Category Archives: Europe

by | 6 April 2025 · 2:46 am

Recruiting Chinese to South Africa

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 199-200:

THE IDEA OF RECRUITING Chinese to South Africa was not entirely novel. During the nineteenth century, nearly sixty thousand Chinese indentured workers labored on French plantation island colonies off the east African coast and in German, British, and French colonies on the continent. The Chinese presence in South Africa dates to the eighteenth century, when the Dutch East India Company shipped Malay and Chinese convicts from Batavia to the Cape Colony. During the 1870s and ’80s a few hundred Chinese artisans and workers arrived in the Cape Colony and Natal, along with greater numbers of Indians, contracted for infrastructure construction after the opening of the diamond fields. Voluntary merchant emigrants from southern China followed in their path. By 1904 there were 2,398 Chinese in all of British South Africa, more than half of them living in the Cape Colony. Chinese in the Cape worked mostly as small traders and also as cooks, carpenters, basket weavers, fish sellers, and wagon drivers.

There were hardly any Chinese in the former Afrikaner republics. The Orange Free State excluded Chinese from settlement altogether. The ZAR excluded from citizenship “any of the native races of Asia, including ‘Coolies’ [Indians and Chinese], Arabs, Malays and Mohammedan subjects of the Turkish Dominion.” It forbade Asiatics from walking on footpaths and pavements; from driving public carriages; from riding in first- and second-class railway compartments; and from buying or possessing liquor. The anti-Chinese laws of the former Afrikaner republics remained in place when power transferred to the British after the South African War.

Notwithstanding these restrictions and discriminations, Chinese carved out small niches in Johannesburg. By 1890 there were more than a hundred Chinese in the town, shopkeepers, laundrymen, and market gardeners; by 1904 the Chinese population of the Transvaal was about nine hundred. Chinese often did business in poorer white districts. Unlike white-owned shops, the Chinese sold at low prices, in small quantities, and on credit.

The Chinese in Johannesburg at the turn of the century followed the same patterns of social organization Chinese practiced across the diaspora. In the 1890s, they formed a huiguan called the Kwong Hok Tong (guanghetang) or Cantonese Club. It built a “clubhouse” on leased land in Ferreirastown, the original settlement of Johannesburg, which now lay at the city’s fringe. The house had several reception rooms, six bedrooms, a kitchen, and a latrine. Membership cost five pounds for initiation and dues according to one’s occupation. The club rented rooms at two pounds a month; kept a library of books and periodicals; and held social events and meetings that drew as many as 150 people. Yeung Ku Wan (Yang Feihong), a collaborator of Sun Yatsen who arrived in South Africa in 1896, formed a second group, the Xingzhonghui (Revive China Society). Photographs of members of both groups show educated men dressed in Western-style clothing.

Thus in 1903, when the idea of importing Chinese labor for the gold mines circulated, there was already a history of Chinese migration to South Africa and a small but established Chinese community in Johannesburg. These served as both precedent and warning—for both Chinese and whites.

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Filed under Britain, China, labor, migration, nationalism, Netherlands, religion, South Africa

by | 3 April 2025 · 8:23 pm

Effects of Witwatersrand Gold

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 193-195:

THE MINING OF Witwatersrand gold had both global and regional effects. At the level of world trade and finance, the economic historian Jean-Jacques Van Helten argues that expansion of international trade in the 1880s and ’90s required an enlargement of the overall money stock and hence the world supply of gold. The gold standard was not yet universal, but since the 1870s it had become the basis of international payments among the leading industrial countries. Witwatersrand gold, along with gold discoveries in the 1890s in Western Australia and Canada, increased the global supply of gold and strengthened the position of Britain, which was already the center of the international financial market.

Van Helten presents the late-century gold discoveries as a fortuitous meeting of a demand, but it also might be considered a stimulus, a new phase of capital accumulation, that powered the expansion of trade and foreign investment. Although this accumulation built on previous decades of gold discoveries in North America and Australasia, South African gold helped inaugurate a new period of capitalist development, the so-called New Imperialism, in which monopoly and finance capital came to the fore; when the great powers scrambled to carve up Africa, the last continent to fall to European colonialism; and Germany and the United States nipped at Britain’s heels for position at the top of the world economic order.

The supremacy of the pound sterling (i.e., gold) in international finance and trade lay at the heart of Great Britain’s strategy to maintain global dominance. The City of London reaped handsome profits from international investment and trade, both within the empire and without: the British compensated for desultory investment in domestic industries by exporting “old” English manufactures to sheltered markets within the empire. The colonies were induced to buy these products (often at artificially high prices) while they in turn sold primary products to the rest of the world (wool from Australia, cotton from India). These enabled Great Britain, in turn, to offset its trade deficits from importing wheat from the United States and Argentina for domestic consumption.

