The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophes, and Community

By William Hardy McNeill and J. R. McNeill

William H. McNeill is known for his ability to portray the grand sweep of history. The Global Condition is a classic work for understanding the grand sweep of world history in brief compass. Now with a new foreword by J. R. McNeill, this book brings together two of William Hardy McNeill's popular short books and an essay. The Human Condition provides a provocative interpretation of history as a competition of parasites, both biological and human; The Great Frontier questions the notion of "frontier freedom" through an examination of European expansion; the concluding essay speculates on the role of catastrophe in our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781400885107

Book preview

The Global Condition

The Global Condition

CONQUERORS, CATASTROPHES, AND COMMUNITY

William H. McNeill

With a new foreword by J. R. McNeill

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Published by Princeton University Press,

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

Copyright © 1992 by Princeton University Press

All Rights Reserved

New Princeton paperback printing, with a new foreword by J.R. McNeill, 2017

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-17414-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958260

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

press.princeton.edu

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 2

Table of Contents

Foreword   vii

Preface   xvii

PART I

The Great Frontier:

FREEDOM AND HIERARCHY IN MODERN TIMES

Acknowledgments   3

Lecture I: To 1750   5

Lecture II: From 1750   33

PART II

The Human Condition:

AN ECOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL VIEW

Acknowledgments   67

Microparasitism, Macroparasitism, and the Urban Transmutation   69

Microparasitism, Macroparasitism, and the Commercial Transmutation   100

PART III

Control and Catastrophe in Human Affairs   133

Notes   151

Index   161

Foreword

WILLIAM MCNEILL was born in Vancouver in 1917. His parents came from opposite ends of Canada, one from a farm on Prince Edward Island and the other from the timberlands of Vancouver Island. His parents met at McGill University where both studied English literature and, according to unverified family lore, both became valedictorians.¹ It was unusual for a P.E.I. farm boy to attend university in those days, and John T. McNeill had to win a prize as the best schoolboy on the Island to get there. It was even less likely for a young woman from the sawmill camps north of Nanaimo, B.C. to attend university, and Netta Hardy had to disappoint her family and convince a temporarily rich uncle to pay her way to McGill. Her parents expected her to help raise her nine younger siblings rather than vanish to Montreal and put on airs.

His parents’ choices and routes brought two legacies that William McNeill embraced. The first was a feel for the English language. He had two of the most literate parents in Canada. His father knew vast tranches of the King James Bible by heart, the result of a Presbyterian childhood and eventually of theological training and a career as a historian of the Christian church. His mother could recite reams of Victorian poetry from memory. They bequeathed to him (and to his sisters) a love of words and a keen preference for precision in their use.

The second parental legacy was ambition, which came mainly from his mother. She had broken with her own parents and desperately needed to show them that university education and the life of the mind was worthwhile and not frivolity. She was ambitious for her husband and for her son. She was a helicopter parent before helicopters existed, and urged her son to aim high, work hard, and seek distinction. Both her husband and her son became professors at the University of Chicago. That did not help to mend fences with her Vancouver Island kin, but provided her with a deep satisfaction nonetheless.

From his undergraduate days at the University of Chicago, William McNeill conceived a plan to write a big book on all of human history. He began in earnest in the mid-1950s. Along the way many ideas came to him that he could not work out fully in the published book, The Rise of the West (1963).² Some he forgot. Some he never forgot but never got to.³ Some became the basis of lectures he gave at universities in the U.S. and Canada and appear in this little book.

Five lectures he prepared between 1979 and 1986 form the core of this book. At that time, William McNeill was nearing the end of his long professorial career at Chicago, teaching less and traveling more. He remained at the height of his intellectual powers, as these pages attest. They provide quick access to some of his most influential work. For in these lectures he positioned some of the ideas he had left out of his major works, The Rise of the West, Plagues and Peoples (1976), and The Pursuit of Power (1982)—the three books he considered his best.

The first two chapters here are lectures delivered in 1982 at Baylor University. They represent McNeill’s reaction against the comforting American piety, as he saw it, of the Turner thesis. His Canadian upbringing, McNeill sometimes said, inoculated him against naively patriotic versions of American history.

Formulated in the late 1880s, Frederick Jackson Turner’s argument postulated a link between the wide open spaces of the American frontier and the democratic culture and rugged individualism of American society. It made no mention of slavery and its westward spread before 1861.⁴ For decades just about everyone learning American history learned the Turner thesis, and was usually encouraged to accept it as part of what made the U.S. exceptional among nations. McNeill rejected it, calling it here a romantic delusion, in favor of a broader vision of frontier politics.

