On Tom Sawyer Abroad and the Accidental Imperialists

Everyone knows about that time Tom Sawyer tricked the neighborhood kids into painting his aunt’s fence for him. Everyone knows about his time hiding out on Jackson Island with his friend Huck Finn and when he made his way out of McDougal’s Cave with his sweetheart Becky. Heck, those who have read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn could even tell you that Tom Sawyer was there when Huck Finn freed the slave Jim after he is recaptured. Tom Sawyer’s story has been a part of not only the literary canon, but a part of the American tale we tell ourselves. But few know about that one time Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Jim hopped on a flying machine with a deranged inventor and made their way over to Northern Africa.

It turns out that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not the end of the Tom and Huck saga. Mark Twain completed two other novels focused on his two most famous characters, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer Detective. Twain even attempted to write other adventure tales featuring Tom and Huck, including Huck and Tom Among the Indians, Schoolhouse Hill, and Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy, but none of these were published or even completed in Twain’s lifetime.

There’s a reason why Tom Sawyer Abroad failed to lodge in America’s consciousness: it’s not great. I suppose you could see it as the Solo: A Star Wars Story of the Tom Sawyer series, or Twain’s Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, if you’re being unkind. While the previous Tom and Huck stories weren’t exactly concerned with narrative realism, it does seem odd to see Twain inject some Jules Verne steampunk into the bucolic world of St. Petersburg, Missouri.

Like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Abroad is narrated by Huck, and though published about a decade after Huck Finn, it begins almost immediately after the events of the previous novel. The first chapter, “Tom Seeks New Adventures,” which begins with Tom Sawyer deciding that the events of Huck Finn wouldn’t be enough to satiate his curiosity and wanderlust, seems to perfectly describe what was likely Twain’s brainstorming process. As M. Thomas Inge notes in my edition’s afterward, Twain, who got himself into financial trouble towards the end of the nineteenth century, wrote Abroad for “crass commercial purposes.” In other words Twain writing a third novel featuring these characters is kind of like when a movie studio decides that they have some IP that they can squeeze a few bucks from. So I guess this makes Tom Sawyer Abroad the Live Free or Die Hard or the Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps or Godfather III of Twain’s oeuvre.

And just like many movie studios of late, Twain had been bitten by the franchise bug. He apparently had plans to ship Huck, Tom, and Jim to other parts of the world in a series of sequels, which never came to be. Judging by the quality of Abroad, this is probably for the better. The main problem is that although Abroad promises lots of hijinks by Tom, Huck, and Jim in Northern Africa, the trio doesn’t really spend much time actually on the ground. Instead, they spend much of the early chapters terrorized by the manic mad inventor of the airship who both seems to have absolute faith in his invention and a streak of misanthropy, and when he plunges to his grizzly death, the three of them are left to figure out what to do now that they’ve somehow wandered across the Atlantic Ocean. But once they reach Africa, they mostly just hang out in the stupid air balloon. There’s no awkward mix up with local customs or getting caught up in the tension between the Berbers and colonizing European powers. No, it’s mostly just Tom, Huck, and Jim observing things from a far and shooting the shit.

On the bright side, the conversation and arguments that the three get into are without a doubt the highlights of the novel. As the most learned of the three, Tom repeatedly tries to represent himself and worldly and authoritative, but he’s almost always rhetorically outmaneuvered by Jim. At one point they consider the implication that fleas are proportionally much stronger than humans, leading them to the horrifying conclusion that if a flea were human-size, then that “flea would be President of the United States, and you couldn’t any more prevent it than you can prevent lightning.”  In these moments, you can feel Twain’s warmth towards his creations, and the book starts to take the shape of an anti-adventure novel, where the characters go halfway around the world just to get into philosophical arguments with one another. Maybe Richard Linklater can do the film adaptation.

It’s worth highlighting the boisterous illustrations, which are admittedly a lot of fun, and interestingly enough they were created by Dan Beard, an early founder of the Boy Scouts of America. 

Tom Sawyer Abroad is uneven at best, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not some interesting work going on here. The novel showcases Twain’s burgeoning anti-imperialist attitudes. Early on, Tom tries to convince his companions to embark on a crusade, but Jim is unsure about the ethics behind this new idea, arguing that if he had a farm and someone wanted it, it wouldn’t be right for them to just take it like the so called crusaders. Apoplectic, Tom rejects Jim’s metaphor outright:

“It ain’t a farm, it’s entirely different. You see, it’s like this. They own the land, just the mere land, and that’s all they do own; but it was our folks, our Jews and Christians, that made it holy, and so they haven’t any business to be there defiling it.”

Tom’s response surely strikes the reader as an inefficient defense of crusades, but it also inaugurates themes of epistemological uncertainty and imperialism. He rejects Jim’s metaphor as a means of knowing how Middle Easterners must have felt about invading Europeans. Throughout the novel the notion of metaphors as a means of knowing comes into play, which in turn affects how the trio see themselves as an invasive force.

Later, after the three have been riding the balloon across America, Huck uses his knowledge of of maps to try and pinpoint exactly where they are. Although they have been riding the balloon for quite some time, Huck’s surprised that they haven’t passed into Indiana yet. When asked why he thinks they haven’t passed Indiana yet, Huck logically observes that while the state of Illinois is green, Indiana is clearly pink. After all, that’s how it’s portrayed on maps he’s seen. Like the metaphor of the farm, Huck is relying on the map as a form of metaphor. It synecdochically stands in for the nation as a whole, but where Jim’s farm metaphor attempts the bridge the distance between Christians and Muslims, the map demonstrates ways in which metaphor can distance us from the reality of the object itself. Color coded states are a helpful shorthand, but they are clearly a fiction.

There’s a running theme of how distance, both figurative and literal, between us and the other becomes difficult to bridge through traditional modes of knowledge production. While reading Tom Sawyer Abroad, I eventually became frustrated by the fact that Tom, Huck, and Jim rarely leave the damn balloon. One of the joys of these globetrotting nineteenth century adventure stories is how our western heroes get to visit new places and cultures. Of course, these cultures are always interpreted through the understanding of the white authors, often in wildly inaccurate and racist ways. But if we’re to look at Abroad as an anti-adventure novel, perhaps this is the point. There’s no uncovering of ancient artifacts from lost civilizations or opportunities to use superior wit to escape capture by the natives. Instead, the three of them much prefer to sit around and jaw with one another just as if the front porches of St. Petersburg, Missouri were transported to the Sahara Desert.

Because Tom, Huck, and Jim rarely leave the balloon, they have a skewed perspective understanding of Africa and its people. It’s telling that Twain borrows the word “aeronaut” from Jules Verne, who he is clearly satirizing, but here he spells it “errornaut” (italics mine).

 To me, this seems to suggest ways in which this new technology allows individuals to more quickly and easily cast about the world while also maintaining a distance from the actual people who live in these “far flung” regions, keeping us just as ignorant as before we left our provincial town. I can’t help but compare the balloon in Abroad with drones sent by the military to places like Northern Africa and the Middle East.

We see both of these issues, the use of metaphor as knowledge-creation and the errornautical view of the world, collide in the chapter, “The Sand-Storm,” where the trio witnesses the destruction of a caravan of nomads violently tossed by a sandstorm. Tom and company were devastated by these deaths and felt like they had lost friends although they never actually met any members of the caravan.

