Debt (85 page)

143.
Wagner,
Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Sage
(1848)—which in English is “World History as Told in Saga.” I am taking my account of Wagner’s argument from another wonderful, if sometimes extravagant, essay by Marc Shell called “Accounting for the Grail” (1992:37–38). Wagner’s argument is really more complicated: it centers on the failed attempt by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa to subdue the Italian city-states and the abandonment of his principle that property can only flow from the king; instead, we have the rise of mercantile private property, which is echoed by financial abstraction.

144.
Shell sees the Grail as a transformation of the older notion of the cornucopia or inexhaustible purse in an age “just beginning to be acquainted with checks and credit”—noting the connection of the legend with the Templars, and fact that Chretien—whose name means “Christian”—was likely, for that reason, to have been a converted Jew. Wolfram also claimed that he got the legend from a Jewish source (Shell 1992:44–45).

145.
Even China was often split and fractured. Just about all the great empire-building projects of the Middle Ages were the work not of professional armies, but of nomadic peoples: the Arabs, Mongols, Tatars, and Turks.

146.
Nicomachean Ethics
1133a29–31.

147.
He compares money not only to a postman, but also, to a “ruler,” who also stands outside society to govern and regulate our interactions. It’s interesting to note that Thomas Aquinas, who might have been directly influenced by Ghazali (Ghazanfar 2000), did accept Aristotle’s argument that money was a social convention that humans could just as easily change. For a while, in the late Middle Ages, this became the predominant Catholic view.

148. As far as I know, the only scholar to have pointed out the connection is Bernard Faure, a French student of Japanese Buddhism: Faure 1998:798, 2000:225.

149.
Later still, as cash transactions became more common, the term was applied to small sums of cash offered as down-payment, rather in the sense of English “earnest money.” On
symbola
in general: Beauchet 1897; Jones 1956:217; Shell 1978:32–35.

150.
Descat 1995:986.

151.
Aristotle
On Interepretation
1.16–17. Whitaker (2002:10) thus observes that for Aristotle, “the meaning of a word is fixed by convention, just as the importance attached to a tally, token, or ticket depends on agreement between the parties concerned.”

152.
Nicomachean Ethics
1133a29–31.

153.
But they believed that these formulae summed up or “drew together” the essence of those secret truths that the Mysteries revealed—“symbolon,” being derived the verb
symballein
, meaning “to gather, bring together, or compare.”

154.
Müri 1931, Meyer 1999. The only knowledge we have of such
symbola
comes from Christian sources; Christians later adopted their own symbolon, the Creed, and this remained the primary referent of the term “symbol” throughout the Middle Ages (Ladner 1979).

155.
Or pseudo-Dionysius, since the real Dionysius the Areopagite was a first-century Athenian converted to Christianity by St. Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius’ works are an attempt to reconcile neo-Platonism, with its notion of philosophy as the process of the liberation of the soul from material creation and its reunification with the divine, with Christian orthodoxy. Unfortunately, his most relevant work,
Symbolic Theology
, has been lost, but his surviving works all bear on the issue to some degree.

156.
In Barasch 1993:161.

157.
Pseudo-Dionysius,
On the Celestial Hierarchy
141A–C. On Dionysius’ theory of symbolism in general, and its influence, see Barasch 1993:158–80, also Goux 1990:67, Gadamer 2004:63–64.

158.
He calls them, like communion, “gifts that are granted to us in symbolic mode.”
On the Celestial Hierarchy
124A.

159.
Mathews 1934:283. Compare the definition of symbolon:

160.
Rotours 1952:6. On
fu
(or
qi
, another name for debt tallies that could be used more generally for “tokens”) more generally: Rotours 1952, Kaltenmark 1960, Kan 1978, Faure 2000:221–29: Falkenhausen 2005.

161.
There is a curious tension here: the will of heaven is also in a certain sense the will of the people, and Chinese thinkers varied on where they placed the emphasis. Xunzi, for instance, assumed that the authority of the king is based on the confidence of the people. He also argued that while confidence among the people is maintained by contracts ensured by the matching of tally sticks, under a truly just king, social trust will be such that such
objects will become unnecessary (Roetz 1993:73–74).

