Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Trade and violence

2017; Wiley; Volume: 59; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/criq.12356

1467-8705

Kevin O’Rourke,

Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance

In the late summer of 344, a pagan rhetorician named Libanius delivered an oration.1 In it, he extolled the virtues of Constantius and Constans, the sons of Constantine the Great, and ruling emperors of the Eastern and Western Roman Empire, respectively. Four years previously, Constans had defeated a third brother, Constantine the Second, in Italy, and become sole ruler in the West. Constans would in his turn meet a violent end, but in 344 it seemed that peace had finally broken out inside the empire. an unbreakable bond of friendship unites the souls of the emperors. Their government has been divided by area but is held together by goodwill … The place where the divisions of the empires are joined is guarded not by the continual presence of armies, but by the immovable strength of trust without guile.2 I think indeed that the very purpose of the creator of the world is now above all being maintained. For when he established the earth … he included everything in this creation: seeds and cattle and in short all that human nature was going to need. However, he did not assign everything to every part, but divided the gifts throughout the countries, bringing mankind into partnership through mutual need; and so he reveals commerce, so that he may make common to all the enjoyment of what is produced among a few. This humanitarian scheme, then, which might bring deliverance, had previously been destroyed and ruined ... The state of the earth was as if it had been split in two. But now what was hitherto separated came together and has been joined, and what so far had been torn apart has been restored to its proper condition. ‘There is one continent, one sea, the islands common to all, the harbours opened up and gates thrown wide. Merchant ships everywhere convey products from all parts and crowd the anchorages. A mutual community has extended through practically all the land under the sun, with some travelling for exploration and others for other reasons, some who cross oceans and others who traverse the continent. Dwellers in the West are observers of the wonders of the Nile while the inhabitants by the Nile gain knowledge of the beauties of the West. There are Phoenicians in the anchorages of Sicily, and Sicilians in turn in the harbours of Phoenicia. The city of Athens has been opened up to the traffickers in logic, and the nation of the Bithynians has become accessible to those desirous to take whatever they want ... Now the sensible nations of the world, as though pitching one harmony in chorus, are singing together as their two chorus leaders strike up the tune.’3 The text provides both a precise theory of international trade, and a theological explanation of why international commerce is part of God's plan for his creation. Countries trade with each other because they are different: in particular, some countries produce things that others cannot. This provides the basis for mutually beneficial trade, but, more importantly, it provides us all with an opportunity to meet foreigners, and to realise how much we like them. In this manner, Babel can be undone. As my previous column pointed out, the argument that trade and peace go hand in hand has been long-lived. It was a favourite of early modern writers such as Montesquieu, and is, I argued, in many respects borne out by the experience of the post-war European Union.4 But if God's aim, in endowing the nations of the world with different resources, was to promote universal brotherhood and peace, then it was surely a high-risk strategy. For an alternative to trading with the Bithynians, as in the passage from Libanius above, was literally to ‘take whatever they want’; and even if trade was preferred to theft, could we really trust the foreigners we were dealing with? One solution to this dilemma was described in the fifth century bc by that purveyor of tall tales, Herodotus. According to him, the Carthaginians used to sail to Libya to sell their goods to the locals, leaving their cargo on the beach. They would then retire to their boats, waiting for the Libyans to leave their payment in gold beside the wares. When this had been done, the Libyans withdrew in turn, and the Carthaginians would see how big a payment was being proposed. If it was satisfactory, they took the goods and withdrew; if not, they went back to the boats, and waited until a fair payment had been left on the shore. Such stories of ‘invisible trade’ occur around the world, and while it is not clear that they are anything more than stories, they do serve as a striking metaphor for several features of international trade: the trust upon which it is invariably based, alongside the unfamilarity – and risks – of dealing directly with foreigners.5 For where foreigners are to be found, there is always the possibility of violence. endearing intercourse unite Remotest nations, scorch'd by sultry suns, Or freezing near the snow-encrusted pole: Where'er the joyous vine disdains to grow, The fruitful olive, or the golden ear; Her hand divine with interposing aid, To ev'ry climate shall the gifts supply Of Ceres, Bacchus, and th'Athenian maid Ye mariners of Britain, chosen train Of Liberty and Commerce, now no more Secrete your generous valour; hear the call Of injur'd Albion; to her foes present Those daring bosoms, which alike disdain The death-disploding cannon, and the rage Of warring tempests, mingling in their strife The seas and clouds: though long in silence hush'd Hath slept the British thunder; though the pride Of weak Iberia hath forgot the roar; Soon shall her ancient terrors be recall'd, When your victorious shouts affright her shores6 Trade and violence have always been alternative ways of getting things from foreigners. Even more damaging for the ‘doctrine of universal economy’, as it was known, is the fact that trade and violence have not only been substitutes for each other historically: in many cases, they have been complements. As Ronald Findlay and I put it in 2007, ‘the greatest expansions of world trade have tended to come … from the barrel of a Maxim gun, the edge of a scimitar, or the ferocity of nomadic horsemen’.7 In large part, this was because violence was required in order to establish the empires that made it possible for merchants to travel over long distances safely. The pax Mongolica is a classic case in point: the product of unspeakable barbarity, it created an empire