Claiming Debts Without Acknowledging Credit

How history is used and abused.

Claiming Debts Without Acknowledging Credit

Part One

The history of the world and its people, places, and events is filled with humans acting like, well, humans. This means that all the attributes of humanity are represented: good, bad, indifference. Humanity’s timeline is filled to the brim with greed, subjugation, war, and death. Lots of death. This leads to a natural tendency to put historical characters into columns of hero or villain. Why? For starters, this makes it easier to tell whatever audience the stories of history without getting into the weeds with excessive details. This also helps simplify the lessons to take away from historical events. However, this has drawbacks…

Human Nature and Presentism

Merriam-Webster defines Human Nature as “The fundamental dispositions and traits of humans.” Briefly, humans act and react today the same they did thousands of years ago. The proof of this come from innumerable sources; from Sumerian tablet writings, Socrates and Plato, Shakespeare, and so forth. Human nature does not age. Civilizations and Empires rise and fall. Whether it was 900 AD or 1300 BC, humans have emotions and acted accordingly. I bring this up to address a major problem in many mainstream historical viewpoints in that they incorporate “Presentism” when analyzing historical events.

Presentism is “an attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences.” Researching something from hundreds of years ago without acknowledging that timeframes morals and ideals will be radically different from modern times is folly. This fallacy ascribes motives and morals from today, and imprints them onto historical events and characters. An easy example of this incorrect usage is the New York Times 1619 Project. (Pay-Wall) While it was an entertaining set of articles describing the ship that sold slaves to people in what would become America, the series engaged in rhetorical flourish and made sweeping declarations on current history as if they were facts. To truly believe that individuals living over 400 years ago created some grand strategy and plan on how the world is today requires a suspension of ones logic and reasoning. The infusion of opinion and personal interpretation these historical events would be fine IF that was stated up front. Nevertheless, the 1619 Project presents itself as some true history that has been hidden purposely.

This article in the series by Matthew Desmond starts with this statement: “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.” The article continues on to discuss Martin Shkreli, the former CEO of a pharmaceutical company that hiked the price of an antiparasitic drug from $13.50 a pill, to an increase of $750 a pill a few years ago. Was this action declared atrocious by most of the media at the time? Of course it was. Mr. Shkreli did not hide his reasoning for the price hike. From the article:

At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.”

Mr. Desmond goes on to compare modern wages, workers’ rights in other countries, and job unions. Then he goes back in time to the Antebellum South. From the article:

“Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled have found answers in many places (religion, politics, culture). But recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to capitalism.

Slavery was undeniably a font of phenomenal wealth. By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export. The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City. What made the cotton economy boom in the United States, and not in all the other far-flung parts of the world with climates and soil suitable to the crop, was our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people and to exert its will on seemingly endless supplies of land and labor. Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above.”

When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps. And yet, despite this, “slavery plays almost no role in histories of management,” notes the historian Caitlin Rosenthal in her book “Accounting for Slavery.” Since the 1977 publication of Alfred Chandler’s classic study, “The Visible Hand,” historians have tended to connect the development of modern business practices to the 19th-century railroad industry, viewing plantation slavery as precapitalistic, even primitive. It’s a more comforting origin story, one that protects the idea that America’s economic ascendancy developed not because of, but in spite of, millions of black people toiling on plantations. But management techniques used by 19th-century corporations were implemented during the previous century by plantation owners.

At a glance, his interpretation and findings look sound and plausible. Wow, accounting came from slavery! However, using the illogical Presentism method, this leaves many areas of history left out. Slavery and plantations did not create “accounting” for all industries. During this time period, Britain had sweatshops with accounting, as did many other civilizations across the globe. It was not something new that Southern slaveholders conjured up by themselves. These methods can be traced back to numerous cultures and prior civilizations. Ancient Egypt kept meticulous inventory records of goods in storehouses, which spread out to other cultures along trade routes including Greece, Rome and Mesopotamia. Closer to America, the fur trade and whaling industry were known for keeping records. This is how we know today how much value and amount of these wares cost hundreds of years ago due to good recordkeeping at the time.

Using history to shape and distort a narrative for one’s personal preference is not limited to economic systems. In the next entry, I will explain how this is used in other historical areas.

Next up soon: Part Two

Heroes and Villains

“History is Written by Victors

-Unknown