162.
Kohn 2000:330. Similarly in Japan: Faure 2000:227.

163.
In the
Encyclopedia of Taoism
they are described as “diagrams, conceived as a form of celestial writing, that derive their power from the matching celestial counterpart kept by the deities who bestowed them” (Bokenkamp 2008:35). On Taoist
fu:
Kaltenmark 1960; Seidel 1983; Strickmann 2002:190–91; Verellen 2006; on Buddhist parallels, see Faure 1998; Robson 2008.

164.
Sasso 1978; the origins of the yin-yang symbol remain obscure and contested but those Sinologists I’ve consulted find this plausible. The generic word for “symbol” in contemporary Chinese is
fúhào
, which is directly derived from fu.

165.
Insofar as I’m weighing in on the “Why didn’t the Islamic world develop modern capitalism?” debate, then, it seems to me that both Udovitch’s argument (1975:19–21) that the Islamic world never developed impersonal credit mechanisms, and Ray’s objection (1997:39–40) that the ban on interest and insurance was more important, carry weight. Ray’s suggestion that differences in inheritance laws might play a role also deserves investigation.

166.
Maitland 1908:54.

167.
Davis 1904.

168.
In the Platonic sense: just as any particular, physical bird we might happen to see on a nearby fruit tree is merely a token of the general idea of “bird” (which is immaterial, abstract, angelic), so do the various physical, mortal individuals who join together to make up a corporation become an abstract, angelic Idea. Kantorowicz argues that it took a number of intellectual innovations to make the notion of the corporation possible: notably, the idea of the aeon or aevum, eternal time, that is, time that lasts forever, as opposed to the Augustinian eternity which is outside of time entirely and was considered the habitation of the angels, to the revival of the works of Dionysius the Areopagite (1957:280–81).

169.
Kantorowicz 1957:282–83.

170.
Islamic law, for instance, not only did not develop the notion of fictive persons, but steadfastly resisted recognizing corporations until quite recently (Kuran 2005).

171.
Mainly Randall Collins (1986:52–58), who also makes the comparison with China; cf. Coleman 1988.

172.
See Nerlich 1987:121–24.

1.
On English wages, see Dyer 1989; on English festive life, there is a vast literature, but a good recent source is Humphrey 2001. Silvia Federici (2004) provides a compelling recent synthesis.

2.
For a very small sampling of more recent debates over the “price revolution,” see Hamilton 1934, Cipolla 1967, Flynn 1982, Goldstone 1984, 1991, Fisher 1989, Munro 2003a, 2007. The main argument is between monetarists who continue to argue that increase in the amount of specie is ultimately responsible for the inflation, and those who emphasize the role of rapid population increase, though most specific arguments are considerably more nuanced.

3.
Historians speak of “bullion famines”—as most active mines dried up, such gold and silver that wasn’t sucked out of Europe to pay for eastern luxuries was increasingly hidden away, causing all sorts of difficulties for commerce. In the 1460s, the shortage of specie in cities like Lisbon had been so acute that merchant ships visiting with cargoes full of wares often had to return home without selling anything (Spufford 1988:339–62).

4.
Brook 1998. Needless to say, I’m simplifying enormously: another problem was the growth of landlordism, with many smallholders falling in debt to landlords for inability to pay. As members of
the ever-increasing royal family and other favored families gained tax exemptions from the state, the tax burden on smallholders became so heavy that many felt forced to sell their lands to the powerful families in exchange for tenancy agreements to free those lands from taxes.

5.
Chinese historians count 77 different “miners’ revolts” during the 1430s and ‘40s (Harrison 1965:103–4; cf. Tong 1992:60–64; Gernet 1982:414). Between 1445 and 1449 these became a serious threat as silver miners under a rebel leader named Ye Zongliu made common cause with tenant farmers and the urban poor in overpopulated Fujian and Shaxian, sparking an uprising that spread to a number of different provinces, seizing a number of cities and expelling much of the landed gentry.