In southern Africa, labor patterns that had been established on the diamond fields carried over to the Rand. The rapid capitalization of diamond mining had reduced independent diggers to wage workers while the industry relied increasingly on African migrant laborers contracted on meager wages and confined to compounds. White miners adopted an aggressive racism to police the color line in order to protect their superior position and wages.

The mining of gold also shifted the center of economic power from the Cape Colony to the heretofore isolated and undeveloped Transvaal. Lord Selborne, who served as undersecretary to Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, considered the Transvaal “the richest spot on earth,” the key to South Africa’s future. “It is going to be the natural capital state and centre of South African commercial, social and political life,” he wrote in 1896.

By then, Johannesburg had grown to a cosmopolitan city of 100,000, with a large population of uitlanders (foreigners), British and other Europeans, who were aggrieved over political exclusions (fourteen years residency for naturalization and the franchise) and high taxes. Mine owners agitated against high railway tariffs and inflated prices set by state monopolies over essential resources (especially dynamite). More broadly for the British Empire, political instability in the Transvaal threatened to unravel the assumptions of its superior position in southern Africa based on commercial and financial domination, British immigration, and geopolitical power. After the failed Jameson raid of 1895 (a botched coup d’état backed by Cecil Rhodes and other leading mine magnates), ZAR president Paul Kruger stiffened his resolve. The British did not want the vote, he said. They wanted his state.

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Filed under Australia, Britain, Canada, China, economics, language, migration, nationalism, Netherlands, South Africa

by | 17 March 2025 · 6:03 am

Chinese Empire Demand for Silver

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 9-10:

AT THE TIME OF the gold rushes, China was already in the grip of European colonialism. China was never directly colonized by a Western power; in fact, by the mid-eighteenth century the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) had built an empire of its own, having expanded China’s boundaries to the west, most notably by annexing Tibet and Xinjiang. But in the mid-nineteenth century China was battered by European aggressions: the opium trade, gunboat diplomacy, and the forced opening to Western trade and missionaries. China’s humiliation stood in stark contrast to the position it had once held, even relatively recently.

For two hundred years, from 1550 to 1750, China had been arguably the most important economic actor in the world. It was not only the single largest domestic economy; it was also at the center of global trade, both with its Sino-centric tributary and trading networks in East and Southeast Asia and as the premier destination market for silver produced in Spanish America and Japan. Europeans shipped silver to China not as “money” but as commodity arbitrage: the Ming Dynasty’s (1368–1644) demand for silver for fiscal and commercial purposes fetched the highest silver prices in the world, double its price in Europe. China was the world’s great “silver sink” that not only drew but also stimulated its production in the New World.

Through the seventeenth century, Europeans traded silver for luxuries, including gold. For example, the British East India Company’s first direct transaction with China in 1637 exchanged 60,000 Spanish dollars for sugar, silk, spices, porcelain, and “loose gould.” Chinese traders also made handsome profits by buying low and selling dear, earning gross profits of 100 to 150 percent on silk and silk textiles sold to Europeans. Economic historians Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giràldez describe these late sixteenth-century dynamics of global trade as “multiple arbitrage.”

Europeans began trading silver for tea in large quantities in the early eighteenth century. Like silk, tea was a luxury item in Europe, but it had greater potential for mass consumption. The creation of a mass market for tea in Europe coincided with the rise in consumption of sugar from the plantation-slave colonies of the Caribbean in the late seventeenth century. Indeed, tea and sugar, along with tobacco, undergirded a global trade in stimulants—“food drugs”—based on a symbiosis of colonialism and slavery, on the one hand, and new mass-consumption economies in European metropolitan societies, especially Britain, on the other.

By 1800 silver’s arbitrage advantage in China had ended. The British, now hooked on tea, looked for a different means of exchange. The East India Company had already drained India of much of its silver to sell in China; now it turned to India for the mass production of opium for export to China.

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Filed under Britain, Caribbean, China, drugs, economics, Europe, Japan, Latin America, Mexico, nationalism

by | 16 February 2025 · 6:21 am

Comparing 1989 With 1848

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 738-740:

People speak of the revolutions of 1989, but the process of transformation preceded that year and extended far beyond it, to our present time. The earliest revolutionary event occurred in August 1980, when Poles launched a 10-million-strong protest movement that authorities outlawed but never crushed. When strikes broke out in Poland toward the end of the decade, reform Communists called on Solidarity’s leaders to negotiate the “solution” of (partly) free elections. The resonance of that event traveled beyond Poland, however, because the trade union’s continued strength showed people across the Soviet Bloc that state socialism was in need of repairs that went beyond and indeed contradicted Leninism.

That is one strand of the story: how some East Europeans showed others the character of their common predicament and how to escape it. Another strand was within the Communist parties themselves, when liberals—most importantly, Mikhail Gorbachev but also Hungarian and Polish socialists—discussed and prepared for change, for example, through reforms of legal codes. Without Gorbachev, the Communist system could have continued, and perhaps transformed into something different. Reformers were absent in the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, which is why the events of 1989 appeared more explosive (and revolutionary) in these places than in Hungary and Poland. One author described the transition in Hungary as a “negotiated revolution.”