For some time, the trio had followed the caravan with their air balloon, and as Tom says, “The longer we traveled with them, and the more we got used to their ways, the better and better we liked them.” Of course, they didn’t actually know any of the Africans below, so they granted them names, like “Mr. Elexander Robinson and Miss Adaline Robinson” or “Miss Harryet McDougal.” Over time, the group became so familiar with these nomads that they decided it was okay to drop the misters and misses and other titles. Once again, Abroad is trapped between the remote and the nearby. Tom and the rest are capable of extending empathy towards outsiders from a culture and place foreign to them, but in order to do so, they must Anglicize these people. The Africans become Robinsons and McDougals.

Over the course of the novel, Tom, Huck, and Jim become accidental imperialists. At one point, Tom looks at all the sand that’s been gathering in their balloon and decides that it must be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Quickly, he sets upon a money-making scheme:

“[W]e can keep on coming back and fetching sand, and coming back and fetching more sand, and just keep it a-going till we’ve carted this whole desert over there and sold it out; and there ain’t ever going to be any opposition, either because we’ll take out a patent.”

The only thing that preventing Tom from embarking on literally stealing the desert sands of North Africa are tariffs, which he reasons would completely eat away at their profits.

But just as it’s easy to not only forgive Tom’s fence-painting scheme, but actually laud him for his ingenuity, Tom, Huck, and Jim are so genial, it’s easy to forgive or miss altogether the fact that they seem to be inadvertently colonizing countries they likely didn’t even know existed at the beginning of the novel. Needless to say, Tom Sawyer Abroad is a strange novel. I don’t think anyone expected Mark Twain to pump out a steampunk sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and after reading the novel, I’m not surprised that it’s fallen into obscurity. Despite the fact that the novel spans oceans and deserts, it seems strangely stagnant and claustrophobic. The novel is filled with contradictions like this, but in many ways Tom Sawyer Abroad is the kind of novel you enjoy the more you think and write about it. 

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I do think that there’s a lot of potential to adapt Tom Sawyer Abroad as a film. Hear me out. There’s no definitive film version of either Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, perhaps the closest being the 1938 technicolor adaptation. For whatever reason, both novels seem to resist adaptation, perhaps because of their episodic structure. But what’s the use in letting these instantly recognizable IPs lying around? People have heard of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and they’re in the public domain. Do I have to draw you a map?

But in all seriousness, I would be down for a steampunk, globe-trotting Tom Sawyer movie. And since the novel isn’t as precious as the first two, a screenwriter doesn’t really have any obligation to follow the book to the letter. It’s an invitation to let your imagination go wild. If Hollywood wanted to play it safe, they could just let Guy Ritchie do to Tom Sawyer what he already did to Sherlock Holmes. But I also think both Kings of Summer and Kong make Jordan Vogt-Roberts uniquely qualified for steampunk Tom Sawyer. This one’s for free, Hollywood.

On Hillbilly Elegy and the Pundit Class

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say Hillbilly Elegy benefited from some good timing. Released a little over four months before the Electoral College ushered Donald J. Trump into the White House, J.D. Vance’s memoir was within easy reach and memory for pundits and journalists who wanted to figure out the once unthinkable event of Trump becoming president of the United States. Trump was able to flip a number of midwestern states thanks to an increased support in the rust belt and Appalachia, and here was a memoir attempting to explain, through the author’s experience, the mindset and problems facing this often ignored population.

While it’s impossible to say whether Hillbilly Elegy would have been as critically well received if Vance had published the book a year or more earlier, I suspect that the rapturous reviews were boosted by Trump’s win. Although well intentioned, Vance’s memoir doesn’t offer much new information. And at it’s worst, Hillbilly Elegy aligns itself with Clintonian incrementalism, a philosophy that has had a stranglehold on the pundit class for the last couple of decades. It also happens to be a philosophy that was resoundly rejected by voters last November.

Personally, I was drawn to Vance’s memoir because, like him, I was also raised in Ohio, although in the northern part of the state. My home was surrounded by farms rather than factories, but I think of myself as an Ohioan to this day, even though I no longer live in the state.

Vance’s family is originally from Kentucky and immigrated to Ohio because his grandfather went to work at a factory in Middletown, Ohio, which is situated in the southwestern part of the state. In his Kentucky parlance, Vance refers to his grandparents as Papaw and Mamaw, and his writing evinces clear affection for these two.

Vance has a more mixed attitude towards hillbilly culture in general. (He uses the term hillbilly, but he identifies with the word and uses it mostly positively). While he’s proud of the culture’s fierce loyalty to family, which can sometimes result in quickly escalating verbal and physical fights, he’s less enamored of the culture’s high divorce rates and teen pregnancies. His own mother became pregnant while in high school, which lead to a string of husbands and boyfriends. Eventually, she became addicted to prescription medication, which could have been devastating to Vance if it weren’t for his Mamaw who was always watching out for her granchild.

Mamaw is without a doubt the memoir’s most interesting character, and not simply because she becomes Vance’s salvation from the failures of his mother. In fact, Mamaw and her husband engaged in many of the typically destructive behavior that Vance faults in hillbilly culture. Both are quick to anger with strangers and each other. Vance recalls a time when his grandparents became incensed and nearly came to blows with a store manager who had told him to stop playing with a toy. Mamaw and Papaw appear to have had a tumultuous relationship, and it’s likely Papaw suffered from alcoholism. They’re the kind of people who may not have been good parents but become good grandparents, perhaps as a means of redemption after failing their own children.

Vance eventually makes his way out of Middletown by joining the Marines, and then goes to college at Ohio State, and finally attends law school at Yale. He’s one of the lucky ones who beat the odds, and he’s sure to note that there were many points in his life where he may have succumbed to the same problems that often bring down those with his background. This narrative of upward mobility is nothing new, and as a memoirist, Vance’s writing is ill equipped. Despite the lyrical title, Vance’s prose is mostly bland, and at its worst, his writing is lazy and cliche. Certain lines really shouldn’t have made the final draft: “Bob was Mom’s third husband, but the third time was not the charm…I knew that Ohio State was put-up-or-shut-up time…Out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

But the reason why Vance’s book became a bestsellers has little to do with his skill as a memoirist. Hillbilly Elegy became a favorite of the pundit class because it not only diagnoses Trump’s base, but it also does so from the perspective of an insider. Vance identifies as a Republican, and he’s mostly skeptical of the power of government intervention, giving us the usual anecdotes of people supposedly misusing SNAP and poor people having such exorbitant luxuries as cell phones. Sidestepping race, Vance argues that the working poor have turned to the Republican party because they are fed up with people who are living off government assistance while they have to work. And yet, in the age of Trump this is a poor explanation of our current climate. After all, Trump managed to win the Republican primary by repeatedly rejecting the party’s “all government is bad government” dogma.

At times, however, Vance’s memoir veers from common images of the white poor, who are almost always represented as proud and hard working men and women (unlike those other kinds of poor people). Here he condemns hillbilly culture:

We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs. Sometimes we’ll get a job, but it won’t last. We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance–the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.

