Slavery, Freedom and Business Endeavor

ISBN-13: 9783030972349 / Angielski / Miękka / 2023

Bradley Bowden

Opis

This book argues that modern Western civilization is synonymous with business, and you cannot have one without the other—or, at least, not for very long. Without Western civilization, with its emphasis on inquiry, questioning, experimentation, reasoning, freedom of expression, a free press, equality of opportunity before the law—then the innovation and vitality that lies at the heart of Western business success, evaporates. Without business endeavor, all the ideas and inquiry are materially meaningless.

The author postulates that only through business opportunity is the wealth created that allows a continuation of our society’s intellectual endeavors. Further, the world of modern business—a unique creation of Western civilization, even if it has witnessed many regional and national adaptations—is also the actual place where inequalities are overcome and opportunities created. It is through the world of business and work that women have, for example, achieved something approaching equality with men, to a degree unprecedented in human history. This book will offer scholars a research-based argument that Western civilization owes its existence to business rather than Greco-Roman antiquity.

Spis treści

 Introduction: the different and competing definitions of Western civilization.

o This will be an extensive introduction that can also act as a standalone essay that will (a) summarize the current debates as to what is Western civilizations and the deep divisions as to its benefits (b) explain why we regard all current enunciations as inadequate and why “Western civilization” should be regarded as a fundamentally new phenomenon that is a creation of the New World as well as the world; a global rather than a European phenomenon.

 Part 1: Foundations, Linkages and Ruptures. This part will explore the following:

o The legacies of the Greco-Roman world:  In considering the legacy of the Greco-Roman world its intellectual bequests should not be understated. Our understandings of democracy, of representative government, and of the very concept of citizenship as a relationship based on legal rights and responsibilities we owe to antiquity. However, if we should not understate the intellectual legacy of the Greco-Roman world, neither should we exaggerate its significance. In the final analysis, the Greco-Roman world was a failed civilization. Its failures were, overwhelmingly, managerial and economic. Its principal means of wealth creation was militarized theft, depriving other societies of not only their possessions but also their people. The Romans themselves well understood these facts, Tacitus (c.AD98 / 1942: 695) placing into the mouth of a British chieftain the following words: “Our goods and fortunes they [the Romans] collect for their tribute, our harvests for the granaries. Our very hands and bodies, under the lash and in the midst of insult, are worn down by the toil of clearing forests and morasses.” A society based on such principles was never one that was going to be characterized by entrepreneurship, innovation, and the swift take-up of new technologies. In consequence, humanity’s economic and social advance necessarily entailed Rome’s ruination.

 The productive advances of the feudal era:

o Although there is a tendency to regard medieval feudalism as a poor substitute for the Greco-Roman civilization of antiquity, in terms of commerce and rural productivity the medieval world was infinitely superior to its classical antecedent. Unlike ancient Chinese societies, and those of Medieval Europe, Rome never developed the skill and capacity to cast iron; a short-coming that ensured a deficit of metal goods, most particularly in the agricultural sector. In agriculture, the absence of the heavy, wheeled-plough that became standard in Medieval Europe made working the rich but heavy soils of Northern Europe’s valley bottoms well-nigh impossible during antiquity. A range of crops that became dietary staples in the medieval era – rye, oats, millet, hard durum wheat with its high protein content, rice, sugarcane, lemons, oranges – were other notable absentees. The Greco-Roman world never invented the wind-mill, which was capable of operating a larger motor than the water-mills of either antiquity or Medieval Europe. The Roman world also operated without either mechanical clocks or magnetic compasses. On the maritime front, the Greco-Roman world was also inferior. Unlike medieval shipwrights, who constructed a ship by first laying down its keel and ribbed frame before attaching the planking, their Greco-Roman predecessors did the reverse. Only when the planking was all laboriously assembled did the Greeks and Romans choose to install the internal frame. By comparison with the triple-masted cargo ships of the early modern era, the single-sailed ships of antiquity were small affairs, their limited cargo capacity restricting trade and, hence, possibilities for regional specialization in production. Despite all of these positive achievements that distinguish medieval society from antiquity we nevertheless argue that medieval feudalism cannot be regarded as a component part of our modern Western civilization; a civilization whose emergence necessarily entailed the rejection of not only medieval modes of societal organization but also modes of thought. 