The “structural” argument that favored Gorbachev’s reform program was economic; all the East European states registered deepening debt and thus growing dependence on banks, with no end in sight. In the 1980s, Poland was struggling simply to pay interest on its debt. The one state that opposed the reliance on Western credit, Romania, which decided in 1982 to pay all foreign debt, maneuvered itself into a position that was reminiscent of Russia in 1917: the question was not whether there would be an explosion but when. The chain-reaction character of the revolutions of 1989 ensured that when the explosion ignited in Timișoara, the subsequent denouement took place within a “discourse” of democracy, though in fact only Communists had changed places with each other. An actual transition to democratic rule had to wait until later in the following decade.

Thus, when writing about chain reactions, or “avalanches” of revolution that crossed borders in 1988 and 1989, from small to huge (more like icebergs falling into the sea than a collapse of part of a glacier), historians do well to keep in mind that no one knew about the extent of change at the time. Perhaps that is because actors—the Polish dissidents and the Hungarian socialist reformers—could not discern what we now see clearly: the international dimensions of the phenomenon. The first people to make out the larger dynamic were the Czechs. After the East German trains left in early October, and the Berlin Wall fell in early November, Prague, with foreign camera crews on the scene, itself became the set for revolution, a very sudden one, where the major questions were posed and seemed to be answered in a week and a half.

There is a third level to the transnational agitation and ferment: the role of the West in the East, beginning with the work of US consular officials promoting dissenters as well as reform Communists in the 1980s, but continuing in the careful monitoring of political change in the 1990s. Next to Poland, Hungary was the front-runner. The émigré philanthropist George Soros had legally moved his Open Society Foundation to Hungary in the early 1980s, cooperating with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and offered technical equipment (such as copiers), stipends, and contacts with Western civil society organizations. Even before Communism’s collapse, Hungary was thus “networked” with pro-democracy nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The later fall of authoritarian leaders in Slovakia and Bulgaria would be directly tied to the work of NGOs active in those countries, as well as officials of the European Union.

The region’s response to a growing debt crisis, and the pressures of Western creditors, also had echoes of a deeper past. The last time peoples had mobilized en masse for freedom across Europe’s borders was the spring of 1848. That crisis had been preceded by a European-wide series of bad harvests, economic downturn, democratic agitation, and thus a political and intellectual ferment that went across the map. Events in France gave a signal that an opportunity had come for common aspirations to be fulfilled; and as soon as word could travel to Naples, Mannheim, or Bucharest, students, workers, and other urban revolutionaries responded. The enthusiasm was relatively short lived, as the old regime in fact was not vanquished but began reasserting itself from the summer of 1848 in northern Italy and Prague, and the revolution was crushed during the following year.

If 1848 was an attempt of urban classes to throw off the shackles of feudalism, 1989 was the effort of entire societies to shake off a modernization that came to seem counterproductive and inappropriate; from the late 1970s, the region was falling behind economically, as we know now inexorably, and outside of East Germany and the Soviet Union, even the party bureaucracy had long since abandoned commitment based on belief.

The year 1989 seemed to offer a similar script to 1848 but had a happier outcome. There was also a parallel to the Habsburg dilemma of a decade later, of the early 1860s, when perennial financial woes had forced constitutional reform on the monarchy, so that it could satisfy lenders in London and Paris. In a similar way, Polish and Hungarian governments ascended to freedom in 1990 with the immediate challenge of putting their countries back on sound financial footings to prevent their falling out of the international system of exchange. But the hyperinflation that Poland witnessed in early 1990 was a distinctly twentieth-century phenomenon, beyond anything Habsburg officials could have imagined or dealt with.

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Filed under Austria, democracy, Eastern Europe, economics, migration, nationalism, NGOs, U.S., USSR

by | 15 February 2025 · 5:57 am

Romania’s Bizarre Revolution, 1989

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 733-736:

Like its East German counterpart, the Czechoslovak regime had discovered it lacked the will and conviction to escalate beyond truncheon and tear gas to live ammunition. Remarkably, these two well-armed hardline regimes had accepted oblivion with little protest. Except for the beatings and arrests in the early Leipzig demonstrations, those that followed in East Berlin and Dresden in early October, and the “massacre” (in which no one actually died in Prague) on November 17, the neo-Stalinist dictators departed the scene peacefully if not always gracefully. The transfer of power in Czechoslovakia became known as the Velvet Revolution.

