentary narrated by Paul Newman, about the hangovers of slavery in the Dominican Republic, based on the life of Catholic Priest Father Christopher Hartley (son of a British industrialist and a Spanish aristocrat), a passionate advocate for workers' wage equity on sugar plantations mostly exporting to the USA. Set in very recent times.

To top it all off, regarding organised crime, we refer not to The Godfather (with a character played unforgettably by mumbling Marlon Brando as he makes “business” offers that can't be refused) ... we note a 1975 movie set in Japan, The Yakuza with Robert Mitchum. It's an action pic, but the players have to negotiate with “an Oriental Mafia”. We also don't forget the China-based Triad gangs, said to be of great vintage in Chinese life, though today in film they tend to be more spoofed by the likes of Jackie Chan movies than taken seriously.

What we don't quite know yet is happens when climate change comes with the territory. We imagine this may be well regarded as an opportunity for a disaster movie scenario, because for other things, it may be, well, too late. Except that by 2010, future wars about environmental resources, such as water, have already long been predicted.

War, Americana and Apocalypse ongoing

Moneylenders and merchants have assisted war efforts down the ages. Given that Apocalypse Now (1979) is a much discussed anti-war movie, we suppose that a metaphor drawn from it - “the mains circuit cable” – can be taken as an allusion not to a life-supporting river snaking through a war zone, the Mekong, but to the warning that US ex-President Eisenhower once delivered to the American people about the future (the Cold War), about the rising and maybe-unstoppable influence of “the military-industrial complex”. US President Lincoln to the end of a ferocious civil war had issued an earlier, similar warning to American posterity, against what he called, “the money interests”. (19)

These sorts of warnings have earned huge popularity in the more heavily-politicised American popular culture, but there is less of any similar unease, or distrust, in either Britain or Australia. Because of current events (since, say, 9/11) we have here given some attention to the historical bases of some conspiracy theories popular in the US, which feed on such anxieties in the US population.

A mains circuit cable: or, the pursuit of metaphors in economic history?

The Vietnam War to put it mildly was expensive. The American Civil War was the world's first photographed war. The Vietnam War was the world's first helicopter war, though the winning Vietnamese unsurprisingly call it the American War. In Apocalypse Now a certain Captain Willard is contacted by military authorities to be given the secret mission of moving up the Nong River, apparently in late 1960s Vietnam, to find and assassinate beyond the Vietnamese border a certain Colonel Kurtz, who as a military man has gone mad in Cambodia and is rampaging out of control, conducting his own war with what seems to be embarrassing success, but with “methods unsound”.

Here, the fictional Nong River is spoken of as being “a river that snaked through the war like a mains circuit cable”. Is this a useful metaphor? While it developed its Empire, Britain engaged in many conflicts, especially the Napoleonic War. But there were not only military conflicts. British interests engaged in trade wars, financial wars. Given racism, given the slaving trades, British interests also engaged in a kind of ethnological war against Africans, at least till the anti-slavery movement began, successfully promoted by many well-principled men who were merchants – Russia merchants. We do not wish to over-emphasise questions of either racism, or war contracting, but we thought the metaphor “mains circuit cable” fits nicely the way any major power will act to protect its interests. Bearing in mind also, Tuchman’s famous formula in The March of Folly, that folly is acted-out when states irrationally adopt policies that work against their own best interests. Certainly, whenever attacked, any state has a legitimate duty to defend itself, in which circumstances, a government will have to engage some war contractors. Such merchants, or businessmen, for a time will have to provide extra power to “the mains circuit cable”.

The mains circuit cable metaphor also suits the structure of this book, since as co-authors we developed a list, which included war contractors, of noted British merchants appearing in British life between 1680 and 1900, which certainly seemed useful for refining any new approach to the discussion of merchant networks. (An early annotation of the first version of the list covered 90 pages.)

Sundry observations

So we have roamed in popular culture. If a child asked what this book is about, we might say, it's partly about men who help soldiers and sailors with supplies, and food, and guns, and ways and means. They are merchants who help armies and navies do their job. They are business firms who help defend the nation and fight a war. They might even perform specialized services such as help the government to pay the soldiers and sailors, and so on.

