Tag: history

Don’t Judge the Past Through the Lens of the Present – New Amsterdam to Run Island

Things are not always what they appear .. whether it be history or this world. The movie “Shooter” said it well:

So this is more of a lesson in how we approach both history as well as current events, and how we can relate the two and become wiser. If the goal is to protect your family and property, you might want to seek wisdom and in the long run find yourself becoming more humble.

This article from Medium helped me how to unpack history in the lens of THOSE times, and also helped me connect the dots from something I was aware of:

  1. The British taking New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664 (without a shot fired)
  2. Battle of Medway in 1667 (as seen best for visual learners in the movie (English version) “Admiral“, the story of then Lieutenant-Admiral Michiel de Ruyter

It seems that #1 above was not received well back in the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands (Dutch Republic). This action helped to kick off the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1665 culminating in a decisive British defeat by the Dutch Navy (60 ships) and Marines (1500 men) in June 1667. Basically, the Dutch had this planned the year before but since negotiations for a peace treaty were in process, this might give the Dutch a better position at that table.

Dutch Republic

The Dutch Navy under nominal command of Willem Joseph van Ghent and Lieutenant-Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, over several days bombarded and captured the town of Sheerness, sailed up the Thames estuary to Gravesend, then sailed into the River Medway to Chatham and Gillingham, where they engaged fortifications with cannon fire, burned or captured three capital ships and ten more ships of the line, and captured and towed away the flagship of the English fleet, HMS Royal Charles.

The context is this:

England and the Dutch Republic both wanted to establish dominance over shipping routes between Europe and the rest of the world. The Anglo-Dutch Wars were how they settled this disagreement.

Think of these conflicts as international trade disputes — in which each side had a big navy and wasn’t afraid to use it.

The Second Anglo-Dutch War lasted two years, from 1665 to 1667, with an estimated joint loss of 52 ships. Over 12,000 men lost their lives.

The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Breda, leaving Manhattan under English rule. In exchange, England conceded to the Dutch the South Pacific Island of Run.

That is it. The Dutch had the upper hand after England was humiliated, at it took the ISLAND of Run (instead of the harbor that would become New York City) located  on the western side of the Banda Islands which is a part of the Maluku Islands now part of Indonesia.

I take it that didn’t help. I too needed a visual aid:

In this view, you don’t see the island OR the chain of islands it is a part of. So the Dutch got a deal? Well … as a matter of fact, yes they did. Again, you need to get in the lens of 1667 .. not 2018 to get this one. Our default follows:

Humans are amazing at making snap decisions, at extrapolating the broad view from the briefest glimpse. Humans see a pattern emerge that reminds them of something else, and — bam — they know exactly what’s going on. And all without a single conscious thought.

It’s a talent that’s served us well in the past. With a single glance, we can draw innumerable conclusions about our environment. What a lovely day. Such a warm smile. Oh crap, a tiger!

It’s this same talent that allows us to look at the terms of the Treaty of Breda and say, Something’s fishy here. The Netherlands got a raw deal.

Yup, we might call them stupid. Knowing what I know, I don’t think is was them. You need to understand the context. There are a few facts you need to know with this story:

First, spice was the 17th Century’s driver for worldwide trade:

Today, we take spices for granted. Every kitchen has a spice rack, or a well-stocked pantry. … But spice prices weren’t so reasonable in the 17th century. In fact, there’s an old French saying that goes something like this: You can buy a serf’s freedom for a pound of pepper.

Let that sink in for a minute. You could buy a person’s way out of a lifetime of indentured servitude with an item we can grab at the supermarket for $12.98.

Spices typically grow best in warm, non-European locales, which means that a lot of time and effort was spent just getting spices to Europe — thereby driving up the price. Case in point: Marco Polo’s first overland journey to Asia took 24 years. Sure, sailing cut that time down considerably. But then you had to factor in problems like scurvy. If it took 50 men to crew ship properly, you’d hire 75. Chances were you’d lose a third of your crew to sickness and death along the way.

Second, Europe’s naval power’s primary interest in the Americas was not settlement and not the fur trade. The English and the Dutch was trying to figure out how to get around America. The possibility of a short route up a river and getting to the “Spice Islands” drove these explorers. The Dutch had lost interest in New Amsterdam as it had little value to them.