In that broader vision McNeill argues that lands of low population density and weak state control invited one or another extreme in the hierarchical structure of human society: either a rude egalitarianism of the sort Turner saw, or its opposite, a brutal master-and-slave (or master-and-serf) society. The U.S. featured both at the same time, as did, for a while, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and Australia. These two essays represent McNeill’s effort to set U.S. history into a broader global pattern, building on earlier efforts of Walter Prescott Webb and Louis Hartz.

McNeill goes further than Webb or Hartz in trying to explain just why and how frontier situations came to exist in the Americas after 1492, in Australia after 1788, in South Africa after 1652, and in Russia and Ukraine. He locates the principal reason in disease history. He adduces the same explanation for the openness of Ukraine to settlement in the 14th and ensuing centuries, citing the recurrence of bubonic plague, as for the Americas, where introduced infections scythed down millions after 1492. The argument with respect to Ukraine and Eastern Europe has met with little assent from specialists, and McNeill’s balancing of overseas and eastward European expansion as two parallel movements has not persuaded world historians generally.

But his vision of the character of the frontier has held up better. McNeill saw regimes of compulsory labor as more characteristic of the world’s frontiers than was rude egalitarianism. Russian serfdom, African slavery in the Americas, and slavery in South Africa all responded to the same governing condition, labor shortage, and were more common than the democratic individualism celebrated by Turner and Webb. Only where oceans made military protection costs low, as in North America and Australia, could radical freedom and egalitarian society prosper. (Even this, however, does not explain the divergent paths of north and south in the U.S. before 1861 or the prevalence of convict labor in Australia after 1788.)

In the second of these two lectures, McNeill connects population growth in Europe with migration to regions where land was cheap—the lands of the Great Frontier. This spate of migration, which included coerced as well as free migrants, spread a handful of lethal infectious diseases still further. That process led to further depopulation in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, Siberia and so forth, which in turn opened opportunity for further migrants. By about 1920, however, continued population growth in the lands of the Great Frontier spelled an end for this particular pattern, which McNeill regards as a transitory phase. So the dynamics of the Great Frontier rested on an imbalance in demographic equilibria unusual in world history before 1500 and over with by 1920.

These essays show a confident familiarity with the broad lines of demographic history, migration patterns, and political development around the world after 1500. They strive to make general sense of characteristics that U.S. historians (of earlier generations) had supposed were unique to the U.S. McNeill saw his efforts as an antidote to provincial and patriotic histories. To some extent they embrace the Cold War contrast between the U.S. and Russia so common in the 1980s, but locate the explanation for differences in freedom between the two countries in places that allow little room for American self-congratulation. In their reliance on population growth, disease, and migration as motors of world history, these chapters are vintage McNeill.

The third and fourth chapters here comprise lectures given at Clark University in 1979. They exhibit, in short form, McNeill’s ideas about microparasitism and macroparasatism in human history. These are terms and concepts McNeill featured in Plagues and Peoples (1976). Here he compresses and refines these ideas.

The concept of multiple layers of parasitism is a familiar one in biology, presaged by Jonathan Swift in his 1733 poem entitled On Poetry: A Rhapsody:

So nat’ralists observe, a flea

Has smaller fleas that on him prey;

And these have smaller fleas to bite ‘em.

And so proceeds Ad infinitum.

Most studies of biodiversity conclude that the kingdom of life contains more parasites than non-parasites, so the relationship of living in or on another and deriving one’s nutrients from that other is in nature more normal than abnormal. Parasites may live inside their hosts, on the skins of their hosts, or (as with rats) on the food supplies stored by their hosts. Human bodies are subject to at least 437 known parasites, not counting legions of viruses and bacteria, although none of us are so generous as to host all of them.⁵ They may or may not cause disease, but McNeill typically used the term microparasite only to refer to pathogens.

The concept of microparasitism as an important variable in human history has stood the test of time. McNeill and several others helped to convince the historical profession that disease must be taken seriously as a historical force, especially what he sometimes called diseases of civilization such as smallpox or measles—acute and often lethal infections for people without acquired immunity. World history texts today always include disease as a subject now and again. Specialists on every region of the world have taken up disease a worthy theme. Many of them have chosen to fit their work into the general framework of disease history that McNeill outlines here.