What makes Vance’s memoir fascinating despite itself, is how he takes the usual racialized criticism of African-Americans and applies it to whites. He sidesteps economic and structural problems and places the blame on culture. Vance isn’t the only conservative to make this move. Charles Murray, who is cited in the memoir more than once, has also made the move from strongly implying that African-Americans are genetically inferior in The Bell Curve to blaming poor whites for their own plight in his 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America. As the shifting global economy has imperiled more working class whites, it’s been interesting to see traditional conservatives turn on the Republican base rather than to question economic dogma.

Even within Vance’s own life story, his cultural explanation of why so many poor whites are struggling today doesn’t quite make sense. He notes in the introduction that the Scots-Irish–his people–are “‘one of the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country.’” And the heavy drinking, fighting, and unstable family structures that he points to as contemporary problems appear to have also existed in his grandparent’s generation. So if by all indicators, this culture seems consistent from one generation to the next, then why is it that his grandparents managed to eek out a living while so many of his peers haven’t?

He also never fully grapples with the fact that the American middle class is shrinking even while American families are working longer hours. And while it’s true that we normally don’t ask memoirs to provide solutions to complex socioeconomic problems, Vance invites this criticism by occasionally becoming prescriptive in his advice, extolling the virtues of optimism and hard work in the greatest country on Earth. Although Vance himself identifies as a Republican, some of his rhetoric actually reminded me of language from the 2016 Democratic Convention, which tried to present itself as an optimistic rejoinder to Trump’s Mad Max view of the world. We saw which image of the United States won out.

To his credit, Vance isn’t the breed of extremist Republican that has taken over the party. He rejects the kinds of conspiracy theories that circulate among his friends and family back home. He also doesn’t appear to be a free market Randian, and he does believe government can help people, if only to push its “thumb on the scale.” His political views line up with coastal Republicans like Mike Bloomberg and Mitt Romney or Blue Dog Democrats like Rahm Emanuel. In other words, he shares the same views as the East Coast elite.

Perhaps the greatest paradox in Hillbilly Elegy is the fact that even as Vance sneers at elites, making fun of their use of fifty-cent words and modern art museums, politically he falls squarely within their ideological worldview. He’s the kind of moderate Republican that populates places like CNN and the Wall Street Journal opinion page. Or, in the parlance of the far right, he has the same beliefs as the MSM.

Things brings me to the uncommented on reason why Hillbilly Elegy has been so damn popular among the pundit class: it’s comfort food for elite journalists. Think about it. Trump came through the political establishment and bulldozed everyone by not only rejecting Republican dogma but also relying on explicitly racist ethno-nationalism, and populations most affected by the new globalized economy ate it up in their desperation. Any rational individual would take a step back and reevaluate the last thirty years of politics, starting with the Reagan revolution through the post-Cold War neoliberal consensus. But then this guy comes out and parrots these same neoliberal beliefs, but what’s more, he comes from the same population that turned on the Republican establishment. It’s almost as if Vance had held the pundit class close, patted its head, and repeatedly whispered, “Don’t worry. You were right. You were right.”

So while Hillbilly Elegy has been held up as a look inside of a culture those living in the coastal bubble largely ignore, it actually functions quite differently. Instead, Vance provides an echo chamber for those East Coast op-ed writers, allowing them to them to dress up old ideas in new working man’s clothes.

On Donald Trump as Part of a Global Phenomenon and Where to Go from Here

What the hell happened? Americans are going to be asking that question about Donald Trump’s election upset for generations, and the reasons are complex and likely opaque from our current position. But I think it’s valuable to start reflecting on how a racist, misogynist demagogue managed to capture one of the most powerful political positions in the world’s oldest democracy. I think it’s useful at this stage to view Trump’s rise as a part of a much larger global phenomenon.

I’m not the first to make a connection between Trump’s rise and the shocking results of Great Britain’s retreat from the European Union. I did, however, write about the issue back in June. The question is, what’s been happening on a global scale that has causes the citizens of developed, democratic nations to reject globalism and retreat into nationalism, paranoia, racism and misogyny?

I think rising inequality and attendant neoliberalism have so stifled economic progress for much of the country that it both emboldened those in the “flyover states” to want to break something and depressed turnout from the same coalition who voted for Obama. This is not to dismiss the vile bigotry that fueled much of Trump’s support. It’s not every presidential candidate who receives that all important KKK endorsement. Since its founding America has been infected with a virulent strain of racism and bigotry. This should come as no surprise. When pundits claimed that we were in a post-racial era after Obama’s win in 2008, the left rightly called these beliefs naive at best.

But racism doesn’t always appear on your yard burning a cross. It can lie dormant for years only to be uncovered by collective anxieties. It’s also quite common for whites to like individual minorities while secretly despising them in the aggregate, known as the “some of my best friends” or “credit to your race” phenomenon. Many whites may like Obama individually but still harbor a deep racism against blacks in general. Racism is not some sort of scarlet letter where we know who’s racist because they a big “R” stitched to their clothes. And as Zach Carter over at the Huffingtonpost noted earlier in the campaign season, economic anxiety feeds the nation’s racism. So while Trump’s win is without a doubt in part a backlash to eight years of a black president, it’s also a result of decades of deregulation and corporate capitulation by both parties that has sent inequality skyrocketing and strangled wages.

And you don’t have to take my word for it. In fact, years before Trump even entered the race, people were warning that extreme inequality could result in isolationism and authoritarianism. In his book, The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman looks at how inequality dismantles democratic institutions. He points to a law passed around the time the book was published (2007) that gave hedge fund managers an extraordinary tax break from 35% of their wages to 15%, costing the American people $6 billion a year, which Krugman notes would be enough to provide medical insurance to three million children. He notes that Democrats were among those who rallied for these tax cuts. It’s a clear case of legalized corruption. In order to win elections, Democrats have to be the party of big business just like Republicans. Krugman goes on to argue that sacrificing the collective good for the benefit of a handful of people destroys trust in America’s institutions and in each other. He writes, “there’s convincing evidence that growing inequality is behind our growing cynicism, which is making the United States seem increasingly like a Latin American country” (569). These words are awfully prophetic considering the fact that nine years after The Conscience of a Liberal was published Trump would repeatedly compared to a Latin American strongman.

Move forward seven years, and Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century becomes a rare academic crossover sensation. Once again, Piketty issues a warning that global levels of inequality will likely lead to political instability, including increased nationalism around the globe. Neither Piketty nor Krugman are academics hidden away in obscurity writing to other academics. Both texts had an impact on the national conversation, but I think there’s a real sense of American exceptionalism, even among those on the left, who felt “it can’t happen here.” Sure, Europeans get pretty extreme on both ends of the political spectrum, but the United States stays in the happy middle ground. That’s never been true, and those who thought America couldn’t slip into extremism just like any other nation on Earth are unfamiliar with America’s history.