Adult matters, of course, are more complex than this. But we (the present writers) do notice that war contractors, or suppliers to military forces, and the funds going to them, are seldom spoken of by historians, despite a later Twentieth Century journalistic preoccupation with suppliers of arms and mercenary forces to mostly small but troubled or failing states. We have long puzzled over this disconnect in historical writing, having long ago read Anthony Mockler's book on mercenaries in history and into the Twentieth Century. (20)

The point may be important if only because of the UN's work in recent decades in convincing the world that peace processes can be rendered viable. Military men can find that peace keeping forces as well as forces used for offence or defence all need financing of their military capability. Modern peace-keeping forces may perchance find themselves teaching contractors the same resource-and-finance-management techniques used by contractors to military forces. Contractors to government and to military forces are too-seldom regarded as part of military history, although sometimes they are mentioned as such but sans further comment in straight commercial histories. Inventors of new weaponry might be mentioned in either military, technical or commercial histories, and they are generally admired. In military history, we hear mostly silence about the contractors who supply old or new weapons to military forces. On the other hand, few groups of men in the world can be as angry as an unpaid army, or an army inadequately supplied.

War itself is an ugly business and a matter for continued, and agonized, human puzzlement. One modern view is that war is the result of the export of violence to the battlefield/field of action. What inspires the violence might be left unsaid, but it often entails the destruction of a good deal of equipment. One might well ask, then, what is imported from the field of action, apart from casualties? It is often claimed that war is futile. But one might observe, that to lose a war is acutely futile. The behavioural point, independently of debate about just wars (or not), is that across millennia, wars continue to break out. Historians often take this behaviour for granted, more than they ask – why does it occur? Is war the result of some human instinct or talent for organised aggression?

Such thoughts sharpened after we encountered Linda Colley's highly-nuanced book, Captives. (21) Whether the British Empire grew like topsy or not, a good deal of violence was employed by British imperialists and/or their enemies. Over time, the narratives of British captives in different regions – North Africa, North America, India – became sub-genres of the annals of British endeavour, although Colley claims the narratives are mined too seldom. “Captives and captivities were the underbelly of British Empire, ... “ (Introduction, p. 4) Colley finds many themes and ideas worth re-exploring -- such as the deceptiveness of maps. Imperial overstretch (a term increasingly applied to international US activity since 2000, as fin-de-siecle, while in 2000 it felt as though the Twentieth Century, where we spent most of our lives, was suddenly gone, put a century into the past). Colley's book is entertaining where she notes changes in the customs and attitudinal behaviour of diplomats over time, especially where diplomats have to negotiate the release of captives.

To the end of her book (p. 374), Colley discusses some of the legacies of British Imperialism, neo-colonialism, oppression, exploitation, violence, arrogance, slavery, racism. Can these be understood today if the contexts and timeframes of Imperial action are misunderstood? We think not. So we have pursued evidence of the lives of merchants to place them in some of Colley's contexts. History is always incomplete where irony is glossed over. After the Battle of Waterloo, that maestro of aloofness, the Duke of Wellington, said perhaps the most unkind words any victorious general has ever said about his army – they'd been “the scum of the earth led by the froth”. What this observation was meant to contribute to the continuation of the non-revolutionary character of the English class system is impossible to establish. But according to a movie, he also said (about casualty rates, probably), “the only thing sadder than losing a war is winning one”. Which seems a remark that only another general can interpret. The old-by-now, popular culture image of the war contractor in the US is "Daddy Warbucks", but this cartoonish image is hardly applicable to data on the careers of British war contractors we've collected. (We observe that the image of “Daddy Warbucks” is too culturally specific to use for any country besides the USA, so we do not reproduce it here.)

Culture aside, we have anyway not had the time and we lack the expertise to puzzle wisely on the more philosophical or socio-biological aspects of war, which as with sexual activity, might even be a biologically or instinctively-based motivation for behaviour. Very few if any species of life on earth are seen to organise themselves specifically to use massed forces to kill large numbers of their own kind, but historically, humanity seems to be unable to deal with its propensity to do this., and so, what happens, happens This is not merely a question of “rationality” or its opposite. To fail to defend oneself or one's group is a distinctly non-rational approach. These issues in human life are perennial and so much for philosophy, might even be finally unanswerable. This however is no reason for economic historians not to say what they can properly say.

While pursuing these questions in terms of a wide range of merchant careers, on several continents, albeit under the umbrella of British Imperial History, and considering associated genealogies, we find that we have encountered some regularities in human activity that seem a far cry from economic history as it is usually treated. One is the way that war contractors step into each other's shoes as time moves on, as a political entity such as the growing British Empire changes over time, the truly efficient contractor earning the usually-understated gratitude of military men.