 Discussion of the forces within feudal society that led to rupture and transformations into a society of a fundamentally different sort:

o In his ground-breaking study, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Fernand Braudel (1946c / 1975: 763) argued that, “The mark of a living civilization is that it is capable of exporting itself, of spreading its culture to distant places”. In this section, we argue that this is a mistaken way of perceiving the emergence of our modern Western civilization. Its wealth, its capacity to finally break through the ceiling that that economically restricted all other societies, would have been impossible without its interactions with the rest of the world and its capacity to integrate the resources of the globe into a single economic-cultural entity. Likewise, the commercial and financial revolution of the sixteenth century would have been impossible without the flooding of European markets with South American silver. Similarly, the cotton mills of late eighteenth century Lancashire would have been inconceivable without the cotton of the Carolinas, the markets of Africa, and the slave labor with which African chiefs purchased the fruits of European industry. In like fashion the burgeoning cities of Europe could not have been fed without the granaries of the United States, Canada, Argentina and Australia. This section will therefore trace how the medieval European world gave way to a new global economy.

 Part 2: The Forging of a New Civilization. This part will explore the following.

o How the new Western civilization was from the outset a global phenomenon: This section will explore the ways in which the peoples of the globe were affected by the emergence of Western civilization, and how these interactions profoundly shaped its economy, social structure and culture. Three broad models characterized this interaction. In Asia and Africa, Western rule was typically exercised through local proxies; a practice pursued even where – as in India, the East Indies and Indo-China – territories were annexed by the metropolitan power. Similar comments can be made with greater force in the second model of interaction relating to those few nations, most notably Japan, where a process of hybridization was driven by indigenous forces. By contrast, a positive indigenous effect is difficult to make were Western expansion was connected with pastoral (beef and wool) and more particularly agricultural settlement. In these latter circumstances the spread of Western civilization was conditional on the displacement of the prior occupants; a displacement that was not a side-effect of Western advance but rather an outcome essential for its very existence. While it is impossible to make the case that a culture that it destroyed by its contact with Western civilization was a beneficiary. Nevertheless, the societies that emerged in Australia, the Americas, Oceania and South Africa were not simply copies of the European original. Rather they were shaped by their confrontation with the geography and peoples of the New World; the confrontations helping to create societies that were peculiar in their own distinctive ways. Almost everywhere, the indigenous peoples remained a not inconsequential force in the new societies; their fates and that of the wider society being inextricably bound.

o The intellectual rupture with the past associated with the Enlightenment: In summarizing the relationship between politics and economics, the British theorist, Thomas Hobbes (1651 / 2002: 62), accurately observed that the lives of people where there was “no place for industry” were “poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. What was thus novel about the concepts of individual liberty that emerged from the European Enlightenment - when compared to ancient Athens - was in the emphasis given to private economic activity. For Pericles, any Athenian democrat who concentrated on their own business was a poor excuse for a citizen. As Pericles expressed it, “we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all”. A very different view was expressed by the Scottish political philosopher, David Hume. For Hume, “self-interest” was not a sin but rather a fundamental characteristic of the human condition. As Hume (1739 / 1896: 266) explained, “Men being naturally selfish … they are not easily induc’d to perform any action for the interest of strangers, except with a view to some reciprocal advantage.” It was, Hume further reflected, only due to “this self-interested” reasoning that “commerce …begins to take place, and to predominate in society”; an understanding famously taken up by Hume’s friend, Adam Smith. The idea that self-interested economic activities are a social good is core to modern democratic understandings. Another key understanding of the European Enlightenment was that freedom and economic progress could only be ensured through the protection of private property. As political thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Burke realised, the main beneficiary of laws in defence of private property were not the rich and powerful – who rarely needed them - but people of modest means; the craft worker, the labourer, and the small entrepreneur. In the late 18th century the linking of private interest, freedom and economic progress found cogent expression in two political declarations. In the first of these, the American Declaration of Independence, it was held that all citizens possess “certain unalienable rights … life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. … whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it”. In the subsequent French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, two Articles are particularly significant. The first of these (Article 2) is found in the understanding that the state exists only as a device for preserving the citizen’s “imprescriptible rights”: “liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression”. The second core principle spelt out in the French Declaration (Article 4) is the idea that, “Liberty consists in the ability to do whatever does not harm another.” In other words, citizens should be entitled to say what they like and engage in any activity without restriction – unless the activity causes another citizen material harm