But you don’t have to take my word for the fact that Trump’s rise and election is a part of a larger phenomenon in response to inequality in a global economy. Just take a look at the last commercial Trump’s team cut before election day. The ad clearly takes a global perspective on America’s economy. In the ad, Trump ominously claims that “the establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in the election.” The narrative moves from images of Wall Street and Washington to Hillary Clinton shaking hands with foreign leaders, images over which Trump warns of a “global power structure” that has been harming America’s interests. Of course, because this is a Trump ad, it also stokes fear of the other, specifically Mexican immigrants and wealthy Jews. (The ad has been rightfully accused of being anti-semitic, and the ominous images of George Soros, Janet Yellen, and Lloyd Blankfein are reminiscent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion propaganda from last century.) It’s telling, however, that Trump’s campaign focuses on global neoliberalism as its final argument, and this suggests that Trump’s campaign sees his base as economically insecure in our globalized world. You could also look at the fact that the states that flipped for Trump were in the rust belt. I’m from this area, and there are cities that have fallen far from their heyday in the mid-twentieth centuries. It seems like for many of them the rebound that’s just around the corner never comes.

Unfortunately, the current levels of global inequality was aided by both Republicans and Democrats, including Bill Clinton. After all, he continued to deregulate Wall Street just like the Republican presidents before him. He also enthusiastically oversaw the “end of welfare as we know it.” Much like Candlebox’s first album, Clinton’s presidency has not aged well. Hillary Clinton, rightly or wrongly, has become a symbol for this form of corporate-centered Democrat. There’s no doubt that the underlying economic system we’ve endured for the last thirty years would have continued under Clinton, possibly with some tweaks here and there. She would have been an incrementalist, and while an incrementalist is a much, much better option than a racist authoritarian, you can start to see why those economically suffering might want to roll the dice with the latter.

Again, the reasons for Trump’s rise and Clinton’s defeat are myriad. I’m not dismissing America’s acceptance of misogyny as completely normal, a development that absolutely shocked me. Clinton also suffered two decades of assaults on her character, often abetted by a weak and compliant media that was more interested in establishing false equivalencies between Democrats and Republicans than establishing truth. They helped perpetuate obviously false conspiracy theories about Hillary and her husband for years when in fact her failings as a politician and candidate were a lot more mundane.

What’s often been missed is how much of a corporate Democrat Obama has been as well. Perhaps it’s easiest to see Obama’s Clintonian side in his approach to education. Instead of repudiating George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy, he mostly doubled down on it with Race to the Top. Obama continued to push the idea that what K through 12 education needs is to be treated like a business by introducing competition in the form of more charter schools and standardized tests. Or you could look at Obama’s proposed “grand bargain,” which would have cut Social Security and Medicare in return for higher taxes on the wealthy, a compromise he sought while the country was suffering double digit unemployment. Luckily, Republicans torpedoed the deal, otherwise it’s likely Obama could have been responsible for starting the dismantlement of some of the Democratic Party’s greatest accomplishments. We could also point to the fact that following the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, Obama’s administration refused to prosecute high level bankers who committed fraud in the run up to the 2008 crash. Trump’s campaign clearly understood that eight years out voters are still angry about the pain inflicted on the American people thanks to Wall Street’s reckless actions. If you want to play guilt by association, you could also point to the fact that Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, is now employed by Uber, a company that could serve as neoliberalism’s poster child. Or maybe you could look at Obama’s former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, who has spent his time as the mayor of Chicago beating up on the teachers’ unions.

But Obama is still popular in the United States, and you can see why Clinton thought offering more of the same would be enough to get her over the finish line. Obama has had a number of important accomplishments during his two terms, not the least of which is healthcare reform. Managing to deliver healthcare to twenty million more Americans, no matter the law’s shortcomings, is something to be proud of. He’s also an incredible communicator who used the internet to reach the American people and, unlike Trump, to bring them together. Obama’s skill as a politician sometimes overshadowed the shortcomings of his policies.

Much of the press is focused on the angry white poor and working class, and it’s clear that Trump tapped into a kind of energy among these voters. However, the flip side to this narrative is the lack of enthusiasm among the multicultural coalition that Obama brought together. This might surprised some people in the press, but people of color work, and they work hard. The working class in the cities did not show up to the polls in the numbers that Clinton needed, which suggests that they too did not think that her presidency, which promised more of the same, was going to materially improve their lives. Showcasing Trump’s bigotry just wasn’t enough to get this coalition out in droves like Obama managed in 2008 and 2012.

As clear as it is to me that a Clinton presidency would have clearly been better than a Trump presidency, Clinton herself just wasn’t able to make the case for why people should vote for her. Instead, she made the case for why you shouldn’t vote for the other guy. What’s truly unfortunate is that despite Trump’s rhetoric, there’s every indication that we’re going to get more of the same with him. Republicans control congress and the presidency, so you can expect the policies of global free trade that Trump ran against to accelerate in the next four years. Those working class whites in the rust belt were duped.

So where do we go from here? Democrats need to recognize that the global economy is not working for everyone. And it’s time to rethink globalization. Too often the term “globalization” has become shorthand for expanding free market capitalism. Globalization will happen, to be sure. Technology will bring us together, but that doesn’t mean that a shrinking world automatically leads to lowering taxes on the wealthy and shredding regulations and government programs.

On a local level, this election has reaffirmed my belief that democracy is about much more than just giving each person one vote. There are larger structures and institutions that make a democracy function. As an educator, I believe schools are an integral pillar of democracy, and public support for schools, both grade schools and higher education, is necessary to defend this institution. We’ve been slowly suffocating our schools. But I truly believe that given the training, time, and money, K-12 teachers could develop in their students the sort of critical thinking skills necessary to be a discerning voter. If we’re doing a poor job of supporting K-12 education, we’re arguably doing even worse when it comes to higher education. We like to pretend like more education is the solution to the economic woes of the American worker, but then we defund colleges and universities, so they have to raise tuition which creates a barrier for entry.

In order for these solutions to happen, education needs to be seen as a public good and its role needs to expand beyond the economy. For instance, studying English literature and language allows us to dissect political rhetoric, which in turn gives us the ability to see through so much of Trump’s bullshit. Literature can also put us in the place of others, and by carefully engaging with literary works, we can develop a better sense of how those with different backgrounds experience and understand the world. In other words, literature can aid us in empathizing with the other. This sort of education is important for a well-functioning republic.

These are my somewhat disconnected thoughts after a disconcerting week. At minimum, I certainly think that we need more empathy in the United States. Naturally, this is more true for those who voted for Trump, a man who mocks the disabled, immigrants, blacks, Muslims, and Latinos. But certainly liberals need to be reminded to see the world through the eyes of others now and again. And even if the left adopts a more populist economic stance, many in rural America will cling to their ways, voting Republican out of a sense of tribalism or racism. But we still must do work to make sure people from all backgrounds, in cities and in the countryside, have access to good jobs and a strong safety net for when times are tough. And we need to help out those struggling economically, even when they also happen to be racists and bigots. We can empathize with racists and bigots too. But if you are one of the many people who are economically secure and still decided to vote for a women-molesting, race-baiting, immigrant-hating orange creamsicle, then you can go fuck yourself.

On Robert W. Chambers’s King in Yellow Panic

Robert W. Chambers has become an apparition in American literature. He’s barely read anymore, but we can feel his ghostly presence across dimensions, mostly through his influence on writers like H.P. Lovecraft whose popularity has only increased in recent years thanks to the memeification of Cthulhu. Lovecraft was most certainly influenced by Chambers and his vision of forbidden knowledge and its ability to drive men mad. Chambers developed the idea of a book called The King in Yellow, a play that at first seems normal to the reader but eventually becomes twisted and macabre. Although the contents of the play are deliberately obscured by Chambers’s writing, those who do in fact read the play become mentally shaken.

