Urban historians sometimes puzzle over why one city grows and its competitors do not. One rivalry, between St. Louis, Missouri, and Chicago, Illinois, is particularly interesting.
In 1840, St. Louis was a thriving part of the “urban frontier,” with a population of 35,979. It managed a rich fur trade, was a major transfer point for goods coming upriver from New Orleans (the nation’s third-largest city at the time), and its two major rivers enabled it to send grain from Midwestern prairies down the Mississippi for shipment east. Indeed, as one historian noted,
“Perhaps no American city was born under such favorable auspices as St. Louis, Missouri. It was located at the confluence of navigable water courses which drained over a million square miles of the continent, and it was built by a number of big businessmen (“big” for that time, which was 1764) who knew precisely what they were doing.”[1]
In contrast, Chicago was a hamlet of 4,470 people.
A few weeks ago, Bruce Gilley, a political science professor at Portland State University, was hit with an online petition opposing his forthcoming book about Sir Alan Burns, a colonial British governor. In response to the petition, the publisher withdrew the book and canceled the series it was supposed to inaugurate.
Although the publisher minimized its aggressive action (“we put the book on hold and removed it from our website while we reviewed the matter”), the petitioners were elated: “Rowman and Littlefield paid attention to the academic community and Gilley’s shameful series has been rejected.”
Something similar happened in 2017. Gilley’s article, “The Case for Colonialism,” was withdrawn from the Third World Quarterly after 18,000 petitioners sought to have it removed, and 15 members of the editorial board resigned. The journal’s publisher withdrew the article due to death threats to the editor who had approved its publication.
Don’t feel too bad for Gilley, however. He wrote Oct. 8 in the Wall Street Journal that “this sort of publicity is hard to buy” and he expects another publisher to pick up his latest book.
What, exactly, is he saying about colonialism? In this post I will share the argument outlined in “The Case for Colonialism.” (His article was published in Academic Questions after the Third World Quarterly withdrew it.)[1] Continue reading “Is There a Case for Colonialism?”
When economist Harold Demsetz looked into the history of the fur trade in the Labrador Peninsula in 1967, he was not studying environmental protection. He was exploring the origins of property rights. Yet his findings contributed to a major rethinking of environmental issues. Here’s what he found.
Before 1700, Indians hunted beaver in forests around Quebec, using them for food and fur. Because the demand for beaver was limited, says Demsetz, “hunting could be practiced freely.”[1]
While studying European guilds last year, I came across a debate over the “Golden Age” of the Netherlands (1580 to 1680). The issue was whether Dutch guilds were weak or strong. I wanted to delve into this subject, but doing so would have been futile. I don’t know the Dutch language. The best writing about Dutch guilds in the seventeenth century would be in Dutch.
I suspect that many historians, including economic historians, have experienced this same problem and not given the Dutch the study they deserve. Historians tend to praise the early muscularity of the Netherlands economy but then dismiss the country as being unimportant in the long run because it missed out on the Industrial Revolution.
This, despite the facts that the country increased its farmland by one-third (from 1300 to 1800) through reclamation from the sea, it had a prosperous economy before any other country, and it had a sturdy middle class in the age of Rembrandt. But it didn’t have factories until late in the nineteenth century, so it was “backward.” It fell off the charts of history—its high point being 1688, when its stadtholder, William of Orange, became the king of England.
