Introduction: History and Political Economy
Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert
Te frst decade of the twenty-frst century, bookended by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and by a global fnancial crisis with aftershocks still resonating throughout the world, witnessed the clamorous and urgent return of both “the political” and “the economic” to historiographical debates. For some, this return could not have come sooner. Economics (both academic and “popular”) had, many argued, largely embraced increasingly abstract formal methods in the preceding decades. So much so that one economic historian could recently argue that
the debate about the role of mathematics in economic theory can hardly be said to be of much signifcance in the modern literature, since there are no longer any leading economists who believe that academic economics can be a nonmathematical discipline.1
Yet, even if this debate is truly closed, an unanswered question remains: is mathematics enough? Whatever their role within economics as an academic feld, these deracinated methods, for intrinsic but also complex sociological and political reasons, have tended to buttress clusters of interrelated ideological programs and proposals favoring
laissez-faire policies and their global institutionalization. And these policies, associated with the so-called “Washington Consensus‚” had been implemented with decidedly varying results.2 At the same time, the historical profession—ideally well positioned to provide realist grounding for theoretical extremes—undertook (or fell under the sway of) its “cultural turn‚” generally leaving historical economic analysis behind and relegating it to an arid subfeld of economics in the academic establishment.3 Te sheer consequentiality of subsequent events, and what many—including, remarkably, even the rather partial Te Economist magazine [Fig. 1]—have seen as the manifest crisis of economic theory as such, reopened the eyes of scholars and laymen alike to the need for a more historical (or at least more historically aware) approach to economic phenomena.4 And, although far from moribund, the so-called “free trade” paradigm in Anglo-American economic thought on the one hand and the wider dominance of cultural concerns in the academic study of history on the other are at last beginning to fragment. As the cracks and fssures in their foundations continue to grow, it is becoming more important than ever to rethink the historical role of politics (and, indeed, of government) in business, economic production, (re)distribution, and exchange, not to mention in the complex array of processes brought together under the umbrella of globalization.5 Indeed, although career prospects for young historians remain challenging at best, leading universities are increasingly hiring scholars working on “the history of political economy” in addition to “the history of capitalism‚” elevating the historical analysis of economic ideas and practices to new heights.6 To be blunt, “political economy” has again become something of an academic catchphrase, and it is now seen to ofer an important vantage point on the turmoil of our time.
Fig. 1 The Economist, July 18–24, 2009. Jon Berkeley for The Economist
New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy contributes to this resurgent historiography and suggests new avenues and agendas for research on the political-economic nexus as it has developed in the Western world since the end of the Middle Ages. Far from procrustean,
the volume brings together purposefully selected young and established scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds—history, economics, law, and political science—in an efort to continue the ongoing reconceptualization of the origins and history of political economy through a variety of still largely distinct but complementary approaches—legal and intellectual, literary and philosophical, political and economic—and from a variety of related perspectives: debt and state fnance, tarifs and tax policy, the encouragement and discouragement of trade, accounting and bookkeeping, merchant communities and companies, smuggling and illicit trades, mercantile and colonial systems, empires and special economic zones, economic cultures, and the history of doctrines more traditionally construed.
Tere are, of course, many ways of engaging with the history of political economy, and it is purposefully not our wish to suggest that there are right and wrong ways of so doing: Herodotus’ house can, happily, be as vast and sprawling as Borges’ “Library of Babel.” Historiographically speaking, it seems important to us, not only given recent trends but also recent events, to purposefully encourage a widening of historical perspectives. Tere is a time for tightly focalized volumes, surely, but an argument can now be made for broader temporal approaches and looser disciplinary boundaries. Tough such an approach may lose something in the way of coherence, this is, we believe, a price worth paying when the ultimate dividend is a richness of detail and variety of insight unlikely if not impossible inside the “box” of strict chronological and essentialist disciplinary bounds. As varied as they are, all of the essays in this volume nonetheless share some crucial points of convergence and the area of conceptual overlap is greater than the areas of disparateness. And John Maynard Keynes was right, during the Great Depression that marked the end of the last major period of laissezfaire globalization, to warn against “the silliness of the doctrinaire.”7 Tat said, diferent approaches to the history of political economy serve divergent purposes, inviting diferent possibilities and challenges alike. As many have pointed out before, historians of economic analysis have frequently pursued internalized economic genealogies, essentially approaching the history of economics from the perspective of contemporary theory.8 Tough the infuence of the history of science and
other traditions has certainly broadened the historiography of economics in recent years, it remains that the history of economic analysis has often been approached as a purely intellectualized trajectory from analytical falsity to truth.9 Mark Blaug, after all, called his major work Economic Teory in Retrospect, and even as erudite and wide-ranging a scholar as the MIT economist Paul Samuelson gave a keynote lecture to the History of Economics Society towards the end of the Cold War in which he forcefully argued that the
history of economics [should] more purposefully reorient itself towards studying the past from the standpoint of the present state of economic science. To use a pejorative word unpejoratively, I am suggesting a Whig Economic History of Economic Analysis.10
As Sir William J. Ashley, something of a British envoy of the German Historical School of Economics almost a century earlier, memorably opined of such methods, they ran the risk of making the history of economics little but “a museum of intellectual odds and ends, where every opinion is labelled as either a surprising anticipation of the correct modern theory or an instance of the extraordinary folly of the dark ages.”11 Quentin Skinner has rightly argued that such intellectual endeavors can be “labelled the mythology of prolepsis, the type of mythology we are prone to generate when we are more interested in the retrospective signifcance of a given episode than in its meaning for the agent of the time.”12 Such proleptic thinking is at best idealistic (in the philosophical sense) and at worst hopelessly anachronistic, so we might be wise to always keep in mind the historian Carlo Ginzburg’s obiter dictum that anticipations (or precorrimenti as they are called in Italian) should always be interpreted as questions rather than answers.13
Te essays that follow are preponderantly externalizing rather than internalizing, and if at times they do explore the “odds and ends” of the historical record, they uniformly do so to understand rather than to pass judgment. Beyond these caveats, however, the internalist approach, which of course can be illuminating and which to this day has many brilliant followers, risks being dismissive of the real causes as well as consequences of past political economy almost by default, particularly
as born from or applied in policy.14 Uniquely vulnerable to charges of anachronism, as we have suggested, the method furthermore courts teleology; it risks, in other words, completely losing hold of the very historical axis it purportedly seeks to embrace.15 Even the Austrian Harvard economist Joseph A. Schumpeter, whose seminal History of Economic Analysis in many ways remains unsurpassed, could be quick to dismiss a long dead economist who did not pass his theoretical muster as owing “his survival” merely to the refutations of a more famous thinker, completely ignoring that the “bad” theories in question might have had unfortunate consequences.16 Tat was simply not his interest, though there are good reasons to argue it should be ours.