The King in Yellow clearly serves as an antecedent to Lovecraft’s own Necronomicon written by the “Mad Arab.” Chambers himself was influenced heavily by Ambrose Bierce who in addition to writing his popular stories of the Civil War also dabbled heavily on ghost stories. In his 1886 story, “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” Bierce first develops the idea of the ancient and unknown city, which may or may not be of our world, which Chambers inserted into his own weird tales. There’s an appeal to how these narratives are borrowed and passed down like a particularly spine-tingling ghost story. Likewise, many other authors, such as Robert E. Howard and Robert Bloch, who freely took from Lovecraft. And it’s likely because of this chain of influence that Chambers is likely still around today, even influencing such works of popular fiction as the first season of True Detective.

This is a pretty cozy narrative of creation as collaboration, but Lovecraft and Chambers also shared some good old fashioned white, American racism. In particular, Chambers appears concerned with the influx of Chinese immigrants towards the end of the nineteenth century, and his stories are replete with suggestions of the “Yellow Peril.” Chambers’s short story, “The Maker of Moons” in particular provides us with a glimpse into the fin de siecle anxieties about the East invading the West.

Like much of Chambers’s speculative fiction, “The Maker of Moons” belongs to the genre of “weird fiction,” a dreamlike blend of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Early in the story, the narrator visits his friend’s gold shop where his friend, Godfrey, shows him an eyeless hybrid creature that looks similar to a sea urchin and a spider. The narrator is so disgusted by the creature, which he claims is worse than a “Japanese grotesque,” that he tells Godfrey to kill it immediately (95). Godfrey discovered the creature in the Canadian wilderness in a place called The Cardinal Woods where he also found an orb of gold that appears to have been synthesized. Hearing this, the narrator, Godfrey and their friend Barris head to the woods on a hunting expedition, hoping to also discover whoever’s making the bootleg gold.

While hunting by himself at night, the narrator stumbles on a fountain and a mysterious woman who goes by the name of Ysonde and tells him she comes from a mysterious place called Yian. She disappears as quickly as she appeared, and the following day the narrator returns to where he found the fountain but nothing is there. Ysonde clearly fulfills the stereotype of the Asian female who is delicate, loving, enticing, and perplexing.

The narrator discovers that his companions have also seen “Chinamen” in these woods. Barris had previously discovered a gold globe with the “Chinese hieroglyphics” of Kuen-Yuin, a sort of Chinese cult (113). As Barris, who makes his living as some sort of secret agent, says,

[T]he Kuen-Yuin have absolute control of a hundred millions of people, mind and body, body and soul. Do you know what goes on in the interior of China? Does Europe know,–could any human being conceive of the condition of that gigantic hell-pit? You read the papers, you hear diplomatic twaddle about Li Hung Chang and the Emperor, you see accounts of battles on sea and land, and you know that Japan has raised a toy tempest along the jagged edge of the great unknown. But you never heard before of the Kuen-Yuin; no, nor has any European except a stray missionary or two, and yet I tell you that when the fires from the pit of hell have eaten through the continent to the coast, the explosion will inundate half a world,–and God help the other half (113).

It’s easy to spot the hallmarks of Orientalism in this passage. China is the province of the mystical and unknown and poses an existential danger to the West. The paradox of yellow peril is present in how easily Barris dismisses knowledge of China the general public might gather from your daily newspaper in order to highlight the hidden threat buried within the nation, inaccessible to those without the proper esoteric knowledge. In order to represent China of the late nineteenth century as a true threat to the West, you had to contend with the contradictory image of China as the “sick man of Asia.”

Throughout the nineteenth century, China faced foreign invasion, colonization, and civil war, but there was still something threatening about the nation to Westerners. This was partly because of America’s nativist and anti-Chinese racism. But, as others have pointed out, China’s longstanding history as an international power that rivaled and often eclipsed Europe surely engendered a feeling of anxiety about Western imperialism and the fear that America and Europe’s foreign adventures would someday lead to a precipitous fall. Western authors, then, simultaneously claimed that China was weak and backwards as well as an incredible threat to our very way of life.

In the story, the West’s fear of China is also embodied in a monster known as a Xin, which is a larger version of those eyeless creatures shown to the narrator at the beginning of the narrative and look like a combination of a spider and a sea urchin. These smaller versions of the Xin follow his every command: “‘This monster is horrible, for it not only lives in its own body, but it has thousands of loathsome satellites,–living creatures without mouths, blind, that move when the Xin moves, like a mandarin and his escort’” (133). The image of this creature and his mindless followers plays into the idea that China was composed of a monolithic mass of people who readily gave up their own individuality for the good of the emperor. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. China is ethnically and religiously diverse, which made establishing a governing authority over China’s intimidating landmass extremely difficult. The Qing Dynasty still ruled in the late nineteenth century, and for many Chinese they were seen as illegitimate because the royal family was ethnically Manchurian.

When it comes to fear of the Other, reality is often less important to people than perception. Like much of Chambers’s fiction, the ending of “The Maker of Moons” is inconclusive. The narrator suggests that more people learn of Kuen-Yuin and his cultish followers but that many may not believe these fantastic stories. Only the chosen truly understand the threat America faces from the other side of the globe. The imprecise nature of the threat only makes it that much more frightening. There are some easy parallels between Chambers’s story and the language used about Syria, a country that’s experiencing a devastating civil war and yet whose refugees are likened to a fifth column ready to undermine our very nation. The clear repetitive nature of these overblown concerns should clue us into how detached they are from reality.

On Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century

It’s not often that a densely researched academic text enters the national conversation. Often there’s a thick barrier between academic and public discourse. The only means to break through this divide is to funnel research that’s important to the public into a more easily digestible op-ed. But the idea that an economist could get the general public to run out and purchase a 600-plus page tome that pores through centuries of data on income inequality seems especially improbable in our day and age of bit-sized digital text and information. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, whose English translation came out in 2014, is that 600-plus page tome. And while Piketty’s centuries spanning analysis of income inequality isn’t exactly a beach read, it’s also clear that Piketty believes his work is important enough for a non-academic audience and clearly wrote his study so that it could be read by anyone willing to put in a little elbow grease.

In the text’s introduction, Piketty attempts to provide a glimpse into his own thinking and where he sees himself in the world of economics. He notes that because he’s a part of the generation that largely came of age following the fall of the Soviet Union, he has no real allegiance to dogmatic Communism and “lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism.” He sees himself as somewhat freed from the dogmas of the Cold War. This might come as news to many of his detractors. From professional pundits to random internet commentators, Piketty’s critics have attempted to smear him with the dreaded commie label. This is less a reflection of Piketty’s politics than it is an indication of how far to the right we’ve shifted in the last few decades. That’s not to say that Piketty is non-ideological, at least in the Althusserian sense. He clearly thinks that vast inequality that’s not justified by social utility and potentially harmful to large portions of the population is a problem. He just doesn’t believe the government needs to seize all means of production in order to rectify economic injustice.