Yet a little to the south, also in former Habsburg lands, this time in Romania, an inflexible dictator was sending militia to quell protest, and the violence he unleashed cost hundreds of lives. The situation there differed from the countries to the north in the absolute separation of the nepotistic regime from society; the extraordinary sacrifices that had been demanded for years—electricity and gas were limited to a few hours a day—and the outrage that resulted, along with revulsion and active hatred. Ceaușescu sought no understanding with groups in the party, let alone beyond the party, and, in contrast to the lands farther north, virtually no opposition groups emerged in Romania’s civil society to articulate interests separate from those of the state. The dictator had regularly cleared the terrain of contenders and destroyed all loci of opposition, producing a “remarkable atomization of Romanian society, in which fear and distrust became the currency of human relations.” The regime and its supporters had no doubt that they would be held responsible for the injustice and misery when the inevitable accounting came, and they fought with corresponding desperation. By 1989 alienation was countrywide, and when demonstrations erupted in one place, they spread quickly, despite—but then because of—knowledge of the numbers of victims.

Protest flared in former Habsburg Transylvania because it had suffered not only privation but also the destruction of local Hungarian culture, including the bulldozing of villages and the deportation of their inhabitants to Eastern Romania. Anger crystalized in mid-December, when authorities scheduled the ejection of the popular Hungarian Reformed Pastor László Tőkés from the city of Timișoara. His memoirs make clear that the Reformed church’s hierarchy was colluding with the state’s plans to help erase his independent voice; Tőkés had routinely acted without bothering to get approval from his superiors, for example, in organizing inter-denominational services at his church.

On December 15, protesters who had been camping near his residence marched toward the city center, where they took control of public offices and looted the well-stocked stores reserved for the Securitate. The following day, security forces fired on the protesters, but instead of extinguishing the embers of revolution, they caused them to spread, and even more citizens of Timișoara converged on the city center. Many were Hungarian-speakers with access to informative media broadcasts from Hungary and Yugoslavia, and word of their demonstrations was carried eastward by railway workers, troops who had rotated out of the city, and the international media. On December 18, Nicolae Ceaușescu left Romania to visit some of his last supporters, the theocratic rulers of Iran. Kept apprised of the growing unrest though his embassy in Bucharest, Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze said he would welcome Ceaușescu’s fall.

On returning on the afternoon of December 20, Ceaușescu declared a state of emergency in Timișoara, claiming that the demonstrators were terrorists who were serving foreign espionage agencies. He then attempted to organize mass rallies in his own favor in Bucharest. Until recently, individuals summoned by the party for mass spectacles could be counted on for abject expressions of adulation; now they demanded Ceaușescu’s resignation. On the evening of December 21, the dictator sent in security forces to disperse the crowd and hundreds were injured. The following day, the armed forces defected to the people, and Ceaușescu and his wife Elena fled Bucharest by helicopter. Under still unexplained circumstances, they touched down in the countryside and were apprehended, placed on trial before a military tribunal, and then executed before television cameras on Christmas Eve. But the fighting between security forces and crowds, now supported by the army, lasted until December 27, spreading to other cities. In all, 1,104 Romanians lost their lives in the revolution.

One explanation that has emerged for the haste in doing away with the rulers was concern that they might lead a counterrevolution against an emerging challenger, the “Front of National Salvation” that suddenly announced its existence over state radio on December 22, just as crowds were seizing the Communist Central Committee building and television station in Bucharest. The Front consisted not of leaders of civil society, let alone dissident groups—none existed—but of formerly high-placed Communists, some of whom had been disgraced by Ceaușescu. Prominent was the onetime apparatchik Ion Iliescu, who enjoyed support among top officials of the police and army. In his first speech, Iliescu called Ceaușescu a “man without a heart or soul or common sense, a feudal fanatic, who destroyed the country” and “perpetrated the worst crimes upon the people.”

Even in its time, this revolution seemed bizarre. Beyond the chilling spectacle of the execution of the dictator and his wife before running cameras, still dressed in heavy winter clothing and looking more like ragged senior citizens than all-powerful rulers, were the sudden change of heart of the crowd facing Ceaușescu in Bucharest; the inexplicably sudden defection of the military; and the sudden rise out of nowhere of a de facto countergovernment. Even in Timișoara, pastor Tőkés had registered an uncanny shift in mood, beyond his control or anyone else’s, perhaps the work of provocateurs from within the police. Was the revolution orchestrated by Ceaușescu’s rivals in the party? Was it in fact staged with demonstrators acting as unwitting actors in someone else’s drama? Afterward rumors spread that the secret services of the United States and the Soviet Union were informed about the activities of anti-Ceaușescu forces.