Of course economic ideas often have had disastrous efects on people when translated into policy, from François Quesnay’s failed physiocratic reforms in eighteenth-century France all the way through Stalinist communism to the famous “faw” Alan Greenspan identifed in his approach to regulation that allowed the 2008 fnancial crisis to occur and the ways in which tentative (and miscalculated) connections between public debt and low economic growth were used to justify austerity measures in its wake, by some accounts negatively infuencing the lives of quite literally hundreds of millions of people.17 Tis lattermost was, perhaps, a moment when in the face of uncertain equilibria it would have been humane to remember (and not only fguratively) Oscar Wilde’s admonition that “to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.”18 Indeed, as several of the following essays point out, we may have just as much to learn from the history of “bad” political economy as we do from charting the genealogies of currently fashionable ideas, and quite possibly much more. Such studies may point to the quintessentially contingent and political nature of much economic thinking, and, as the Columbia economist Joseph Dorfman long ago put it,
since in the fnal analysis men’s minds may be read most clearly in their actions, the practical ambitions and political interests of the molders of economic thought must constantly be kept in view by those who seek to understand what successive generations have put into the public record.19
An openness to the variety of approaches and justifcations currently characterizing the history of political economy, and a rejection of the theoretical dogmatism that has characterized much thinking about economic matters and their history in recent decades does not mean the volume completely lacks a central coherence. Instead, the contributors diferent approaches represent complementary perspectives on some of the central questions of economic and political life, and particularly so regarding the nature, legitimation, contention, and neutralization of power in a world increasingly driven by economic concerns. From Jefrey Miner’s opening chapter on Medieval Genoese debates regarding public debt to Erik Grimmer Solem’s analysis of Germany’s violent call for a “place in the sun” on the eve of the Great War and Bernard Harcourt’s exploration of the genealogy of morals in the history of political economy, the chapters ofer compelling alternate narratives of power—economic, political, military, territorial, and cultural—as they relate to the theories and practices of political economy in the period since economic matters frst became a question of political survival. Since, in the Scottish philosopher David Hume’s celebrated phraseology, “trade” frst became “an afair of state.”20
For Hume that moment occurred in the seventeenth century, and he was confounded by the lack of engagement with trade by political writers in antiquity and among the “Italians.”21 We to the contrary suspect that trade has been inextricably and momentously linked with politics from the beginnings of recorded history, but privilege two historical moments in Europe, the height of the so-called “commercial revolution” of the late Middle Ages and the “Economic Turn” of the mid-eighteenth century, which saw an explosion of printed texts and translations of a political-economic character and which quantitatively and qualitatively changed the scale of political-economic discussions.22 All told, trade’s life-or-death centrality to “the state” seems as old as the state itself, however we choose to understand that term. Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of the genesis of the (modern) state as a process of the accumulation or concentration of diferent species of “capital” is especially compelling, but where Bourdieu sees taxation and levies at the heart of the “economic capital” subsumed by the emergent state, we prefer to look
at the ways the state managed commerce, giving (through privileges and protection) as much as taking, or even liberated it.23
Financial and corporate structures in the European world developed alongside governmental ones, and the story of the origins of political economy is not a one-sided one, in which states or proto-states simply regulated production and trade. Nor is it a teleological one, with the neoliberal internationalist state waiting for us at the end. Rather, it is a dynamic and contentious story in which the power of creditors and of capital, and of economic ideas and practices, shaped and were shaped by political communities. It is, in short, the story of wealth and power in the West and the world it often violently created; of how human beings thought about, grappled with, and overcame material hardship; organized their political and economic communities, and struggled for dominance on an increasingly larger global stage. With the rise of China as an economic superpower, “state capitalism” has rushed to the center of the economic discourse.24 But this is nothing new—the history of state capitalism, of truly political economy, is also the history of the global hegemony of the West over the past 700 years as well as of the rise of the proverbial rest.25 We maintain that a good way of gaining greater clarity with regards to this vital history—its manifest successes and egregious limitations—is to examine the intricate ways in which politico-economic ideas and practice intertwined in the city-states of late medieval Italy as much as in the oceanic empires that birthed the vexed geopolitical world in which we live. In fact, the essays contained in this volume help tell precisely this story, through snapshots from a truly global array of individuals, business enterprises, states, empires, and from the idealized domain of theories themselves.