The war has ended -- long may we hope to employ military contractors as good as, or better than the last lot, when the next war breaks out! As wars moved through Modern History, military technology improved apace, a matter which no military contractor (or over-enthusiastic Mercantilist) could overlook. We have avoided discussions of changes in military technology simply for reasons of lack of space. (Military-technology improvements in the Nineteenth Century alone would be fascinating to discuss.)

Irony and Great Expectations

The prolific novelist Charles Dickens knew an enormous amount about life in London. He once noted that certain vaults under a prestige London address were to be avoided, they'd be a good place for a murder. [Which is correct, they still existed in 1989 - Ed]. (22) The address was 3 Robert Street, the Adelphi, which was once the address of the same Duncan Campbell meeting Jefferson. Dickens promoted emigration to Australia and saw two of his sons sail to live there. He also knew something of the Thames River prison hulks, which till 1803 were managed by the very same Duncan Campbell. The hulks appear grimly in the David Lean movie of Dicken's Great Expectations (starring John Mills, 1946). In this movie a convict named Magwitch returns from Australia wealthier than anyone could have expected, to reveal the English social system for what it is.

Inexplicably, a naïve but well-intentioned young man is brought up to be a gentleman with an independent income, (as we the viewers find) only to discover that all his life, his money has come from Magwitch, an ex-convict who has done uncommonly well with sheep and pastoralism in Australia. By no means a sympathetic character, bitter and twisted, Magwitch disturbs complacency, spills the beans of truth, reveals motives, deploys subtle revenge, and allows author Dickens to re-explore The Law and questions of character and destiny.

Ironically, some of the information used by Dickens for the modelling of ex-convict Magwitch and his earlier background as a hulks prisoner in England came probably via a scapegrace of a provincial English banking family, the Mortlocks of Cambridge. (23) From website pages by Robert Griffiths (UK) we find a story about not a possible model for Magwitch, but "a technical adviser" on convict life, the hulks, and convict transportation and work in Australia due to Dicken's meeting with a middle-class ex-convict who returned to England, by name of John Frederick Mortlock (JFM). The facts begin regarding the assault of a family member, as the story was handed down in a solid, middle-class family. (24)

(Note 24: The editor is extremely grateful to Robert Griffiths (UK) for a liberal permission to quote from and use his researches on JFM and Mortlock family history. For any extra see the Mortlock Encyclopedia website section by Robert J. H. Griffiths. English informants can find astonishing connections. One East Indiaman which was used as a convict transport was the Juliana in 1820, one of her part-owners being James Thomas who was the gggggfather of RJH Griffiths.)

(Note 24a:) When I [Griffiths] first read JFM's own book (John Frederick Mortlock, Experiences of a Convict, transported for twenty-one years: an autobiographical memoir by an ex-military officer, London, 1864-1865) I could immediately see from his own writing that in some ways he was as mad as a box of frogs, it walked out of his own pages towards me. However as far as I know it is the only literate account of what it was like to be a transported convict, which makes JFM a contributor to Australian history.

24b: One reading of JFM's book shows that he was one of those people who always feel they are right and everyone else is wrong, something he clearly got from his mother and an attitude which was clearly visible in many of her other children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. His brother who was a customs officer eventually had plantations of his own in Jamaica and a considerable progeny (white and black and all shades in between), even some from his eventual marriage, a formality which did not trouble him until late in life. One of his children inherited the family propensity for fantasy, the artist Ethel Mortlock (see Ethel from the Mortlock Encyclopedia online). Unlike Magwitch, JFM was a very pleasant (and very interesting) character who easily made friends and attracted to his cause those people who did not look very far into the facts.

(Note 24c: As it happens, an unrelated Mortlock, Thomas, was also transported (see An Essex Transportee in the Mortlock Encyclopedia online). Thomas, whose transportation was a commutation of a death sentence, went on to indeed make a living from sheep and also left a very considerable (and legitimate) progeny in NSW. - RJH Griffiths.

JFM was son of Frederick Cheetham Mortlock (1784-1838) and Sarah Finch (born 1788), daughter of a Cambridge ironmonger Charles Finch and sister of MP Charles Finch. One evening in November 1842 the Reverend Edmund Davy Mortlock was sitting in his rooms in Christ’s college talking to Mr Mitchell, the landlord of the Eagle and Child. Suddenly the door burst open and in dashed Edmund's nephew, John Frederick Mortlock (born 1809), armed with a dagger and two pistols. Earlier in life, JFM has been a soldier in Bengal, sailing to there in 1821 on Earl Balcarres. JFM was one of seven children and his brother William was also a soldier; his brother Frederick William was a customs official at Jamaica. Several sisters married clergymen.