Third, the spice that grew on Run best was nutmeg .. and the value of nutmeg in 1667 when the treaty was signed was similar to the price of gold:

The economics of nutmeg

The third fact to know is that of all the high-demand, low-supply, overpriced spices, nutmeg was king. It was the most precious spice on earth from kingdom to kitchen.

I’m not knocking it. It’s the secret ingredient in my homemade pancakes. It does a stand-up job dusted over eggnog. I wouldn’t want to imagine pumpkin pie without it. In the 1660s, though, nutmeg ruled the world.

It was literally worth its weight in gold. Incidentally, I looked up the price of gold, and, at the time of this writing, it’s trading over $1,250 an ounce. That would make the average quarter-ounce nutmeg seed worth over $300

So the decision was made and so did the Dutch cash in on their choice? (Do note that the British only held on to New York City for about 100 years)

Holland went into the war already controlling most of the Banda Islands. All but Run, to be precise. By the end of the hostilities, the Dutch had an exclusive monopoly over the most expensive spice on the planet. A nutmeg-opoly, if you will. And they held onto it until 1810. (At which time, the British used the Napoleonic Wars as an opportunity to capture Run’s neighbor, Banda Neira. They then shipped nutmeg trees to tropical parts of the British Empire, such as modern day Sri Lanka, effectively killing the Dutch nutmeg-opoly.)

That’s 143 years of nutmeg domination.

Or, 34 years longer than England held onto New England. Not a great bargain for the English after all.

So there you have it. In context you know know more about the big deals of the 17th century BUT you also can look at history and research for yourself how to get into THEIR shoes and try to SEE what they saw BEFORE you pass judgement on THEIR decisions.

Does this help? Can you follow the process to unpack history for your advantage which helps you, your family and your friends start to figure out current affairs in your country as well as in the world. It is my hope that when you read of situations in other parts of the globe that you would take time to research their world, their context and their culture before you quickly come to a snap judgement based only on your own lens.

SF1

 

Democracy – The God That Failed: How Can We Exit the Current Trajectory?

Here is the path .. from colony, toward an experiment in republican representation hijacked by a centralizing constitution that paved the way towards democracy and possibly towards socialism and communism .. and how can you NOT think about communism when we hear about the crackdown on freedom of speech by the Government-Entertainment complex … mainstream media?

As our government continues to suck the economic life out of its people (the VERY thing the South felt from 1830s to 1860) you have to wonder what is next?