In his classic American Capitalism (1952), John Kenneth Galbraith presented a suggestive theory of “countervailing powers” in market societies, arguing that the United States had ceased to be (if it ever had been) a perfectly competitive market because of oligopolistic business practices, suggesting a solution in the countervailing infuences of corporations, states, and trade unions.26 Tese would be the de facto building blocks of much subsequent historiography, even in felds and for periods far distant from Galbraith’s own, to the extent that they eventually came to be taken for granted: the world was made up of frms, states, and
workers.27 Today, however, these categories of analysis are increasingly being questioned and indeed exploded, allowing for the reconstruction of a far richer—and more nuanced—history of power in which an array of state and non-state actors, not to mention theories, dogmas, and ideologies, vie for supremacy in a world characterized by relentless economic competition. Te fact that something close to the Weberian “State” for a time gained a near monopoly on the legitimacy of power should, as many of the following essays make clear, not blind us to the contentious process that gave birth to our world, the many sources of its regulation, or the continuing relevance of non-state and trans-state power in shaping it.28 Te state, then, need not be the central actor in a sophisticated history of political economy, and perhaps, some day in the future, glancing at the grim outlines of international capital in a world of diminished nation-states and diminished discourses of legitimacy, one redolent of an earlier and formative age, we can begin to sketch a new and compelling metaphor for power, one that is plural where the state is singular: as Herman Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Leviathan is not the biggest fsh;—I have heard of Krakens.”29
For the sake of clarity, it must be said that this volume’s use of the term “political economy” does not refect current sectarian uses of it, whether by Marxists or by Chicago-school public choice theorists.30 Rather, it is a conscious resurrection of “political economy” in its original designation and a glimpse at its prehistory (and perhaps future). Adam Smith famously defned the discipline as a “branch of the science of a statesman or legislator” in his 1776 Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, forever linking politics, economics, and law to the legitimacy of power.31 Te term ‘legitimate’ is related to the Latin legitimus, or “lawful‚” itself in turn emerging from the etymological varieties of “law‚” meaning “rule‚” perhaps in the earliest instance derived from Proto-Germanic or Indo-European roots signifying “putting” or “laying.” So ftting is the widespread historical phraseology of “giving” or “laying down the law” as a metaphor for conquest and a way of conceptualizing hierarchies of power in a variety of contexts from the commercial to the cultural. Linguistically speaking, then, law is power, and political economy was long considered its pre-eminent “science.”32
Te questions posed, in a variety of ways, by the contributors to this volume regard the nature, legality, and consequences of such power in historical time, as well as attempts to navigate, manage, project, usurp, and neutralize it. Needless to say, this process is, and must be, ongoing, but the intellectual history of such political economy is a topic too important to be left to policy makers and economists unaware of this past. Tis raises, however obliquely, the perennial questions of intentionality and relevance in—and of—the history of political economy. On the one hand, historians fnd themselves scrambling for “relevance” in the face of the proverbial “crisis of the humanities‚” and have, perhaps naturally, turned to the histories of capitalism and political economy en masse in the wake of the 2008 fnancial meltdown, not unlike how the study of economic history came into being and has since been strengthened during previous periods of economic crisis—theoretical as well as practical.33 On the other hand, many historians remain deeply vexed by such calls for “relevance‚” the pressures of “presentism‚” and their collateral danger of “anachronism.”34
We do not pretend to speak for the contributors to this volume, and respect deeply their individual approaches and perspectives, but we believe that their works—independently but particularly in concert—simultaneously elucidate our complex past, clarify the problems of the present, and adumbrate future concerns. As Skinner has argued, “if they simply ply their trade‚” intellectual historians help “prevent us from becoming too readily bewitched.”35 And bewitched we have been. Yet we would venture to argue that, in the vast constellation of the history of ideas, the past plays an even more organic and integral role for the study of political economy than for many other intellectual endeavors. Already at its very outset as an academic enterprise in the eighteenth century, “history” was considered one of the principal sources of authority in economic debates because it grounded theories in what many might still consider the realm of “facts.”36 As Italy’s third professor of political economy taught his students in the early 1770s, “Tere is no better way of understanding the uses of a machine‚” in his example the politics of the world economy, “than to observe the process of its construction.”37 Similar sentiments have frequently resurfaced in the labyrinthine history of the subject, and the Cambridge historian
and political philosopher Istvan Hont, one of the principal architects of the history of political economy over the past four decades, was utterly unapologetic about writing “with eyes frmly fxed on the challenges of today‚” justifying his work on the grounds that “the globalization debate of the late twentieth and early twenty-frst centuries lack[ed] conceptual novelty.”38 To study the history of political economy was, in his opinion, to engage with the principal political and economic questions of the day; as he once asked, “why else would you do it?.”39 Nor by any means was Hont the frst to suggest this: “A careful study of economic history,” wrote business historian Edmond E. Lincoln in the vexed early years of the 1930s, “reveals surprisingly few new ‘problems’.”40 Even Schumpeter himself, late in life, expressed hope that the historical study of political economy would “result in a new wing being added to the economist’s house.”41 Tough it may be an architectural pipe dream, it remains one worthy of our attention. For, since economics cannot but be political, its history should be considered not merely a foil against bewitchment but the ballast of its very endeavor.42
Tere can be no doubt that we fnd ourselves now at a proverbial crossroads of capitalism, and that many central assumptions regarding the nature, purpose, and future of political economy are being actively rethought across the world.43 Whether with respect to long-term dynamics, like the recent peaking of international trade and subsequent decline of aggregate trade fows, or to singular yet momentous events such as Britain’s decision by popular referendum to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency— symptoms and causes of what some have come to call “the Rage of 2016”—everything suggests we are living through a period of long unprecedented change as neglected economic forces, which scientism failed to identify and address, trigger surprising political results with real and widespread social consequences.44 Yet this is hardly the frst time we fnd ourselves in this position, nor, bar the direst of recent predictions coming to pass, will it be the last.45
In a classic study of the history of economic thought, the economist and economic historian William J. Barber proudly proclaimed that “few things on this earth approach immortality so closely as a taut set of economic ideas.”46 When we are no longer so certain about the certainties,
when ideologies have failed, our only lodestar is and must be history. Te artifacts of pre- and early modern political economy, not to mention of the postwar period, remain monuments of perennial importance for understanding how human beings organized their political and economic communities, won great wealth and lost it, conquered and were conquered. We must understand this past, the history of business, politics, and economics, on its own terms and, indeed, in its own terms, not for reasons of antiquarianism but because they shed precious light on some of the most pressing challenges of our own time, including how we got “here‚” wherever that happens to be. Te following essays testify to the rich and powerful lessons to be had from such a historical understanding of political economy, and will hopefully serve as inspiration for further work on the role of power in our long economic age.
* * *
Although the road was winding and somewhat bumpy, this volume emerged from a conference we organized at Harvard Business School in the fall of 2013, and we are grateful to that institution, and particularly to the Faculty Chair of its Business History Initiative, Geofrey Jones, for making the event possible. In addition to the contributors represented here, the success of that conference owed to the extraordinary participation of S.M. Amadae, David Armitage, Lawrin Armstrong, Ed Balleisen, Paul Cheney, Rebecca Henderson, Geofrey Jones, Julius Kirshner, Michael Kwass, Sreemati Mitter, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Emma Rothschild, Jacob Soll, Anoush Terjanian, and Richard Tuck. Kate Jenkins and Jayanthi Narayanaswamy also provided invaluable assistance during the editing of this volume.