which stretched from China to Europe, and made it possible for a Marco Polo or an Ibn Battuta to travel across Eurasia. A Florentine commercial handbook of the 1340s famously opined that the road from Crimea to Beijing was ‘perfectly safe, whether by night or by day’. This would surely not have been the case had Genghis Khan never existed. Nor was there anything particularly peaceful about European expansion in the sixteenth century, which made possible the creation of a truly global economy, or about the British and French imperialism of the nineteenth century, both formal and informal, which played such an important role in facilitating the first great wave of modern globalisation, stretching from Waterloo to the First World War. In the above cases, admittedly, you could argue that violence was necessary in order to establish a monopoly of violence, and hence the relatively peaceful conditions which long-distance trade required. Violence begat peace, which begat trade. But in other historical cases, trade, and the opportunities which it afforded, directly provoked violence. This was certainly the case during the early modern period. Historians used to debate whether the rulers of that time were more interested in power, or in plenty. Jacob Viner disposed of that debate in elegant fashion, showing that both were equally important in the minds of mercantilist rulers.8 Plenty was self-evidently essential for power, especially at a time when a revolution in military technology and organisation was increasing the costs of warfare, and threatening with extinction states that fell behind. But power was also held to be essential for plenty. The high transport costs of the period meant that the goods that could be profitably transported back to Europe from Asia or the Americas were high-value in relation to their weight or bulk, and this in turn required that they could not be produced in Europe at all, or only very expensively. Cane sugar, tobacco, silks, spices, and other colonial goods commanded high prices in Europe because of their scarcity in the Old World; African slaves commanded high prices in the Americas because of their scarcity in the New. A country that controlled the trade in such colonial products, or in slaves, could sell them on to other European consumers, or American producers, respectively, thus gaining a monopoly profit. But control was established by excluding others through violence, and one country's monopoly profit was another country's loss: and this in a world where the major European powers were continually at each other's throats. And so the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries saw a series of mercantilist wars around the globe, involving the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French. In a zero-sum world it made sense to view trade in zero-sum terms, and trade was pretty clearly more a cause of war than a source of peace during this period. Eventually, during the nineteenth century, transport costs declined to the point where the most important intercontinental trades no longer involved scarce, highly priced commodities, but bulk goods such as grain, metal, or meat. By this stage, attempting to monopolise the transatlantic trade no longer made any sense: who could possibly monopolise the world trade in wheat, for example? Furthermore, the geopolitical landscape had changed completely. British victory over France implied British hegemony at sea, and the British hegemon had a vital interest in maintaining a liberal international trading order. A population explosion had rendered Britain dependent on imported food, while the Industrial Revolution that accompanied it not only implied a further need for imports, this time of vital raw materials, but gave Britain the means to pay for them. But feeding Britain's people and factories meant keeping the world's trade lanes open. And that required Britain's maintaining a monopoly of naval violence, or as near to a monopoly as possible.9 And therein lay the seeds of a third way in which trade and war have been intertwined historically. Trade implies dependence on foreigners, and even if the dependence is mutual this can sometimes feel uncomfortable, especially if one is dependent upon sea-borne trade for the essentials of life. In particular, if a rising power fears that its trade might be blockaded by an incumbent naval hegemon in the event of warfare, it may decide to eliminate that vulnerability, either by building up its own naval forces, or by seizing control of resource-rich territories, or by doing both.10 And so, when a rapidly industrialising and increasingly populous Germany found itself increasingly dependent on imports of food and raw materials in the decades before World War I, one response was to try to build up its navy, with the consequences for Anglo–German relations that we know.11 After that war, Hitler became obsessed with the need to avoid dependence on strategic raw materials; attacking Eastern Europe and, above all, Russia, was in his mind a way to become self-sufficient.12 And Japan's invasions of resource-rich Manchuria, China, and South-East Asia were also attempts to break free from the increased dependence on imported raw materials that had resulted from its own industrial revolution and population growth.13 As Azar Gat put it, ‘the quest for self-sufficiency in strategic war materials became a cause as well as an effect of the drive for empire, most notably in the German and Japanese cases towards and during the Second World War’.14 If there is a parallel today, it is surely with China, and other rapidly industrialising powers. Chinese dependence on the Malacca Straits for vital oil imports is not just a source of vulnerability for China itself: it can become a source of vulnerability for others, by provoking Chinese naval expansion. While it is important to resist Chinese expansion in the South China Sea, and to recognise Chinese nationalism for the danger that it is, it is also important to reassure that country, and others, that they will be able to rely on international markets to provide them with the food and raw materials that they need in the decades ahead. And this requires all countries – including Brexit Britain, and Donald Trump's America – to commit unambiguously to the rule of international law, including in the trade sphere, with the supranational judicial supervision this inevitably requires. An unambiguous commitment by all countries to a rules-based international trade regime, including a blanket prohibition of strategically-motivated export restraints, can contribute to making the world a safer place.