By macroparasites, McNeill meant subsets of the human race. Biologists recognize humans as hosts for parasites, but not as parasites themselves. It is an awkward term to apply to humans, made no easier because as metaphor, the term parasite (not macroparasite) was and sometimes still is deployed as political invective. Marxists liked to use it when castigating the bourgeoisie or, in the case of Chinese Marxists, landowning gentry. Nazis used it for vilifying Jews.

The subsets of the human race that McNeill considers macroparasites included rulers and bureaucrats, and, at times, military men. They did not produce their own food, but survived on food produced by others, and so, metaphorically speaking, are parasites. Toiling peasants surrendered part of the fruits of their labor through taxes and other impositions, thus feeding the unproductive classes. Using the concept of parasite for the personnel of states, however, presupposes those rulers, bureaucrats, and soldiers provided no services in return for their exactions. Typically, rulers, bureaucrats, and soldiers claim to provide several services and in the modern world usually do so, albeit imperfectly: defense from attack, administration of justice, and other public goods such as the building and maintenance of infrastructure. In prior times, ruling classes also claimed to provide intervention—in effect lobbying—with divine power. Insofar as states and rulers rendered some of these services to the laboring masses, the concept of macro-parasitism is at best inexact.

The concept of macroparasatism has fared less well than microparasitism among historians. According to Google N-gram, the word macroparasitism made its debut in English-language books in 1974, but a search of Google Books reveals no usage before Plagues and Peoples (1976). The term reached a brief and fleeting peak in 1997 (when it appeared in 1 of every 500,000 books published), before falling into near-oblivion again by 2000. The word ‘macroparasite’ appeared in an almost infinitesimal number of books from 1966 to 1970, then went extinct until 1981, after which it became a fixture, if still a rarity, in English-language books. Of course, just what authors other than McNeill intended by these terms remains invisible in N-gram viewer; it could be they were medical authors and merely meant larger than average worms and germs.

McNeill was well aware of the imperfections of the concept and term macroparasitism and after the early 1980s used it less and less in his own writings. It originally appealed to him because of the symmetry with microparasitism and the possibility it offered for painting human history as a set of tensions among biological equilibria. He also had a durable sympathy and respect for the honest toil of farmers, exemplified in his mind by his Prince Edward Island cousins and ancestors, whose way of life he experienced nearly every summer until his late teenage years.⁶ But the term macroparasitism did not catch on, was too often misunderstood, too easily taken as endorsement of Marxist positions McNeill did not share, and eventually he abandoned it, grudgingly.

The final essay here is a lecture a given at Princeton in 1986. It represents another attempt to make sense of a recurrent phenomenon in human history, catastrophes, and to fit them into a general framework. The central idea here is that, despite endless ingenuity and ambition, catastrophes can never be banished from human experience. Every effort to shield one group of people from catastrophe both raises the odds that other groups will be hit instead, and the odds of rarer but bigger catastrophes all around. The example of struggles to control floods along the Mississippi, with which he begins the chapter, illustrates the principle. Communities that built levees to protect themselves shunted floodwaters onto others, and when everyone had levees, there were fewer floods that escaped the river’s bed, but when floods came they were more catastrophic than before.

McNeill applies this concept to macro-economic management in this essay, in effect likening the tools of fiscal and monetary policy to levee-building. Well-honed economic policy has, in his view, saved well-organized societies some economic pain, by shunting it onto others. And skilled economic management, by reducing the frequency of smaller mishaps, has also raised the odds of gigantic misfortunes, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s. McNeill also applies the levee principle to the management of businesses, arguing that the better organized ones prosper by feeding off the less well organized, a process that cannot go on indefinitely: eventually the poorly organized ones either vanish or organize themselves better.

The only published response to this essay was that of the economist and historian of financial crises, Charles Kindleberger, which appeared together with the essay in 1989 in Daedalus.⁷ Kindleberger defended the honor of economists and the efficacy of economic management by disputing the proposition that certain downturns, particularly the one beginning in 1873, qualified as catastrophic. McNeill’s essay left little imprint to judge by citation numbers in Google Scholar (21 citations in 26 years).

The economic collapse of 2008 gives the essay a new relevance, however, and its central idea, whether applied to flood control or economic management still bears examination. For a quarter century or so before 2008, U.S. economic management made it possible