Boston, December 28Not a government officer in sight
American Naval Success
A letter has been received from capt. Seward, of the armed ship Camillus, of this port, belonging to Mr. Eben Parson, informing, that on his outward passage he was attacked by two French privateers, which, after an action he beat off -- and rescued from them a Portuguese vessel, which they had taken. His men stood to their guns with perfect resolution, and exercised them in the most active manner. This is another proof of the expediency of arming. Several benefits result from the issue of this engagement, which all honest Americans must exult in. A valuable ship, cargo, and a number of brave fellows are preserved to their country -- and piracy disappointed of its prey.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
"Another Proof of the Expediency of Arming"
The Louisville Gazette (Georgia), Feb. 5, 1799, pg. 4:
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
welcome
Comments now enabled! New posts to actually, you know, happen. Meanwhile, I have a bunch of new posts up at Cliopatria.
fish legs
Via Defense Tech: The AP captions a photo of a Chinese sailor on a frigate with, "A Chinese navy soldier guards on a battleship..."
[Sic], yeah.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Cash and Carry
Or, "The Willful Ignorance of Educated People"
A recurring complaint from the American political right is that academic historians are "liberal." I agree with the term, but not at all with the substance of it. Many of the liberal historians trained in American universities have an instinctive faith in state institutions. That faith leads them to adopt a triumphalist view of American history as a march of progress: Americans have done bad stuff, but the government usually gets in right in the end. Liberal historians are "liberal" in the sense that they aren't radical -- they basically buy the product, and they think it works just fine.
If you want to watch this worldview in action, you can't do any better than to read Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, an ongoing advertisement for a whiggish narrative of American history. Marshall provides a wonderful example this week with his post on Ron Paul's suggestion that the United States fight pirates by issuing letters of marque and reprisal. Marshall finds this suggestion almost too silly to contemplate.
Letters of marque and reprisal are used in "a classic stage of under-developed state power," Marshall writes, "in which we may not have the capacity to have a fully built out Navy but we can subcontract the harassment and capture of enemy shipping and commerce by setting up privateers to do the job for them."
There are a number of remarkable assumptions casually built into this statement: States develop through stages, like they're sequentially climbing stairs toward their perfect end state; there's a stage at which a navy is "fully built out," perfected and complete. (And then the admirals sprout stigmata and ascend to the right hand of the Lord.) Marshall later throws in the observation that Paul proposes to use private violence "rather than having a powerful Navy, which keeps the oceans safe and provides a vast support to global commerce," appearing not to notice that the world's most powerful navy took five hours to get a single warship to the site of an actual recent pirate takeover -- in some of the most aggressively patrolled waters on the planet. Oceans: still big.
But as a statement from a historian -- and he has a PhD in American history from Brown University -- Marshall's post is just baffling. States rent violence. Routinely, persistently, unremarkably. You could notice that reality just by reading the newspaper. The United States military recently created the (now unravelling) "Anbar Awakening" with cash payments to Sunni paramilitaries, buying peace with paychecks -- while simultaneously renting violence from contractors like Blackwater and Triple Canopy to protect its facilities and personnel.
And nothing about the American leveraging of paramilitary and corporate violence is in any way historically remarkable or new. A nation initially settled by armed representatives of mercantilist corporations went on to routinely acquire violent power through proxies and auxiliaries who took their rewards in cash, guns, and land. With nearly a full century of lightly restrained filibuster armies behind us -- and Sunni gunfighters buying lunch in Ramadi with wads of U.S. dollars -- Marshall finds the idea of state-sanctioned private violence somehow antique, a relic from the days of powdered wigs.
There is no final moment of attainment at which states divorce themselves from the economic leveraging of private violence. The United States has used pirates and privateers to fight its battles, and will do so again.
A recurring complaint from the American political right is that academic historians are "liberal." I agree with the term, but not at all with the substance of it. Many of the liberal historians trained in American universities have an instinctive faith in state institutions. That faith leads them to adopt a triumphalist view of American history as a march of progress: Americans have done bad stuff, but the government usually gets in right in the end. Liberal historians are "liberal" in the sense that they aren't radical -- they basically buy the product, and they think it works just fine.
If you want to watch this worldview in action, you can't do any better than to read Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, an ongoing advertisement for a whiggish narrative of American history. Marshall provides a wonderful example this week with his post on Ron Paul's suggestion that the United States fight pirates by issuing letters of marque and reprisal. Marshall finds this suggestion almost too silly to contemplate.
Letters of marque and reprisal are used in "a classic stage of under-developed state power," Marshall writes, "in which we may not have the capacity to have a fully built out Navy but we can subcontract the harassment and capture of enemy shipping and commerce by setting up privateers to do the job for them."
There are a number of remarkable assumptions casually built into this statement: States develop through stages, like they're sequentially climbing stairs toward their perfect end state; there's a stage at which a navy is "fully built out," perfected and complete. (And then the admirals sprout stigmata and ascend to the right hand of the Lord.) Marshall later throws in the observation that Paul proposes to use private violence "rather than having a powerful Navy, which keeps the oceans safe and provides a vast support to global commerce," appearing not to notice that the world's most powerful navy took five hours to get a single warship to the site of an actual recent pirate takeover -- in some of the most aggressively patrolled waters on the planet. Oceans: still big.
But as a statement from a historian -- and he has a PhD in American history from Brown University -- Marshall's post is just baffling. States rent violence. Routinely, persistently, unremarkably. You could notice that reality just by reading the newspaper. The United States military recently created the (now unravelling) "Anbar Awakening" with cash payments to Sunni paramilitaries, buying peace with paychecks -- while simultaneously renting violence from contractors like Blackwater and Triple Canopy to protect its facilities and personnel.
And nothing about the American leveraging of paramilitary and corporate violence is in any way historically remarkable or new. A nation initially settled by armed representatives of mercantilist corporations went on to routinely acquire violent power through proxies and auxiliaries who took their rewards in cash, guns, and land. With nearly a full century of lightly restrained filibuster armies behind us -- and Sunni gunfighters buying lunch in Ramadi with wads of U.S. dollars -- Marshall finds the idea of state-sanctioned private violence somehow antique, a relic from the days of powdered wigs.
There is no final moment of attainment at which states divorce themselves from the economic leveraging of private violence. The United States has used pirates and privateers to fight its battles, and will do so again.
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