Piketty also harbors a deep distrust of the economic discipline. He claims that too often economists make use of equations that arise not out of a careful analysis of data but rather to illustrate largely abstract points. These equations give the discipline the image of rigor without actually backing it up with the requisite amount of data gathering and analysis. For instance, the Laffer Curve, which suggests that tax revenues will disappear at 0% or 100% of taxation, has often been used to argue against any increase in taxes. The basic argument that if you tax one hundred percent of income, then you will obliterate economic activity makes sense, but no one really knows at what point prior to this point that economic activity will drop off. The U.S. had a marginal tax rate of 90% during Eisenhower’s administration and it hardly killed the economy.

To rectify what he sees as the sins of his discipline, Piketty has collected a boatload of data. Stretching all the way back to the eighteenth century, Piketty examines inequality in income, inequality in capital, sources of capital, public and private capital, and much more. Throughout the text are found helpful graphs and clear definition of Piketty’s terms. The division between income–money brought home from a day’s work–and capital–assets that are owned and bought and sold–are essential to his analysis. He notes that for much of the past two hundred and fifty years, the elite derived their wealth from capital, through speculation and the stock market as well as rents on property. The landed gentry made money by merely owning things, on average pulling in four or five percent per year of the value of what they owned, a rate of return that has largely stayed the same over the centuries.

Piketty’s data analysis leads him to several main points, including two important “laws of capitalism” (which I will get to in a bit) that help explain vast movements of wealth over the last few centuries. Perhaps the simplest and most striking observation is r>g where r equals the rate of return on capital and g equals national growth. In other words, those who own capital are receiving returns at a greater rate than the economy as a whole grows. There appears to be a disconnect between returns on capital and general economic growth, meaning that those with enough money invested in capital will prosper far more than the working stiff bringing home a paycheck. This also means that claims that we can grow our way out of inequality are largely overly optimistic at best and completely bunk at worst.

From here, Piketty’s explanations become a little trickier, but are by no means opaque, even to economic novices like myself. The first fundamental law of capitalism is α = r x β where α equals share of income from capital in national income, r is the rate of return on capital, β and equals the capital/income ratio (the amount of total wealth between wealth from income and wealth in capital). Even if you are, like me, not used to conceptualizing in mathematical notations, Piketty makes certain that the reader understands each variable in his laws, clearly defining his terms for academics and non-academics alike. To (overly)simplify Piketty’s first law of capitalism, as the capital/income ratio and or the rate of return on capital increases, so does the percentage of income from capital in our national income. This matters, in part, because capital is normally owned by those with greater wealth and because the capital/income ratio has been steadily increasing for the past thirty years.

The second fundamental law of capitalism posits β = s/g where , once again, β equals capital/income ratio, s equals the savings rate and g equals the growth rate. To put this into words, as savings increase and growth decreases, the capital/income ratio increases, that is more wealth is derived from capital (those who have the means to invest) than from income (those who take home a paycheck). Once again, not everyone is able to save or save in large measure. As the ultra wealthy are able to set aside money, the capital/income ratio becomes more severe, and this is only exacerbated when economic growth slows as it recently has in much of the globe.

By looking at wealth over the course of centuries, Piketty is able to establish that left to its own devices, wealth will outpace growth, but anyone who is casually familiar with movements like Occupy Wall Street are aware that the inequality we now experience was not always the case. In fact, when graphed income inequality across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century follows a U-shaped curve with massive inequality to be found at the beginning of the twentieth century and at the end the millennium. So what happened during the middle of the century? Both World Wars as well as the Great Depression demolished global wealth. These global shocks combined with policies to tax and redistribute wealth limited gaps within the socioeconomic strata. The Reagan and Thatcher revolutions combined with fears that nations like Japan were going to eclipse the West lead to a gradual dissolution of the redistributive policies of the mid-twentieth century.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an impressive achievement for plenty of reasons, but as someone who loves literature, I was particularly drawn to Piketty’s attempts to engage with literature to illustrate and explain attitudes surrounding wealth. He argues that because inflation was relatively low in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, authors during these times could note the exact wealth of a character and expect their audience to know exactly how that translated into an annual yield. Capital results in a relatively safe four or five percent return each year, so if a wealthy aristocrat in a Jane Austen novel is believed to own £200,000, then the audience knows they make £8,000 per year. The audience of the time was well aware that those at the very top of the economic pyramid are the idle rich living off the dividends from inherited wealth.

Of all the literary analysis in Capital, I found “Vautrin’s Lesson” to arguably be the most fascinating and useful for scholars of literature. In Honore de Balzac’s Pere Goriot (1835), the character of Eugene de Rastignac has studied law but is introduced to the cruelty of the culture and capitalism of nineteenth-century France. Rastignac comes across the cynical and morally bankrupt Vautrin who attempts to embroil Rastignac in a scheme to commit murder in order to access a large estate. Vautrin outlines the sheer impossibility of ever amassing a wealth of consequence through hard work in even a potentially lucrative profession like law. Even if he is capable of networking in the city and landing a plumb legal position–which are hard to come by–after a lifetime of unending labor, Rastignac will never reach the peaks of those who have simply inherited their wealth (238-39). Thus, inheritance will always beat out hard work.

Shortly after reading Capital, I happened to reread George Orwell’s fantastic little memoir, “Such, Such Were the Joys” about his time at an English boarding school. I was shocked to find the following passage:

Very early, at the age of only ten or eleven, I reached the conclusion­ no one told me this, but on the other hand I did not simply make it up out of my own head: somehow it was in the air I breathed–that you were no good unless you had £100,000. I had perhaps fixed on this particular sum as a result of reading Thackeray. The interest on £100,000 a year (I was in favour of a safe 4 per cent), would be £4,000, and this seemed to me the minimum income that you must possess if you were to belong to the real top crust, the people in the country houses. But it was clear that I could never find my way into that paradise, to which you did not really belong unless you were born into it. You could only make money, if at all, by a mysterious operation called “going into the City,” and when you came out of the City, having won your £10,000, you were fat and old. (291)

It’s remarkable how similar Orwell’s passage mirror’s Balzac’s, despite the fact that it the events are separated by eighty years and the English Channel. The events Orwell recounts would have occurred around 1913, and at the early age of ten he had already soaked in the idea that hard work could never compete with inheritance, an idea present in both literature and, as Piketty illustrates, fact.

Are we doomed to enter a new age of aristocracy or is there a way to divert this catastrophe? Piketty suggests that we institute a global tax on capital of two percent. This has been largely been criticized as unrealistic. However, with the release of the Panama Papers, it’s becoming clearer that the ultra-wealthy are hiding their wealth from tax collectors, a modern benefit not available to the poor and middle class. Besides, it seems like the international community is fully capable of coming together to develop transnational trade deals. What prevents nations from coming together to fight global inequality, except for a lack of political will? If something is not done about the issue of inequality, the political unrest could also start to resemble what we saw in the first half of the twentieth century.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century serves as a wake up call. If we continue down the road we are heading, inequality will eventually rise to the level last seen in the early twentieth century. It is already the case that the wealth of one’s parents has become a determining factor in most people’s lives. Piketty further warns that unless we do something about inequality, we are likely to see a rise in nationalism. Consider the fact that Capital was released before the Brexit and Donald Trump’s meteoric rise. Those two events alone should scare even the one percent into action.