In December of 1941, just weeks after the United States entered World War Two and while the Great Depression was still spurring new investigations of the economy and its history, N.S.B. Gras, the “father of business history” and the school’s frst Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, presented a paper titled “Capitalism—Concepts and History” at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting. As his respondent, Gras personally chose Raymond de Roover, his former M.B.A. student, who was then a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of Chicago. De Roover’s reply played with one of Gras’s central economic-historical conceits—the transition from petty capitalism to commercial capitalism, and a corresponding shift from the central
importance of the traveling to the sedentary merchant—and laid out the remarkable case for a “commercial revolution” in the thirteenth century, frst among the Italians and then in the Low Countries.47 De Roover, especially with his 1963 magnum opus Te Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, would go on to become one of the driving forces in the economic historiography of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. When Wallace K. Ferguson surveyed the feld of Renaissance economic history in 1960, he made a point of mentioning Gras’s importance in the development of the feld. Business history, “in the sense in which Professor Gras envisaged it‚” he argued, encompassed works from Armando Sapori’s seminal studies of the medieval Bardi, Peruzzi, and del Bene frms; to most of De Roover’s work; to Frederic Lane’s study of the Renaissance Venetian merchant Andrea Barbarigo; and even Iris Origo’s Merchant of Prato. 48 Tat this volume should have originated at Harvard Business School is, then, more than a happy coincidence. We have brought together “Business Historians” and historians of many other stripes precisely because we share the broadness of vision that brought together Gras and De Roover, one we believe still remains fruitful for historical research to this day.
And it is also important that this volume begins in the commercial republics of premodern Italy. According to Emma Rothschild, David Hume’s well-known 1754 essay “On Refnement in the Arts” proposed nothing less than a “Florentine Model” of political economy; Florence, whose history Hume loved, represented for him a paradigmatic form of the “opulent republic” in which democracy and commerce were united.49 Whether or not this is actually true of the historical Florence, Enlightenment thinkers found in the Renaissance (and especially in the commercial and industrial cities of Northern and Central Italy) models for understanding how wealth and virtue, luxury and political moderation could coexist. Hume’s essay was just one entry in the then raging debate over luxury and its presumably deleterious efects on public virtue. We are again faced with questions, as pressing as ever in human history, about the corrupting infuence of wealth and the practices that produce it on our polities. Tese are civilizational questions and, indeed, existential ones. And they are also personal and moral questions. When so many ask simply how do we get rich, we should again
be asking what it means for us to be both rich and good. With Hume we assert that wealth and virtue are not incompatible, and with him we look to the past in order to understand where we are and where we might be headed.
Robert Fredona Sophus A. Reinert
Notes
1. Angmar Sandmo, Economics Evolving: A History of Economic Tought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 464.
2. On the mathematization of economics see E. Roy Weintraub, How Economics Became a Mathematical Science (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). For an early statement of the so-called “Washington Consensus,” see John Williamson, “What Washington Means by Policy Reform,” in Williamson, ed., Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened, (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1990), 7–38. For perspectives on its earlier history, see Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., Te Road from Mont Pèlerin: Te Making of the Neoliberal Tought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). For early critical works on the phenomenon, see Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 2002); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Erik S. Reinert, How Rich Countries Got Rich… and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor (London: Constable, 2007). Te 2008 crisis of course magnifed the (already more than extensive) literature substantially, but see for a pugnacious take Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013).
3. See, among many others on this, Francesco Boldizzoni, Te Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 169–70; Marc Parry, “Shackles and Dollars: Historians and Economists Clash over Slavery,” Te Chronicle of Higher Education, 28 October 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/ShacklesDollars/238598.
4. For an emblematic statement of this crisis, see the remarkable list of contrarian works by mainstream economists discussed in Noah Smith, “Te Writing Tat Shaped Economic Tinking in 2016,”
Bloomberg, 20 December 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-20/the-writing-that-shaped-economic-thinking-in-2016.
5. Te many globalizations have many histories, but see the essays in Anthony G. Hopkins, ed., Globalisation in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002) and more recently Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
6. A veritable cottage industry has sprung up to address the “crisis of the humanities‚” but for a refreshing perspective on it see Peter Mandler, “Rise of the Humanities,” 17 December 2015, https://aeon.co/essays/ the-humanities-are-booming-only-the-professors-can-t-see-it. On the academic resurgence of the history of capitalism, see among others Jennifer Schuessler, “In History Departments, It’s Up with Capitalism,” Te New York Times, April 6, 2013.
7. Jorge Luis Borges, “Te Library of Babel,” in id., Te Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922–1986, trans. Eliot Weinberger (London: Allen Lane, 2000), 214–16; John Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufciency,” Te Yale Review 22, no. 4 (1933): 755–69, now in id., Te Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, ed. Elizabeth Johnson and David Moggridge, 30 vols., vol. XXI, Activities 1931–1939; World Crises and Policies in Britain and America (London: Macmillan et al for the Royal Economic Society, 1971–1989), 233–46, 244. For a varied perspective on how to write the history of economics today, see E. Roy Weintraub, “How Should We Write the History of Twentieth-Century Economics,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 15, no. 4 (1999): 139–52.
8. See for example Sandmo, Economics Evolving, 7.
9. On such approaches see among many others Riccardo Faucci, L'economia politica in Italia: Dal cinquecento ai nostri giorni (Turin: UTET, 2000), 5–6. On the importance of the history of science for the history of political economy see Margaret Schabas, “Coming Together: History of Economics as History of Science,” History of Political Economy, Annual Supplement to vol. 34 (2002): 208–25.
10. Mark Blaug, Economic Teory in Retrospect, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Paul A. Samuelson, “Out of the Closet: A Program for the Whig History of Economic Science; Keynote Address at History of Economics Society Boston Meeting, June 20, 1987,” History of Economics Society Bulletin IX, no. 1: 51–60, 52, and see generally for his perspective on the essays in id., Paul Samuelson on the History of Economic Analysis: Selected Essays, ed. Steven G. Medema and Anthony M. C. Waterman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014). For a take on Blaug’s tentative conversion late in life, see Antonio Magliulo, “Amintore Fanfani e la storiografa del pensiero economico,” in Amintore Fanfani storico dell’economia e statista: Economic Historian and Statesman, ed. Angela Maria Boci Girelli (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2013), 49–70, 66–67.
11. William J. Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History and Teory, 2 vols., vol. II (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893), 381, on whom see Bernard Semmel, “Sir William Ashley as ‘Socialist of the Chair’,” Economica 24 (1957): 343–53; Gerard M. Koot, English Historical Economics, 1870–1926: Te Rise of Economic History and Neomercantilism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), particularly 113–15. Te quote is beautifully discussed in Lars Magnusson, Mercantilism: Te Shaping of an Economic Language (London: Routledge, 1994), 13 and id., Te Political Economy of Mercantilism (London: Routledge, 2015), 7. On the German Historical School generally, see among others Yuichi Shionoya, Te Soul of the German Historical School: Methodological Essays on Schmoller, Weber and Schumpeter (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005) and the masterful Erik Grimmer-Solem, Te Rise of Historical Economics and Social Reform in Germany 1864–1894 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). For a profound engagement with the purpose of such historical economics, see Nicholas W. Balabkins, Not by Teory Alone… Te Economics of Gustav von Schmoller and Its Legacy to America (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1988).
12. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in id., Visions of Politics, 3 vols., vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57–89, 73. For the history of economics being particularly prone to this, see also Richard Whatmore, What Is Intellectual History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 88–89.
13. Carlo Ginzburg, “Machiavelli, the Rule and the Exception,” in Renaissance Letters and Learning, ed. Dilwyn Knox and Nuccio Ordine (London and Turin: Warburg Institute and Nino Aragni, 2012), 73–92, 81. For the context of Italian thought on precorrimenti and idealism, see Ferruccio de Natale, “Storicità della flosofa e flosofa come storiografa,” in Dentro la storiografa flosofca. Questioni di teoria e didattica, ed. Giuseppe Semerari (Bari: Dedalo, 1983), 101–48.
14. On theoretically internalist and “absolutist” versus contextually “relativist” approaches to the history of political economy, see among others Robert B. Ekelund and Robert F. Hebert, A History of Economic Teory and Method, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), 61.
15. See, for example, the memorable statement in the epochal Charles Gide and Charles Rist, Histoire des doctrines économiques depuis les physiocrates jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: J.B. Sirey, 1909), vii, that “in this book the history of facts will not be discussed beyond the measure to which it seemed indispensible to us for understanding the appearance or the eclipse of such and such a doctrine.” On the dimension of time in the history of economics, see furthermore Graeme Donald Snooks, “What Can Historical Analysis Contribute to the Science of Economics?,” in id. ed., Historical Analysis in Economics (London: Routledge, 1993), 1–25.
16. Joseph Alois Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 [1954]), 344f7. Tat long forgotten economist was Marc’ Antonio de Santis. Jacob Viner’s own verdict regarding Schumpeter’s posthumous work remains apt: “there is, as we shall see, much in this book which is redundant, irrelevant, cryptic, strongly biased, paradoxical, or otherwise unhelpful or even harmful to understanding. When all this is set aside, there still remains enough to constitute, by a wide margin, the most constructive, the most original, the most learned, and the most brilliant contribution to the history of the analytical phases of our discipline which has ever been made.” See Jacob Viner, “Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis,” Te American Economic Review 44, no. 5 (1954): 894–910, 894–95. One may still ask, however, with George J. Stigler, “Why Schumpeter or Anyone else Should want to Write on such a Scale‚” see his “Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis,” Journal of Political Economy 62, no. 4 (1954): 344–45, 344.
17. On the failure of Physiocracy, see the classic work of Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics, and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV, 2nd ed. (London: Anthem, 2015). On Stalinism, see for an exemplary study Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); on the theoretical causes of the fnancial crisis see David Sington, Te Flaw: Markets, Money, Mortgages, and the Great American Meltdown (New York: New Studio Group et al., 2011); for the miscalculations see Carmen
M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogof, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings 100 (2010): 573–78, which astoundingly concluded by claiming their (tentative and erroneous) correlations “should be at the forefront of public policy concerns‚” 578. On the subsequent brouhaha see John Cassidy, “Te Reinhart and Rogof Controversy: A Summing Up,” Te New Yorker, April 26, 2013. See also L. Randall Wray, “Why Reinhart and Rogof Results Are Crap,” EconoMonitor, April 20, 2013, http://archive.economonitor.com/lrwray/2013/04/20/why-reinhart-and-rogof-results-are-crap/. On austerity in general see Mark Blyth, Austerity: Te History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Florian Schui, Austerity: Te Great Failure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). On economists making mistakes, see Alessandro Roncaglia, Economisti che sbagliano: Le radici culturali della crisi (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010).
18. Oscar Wilde, “Te Soul of Man Under Socialism,” in id., Te Soul of Man Under Socialism & Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (London: Penguin, 2001), 125–60, 130. For an illuminating take on how “anyone” still believing in self-regulating markets “must have been asleep for the past fve or six years‚” see Raymond Geuss, “Economies: Bad, Good, Indiferent,” in id., Reality and Its Dreams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 117–47, 143.
19. Joseph Dorfman, Te Economic Mind in American Civilization, 3 vols. vol. I (New York: Viking, 1946–1949), ix.
20. David Hume, “Of Civil Liberty,” in id., Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 51–57, 52.
21. On the limitations of Hume’s viewpoint, see Sophus A. Reinert, “Introduction” to Antonio Serra, A Short Treatise on the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1613), trans. Jonathan Hunt (London, New York, and Delhi: Anthem, 2011), 1–86, 19–21.
22. Te idea of a medieval “commercial revolution” is perhaps most strongly linked to Roberto S. Lopez’s late survey Te Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). On the “Economic Turn‚” see Steven L. Kaplan and Sophus A. Reinert, “Te Economic Turn in Enlightenment Europe,” introduction to Kaplan and Reinert, eds., Te Economic Turn: Recasting Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 2 vols. (London: Anthem, forthcoming 2018).
23. Pierre Bourdieu, Sur l’état: Cours au Collège de France, 1989–1992 (Paris: Seuil, 2012), 300–347, but still very useful is id., “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” in State/ Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 53–75.
24. See among others Aldo Musacchio and Sergio G. Lazzarini, Reinventing State Capitalism: Leviathan in Business, Brazil and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
25. See, again among others, Erik S. Reinert, “Te Role of the State in Economic Growth,” Journal of Economic Studies 26, no. 4/5 (1999): 268–326; Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: Te Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982); Robert Wade, Governing the Market: Economic Teory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Alice H. Amsden, Te Rise of “Te Rest:” Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
26. John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: Te Concept of Countervailing Power (New York: Houghton Mifin, 1952). On Galbraith, see among others Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).
27. For a related argument, see John O’Neill, Te Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics (London: Routledge, 1998), 2.
28. For a happy reminder of which see Philip J. Stern, Te Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sophus A. Reinert, “Rivalry: Greatness in Early Modern Political Economy,” in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 248–370, now also as “Economic Emulation and the Politics of International Trade in Early Modern Europe,” in Handbook of Alternative Teories of Economic Development, ed. Erik S. Reinert, Jayati Ghosh, and Rainer Kattel (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2016), 42–62, particularly 55–56.
29. Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed., Lynn Horth, Evanston and (Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1993), letter of [17?] November 1851, 213.
30. On these varieties of political economy see Peter Groenewegen, “‘Political Economy’ and ‘Economics’,” Te New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, 2nd ed., 8 vols., vol. III, ed. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 904–7. Te histories of how the term evolved are many, but see among others Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine, From Political Economy to Economics: Method, the Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Economic Teory (London: Routledge, 2009).
31. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. in one, vol. I, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 449.
32. See Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 26–29 for a discussion of this idiom.
33. Boldizzoni, Poverty of Clio, 3 and passim; Alon Kadish, “Economic History and the Contraction of Economics,” in id., Historians, Economists, and Economic History (London: Routledge, 1989), 221–45.
34. For diferent caveats regarding these challenges, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 101–20; Lynn Hunt, “Against Presentism,” Perspectives on History, May 2002; and Nick Jardine, “Uses and Abuses of Anachronism in the History of the Sciences,” History of Science 38 (2000): 251–70.
35. Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 116, 118.
36. Sophus A. Reinert, “Authority and Expertise at the Origins of Macroeconomics,” in Antonio Serra and the Economics of Good Government, ed. Rosario Patalano and Sophus A. Reinert (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 112–42, 113 and passim.
37. Agostino Paradisi, “Lezioni di economia civile [1771]‚” Biblioteca Panizzi, Reggio Emilia, Italy, MSS. REGG: E 139, vol. II, f. 102–3. On Paradisi, see Sophus A. Reinert, “Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Conquest, Commerce, and Decline in Enlightenment Italy,” Te American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (2010): 1395–1425.
38. Istvan Hont, “Jealousy of Trade: An Introduction,” in id., Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1–156, 5, 155.
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the dissolution of the lower extremity of the glaciers is effected in the Arctic world.
In the neighbourhood of Cape Alexander, one of the headlands of Smith Strait, Dr. Hayes met with a glacier, of which he gives an interesting description in his narrative of an “Arctic Boat Journey,” (1854):—
It was the first, protruding into the ocean, which he had had an opportunity of inspecting closely; and though small, compared with other similar formations, it had nevertheless all their principal characteristics. It presented to the sea a convex mural face, seventy feet in height and about two miles in length, its centre projecting into the water beyond the general line of the coast to the east and west of it. The surface rose abruptly to the height of about two hundred feet, and, sloping thence backward with a gentle inclination, seemed to be connected with an extensive mer de glace above. Several fissures or crevasses, apparently of great depth, struck vertically through its body, and extended far up into its interior; and others, more shallow, which seemed to have been formed by the streams of melted snow that poured in cataracts down into the sea. Dr. Hayes remarks that he was impressed by its viscous appearance; but we have shown that a certain amount of viscosity naturally appertains to glacier ice.
FORCING A PASSAGE THROUGH THE ICE.
Parallel with its convex face ran a succession of indistinctly marked lines, which gave it the aspect of a semi-fluid mass moving downward upon an inclined surface; and this idea was confirmed by its appearance about the rocks on either side. Over these it seemed to have flowed; and, fitting accurately into all their inequalities, it gave the effect of a huge moving mass of partially solidified matter suddenly congealed.
Of still greater interest is the same adventurous explorer’s description of the great Arctic Mer de Glace which lies inland from Rensselaer Bay, in about lat. 79° N., and long. 68° W.
Dr. Hayes and his party had set out on an expedition into the interior, and after passing through a really picturesque landscape, enriched with beds of moss and turf, patches of purple andromeda,
and the trailing branches of the dwarf-willow, they emerged upon a broad plain or valley, in the heart of which reposed a frozen lake, about two miles in length by half a mile in width. They traversed its transparent surface. On either side of them rose rugged bluffs, that stretched off into long lines of hills, culminating in series in a broadtopped mountain-ridge, which, running away to right and left, was cut by a gap several miles wide that opened directly before them. Immediately in front was a low hill, around the base of which flowed on either side the branches of a stream whose course they had followed. Leaving the river-bed just above the lake, they climbed to the summit of this hillock; and there a sight burst upon them, grand and imposing beyond the power of words adequately to describe. From the rocky bed, only a few miles in advance, a sloping wall of pure whiteness rose to a broad level plain of ice, which, apparently without limits, stretched away toward the unknown east. It was the great mer de glace of the Arctic continent.
Here then was, in reality, the counterpart of the river-systems of other lands. From behind the granite hills the congealed drainings of the interior water-sheds, the atmospheric precipitations of ages, were moving in a mass, which, though solid, was plastic, moving down through every gap in the mountains, swallowing up the rocks, filling the valleys, submerging the hills: an onward, irresistible, crystal tide, swelling to the ocean. The surface was intersected by numerous vertical crevasses, some of considerable depth, which had drained off the melted snow.
It was midnight when the explorers approached this colossal reservoir. The sun was several degrees beneath the horizon, and afforded a faint twilight-gleam. Stars of the second magnitude were dimly perceptible in the cold, steel-blue Arctic heavens. When they were within about half a mile of the icy wall, a brilliant meteor fell before them, and, by its reflection upon the glassy surface beneath, greatly increased the magical effect of the scene; while loud reports, like distant thunder or the roll of artillery, broke at intervals from the depths of the frozen sea.
On closer inspection it was found that the face of the glacier ascended at an angle of from 30° to 35°. At its base lay a high bank
of snow, and the wanderers clambered up it about sixty feet; but beyond this their efforts were defied by the exceeding smoothness of the ice. The mountains, which stood on either hand like giantwarders, were overlapped, and to some extent submerged, by the glacier. From the face of the huge ice-river innumerable little rivulets ran down the channels their action had gradually excavated, or gurgled from beneath the ice; forming, on the level lands below, a sort of marsh, not twenty yards from the icy wall. Here, in strange contrast, bloomed beds of verdurous moss; and in these, tufts of dwarf-willows were wreathing their tiny arms and rootlets about the feebler flower-growths; and there, clustered together, crouching among the grass, and sheltered by the leaves, and feeding on the bed of lichens, flourished a tiny, white-blossomed draba and a white chickweed. Dotting the few feet of green around might be seen the yellow flowers of the more hardy poppy, the purple potentilla, and saxifrages yellow, purple, and white.
