The Memory Bank

In 1900, about four-fifths of the planet’s land was controlled by people of European origin. Although European expansion was by then four centuries old, this land grab had largely taken place in the previous half-century and for most of Africa in the last two decades. It was manned by the world’s first population explosion, when European death rates fell faster than birth rates from the 1830s, and was enabled by rapid improvements in technologies for inflicting death on others. It is hardly surprising that the Europeans asked themselves how they came to enjoy what sometimes seemed like an effortless superiority over all-comers. This was also the time when modern anthropology was born with the aim of finding answers. The means seem obviously enough now to have been industrial capitalism, that combination of big money and machine production that took off around 1800 in Britain and a few other places. But where did this come from? It had to be something in the culture of Europeans that accounted for their successful application of scientific rationality to the task of world domination. Soon enough this cultural perception was given a biological foundation as a racial hierarchy with whites at the top, blacks at the bottom and brown and yellow people in between. So, when world society was launched by western imperialism in the course of the nineteenth century, it took the highly unequal form of a racial order which most people had been coerced into joining. Not only the anthropologists, but western historians, philosophers and social theorists set out to explain this European triumph in self-congratulatory terms. And most of them are still content to do so. Continue reading ‘The theft of history’ »

In the wake of market fundamentalism

We have lived in the last three decades through an explosion of money, markets and communications and are now beginning to experience the consequences. Whatever else this hectic period of ‘globalization’ brings, it represents a rapid extension of society to a more inclusive level than the twentieth-century norm which identified society with the nation-state. In order to live in the world together, we have to devise new ways of doing things for each other that go beyond our attempts to achieve local self-sufficiency. I call this historical process ‘commoditization’ (Hart 1982), the evolution of methods for making work social, so that it can circulate in the form of commodities. This essay is one such commodity. It does not have to be sold, but it was written with the aim of finding some limited circulation in this form. So far in history commoditization has been closely linked to the extension of society by means of markets and money. But there are other means and they may become more important as a result of the digital revolution in communications — and no doubt other factors. Continue reading ‘On commoditization: exchange in the human economy’ »