o The Economic Rupture with the Past: The Industrial Revolution: The Industrial Revolution is a transformative event in human history that is – despite all the research that has been devoted to it – poorly understood as to its motive forces and its long-term consequences. In terms of motive forces it becomes difficult to argue that the civilization that arose from it was merely a continuation of the previous order. Yes, many of the same outward forms existed. In Britain, for example, a monarchy and a parliamentary system survived without outward revolution. Britain had, however, already been through a revolution and civil war in the 17th century and the changes that occurred during the 19th century were even more revolutionary as the franchise – and political and social power – shifted towards the new industrial classes of entrepreneurs and proletarians in the factory districts. An interesting quandary is why the Industrial Revolution first occurred in northern England rather than in the Netherlands during that nation’s Golden Age in the 17th century. As Schiedel and Friesen (2009: 64) indicate, Golden Age Netherlands represented the most prosperous human society in the pre-industrial experience. It had a higher level of literacy than did England in the first decades of the Industrial Revolution. Like England, it had access to cheap sources of carbon-based power (peat rather than coal). It had established international trade links and a finance and bond market which – if anything – was superior to London’s. Why then was England rather than the Netherlands the first society to industrialize? Most explanations look to local factors. Of these local factors there is no doubt that a factor of particular importance was the size of Britain’s coal industry and the fact that continued exploitation was associated with steam-operated pumps; a technology that was eventually utilized in textile production. This chapter will argue, however, that these undoubtedly significant local factors can only be understood in terms of the creation of a new “world-economy”, capable of drawing on resources and markets from across Africa and the Americas. It is also important to highlight the significance of cheap cotton clothes, and their appeal not only in Europe but also in Africa, the Americas and Asia; where cheap, washable cotton allowed a level of comfort and cleanliness for populations used to clothing themselves in either animal skins or wool garments. Putting it succinctly, the revolutionary transformation of the industrial districts of England were only possible due to the prior existence of a global economy.

 Part 3: Western civilization and business endeavor as humanity’s hope. This final section will look at:

Debates about modernity. This chapter will build on my recent chapter in the Palgrave Handbook of Management History, entitled: Foundations: The Roots of Idealist and Romantic Opposition to Capitalism and Management. In this chapter, as in my recent work, I argue that it is now evident that the most significant movements of opposition to capitalism, management and the whole structure of our modern Western civilizations were not Marxists and socialists of various hues – oppositional groups who accepted the fundamental premises of industrialization – but rather the Romantic and Idealist traditions who found the whole direction of the new civilization to be fundamentally misguided. In the Anglosphere, the roots of these oppositional traditions are most obvious in the English Romantic tradition (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Percy and Mary Shelley, Bryon, Carlyle). Central to this Romantic tradition is belief in what William Wordsworth (1802 / 1935: 296) described as “eternal Nature, and the great moving spirit of things” that connects humanity to the wellsprings of its spiritual existence. Material “existence” Samuel Coleridge (1817: 47, 257) explained, is merely an outward manifestation of an “essence” that pervades all things. Without exception, those located within the Romantic tradition perceived industrialization not as a source of wealth and advancement but rather as an existential threat to humanity’s spiritual survival. It was, William Blake (1808 / 1969: 481) famously observed in its epic poem on Milton, industrialization that caused increasing numbers to spend their lives among “dark Satanic Mills” rather than “England’s green and pleasant land.” The damaging effects of modernity is also associated in Romantic canon with inhuman monstrosities, the most vivid of which emerged from a night of story-telling amid the storms of Lake Geneva’s foreshore in June 1816. From these lurid tales emerged monsters who have since occupied a permanent place in the Western imagination. The Vampyre (vampire) owes its modern existence to Lord Byron (1816 / 1817) and, more particularly, his physician and fellow author, John Polidori (1819). A creature of apparent wealth and sophistication at home in London’s balls and dinner parties, Polidori’s vampyre – like England’s growing industrial world – feeds on the innocent blood of rural youth. If the vampyre / vampire - subsequently made famous by Bram Stoker’s much later imitation - is evil lurking in civilized form, the other famed creation that emerged from the June 1816 night of story-telling, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is a none too subtle warning against the beguiling promises of science with their supposed capacity to “command the thunder of heaven” and “penetrate into the recesses of nature” (Shelley, 1818 / 2005: 49).

As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace the concerns of the English Romantics with spiritual essence, and a spiritually infused Nature, were shared by the leading exponents of German idealist philosophy, most notably Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling and Arthur Schopenhauer. Like the English Romantics, this philosophic strand believed, as Fichte (1799 / 1910: 11) declared, that “Nature is one connected whole”; a whole in which one cannot “move a single grain of sand from its place, without thereby … changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole.” Even more than the English Romantics, German idealism was concerned with “inner being”, or what Martin Heidegger (1927 / 1962) subsequently referred to as Dasein; understandings that were to profoundly influence Jacques Derrida and, through him, the post-structuralist strand of postmodernist thought. Unlike materialist-oriented thinkers (Adam Smith, Karl Marx, etc.), with their emphasis on the mechanics of production, German idealism made individual will the central force in human affairs, Schopenhauer (1859 / 1969: 272) declaring, “the will is not only free, but even almighty; from it comes not only its action, but also its world.” Like the English Romantics, and the postmodernist schools of thought that they helped inspire, German idealist philosophers also held that all knowledge rested, as Fichte (1799 / 1911: 91) explained, on subjective “representation” rather than some objectively verifiable reality. 