"Give me back my property!" cried JFM to uncle Edmund, and mis-fired one of the pistols. Mercifully only the cap exploded. Edmund seized a chair and Mitchell grabbed a poker. Edmund said calmly "John, I have none of your property." John Frederick dropped his dagger, then lowered the other pistol - which he had kept pointing at his uncle’s head - and fired. Mr Cartmel, the college tutor, who lived in the room below, rushed up the stairs, took the poker from the terrified Mitchell who was escaping in the other direction, and happened to see the flash of the discharge of the second pistol. "He’s killed me, he’s killed me" cried Edmund as he staggered down the stairs followed by Mr Cartmel.

A surgeon was hastily summoned, but when Edmund was examined, little-wounded, it was found – and the surgeon later testified - that the bullet must have been fired too obliquely to cause a fatality. Cartmel returned to Edmund’s room to find it empty, the dagger on the floor, and two riding whips, knotted together, hanging out of the window. Escaping, JFM was observed by witnesses who gave chase. One witness was fired on at 12 yards and hit in a leg – but shortly JFM gave himself up. He was tried at Cambridge Assizes on 24 March 1843. He had fine features – was “instinct with intelligence” – and had debonair bearing. Generally he was popular, and regarded as of a generous disposition. But soon JFM was "fagged and dejected". Aged 32, he was "of a fine, open countenance, with a remarkably handsome profile, about five feet and a half in height and of an easy, gentlemanly appearance." It appears that before the trial, public sympathies were with him because it was considered that he and his family had been harshly dealt with. (And uncles of the family had always kept a “decent reticence” about an essentially family affair, not discussing it in public.) JFM was actually destitute at the time of his offence. JFM decided to defend himself, but though eloquent, failed to convince that “an attempt to kill was a legitimate remedy for civil wrongs – or supposed civil wrongs – of which he alleged the Rev. Edmund was the source. The result of the trial was inevitable, the facts not being in dispute. A petition got up for political reasons in JFM's favour, by a notorious Radical named Wagstaff, availed John Frederick nothing.” (Report by the Cambridge Advertiser)

JFM’s defence to the immediate criminal charge was that there was only a small powder charge in the pistol, merely meant to frighten, as demonstrated by the fact that Edmund’s abdomen had only been bruised by the ball and not penetrated; but, as above, it was in fact providential that it was a grazing shot. His eloquence moved many of the spectators in the crowded courtroom - some had queued for their places since 7am. - to tears. But not the judge, nor the jury. At the time destitute, when the sentence of transportation for twenty-one years was announced, JFM's calm reply to the judge was only "My Lord, it will save me from starvation."

The website writer indicates (a good example of England's views today on the old legal ways) that John Frederick was undoubtedly clever, if unable to analyse his situation, resilient and resourceful. JFM had been sentenced to hard labour. His first stop while awaiting passage was on board the hulked 90-gun Trafalgar veteran Leviathan at Portsmouth, where his companions included a number of comparatively well-born "white-collar" criminals. Fettered and half-starved he was put to work in the dockyard, where the convicts from our maritime gulag, hobbling in their four-pound leg-irons, were a sight for flocks of amused spectators, one of whom John Frederick recognised as a Cambridge chum. After eighteen weeks aboard Leviathan, in August 1843 he was transferred for passage to the ex-Indiaman Maitland. (That one of his cousins was destined to marry a Maitland was a piquant irony.) The Maitland took departure from Plymouth on 1st September 1843 and arrived in Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) in January 1844. Imagine what transportation as a convict to Botany Bay in New South Wales meant to a man gently born. Herded on a ship carrying – from the modern point of view (Griffiths' emphasis)– ten times the number it should have carried. Locked up in a space about the size of a coffin with hardly any elbow room. Surrounded by the dregs of the population. At the mercy of low-born warders who – class conscious – welcomed the opportunity of insulting any gentleman whom fate placed at their mercy. JFM can have had no idea of what was in store for him.