In the years since, no evidence has emerged to support claims of a wider or deeper conspiracy; what seems clear is that formerly highly placed officials wanted Ceaușescu out of the way. But they themselves were surprised and overwhelmed by the revolutionary events of those late fall days and adapted well to the events as they unfolded, posing as saviors to a deeply traumatized society. The revolution had resulted from a mix of planning and spontaneity. Opposition leaders emerged who, inspired by the example of Timișoara, had hoped to turn the Bucharest demonstration against the dictator. Their hopes proved justified. Many thousands arrived on December 21 in central Bucharest because they had been instructed to do so; they had no plans to oppose, much less topple the dictator. Yet once others, especially young people, began demanding the dictator’s fall, they joined in, suddenly and decisively, at great personal risk, propelled by years of humiliating privation.

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Filed under Czechia, democracy, Germany, Hungary, military, nationalism, religion, Romania, USSR

by | 13 February 2025 · 9:26 pm

Nonviolent Protest in Plauen, 1989

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 726-729:

Citizens of Leipzig also knew that in East Berlin and Dresden, small groups had taken to the streets two days earlier on the national holiday of the state’s founding; they had been beaten brutally. The exception to violence on that October 7 was Plauen, a manufacturing town on the border to Bavaria, where some 15,000 had marched for reforms and dispersed peacefully, thanks to the intervention of that city’s Protestant Superintendent. Like many citizens of southern East Germany, Plaueners had suffered poor air quality and provisioning, and they were still electrified, recalling the fourteen trainloads of fellow East German refugees from Prague that had rushed through their town on September 30, southward to freedom. But the October 7 demonstration in Plauen, the largest to that date in East Germany, would not have happened but for the act of one young man, the toolmaker Jörg Schneider. The previous week, he had distributed dozens of leaflets around town calling townspeople to a demonstration for reforms and basic rights. As a result, thousands descended on central Plauen that rainy Saturday afternoon. Authorities did nothing to stop them, because they too had called on citizens to come into town that day: for a celebration of the state’s founding. The crowds had no leader, but they morphed into a demonstration when police pummeled a man who had unfurled a banner reading simply “we want reforms!” The huge crowd then marched around the city center and finally gathered at Plauen’s city hall, the seat of power, where local party officials were sequestered, not knowing what to expect. Guarding them were police armed with enough ammunition to frustrate any attempt to storm the building.

Fortunately, the superintendent, Thomas Küttler, a man of peace, went through the cordon, spoke with the party secretary, a man he knew well, and elicited a pledge to receive a citizens’ delegation in the coming days. He assured the crowd over a megaphone that their demands had been heard, and it dispersed peacefully. Within a few weeks, Plauen had its own round table, as did virtually every East German town.

But before that point was reached, the regime had to be openly tested in its will to use violence to maintain power, and that test occurred on Monday, October 9 in Leipzig. For reasons that are still debated, the regime backed down and let the largest demonstration to date—an estimated 70,000 people—take place without incident. Honecker’s heir apparent, the “youth functionary” Egon Krenz (a man famous for a big smile), later took credit, but actually decisive were three other factors: an impromptu intervention of six prominent local figures, including the SED first party secretary as well as Maestro Kurt Masur, who drafted and read a call for peace on the radio; the fact that no commander in the huge assemblage of well-armed troops and police (with ambulances at the ready) was ready to take responsibility for a bloody showdown; and the fact that the demonstration started as a peace prayer. The October 9 demonstration commenced with thousands of East Germans departing a church holding lit candles as a sign of their commitment to nonviolence.

Thanks to cameras that Roland Jahn had smuggled into the GDR, audiences in the East and West could watch on television the tens of thousands who joined them the next day. They had chanted the authorless words, “We are the people!,” a phrase more daring and challenging than it sounds. For decades, authorities had claimed—in posters and other propaganda draped all over the country—to represent the people. For example, their social policies were “all for the good of the people!” Here on the streets of Leipzig, the people were in fact speaking, revealing the regime’s claim as a lie. You are not the people—we are.

Without the example of a Soviet leader who sanctioned thoughts of radical change, and circumstances that desperately needed change, the demonstrations in Plauen or Leipzig would not have happened. But they also would not have happened without the courage of thousands of anonymous citizens who wanted change and believed that it would come that day or never. They marched and chanted, knowing that the police and militia might fire. After this point, the police and military seemed defanged, their ability to intimidate broken, the regime’s claim to incorporate the will of a “socialist community of human beings” an obvious fiction. Within a week, more than 300,000 came for the Monday demonstration in Leipzig, and they were joined by hundreds of thousands in towns across the GDR, men, women, and children, hands often raised as a sign of peace. A little more than a week later, the leadership of mostly eighty-year-olds submitted its resignation.

In their banners and chants, the demonstrators used an eloquent German word to tell what they had come to detest in the state socialist welfare state: having been treated like children. But they were “mündig,” adults (literally, “people with mouths,” that is, voices). One banner mocked Honecker’s successor Egon Krenz, the man of the irrepressible grin, placing him in a crib above the inscription: “What big teeth you have, Grandma.”