6.
Von Glahn (1996:70–82) documents the process. Gernet (1982:415–16) documents how between 1450 and 1500, most taxes became payable in silver. The process culminated in the “single lash of the whip” method: tax reforms put into place between 1530 and 1581 (Huang 1974, see Arrighi, Hui, Hung and Seldon 2003:272–73).

7.
Wong 1997, Pomeranz 2000, Arrighi 2007, among many others who make this point.

8.
Pomeranz 2000:273.

9.
The value of silver in China (as measured in gold) remained, through the sixteenth century, roughly twice what it was in Lisbon or Antwerp (Flynn & Giráldez 1995, 2002).

10.
von Glahn 1996b:440; Atwell 1998.

11.
Chalis 1978:157.

12.
China had its own “age of exploration” in the early fifteenth century, but it was not followed by mass conquest and enslavement.

13.
It’s possible that they were wrong. Generally populations did decline by 90 percent even in areas where no direct genocide was taking place. But in most places, after a generation or so, populations started recovering; in Hispaniola and many parts of Mexico and Peru, around the mines, the ultimate death rate was more like 100 percent.

14.
Todorov 1984:137–38; for the original, Icazbalceta 2008:23–26.

15.
One historian remarks: “By the close of the sixteenth century bullion, primarily silver, made up over 95 percent of all exports leaving Spanish America for Europe. Nearly that same percentage of the indigenous population had been destroyed in the process of seizing those riches” (Stannard 1993:221).

16.
Bernal Díaz 1963:43.

17.
Bernal Díaz: the quote is a synthesis of the Lockhart translation (1844 II:120) and Cohen translation (1963:412), though these appear to be based on slightly different originals.

18.
Bernal Díaz op cit.

19.
Cortés 1868:141.

20.
Most of the conquistadors had similar stories. Balboa came to the Americas to flee his creditors; Pizarro borrowed so heavily to outfit his expedition to Peru that after early reverses, it was only the fear of debtor’s prison that prevented his return to Panama; Francisco de Montejo had to pawn his entire Mexican possessions for an eight-thousand-peso loan to launch his expedition to Honduras; Pedro de Alvarado too ended up deeply in debt, finally throwing everything into a scheme to conquer the Spice Islands and China—on his death, creditors immediately tried to put his remaining estates to auction.

21.
e.g., Pagden 1986.

22.
Gibson 1964:253. All this is disturbingly reminiscent of global politics nowadays, in which the United Nations, for example, will urge poor countries to make education free and available to everyone, and then the International Monetary Fund (which is, legally, actually a part of the United Nations) will insist that those same countries do exactly the opposite, imposing school fees as part of broader “economic reforms” as a condition of refinancing the country’s loans.

23. Following William Pietz (1985:8), who studied early merchant adventurer’s accounts of West Africa; though Todorov (1984:129–31) on the very similar perspective of the conquistadors.

24.
Some did go bankrupt—for instance, one branch of the Fuggers. But this was surprisingly rare.

25.
Martin Luther,
Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher
, 1524, cited in Nelson 1949:50.

26.
In Luther’s time the main issue was a practice called
Zinskauf
, technically rent on leased property, which was basically a disguised form of interest-bearing loan.

27.
In Baker 1974:53–54. The reference to Paul is in Romans 13:7.

28.
He argued that the fact that Deuteronomy allows usury under any circumstances demonstrates that this could not have been a universal “spiritual law,” but was a political law created for the specific ancient Israeli situation, and therefore, that it could be considered irrelevant in different ones.

29.
And in fact, this is what “capital” originally meant. The term itself goes back to Latin
capitale
, which meant “funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money, or money carrying interest” (Braudel 1992:232). It appears in English in the mid–sixteenth century largely as a term borrowed from Italian bookkeeping techniques (Cannan 1921, Richard 1926) for what remained when one squared property, credits, and debts; though until the nineteenth century, English sources generally preferred the word “stock”—in part, one suspects, because “capital” was so closely associated with usury.