He was never flogged himself, but on Norfolk Island, where he started his sentence, he was sickened by the daily thrashing of his companions on the "triangle". On licence in Tasmania he successfully maintained himself variously as a children’s tutor, schoolmaster - arbitrarily thrashing any boys whose parents had come out as free settlers - and as a peddler in the bush. In 1857 John Frederick, quite illegally,since he refused to recognise the limitations of his licence - returned to England on Swiftsure, Captain Pryce. It is a sad reflection on his saintly and forgiving uncle Alderman William Mortlock that it was news of a small legacy from William that triggered this return home - and its consequences. Apprised that this £46 was due to him, John Frederick counted up his various savings, which came to £240 and took ship as above; however the £46 did not reach Tasmania until well after John Frederick was back in England. Landing at Dartmouth, John Frederick made his way to London where he lodged at his favourite spot, the Craven Hotel near Northumberland House.

Then Cambridgeshire beckoned. He visited his sister’s grave at Westley, he went to his mother’s for the night. The next morning he was arrested. In March 1858 John Frederick was sentenced to a year in gaol at home to be followed by re-transportation, this time to Western Australia, to serve the five-year remainder of his original sentence. A police description of JF published at the time of his illegal return, described him as 5'9" tall, of square, thickset and powerful build, with light hair but a darker moustache. He finally finished serving his time, when he returned to London to live in relative obscurity and poverty, in a boarding house in Craven Street (which runs off the Strand next to Charing Cross Station), kept by one Todd, an ex-servant of his mother’s, until his death in 1882.

Even in old age JF’s clear-cut features and charm of manner were noted, and, although his memory began to fail somewhat towards the end, his wide range of knowledge, painfully acquired, was still remarked. In his will he left the town of Cambridge a vast but wholly imaginary fortune. He left the rest of us a most important legacy in the shape of a literate account of his "Experiences of a Convict". In later life he had made an acquaintance of Charles Dickens and is said to have been the model for Magwitch in Great Expectations (1860). However, Magwitch is entirely unsympathetic and totally lacks John Frederick’s undoubted personal charm. It is, though, unlikely that a craftsman like Dickens would have passed up the chance to use John Frederick as a source for circumstantial detail relating to the hulks and prisoners and their fetters and so forth, although he removed the scene to the eerie mudflats of his native Kent. Conversely, Great Expectations is a good source for any modern reader who wants to understand more of John Frederick’s interlude in the hulks before he was transported. JF at one point asked Dickens’ advice about finding a publisher for his memoirs, to find that Dickens thought that the libels would have to come out first.

Frederick Cheetham Mortlock had other sons. JF's brother Frederick William worked for the Jamaica Customs department for twenty-five years, an appointment obtained for him by his Uncle Edmund via Lord Harrowby. Frederick William died in Jamaica in 1878 in his late sixties. He had married a Miss Amy Williams of Montego Bay and they had two sons (widowed, Amy remarried, to a James Rosser). Little else arises here of interest about the family. (25)

Why do historians distrust bankers?

To an extent, the distrust of bankers often expressed in popular histories is another kind of ongoing history war, though it is seldom commented as such. Whatever, one article we encountered has the following quote from one Josiah Stamp of the Bank of England – but has Stamp been misquoted? On the face of it, Stamp here would quickly convince any historian to distrust bankers.

"The Great Depression

"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin . . . Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again . . . Take this great power away from them, and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in ... But, if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit."

- Sir Josiah Stamp, Director of the Bank of England, 1927

The question soon arises, who then should have the power in society to create credit? And this question is basically unanswerable in human society. Credit creation is something that people will engage in to survive if not to merely enjoy ... To create credit, that is, to exchange moral and material obligations -- mankind after all is a social animal often assailed by problems of war – all too-often ignored by theologians and economists. But it may be that the creation of credit is an outcome of a particular kind of human arrogance, more than of confidence. (Maybe, militarised arrogance at that.) But all round, credit creation as a phenomenon is a two-edged sword? And so quite like many other human inventions!

From a website we find - Benjamin Strong, Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, who worked closely together throughout the 1920s, decided to “use the financial power of Britain and the United States to force all the major countries of the world to go on the gold standard and to operate it through central banks free from all political control, with all questions of international finance to be settled by agreements by such central banks without interference from governments.” These men were not working for the governments and nations of whom they purportedly represented, but “were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of throwing them down.”

The present co-writers feel basically that historians distrust bankers because they know that bankers somehow influence politicians but cannot always work out quite how this happens. The influence is not always identifiably direct but is rather indirect, through agency, and/or, arcane discussions on questions of high finance and how to manage it. High finance is itself a contentious topic for many commentators inasmuch as bankers are allowed to create credit. (26) The arguments become rather circular. If this happens on stage when a microphone is put wrongly near an amplifier, it's called feedback. And it's ear-splitting! And audiences rightly object!

