Talking about the recent high profile conflicts - such as Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Palestine - in terms of the US Empire's involvement is a tricky business. On the one hand, you do have clear geopolitical maneuverings like the US' long history of global occupations and bases, covert wars, punitive sanctions, political coups, economic warfare in the form of debt trapping, austerity, and privatization and the like, and also its motivated and cynical economic and political support of its allies' repressive politics, such as with the successive regimes in Israel, which point to a real material and geopolitical efficacy. On the other hand, you do have to acknowledge the long independent regional history of these conflict zones, as well as the autonomy and dignity of the actors struggling within them that are not necessarily a part of the United States.
At any rate, the US Empire is there, its power is effective, and these things must be talked about and put into consideration, if anything, to develop the structural aspect to an effective analysis of the world system, as I've talked about before.
Needless to say, this stuff is exceptionally complex and difficult to discuss, requiring years upon years of intensive study and experience to get a grip on, at last without sounding like some sort of sloganeer, but nevertheless it can be done. There are a whole galaxy of excellent thinkers and frameworks which develop effective critiques of the historical evolution of empire and its manifold effects, in all of its subtlety and nuance.
Of course right here at this moment we have this here blog post and its functionally smaller space, so what I'd like to do is attempt to compress all of that, using a simpler metaphorical analysis to make a point - something I do here regularly - which draws off of that large body of work that has been put in to make it work.
I want to start with the image of spinning plates, as in the exhibitionist spectacle. A plate - a generally symmetrical, balanced, round object made of ceramic, wood, porcelain, china, stoneware, plastic, or what have you - spinning upright balanced at the top of a pole or stick is not something you typically find occurring in nature of its own accord .
No, that is a phenomenon that owes its sole existence to human intervention, a specific, delimited species branching out in a very particular evolutionary path, a complex and unlikely dance of energy winking in and out of cosmic history, which has become dominant in the natural world at this particular point in time and space, and so is afforded the surplus for phenomena like exhibitionary spinning plates. That's a drop in the bucket of course: we can talk about unlikely surplus phenomena in the modern world all day, but we do have to start somewhere, and we all have places to be.
What set of conditions makes something like a spinning plate possible? You're talking about generation upon generation of traditions developed and perfected to craft perfectly symmetrical and balanced dinnerware as well as the historical development of the aesthetics, needs, and sensibilities which implore those crafts, and the same goes for the poles and sticks used to balance them, and the production and manipulation of the materials that goes into making them. Then add in the history and development of the exhibitionary spectacle, which implies the human surpluses that make such spectacle possible, and also all of the time and energy that went into developing the techniques and methods and the imaginary for conceiving of the spectacle in the first place, time and energy which must be afforded by the collective labors required to produce the necessary food, shelter, and security.
Given this set of conditions, if one drops a spinning plate and it shatters on the floor, it isn't typically said that gravity and unbalanced movement finally felled the plate and the superior denseness and stability of the stone floor shattered the plate for good, except perhaps by means of a joke.
What is more likely is that one points to the person doing the spinning and locates the cause there, exclaiming, "oh, you dropped it!" and then asking: "what went wrong?" Did the person lose focus? Did the person lack the sufficient level of skill and concentration? Did the person's hand get tired? Or was it intentional?
This is partially due to the thermodynamic unlikeliness of such an event happening of its own accord except through human intervention, so by convention we locate the genesis of the cause in the condition and intentionality of the person doing the spinning, which was the only likely place from which the event could have possibly occurred. Responsibility and consequence are properly assigned to the place where the energy is moving, and where the direction of that movement can be changed.
With this image in mind let's address an earlier iteration of the world system. From almost two centuries away, the Opium Wars appear absurdly cruel and preposterous, and maybe they really were those things. But why would the British Empire traipse halfway across the globe to force opium upon the Chinese people, setting aside the comically villainous reason of "fun and profit," or the slightly more serious reason of simply wanting it all (the sun never setting upon the empire and etc.)? Considering the operation of the world system at the time, and Britain's interest in dominating and manipulating that system for its own gain, things begin to make more sense.