Four of my classmates in advanced Romanian language classes at the University of Bucharest in 1983-84 were German girls from Leipzig University. They were adding Romanian to their translator/interpreter skills repertoire; they already knew Russian. Two of them seemed strict party-liners but the other two seemed more open to exploring new ideas and I ran into one of them (a fellow redhead) at a West German embassy art exhibit in Bucharest. She panicked and begged me not to tell anyone. Of course, I kept silent about it. I ran into the redhead again just before leaving Romania when I went to their dorms to give away my shortwave radio/cassette recorder to one of the two Chinese classmates who became a friend. (They worked for Radio Beijing’s Romanian broadcast service.) The daring redhead insisted on giving her capitalist classmate a good-bye kiss. I’ve lost track of my German classmates’ names but wonder what happened to them in 1989 and where they ended up.

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Filed under democracy, education, Germany, migration, nationalism, philosophy, religion

by | 12 February 2025 · 11:13 pm

GDR Illusions in 1989

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 704-705:

Gorbachev was not alone in admiring the apparent East German economic strength. In 1987, Western economists, looking primarily at numerical data, placed East Germany ahead of the United Kingdom in per capita income, a major index of development. As late as 1988, even sober Western newspapers were describing the GDR as a powerhouse. Its deep debt, similar to that of other countries (in per capita terms) was known but was not considered an impediment to growth and continued “success.” The times when East Germany’s economy was lame were “long past,” wrote journalist Peter Merseburger in 1987. He imagined the GDR lasting far into the unspecified future, thriving as a state that had solved the problem of unemployment and social insecurity, and he praised it for low rents, ignoring the fact that they reflected low investment in housing. The data existed to draw more sobering conclusions, but few did so. The GDR was so much wealthier than Poland that no one believed it, too, might have deep problems. Per capita East German gross national product was 40 percent higher than that of the Soviet Union.

The success of the GDR’s economy was an illusion. The state carried an unsustainable debt and tore down centuries-old buildings in world-class architectural gems (like Greifswald, Weimar, and Brandenburg), because it was too poor renovate them. The GDR could not compete even in areas where the state made its heaviest investments, like microelectronic technology, a major focus from the late 1970s. By September 1988, some 250,000 workers at seventeen Kombinate and 14 billion marks of investment had yielded the production of the GDR’s own 1-megabyte microchip, much celebrated in the party press, but already years behind the standard in the West. Toshiba had been mass-producing a 1-megabyte chip for two years at that point and was at work on a 4-megabyte chip.

The relatively high living standards were made possible by fortuitous circumstances: a strong preexisting industrial base; heavy investments in the 1950s; rational organizational reforms in the 1970s and 1980s (Kombinate); and the fact that West Germany considered the GDR a part of united Germany and gave it full access to the markets of the European Union, as well as several massive loans. Still, East Germany’s leaders felt that no reform was needed. Kurt Hager, East German ideology chief, said his land did not need Gorbachev’s plans for greater openness and restructuring. Simply because your neighbor puts up new wallpaper does not mean that you should do the same. The GDR leader Erich Honecker even mocked Gorbachev. “The young man has been making policy for only a year, and already he wants to take on more than he can chew.”

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Filed under economics, Germany, industry, philosophy, publishing, USSR

by | 9 February 2025 · 4:54 am

De-Stalinizing Czechoslovakia, 1960s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 623-625:

The Czechoslovak party leadership had a special fear of questions about Stalinism because they knew questions about that period’s crimes pointed directly to them. Antonín Novotný, Antonín Zápotocký, and Václav Kopecký all supported the purges and judicial murders of their comrades, and a few leaders had personally enriched themselves by taking things from the households of the comrades whom they had sent to the gallows. On festive occasions, some set their tables with the best silverware and linens of their murdered comrades. Yet the Czech Communist Party apparatus over which they presided was well rooted in factories and working-class neighborhoods, and it was able to draw on the deepest, most confident, and disciplined cadre reservoirs in Central Europe. It was not easily shaken.

The party had easily dealt with challenges from within Czechoslovak society. In 1956, after Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes, writers had demanded the lifting of censorship and freedom for authors who had been arrested. University campuses and some state ministries and party organizations were briefly transformed into hotbeds of critical discussion. The regime’s response was to focus criticism on Interior Minister Alexej Čepička for fostering a cult of personality, while resisting suggestions that former leader Klement Gottwald or anyone else was guilty of misdeeds. There was no mention of Rudolf Slánský. More importantly, within days of Khrushchev’s speech, party leaders took steps to improve people’s living standards, especially those with low incomes. The advanced Czechoslovak industrial base continued to churn out high-quality products, and so the population lived in relative affluence thanks to the sacrifices and investments made by earlier generations.