A spectrum for the argument about credit creation

However, what the critics of bankers as credit creators all seem to overlook is that in societies, someone, somewhere, has to provide the means – credit – of projects being undertaken. Whether it is an Egyptian pharaoh building a pyramid, a medieval Chinese emperor working on extending canals, or an International Monetary Fund today attempting to assist archaic economies to modernise. There are risks of course involved in credit creation. Governments are best advised to regulate credit creation as a set of activities - and to be otherwise not involved. It is rather as follows ... angst from writers in various usury-using countries about credit creation seems to overlook the very fact that credit creation and allocation can be contentious. This is precisely the reason that governments should not be directly involved in credit creation.

The arguments which can arise when things go wrong, when praise or blame is apportioned, or when credit is restricted, when allegations about social inequity and financing arise, are not issues, historically, in which rulers and governments wish to have a direct interest. For one thing, the users of credit become personally and morally responsible for repayment. Once credit has been allocated, simply because (and according to Adam Smithian economics), credit users may not have the national interest fully in mind. Wheras rulers and governments can only ignore the national interest at their peril. A government listening to the woes of credit users will risk waves of disharmony, a disruption of the balance between domestic and foreign affairs. Those dependent on credit creation, their views, their problems, may well be distractions from proper governance of the national interest. Rulers have tended then to shunt the dilemmas native to credit creation into the private sector and try to quarantine them there, except in financial emergencies where the state does need to intervene in financial problems which threaten to plague the entire nation. Perhaps though, not including the cases of military contractors, who allegedly service the armed forces of the national interest. Military contractors do not so much use credit as expend funds released by a government, which is hard money as guaranteed by government. There is, then, a spectrum of consideration for the allocation of large amounts of money, with private borrowers dependent on credit creation at one end of the spectrum, the governance of national finances at the other, and sitting closer to government than to the frailities of borrowers, is a spectrum-location for contractors to government and the management of national financial emergencies. Periodic debates about more national credit creation will occupy a place on the spectrum, as it is perceived by governments, somewhere near the location of military contractors, only if an emergency arises and a government needs to intervene in the economy regarding questions of the management of private capital. We shall explore this spectrum as the book progresses.

Modernisation is also a consideration within the topic of credit creation. The British 18th Century provides good examples of attempted modernisation - the first half of the world's first industrial revolution. Take for example (assuming how Mercantilism prevailed), Britain's colonisation histories and Harlow's theory concerning the “swing to the east” after the loss of the American colonies. (27)

The “swing” came about partly through merchants' involvement in exploration, with some voyages, albeit undertaken with commercial motives, initiated through social and political networks via the agency of institutions such as the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Arts/Encouragement of Manufacture and Commerce, plus Britain's royal navy. Meanwhile, a great number of institutions in British life adjusted themselves to revised agendas.

Put simply, economic development is a process of change which comes about partly through political policy which in turn is favoured by those who make the laws, i.e. members of Parliament and their more powerful associates. Although many of Britain's C18th Century merchant bankers would say that they had high ideals and were patriotic (perhaps today's term, “civic-minded” better suit the case), they were still businessmen and we would therefore say they kept their eye on a profit.

Given the times, only after becoming sufficiently rich could a man develop a social consciousness and devote time to higher-minded matters such as charitable institutions, “good works”, philanthropy, in a society besotted with its spirits of Imperialism and the influence of religion, the urge to spread an allegedly superior British culture. The performance of good works in ethnocentric Britain itself might have been laudable. Promoted by very affluent men, Russia merchants all free of the taint of linkage to businesses addicted to the use of slaves, Britain's abolition of slavery was highly laudable. The soon-arising and contrarian fiction of “the white man's burden” in India was deplorable. Pitched roughly midway between the laudable and the deplorable came the transportation of convicts to a new part of the world, the eastern coast of Australia. Was this exercise in cleansing the society of Britain part of a well-defined Imperial swing to the East, or not? Does it matter to ask? Australians have still to bother with producing a movie about The First Fleet of convict ships to Australia. The Australian film industry has had difficulty catching up with its national history.

:::: Ends chapter Two ::::::::::

View web stats from www.statcounter.com/ for this website begun 4 July 2006