In the 20th and 21st centuries these romantic and idealist notions provided the intellectual and cultural foundations for not only postmodernism but also the environmental movement. It is argued, however, that the fundamental premises of these movements - like the romantic and idealist movements before them – reflect a profound ignorance as to the circumstance of pre-industrial existence. The fact that the first generations to enter the new industrial factories suffered poverty is thus undoubtedly true, but hardly historically unique. As Braudel (1946c / 1975: 725) noted, the “price of progress” has historically been “social oppression”, in which only “the poor gained nothing.” What is historically unique about the Industrial Revolution and its associated management systems is that by 1850 – two generations after its commencement – the poor had become major beneficiaries. As managers concerned with increased productivity quickly realized, the presence of children in a highly capitalized work environment was more of a hindrance than a help. Accordingly, child labor collapsed. By 1851 (Kirby, 2011), only 30 percent of English and Welsh children worked. Of those who did, only 15.4 percent of males and 24.1 percent of females were found in factories. As the new industrial factories demanded literate workforces, attendance at school become the social norm, rather than the exception. For the great majority, in short, romanticised hankering for a bucolic existence was something best left to poetry and literature.

o Explore the relationship between civilization, business and climate: In this final chapter we will explore the nature of modern Western civilization; a civilization which we argue is both global and present nowhere in a pure form, unadulterated by local experiences and culture. Western civilization in its United States form is different from that found in its Australian form. In the New World, these unique characteristics reflect not only different mixes of immigrants but also different interactions with local geographies and indigenous peoples. In the Old European heartlands variations reflect both national factors and the presence of other civilizations which have proved partially resistant to the values and norms of the new civilization, associated as it is with capitalism, free markets and political democracy. As a rule of thumb, the further east one goes in Europe the less pervasive are the norms and societal structures of Western civilization. The result is a hybridization, societies that cannot be understood apart from Western civilization but which also cannot be understood apart from the factors that make each given society resistant or hostile to Western civilization. This hybridization we argue is even more pronounced in Asia, where we can see societies – most particularly China – that have adopted the economic and technological forms of Western civilization but not its cultural or political norms; norms that emphasize individuality, personal freedom, protection of private property and democracy. In addition to arguing that the values of Western civilization have prevailed – and will continue to prevail – because of their inherent attractiveness as well as their economic success this chapter will also confront the issue of climate change. On this front it will argue that the climate change debate has been utilized in ways  that harness genuine fears about the climate and the environment to argue opinions and policies that are inherently retrograde; policies which – reflective of their romantic and idealist roots – operate in profound ignorance as to humanity’s circumstance prior to the rise of our modern industrial Western civilization.

O autorze

Bradley Bowden is Professor of Employment Relations at Griffith University, Australia. He is currently Executive Member and Past Chair of the Management History Division of the Academy of Management. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Management History. His past works include Work, Wealth, and Postmodernism: The Intellectual Conflict at the Heart of Business Endeavour and the edited collection, Management History: Its Global Past and Present.

Blurb

‘Bowden’s book provides a provocative prism through which to view western civilization and capitalism. It reveals Bowden’s understanding of the freedom and courage required to defend and sustain the values upon which the survival of modern society depends: individualism, democracy, economic and political liberalism. With the growing ascendency of social movements that prioritize group-based identities over individual achievement, his powerful warning about the “milletization” of society is more urgent than ever.’

--Art Bedeian. Louisiana State University and founding member of Management History Division, Academy of Management

This book argues that the modern iteration of western civilization is profoundly different to earlier versions. Assuming definitive shape around 1850, the new civilization differed from every culture that came before it. Whereas earlier civilizations were caught within a “Malthusian” trap that subjected most to a life of misery, the new version of western civilization was associated with material plenty. Whereas slavery was previously endemic in both the Old and New Worlds, after 1850 the new civilization drove it to near extinction. Freedom and individualism were its hallmarks.

The author postulates that it is lived experience that primarily defines a civilization. It is thus apparent that western civilization is now a global civilization. Every society has been shaped by it in terms of business, work and home life. Constantly, however, the individualist values at its core have come under threat. Increasingly, we witness what the book calls the “milletization” of society, whereby individuals obtain their identity from this or that “identity” group in ways akin to Ottoman Turkey’s “millet” system, in which each person was assigned to a particular “millet”. Across its pages, the book offers fundamentally new understandings of western civilization and how it was reforged by business endeavor.

Bradley Bowden is Professor at Griffith University and Fellow at the Institute for Public Affairs. He is a Past Chair, Management History Division of the Academy of Management and Co-editor of the Journal of Management History. Past works include Work, Wealth, and Postmodernism and the edited, Palgrave Handbook of Management History.