By the early 1960s, Czechoslovak industry began to wobble. Between 1949 and 1964, less than 2 percent of the value of the stock of machinery was retired, and its productivity had declined. For the first time, the Czechoslovak economy registered negative growth. Though the entire Soviet Bloc was confronted with problems of growth in the early 1960s, this was the most extreme case. Some radical rethinking was necessary. In a sense, the sluggish economy combined with impatient calls for destalinization from Moscow to send Czechoslovakia on the path toward serious and wide-ranging reform. Teams of Czech and Slovak economists led by former Mauthausen inmate Ota Šik urgently recommended taking decision making away from party bureaucrats—who calculated success in tons produced and not in terms of efficiency—and placing it in the hands of scientists, engineers, and trained managers. In line with ideas coming out of Yugoslavia and Hungary, the Šik commission stipulated that decisions on production, pricing, and wages should not be handed down from an anonymous bureaucracy, comprising about 8,500 functionaries of the national party apparatus, who were out of touch with local needs. Instead, decisions should be made locally, at the plant and community levels.

They urged that market mechanisms (above all, prices) be employed, so that enterprises would gain incentives to produce things that people wanted. They would do so by retaining profit (which in the command economy went to the center), and by rewarding employees according to their contributions. Basic changes like this were meant to have far-reaching consequences, for example, creating incentives to apply modern technologies to production. They would be a way of returning Czech lands to earlier prominence. But making plants more productive would also mean letting less-productive—indeed, unneeded—workers go.

These ideas for reform represented a growing consensus among leading economists throughout the bloc, extending to the Soviet Union. The ultimate problem, everywhere, was that workers as well as large production facilities were protected from market pressures and could not be fired or closed even if radically inefficient. In the post-Stalin period, outright terror was no longer an option. But for the time being, there was optimism. In the mid-1960s, economists felt that central planning would be qualitatively improved by employment of advanced mathematical models and computerization. They thought the deeper problem lay in the crude methods used in plan calculations.

As Stalinists were edged out of the leadership, younger, more enlightened figures entered the cultural bureaucracy, some of whom felt remorse and shame for the recent period of Stalinist extremism. A harbinger of new openness was an international Franz Kafka conference in Prague in 1963 under the aegis of Eduard Goldstücker, a professor of literature and former diplomat who had been condemned to death under Stalinism but had his sentence commuted for work in uranium mines. Now he was now minister of culture. Kafka (1883–1924) had spent his short life almost entirely in the city’s center, working in a law office during the day and writing all night after a nap. His stories evoked the disorienting anonymity of modern life, and by depicting human ciphers caught in webs of inscrutable and merciless bureaucracies, his writings seemed to foretell the fate of the region. Up to this time, Kafka had been a nonperson in Czech cultural life, and to discuss his work seemed to be a move toward waking up from the nightmares he had foreseen. Some of the hardline East German Communists invited to Goldstücker’s conference registered discomfort because they sensed that once unleashed, Kafka’s challenge would act like acid on the power of the state socialist bureaucracy.

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by | 7 February 2025 · 6:24 am

Indian Slavery in California

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 248-250:

Foreign visitors who ventured out of Don Guadalupe’s home and onto his nearby Rancho Petaluma were able to gain a great deal more insight. At its peak in the early 1840s, this 66,000-acre ranch was tended by seven hundred workers. An entire encampment of Indians, “badly clothed” and “pretty nearly in a state of nature,” lived in and around the property and did all the work. As Salvador Vallejo recalled, “They tilled our soil, pastured our cattle, sheared our sheep, cut our lumber, built our houses, paddled our boats, made tiles for our houses, ground our grain, killed our cattle, dressed their hides for the market, and made our unburned bricks; while the women made excellent servants, took good care of our children and made every one of our meals.” The Vallejos were quick to paint a picture of benevolent patriarchy. “Those people we considered as members of our families,” Salvador Vallejo remembered. “We loved them and they loved us. Our intercourse was always pleasant: the Indians knew that our superior education gave us a right to command and rule over them.”

But what seemed pleasant and natural to the Vallejos was decidedly less so to the Indians. Some workers at Rancho Petaluma were former mission Indians. As administrator of the mission of San Francisco de Solano, Don Guadalupe had ample opportunity not only to dispose of mission lands and resources (in fact, his Sonoma home, the military barracks, and the entire plaza lay on former mission lands) but also to bind ex-neophytes to his properties through indebtedness. Faced with dwindling resources and loss of land, former mission Indians had little choice but to put themselves under the protection of overlords like the Vallejos. Other Indian laborers had been captured in military campaigns north of Sonoma. As comandante (commander) of the northern California frontier, Don Guadalupe had a guard of about fifty men to keep order in the region and prevent Indians from stealing cattle. He also used his guardsmen to procure servants. He was not alone in doing so. Especially after the secularization of the missions in 1833, Mexican ranchers sent out armed expeditions to seize Indians practically every year—and as many as six times in 1837, four in 1838, and four in 1839.