On The Brexit and Two Forms of Sovereignty

Like most Americans last Thursday night, I went to sleep with the comfort of knowing that Great Britain would inevitably vote to remain within the European Union, to choose unity over chaos, globalization over sovereignty. And then, when I woke up, I was completely flabbergasted. The unification of Europe has been an ongoing project since the end of World War II, and globalization, as they tell, us is basically inevitable. The entire planet will soon be a wonderful playground for the free movement of capital and labor, which will in turn release all the best that innovation, technology, and disruption have to offer (except for 99% of the population who can’t hide their funds in offshore accounts, but nevermind).

Of course, globalization is more than just neoliberalism personified. There’s wonderful potential to be found in living in a smaller world. Ultranationalism gave us World War II, after all, so it’s not like strong sovereignty has a great track record. Furthermore, large global problems, like global warming and refugees and, perhaps, even inequality, can best be tackled through transnational channels. And I think that’s why people are stunned by the Brexit (a neologism that becomes more infuriatingly awful each time you hear it, kind of like “natch”).

As I said, like most Americans, I was blindsided by the decision of the British people to flee the EU, but as an American I shouldn’t have been. We have been living in our own revolt against current trends in globalization in the form of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. While Sanders offers a more thoughtful response to the ills of globalization and inequality, Trump has fashioned his political career out of locating and exploiting the id of the American public.

And much of the discussion over Great Britain’s vote to leave has positioned nationalism against globalization. While this is an oversimplification, there is some truth here. If we view recent events through these twin poles, then I think it leads us to a paradox in how the political establishment deploys these dual notions. It’s necessary for politicians to espouse the virtues of globalization in order to achieve the economic goal of unleashing the power of the free market planetwide, but at the same time they must froth up nationalism in order to fight an unending war against terror across borders. With the Brexit and Trump’s rise to power, you can see how these two ideas are often at cross purposes. For globalized neoliberalism, you need to allow people to freely cross borders, even when those people are brown. To fight the forever war against terror, you need to reinforce ultranationalism in order to kill the Other, which happen to be brown people.

My PhD dissertation actually looked at sovereignty in nineteenth-century American literature, and one of the guiding theorists in my research and thinking was political philosopher Wendy Brown and her book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, which she published back in 2010. Brown argues that the increased effort to build walls (in particular she looks at Israel) signals an anxiety about our globalized world. Again, this was five years before Trump ran for president using the idea of a border wall as central to his platform. (It would probably behoove politicians to pay a little more attention to what the humanities are saying or at the very least to academics in general).

One of the ideas I worked on with the help of Brown’s study is the dual meanings of sovereignty. The more common usage of the term refers to inviolable control over a nation’s borders. The United States determines who enter the country and what rules are enacted within. The nation is an island. The second meaning of sovereignty is the location of authority within a nation. The sovereign within an absolute monarchy is the king, but authority within a democracy is supposed to be held by “the people.” The notion that a nation is ruled by its people undergirds how we have conceived of political power for the last couple of centuries.

I argue in my dissertation that the view of sovereign authority as emanating from the people does not necessarily result in a liberal democracy. It could just as easily result in authoritarian rule. However, liberalism generally takes rule by the people as one of its starting points. By contrast, Brown points out, global capital “mocks efforts by national and subnational communities to contour their ways of life or to direct their own fates” (65). In other words, one of the pillars of liberalism is also at odds with global capital. This is why it’s a mistake to claim that we’re seeing a conflict between ultranationalism and traditional liberal democracy. Both nationalism and liberal democracy erode under the threat of global capitalism.

The results of this blowback can be frightening and can take the form of racism and xenophobia. But I also think that rejection of globalization is a reaction to a general feeling that individual citizens have lost control of their status as the ultimate authority within the nation-state. And these people aren’t wrong. A Princeton University study found that laws passed by the Congress in no way line up with public opinion. Moneyed interest of the top ten percent of earners have an outsized impact on the laws of our nation. These are the same people who have benefited from unfettered global capitalism. This form of globalization is also an assault on the liberal order and sovereign authority of the people. Of course, people don’t need a Princeton study to tell them what they already know. Democracy has been losing sway for some time. Although many people might be frightened into blaming scapegoats, the basic assumption that the demos has lost power within the nation is founded on truth, and it is no wonder that the citizens of Great Britain and The United States are lashing out any way they can.

On Charles C. Mann’s 1493 and Misidentifying Globalization

What is globalization? The answer may seem pretty obvious, especially in an age when “globalization” has become a buzzword. We might simply define globalization as a process that involves technology’s ability to shrink time and distance, connect the world economy, and weaken state sovereignty. In Charles C. Mann’s 1493, he makes the sensible argument that globalization’s roots stretch back all the way to Columbus’s stumble onto the Americas. In academia, this idea goes back at least forty years and is known as the Columbian Exchange. However, Mann’s understanding of globalization carries with it an ideological subtext that affects his understanding of this five hundred year development. For Mann, globalization isn’t a process that could lead to multiple worldwide outcomes. He sees globalization solely as the global movement towards laissez faire capitalism while ignoring alternative possibilities that might arise from our ever shrinking world.

In his introduction, Mann describes his visit to Manila’s bust of Rajah Sulayman, a filipino leader who resisted Spanish rule, a conflict that for Mann represents one of the first battles between the forces of globalization and indigenous people. Looking around the Philippines, he observes in the present day numerous toys based on Western television shows and fast food restaurants and declares that in the end Sulayman lost. Throughout the book, Mann engages in a form of presentism that forces him to flatten complex historical events into simple either or propositions. The conflict between Sulayman and the Spanish revolved around questions of colonialism and self rule, but in Mann’s eyes it’s really about whether a nation will engage in globalized trade or isolationism. He cannot imagine that a non-European nation might engage with global trade in order to incorporate new goods and technology while maintaining self rule and rejecting colonialism. Japan and Siam (Thailand) in the nineteenth century might serve as instructive examples of non-European nations navigating globalization while rebuking colonialism, but both nations are given scant attention in the book.

The Philippines become the epicenter of global trade, and Mann’s discussion of Spanish colonization perhaps best illustrates his simplified, neoliberal understanding of the process of globalization. In Mann’s discussion of the Chinese/Spanish trade in Manilla, he describes the repeated massacre of Chinese merchants by the Spanish, a cycle of violence that occurred every decade or two throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. In attempting to explain these centuries of violence, Mann divorces economics from politics. Taking a page from neoliberal theories of free trade, Mann argues that left to their own economic devices, countries trade goods neither produces on their own in order to benefit both nations. The mutual benefit from the differing goods and services provided by these nations is called a “comparative advantage.” These nations trade goods that each are best at producing, and they both go away happy (156-61).

This is, of course, a fantasy. Even if this happy image of the invisible hand at work were true, there are still losers in this economic model, often the laborers who produce these goods. Putting these issues aside, the relationship between Spanish colonialists and Chinese merchants just doesn’t fit the comparative advantage framework. Mann conveniently forgets that in this scenario the Spanish aren’t producing olive oil on Spanish soil and then shipping them off to China in return for silk. Spain is consuming the agriculture and labor of a foreign nation in order to enrich its coffers and those of its merchant class.