“Every State must begin territorially small. That makes it easy for productive people to run away to escape its taxation and legislation. Obviously, a State does not like to see its productive people run away and tries to capture them by expanding its territory. The more productive people the State controls, the better off it will be. In this expansionist desire, it runs into opposition by other States. There can be only one monopolist of ultimate decision-making in any given territory. That is, the competition between different States is eliminative. Either A wins and controls the territory, or B. Who wins? At least in the long run, that State will win — and take over another’s territory or establish hegemony over it and force it to pay tribute — that can parasitically draw on a comparatively more productive economy. That is, other things being the same, internally more “liberal” States, i.e., States with comparatively low taxes and little legislative regulation, will win over less “liberal,” i.e., more oppressive, States and expand their territory or their range of hegemonic control. There is only one important element missing still in this reconstruction of the tendency toward imperialism and political centralization: money. As a territorial monopolist of legislation, every State, whether monarchic or democratic, immediately recognized the immense potential for its own enrichment — far beyond anything offered by taxation — provided by the monopolistic control of money. By appointing itself as the sole producer of money, the State could increase and inflate the money supply through currency depreciation: by producing an increasingly cheaper and ultimately “worthless” money, such as paper money, that could be produced at virtually zero cost, and thus enabled the State to “buy” real, non-monetary goods at no cost to itself. But in an environment of multiple, competing states, paper monies and currency areas, limitations to this policy of “expropriation through inflation” come into play. If one State inflates more than another, its money tends to depreciate in the currency market relative to other monies, and people react to these changes in selling the more inflationary money and buying the less inflationary one. “Better” money would tend to outcompete “worse” money. This can be prevented only if the inflationary policies of all states are coordinated and an inflation cartel is established. But any such cartel would be unstable. Internal and external economic pressures would tend to burst it. For the cartel to be stable a dominant enforcer is required — which leads back to the subject of imperialism and empire building. Because a militarily dominant State, a hegemon, can and will use its position to institute and enforce a policy of coordinated inflation and of monetary imperialism. It will order its vassal States to inflate along with its own inflation. It will further pressure them to accept its own currency as their reserve currency, and ultimately, to replace all other, competing currencies by a single paper money, used worldwide and controlled by itself, so as to expand its exploitative power over other territories and ultimately the entire globe even without further war and conquest. But — and with that I am slowly approaching the end of my tale of moral and economic folly and decay and have already touched upon a possible way out — imperialism and empire building also bears the seeds of its own destruction. The closer a State comes to the ultimate goal of world domination and one-world government and paper money, the less reason there is to maintain its internal liberalism and do instead what all States are inclined to do anyway, i.e., to crack down and increase their exploitation of whatever productive people are still left. Consequently, with no additional tributaries left and domestic productivity stagnating or falling, the empire’s internal policies of bread and circuses and its foreign policies of war and domination can no longer be maintained. Economic crisis hits, and an impending economic meltdown will stimulate decentralizing tendencies, separatist and secessionist movements, and lead to the breakup of empire. What, then, is the moral of my story? I have tried to make the current world intelligible, to reconstruct it as the predictable result of a series of successive and cumulative moral and economic errors. We all know the results. The price of justice has risen astronomically. The tax load imposed on property owners and producers makes the burden imposed on slaves and serfs appear moderate in comparison. As well, government debt has risen to breathtaking heights. Everywhere, democratic states are on the verge of bankruptcy. At the same time, the quality of law has steadily deteriorated to the point where the idea of law as a body of universal and immutable principles of justice has disappeared from public opinion and consciousness and been replaced by the idea of law as legislation. Every detail of private life, property, trade, and contract is regulated by increasingly higher mountains of paper laws. In the name of social, public, or national security, democratic caretakers “protect” us from global warming and cooling, the extinction of animals and plants and the depletion of natural resources, from husbands and wives, parents and employers, poverty, disease, disaster, ignorance, prejudice, racism, sexism, homophobia and countless other public “enemies” and “dangers.” Yet the only task government was ever supposed to assume — of protecting our life and property — it does not perform. To the contrary, the higher the state expenditures on social, public, and national security have risen, the more private property rights have been eroded, the more property has been expropriated, confiscated, destroyed, and depreciated, and the more have people been deprived of the very foundation of all protection: of personal independence, economic strength, and private wealth. The more paper laws have been produced, the more legal uncertainty and moral hazard has been created, and lawlessness has displaced law and order. And while we have become ever more dependent, helpless, impoverished, threatened and insecure, the ruling elite of politicians and plutocrats has become increasingly richer, more corrupt, dangerously armed, and arrogant. Likewise, we know about the international scene. The once-upon-a-time comparatively liberal USA, through a seemingly endless series of wars — wars supposed to make the world safe for democracy but in reality wars for US and its plutocrats’ world-domination — has risen to the rank of the world’s foremost empire and global hegemon, meddling in the domestic affairs and superimposing its rule on countless other countries and their local power elites and populations. Moreover, as the world’s dominant empire, the US has also established its currency, the US-dollar as the leading international reserve currency. And with the dollar used as reserve currency by foreign central (government) banks, the US can run a permanent “deficit without tears.” That is, the US must not pay for its steady excesses of imports over exports, as it is normal between “equal” partners, in having to ship increasingly more exports abroad (exports paying for imports!). Rather: Instead of using their export earnings to buy American goods for domestic consumption, foreign governments and their central banks, as a sign of their vassal status vis-à-vis a dominant US, use their paper dollar reserves to buy up US government bonds to help Americans consume beyond their means at the expense of foreign populations. What I have tried to show here is why all of this is not a historical accident, but something that was predictable. Not in all details, of course, but as far as the general pattern of development is concerned. That the ultimate error committed, leading to these deplorable results, was the establishment of a territorial monopoly of ultimate decision making, i.e., a State, and hence, that the entire history we are told and taught in schools and standard textbooks, which presents democracy as the crowning achievement of human civilization, is just about the opposite of the truth. The final question, then, is “Can we rectify this error and go back to a natural aristocratic social order?” ..”

Can we? IMHO, only when the elite find no more use of the common people will we be free to understand that we each come into this world equipped (nature) to be who we can be .. and the most honorable among us are the only ones that can judge and protect without becoming a parasite 🙂