Mexican ranchers pioneered the other slavery in California, but American colonists readily adapted to it. They acquired properties of their own and faced the age-old problem of finding laborers. Their options were limited. No black slaves existed in California, at least not in the open, as Mexico’s national government had abolished African slavery in 1829. Asian workers were still rare. In the early 1840s, Don Guadalupe kept four Native Hawaiians at Rancho Petaluma, as did a neighboring American rancher named John Sinclair and some others. The “coolie” (Asian) trade began after the gold discoveries of 1848 and would reach significant numbers only years later. Indian labor was the only viable option. Although the indigenous population of Alta California had been cut by half during the Spanish and Mexican periods—roughly from 300,000 to 150,000—Indians still comprised the most abundant pool of laborers. Short of working the land themselves, white owners had to rely on them.

Traces of the earliest Euro-American settlers are still visible in northern California. John Sutter was the proprietor of a large fort by the junction of the Sacramento and American Rivers that is now a major tourist attraction in midtown Sacramento. George C. Yount was the first Euro-American to settle permanently in the Napa Valley; the wine-sipping town of Yountville is named after him. Pierson B. Reading was the recipient of a huge land grant that would give rise to the city of Redding. And Andrew Kelsey, a ruthless entrepreneur, built a ranching operation just south of Clear Lake that is now the town of Kelseyville. These foreigners were acquisitive, possessed good business sense, and were quick to appreciate the advantages of coerced Indian labor.

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by | 4 February 2025 · 3:48 am

Indigenous Slavers in North America

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 172-177:

NATIVE AMERICANS WERE involved in the slaving enterprise from the beginning of European colonization. At first they offered captives to the newcomers and helped them develop new networks of enslavement, serving as guides, guards, intermediaries, and local providers. But with the passage of time, as Indians acquired European weapons and horses, they increased their power and came to control an ever larger share of the traffic in slaves.

Their rising influence was evident throughout North America. In the Carolinas, for instance, English colonists took tens of thousands of Indian slaves and shipped many of them to the Caribbean. In the period between 1670 and 1720, Carolinians exported more Indians out of Charleston, South Carolina, than they imported Africans into it. As this traffic developed, the colonists increasingly procured their indigenous captives from the Westo Indians, an extraordinarily expansive group that conducted raids all over the region. Anthropologist Robbie Ethridge has coined the term “militaristic slaving societies” to refer to groups like the Westos that became major suppliers of Native captives to Europeans and other Indians. The French in eastern Canada had a similar experience. They procured thousands of Indian slaves during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but as they moved away from Quebec and Montreal and into the Great Lakes region and upper Mississippi basin, they encountered a world of bondage they could scarcely comprehend, let alone control. Indians preyed on one another to get captives whom they offered to the French in exchange for guns and ammunition and to forge alliances. Throughout North America, Natives adapted to the sprawling slave trade and sought ways to profit from it.

…

The most dramatic instances of Indian reinvention occurred in what is now the American Southwest. Multiple factors propelled Indians of this region to become prominent traffickers. The royal antislavery activism of the Spanish crown and the legal prohibitions against Indian slavery dissuaded some Spanish slavers of northern Mexico, leaving a void that others filled. Moreover, the Indian rebellions of the seventeenth century that culminated in the Great Northern Rebellion [of the 1680s and 1690s] restricted the flow of Indian slaves from some regions and led to the opening of new slaving grounds, creating new opportunities. Most important, the diffusion of horses and firearms accelerated at this time, giving some Indians the means to enslave other people. Thus new traffickers, new victims, and new slaving routes emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some Native communities experienced a process of “deterritorialization,” as Cecilia Sheridan has called it, becoming unmoored from their traditional homelands, fusing with other groups, and reinventing themselves as mobile bands capable of operating over vast distances. They made a living by trading the spoils of war, including horses and captives.

…

Comanche captive taking introduced Apaches from the east, Navajos from the west, and Pawnees from the north into New Mexico. The Comanches’ radius of action was astonishing. In 1731 a New Mexican friar asked one of the Comanches’ captives to which nation he belonged and how far it was to his country of origin. The slave responded that he was a “Ponna” (quite possibly a Pawnee, whose traditional homeland was along the North Platte and Loup Rivers in present-day Nebraska). The Indian also said that he had traveled with his captors for “one hundred suns,” moving at a rate of about ten leagues (thirty miles) for each one. The friar estimated that in the course of a year, Comanches might travel “more than one thousand leagues [three thousand miles] from New Mexico,” a distance that may have been entirely possible, considering that Pawnee country was eight hundred miles away from northern New Mexico and that the Comanches traveled to and from these lands, making various detours along the way.

The Comanches sold their first slaves in New Mexico sometime in the first decade of the eighteenth century. By the 1720s, they had become well-established traders. And by the 1760s, they were acknowledged as the preeminent suppliers of captives in the region.

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Filed under Canada, Mexico, migration, military, North America, slavery, Spain, U.S.