Mann goes on claim that the violence between the Spanish and Chinese in Manila can be explained away by politics. In his understanding, politics and economics are separate entities. This is adorably naive. At one point, Mann bizarrely claims that the desire on the part of the Spanish to seize Asian territory is solely a political endeavor. Of course, government and the economy are and have always been interconnected. Money or capital, which allows capitalism to exist, derives its value from its government backing. There is nothing natural about the “free market.” In one way or another, it is regulated and controlled. (Perhaps a prehistorical bartering system is the closest we might get to a true “free market,” but I doubt this is what Mann has in mind.) What’s more, the free market often leads to monopolies, which hinders competition, supposedly one of the advantages of capitalism. Preventing monopolies and unleashing the power of competition requires government intervention.

But we don’t have to delve into the nature of capitalism in order to see how wildly off the mark Mann is here. Starting in the seventeenth century, European nations created private chartered companies that colonized other nations for commercial gain. These joint stock companies were often seen as an extension of their country of origin, but they would break from nationalist goals if it interfered with the bottom line. These private companies were not looking for the mutual benefit of comparative advantage. They had their own armies, they suppressed self rule of foreign nations, and they squeezed wealth from foreign soil. Tellingly, the first massacre of the Chinese by Spanish in Manila described by Mann occurs after Chinese officials visit the Philippines looking for a mythical mountain of silver.

Mann’s ideological blinders lead him to make plenty of bizarre or simply factually incorrect statements. As a scholar of Antebellum America, the one that bothered me the most was his outdated understanding of slavery and capitalism. Any transnational economic history will at some point have to deal with the transatlantic slave trade. How does the development of chattel slavery fit within Mann’s neoliberal view of the world? Conveniently, he argues that slavery just does not make economic sense. Relying on Adam Smith’s economic arguments against slavery, Mann claims that because the enslaved lack the self interest to work hard and might run away or sabotage their enslavers crops, free labor is more productive in the long run. Mann rightly notes that Smith was trying to claim that slavery is not only immoral but also poor business (90-1). There’s only one problem with this argument: it is completely and totally wrong.

A number of studies have come out in recent years putting to lie the argument that slave labor does not work as intended. Edward Baptist’s superb The Half Has Never Been Told artfully dismantles the idea that nineteenth century slavery in the U.S. was a backwards and inefficient economic system. He carefully shows that slavery was deeply plugged into the world economy and modern capitalist system. In fact, enslavers continually developed cruel and ingenious means of making slave labor more productive, including increased use of measurement and documentation as well as creating what was known as the “pushing system,” new methods of discipline and violence that rung out as much labor as possible from the enslaved. By examining cotton production over the course of the nineteenth century’s first half, Baptist demonstrates that slavery was incredibly productive–far more productive than freeman labor–and that Smith and Mann’s claims to the contrary are just not based on the facts.

Interesting enough, Smith isn’t alone in his claim that slavery wasn’t much of an economic boon; slave owners also denied there was much economic benefit to slave ownership, an argument that allowed them to further claim they were really looking out for the well being of the enslaved who wouldn’t be able to care for themselves otherwise. As an early promoter of capitalism, Smith clearly had an ideological reason for separating the free market from one of its worst outcomes. Because Mann shares Smith’s ideological worldview, he of course wishes that slavery weren’t so damn profitable.

More is at stake here than just the fact that Mann didn’t do his homework. Mann wants to separate economics from politics. But if we do separate capitalism from values like human rights and we just look at issues of growth and productivity, then some of the absolute worst of humanity’s sins are perfectly justifiable. In other words, it’s not that politics interfere with the perfect laissez faire economic system; it’s that politics are necessary, at the very least, to curb the violence and exploitation of unfettered capitalism.

For much of 1493, Mann’s rigid ideology subtly guides his reading of history, but there are moments where this becomes more explicit. One such incident occurs in a footnote attempting to expand on his idea that politics and economics are distinct entities. He concedes that at times businesses might manipulate government for their own ends, but that the distinction between private exchange and trade as a “tool of state aggrandizement” is still useful (161). He goes on to write, “one reason for the conflict between today’s free traders and anti-globalization activists is that the former regard the first role [private exchange] as paramount whereas the latter think in terms of the second [trade as an extension of state power]” (161). I’ve already covered why this distinction between these two forms of trade is at best an oversimplification and at worst an impossibility. I’m interested here with how Mann’s language splits globalization into rigid dichotomies. From this excerpt it’s clear that Mann sees free trade–uninhibited corporate trade across borders–and globalization as synonymous. To be anti-free trade is to be anti-globalization, but of course this is not true.

In order to simply see why this definition of globalization is false, you simply need to walk down the coffee aisle in your grocery store and look for packages with a fair trade symbol. Fair trade, as opposed to free trade, works towards equanimity between trading partners so that the laborer is paid a living wage. Fair trade can be a part of a company’s ethics as well as a tactic to sell to ethically minded customers, but it may also be brought about by international trade agreements. Like free trade, fair trade is a product of our globalized world, but it seeks a very different outcome from globalization.

I would argue that there are few people who are truly anti-globalization. Sure, there are ultra-nationalists in many nations who want to close down borders and immigration. There are others who decry any international organization, whether it’s the WTO or the UN, that challenges state sovereignty. In the United States, Donald Trump and Glenn Beck are probably some of the best examples of anti-globalization demagogues. But that’s not how Mann sees the world. Throughout 1493, he suggests that environmentalists are anti-globalization. You can only make this claim if you assume that globalization means the same thing as unfettered capitalism.

In fact, environmentalists are very much pro-globalization. They support international treaties and organizations that limit the amount and kind of pollution corporations can inject into our air, rivers, and oceans. Environmentalists realize that pollution and global warming cannot be fixed through the actions of individual nation-states. Even if France limits the amount of C02 they produce, the United States may very well continue to pump out greenhouse gases, which will have deleterious global effects. 1992’s Kyoto Protocols and last year’s Paris Agreement are not standing in the way of globalization. They are a product of globalization, just not the kind globalization that Mann envisions.

Mann is a journalist, not an academic, so it’s not surprising that his understanding of these worldwide phenomena are limited. But he’s not the only person who implicitly defines globalization as the worldwide flourishing of the free market. This assumption repeatedly makes its way into public discourse, and it’s time that writers are called out on this lazy conflation between the two ideas.

One apparent goal of 1493 is to present globalization not as a recent phenomenon but as an ongoing process stretching back centuries. But because he sees globalization and worldwide neoliberalism as synonymous, this process forms a teleology. We are moving towards a kind of end of history envisioned by the likes of Francis Fukuyama in the 90s. This is of course a fiction. Globalization may be inevitable, but what form globalization takes is constantly developing. Maybe it will look like the free market utopia that Mann has in mind. Maybe it will look like the ultracapitalist dystopia of a cyberpunk novel. Or, just maybe, it will look like a world of overlapping state and transnational authorities that come together to solve problems of human rights, inequality, environmentalism and other excesses of capitalism. But 1493 attempts to preclude us from imagining these possibilities.