To begin with, much of the civilized world from the ancient period up until then ran largely on silver (alongside gold, with preferences occasionally shifting), due to the various physical properties of the metal as well as long arcs of economic tradition and global convention, which through its histories and conventions, produced a magical property of trade circulation as it was introduced into an economy.
A lot of the silver mines around the Mediterranean were exhausted in the ancient world, and since pure silver is more reactive and degrades quicker than gold, supplies were tighter and more precious. A lot of the discovery and production shifted to South America and Asia. And for various historical, cultural, and political/economic reasons, a lot of the world's silver trade was ending up in China, and China was holding onto its silver stores.
In the run-up to the mid-19th century, British finances were shaky, owed in part to recovery from the Napoleonic Wars and the experience of a series of poor harvests in the region (yes, the Irish Great Famine was one of the many disasters directly produced by this iteration of the world system). More immediately, Britain's silver store was draining, a lot of which was going out to China due to a trade deficit caused in part by the British people's insatiable demand for Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain.
Wow, the hemorrhaging of silver over tea? But besides a clear consumer preference for the pleasure and growing tradition of tea-drinking, the tea itself - especially black tea with its caffeine content and accompanying traits of concentrating focus and speeding up activity - was the perfect drug to facilitate a continuously accelerating and industrializing and modernizing imperial society.
And upon further thought, this does make sense, especially considering the razing of whole societies and regions for the sake of tobacco, coffee, and chocolate, which continues to the current moment. And to put it really crudely, when a lot of people really want something, it behooves capital to give it to them, which makes it easier to extract value in unequal exchange.
So silver was draining out of Britain; how to keep it circulating in Britain's favor? The West didn't really have anything that China wanted in return. How to set that silver free again? The East's long tradition of opium use was one weak-point to exploit, which like many traditions of mind and body-altering intoxicant use, could easily go pathological through imperial exploitation.
Through its long history of conquest and monocropping, Britain was able to subvert large swathes of land in its crown jewel colony, India, for this particular purpose, where traditions of opium production were already developed and cultivated (introduced in India by Arab traders in the 700's CE). And so the opium was produced in India and then traded to China - another region of traditional opium cultivation and use, also introduced by Arab traders - in increasingly greater amounts, in exchange for that coveted silver.
At the same time, opium usage was increasingly becoming a social and economic problem in China. Silver was once again draining out of China, but also opium use was going increasingly pathological since 18th century, which was then accelerating, not just because the country was being flooded with it, but also due to more complex social reasons, attributable in part to the decline of the reigning Qing dynasty, and growing turbulence due in part to increasing Western imperial aggression.
This is all culminated in the Chinese destroying a large store of British opium, which touched off the first Opium War, with the British military prevailing, winning a grab bag of concessions in an unequal treaty, including trading privileges, acquired territories, and the forcing of opium back into circulation in trade with China, which formed an early part of China's traumatic "century of humiliation."
So there you have it. To wrap this up and put things together, this phenomenon of an empire flitting around the globe, conquering through trade seems to be an important attribute of modern imperialism and conquest.
Through historical accumulations of wealth and technological development, the British Empire was able to develop in particular the appropriate maritime and military technologies to be able to move rapidly and effectively anywhere around the world, engaging in brutal military conquests yes, but then accumulating much of its wealth through the rejiggering of existing conquered societies, subverting their economies and their land towards the intentionally asymmetrical circulation of trade and goods in Britain's narrow favor.
In many cases, wealth was directly expropriated and extracted, yes. But the deftness of the British system was such that it kept many of its subjects largely intact (save for the famines), so as to continuously circulate trade in its own idiosyncratic image, while the Empire would continuously skim and accumulate and concentrate value off of that circulation, at least before bleeding that value out again in its late stages, given its late 19th century onset of free trade fundamentalism, its advancing financialization, and its offshoring of capital to its colonies.
The globe and its centuries of built up resources and economies became so much raw material for Britain's spinning plates. But as a concentrated intentionality manipulating those plates, eventually Britain would lose focus, and concentration, and strength, and the plates would fall, at least until someone else would come along to pick them up. We'll continue on into more contemporary matters next time.