The great glacier of Sermiatsialik is one of the arms, or outlets, of this immense reservoir of ice. It occupies the bed of a valley, varying from three and a half to five miles in width, and attaining at certain points a depth of upwards of three hundred and seventy feet. This valley opens upon the fiord of Sermiatsialik, which is separated from that of Julianshaab by the range of mountains culminating in the peak of Redkammen.
We owe to Dr Hayes a lively description of the Sermiatsialik glacier, which he thinks must at some places be more than seven hundred and fifty feet in depth, overflowing the borders of the valley like a swollen torrent. For upwards of four leagues, the icebergs which throng the fiord, or gulf, are those of the glacier itself, and terminating in a wedge-like outline, disappear in the vast sea of ice expanding to right and left above the loftiest summits, and drawing irresistibly the eye to its rippled surface,—boundless, apparently, like that of ocean. As the voyager sails up the gulf, he gradually loses sight of the frozen slope, and then of the white line of the mer de
glace: he finds himself in front of an immense cliff, from one hundred to two hundred feet in height, diaphanous as the purest crystals, and reflecting all the hues of heaven.
One almost shudders as one approaches this vast domain of Winter. Collecting in copious streams, the ice and snow melted on the surface of the glacier pour over its brink, forming floating clouds of spray, irradiated by rainbow colours. The din of these cascades fills the air. At intervals, the loud reports of the internal convulsions of the glacier are repeated by every echo.
The cliff is entirely vertical; but its face, far from being smooth, is broken up into an infinite variety of forms: into unfathomable cavernous hollows, symmetrical spires, ogives, pinnacles, and deep fissures, where the eye plunges into a transparent blue, which changes every second its fleeting, opaline tints; tints so soft, and yet so vivid, that they defy the skill of the artist to reproduce them. The lustre of the “dark eye of woman” is not more difficult to seize. A deep dark green, less delicate but not less splendid, colours all the recesses where the ice overhangs the waters. In the sunlight one sees the surface of these huge crystals shining with the whiteness of the purest snow; except, indeed, where recent fractures have taken place. They suggest to the mind the idea of the gleams and reflections of a piece of satin; the undulatory lustre and shifting sparkle being produced by the different angles under which the light is reflected.
But let us suppose that we have landed; with much difficulty have ascended the cliffs; and have clambered up the glacier to its very summit. The scene before us, how shall we convey to the mind of the reader?
THE GLACIER OF SERMIATSIALIK, GREENLAND
Imagine, if you can, the rapids of the Upper Niagara congealed even to their lowest depths; imagine the falls, and the broad river, and the great Lake Erie all frozen into solid ice; with bergs above the cataract towering as high as the lower banks: suppose that you, the spectator, having taken your stand upon the rapids, with the Erie so near that you can see its crystallized surface, and you will have a picture, on a reduced scale, of the sea of ice now spreading far before us. The rapids will represent the glacier; the Great Fall the cliff which it projects into the sea (only that the celebrated “horseshoe” is here turned outwards); the river which broadens into the Ontario will be the fiord; and the Ontario, that dark grim ocean into which the gigantic bergs detached from the mighty ice-cascade are slowly making their way!
We must indicate, however, one remarkable dissimilarity, for which our previous observations on the nature of glaciers will have prepared the reader. From one bank to the other, the surface of a river is always horizontal, but that of a glacier is slightly convex.
Through the narrow glen, or ravine, formed by this curvature of the glacier, a kind of lateral trough or gully, bounded by the escarpment of the soil, we reach the sea. The descent is not without its dangers, for at every point crevasses open, separated by slippery projections. These deep gashes, at some points, are only a few yards apart; and they incessantly cross each other, and run into one another, so as to form a perfect labyrinth, in the windings of which the adventurous traveller is apt to feel bewildered.
The border of the glacier once crossed, the way becomes less difficult; for a mile and a half the level is almost perfect, and the ice but little broken up. The frozen desert, however, impresses us with an almost solemn feeling, and there is something terrible in the desolation of such a Sahara of snow!
Moreover, the traveller is irresistibly affected by the continual roar or growling of the enormous mass, which seems to stir and shake under our very feet. He would not be surprised if a vast chasm suddenly yawned before him! These harsh deep voices of the glacier, however, are not the only sounds we hear. On every side rises the murmur of brooks which trace their furrows across the crystalline plain. Some of these gradually converge, and, uniting, form a considerable torrent, which leaps with a clang from icy crag to icy ledge, until it is lost in a crevasse, or precipitated over the frozen cliff into the waters of the fiord. The solitude of the scene is complete, but not the silence. The air is as full of “noises” as ever was Prospero’s isle.
Such are the principal features of the glacier of Sermiatsialik.
About ninety miles north-east of Rensselaer Bay lies the great Humboldt Glacier, which seems to serve as a connecting-link
between the Old World and the New
It lies between the 79th and 80th parallels north, and between the 64th and 65th meridians west, skirting the shore of Peabody Bay, which is a bold indentation of the east coast of Kane Sea.
It was discovered in Dr. Kane’s expedition, and is probably one of the grandest spectacles in the Arctic world. Dr. Kane acknowledges himself unable to do justice to its magnificent aspect. He can speak only of its “long, ever-shining line of cliff diminished to a well-pointed wedge in the perspective;” of its “face of glistening ice, sweeping in a long curve from the low interior, the facets in front intensely illuminated by the sun.”
This line of cliff rises, like a solid wall of glass, three hundred feet above the water-level, with an unknown, unfathomable depth below it; and its curved face, sixty miles in length, disappears into unknown space at not more than a single day’s railroad-travel from the Pole. The interior with which it communicates, and from which it issues, is an unexplored mer de glace, an ice-ocean, of apparently boundless dimensions.
Such is the “mighty crystal bridge” which connects the two continents of America and Greenland. We say, continents; for Greenland, as Dr. Kane remarks, however insulated it may ultimately prove to be, is in mass strictly continental. Its least possible axis, measured from Cape Farewell to the line of the Humboldt Glacier, in the neighbourhood of the 80th parallel, gives a length of upwards of twelve hundred miles,—not materially less than that of Australia from its northern to its southern cape.
Imagine the centre of such a continent, says Dr. Kane, occupied through nearly its whole extent by a deep, unbroken sea of ice, that gathers perennial increase from the watershed of vast snow-covered mountains and all the precipitations of the atmosphere upon its own surface. Imagine this, moving onward like a great glacial river, seeking outlets at every fiord and valley, rolling icy cataracts into the Atlantic and Greenland seas; and, having at last reached the northern limit of the land that has borne it up, pouring out a mighty frozen torrent into unknown Arctic space.
“It is thus,” remarks Dr Kane, “and only thus, that we must form a just conception of a phenomenon like this great glacier. I had looked in my own mind for such an appearance, should I ever be fortunate enough to reach the northern coast of Greenland. But now that it was before me, I could hardly realize it. I had recognized, in my quiet library at home, the beautiful analogies which Forbes and Studer have developed between the glacier and the river; but I could not comprehend at first this complete substitution of ice for water.
“It was slowly the conviction dawned on me that I was looking upon the counterpart of the great river-system of Arctic Asia and America. Yet here were no water-feeders from the south. Every particle of moisture had its origin within the Polar Circle, and had been converted into ice. There were no vast alluvions, no forest or animal traces borne down by liquid torrents. Here was a plastic, moving, semi-solid mass, obliterating life, swallowing rocks and islands, and ploughing its way with irresistible march through the crust of an investing sea.”
When, at a later period, Dr. Kane made a closer examination of this great natural wonder, he found that previously he had not realized the full grandeur of the spectacle. He noted that the trend of the glacier was a few degrees to the west of north; and he remarks, as the peculiarity of its aspect, that it did not indicate repose, but activity, energy, movement.
Its surface seemed to follow that of the basis-country over which it flowed. It was undulating on and about the horizon, but as it descended towards the sea it represented a broken plain with a general inclination of some nine degrees, still diminishing toward the foreground. Crevasses, which in the distance seemed like mere wrinkles, expanded as they came nearer, and were intersected almost at right angles by long continuous lines of fracture parallel with the face of the glacier.
These lines, too, scarcely perceptible in the far distance, widened as they approached the sea until they formed a gigantic stairway. It seemed as though the ice had lost its support below, and that the mass was let down from above in a series of steps; and such an action is the necessary result of the heat thrown out by the soil, the excessive surface-drainage, and the constant abrasion of the sea.
The indication of a great propelling agency seemed to be just commencing at the time that Dr. Kane visited the great glacier. The split-off lines of ice were evidently in motion, pressed on by those behind, but still broadening their fissures, as if the impelling action grew more and more energetic nearer the water, till at last they floated away in the form of icebergs. Long files of these detached masses might be seen, like the ranks of a stately armada, slowly sailing out into the remote sea, their separation marked by dark parallel shadows; broad and spacious avenues near the eye, but narrowed in the perspective to mere furrows. A more impressive illustration of the forces of nature it would be difficult to conceive.
Dr. Kane’s view of the formation of icebergs differs considerably from that which most physicists entertain.
He does not believe that the berg falls into the sea, broken by its weight from the parent glacier; he is of opinion that it rises from the sea. The process is at once gradual and comparatively quiet. “The idea of icebergs being discharged, so universal among systematic writers, seems to me at variance with the regulated and progressive actions of Nature. Developed by such a process, the thousands of bergs which throng the Polar seas should keep the air and water in perpetual commotion, one fearful succession of explosive detonations and propagated waves. But it is only the lesser masses falling into deep waters which could justify the popular opinion. The enormous masses of the great glacier are propelled, step by step and year by year, until, reaching water capable of supporting them, they are floated off to be lost in the temperatures of other regions.”
The Humboldt Glacier did not differ in structure from the Alpine and Norwegian ice-growths; and its face presented nearly all the characteristic features of the latter. The overflow, or viscous
overlapping of the surface, was very strongly marked. “When close to the island rocks,” says Kane, “and looking out upon the upper table of the glacier, I was struck with the homely analogy of the batter-cake spreading itself out under the ladle of the housewife, the upper surface less affected by friction, and rolling forward in consequence.”
The crevasses bore the marks of direct fracture, as well as of the more gradual action of surface-drainage. The extensive watershed between their converging planes gave to the icy surface most of the hydrographic features of a river-system. The ice-born rivers which divided them were margined occasionally with spires of discoloured ice, and generally lost themselves in the central areas of the glacier before reaching its foreground. Occasionally, too, the face of the glacier was cut by vertical lines, which, as in the Alpine examples, were evidently outlets for the surface drainage.
The height of this ice-wall at the nearest point was about three hundred feet, measured from the water’s edge; and the unbroken right line of its diminishing perspective showed that this might be regarded as its constant measurement. It seemed, in fact, a great icy table-land, abutting with a clean precipice against the sea. This, indeed, is the great characteristic of all those Arctic glaciers which issue from central reservoirs or mers de glace upon the fiords or bays, and is strikingly in contrast with the dependent or hanging glacier of the ravines, where every line and furrow and chasm seem to indicate the movement of descent and the mechanical disturbances which have impeded and delayed it.
Dr. Kane named this monster glacier after Alexander Von Humboldt, to whose labours Physical Science is so largely indebted; and the cape which flanks it on the Greenland coast after the distinguished naturalist, whom the world has so recently lost, Professor Agassiz.
The point at which the Humboldt Glacier enters the “Land of Washington” affords even at a distance very clear indications of its plastic or semi-solid character. The observer finds it impossible to resist the impression of fluidity conveyed by its peculiar markings. Dr. Kane very appropriately named it Cape Forbes, in honour of the illustrious son of Scotia who contributed so largely to our true knowledge of the structure and mode of progression of glaciers.
As the surface of the glacier, adds its discoverer, receded to the south, its face seemed broken with piles of earth and rock-stained rubbish, until far back in the interior it was concealed from view by the slope of a hill. But even beyond this point its continued extension was shown by the white glare or ice-blink in the sky above.
Its outline to the northward could not be so easily traced, on account of the enormous discharges at its base. The talus of its descent from the interior, looking far off to the east, ranged from 7° to 15°; so interrupted by the crevasses, however, as only in the distance to produce the effect of an inclined plane. A few black protuberances rose above the glittering surface of the snow, like islands in a foamy sea.
It could be seen, from the general inequalities of its surface, how well the huge mass adapted itself to the inequalities of the basiscountry beneath. The same modifications of hill and dale were discernible as upon land. Thus grand and various in its imposing aspect, it stretches to the north until it touches the new Land of Washington, cementing together by an apparently indissoluble tie the Greenland of the Norse Vikings and the America of the AngloSaxon colonists.
